‘I thought so; I was convinced of that.’
‘But not at first?’
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘not at first. I was shoe—surprised to see you watching such a scene. I understand better now.’
‘I want you to understand, for later on you will hear that I love to witness the suffering of my slaves—a manifest lie! If people, white or black, deserve to suffer, then suffer they must; I don’t see why they should be pitied. But if I look on while they are being punished it is through a sense of duty—and to prevent too much punishment. That girl today was only given eight lashes. I could have given her three times as many.’
‘I am glad you didn’t! It would have killed her.’
‘Oh, no; it wouldn’t. These people have skins as tough as their dispositions, and those are tougher than you will ever guess. But slaves are valuable now and they have to be pampered. Fifty years ago we could burn them alive for a serious offence; today we are afraid to whip them, and they grow more insolent every hour. But I wanted to talk to you about myself, not about my people. I was saying how for three years I have lived in this place, and the one behind it, a sort of woman hermit, visiting no one, being visited by no one, and traduced by many who have never even seen me.’
‘They are base to treat you so,’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘There is only one explanation: they envy you your beauty and your wealth.’
‘It may be so,’ she answered softly. ‘But, of course, had I wished it, they would have come to Rosehall. There would have been plenty of men to come; some wanted to. I would not encourage them, desperately lonely though I was. I wished to have nothing to do with them: I believe I had almost come to hate men.’
‘All men?’ he queried, knowing what the answer would be, for had she not shown him favour?
‘You know I couldn’t say that now,’ she laughed. ‘I myself asked you up here today; I am with you now, telling you my miserable little troubles. If you were ungenerous you would say I was bold and forward, and pushing myself on you.’
‘If I were a fool and an ingrate I might say that,’ he cried, ‘and even then I don’t think I should dare. You are kind, very kind to me, an unknown stranger who is only your second bookkeeper. Why should you be so, unless——’
‘Unless what?’ she asked, prompting him, for he had paused.
‘Unless you have a kind heart,’ he concluded.
‘I don’t know that I have. My kind heart was warped long ago. But I want to be nice to you, Robert, because I like you—an unwomanly avowal, perhaps, but I have long ceased to care about what is called womanly by women who rob other people’s husbands and lovers and still think that they are virtuous and good! I like you, and I am tired of all this loneliness. I want you to help me; and you would not do it as Ashman does—for money. I want you to help me as a friend.’
‘I know nothing about this country, I am afraid,’ confessed Robert; ‘and you know nothing about me, remember. We have met only within the last few hours.’
A rap sounded on the door to the rear of them, the door opened slowly and a girl’s voice was heard:
‘Dinner is on de table, missis.’
‘Come,’ she said, rising, and they went into the dining-room.’
Somewhat smaller than the hall they had just left, it was nevertheless a large, lofty, handsome apartment, running the whole length of the right wing of the house. In the room, besides the sideboard and a score or so of highly polished chairs, there were two tables, one, a huge oblong mahogany piece; the other, a small circular table set for dinner, with a two-branched silver candelabrum in which tall wax candles burned with a steady flame.
They seated themselves, two barefoot slave girls attending them. The meal began with turtle soup, and one of the girls filled their glasses with madeira.
A glance from their mistress sent these waitresses some distance off, though their eyes were vigilant to watch the diners so as to anticipate their wants. The girls looked nervous, painfully anxious to make no mistake.
‘You know nothing about Jamaica, yes,’ Mrs. Palmer took up the conversation where it had broken off. ‘But it is not professional help that I want, it is advice, disinterested suggestions. You said to me today that you had come out to learn about planting. You are not a regular bookkeeper; anyone can see that. Won’t you tell me something about yourself?’
He told her briefly all that there was to know. He told her the truth.
‘I might almost have guessed something of the sort,’ was her comment; ‘though if you were a mere bookkeeper it would make no difference to me. You would still be you, don’t you see; someone that could assist a poor, unfortunate woman who is badly in need of genuine friendship.’
A girl came forward to remove the soup plates, another filled the wine glasses; again they withdrew.
‘I am at your service,’ said Robert awkwardly. ‘Tell me what you want me to do from time to time, and I will do my best.’
‘You shouldn’t live in such squalid quarters,’ she said suddenly. ‘Would you like to stay with Ashman, the overseer?’
She eyed him narrowly; she looked relieved when she saw distaste registered in his face.
‘With the overseer? No, thanks! I shall be much happier where I am.’
‘I understand. Ashman is not very pleasant to subordinates, though you are not going to be a subordinate of his. Would you like to live up here?’
‘Here? But how could I! You and I together in this house? What would Ashman and Burbridge and your other white employees say?’
She made no effort to disguise the contempt in her eyes and voice. ‘Do they matter?’ she asked.
‘But the people in Montego Bay? Your own class. When they knew, they would—well, you—you can guess what they would do, can’t you?’
‘Talk? But this isn’t England; it is Jamaica; and we are miles and miles away from Montego Bay and anywhere else. Besides, what would there be to say? We are together now, aren’t we? Where is the harm? Where would the harm be if you stayed here tonight, in one of these many rooms; what real difference would it make whether you slept in a room upstairs or in your own room in the bookkeepers’ house? What would the actual difference be?’
‘None, actually; but——’
‘It is what might seem, not what really was, that you are thinking of, isn’t it? But you are independent and so am I. This is my property, and I am mistress here. I don’t care now what is said about me; I have suffered too much to care. Are you less brave than I, Robert?’
‘For your own sake——’ he began, and she laughed.
‘I can take very good care of my own self; had I not been able to do so, where do you think I should be now? But you can decide what you think best; only, remember that you can stay at the Great House if you wish, and here is the only place on Rosehall where you should stay. They say it is haunted,’ she added abruptly. And again she watched him keenly.
‘By ghosts? Of whom?’
‘Of the men, the people who have died here. Another of their lies. I am a woman and I stay here alone.’ She swallowed another glass of wine quickly; she had been keeping pace with him in his drinking.
‘And you do not believe in ghosts, of course!’
‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘Frankly, I don’t know. Who knows if he doesn’t? But you haven’t answered me.’
‘Ghosts, Robert? Spirits of the dead? Spirits of hell? Yes, I believe in them; I know that they exist; I have seen them! Don’t be startled; I am not raving; I tell you I have seen them. But Rosehall Great House itself is not haunted; no house can be haunted if there lives in it a man or a woman strong-minded enough to defy anyone, anything, that might wish to return from the grave to revisit the scenes of its bodily existence. I can keep away any spirit by the force of my mind; they may be outside this building, they may creep and crawl close, close up to the windows to the threshold of the door; but inside, where I am, they can never come. It is not of them I am afraid; I despise them in death as I
despised them in life! They were weaker than I when alive, and I am still stronger than they are now that they are dead.’
She had spoken fiercely, bitterly, heated with wine as she was and filled with a sense and feeling of her own power. He gazed at her astonished, seeing her in this new mood; he was getting a glimpse of another side to her character, a stronger, fiercer, more imperious though fascinating personality. She rose from the table with an abrupt movement; they had drunk more than they had eaten. ‘Come,’ said she, ‘I will show you the house, the haunted house, where I live by myself.’
She bade him take up the candelabrum and led the way into a hall behind the great room in which she had met him. Here he had a glimpse of a broad polished stairway to the left, which obviously led up to the third story of the building, a stairway of mahogany with carved ornamentation and well in keeping with the magnificence of this spacious West Indian home. He noticed particularly now the deep embrasures of the windows whose sills of mahogany were comfortable seats; he glanced up at the arched doorway, high and ornamented, which led from the room in which he was into that where he had been received an hour before. ‘We’ll go upstairs later on,’ she said, and led the way outside.
They stood on a flagged piazza; above them a wide balcony extended the whole length of the upper floor, and upon this balcony doors and windows opened. Seen from the rear, the house seemed to be of two stories only; but Robert knew that this was because the ground floor with its many apartments lay under the flagstones he trod. In front of them was a little wooden structure with sharply sloping roof, and in the midst of it an opening into which a flight of brick steps descended. But the lady did not offer to take him down to this region; she turned to her left, indicating a suite of rooms which was attached to the main building by a paved covered way which was the segment of a circle in shape, and curving outwards. This suite stretched straight from the end of the covered way towards a rising in the land to the south. On the opposite hand was another covered path and another suite. A flagstone veranda fronted each suite.
Taking the light from him she led the way. She flung open the first of three doors in this range of rooms; he saw within the room thus revealed a large billiard table, evidently long unused, for there was heavy dust upon it. The second apartment was a concert-room, as its appointments showed; the third was a bedroom, a guest-room clearly, and that too gave signs of not having been for a long time occupied.
‘All built regardless of cost,’ she said with a little laugh; ‘but people were much richer in Jamaica then than we are today. There weren’t so many missionaries in those days to preach to them and stir up discontent among their slaves.’
‘It is a place well worth having,’ he answered for the sake of saying something.
‘But almost a prison for a woman who has to live in it alone,’ she rejoined.
They crossed over to the other side, through a sort of fruit garden with full-grown trees standing about it. Just as they had nearly reached their objective a puff of wind suddenly coming down from the hills to the south, which rose behind the building, extinguished the candles, and they stood in the soft darkness, with the trees moving and sighing gently, and the dainty, white-robed woman looking, as it seemed to Robert’s fancy, very much like a delicate ghost.
‘I don’t mind the dark, do you?’ she asked, coming close to him. ‘I can call one of the girls to get a light, but these rooms are not very interesting; they are for the house servants, and that one at the end is the kitchen. You can see them any other time; indeed, there is nothing in them to see. I’ll take you upstairs now.’
She took his hand to guide him; he closed his fingers over hers with a gentle pressure; he felt her answering clasp, tender and persuasive.
They regained the rear hall and then went back to the dining-room; she still leading him, for it was dark in the house. She placed the candelabrum on the big banqueting table; then stood still for a space very near to him. He heard her sigh.
‘Can I relight the candles for you?’ he asked, but this she did herself, not answering. She handed him the lights. ‘Hold them high,’ she suggested, ‘or the breeze may put them out again. We’ll go upstairs.’
Chapter Six—ANNIE PROPOSES
THEY moved slowly up the broad stairway, built in three short flights; arrived at the upper story, Robert walking straight in front him with the candles held high in his hand—for the windows were open—came to the door of a room which faced the steps, and paused. Annie hesitated for a second; then seemed to make up her mind to speak. ‘My first husband died in that room,’ she said laconically, ‘so I keep it closed. The silly slaves are always hearing noises in there, though I have stopped them showing fright when I am near.’
‘And there,’ she went on, indicating the next room, the one farther on, ‘is where my second husband died, and this one’—she pointed to another—‘was where my last master passed away—drunk. It’s a beastly story, Robert. I tell it to you because others will do so, and they are not likely to tell the truth, or indeed to know it so well as I. You will probably hear that I keep all these rooms closed, and that is so. They are never opened now.’
‘Not even by the house slaves?’ he asked, gazing curiously at those three rooms where the men who had been successively the lords of this lovely, brave, vivacious little woman by his side had breathed their last. He wondered how she could find the courage to sleep night after night under the same roof, believing as she did, as she had said, that the spirits of the dead could return to earth from hell itself.
‘By no one,’ she answered, ‘such rooms are really graves, or like graves.’
The courage of this admission struck him.
‘But if everyone closed for ever a room in which a man or woman died, Annie,’ he urged, ‘the largest house would soon become an empty ruin.’
‘True,’ she admitted, ‘but I have a wish to keep these rooms so. There is no one to use them, so why should they be opened? This place is far too big for me as it is.’
She took the lights from him, went towards the other side of the landing and threw open another door, stepping inside. ‘And this is where your little friend retires at night to her loneliness and friendlessness,’ she explained.
He peeped in; he saw a great canopied bed hung with a white mosquito net, a huge mahogany four-poster with the uprights richly carved. Three chairs of expensive wood were in the room, a large dressing-table stood in front of a tall mirror; a mahogany press, and a heavy rug spread upon the floor, completed the furniture. It was a sumptuously furnished apartment, more sumptuous than elegant. She entered it; he stood at the threshold. ‘Come in,’ she mocked, ‘there is not a single soul to see us, and to talk.’ She put the candle-holder on the dressing-table and fixed her eyes on him. There was provocation in them; an invitation scarcely to be misunderstood.
He stepped inside, looked round and went up to one of the windows; he was breathing heavily as an unpractised runner might. He saw the lands of the estate rolling away until lost in obscurity, could distinguish the darker shadows as trees towering above the cane, caught a glimpse of lights far below, and knew them to be those from boiling-house and still-house and bookkeepers’ quarters, and, raising his head, gazed for a while on the innumerable tropical stars which glowed above in the soft silken blackness of the sky. It was all vague and still and lovely out there, and here was he, a few days after his coming to this strange land of slavery and passion, beauty and mystery—for to him it seemed mysterious—in the company of a woman with a strange history, a woman alone, who had passed through more heart-searing experiences than fall to the lot of most women, and who was, to his thinking, the most beautiful of her sex that his eyes had ever seen.
And she loved him, wanted him: he could not be blind to that.
Elsewhere, to some men, she might seem bold and forward, as she herself had suggested she must appear in his eyes. But here it seemed that everything she did or said was natural, inevitable; for her circumstances were
not normal and the hardships and distresses of her life were surely a warrant for her splendid independence. She loved him—he could not use a weaker word, though always, in his relations with women he was modest. And he?—he had never fallen seriously in love with a woman before, but for this one he felt that he could do anything, brave any censure, face any desperate risk. She had taken him absolutely into her confidence, told him, at almost their very first meeting, the story of her bitter married life. She had appealed to him for his sympathy and help, and he had promised that they should be hers to the full. She was ready to brave the world’s sneers and calumny for his sake: she had more than hinted as much. Could he be prepared to do less for her?
He turned from the window and walked towards her; she was standing by the side of her canopied bed, her back towards it, her hands resting upon it. Again she caught his eyes and held them, with that curious magnetic gaze that had struck him in the cane-fields that forenoon. But while it had then appeared hard and compelling, now it was alluring and soft, for the light of love was in her eyes, and the warm flame of an appealing desire.
‘It is a very beautiful view from that window,’ he began, banally, for it was not about the outer scene that he wished to speak. The words sounded puerile in his own ears. The wine he had drunk was still heating his brain, still causing his blood to course through his veins in a hot stream; his pulses throbbed under the influence of this bewitching woman’s beauty. She nodded her head, agreeing, but looked as though she expected he had something more to say. His arms went suddenly out; he caught her and drew her close to him, tightly, and kissed her hair, her brow, her lips in a frenzy of passion. He felt her answering kisses; they burned upon his lips. She gave herself up to him, a complete surrender. ‘So you love me, Robert, love me as I love you!’ she panted, and as she spoke a thunderous noise filled the house with weird, nerve-shattering sound. And the lights went out.
The White Witch of Rosehall Page 5