“I goin’ in three weeks’ time. I not comin’ back to Jamaica at all! Sam going to get three pounds a week! What a good luck, eh, Letitia? What a luck!”
Hezekiah heard it all, and saw Jones in the flesh, smiling with the consciousness of irresistible masculine attractions and great potential wealth. Hezekiah could not doubt, and so that night he did exactly what Susan had calculated on his doing. Not only Maria and her mother, but everybody else that he met in Blake Lane was told that Susan had got another intended with plenty of money, and was going to Colon.
“Dis world don’t level,”[[1]] was Maria’s bitter comment on Susan’s undeserved good fortune.
| [1] | Fortune is not fair. |
CHAPTER VII
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
“We must take a ’bus,” said Jones, when he and Susan alighted from the train at Kingston. “Don’t bother with the car. It’s late already.”
He hailed a cab, and both of them, after bidding Letitia good-bye, got into the cab and drove off, but not before the cabman had exchanged some sharp words with the policeman who was regulating the traffic. Jones wanted to take sides with the cabman, partly through a natural inclination for argument, partly from a desire to impress Susan with his utter contempt for the guardian of the law. But she urged the cabman to drive on, fearing any serious quarrel at the very beginning of her new career; and the cabman obeyed after some grumbling, though he was clearly in the wrong.
She was glad to be back in Kingston, glad to be riding once more through the ill-lighted streets, to be amongst the slow-moving, chattering people, to feel the dust of the city in her face. She thrilled with excitement at the thought of her parents’ surprise; the whole yard would wonder who it was that had brought her home so splendidly from the picnic. Then she remembered the room and felt ashamed.
“The place shabby,” she again warned Jones. “Me an’ me family are poor; but we are decent. Me father ’ave cramps in his feet; that is why we ’ave to live in a little room.”