Meanwhile, Célandine, moved by an impulse for which she could not account, or perhaps dreading to analyse a sentiment that might after all be founded on a fallacy, led the young seaman into a cool, quiet room in a wooden house, on the shady side of the street, of which the apparent mistress was a large bustling negress, with a numerous family of jet-black children, swarming and crawling about the floor like garden-snails after a shower. This proprietress seemed to hold the Quadroon in considerable awe, and was delighted to bring the best her house afforded for the entertainment of such visitors. Slap-jack, accommodated with a deep measure of iced rum-and-water, lit his pipe, played with the children, stared at his black hostess in unmitigated astonishment, and prepared himself to answer the questions it was obvious the Quadroon was burning to put.
Célandine hovered restlessly about the room, fixing her bright black eyes upon the seaman with an eager, inquiring glance, that she withdrew hastily when she thought herself observed, and thereby driving into a state of abject terror the large sable hostess, whose pity for the victim, as she believed him, at last overcame her fear of the Quadroon, and impelled her to whisper in Slap-Jack’s ear—
“Obi-woman! bruxa,[4] buckra-massa, bruxa! Mefiez-vous!—Ojo-malo.[5] No drinkee for drunkee! Look out! Gare!” A warning utterly incomprehensible to its object, who winked at her calmly over his tumbler, while he drank with exceeding relish the friendly mother’s health, and that of her thriving black progeny.
There is nothing like a woman’s tact to wind the secrets out of a man’s bosom, gradually, insensibly, and by much the same smooth, delicate process as the spinning of flax off a distaff. With a few observations rather than questions, a few allusions artfully put, Célandine drew from Slap-Jack an account of his early years, and an explanation, offered with a certain pride, of the manner in which he became a seaman. When he told her how he had made his escape while a mere child from his protector, whom he described as “the chap wot wanted to bind him ’prentice to a sawbones,” he was startled to see the Quadroon’s shining black eyes full of tears. He consoled her in his own rough, good-humoured way.
“What odds did it make after all,” argued Slap-Jack, helping himself liberally to the rum-and-water, “when I was out of my bed by sunrise and down to the waterside to get aboard-ship in the British Channel, hours afore he was up, and so Westward-ho! and away? Don’t ye take on about it. A sailor I would be, and a sailor I am. You ask the skipper if I’m not. He knows my rating I should think, and whether I’m worth my salt or no. Don’t ye take on so, mother, I say!”
But the Quadroon was weeping without concealment now.
“Call me that again!” she exclaimed, sobbing convulsively. “Call me that again! I have not been called mother for so long. Hush!” she added, starting up, and laying her hand forcibly on his lips. “Not another word. Fool! Idiot that I am! Not another word. She can hear us. She can understand;” and Célandine darted a furious glance at the busy negress, which caused that poor woman to shake like a jelly down to her misshapen black heels.
Slap-Jack felt considerably puzzled. His private opinion, as he afterwards confided to his messmates, was, that the old lady not being drunk, must be mad—a cheerful view, which was indeed confirmed by what occurred immediately afterwards.
In struggling to keep her hand upon his mouth, she had turned back the deep, open collar of his blue shirt till his brawny neck was exposed nearly to the shoulder. Espying on that neck a certain white mark, contrasting with the ruddy weather-browned skin, she gave a half-stifled shriek, like that with which a dumb animal expresses its rapture of recognition; and taking the man’s head in her arms, pressed it to her bosom, rocking herself to and fro, while she wept and murmured over him with an inexplicable tenderness, by which he was at once astonished and alarmed.