To-day she was happy without mitigation. The ball at Government House had no sting in its wake. She had been one of the belles. Not a dance had she missed, and she knew that, thanks to one of her governesses, she danced very well. To be sure the young officers in Her Blessed Majesty’s uniform had perspired a good deal, and a big and rather horrid man had tried to monopolize her, but at least he had been the best dancer of the squadron, and his rivals had looked ready to call him out. Also, the other girls had been jealous. Julia was human.
“After all, one goes to a party to dance,” she thought philosophically. “The men don’t matter.”
Dismissing France she reviewed the other young men in turn, but shook her head over each. Not one had made the slightest impression on her. The Prince was yet to arrive. And then she laughed a little at her mother’s expense.
So far, she owed the only excitements of her life to her mother’s practices in astrology. She knew that old M’sieu, who had lived at Great House until his death shortly after her eighth birthday, had instructed her mother deeply in the ancient science. Many a time she had stolen out into the garden at night and watched the two motionless figures on the flat roof of the house. They were sequestered for days at a time in Mrs. Edis’s study, a room Julia was forbidden to enter. Julia, however, had hung over that tempting sill upon more than one occasion, and long since discovered that every book on the walls related to astrology and other branches of Eastern science; had gathered, also, from remarks at the dinner table while M’sieu was alive, that it was one of the most valuable libraries of its kind in the world.
She also knew that M’sieu had cast her horoscope the very moment that old Mammy Cales had brought her up to Great House in her wonderful basket, as he had cast the horoscopes of all her brothers, whose only survivor was the wretched Fawcett. Her ears had been very sharp long before she reached the age of eight, and she knew that the planets had conspired to make a great lady of her in a great country (the queen’s of course); she also knew that her mother had cast her little daughter’s horoscope herself a month later, and the result had been the same. The dates had then been sent to the leading astrologer in Italy, and again with the same result. Therefore had Julia, happy and buoyant by nature, grown up in the comfortable assurance that the wildest of her dreams must be realized.
She had shrewdly divined that last night at Government House had coincided with the first of the fateful dates announced by the planets of her birth, and that her mother, having no intention of deflecting the magnet of fate, had postponed her introduction to the world of young men until the third of March; which, extraordinarily, had brought no less than three cruisers to the little world of St. Kitts. And the poor old planets, for whom she felt an almost personal affection, had been all wrong, even when so ably assisted by her august parent! She felt a momentary pang at the unsettling of her faith, the loss of her idols, then curled herself up and went to sleep on the soft cheek of the old volcano.
III
She was awakened by the dinner gong, booming loudly on the terrace; her predilection for the woods about the crater was an old story. She sat up with a yawn and a naughty face. Such good things she had eaten at Government House last night, and even her strong little teeth were weary of fibrous cattle killed only when too old and feeble to do the work of the infrequent horse. She detested even the Sunday chicken, invitingly brown without but as tough as the cows within, so recent her exit from the court of much repose. That chicken! No West Indian ever forgets her. She looks alive and full of pride, as, with her gizzard tucked under her left wing, she is carried high but mincingly down the dining room to the head of the table by a yellow wench or superannuated butler. When a venerable cock is sacrificed, he is boiled as a tribute to the doughtiness of his sex, but the more abundant ladies of the harem are given a brown and burnished shroud, deceitful to the last.
Butter, Julia had rarely tasted; milk was almost as scarce; but she would have been quite willing to live on the delicious fruits and vegetables of the Indies, bread and coffee. Her mother, however, forced her to eat meat once a day, hoping to check the anæmia inevitable in the tropics.
Mrs. Edis, kind as she ever was to the one creature that had found the soft spot in her heart, did not like to be kept waiting, and Julia, pinning up her untidy hair as she ran, was in the dining-room before the gong had ceased to echo. Like the other rooms of Great House, and the older mansions of the West Indies in general, this was very large and very bare, although the sideboard, table, and chairs were of mahogany. Only two of the ancestral portraits hung on the whitewashed walls, John and Mary Fawcett; the grandparents, also, of one Alexander Hamilton, who had unaccountably become something or other in the United States of America, instead of serving his mother country. Mrs. Edis disapproved of his conduct, and rarely alluded to him, but Julia sometimes haunted the ruin of the house down near the shore, where he was supposed to have come to light, and would have liked to know more of him. There was an old print of him in the garret (her grandfather, it seemed, had admired him), and she liked his sparkling eyes and human mouth. A photograph of her brother Fawcett, taken some years ago in London, was not unlike, although the charming mouth had always been weaker; but now—and this was Julia’s only trouble—he was quite dreadful to look at, and came seldom to Great House. When he did, there were terrible scenes; Julia, much as she loved him, ran to the forest the moment she heard his voice.