The girl laughed through her tears. “You funny man, Signor!” said she, archly, yet with a gleam of alarm in her wild black eyes; “you no believe only when you see. Piccaninny gone in wash-tub long since; Fleurette talkee trash, trash; dis lilly turkey fed on plantation at Maria Gralante; good father give um to Fleurette a-cause dis nigger say ‘Ave’ right through, and spit so at Mumbo-Jumbo.”
This story was less credible than the last, inasmuch as the adjoining plantation of Maria Galante, cultivated by a few Jesuit priests, although in a thriving condition, and capable of producing the finest poultry reared, was more than an hour’s walk from where they stood, and it was impossible that Fleurette could have been absent so long from her duties at that period of the day. So Bartoletti, placing his hand in his waistcoat, pulled out a certain roll, which the slaves called his “black book,” and inserted Fleurette’s name therein for corporal punishment to the amount of stripes awarded for the crime of theft.
It was a common action enough; scarce a day passed, scarce even an hour, without the production of this black book by the overseer, and a torrent of entreaties, couched in the mingled jargon of French, Spanish, and British, I have endeavoured to render through the conventional negro-English, which, indeed, formed its basis, from the unfortunate culprit whose name was thus inscribed; but on this occasion Fleurette seemed to entertain a morbid terror of the ordeal quite out of proportion to its frequency, and, indeed, its severity—for though sufficiently brutal, the lash was not dangerous to life or limb. She screamed, she wept, she prayed, she caught the overseer by his knees and clasped them to her bosom, entreating him, with a frantic earnestness that became almost sublime, to spare her this degradation! to forgive her only this once! to bid her work night and day till crop-time, and then to send her into the field-gang for the hardest labour they could devise—nay, to sell her to the first trader that touched at Port Welcome, never to look on her home at Cash-a-crou again—anything, anything, rather than tie her to a stake and flog her like a disobedient hound!
But Bartoletti was far too practised an overseer to be in the slightest degree moved by such entreaties. Replacing the black book in his waistcoat, he walked coolly away, without deigning to look back at his despairing suppliant, writhing under such a mixture of grief and shame as soon maddened into rage. Perhaps, had he done so, he would have been frightened into mercy, for a bolder man than the Italian might have been cowed by the glare of that girl’s eyes, when she drew up her slender figure, and clenching her hands till the nails pierced them, spat after him with an intensity of hatred that wanted only opportunity to slake its fierce desire in blood.
The Signor, however, wiping his brow, unconscious, passed quietly on, to report his morning’s work to the Marquise, and obtain her sanction for Fleurette’s punishment, because the mistress never permitted any slave on her estate to be chastised but by her own express command.
Long years ago, when his heart was fresh and high, the Italian had spent a few months in this very island, a period to which he still looked back as to the one bright ray that gilded his dreary, wandering, selfish life. It was here he met Célandine while both were young, and wooed her with little encouragement indeed, for she confessed honestly enough that he was too late, yet not entirely without hope. And now in gleams between the cane-pieces he could catch a glimpse of that silver-spread lagoon by which they had walked more than once in the glowing evenings, till darkness, closing without warning like a curtain, found them together still.
He had conceived for himself then an ideal of Paradise, which had never in after years faded completely away. To win the Quadroon for his own—to make himself a peaceful home in easy circumstances, somewhere amidst this tangled wilderness of beauty from which Port Welcome peeped out on the Caribbean Sea—to sit in his own porch and watch the tropical sunset dying off through its blended hues of gold, and crimson, and orange, into the pale, serene depths of opal, lost ere he could look again, amongst the gathering shades of night—such were his dreams, and at last he had realised them to the letter; but he never watched the sunset now, nor walked by the cool glistening lagoon with the woman whom in his own selfish way he had loved for half a lifetime. She was his wife, you see, and a very imperious wife she proved. When he had leisure to speculate on such matters, which was seldom, he could not but allow that he was disappointed; that the ideal was a fallacy, the romance a fiction, the investment a failure; practically, the home was dull, the lagoon damp, and the sunset moonshine!
Therefore, as he walked on, though the material Paradise was there, as it had always been, he never wasted a look or thought on its glowing beauties, intent only on the dust that covered his shoes, the thirst that fired his throat, and the perspiration that streamed from his brow. Yet palm, cocoa, orange, and lime-tree were waving overhead; while the wild vine, pink, purple, and delicate creamy-white, winding here about his path, ran fifty feet aloft round some bare stem to which it clung in a succession of convolvulus-like blossoms from the same plant he trod beneath his very feet. Birds of gaudy feather—purple, green, and flaming scarlet, flashed from tree to tree with harsh, discordant cries, and a Louis d’or flitted round him in its bright, golden plumage, looking, as its name implies, like a guinea upon wings.
The grass-grown road he followed was indeed an avenue to the great house, and as he neared his destination he passed another glimpse of tropical scenery without a glance. It was the same view that delighted the eyes of the Marquise daily from her sitting-room, and that Cerise would look at in quiet enjoyment for hours.
A slope of vivid green, dotted with almond-trees, stretched away from the long, low, white building to a broad, clear river, shining between the plantains and bananas that clothed its banks; beyond these, cattle pasture and cane-pieces shot upward in variegated stripes through the tangled jungle of the steep ascent, while at short intervals hog-plum, or other tall trees of the forest, reared their heads against the cloudless sky, to break the dark thick mass that clothed the mountain to its very summit—save where some open, natural savannah, with its crop of tall, rank, feathering grass, relieved the eye from the vivid colouring and gaudy exuberance of beauty in which nature dresses these West Indian islands.