Bartoletti knew well that he should find the Marquise in her sitting-room, for the sun was still high and the heat intense; none therefore but slaves, slave-drivers, or overseers would be abroad for hours. The Signor had however been reduced to such proper subjection by Célandine that he never ventured to approach the Marquise without making a previous report to his wife, and as the Quadroon had not yet returned from the visit to Port Welcome, in which she made acquaintance with Slap-Jack, some considerable delay took place before the enormity of Fleurette’s peculations could be communicated to her mistress.
Mother and daughter were inseparable here, in the glowing tropical heat, as under the cool breezes and smiling skies of their own beautiful France, a land to which they constantly reverted with a longing that seemed only to grow more and more intense as every hour of their unwelcome banishment dragged by.
They were sitting in a large low room, with the smallest possible amount of furniture and the greatest attainable of air. To insure a thorough draught, the apartment occupied the whole breadth of the house, and the windows, scarcely closed from year’s-end to year’s-end, were placed opposite each other, so that there was free ingress on all sides for the breeze that, notwithstanding the burning heat of the climate, blows pretty regularly in these islands from morning till night and from night till morning. It wafted through the whole apartment the fragrance of a large granadilla, cut in half for the purpose, that stood surrounded by a few shaddocks, limes, and pomegranates, heaped together like a cornucopia on a small table in the corner; it fluttered the leaves of a book that lay on Mademoiselle de Montmirail’s knee, who was pretending to read, with her eyes resting wearily on a streak of blue sea, far off between the mountains; and it lifted the dark hair from the temples of the Marquise, fanning with grateful breath, yet scarce cooling, the rich crimson of her cheek.
The resemblance between these two grew closer day by day. While the mother remained stationary at that point of womanly beauty to which the daughter was approaching, figure and face, in each, became more and more alike; and though the type of the elder was still the richer and more glowing, of the younger, the more delicate and classical, Cerise seemed unaccountably to have gained some of that spirit and vitality which the Marquise seemed as unaccountably to have lost.
Also on the countenance of each might be traced the same expression—the longing, wistful look of those who live in some world of their own, out of and far beyond the present, saddened in the woman’s face with memory as it was brightened in the girl’s by hope.
“It is suffocating!” exclaimed the former, rising restlessly from her seat, and pushing the hair off her temples with a gesture of impatience. “Cerise, my darling, are you made of stone that you do not cry out at this insupportable heat? It irritates me to see you sit reading there as calmly as if you could feel the wind blowing off the heights of Montmartre in January. It seems as if the sun would never go down in this oven that they call an island.”
Cerise shut her book and collected her scattered ideas with an obvious effort. “I read, mamma,” she answered smiling, “because it is less fatiguing than to think, but I obtain as little result from the one process as the other. Do you know, I begin to believe the stories we used to hear in Paris about the West Indies, and I am persuaded that we shall not only be shrivelled up to mummies in a few more weeks, but that our tongues will be so dry and cracked as to be incapable of expressing our thoughts, even if our poor addled brains could form them. Look at Pierrot even, who is a native; he has not said a syllable since breakfast.”
Pierrot, however, like the historical parrot of all ages, though silent on the present occasion, doubtless thought the more, for the attitude in which he held his head on one side, peering at his young mistress with shrewd unwinking eye, implied perceptions more than human, nay, even diabolical in their malignant sagacity.
“What can I do?” said the Marquise, vehemently, pacing the long room with quick steps ill suited to the temperature and the occasion. “While the Regent lives I can never return to Paris. For myself, I sometimes fancy I could risk it; but when I think of you, Cerise—I dare not—I dare not; that’s the truth. An insult, an injury, he might forgive, or at least forget; but a scene in which he enacted the part of the Pantaleone, whom everybody kicks and cuffs; in which he was discovered as a coxcomb, an intruder, and a polisson, and through the whole of which he is conscious, moreover, that he was intensely ridiculous—I protest to you I cannot conceive any outrage so horrible as to satisfy his revenge. No, my child, for generations my family have served the Bourbons, and we should know what they are: with all their good qualities there are certain offences they can never forgive, and this Regent is the worst of the line.”
“Then, mamma,” observed Cerise cheerfully, though she smothered a sigh, “we must have patience and live where we are. It might be worse,” she added, pointing to the streak of deep-blue sea that belted the horizon. “This is a wider view and a fairer than the dead wall of Vincennes or the gratings of the Bastile, and some day, perhaps, some of our friends from France may drop in quite unexpectedly to offer their homage to Madame la Marquise. How the dear old Prince-Marshal would gasp in this climate, and how dreadfully he would swear at the lizards, centipedes, galley-wasps, red ants, and cockroaches! He who, brave as he is, never dared face a spider or an earwig! Mamma, I think if I could see his face over a borer-worm, I should have one more good laugh, even in such a heat as this.”