In her bedroom hard-by, a massive four-poster reached to the ceiling, and off in a dark corner there was an old chest, richly ornamented with brass. In every room there were chairs and davenports in quaintest fashion, all dull and worn and beautiful, while the billiard-room outside was well filled by a massive old-fashioned rosewood billiard-table whose woodwork, undermined by the extensive ravages of ants, was fast falling in pieces. “Where has it come from?” we ask; and she replies, with a lofty air, that her grandfather brought all these over from England long, long ago. No doubt the Madame would have sold any and all of it, and we caught ourselves wondering how we could get one of those old pieces home. It really seemed as if we ought to buy something, for the black Madame, towering above us, certainly expected to make a sale. But we didn’t buy; we just admired it all, and particularly the Madame, and then we began again to try and think out the dreary tangle.
There was just one thing the Madame had which she would not sell, and that was the one thing we wanted most: the story of that grandfather. She was the grande dame; his history was sealed behind those unfathomable eyes. She admitted only the patrician in her blood, not the savage. The grandfather had left his stamp upon that face, but there was that other stamp! Alas, the Englishman has sold his birthright in Jamaica; he is selling it to-day, and what more hopeless future could rest over a people than does this day over the island of Jamaica?
III.
And now we are back in Kingston, the city. “How would it be for us to leave Daddy here—he wants to be measured at the military tailor’s for some khaki suits—and run off down the street on the shady side, to what seems to be a ‘Woman’s Exchange?’” The little girls, always ready for a new expedition, take the lead, and for once we found a sign which was not misleading. It proved to be a veritable Woman’s Exchange, filled with no end of curious specimens of native workmanship which had been brought there for sale. Among the natural curios—to us the most wonderful—was a branch of what is known as the lacebark-tree. The botanist will have to tell you its real unpronounceable name. For us “lacebark” answers very well, because we don’t know the other, and have no way of finding it out just now. Who ever thought of carrying an encyclopedia in a steamer-trunk? I am sadly conscious that we even forgot the pocket-dictionary. Please forgive us this time! But it was the tree that interested us, not its name. Its fibrous inner bark (much like the bark of our Northern moosewood) is made of endless layers of lacelike network, which can be opened and stretched a great width, even in the bark of a bit of wood an inch and a half in diameter. These layers of lace are separated and opened into flowerlike cups, with rim upon rim of lacy edge, all coming from the one solid stick of wood, or carefully unrolled into filmy sheets of net-like tissue. The native whips are made by taking long branches of this tree, scraping off the brittle outer bark, opening the inner fibrous bark, and braiding the ends into a tapering lash as long as one wishes. Hats are trimmed with scarfs of this dainty woodland lace, and even dresses are said to be made from this cloth of the forest, which rivals in loveliness the fairest weaving of Penelope.
The gracious woman in charge told us that, while the Exchange was self-supporting, it owed its existence to the liberality of an American girl, who had many years ago married an English nobleman. And it made me glad to think that our glorious American women had, with all their foolish love for titles, a generous hand for woman the world over, and that, wherever they wandered, their ways could be followed by the light of their liberality. In a way, the Exchange—founded by an American woman—made us forgive much in Kingston; so, when we took the street up to the Myrtle Bank Hotel, expecting from its name to find a sweet, delicious caravansary, embowered in myrtle green and magnolia, and found the “Myrtle Bank” an arid sand beach, with a large, self-sufficient modern hotel built therein, we still forgave, because we said we would for the sake of that dear American girl who couldn’t quite forget.
And then, too, the Doctor met us straight in the doorway; not the newly made Philadelphia doctor. No, not that one; it was the other one, the Northeast Trade, the million-year-old West Indian Doctor. Do you suppose he is as old as that? Yes, even older. But, for all that, he’s as faithful to his trust as though but yesterday he had slipped from out the wrangling of chaos. So we kiss the Doctor, and run up after him into the big, spacious parlour of the Myrtle Bank Hotel, drop down into a delightful rocker, and think it all over.
Here we are in Kingston, owned by the English, governed by the English, bullyragged by the English,—but where is he, the Englishman, where the Englishwoman? To be sure, we found some white faces in the shops, and we remembered seeing a few fair-haired, sallow little girls. And we saw on the street, just as we left the Exchange, an Englishman with a golf-bag on his shoulder; but these were the landmarks only—the exception. The people we saw were of all shades of a negro admixture, and some very black ones at that.
But the Myrtle Bank Hotel was not the place for such reflections. At least, so the good Doctor seemed to think, for he had no sooner brought us under the magic of his presence, than we were carried into the most affable state of contentment with all things visible, and it was not until the next morning that the question fully dawned upon us in its true significance.