'Will,' she said, 'if I receive that permission to return which my Lord promises, what will you do? Will you come home with me?'
'I do not know,' I told her. 'If the place pleases us, why should we go home again? My memories of home will be full of wrongs for many a year to come. I can never get back to my old friends in the City. Although, thanks to you, I was fully acquitted, I am a Newgate bird and a bird of the King's Bench. People look askance upon such a man. I must think of Alice, too, and of the boy. We must not let these memories haunt the mother and make the boy ashamed.'
'To go back,' she answered without heeding me, 'to stand on the stage at Drury Lane once more. Have they forgotten me already, do you think? The Orange Girls will remember, I am sure, and the natives of St. Giles's,' she laughed, 'I don't think they will bear malice.'
'You must not go back to Drury Lane, Jenny.'
'I can do better than Drury Lane, Will,' she said. 'I have but to consent and I shall be—a Countess. And oh! how proud will my children be of their mother, proud indeed of their mother. Oh! Will, to think how one's birth clings round and hampers us all our lives. I might be happy; I might make a good and faithful man happy; but the time would come when the children would grow up and would ask who and what was their mother and where she was born. Could I take them to the ruins of the Black Jack? Could I take them to the Tyburn Tree of Glory and tell them how how their grandfather died?' Then she relapsed into silence and so remained for awhile.
She had none of the common accomplishments of women; she could not sew or embroider or make things as women used. She could do nothing; she could not cook or make cordials; she understood no household work of any kind: she could read, but she had read nothing beyond the plays in which she had acted; she knew no history or geography or politics; she knew nothing but what she had learned for her own purposes; the scaffolding, so to speak, on which the actor builds his playing; the art of fine dress; and how to wear it; the art of dancing with an admirable grace of manner and of carriage; the art of courtesy and graciousness, in which she was a Princess; the art of making herself even more beautiful than Nature intended; and the art of bringing all men to her feet. Before we had been a day at sea, the Captain was her servant to command; by the second day, the mate was her slave; by the third day the sailors worshipped her. She brought good luck to the ship; every sailor will tell you that passengers may, and often do, resemble Jonah, who was pursued by a tempest; Jenny brought fair weather and a balmy breeze always from the right quarter.
She did not forget our fellow-passengers. When she heard that they were dying fast she would have gone below to visit them but the Captain refused his leave; the noisome quarters where they herded together, day and night, was not a proper place for any decent woman to visit. Let her send down what she pleased, and they should have it. She sent down from our stores daily drams of cordial and of rum; if she did not save many lives she made death less terrible.
The voyage came to an end all too quickly. On a certain day at the beginning of April we put into port and presently landed on the shores of the New World. There are certain forms. The bodies of Jenny Halliday and Pamela St. Giles's—I called the girl Pamela for obvious reasons—were duly delivered to the officer representing the Governor and as duly handed over to me as their master for five years. This proceeding was performed without Jenny's presence or knowledge. I then found a lodging not far from the Port and sought the merchants to whom I had letters of introduction and credit.
My tale draws to an end. Let it not grow tedious in its last pages. In one word, in a week or so after our landing we started on a short journey of thirty miles or so over a somewhat rough road. Our journey took us five hours. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived. First there was a large wooden house of two storeys painted white; in the front a long and deep veranda—meaning a place covered over and protected from the sun by the roof and hangings at the side and in the front. Before the house was a flower-garden; at the back was a kitchen garden and orchard; the house was well and solidly furnished; all round the house lay fields of tobacco on which black people were working; on the steps of the veranda; in the garden; under the trees played in the warm sun the little naked negro children.
'Where are we?' asked Jenny, looking round her.