“Well, well! She is a very good girl in her way; but she talks about what she does not understand. She pretends to judge of governors of the colony, when her own father cannot govern this town, and she never knew Blanchelande! Ah! if she had known Blanchelande, she would have seen a man who understood his business, and had spirit to keep up the dignity and honour of the colony. If that sort of rule had gone on till now, we should not have had the best houses in the island full of these black upstarts; nor a mulatto governor in this very town.”
“And then I should not have had Afra for a friend, grandpapa.”
“You would have been better without, child. I do not like to see you for ever with a girl of her complexion, though she is the governor’s daughter. There must be an end of it—there shall be an end of it. It is a good time now. There is a reason for it to-day. It is time you made friends of your own complexion, child; and into the convent you go—this very day.”
“Oh, grandpapa, you don’t mean that those nuns are of my complexion! Poor pale creatures! I would not for the world look like them: and I certainly shall, if you put me there. I had much rather look like Afra than like sister Benoite, or sister Cecile. Grandpapa! you would not like me to look like sister Benoite?”
“How do I know, child? I don’t know one from another of them.”
“No, indeed! and you would not know me by the time I had been there three months. How sorry you would be, grandpapa, when you asked for me next winter, to see all those yellow-faced women pass before you, and when the yellowest of all came, to have to say, ‘Can this be my poor Euphrosyne!’”
Monsieur Revel could not help laughing as he looked up at the girl through his spectacles. He pinched her cheek, and said that there was certainly more colour there than was common in the West Indies; but that it must fade, in or out of the convent, by the time she was twenty; and she had better be in a place where she was safe. The convent was the only safe place.
“You have often said that before,” replied she, “and the time has never come yet. And no more it will now. I shall go with Afra to the cacao-gathering at Le Zéphyr, as I did last year. Oh, that sweet cool place in the Mornes du Chaos! How different from this great ugly square white convent, with nothing that looks cheerful, and nothing to be heard but teaching, teaching, and religion, religion, for ever.”
“I advise you to make friends among the sisters, however, Euphrosyne; for there you will spend the next few years.”
“I will not make friends with anything but the poor mocking-bird. I have promised Afra not to love anybody instead of her; but she will not be jealous of the poor bird. It and I will spend the whole day in the thicket, mocking and pining—pining and mocking. The sisters shall not get a word out of me—not one of them. I may speak to old Raphael now and then, that I may not forget how to use my tongue; but I vow that poor bird shall be my only friend.”