Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

“Call me mother again!” exclaimed the Quadroon. “You called me mother down yonder at the store, and my heart leaped to hear the word. Sit ye down, my darling, there in the light, where I can see your innocent face. How like you are to your father, my boy. You’ve got his own bold eyes, and broad shoulders, and large, strong hands. I could not be deceived. I knew you from the first. Tell me true; you guessed who I was. You would never have gone up to a stranger as you did to me!”

Slap-Jack looked completely mystified. Wisely reflecting, however, that if a woman be left uninterrupted she will never “belay,” as he subsequently observed, “till she has payed-out the whole of her yarn,” he took another pull at the rum-and-water, and held his peace.

“Look about you, boy,” continued Célandine, “and mark the wild, mysterious retreat I have made myself, on your account alone. No other white man has ever entered the Obi-woman’s hut. Not a negro in the island but shakes with fear when he approaches that low doorway; not one but leaves a gift behind when he departs. And now, chance has done for the Obi-woman that which all her perseverance and all her cunning has failed to effect. Influence I have always had amongst the blacks, for I am of their kindred, and they believe that I possess supernatural powers. You need not smile, boy. I can sometimes foretell the future so far as it affects others, though blindly ignorant where it regards myself; just as a man reads his neighbour’s face clearly, though he cannot see his own. All my influence I have devoted to the one great object of making money. For that, I left my sunny home to live years in the bleak, cold plains of France; for that, I sold myself in my old age to one whom I could not care for, even in my youth; for that I have been tampering of late with the most desperate and dangerous characters in the island; and money I only valued because, without it, I feared I could never find my boy. Listen, my darling, and learn how a mother’s love outlives the fancy of youth, the devotion of womanhood, and the covetousness of old age. Look at me now, child. It is not so long since men have told me—even in France, where they profess to understand such matters—that I retained my attractions still. You may believe that thirty years ago the Quadroon of Cash-a-crou, as they called her, had suitors, lovers, and admirers by the score. Somehow, I laughed at them all. It seemed to me that a man’s affection for a girl only lasted while she despised him, and I resolved that no weakness of my own should ever bring me down a single step from the vantage-ground I held. Planters, overseers, councillors, judges, all were at my feet; not a white man in the island but would have given three months’ pay for a smile from the yellow girl at Cash-a-crou; and the yellow girl—slave though she was—carried her head high above them all.

“Well, one bright morning, a week before crop-time, a fine large ship, twice the size of that brigantine in the harbour, came and dropped her anchor off the town. The same night her sailors gave a dance at one of the negro-houses in Port Welcome. I never hear a banjo in the still, calm evenings but it thrills to my very marrow still, though it will be five-and-twenty long years, when the canes are cut, since I went into that dancing-room a haughty, wilful beauty, and came out a humble, love-stricken maid. Turn a bit more to the light, my boy, that I may look into your blue eyes; they shine like his, when he came across the floor and asked me to dance. I’ve heard the Frenchwoman say that it takes a long time for a man to win his way into a girl’s heart. Theirs is a cold country, and they have no African blood in their veins. All I know is, that your father had not spoken half-a-dozen words ere I felt for him as I never felt for any creature on earth before. I’d have jumped off the Sulphur Mountain, and never thought twice about it, if he had asked me. When we walked home together in the moonlight—for he begged hard to see me safe to my own door, and you may think I wasn’t very difficult to persuade—I told him honestly that I had never loved any man but him, and never would love another, come what might. He looked down into my eyes for a moment astonished, just as you look now, and then he smiled—no face ever I saw had such a smile as your father’s—and wound his great strong arm round my waist, and pressed me to his heart. I was happy then. If I might live over just one minute of my life again, it should be that first minute when I felt I belonged no more to myself, but to him.

“So we were married by an old Spanish priest in the little white chapel between the lighthouse and the town—yes, married right enough, my boy, never doubt it, though I was but a slave.

“I do not know how a great lady like our Marquise feels who can give herself and all her possessions, proudly and in public, to the man she loves, but she ought to be very happy. I was very happy, though I might only meet your father by stealth, and with the fear of a punishment I shuddered to think of before my eyes. I thought of it very often, too, yet not without pride and pleasure, to risk it all for his sake. What I dreaded far worse than punishment—worse than death, was the day his ship would sail, and though she lay weeks and months refitting in the harbour, that day arrived too soon. Never tell me people die of grief, my boy, since I came off the hill alive when I had seen the last of those white sails. I could have cursed the ship for taking him away, and yet I blessed her for his sake.

“There was consolation for me too. I had his solemn promise to come back again, and I’ll never believe but he would have kept it had he been alive. Nothing shall persuade me that my brave, blue-eyed Englishman has not been sleeping many a year, rolled in his hammock, under the deep, dark sea. It was well the conviction came on me by degrees that I was never to see him again. I should have gone mad if I had known it that last night when he bade me keep my heart up, and trust him to the end. After a while I fretted less, for my time was near, and my beautiful boy was born. Such an angel never lay on a mother’s knees. My son, my son, you have the same eyes, and the same sweet smile still. I knew you that day in the street, long before I turned your collar down, and saw the little white mark like an anchor on your neck. How proud I was of you, and how I longed to show my sturdy, blue-eyed boy, who began to speak at eleven months, to every mother in the island, but I dared not—I dared not, for your sake more than for my own. I was cunning then—ay, cunning, and brave, and enduring as a panther. They never found me out—they never so much as suspected me. I had money, plenty of it, and influence too, with one man at least, who would have put his hand in the fire, coward as I think he is, if I had only made him a sign. With his help, I concealed the existence of my boy from every creature on the plantation—black or white. In his house I used to come and nurse you, dear, and play with you by the hour together. That man is my husband now, and I think he deserves a better fate.

“At last he was forced to leave the island, and then came another parting, worse than the first. It was only for myself I grieved when I lost your father, but when I was forced to trust my beautiful boy to the care of another, to cross the sea, to sleep in strange beds, to be washed and dressed by other hands, perhaps to meet with hard words and angry looks, or worse still, to clasp his pretty arms about a nurse’s neck, and to forget the mother that bore him, I thought my heart would break. My boy, there is no such thing—I tell you again, these are fables—grief does not kill.

“For a long time I heard regularly of your welfare, and paid liberally for the good news. I was sure the man to whom I had entrusted you looked upon me as his future wife, and though I hated him for the thought, I—who loved that bold, strong, outspoken sailor—I permitted it, I encouraged it, for I believed it would make him kinder to my boy. When you were a little older, I meant to buy my own freedom, and take you with me to live in Europe—wherever you could be safe.

“At last a ship sailed into Port Welcome, and brought no letter for me, no news of my child. Another, and yet another, till months of longing, sickening anxiety had grown to years, and I was nearly mad with fear and pain. The father I had long despaired of, but I thought I was never to be used so hardly as to lose the child.