“As you wish,” he said with a heavy sigh. The sight of the girl anguished his soul.
CHAPTER XVIII. AT SALEM
The plantation of Salem was in a region below the Pedro Plains in the parish of St. Elizabeth, where grow the aloe, and torch-thistle, and clumps of wood which alter the appearance of the plain from the South Downs of England, but where thousands of cattle and horses even in those days were maintained. The air of the district was dry and elastic, and it filtered down to the valleys near like that where Salem was with its clusters of negro huts and offices, its mills and distilleries where sugar and rum were made. Salem was situated on the Black River, accessible by boats and canoes. The huts of negro slaves were near the sugar mills, without regard to order, but in clusters of banana, avocado-pear, limes and oranges, and with the cultivated land round their huts made an effective picture.
One day every fortnight was allowed the negroes to cultivate their crops, and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes, wicker-chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing. The huts themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth, the roof, of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides hard-posts driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster, and inside scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright. The furniture was scant—a quatre, or bed, made of a platform of boards, with a mat and a blanket, some low stools, a small table, an earthen water-jar, and some smaller ones, a pail and an iron pot, and calabashes which did duty for plates, dishes and bowls. In one of the two rooms making the hut, there were always the ashes of the night-fire, without which negroes could not sleep in comfort.
These were the huts of the lowest grade of negro-slaves of the fields. The small merchants and the domestics had larger houses with boarded floors, some even with linen sheets and mosquito nets, and shelves with plates and dishes of good ware. Every negro received a yearly allowance of Osnaburgh linen, woollen, baize and checks for clothes, and some planters also gave them hats and handkerchiefs, knives, needles and thread, and so on.
Every plantation had a surgeon who received a small sum for attendance on every slave, while special cases of midwifery, inoculation, etc., had a particular allowance. The surgeon had to attend to about four hundred to five hundred negroes, on an income of L150 per annum, and board and lodging and washing, besides what he made from his practice with the whites.
Salem was no worse than some other plantations on the island, but it was far behind such plantations as that owned by Dyck Calhoun, and had been notorious for the cruelties committed on it. To such an estate a lady like Sheila Llyn would be a boon. She was not on the place a day before she started reforms which would turn the plantation into a model scheme. Houses, food, treatment of the negroes, became at once a study to her, and her experience in Virginia was invaluable. She had learned there not to work the slaves too hard in the warm period of the day; and she showed her interest by having served at her own table the favourite olio the slaves made of plantains, bananas, yams, calalue, eddoes, cassavi, and sweet potatoes boiled with salt fish and flavoured with cayenne pepper. This, with the unripe roasted plantain as bread, was a native relish and health-giving food.
Ever since the day when she had seen Dyck Calhoun at Spanish Town she had been disturbed in mind. Dyck had shown a reserve which she felt was not wholly due to his having been imprisoned for manslaughter. In one way he looked little older. His physique was as good, or better than when she first saw him on the hills of Playmore. It was athletic, strenuous, elastic. Yet there was about it the abandonment of despair—at least of recklessness. The face was older, the head more powerful, the hair slightly touched with grey-rather there was one spot in the hair almost pure white; a strand of winter in the foliage of summer. It gave a touch of the bizarre to a distinguished head, it lent an air of the singular to a personality which had flare and force—an almost devilish force. That much was to be said for him, that he had not sought to influence her to his own advantage. She was so surrounded in America by men who knew her wealth and prized her beauty, she was so much a figure in Virginia, that any reserve with regard to herself was noticeable. She was enough feminine to have pleasure in the fact that she was thought desirable by men; yet it played an insignificant part in her life.
It did not give her conceit. It was only like a frill on the skirts of life. It did not play any part in her character. Certainly Dyck Calhoun had not flattered her. That one to whom she had written, as she had done, should remove himself so from the place of the deserving friend, one whom she had not deserted while he was in jail as a criminal—that he should treat her so, gave every nerve a thrill of protest. Sometimes she trembled in indignation, and then afterwards gave herself to the work on the estate or in the household—its reform and its rearrangement; though the house was like most in Jamaica, had adequate plate, linen, glass and furniture. At the lodgings in Spanish Town, after Dyck Calhoun had left, her mother had briefly said that she had told Dyck he could not expect the conditions of the Playmore friendship should be renewed; that, in effect, she had warned him off. To this Sheila had said that the killing of a man whose life was bad might be punishable. In any case, that was in another land, under abnormal conditions; and, with lack of logic, she saw no reason why he should be socially punished in Jamaica for what he had been legally punished for in Ireland. As for the mutiny, he had done what any honest man of spirit would do; also, he had by great bravery and skill brought victory to the king’s fleet in West Indian waters.