THE QUEEN ON THE DOOR-STEP.
We found that Corny had not been mistaken about her influence over her
family, for the next morning, before we were done breakfast, Mr.
Chipperton came around to see us. He was full of Nassau, and had made up
his mind to go with us on Tuesday. He asked us lots of questions, but he
really knew as much about the place as we did, although he had been so
much in the habit of mixing his Bahamas and his Bermudas.
"My wife is very much pleased at the idea of having you two with us on
the trip over," said he; "although, to be sure, we may have a very
smooth and comfortable voyage."
I believe that, since the Silver Spring affair, he regarded Rectus and
me as something in the nature of patent girl-catchers, to be hung over
the side of the vessel in bad weather.
We were sorry to leave St. Augustine, but we had thoroughly done up the
old place, and had seen everything, I think, except the Spring of Ponce
de Leon, on the other side of the St. Sebastian River. We didn't care
about renewing our youth,--indeed, we should have objected very much to
anything of the kind,--and so we felt no interest in old Ponce's spring.
On Tuesday morning, the "Tigris" made her appearance on time, and Mr.
Cholott and our good landlady came down to see us off. The yellow-legged
party also came down, but not to see us off. They, too, were going to
Nassau.
Rectus had gone on board, and I was just about to follow him, when our
old Minorcan stepped up to me.
"Goin' away?" said he.
"Yes," said I, "we're off at last."
"Other feller goin'?"
"Oh, yes," I answered, "we keep together."
"Well now, look here," said he, drawing me a little on one side. "What
made him take sich stock in us Minorcans? Why, he thought we used to be
slaves; what put that in his head, I'd like to know? Did he reely think
we ever was niggers?"
"Oh, no!" I exclaimed. "He had merely heard the early history of the
Minorcans in this country, their troubles and all that, and he----"
"But what difference did it make to him?" interrupted the old man.
I couldn't just then explain the peculiarities of Rectus's disposition
to Mr. Menendez, and so I answered that I supposed it was a sort of
sympathy.
"I can't see, for the life of me," said the old man, reflectively, "what
difference it made to him."
And he shook hands with me, and bade me good-bye. I don't believe he has
ever found anybody who could give him the answer to this puzzle.
The trip over to Nassau was a very different thing from our voyage down
the coast from New York to Savannah. The sea was comparatively smooth,
and, although the vessel rolled a good deal in the great swells, we did
not mind it much. The air was delightful, and after we had gone down the
Florida coast, and had turned to cross the Gulf Stream to our islands,
the weather became positively warm, even out here on the sea, and we
were on deck nearly all the time.
Mr. Chipperton was in high spirits. He enjoyed the deep blue color of
the sea; he went into ecstasies over the beautiful little nautiluses
that sailed along by the ship; he watched with wild delight the
porpoises that followed close by our side, and fairly shouted when a big
fellow would spring into the air, or shoot along just under the surface,
as if he had a steam-engine in his tail. But when he saw a school of
flying-fish rise up out of the sea, just a little ahead of us, and go
skimming along like birds, and then drop again into the water, he was so
surprised and delighted that he scarcely knew how to express his
feelings.
Of course, we younger people enjoyed all these things, but I was
surprised to see that Corny was more quiet than usual, and spent a good
deal of her time in reading, although she would spring up and run to the
railing whenever her father announced some wonderful discovery. Mr.
Chipperton would have been a splendid man for Columbus to have taken
along with him on his first trip to these islands. He would have kept up
the spirits of the sailors.
I asked Corny what she was reading, and she showed me her book. It was a
big, fat pamphlet about the Bahamas, and she was studying up for her
stay there. She was a queer girl. She had not been to school very much,
her mother said, for they had been travelling about a good deal of late
years; but she liked to study up special things, in which she took an
interest. Sometimes she was her own teacher, and sometimes, if they
staid in any one place long enough, she took regular lessons.
"I teach her as much as I can," said her mother, "although I would much
rather have her go regularly to school. But her father is so fond of her
that he will not have her away from him, and as Mr. Chipperton's lung
requires him to be moving from place to place, we have to go, too. But I
am determined that she shall go to a school next fall."
"What is the matter with Mr. Chipperton's lung?" I asked.
"I wish we knew," said Mrs. Chipperton, earnestly. "The doctors don't
seem to be able to find out the exact trouble, and besides, it isn't
certain which lung it is. But the only thing that can be done for it is
to travel."
"He looks very well," said I.
"Oh, yes!" said she. "But"--and she looked around to see where he
was--"he doesn't like people to tell him so."
After a while, Rectus got interested in Corny's book, and the two read a
good deal together. I did not interrupt them, for I felt quite sure that
neither of them knew too much.
The captain and all the officers on the steamer were good, sociable men,
and made the passengers feel at home. I had got somewhat acquainted with
them on our trip from Savannah to St. Augustine, and now the captain let
me come into his room and showed me the ship's course, marked out on a
chart, and pointed out just where we were, besides telling me a good
many things about the islands and these waters.
I mentioned to Corny and Rectus, when I went aft again,--this was the
second day out,--that we should see one end of the Great Bahama early in
the afternoon.
"I'm glad of that," said Corny; "but I suppose we sha'n't go near enough
for us to see its calcareous formation."
"Its what?" I exclaimed.
"Its cal-car-e-ous formation," repeated Corny, and she went on with her
reading.
"Oh!" said I, laughing, "I guess the calcareous part is all covered up
with grass and plants,--at least it ought to be in a semi-tropical
country. But when we get to Nassau you can dig down and see what it's
like."
"Semi-tropical!" exclaimed Mr. Chipperton, who just came up; "there is
something about that word that puts me all in a glow," and he rubbed his
hands as if he smelt dinner.
Each of us wore a gray bean. Rectus and I had ours fastened to our
watch-guards, and Corny's hung to a string of beads she generally wore.
We formed ourselves into a society--Corny suggested it--which we called
the "Association of the Three Gray Beans," the object of which was to
save each other from drowning, and to perform similar serviceable acts,
if circumstances should call for them. We agreed to be very faithful,
and, if Corny had tumbled overboard, I am sure that Rectus and I would
have jumped in after her; but I am happy to say that she did nothing of
the kind on this trip.
Early the next morning, we reached Nassau, the largest town in the
Bahamas, on one of the smallest islands, and found it semi-tropical
enough to suit even Mr. Chipperton.
Before we landed, we could see the white, shining streets and
houses,--just as calcareous as they could be; the black negroes; the
pea-green water in the harbor; the tall cocoa-nut trees, and about five
million conch-shells, lying at the edges of the docks. The colored
people here live pretty much on the conch-fish, and when we heard that,
it accounted for the shells. The poorer people on these islands often go
by the name of "conchs."
As we went up through the town we found that the darkeys were nearly as
thick as the conch-shells, but they were much more lively. I never saw
such jolly, dont-care-y people as the colored folks that were scattered
about everywhere. Some of the young ones, as joyful skippers, could have
tired out a shrimp.
There is one big hotel in the town, and pretty nearly all our passengers
went there. The house is calcareous, and as solid as a rock. Rectus and
I liked it very much, because it reminded us of pictures we had seen of
Algiers, or Portugal, or some country where they have arches instead of
doors; but Mr. Chipperton wasn't at all satisfied when he found that
there was not a fireplace in the whole house.
"This is coming the semi-tropical a little too strong," he said to me;
but he soon found, I think, that gathering around the hearth-stone could
never become a popular amusement in this warm little town.
Every day, for a week, Mr. Chipperton hired a one-horse barouche, and he
and his wife and daughter rode over the island. Rectus and I walked, and
we saw a good deal more than they did. Corny told us this, the first
walk she took with us. We went down a long, smooth, white road that led
between the queer little cottages of the negroes, where the cocoa-nut
and orange trees and the bananas and sappadilloes, and lots of other
trees and bushes stood up around the houses just as proudly as if they
were growing on ten-thousand-dollar lots. Some of these trees had the
most calcareous foundations anybody ever saw. They grew almost out of
the solid rock. This is probably one of the most economical places in
the world for garden mould. You couldn't sweep up more than a bucketful
out of a whole garden, and yet the things grow splendidly. Rectus said
he supposed the air was earthy.
Corny enjoyed this walk, because we went right into the houses and
talked to the people, and bought cocoa-nuts off the trees, and ate the
inside custard with a spoon, and made the little codgers race for
pennies, and tried all the different kinds of fruits. She said she would
like to walk out with us always, but her mother said she must not be
going about too much with boys.
"But there are no girls on the island," said she; "at least, no white
ones,--as far as I have seen."
I suppose there were white children around, but they escaped notice in
the vast majority of little nigs.
The day after this walk, the shorter "yellow-legs" asked me to go out
fishing with him. He couldn't find anybody else, I suppose, for his
friend didn't like fishing. Neither did Rectus; and so we went off
together in a fishing-smack, with a fisherman to sail the boat and
hammer conch for bait. We went outside of Hog Island,--which lies off
Nassau, very much as Anastasia Island lies off St. Augustine, only it
isn't a quarter as big,--and fished in the open sea. We caught a lot of
curious fish, and the yellow-legs, whose name was Burgan, turned out to
be a very good sort of a fellow. I shouldn't have supposed this of a man
who had made such a guy of himself; but there are a great many different
kinds of outsides to people.
When we got back to the hotel, along came Rectus and Corny. They had
been out walking together, and looked hot.
"Oh," cried Corny, as soon as she saw me. "We have something to talk to
you about! Let's go and sit down. I wish there was some kind of an
umbrella or straw hat that people could wear under their chins to keep
the glare of these white roads out of their eyes. Let's go up into the
silk-cotton tree."
I proposed that I should go to my room and clean up a little first, but
Corny couldn't wait. As her father had said, she wasn't good at waiting;
and so we all went up into the silk-cotton tree. This was an enormous
tree, with roots like the partitions between horse-stalls; it stood at
the bottom of the hotel grounds, and had a large platform built up among
the branches, with a flight of steps leading to it. There were seats up
here, and room enough for a dozen people.
"Well," said I, when we were seated, "what have you to tell? Anything
wonderful? If it isn't, you'd better let me tell you about my fish."
"Fish!" exclaimed Rectus, not very respectfully.
"Fish, indeed!" said Corny. "_We_ have seen a _queen_!"
"Queen of what?" said I.
"Queen of Africa," replied Corny. "At least a part of it,--she would be,
I mean, if she had stayed there. We went over that way, out to the very
edge of the town, and there we found a whole colony of real native
Africans,--just the kind Livingstone and Stanley discovered,--only they
wear clothes like us."
"Oh, my!" exclaimed Rectus.
"I don't mean exactly that," said Corny; "but coats and trousers and
frocks, awfully old and patched. And nearly all the grown-up people
there were born in Africa, and rescued by an English man-of-war from a
slave-ship that was taking them into slavery, and were brought here and
set free. And here they are, and they talk their own language,--only
some of them know English, for they've been here over thirty years,--and
they all keep together, and have a governor of their own, with a
flag-pole before his house, and among them is a real queen, of royal
blood!"
"How did you find out that?" I asked.
"Oh, we heard about the African settlement this morning, at the hotel,
and we went down there, right after dinner. We went into two or three of
the houses and talked to the people, and they all told us the same
thing, and one woman took us to see the queen."
"In her palace?" said I.
"No," said Corny, "she don't live in a palace. She lives in one of the
funniest little huts you ever saw, with only two rooms. And it's too
bad; they all know she's a queen, and yet they don't pay her one bit of
honor. The African governor knows it, but he lives in his house with his
flag-pole in front of it, and rules her people, while she sits on a
stone in front of her door and sells red peppers and bits of
sugar-cane."
"Shameful!" said I; "you don't mean that?"
"Yes, she does," put in Rectus. "We saw her, and bought some sugar-cane.
She didn't think we knew her rank, for she put her things away when the
women told her, in African, why we came to see her."
"What did she say to you?" I asked, beginning to be a good deal
interested in this royal colored person.
"Nothing at all," said Corny; "she can't talk a word of English. If she
could, she might get along better. I suppose her people want somebody
over them who can talk English. And so they've just left her to sell
peppers, and get along as well as she can."
"It's a good deal of a come-down, I must say," said I. "I wonder how she
likes it?"
"Judging from her looks," said Rectus, "I don't believe she likes it at
all."
"No, indeed!" added Corny. "She looks woe-begone, and I don't see why
she shouldn't. To be taken captive with her people--may be she was
trying to save them--and then to have them almost cut her acquaintance
after they all get rescued and settled down!"
"Perhaps," said I, "as they are all living under Queen Victoria, they
don't want any other queen."
"That's nothing," said Corny, quickly. "There's a governor of this whole
island, and what do they want with another governor? If Queen Victoria
and the governor of this island were Africans, of course they wouldn't
want anybody else. But as it is, they do, don't you see?"
"They don't appear to want another queen," I said, "for they wont take
one that is right under their noses."
Corny looked provoked, and Rectus asked me how I knew that.
"I tell you," said Corny, "it don't make any difference whether they
want her or not, they haven't any right to make a born queen sit on a
stone and sell red-peppers. Do you know what Rectus and I have made up
our minds to do?"
"What is it?" I asked.
Corny looked around to see that no one was standing or walking near the
tree, and then she leaned toward me and said:
"We are going to seat her on her throne!"
"You?" I exclaimed, and began to laugh.
"Yes, we are," said Rectus; "at least, we're going to try to."
"You needn't laugh," said Corny. "You're to join."
"In an insurrection,--a conspiracy," said I. "I can't go into that
business."
"You must!" cried Corny and Rectus, almost in a breath.
"You've made a promise," said Corny.
"And are bound to stick to it," said Rectus, looking at Corny.
Then, both together, as if they had settled it all beforehand, they held
up their gray sea-beans, and said, in vigorous tones:
"Obey the bean!"
I didn't hesitate a moment. I held up my bean, and we clicked beans all
around.
I became a conspirator!