Then Susan locked the door, took pen, ink, and paper out of one of her cupboards, and sat down to write. She had given Samuel a last chance. He had answered her as he had done before. In a sentence or two she informed Mackenzie that she would leave Colon for Culebra by the second train on Saturday morning.
Then she indicted a letter to her father. This was an important epistle, for she calculated upon its being shown to a large number of persons in Kingston. She informed her father that “When these few lines come to hand, hoping it will reach you in the same good health it leave me, your affectionate daughter will be Mrs. John Mackenzie, for I am going to married to a nice gentleman working with the American people up at Culebra. Jones is too bad. He meet Tom the other night at a dance, and make a row and I have to fret too much. But I wouldn’t leave him all the same if I wasn’t a girl that like religion as you brought me up, and beside it is an honourable life to get married. Tell Kate and Eliza them must follow my example, for God bless me and smile on me, and I have everything I want and Mackenzie care for me, otherwise him wouldn’t want to put a ring on me finger. If it wasn’t that I always fear the Lord this good luck wouldn’t happen to me, and I going to pray for all of you. Tell Kate and Eliza them mustn’t keep any bad company in Kingston, and make Maria and her old obeah mother know that I married, for it will hurt them. Tell mammee and Aunt Deborah that I will rite them.—Yours truly loving daughter,
“Susan.”
Then an idea occurred to her, and she added a postscript.
“I send some money for all of you out of what I save. It is a wedding present.”
This wedding present consisted of five pounds. Only once before had she written to her people, and then she had enclosed three pounds. She thought, and rightly, that she was acting generously by them.
She regarded this composition with no little pride, then, though fatigued by such unwonted mental exertion, she proceeded to compose another letter. It was brief and to the point.
“Dear Sam,—When I ask you Thursday evening after you leave the jail if you was going to keep your promise on board ship and marry me you say no. Alright then. I am obliged to leave you for I am going to marry another gentleman who you know. Mr. Mac has been good to me, and when you get this letter I will be Mrs. Mackenzie, but if you did behave yourself I wouldn’t go away from you but it is all your own fault.—Yours affectionate,
“Susan Proudleigh.”
She folded these letters, enclosed them in envelopes, and carefully addressed them. She would post Mackenzie’s that evening. To-morrow she would buy postal orders for five pounds and then register the letter to Jamaica; in the meantime the letters that were to be posted the next day were carefully locked away by her in a little box which she kept at the bottom of her trunk. Susan had carefully observed how absconding wives acted in moving-picture dramas. These wrote their last farewells in the space of five seconds, read them over with frowning brows, sealed them, and placed them in a most conspicuous position in order that they should not by any possibility be overlooked. A wife of this type would scarcely have left the house before the husband would return, and there, on the table, would be the letter waiting for him, as large as life. But he never saw it at once. Some occult influence, apparently, kept his eyes away from it. He would look round the room, search the ceiling for the missing one, scrutinize the floor, survey the atmosphere, and would be on the point of leaving the room when his eye would fall upon the table and the letter would be seen. This procedure would probably give him just sufficient time to rush into the street, summon the motor-car that always attends upon the movements of repentant husbands, and dash off to the railway station or the ship’s dock, or the house to which his wife had fled. A second more and he would have been too late. In the moving-picture world, however, time itself is subordinate to the imperious demands of domestic felicity, and the reconciliation takes place dramatically with a public embrace.