He was far from feeling any of this respect in the present instance. Old Robert could not be got to answer a question straightforward, or to tell anything without contradicting himself twenty times. He told fibs about his master and Cassius and himself; had a story for every question that was asked, the object of the story being to find out how the gentleman would like to have the question answered; and praised everything and everybody that he supposed would be acceptable to a white. Alfred soon grew tired of this, and bade him mind where he was going and leave off talking: whereupon the old man began to sing,—not, as Alfred would have liked, one of the songs of his own land, in consideration of which the cracked voice and antic action would have been forgiven,—but an English hymn, which he shouted through the wood, shaking his head, clasping his hands and turning up his eyes, which, however, never failed to warn him of the boughs which straggled across the path, and which he held aside that they might not incommode his companion. When they came within hearing of the pavilion, the chaunt became doubly devout. Mitchelson shouted to him, with an oath, to hold his tongue, to which he answered with a flippant “Very well, sir,” and took his way back again, muttering to himself as he hobbled along.
Alfred was surprised to find that Mrs. Mitchelson and her two daughters had joined the party in the pavilion. Fruit and wine were on the table; the ladies reposed on couches and the gentlemen lolled in their chairs, as English people are wont to do in a hot climate. Alfred took his seat by a window, where the spicy winds breathed softly in, and whence he could look over cane-fields glaring in the sun with coffee-walks interspersed, over groves of the cotton-tree, of the fig, the plantain and the orange, to where the sea sparkled on the horizon, with here and there a white sail gliding before the breeze.
“What[“What] luxury!” he exclaimed, “to sit in this very seat once more, to look again on this landscape; to be regaled with such fragrance as I have only dreamed of since my childhood, and to feast on such fruit,” helping himself to an orange, “as the English at home have little more idea of than the Laplanders.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Grace Mitchelson, “I thought the English ate oranges. I am sure there was something about oranges in what papa read out of the newspaper about the theatre.”
“Yes,” said her sister Rosa, “did not they throw orange-peel on the stage, papa?”
Alfred explained that the oranges which are thought a great treat in England, are such as would be thrown away as only half-ripe at Demerara. His father looked pleased as he praised one after another of the things in which a tropical climate excels a temperate one. Mr. Mitchelson stopped him, however, in the midst of his observations on the fertility of the soils which stretched from the height on which they sat to the distant ocean.
“Fertile indeed they have been,” said he, “and fertile many of them still are; but richness of soil is not a lasting advantage like a fine climate. It wears out fast, very fast, as I can tell to my cost. If you had seen what yonder cane-field produced when it first came into my hands, and could compare it with last year’s crop, you would be surprised at the change.”
“Do soils become exhausted faster at Demerara than elsewhere?” asked Mr. Bruce. “If not, there is a poor prospect before our whole race. One would fear they must starve in time. What do they say in England, son?”
“They say, sir, that soils used to be exhausted there, and that, as a matter of course, they were suffered to lie fallow from time to time; but I believe sugar-planters do not like fallows.”
“We cannot afford them,” said Mitchelson. “We must have crops year by year to answer our expenses; and when we have short leases, we must make the most of them, whatever becomes of the land when we have done with it.”