THE LAST TEMPTATION
'We are waiting,' said the Captain, 'for our passengers.'
While he spoke there came alongside the ship a dozen boats or more laden
with the passengers for whose sake the good ship was about to cross the
Atlantic. There were, I remember--it is not possible for me to forget
anything that happened on this voyage--one hundred and eight of them who
came on board, men and women. They were brought down from Blackfriars
Stairs in a closed lighter.
'Jenny,' I said, 'go into the cabin. Do not look at them.'
'Why, Will, I ought to be among them. I am one of them. Suffer me to
look at my brothers and sisters in misfortune.'
Of these poor wretches we had seen the greater part already in Newgate.
Within those walls: in the bad air; among those companions; where
everything was sordid and wretched; they did not present an appearance
so horrible as they did in the open air; on the bright river; in the
sunshine; under the flying clouds; among the sailors; where everything
spoke of freedom. The pallor of their faces; their wretched rags blowing
about in the breeze; their pinched faces; the unnatural brightness of
their eyes; their tottering limbs; their meek submissiveness to order;
proclaimed their long detention in prison while they were waiting for
the ship. As they climbed up the companion painfully; as they stepped
down upon the deck; as they stood huddled together like sheep, my heart
sank within me for thinking that Jenny, too, was reckoned as one of
these. I glanced at her; she was thinking the same thing; her cheek was
aflame; her eyes, glowed; her lips trembled.
'Will,' said she; 'we are a proper company. Virginia will welcome us.'
They brought with them--faugh! the prison reek and stench. But we saw
them for a few moments only. Then they were bundled down below to their
own quarters and we saw the poor creatures no more.
It has been said that these poor convicts are cruelly ill-used on board
the transport ships. I can speak only of what I saw; I know that our
Captain was a humane man. I can testify to the fact that there were
seldom more than two or three floggings a day, and of the women not so
many; I know that our convicts were a gang of hardened wretches whom
nothing but the fear of the lash kept in order; I know that when they
came on board they were for the most part in a wretched condition; of
low habits from long confinement, poor food, and bad drink; that many of
them lay down directly the ship got into open water and, what with
sea-sickness, fever, and weakness, never got up again. The truth is that
the contractors, who receive £5 a head for a voyage which takes about
two months, do honestly provide the convicts the rations prescribed by
the Government. These rations are sufficient but not luxurious; they
consist of beef, pork, biscuits and cheese once a week; to keep up their
spirits they are served a ration of gin. The beef may have been tough
and the pork rusty, but such as it was the Captain served it out among
them. Yet, on the voyage of seven weeks we buried forty-seven, or nearly
one every day. It seems a large number; those who died were nearly all
men; very few of them were women. They were unfit to face the fatigues
of the voyage and the rolling of the ship; some of them were even
consumptive; some were asthmatic; some were in fevers; some had other
diseases; they died; perhaps they would have died at home in prison. At
Newgate scarce a day passes that some poor wretch does not succumb to
privation and bad air. If so many of them died on board the ship that is
no proof of inhumanity.
Let us forget these poor sinners. It is easy to say that they deserved
all they got. No doubt they did. And what do we deserve? And when a man
like myself has gone through that gate and mouth of Hell called Newgate,
he looks on the poor creatures who go there to be flogged and branded
and pilloried and hanged and transported with some compassion because he
knows that such as they are, such they have been made. Mr. Merridew is
always with them: the landlady of the Black Jack is always ready to buy
what they offer her for sale: no respectable person will employ them;
they have never been taught anything. The Divine and the schoolmaster
dare not venture within their streets, which are the very Sanctuary of
Wickedness; our charities are all for the deserving; we have no bowels,
no compassion, for those we call the undeserving. Let us forget them.
Better to lie at the bottom of the ocean, where at least it is peaceful,
than to face the cruel whip of the overseer, and the burning fields of
the American Plantations.
Our voyage lasted, I say, little more than seven weeks; we were wafted
across a smooth sea by favouring breezes. After leaving the Channel we
got into a warmer air; we began to sit on the quarterdeck. Tom and I got
out our violins and played. We played for our party; we played for the
sailors; we sang those part-songs which he made so well. Jenny, for her
part, was silent. Now and then she spoke to me about herself.
'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.
I assisted her to get out of the waggon--it was little better--in which
we had made our journey.
I led her into the house. In the principal room there was a long table
laid as if for dinner. At the head was an armchair carved, I should
think, in the sixteenth century, or earlier; it was a kind of throne
with a coat of arms carved, gilded, and coloured upon it; the shield of
the late occupant of the estate, recently dead.
I led Jenny to the head of the table. I placed her in the throne.
'Madame,' I said, 'this house is yours; these gardens are yours; this
estate is yours; and we, if you please, are your most humble servants to
command.' So I bent one knee and kissed her hand.
'Your most humble, obedient and grateful servants,' said Alice,
following my example.
So we all did homage, but our Queen and mistress hid her face in her
handkerchief and for a while she could not speak.
Thus began our new life, in which we all vied with each other in making
Jenny feel that she was our mistress. We called her Madame; we made way
for her; we flew to obey her; the overseers were instructed to report to
her, personally, as to the condition of the field and the conduct of the
slaves--there were no white servants on the estate; the slaves
themselves looked to Madame as their owner, their mistress, and their
friend.
For a time Jenny's mind remained still with the events of the past: the
thought of Lord Brockenhurst; of the danger and the horrors which she
had escaped; indeed she could never forget these things. Little by
little, as I hoped, the sense of power and authority returned. She never
asked how this lovely property came to her, or if it truly belonged to
her; she began quietly, as she had done in the Assembly Rooms at Soho
Square, to direct, administrate, and improve. She mitigated the
floggings; she improved the slaves' rations; she gave them days of
rejoicing; she made the poor ignorant blacks who for the most part
understand little but the whip and the stick and the cuff, feel that
they were in kindly hands; their children rolled about at her feet
taking their childish liberties; she learned the business of
tobacco-growing in all the stages; she walked about the fields in the
morning before the sun was high, and noted how the plants were looking
and whether the weeds were kept down.
Our neighbours--we had neighbours in all directions at two or three
miles' distance--for some time hesitated to call. Things were variously
reported; that Madame had come out for the help of her cousin, a
convict; that Madame had brought out a large fortune; that the cousin
had certainly letters of credit for a very large amount; that Madame was
herself a convict; that we were all convicts--political prisoners--sent
out for some kind of treason--Jacobite conspirators; friends of the
Young Pretender; there was no end to the rumours and reports which were
spread abroad concerning us. Nor was it until Lord Brockenhurst himself
came all the way from England to visit us and stay with us, as you shall
hear, that the neighbours made up their minds that we could be visited.
I believe people think that Colonial society is open to all comers
without question--perhaps they think it is composed of convicts. On the
other hand the Colonials are more careful than the English at home whom
they admit into their houses on friendly or intimate terms.
Our method of life was simple and uniform. We assembled on the veranda
at seven, when I read prayers and a chapter. This done we took
breakfast, not the petty meal of thin bread and butter and tea which
satisfies the man about town, but a plentiful repast with many dishes
containing vegetables and fruits unknown in London. After breakfast came
the duties of the day. My own part was the keeping of the accounts. I
called myself the steward. Alice directed the household; Jack was
butler in command over the negroes of the house; and Pamela St. Giles's
was in charge of the stillroom. Outside, the blacks were busy in the
fields. At twelve a bell rang which brought them all back to camp where
they took their dinner. At half past twelve we dined. For our eating I
declare that we had the choicest birds; the finest mutton; the best
beef; the most excellent fish that you can imagine; all things cheap;
all plentiful; and for drink our cellars were full of such Canary,
Madeira and Port as few gentlemen could show at home. In the evening we
had supper at six; after supper I read prayers and another chapter. Then
we played cards; or we had in the violins; or Tom played on the
harpischord; or we sang glees and Madrigals. And every night all to bed
by nine.
On Sundays we had morning service, which I read. The overseers were
present and after the blacks grew to like the music they sat about the
door while we chanted the Psalms and sang our Hymns. In the evening I
read a sermon or a discourse on some godly subject.
At these religious exercises Madame would always be present; sitting in
her carved armchair, her head resting on her hand, expressing in her
face neither interest nor weariness. Remember that never had anyone
taught her a word of religion. She looked on and listened; sometimes she
did not listen; her eyes were fixed and far away; she was back on the
stage of Drury Lane.
Who can tell how they all loved and worshipped her? Even the overseers,
commonly the most brutal of men, some of whom pride themselves at being
able to cut a lump of flesh from a negro's leg at a distance of ten feet
and more, were softened by the gracious presence. The worst cruelties
were abandoned on our estate; as for floggings; of course there must be
flogging so long as there are slaves; and of course there must be slaves
so long as there are negroes. The clergy of Virginia are united in this
opinion; I wish they were also united in the opinion that even a slave
should be protected by the law from inhuman treatment.
This our quiet mode of life was broken into one day when there appeared
unexpectedly Lord Brockenhurst himself. It was about six months after
our arrival. He dismounted; he threw his reins to his servant and
mounted the steps of the veranda.
It was late in the afternoon--about six; the autumn sun was getting
low; Jenny was sitting with Alice and Tom's wife talking of household
affairs. She rose quietly with a pretty blush and stepped forward.
'Good Heavens, Jenny!' his Lordship cried, 'you are more beautiful than
ever, I swear.'
'Welcome, my Lord, to Virginia. You are come, I trust, to accept the
hospitality of this poor house?'
'Madame, you honour me. It is a lovely house with a view the most
charming in the world. I knew not that Virginia was half so fine a
country.'
'Indeed, if English people did know--they would all come over. I pray
your Lordship not to speak too well of us. There are some people in the
old country that we would not willingly welcome in the New.'
So she led him into the inner room and sent for Madeira to refresh him.
'Your Lordship has something to tell me,' she said, beginning to shiver
and shake. 'You did not come all the way from England only to wish me
Good-morning.'
'I bring you, Jenny, what I promised, your full pardon and release. It
is in the hands of the Governor. You can return, now, whenever you
please.'
'I was beginning to forget, my Lord, that I am but a prisoner still and
a convict. These people with whom I live, the best people, I very
believe, in the whole world, have almost made me forget that fact. But I
thank your Lordship all the same. I thank you most humbly and most
gratefully. Except my Cousin Will--my husband's cousin--there is no more
loyal and faithful gentleman than my Lord Brockenhurst.'
'I have done what I can. I could do no more.'
'My lord, you have ridden thirty miles. You are tired? No? Then--let me
ask you one more favour. Tell me about this matter to-morrow. Sleep
first upon it,' for she saw his purpose in his eyes. 'Think, I pray you,
partly of what I am and of what you are; partly of your own dignity;
partly of how one such as I am should behave towards one such as you.'
She rose.
'I will now,' she said, 'if you are not tired, show you our gardens and
our tobacco-fields.'
His Lordship took supper with us. I saw that he was pleased at the
little state and ceremony with which we surrounded Jenny. I saw, as
well, the love in his eyes, which he could not tear away from her face.
After supper, we had a little concert Tom took the harpsichord, and I
took the violin. First we played a piece, as a duet; then Tom played
while Alice sang; then we all, with Jack our Butler, who had an
excellent bass, while Tom sang alto and I the tenor, sang four-part
songs, and I saw how his Lordship watched the negroes sitting about
outside and crowding up the doorway. I am sure he took home the belief
that we were a happy household, blacks and all; and that Jenny was the
mistress over all.
After breakfast in the morning Jenny bade Alice and me come with her
while she received his Lordship.
She took her place at the window, sitting in her high chair. Lord
Brockenhurst entered, bearing certain papers in his hand.
'My lord,' she said, 'you can speak with perfect freedom. I entreat you
to use perfect freedom before my cousins. I have no secrets from them;
they can tell you perhaps more about myself than I ever will speak--for
myself.'
Lord Brockenhurst coloured and was confused, but only for a little.
'Dear Madame,' he said, 'since you will not give an interview alone I
must make the best of the presence of others.'
'They know everything,' said Madame.
He bowed. 'I have told you,' he said, 'that I have brought out and
delivered over to the Governor your full pardon and release. These
papers are a copy.'
Jenny pushed them aside. 'I do not want to see them,' she said, 'let me
never be reminded of their existence. Take them, Will, and lock them
up.'
I received them and placed them in my pocket.
'That done, Madame,' he went on, 'I have only to invite your remembrance
of a certain proposal that--I believe you have not forgotten it. Since
your worthy cousins know what that proposal was I have only to say that
once more, most divine woman, I offer myself--my name and rank--my
fortune and possessions--at your feet.' He fell on his knees and took
her hand.
Jenny turned away her face. 'Answer him, Alice--tell him what I have so
often told you. Rise, my Lord. Do not pain me by kneeling at my unworthy
feet.'
'My Lord,' said Alice solemnly, 'there is no one in the world--believe
me--whom Jenny regards with greater respect and gratitude than
yourself.'
'Respect and gratitude are but cold words,' he said.
'Let me add with greater love. Your Lordship is the only man in the
world whom she has ever loved or could love. That also, believe me, is
most true.'
'Why, then----' He held out his hand.
'Nay, my Lord. Jenny loves you so well that nothing would induce her to
accept the honour of your proposal.'
'How? Loves me so well?'
'Jenny bids me tell you that the time would come when your children
would ask who was their mother, and who were her mother's friends. They
would learn her history, I need not remind you of her history. You know
it all. Jenny loves you too well to bring shame and discredit on a noble
House. Your children, she says, must have a mother worthy of yourself.'
'There is no more worthy woman in the world than Jenny!'
'Their mother must have an unblemished name, my Lord, worthy of your
own. She knows you to be so good and loyal that you could never reproach
her with the past. But it belongs to her. And, my Lord, it must not
belong to you.'
'It must not; it shall not,' Jenny repeated through her tears.
'Is this your answer, Jenny? Oh! Jenny, will you cast me off for such a
scruple?'
'I must--I must. Go, my Lord. Think of me no more. Why'--she sprang to
her feet--'what could I expect? I--the Orange Girl--the daughter of the
Black Jack--the friend of thieves; the Newgate Prisoner; the transported
convict? A coronet? For me? the hand of a noble gentleman? the name of a
noble house? For me? Fie upon you, my Lord, for thinking of such a
thing! Remember what is due to a gentleman. And I thank you--oh! I thank
you--you can never know how much--for thinking--you the only one--of
nothing less or lower. Go, my Lord. Tempt me no more. I know what I must
do. Farewell.'
He seized her in his arms; he kissed her--forehead and cheek and lips
and hands. He ceased to urge his suit. He saw that she was fixed, and in
his heart he knew that she was right. 'I obey,' he said. 'Oh! noblest
of women, I obey.'
So he rushed away, and Jenny fell into Alice's arms.
* * * * *
I sit on my own estate in the pleasant land of Virginia; outside the
veranda the hot sun ripens the corn and fruit: I did my duty in the
great and glorious war which set our country free: my sons will do
theirs if the occasion should again arise: we have taught our cousins
across the seas that we can fight for freedom: but there will be no more
fighting for that. It is won, once for all--I am now old, but as I sit
alone, my eyes resting on as fair a landscape of river and forest and
orchard and garden as the world can show, I suddenly wander away and
gaze beyond the ocean, beyond the years, upon that abode of despair and
wretchedness, where Jenny sits like a flower in a pigsty, talking of
what she should do when she came out of prison, but unable to read in
the future any return to the world at all. As for fear or doubt, or any
anxiety about the future, the poor soul had none. She was going to
continue for ever beautiful, to win that worship of men which she loved
so much. I have now lost all the friends of my youth: they pass before
me sometimes in a long procession. It is the consolation of age to live
in the past: but in all the array of ghosts there is none that brings
tears except the figure of Jenny in her wondrous beauty and her soft and
lovely eyes.
She lived with us for more than thirty years. She grew gray--but she was
as lovely in her age as in her youth. She was mistress unquestioned to
the end and never more than in her old age. But always with the same
kindness: the same grace: the same sweetness of look, and the same
softness of eye.
She died at last of some fever caught of a young negress whom she
visited in the infirmary. She was ill for three days only, and she died
lying in the veranda, looking out upon the woods and mountains on the
golden sunshine that she loved.
'Alice, dear,' she said, 'you have told me, often, that we are led, we
know not how, to things that are best for us, though by ways that we
would not choose. I have not forgotten what you said. I never forget, my
dear, what you say.'
Alice kissed her fingers.
'I understand now what you mean. I have been led. I have been led----My
dear, I am going to die. Bury me as one of yourselves--not in a ditch
like my own people--who, perhaps, are not led. Bury me in the
burial-ground where your baby lies. Put no stone upon my grave, but
plant white flowers over it. Let my abode, at least, look lovely after
death. I have been led, Alice--I have been led--I understand it now.'
After a little. 'Alice, I have been proud of what men called my
loveliness. It makes every woman happy when men call her lovely. My Lord
called me lovely. Send him, Alice, a lock of my hair. Tell him that I
have never loved any other man.'
She died. We buried her in the little burial-ground where lay the child
we lost. We put up no headstone, but we planted the grave with white
flowers.
There is now another grave beside hers with more white flowers. It bears
the name of Alice.
To me it has been given to love two women at the same time, and that
with equal love and equal respect and without blame or sin.