MONTMIRAIL WEST
At a distance of less than a league from Port Welcome stood the large
and flourishing plantation of _Cash-a-crou_, known to the European
population, and, indeed, to many of the negroes, by the more civilised
appellation of Montmirail West. It was the richest and most important
establishment on the island, covering a large extent of cultivation,
reclaimed at no small cost of labour from the bush, and worked by a
numerous gang of slaves. Not a negro was purchased for these grounds till
he had undergone a close inspection by the shrewd and pitiless overseer,
who never missed a good investment, be it Coromantee, Guinea-man, or
Congo, and never bought a hand, of however plausible an appearance, in
whom his quick eye could detect a flaw; consequently, no such cheerful
faces, fresh lips, sound teeth, strong necks, open chests, sinewy arms,
dry, large hands, flat stomachs, powerful loins, round thighs, muscular
calves, lean ankles, high feet, and similar physical points of servile
symmetry, were to be found in any other gang as in that which worked the
wide clearings on the _Cash-a-crou_ estate, which, for convenience, we
will call by its more civilised name. It was said, however, that in the
purchase of female negroes this overseer was not so particular; that
a saucy eye, a nimble tongue, and such an amount of good looks as is
compatible with African colouring and features, found more favour in his
judgment than size, strength, substance, vigorous health, or the prolific
qualities so desirable in these investments. The overseer, indeed, was a
married man, living, it was thought, in wholesome dread of his Quadroon
wife, and so completely did he identify himself with the new character
he had assumed, that even Célandine could hardly believe her present
husband was the same Stefano Bartoletti who had wooed her unsuccessfully
in her girlhood, had met her again under such strange circumstances in
France, eventually to follow her fortunes, and those of her mistress,
the Marquise, and obtain from the latter the supervision of her negroes
on the estate she had inherited by her mother’s will, which she chose to
call Montmirail West.
Bartoletti had intended to settle down for the rest of his life in a
state of dignified indolence with Célandine. He had even offered to
purchase the Quadroon’s freedom, which was generously given to her by
the Marquise with that view; but he had accustomed himself through the
whole of his early life to the engrossing occupation of money-making,
and like many others he found it impossible to leave off. He and his
wife now devoted themselves entirely to the acquisition of wealth; she
with the object of discovering her long-lost son, he, partly from inborn
covetousness, and yet more from force of habit. Quick, shrewd, and indeed
enterprising, where there was no personal risk, he had been but a short
time in the service of the Marquise ere he became an excellent overseer,
by no means neglecting her interests, while he was scrupulously attentive
to his own. The large dealings in human merchandise which now occupied
his attention afforded scope for his peculiar qualities, and Signor
Bartoletti found few competitors in the slave-market who, in caution,
cupidity, and knowledge of business, could pretend to be his equals.
Moreover, he dearly loved the constant speculation, amounting to actual
gambling, inseparable from such transactions, nor was he averse, besides,
to that pleasing sensation of superiority experienced by all but the
noblest natures from absolute authority, however unjustifiable, over
their fellow-creatures.
The Signor was a great man in the plantation, a great man in Port
Welcome, a great man on the deck of a trader just arrived with her
swarthy cargo from the Bight of Benin or the Gold Coast; but his
proportions seemed to shrink and his step to falter when he crossed the
threshold of his own home. The older negroes, who knew he had married
an Obi-woman, and respected him for his daring, were persuaded that
he had been quelled and brought into subjection through some charm put
upon him by Célandine. To the same magical influence they attributed the
Quadroon’s favour with her mistress, and this superstitious dread had
indeed been of service to both; for a strong feeling of dissatisfaction
was gaining ground rapidly amongst the blacks, and then, as now,
notwithstanding all that has been said and written in their favour, they
were less easily ruled by love than fear.
It is not that they are naturally savage, inhuman, brutal. Centuries of
Christianity and cultivation might probably have done for the black man
what they have done for the white; but those centuries have been denied
him; and if he is to be taken at once from a state of utter ignorance and
degradation to be placed on a footing of social equality with those who
have hitherto been his masters—a race that has passed gradually through
the successive stages he is expected to compass in one stride—surely it
must be necessary to restrain him from the excesses peculiar to the lusty
adolescence of nations, as of individuals, by some stronger repressive
influence than need be applied to the staid and sober demeanour of a
people arrived long ago at maturity, if not already past their prime.
Signor Bartoletti did not trouble himself with such speculations.
Intimidation he found answered his purpose tolerably, corporal punishment
extremely well.
Passing from the supervision of some five-score hoes, picking their
labour out with great deliberation amongst the clefts and ridges of a
half-cleared mountain, clothed to its summit in a tangle of luxuriant
beauty, he threaded a line of wattled mud cottages, cool with thick
heavy thatch, dazzling in whitewash, and interspersed with fragrant
almond-trees, breaking the scorching sunlight into a thousand shimmering
rays, as they rustled and quivered to the whisper of the land-breeze, not
yet exhausted by the heat.
At the door of one of these huts he spied a comely negro girl, whose
duties should have kept her in the kitchen of the great house. He also
observed that she concealed something bulky under her snowy apron, and
looked stealthily about as if afraid of being seen.
He had a step noiseless and sure as a cat; she never heard him coming,
but started with a loud scream when she felt his hand on her shoulder,
and incontinently began to cry.
“What have you got there, Fleurette?” asked the overseer, sternly. “Bring
it out at once, and show it up!”
“Nothing, Massa,” answered Fleurette, of course, though she was sobbing
all the time. “It only Aunt Rosalie’s piccaninny, I take him in please,
just now, to his mammy, out of the wind.”
There was but such a light breath of air as kept the temperature below
actual suffocation.
“Wind! nonsense!” exclaimed Bartoletti, perspiring and exasperated. “Aunt
Rosalie’s child was in the baby-yard half an hour ago; here, let me look
at him!” and the overseer snatched up Fleurette’s apron to discover a
pair of plump black hands, clasped over a well-fattened turkey, cleaned,
plucked, and ready for the pot.
The girl laughed through her tears. “You funny man, Signor!” said she,
archly, yet with a gleam of alarm in her wild black eyes; “you no believe
only when you see. Piccaninny gone in wash-tub long since; Fleurette
talkee trash, trash; dis lilly turkey fed on plantation at Maria
Gralante; good father give um to Fleurette a-cause dis nigger say ‘Ave’
right through, and spit so at Mumbo-Jumbo.”
This story was less credible than the last, inasmuch as the adjoining
plantation of Maria Galante, cultivated by a few Jesuit priests, although
in a thriving condition, and capable of producing the finest poultry
reared, was more than an hour’s walk from where they stood, and it
was impossible that Fleurette could have been absent so long from her
duties at that period of the day. So Bartoletti, placing his hand in his
waistcoat, pulled out a certain roll, which the slaves called his “black
book,” and inserted Fleurette’s name therein for corporal punishment to
the amount of stripes awarded for the crime of theft.
It was a common action enough; scarce a day passed, scarce even an
hour, without the production of this black book by the overseer, and a
torrent of entreaties, couched in the mingled jargon of French, Spanish,
and British, I have endeavoured to render through the conventional
negro-English, which, indeed, formed its basis, from the unfortunate
culprit whose name was thus inscribed; but on this occasion Fleurette
seemed to entertain a morbid terror of the ordeal quite out of proportion
to its frequency, and, indeed, its severity—for though sufficiently
brutal, the lash was not dangerous to life or limb. She screamed, she
wept, she prayed, she caught the overseer by his knees and clasped them
to her bosom, entreating him, with a frantic earnestness that became
almost sublime, to spare her this degradation! to forgive her only this
once! to bid her work night and day till crop-time, and then to send her
into the field-gang for the hardest labour they could devise—nay, to sell
her to the first trader that touched at Port Welcome, never to look on
her home at _Cash-a-crou_ again—anything, anything, rather than tie her
to a stake and flog her like a disobedient hound!
But Bartoletti was far too practised an overseer to be in the slightest
degree moved by such entreaties. Replacing the black book in his
waistcoat, he walked coolly away, without deigning to look back at his
despairing suppliant, writhing under such a mixture of grief and shame
as soon maddened into rage. Perhaps, had he done so, he would have been
frightened into mercy, for a bolder man than the Italian might have been
cowed by the glare of that girl’s eyes, when she drew up her slender
figure, and clenching her hands till the nails pierced them, spat after
him with an intensity of hatred that wanted only opportunity to slake its
fierce desire in blood.
The Signor, however, wiping his brow, unconscious, passed quietly on, to
report his morning’s work to the Marquise, and obtain her sanction for
Fleurette’s punishment, because the mistress never permitted any slave on
her estate to be chastised but by her own express command.
Long years ago, when his heart was fresh and high, the Italian had spent
a few months in this very island, a period to which he still looked back
as to the one bright ray that gilded his dreary, wandering, selfish life.
It was here he met Célandine while both were young, and wooed her with
little encouragement indeed, for she confessed honestly enough that he
was too late, yet not entirely without hope. And now in gleams between
the cane-pieces he could catch a glimpse of that silver-spread lagoon
by which they had walked more than once in the glowing evenings, till
darkness, closing without warning like a curtain, found them together
still.
He had conceived for himself then an ideal of Paradise, which had never
in after years faded completely away. To win the Quadroon for his own—to
make himself a peaceful home in easy circumstances, somewhere amidst
this tangled wilderness of beauty from which Port Welcome peeped out on
the Caribbean Sea—to sit in his own porch and watch the tropical sunset
dying off through its blended hues of gold, and crimson, and orange, into
the pale, serene depths of opal, lost ere he could look again, amongst
the gathering shades of night—such were his dreams, and at last he had
realised them to the letter; but he never watched the sunset now, nor
walked by the cool glistening lagoon with the woman whom in his own
selfish way he had loved for half a lifetime. She was his wife, you see,
and a very imperious wife she proved. When he had leisure to speculate
on such matters, which was seldom, he could not but allow that he was
disappointed; that the ideal was a fallacy, the romance a fiction, the
investment a failure; practically, the home was dull, the lagoon damp,
and the sunset moonshine!
Therefore, as he walked on, though the material Paradise was there, as
it had always been, he never wasted a look or thought on its glowing
beauties, intent only on the dust that covered his shoes, the thirst
that fired his throat, and the perspiration that streamed from his brow.
Yet palm, cocoa, orange, and lime-tree were waving overhead; while the
wild vine, pink, purple, and delicate creamy-white, winding here about
his path, ran fifty feet aloft round some bare stem to which it clung in
a succession of convolvulus-like blossoms from the same plant he trod
beneath his very feet. Birds of gaudy feather—purple, green, and flaming
scarlet, flashed from tree to tree with harsh, discordant cries, and a
_Louis d’or_ flitted round him in its bright, golden plumage, looking, as
its name implies, like a guinea upon wings.
The grass-grown road he followed was indeed an avenue to the great house,
and as he neared his destination he passed another glimpse of tropical
scenery without a glance. It was the same view that delighted the eyes of
the Marquise daily from her sitting-room, and that Cerise would look at
in quiet enjoyment for hours.
A slope of vivid green, dotted with almond-trees, stretched away from
the long, low, white building to a broad, clear river, shining between
the plantains and bananas that clothed its banks; beyond these, cattle
pasture and cane-pieces shot upward in variegated stripes through the
tangled jungle of the steep ascent, while at short intervals hog-plum, or
other tall trees of the forest, reared their heads against the cloudless
sky, to break the dark thick mass that clothed the mountain to its very
summit—save where some open, natural savannah, with its crop of tall,
rank, feathering grass, relieved the eye from the vivid colouring and
gaudy exuberance of beauty in which nature dresses these West Indian
islands.
Bartoletti knew well that he should find the Marquise in her
sitting-room, for the sun was still high and the heat intense; none
therefore but slaves, slave-drivers, or overseers would be abroad for
hours. The Signor had however been reduced to such proper subjection by
Célandine that he never ventured to approach the Marquise without making
a previous report to his wife, and as the Quadroon had not yet returned
from the visit to Port Welcome, in which she made acquaintance with
Slap-Jack, some considerable delay took place before the enormity of
Fleurette’s peculations could be communicated to her mistress.
Mother and daughter were inseparable here, in the glowing tropical heat,
as under the cool breezes and smiling skies of their own beautiful
France, a land to which they constantly reverted with a longing that
seemed only to grow more and more intense as every hour of their
unwelcome banishment dragged by.
They were sitting in a large low room, with the smallest possible amount
of furniture and the greatest attainable of air. To insure a thorough
draught, the apartment occupied the whole breadth of the house, and the
windows, scarcely closed from year’s-end to year’s-end, were placed
opposite each other, so that there was free ingress on all sides for
the breeze that, notwithstanding the burning heat of the climate, blows
pretty regularly in these islands from morning till night and from night
till morning. It wafted through the whole apartment the fragrance of a
large granadilla, cut in half for the purpose, that stood surrounded
by a few shaddocks, limes, and pomegranates, heaped together like a
_cornucopia_ on a small table in the corner; it fluttered the leaves of
a book that lay on Mademoiselle de Montmirail’s knee, who was pretending
to read, with her eyes resting wearily on a streak of blue sea, far off
between the mountains; and it lifted the dark hair from the temples of
the Marquise, fanning with grateful breath, yet scarce cooling, the rich
crimson of her cheek.
The resemblance between these two grew closer day by day. While the
mother remained stationary at that point of womanly beauty to which the
daughter was approaching, figure and face, in each, became more and more
alike; and though the type of the elder was still the richer and more
glowing, of the younger, the more delicate and classical, Cerise seemed
unaccountably to have gained some of that spirit and vitality which the
Marquise seemed as unaccountably to have lost.
Also on the countenance of each might be traced the same expression—the
longing, wistful look of those who live in some world of their own, out
of and far beyond the present, saddened in the woman’s face with memory
as it was brightened in the girl’s by hope.
“It is suffocating!” exclaimed the former, rising restlessly from her
seat, and pushing the hair off her temples with a gesture of impatience.
“Cerise, my darling, are you made of stone that you do not cry out at
this insupportable heat? It irritates me to see you sit reading there
as calmly as if you could feel the wind blowing off the heights of
Montmartre in January. It seems as if the sun would never go down in this
oven that they call an island.”
Cerise shut her book and collected her scattered ideas with an obvious
effort. “I read, mamma,” she answered smiling, “because it is less
fatiguing than to think, but I obtain as little result from the one
process as the other. Do you know, I begin to believe the stories we used
to hear in Paris about the West Indies, and I am persuaded that we shall
not only be shrivelled up to mummies in a few more weeks, but that our
tongues will be so dry and cracked as to be incapable of expressing our
thoughts, even if our poor addled brains could form them. Look at Pierrot
even, who is a native; he has not said a syllable since breakfast.”
Pierrot, however, like the historical parrot of all ages, though silent
on the present occasion, doubtless _thought_ the more, for the attitude
in which he held his head on one side, peering at his young mistress with
shrewd unwinking eye, implied perceptions more than human, nay, even
diabolical in their malignant sagacity.
“What can I do?” said the Marquise, vehemently, pacing the long room with
quick steps ill suited to the temperature and the occasion. “While the
Regent lives I can never return to Paris. For myself, I sometimes fancy I
could risk it; but when I think of you, Cerise—I dare not—I _dare_ not;
that’s the truth. An insult, an injury, he might forgive, or at least
forget; but a scene in which he enacted the part of the _Pantaleone_,
whom everybody kicks and cuffs; in which he was discovered as a coxcomb,
an intruder, and a _polisson_, and through the whole of which he is
conscious, moreover, that he was intensely ridiculous—I protest to you I
cannot conceive any outrage so horrible as to satisfy his revenge. No, my
child, for generations my family have served the Bourbons, and we should
know what they are: with all their good qualities there are certain
offences they can never forgive, and this Regent is the worst of the
line.”
“Then, mamma,” observed Cerise cheerfully, though she smothered a sigh,
“we must have patience and live where we are. It might be worse,” she
added, pointing to the streak of deep-blue sea that belted the horizon.
“This is a wider view and a fairer than the dead wall of Vincennes or the
gratings of the Bastile, and some day, perhaps, some of our friends from
France may drop in quite unexpectedly to offer their homage to Madame la
Marquise. How the dear old Prince-Marshal would gasp in this climate, and
how dreadfully he would swear at the lizards, centipedes, galley-wasps,
red ants, and cockroaches! He who, brave as he is, never dared face
a spider or an earwig! Mamma, I think if I could see his face over a
borer-worm, I should have one more good laugh, even in such a heat as
this.”
“You might laugh, my dear,” answered her mother, “but I think I should
be more inclined to cry—yes, to cry for sheer joy at seeing him again. I
grant you he was a little ridiculous; but what courage! what sincerity!
what a true gentleman! I hear that he too is out of favour at the Palais
Royal, and has returned to his estates at Chateau-Guerrand. His coach was
seen near the Hôtel Montmirail the night of Monsieur le Duc’s creditable
_escapade_, and that is crime enough, I conclude, to balance a dozen
battles and forty years of loyal service to the throne. No, Cerise, I
tell you while the monster lives we must remain exiled in this purgatory
of fire. But my friends keep me well informed of passing events. I
hear his health is failing. They tell me his face is purple now in the
mornings when he comes to Council, and he drinks harder than ever with
his _roués_ at night. Of course, my child, it would be wicked to wish for
the death of a fellow-creature, but while there is a Regent in France you
and I must be content with the lizards and the cockroaches for society,
and for amusement, the supervision of these miserable, brutalised negro
slaves.”
“Poor things!” said the younger lady, tenderly. “I am sure they have
kind hearts under their black skins. I cannot but think that if they
were taught and encouraged, and treated less like beasts of burden, they
would show as much intelligence as our own peasants at La Fierté or the
_real_ Montmirail. Why, Fleurette brought me a bouquet of jessamines and
tuberoses yesterday, with a compliment to the paleness of my complexion
that could not have been outdone by Count Point-d’Appui himself. Oh!
mamma, I wish you would let me establish _my_ civil code for the
municipal government of the blacks.”
“You had better let it alone, my child,” answered the Marquise, gravely.
“Wiser brains than yours have puzzled over the problem, and failed to
solve it. I have obtained all the information in my power from those
whose experience is reliable, and considered it for myself besides,
till my head ached. It seems to me that young colonists, and all who
know nothing about negroes, are for encouragement and indulgence; old
planters, and those who are well acquainted with their nature, for
severity and repression. I would not be cruel; far from it; but as
for treating them like white people, Cerise, in my opinion all such
liberality is sheer nonsense. Jaques and Pierre, at home, are ill-fed,
ill-clothed (I wish it were not so), up early, down late, and working
often without intermission from sunrise till sunset; nevertheless, Jaques
or Pierre will doff his red cap, tuck up his blouse, and run a league
bareheaded, after a hard day’s work, if you or I lift up a finger; and
why?—because we are La Fiertés or Montmirails. But Hippolyte or Achille,
fat, strong, lazy, well-fed, grumbles if he is bid to carry a message to
the boiling-house after his eight hours’ labour, and only obeys because
he knows that Bartoletti can order him a hundred lashes by my authority
at his discretion.”
“I do not like the Italian, mamma! I am sure that man is not to be
trusted,” observed Cerise, inconsequently, being a young lady. “What
could make my dear old _bonne_ marry him, I have never been able to
discover. He is an alchemist, you know, and a conjuror, and worse. I
shudder to think of the stories they told about him at home, and I
believe he bewitched her!”
Here Mademoiselle de Montmirail crossed herself devoutly, and her mother
laughed.
“He is a very good overseer,” said she, “and as for his necromancy, even
if he learned it from the Prince of Darkness, which you seem to believe,
I fancy Célandine would prove a match for his master. Between them, the
Signor, as he calls himself, and his wife, manage my people wonderfully
well, and this is no easy matter at present, for I am sorry to say they
show a good deal of insubordination and ill-will. There is a spirit of
disaffection amongst them,” added the Marquise, setting her red lips
firmly together, “that must be kept down with the strong hand. I do not
mind your going about amongst the house negroes, Cerise, or noticing
the little children, though taking anything black on your lap is, in my
opinion, an injudicious piece of condescension; but I would not have you
be seen near the field-gang at present, men or women, and above all,
never trust them. Not one is to be depended on except Célandine, for I
believe they hate her as much as her husband, and fear her a great deal
more.”
The Marquise had indeed cause for uneasiness as to the condition of
her plantation, although she had never before hinted so much to her
daughter, and indeed, like the generality of people who live on the
crust of a volcano, she forced herself to ignore the danger of which she
was yet uncomfortably conscious. For some time, perhaps ever since the
arrival of the Italian overseer, there had been symptoms of discontent
and disaffection among the slaves. The work indeed went on as usual,
for Bartoletti was unsparing of the lash, but scarce a week passed
without a runaway betaking himself to the bush, and vague threats,
forerunners of some serious outbreak, had been heard from the idlest and
most mutinous of the gang when under punishment. It would not have been
well in such difficulties to relax the bonds of discipline, yet it was
scarcely wise to draw them tighter than before. The Marquise, however,
came of a race that had never yet learned to yield, and to which, for
generations, the assertion of his rights by an inferior had seemed an
intolerable presumption that must be resisted to the death. As her
slaves, therefore, grew more defiant she became more severe, and of late
the slightest offences had been visited with the utmost rigour, and under
no circumstances passed over without punishment. It was an unfortunate
time therefore that poor Fleurette had chosen to be detected in the
abstraction of a turkey ready plucked for cooking, and she could not have
fallen into worse hands than those of the pitiless Italian overseer.
The Marquise had scarce concluded her warning, ere Bartoletti entered the
sitting-room with his daily report. His manner was extremely obsequious
to Madame de Montmirail, and polite beyond expression to Mademoiselle.
The former scarcely noticed his demeanour at any time; the latter
observed him narrowly, with the air of a child who watches a toad or any
such object for which it feels an unaccountable dislike.
Cerise usually left the room soon after the Signor entered it, but
something in her mother’s face on the present occasion, as she ran her
eye over the black book, induced her to remain.
The Marquise read the punishment list twice; frowned, hesitated, and
looked discomposed.
“It is her first offence?” said she, inquiringly. “And the girl is
generally active and well-behaved enough.”
“Pardon, Madame la Marquise,” answered Bartoletti. “Madame forgave
her only last week when she lost half-a-dozen of Mademoiselle’s
handkerchiefs, that she had taken to wash; or _said_ she lost them,” he
added pointedly.
“Oh, mamma!” interposed Cerise, but the Marquise checked her with a sign,
and Bartoletti proceeded.
“One of her brothers is at the head of a gang of _Maroons_,[6] who infest
the very mountains above our cane-pieces, and another ran away to join
him last week. They say at the Plantation we _dare_ not punish any of the
family, and I am pledged to make an example of the first that comes into
my hands.”
“Very well,” said the Marquise, decidedly, returning his black book to
her overseer, and observing to Cerise, who was by this time in tears, “A
case, my dear, that it would be most injudicious to pardon. After all,
the pain is not much, and the disgrace, you know, to these sort of people
is nothing!”