The Orange Girl Part 59

'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 pa.s.ses that some poor wretch does not succ.u.mb 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 h.e.l.l called Newgate, he looks on the poor creatures who go there to be flogged and branded and pilloried and hanged and transported with some compa.s.sion 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 compa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sengers 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-pa.s.sengers. 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 sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.sisted 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembled 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 b.u.t.ter 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 G.o.dly 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 ba.s.s, 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.