“Of the estate and niggers, you know! We had plenty of niggers on the coffee plantation, regular African fellows, with woolly heads and blubber lips, and yellow whites to their eyes. When I was a little thing of four years old, Pete used to let me whip the little niggers for a treat, when they had done anything wrong. It used to make me laugh to see them wriggle their legs under the whip and cry!”
“O! don’t, Miss Brandt!” exclaimed Margaret Pullen, in a voice of pain.
“It’s true, but they deserved it, you know, the little wretches, always thieving or lying or something! I’ve seen a woman whipped to death, because she wouldn’t work. We think nothing of that sort of thing, over there. Still—you can’t wonder that I was glad to get out of the Island. But I loved old Pete, and if he had been alive when I left, I would have brought him to England with me. He used to carry me for miles through the jungle on his back,—out in the fresh mornings and the cool, dewy eves. I had a pony to ride, but I never went anywhere, without his hand upon my bridle rein. He was always so afraid lest I should come to any harm. I don’t think anybody else cared. Pete was the only creature who ever loved me, and when I think of Jamaica, I remember my old nigger servant as the one friend I had there!”
“It is very, very sad!” was all that Mrs. Pullen could say.
She had become fainter and fainter, as the girl leaned against her with her head upon her breast. Some sensation which she could not define, nor account for—some feeling which she had never experienced before—had come over her and made her head reel. She felt as if something or someone, were drawing all her life away. She tried to disengage herself from the girl’s clasp, but Harriet Brandt seemed to come after her, like a coiling snake, till she could stand it no longer, and faintly exclaiming:
“Miss Brandt! let go of me, please! I feel ill!” she rose and tried to make her way between the crowded tables, towards the open air. As she stumbled along, she came against (to her great relief) her friend, Elinor Leyton.
“O! Elinor!” she gasped, “I don’t know what is the matter with me! I feel so strange, so light-headed! Do take me home!”
Miss Leyton dragged her through the audience, and made her sit down on a bench, facing the sea.
“Why! what’s the matter?” demanded Harriet Brandt, who had made her way after them, “is Mrs. Pullen ill?”
“So it appears,” replied Miss Leyton, coldly, “but how it happened, you should know better than myself! I suppose it is very warm in there!”