“You mean to say that y’u didn’t hear what that man tell us to-day in the cook-shop?”
“Yes,” said Susan, “I did hear what him say; but that don’t ’ave nothing to do with what you say on board the ship. Y’u promise to marry me because we wasn’t living quite correct, an’ if that was true yesterday morning, it must be true to-night.”
Susan’s rejoinder was so straightforward and clear that Jones could only reply indirectly.
“Well!” he exclaimed, apostrophizing the ceiling; “I never see people so unreasonable like Jamaica females. They have no logical perspecuity. They are so ambitious that I can’t understand them. Susan, you forget that when I talk to you about marriage an’ all that sort of foolishness we didn’t expect to live another week? You forget that? I don’t tell you that if the comet was really goin’ to kill us I wouldn’t get married. But now, seeing that we are safe, it would be the height of stupidness in me to pick up meself an’ enter in the bonds of matrimony, which, when you once get into it, y’u can’t get out of it at all. What you take me for? Specify!”
“Then you not goin’ to marry me again?” was Susan’s only reply to this long speech.
“Don’t I have signified to you?” he answered; and as she sat there looking at him darkly, he hastened to pacify her.
“But you are all right, Sue; you goin’ to live like a queen. After all, when we leave Jamaica we didn’t think about married. Besides, look what I do for you already!”
She did not see that he had done much for her at all, for she was not a woman easily satisfied. But Colon was not Kingston; she had no friends here; all the advantage would be on Jones’s side if she quarrelled with him now. She was well aware too that she could scarcely claim that he had brought her with him under false pretences. Nevertheless she felt bitterly disappointed, and Jones’s way of looking upon marriage with her as being only a sensible action when death appeared imminent, wounded her vanity. If he had not promised to marry her on the ship, she would not have mentioned the matter; but he had created hope in her, had awakened a dormant ambition, and she understood how advantageous it would be for her to have a legal right to his name in this new country. She now felt, therefore, that she had a grievance, and her resentment was increased by her sense of entire dependence upon Jones. It was true that she had boasted in Jamaica about going to Colon as an independent woman to earn her own living; but her few hours’ experience in that town had taught her that with girls like herself that was more easily said than done. Catherine had proved right after all. The young woman who did not know Panama well must have some one to assist her.
She did not propose to argue any more with Samuel. If her family were with her, she reflected, the situation might be very different, for together they would surely be able to earn a decent living, and then she would not feel so much obliged to tolerate anything like neglect from Samuel. Or again, if she had some money and knew Panama, she might be able to make her way about with ease. But she was not prepared to become a servant. She knew that women of a certain type flourished in Colon, but to their depths she would not and could never sink. Her mind ran upon Tom: she knew she had influence with him, and as a last resort she could always appeal to him for assistance; Truth to tell, however, she had felt Tom’s departure as a relief after he had left Jamaica: she had never cared for him. Samuel was wild, unstable, but was not intentionally unkind. . . . She liked him.
Sitting on the edge of the cot, one leg crooked over the other, her chin supported by her right hand, she thought the matter over. The sound of the rain and the thunder’s long roll came to her ears. In the next apartment a girl was singing—she knew the words, she had heard them in Jamaica: