"You are living in London, now?" I asked.
"Yes," he answered, "we have a little home of our own in Kensington. I am working on the staff of the Morning Detonator."
"Mrs. Carvalho is here this evening," said Mrs. Bouverie Barton. "Do you know her? I suppose you do, of course."
Mrs. Carvalho! As I heard the name, I was conscious of a deep but rapid thud, thud, thud in my ear, and after a moment it struck me that the thud came from the quick beating of my own heart. Then Ernest Carvalho was married!
"No," he said in reply, seeing that I did not answer immediately. "Miss Hazleden has never met her, I believe; but I shall be happy to introduce her;" and he turned to a sofa where two or three ladies were chatting together, a little in the corner.
A very queenly old lady, with snow-white hair, prettily covered in part by a dainty and becoming lace cap, held out her small white hand to me with a gracious smile. "My mother," Ernest Carvalho said quietly; and I took the proffered hand with a warmth that must have really surprised the slave-born octaroon. The one thought that was uppermost in my mind was just this, that after all Ernest Carvalho was not married. Once more I heard the thud in my ear, and nothing else.
As soon as I could notice anybody or anything except myself, I began to observe that Mrs. Carvalho was very handsome. She was rather dark, to be sure, but less so than many Spanish or Italian ladies I had seen; and her look and manner were those of a Louis Quinze marquise, with a distinct reminiscence of the stately old Haitian French politeness. She could never have had any education except what she had picked up for herself; but no one would suspect the deficiency now, for she was as clever as all half-castes, and had made the best of her advantages meanwhile, such as they were. When she talked about the literary London in which her son lived and moved, I felt like the colonial-bred ignoramus I really was; and when she told me they had just been to visit Mr. Fradelli's new picture at the studio, I was positively too ashamed to let her see that I had never in my life heard of that famous painter before. To think that that queenly old lady was still a slave girl at Palmettos when my poor dear mother was a little child! And to think, too, that my own family would have kept her a slave all her life long, if only they had had the power! I remembered at once with a blush what Ernest Carvalho had said to me the last time I saw him, about the people with whom the guilt and shame of slavery really rested.
I sat, half in a maze, talking with Mrs. Carvalho all the rest of that evening. Ernest lingered near for a while, as if to see what impression his mother produced upon me, but soon went off, proudly I thought, to another part of the room, where he got into conversation with the German gentleman who wore the big blue wire-guarded spectacles. Yet I fancied he kept looking half anxiously in our direction throughout the evening, and I was sure I saw him catch his mother's eye furtively now and again. As for Mrs. Carvalho, she made a conquest of me at once, and she was evidently well pleased with her conquest. When I rose to leave, she took both my hands in hers, and said to me warmly, "Miss Hazleden, we shall be so pleased to see you whenever you like to come, at Merton Gardens." Had Ernest ever told her of his proposal? I wondered.
Mrs. Bouverie Barton was very kind to me. She kept on asking me to her Thursday evenings, and there time after time I met Ernest Carvalho. At first, he seldom spoke to me much, but at last, partly because I always talked so much to his mother perhaps, he began to thaw a little, and often came up to me in quite a friendly way. "We have left Jamaica and all that behind, Miss Hazleden," he said once, "and here in free England we may at least be friends." Oh, how I longed to explain the whole truth to him, and how impossible an explanation was. Besides, he had seen so many other girls since, and very likely his boyish fancy for me had long since passed away altogether. You can't count much on the love-making of eighteen and twenty.
Mrs. Carvalho asked me often to their pretty little house in Merton Gardens, and I went; but still Ernest never in any way alluded to what had passed. Months went by, and I began to feel that I must crush that little dream entirely out of my heart—if I could. One afternoon I went in to Mrs. Carvalho's for a cup of five-o'clock tea, and had an uninterrupted tête-à-tête with her for half an hour. We had been exchanging small confidences with one another for a while, and after a pause the old lady laid her gentle hand upon my head and stroked back my hair in such a motherly fashion. "My dear child," she said, half-sighing, "I do wish my Ernest would only take a fancy to a sweet young girl like you."