Part 59 (1/2)

'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 suns.h.i.+ne; 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p; 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 s.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+pped her. She brought good luck to the s.h.i.+p; 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 s.h.i.+eld 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.