No Defense: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

A LETTER

With a deep sigh, the planter raised his head from the table where he was
writing, and looked out upon the lands he had made his own. They lay on
the Thomas River, a few hours' horseback travelling from Spanish Town,
the capital, and they had the advantage of a plateau formation, with
mountains in the far distance and ravines everywhere.

It was Christmas Day, and he had done his duty to his slaves and the folk
on his plantation. He had given presents, had attended a seven o'clock
breakfast of his people, had seen festivities of his negroes, and the
feast given by his manager in Creole style to all who came--planting
attorneys, buccras, overseers, bookkeepers, the subordinates of the local
provost-marshal, small planters, and a few junior officers of the army
and navy.

He had turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its
shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee,
tea, spruce-beer, cassava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef,
barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet, and
acid fruits. It was so unlike what his past had known, so "damnable
luxurious!" Now his eyes wandered over the space where were the
grandilla, with its blossom like a passion-flower, the black Tahiti plum,
with its bright pink tassel-blossom, and the fine mango trees, loaded
half with fruit and half with bud. In the distance were the guinea
cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges of negro
houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their beautiful
red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood, and breadfruit
trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the jack-fruit tree;
and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates, negro settlements
and pens. He heard the flight of parrots chattering, he watched the
floating humming-bird, and at last he fixed his eyes upon the cabbage
tree down in the garden, and he had an instant desire for it. It was a
natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top boiled for a
simple yet sumptuous meal.

He liked simplicity. He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret
or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise. In a land where all were
bon-vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and rum,
brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome view
of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried planter.
For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain
shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.

It was Dyck Calhoun.

With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.
Christmas Day was on his nerves. The whole town of Kingston, with its
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church. If he entered
it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to
two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants in
shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one
or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that
number of ladies. It was not an island given over to piety, or to
religious habits.

Not that this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by the
fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many
married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black
women, and that the girls had no married future. They would become the
temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful and
devoted. It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be whipped
in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and that if
he was a negro-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.

It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and
white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white
man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and the
people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos
rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.

But let Dyck tell his own story. The papers he held were sheets of a
letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the
night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.
This was the letter:

   MY DEAR FRIEND:
   You will see I address you as you have done me in the two letters I
   have had from you in the past. You will never read this letter, but
   I write it as if you would. For you must know I may never hope for
   personal intercourse with you. I was imprisoned for killing your
   father, Erris Boyne, and that separates us like an abysss. It
   matters little whether I killed him or not; the law says I did, and
   the law has taken its toll of me. I was in prison for four years,
   and when freed I enlisted in the king's navy, a quota man, with my
   servant-friend, Michael Clones. That was the beginning of painful
   and wonderful days for me. I was one of the mutineers of the Nore,
   and--

Here followed a description of the days he had spent on the Ariadne and
before, and of all that happened down to the time when he was arrested by
the admiral in the West Indian Sea. He told how he was sent over to the
Ariadne with Captain Ivy to read the admiral's letter to the seamen, and
then, by consent of the admiral, to leave again with Michael Clones for
Jamaica, where he was set ashore with twenty pounds in his pocket--and
not on parole, by the admiral's command. Here the letter shall again take
up the story, and be a narrative of Dyck Calhoun's life from that time
until this Christmas Day.

   What to do was the question. I knew no one in Jamaica--no one at
   all except the governor, Lord Mallow, and him I had fought with
   swords in Phoenix Park five years before. I had not known he was
   governor here. I came to know it when I first saw him riding over
   the unpaved street into Kingston from Spanish Town with his suite,
   ornate with his governorship. He was a startling figure in scarlet,
   with huge epaulets on his lieutenant-general's uniform, as big a pot
   as ever boiled on any fire-chancellor, head of the government and of
   the army, master of the legislature, judging like one o'clock in the
   court of chancery, controller of the affairs of civil life, and
   maker of a policy of which he alone can judge who knows what
   interests clash in the West Indies.
   English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are all hereabout. All struggle
   for place above the other in the world of commerce and society,
   though chiefly it is the English versus the French in these days;
   and the policy of the governor is the policy of the country. He
   never knows whether there will be a French naval descent or whether
   the blacks in his own island will do as the blacks in St. Domingo
   did--massacre the white people in thousands. Or whether the free
   blacks, the Maroons, who got their freedom by treaty with Governor
   Trelawney, when the British commander changed hats with Cudjoe, the
   Maroon chief, as the sealing of the bargain--whether they will rise
   again, as they before have risen, and bring terror into the white
   settlement; and whether, in that case, all negro-slaves will join
   them, and Jamaica become a land of revolution.
   Of what good, then, will be the laws lately passed regulating the
   control of slaves, securing them rights never given before, even
   forbidding lashes beyond forty-nine! Of what use, then, the
   punishment of owners who have ill-used the slaves? The local
   councils who have power to punish never proceed against white men
   with rigour; and to preserve a fair balance between the white man up
   above and the black down below is the responsibility of the fair-
   minded governor. If, like Mallow, he is not fair-minded, then is
   the lash the heavier, and the governor has burdens greater than
   could easily be borne in lands where the climate is more friendly.
   Lord Mallow did not see me when I passed him in the street, but he
   soon came to know of me from the admiral and Captain Ivy, who told
   him all my story since I was freed from jail. Then he said I should
   be confined in a narrow space near to Kingston, and should have no
   freedom; but the admiral had his way, and I was given freedom of the
   whole island till word should come from the Admiralty what should be
   done with me. To the governor's mind it was dangerous allowing me
   freedom, a man convicted of crime, who had been imprisoned, had been
   a mutineer, had stolen one of his majesty's ships, and had fled to
   the Caribbean Sea. He thought I should well be at the bottom of the
   ocean, where he would soon have put me, I make no doubt, if it had
   not been for the admiral, and Captain Ivy--you do not know him, I
   think--who played a good part to me, when men once close friends
   have deserted me.
   Well, we had, Michael and I, but twenty pounds between us; and if
   there was not plenty of free food in the island, God knows what
   would have become of us! But there it was, fresh in every field, by
   every wayside, at every doorway. We could not starve, or die of
   thirst, or faint for lack of sleep, since every bush was a bed in
   spite of the garapatos or wood-ticks, the snore of the tree-toad,
   the hoarse shriek of the macaw, and the shrill gird of the guinea-
   fowl. Every bed was thus free, and there was land to be got for a
   song, enough to grow what would suffice for two men's daily wants.
   But we did not rest long upon the land--I have it still, land which
   cost me five pounds out of the twenty, and for the rest there was an
   old but on the little place--five acres it was, and good land too,
   where you could grow anything at all. Heaven knows what we might
   have become in that tiny plantation, for I was sick of life, and the
   mosquitos and flying ants, and the chattering parroquets, the grim
   gallinazo, and the quatre, or native bed--a wooden frame and canvas;
   but one day at Kingston I met a man, one Cassandro Biatt, who had an
   obsession for adventure, and he spoke to me privately. He said he
   knew me from people's talk, and would I listen to him? What was
   there to do? He was a clean-cut rogue, if ever there was one, but
   a rogue of parts, as he proved; and I lent an ear.
   Now, what think you was his story? Well, but this--that off the
   coast of Haiti, there was a ship which had been sunk with every man
   on board, and with the ship was treasure without counting-jewels
   belonging once to a Spaniard of high place, who was taking them to
   Paris. His box had been kept in the captain's cabin, and it could
   be found, no doubt, and brought to the surface. Even if that were
   not possible, there was plenty of gold on the ship, and every piece
   of it was good money. There had been searching for the ship, but
   none had found it; but he, Cassandro Biatt, had sure knowledge, got
   from an obi-man, of the place where it lay. It would not be an
   expensive business, but, cheap as it was, he had no means of raising
   cash for the purpose; while I could, no doubt, raise the needed
   money if I set about it. That was how he put it to me. Would I do
   it? It was not with me a case of "no shots left in the locker, no
   copper to tinkle on a tombstone." I was not down to my last
   macaroni, or quarter-dollar; but I drank some sangaree and set about
   to do it. I got my courage from a look towards Rodney's statue in
   its temple--Rodney did a great work for Jamaica against Admiral de
   Grasse.
   Why should I tell Biatt the truth about myself? He knew it.
   Cassandro was an accomplished liar, and a man of merit of his kind.
   This obi-man's story I have never believed; yet how Biatt came to
   know where that treasure-ship was I do not know now.
   Yes, out we went through the harbour of Kingston, beyond the
   splendid defences of Port Royal and the men-of-war there, past the
   Palisadoes and Rock Fort, and away to the place of treasure-trove.
   We found it--that lost galleon; and we found the treasure-box of the
   captain's cabin. We found gold too; but the treasure-box was the
   chief thing; and we made it ours after many a hard day. Three
   months it was from the day Biatt first spoke to me to the day when,
   with an expert diver, we brought the box to the surface and opened
   it.
   How I induced one of the big men of Jamaica to be banker and skipper
   for us need not be told; but he is one of whom men have dark
   sayings--chiefly, I take it, because he does bold, incomprehensible
   things. That business paid him well, for when the rent of the ship
   was met, and the few men on it paid--slaves they were chiefly--he
   pocketed ten thousand pounds, while Biatt and I each pouched forty
   thousand, and Michael two thousand. Aye, to be sure, Michael was in
   it! He is in all I do, and is as good as men of ten times his birth
   and history. Michael will be a rich man one day. In two years his
   two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.
   But those days when Biatt and I went treasure-ship hunting were not
   without their trials. If we had failed, then no more could this
   land have been home or resting-place for us. We should only have
   been sojourners with no name, in debt, in disgrace, a pair of
   braggart adventurers, who had worked a master-man of the island for
   a ship, and money and men, and had lost all except the ship! Though
   to be sure, the money was not a big thing--a few hundred pounds;
   but the ship was no flea-bite. It was a biggish thing, for it could
   be rented to carry sugar--it was, in truth, a sugar-ship of four
   hundred tons--but it never carried so big a cargo of sugar as it did
   on the day when that treasure-box was brought to the surface of the
   sea.
   I'm bound to say this--one of the straightest men I ever met, liar
   withal, was Cassandro Biatt. He took his jewels and vanished up the
   seas in a flourish. He would not even have another try at the gold
   in the bowels of the ship.
   "I've got plenty to fill my paunch, and I'll go while I've enough.
   It's the men not going in time that get left in the end"--that's
   what he said.
   And he was right; for other men went after the gold and got some of
   it, and were caught by French and South American pirates and lost
   all they had gained. Still another group went and brought away ten
   thousand pounds, and lost it in fighting with Spanish buccaneers.
   So Biatt was right, and went away content, while I stayed here--
   because I must--and bought the land and house where I have my great
   sugar-plantation. It is an enterprise of volume, and all would be
   well if I were normal in mind and body; but I am not. I have a past
   that stinks to heaven, as Shakespeare says, and I am an outlaw of
   the one land which has all my soul and name and heritage. Yes, that
   is what they have done to me--made a convict, an outlaw of me. I
   may live--but not in the British Isles; and if any man kills me, he
   is not liable to the law.
   Men do not treat me badly here, for I have property and money, and
   this is a land where these two things mean more than anywhere else,
   even more than in a republic like that where you live. Here men
   live according to the law of the knife, fork, and bottle, yet
   nowhere in the world is there deeper national morality or wider
   faith or endurance. It is a land where the sea is master, where
   naval might is the chief factor, and weighs down all else.
   Here the navies of the great powers meet and settle their disputes,
   and every being in the island knows that life is only worth what a
   hundred-ton brig-of-war permits. I have seen here in Jamaica the
   off-scourings of the French and Spanish fleets on parole; have seen
   them entering King's House like loyal citizens; have even known of
   French prisoners being used as guards at the entrance of King's
   House, and I have informed the chief justice of dismal facts which
   ought to have moved him. But what can you expect of a chief justice
   who need not be a lawyer, as this one is not, and has other means of
   earning income which, though not disloyal, are lowering to the
   status of a chief justice? And not the chief justice alone. I have
   seen French officers entertained at Government House who were guilty
   of shocking inhumanities and cruelties. The governor, Lord Mallow,
   is much to blame. On him lies the responsibility; to him must go
   the discredit. For myself, I feel his enmity on every hand. I
   suffer from his suggestions; I am the victim of his dark moods.
   If I want a concession from a local council, his hand is at work
   against me; if I see him in the street, I get a courtesy tossed, as
   you would toss a bone to a dog. If I appear at the king's ball,
   which is open to all on the island who are respectable, I am treated
   with such disdain by the viceroy of the king that all the island is
   agog. I went one day to the king's ball the same as the rest of the
   world, and I went purposely in dress contrary to the regulations.
   Here was the announcement of the affair in the Royal Gazette, which
   was reproduced in the Chronicle, the one important newspaper in the
   island:
                    KING'S HOUSE,
                    October 27th, 1797.
     KING'S BALL.
     There will be a Ball given by His Honour the Lieutenant-
     Governor, on Tuesday evening, the 6th day of December next,
     in honour of
             HIS MAJESTY'S BIRTHDAY.
     To prevent confusion, Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to
     order their carriages to come by the Old Court House, and go
     off by the Long Room.
     N.B.--No gentlemen can possibly be admitted in boots, or
     otherwise improperly dressed.
   Well, in a spirit of mutiny--in which I am, in a sense, an expert--
   I went in boots and otherwise "improperly dressed," for I wore my
   hair in a queue, like a peasant. What is more, I danced with a
   negress in the great quadrille, and thereby offended the governor
   and his lady aunt, who presides at his palace. It matters naught to
   me. On my own estate it was popular enough, and that meant more to
   me than this goodwill of Lord Mallow.
   He does not spare me in his recitals to his friends, who carry his
   speech abroad. His rancour against me is the greater, I know,
   because of the wealth I got in the treasure-ship, to prevent which
   he tried to prohibit my leaving the island, through the withholding
   of a leave-ticket to me. His argument to the local authorities was
   that I had no rights, that I am a murderer and a mutineer, and
   confined to the island, though not on parole. He almost succeeded;
   but the man to whom I went, the big rich man intervened,
   successfully--how I know not--and I was let go with my permit-
   ticket.
   What big things hang on small issues! If my Lord Mallow had
   prevented me leaving the island, I shouldn't now own a great
   plantation and three hundred negroes. I shouldn't be able to pay
   my creditors in good gold Portuguese half-johannes and Spanish
   doubloons, and be free of Spanish silver, and give no heed to the
   bitt, which, as you perhaps know, is equal to fivepence in British
   money, such as you and I used to spend when you were Queen of
   Ireland and I was your slave.
   Then I worshipped you as few women have been worshipped in all the
   days of the world--oh, cursed spite of life and time that I should
   have been jailed for killing your bad father! Aye, he was a bad
   man, and he is better in his grave than out of it, but it puts a
   gulf between you and me which nothing will ever bridge--unless it
   should some day be known I did not kill him, and then, no doubt, it
   will be too late.
   On my soul, I don't believe I put my sword into him; but if I did,
   he well deserved it, for he was worse than faithless to your mother,
   he was faithless to his country--he was a traitor! I did not tell
   that story of his treachery in court--I did not tell it because of
   you. You did not deserve such infamy, and the truth came not out at
   the trial. I, in my view, dared not, lest it might injure you, and
   you had suffered enough--nay, more than enough--through him.
   I wonder how you are, and if you have changed--I mean in appearance.
   I am sure you are not married; I should have felt it in my bones,
   if you were. No, no, my sweet lass, you are not married. But
   think--it is more than seven long years since we met on the hills
   above Playmore, and you put your hand in mine and said we should be
   friends for all time. It is near three years since a letter came to
   me from you, and in the time I have made progress.
   I did not go to the United States, as you asked me to do. Is it not
   plain I could not? My only course was to avoid you. You see, your
   mother knows the truth--knows that I was jailed for killing your
   father and her divorced husband. Therefore, the only way to do was
   as I did. I could not go where you were. There should be hid from
   you the fact that Erris Boyne was a traitor. This is your right, in
   my mind. Looking back, I feel sure I could have escaped jail if I
   had told what I knew of Erris Boyne; and perhaps it would have been
   better, for I should, no doubt, have been acquitted. Yet I could
   not have gone to you, for I am not sure I did not kill him.
   So it is best as it is. We are as we are, and nothing can make all
   different for us. I am a dissolute planter of Jamaica who has
   snatched from destiny a living and some riches. I have a bad name
   in the world. Yet by saving the king's navy from defeat out here I
   did a good turn for my country and the empire.
   So much to the good. It brought me freedom from the rope and pardon
   for my chief offence. Then, in company with a rogue, I got wealth
   from the depths of the sea, and here I am in the bottom of my
   luxury, drunken and obscene--yes, obscene, for I permit my overseers
   and my manager to keep black women and have children by them. That
   I do not do so myself is no virtue on my part, but the virtue of a
   girl whom I knew in Connemara. I fill myself with drink. I have a
   bottle of madeira or port every night, and pints of beer or claret.
   I am a creature of low habits, a man sodden with self-indulgence.
   And when I am in drink, no slaver can be more cruel and ruthless.
   Yet I am moderate in eating. The meals that people devour here
   almost revolt me. They eat like cormorants and drink like dry
   ground; but at my table I am careful, save with the bottle. This
   is a land of wonderful fruits, and I eat in quantities pineapple,
   tamarind, papaw, guava, sweet-sop, star-apple, granadilla, hog-plum,
   Spanish-gooseberry, and pindal-nut. These are native, but there are
   also the orange, lemon, lime, shaddock, melon, fig, pomegranate,
   cinnamon, and mango, brought chiefly from the Spanish lands of South
   America. The fruit-market here is good, Heaven knows, and I have my
   run of it. Perhaps that is why my drink does not fatten me greatly.
   Yes, I am thin--thinner even than when you saw me last. How
   wonderful a day it was! You remember it, I'm sure.
   We stood on the high hills, you and I, looking to the west. It was
   a true Irish day. A little in front of us, in the sky, were great
   clusters of clouds, and beyond them, as far as eye could see, were
   hills so delicately green, so spotted with settlements, so misty and
   full of glamour, and so cheerful with the western light. And the
   storm broke--do you remember it? It broke, but not on us. It fell
   on the middle of the prospect before us, and we saw beyond it the
   bright area of sunny country where men work and prophesy and slave,
   and pray to the ancient gods and acclaim the saints, and die and
   fructify the mould; where such as Christopher Dogan live, and men a
   thousand times lower than he. Christopher came to the jail the day
   I was released--with Michael Clones he came. He read me my bill of
   life's health--what was to become of me--the black and the white of
   it, the good and the bad, the fair and the foul. Even the good
   fortune of the treasure from the sea he foresaw, and much else that
   has not come to me, and, as I think, will never come; for it is too
   full a cup for me so little worthy of it.
   It seems strange to me that I am as near to the United States here
   in Jamaica, or almost as near, as one in London is to one in Dublin;
   and yet one might as well be ten thousand leagues distant for all it
   means to her one loves in the United States. Yes, dear Sheila, I
   love you, and I would tear out the heart of the world for you. I
   bathe my whole being in your beauty and your charm. I hunger for
   you--to stand beside you, to listen to your voice, to dip my prison
   fingers into the pure cauldron of your soul and feel my own soul
   expand. I wonder why it is that to-day I feel more than I ever felt
   before the rare splendour of your person.
   I have always admired you and loved you, always heard you calling
   me, as if from some sacred corner of a perfect world. Is it that
   yesterday's dissipation--yes, I was drunk yesternight, drunk in a
   new way. I was drunk with the thought of you, the longing for you.
   I picked a big handful of roses, and in my mind gave them into your
   hands. And I thought you smiled and said:
   "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter Paradise." So I
   followed you to your home there in the Virginian country. It was a
   dream, all except the roses, and those I laid in front of the box
   where I keep your letters and a sketch I made of you when we were
   young and glad--when I was young and glad. For I am an old man,
   Sheila, in all that makes men old. My step is quick still, my eye
   is sharp, and my brain beats fast, but my heart is ancient. I am an
   ancient of days, without hope or pleasure, save what pleasure comes
   in thinking of one whom I worship, yet must ever worship from afar.
   I wonder why I seem to feel you very near to-day! Perhaps it's
   because 'tis Christmas Day. I am not a religious man but Christmas
   is a day of memories.
   Is it because of the past in Ireland? Am I only--God, am I only to
   be what I am for the rest of my days, a planter denied the pleasure
   of home by his own acts! Am I only a helpless fragment of a world
   of lost things?
   I have no friends--but yes, I have. I have Michael Clones and
   Captain Ivy, though he's far away-aye, he's a friend of friends, is
   Captain Ivy. These naval folk have had so much of the world, have
   got the bearings of so many seas, that they lose all littleness, and
   form their own minds. They are not like the people who knew me in
   Ireland--the governor here is one of them--and who believe the worst
   of me. The governor--faugh, he was made for bigger and better
   things! He is one of the best swordsmen in the world, and he is
   out against me here as if I was a man of importance, and not a
   commonplace planter on an obscure river. I have no social home
   life, and yet I live in what is called a castle. A Jamaica castle
   has none of the marks of antiquity, chivalry, and distinction which
   castles that you and I know in the old land possess.
   What is my castle like? Well, it is a squarish building, of
   bungalow type, set on a hill. It has stories and an attic, with a
   jutting dormer-window in the front of the roof; and above the lowest
   story there is a great verandah, on which the livingrooms and
   bedrooms open. It is commodious, and yet from a broad standpoint it
   is without style or distinction. It has none of those Corinthian
   pillars which your homesteads in America have. Yet there is in it a
   simple elegance. It has no carpets, but a shining mahogany floor,
   for there are few carpets in this land of heat. It is a place where
   music and mirth and family voices would be fitting; but there are no
   family voices here, save such as speak with a negro lisp and
   oracularly.
   I can hear music at this moment, and inside my castle. It comes
   from the irrepressible throats of my cook and my housemaid, who have
   more joy in the language of the plantation than you could have in
   the songs of St. Angelus. The only person in this castle out of
   spirits is its owner.
   My castle is embowered in a loose grove of palms and acacias,
   pimento shrubs, spendid star-apples, and bully-trees, with wild
   lemon, mahogany, dogwood, Jerusalem-thorn, and the waving plumes of
   bamboo canes. There is nothing British in it--nothing at all. It
   stands on brick pillars, is reached by a stair of marble slabs, and
   has a great piazza on the front. You enter a fine, big hall, dark-
   you will understand that, though it is not so hot in Virginia, for
   the darkness makes for coolness. From the hall the bedrooms open
   all round. We are not so barbaric here as you might think, for my
   dining-room, which lies beyond the hall, with jalousies or movable
   blinds, exposed to all the winds, is comfortable, even ornate.
   There you shall see waxlights on the table, and finger-glasses with
   green leaves, and fine linen and napkins, and plenty of silver--even
   silver wine-coolers, and beakers of fame and beauty, and flowers,
   flowers everywhere, and fruit of exquisite charm. I have to live
   in outward seeming as do my neighbours, even to keeping a black
   footman, gorgeously dressed, with bare legs.
   Here at my window grows a wild aloe, and it is in flower. Once only
   in fifty years does this aloe flower, and I pick its sweet verdure
   now and offer it to you. There it lies, beside this letter that I
   am writing. It is typical of myself, for only once has my heart
   flowered, and it will be only once in fifty years. The perfume of
   the flower is like an everlasting bud from the last tree of Time.
   See, my Sheila, your drunken, reckless lover pulls this sweet
   offering from his garden and offers it to you. He has no virtues;
   and yet he would have been a thousand times worse, if you had not
   come into his life. He had in him the seeds of trouble, the
   sproutings of shame, for even in the first days of his love there in
   Dublin he would not restrain himself. He drank, he played cards, he
   fought and went with bad company--not women, never that; but he kept
   the company of those through whom he came at last to punishment for
   manslaughter.
   Yet, without you, who can tell what he might have been? He might
   have fallen so low that not the wealth of ten thousand treasure-
   boxes could give him even the appearance of honesty. And now he
   offers you what you cannot accept--can never accept--a love as deep
   as the life from which he came; a love that would throttle the world
   for you, that would force the doors of hell to bring you what you
   want.
   What do you want? I know not. Perhaps you have inherited the vast
   property to which you were the heir. If you have, what can you want
   that you have not means to procure? Ah, I have learned one thing,
   my friend 'one can get nearly everything with money. It is the
   hidden machinery which makes the world of success go round. With
   brains, you say? Yes, money and brains, but without the money
   brains seldom win alone. Do not I know? When I was in prison, with
   estate vanished and home gone and my father in his grave, who was
   concerned about me?
   Only the humblest of all God's Irish people; but with them I have
   somehow managed to win back lost ground. I am a stronger man than I
   was in all that men count of value in the world. I have an estate
   where I work like any youth who has everything before him. I have
   nothing before me, yet I shall go on working to the end. Why?
   Because I have some faculties which are more than bread and butter,
   and I must give them opportunity.
   Yet I am not always sane. Sometimes I feel I could march out and
   sweep into the sea one of the towns that dot the coast of this
   island. I have the bloody thirst, as said the great Spanish
   conquistador. I would like--yes, sometimes I would like to sweep
   to a watery grave one of the towns that are a glory to this island,
   as Savanna la Mar was swept to oblivion in the year 1780 by a
   hurricane. You can still see the ruins of the town at the bottom of
   the sea--I have sailed over it in what is now the harbour, and there
   beneath, on the deep sands, lost to time and trouble, is the slain
   and tortured town of Savanna la Mar. Was the Master of the World
   angry that day when, with a besom of wind and a tidal wave, He swept
   the place into the sea? Or was it some devil's work while the Lord
   of All slept? As the Spanish say, Quien sabe?
   Then there was that other enormous incident which made a man to be
   swallowed by an earthquake, then belched out again into the sea and
   picked up and restored to life again, and to live for many years.
   Indeed, yes, it is so. His tombstone may be seen even at this day
   at Green Bay, Kingston. His name was Lewis Galdy, and he is held in
   high repute in this land.
   I feel sometimes as Beelzebub may feel, and I long to do what
   Beelzebub might do as part of his mission. Sometimes a madness
   of revolt comes over me, and I long to ravage all the places I see,
   all the people I know--or nearly all. Why I do not have negroes
   thrashed and mutilated, as some do, I know not. Over against the
   southern shore in the parish of St. Elizabeth is an estate called
   Salem, owned, it is said, by an American, where the manager does
   such things. I am told that savageries are found there. There
   are too many absentee owners of land in this island, and the wrongs
   done by agents who have no personal honour at stake are all too
   plentiful. If I could, I would have no slavery, would set all the
   blacks free, making full compensation to the owners, and less to the
   absentee owners.
   I look out on a world of summer beauty and of heat. I see the sheep
   in hundreds on the far hills of pasturage--sheep with short hair,
   small and sweet as any that ever came from the South Downs. I see
   the natives in their Madras handkerchiefs. I see upon the road some
   planter in his ketureen--a sort of sedan chair; I see a negro
   funeral, with its strange ceremony and its gumbies of African drums.
   I see yam-fed planters, on their horses, making for the burning,
   sandy streets of the capital. I see the Scots grass growing five
   and six feet high, food unsurpassed for horses--all the foliage too
   --beautiful tropical trees and shrubs, and here and there a huge
   breeding-farm. Yet I know that out beyond my sight there is the
   region known as Trelawney, and Trelawney Town, the headquarters of
   the Maroons, the free negroes--they who fled after the Spanish had
   been conquered and the British came, and who were later freed and
   secured by the Trelawney Treaty. I know that now they are ready to
   rise, that they are working among the slaves; and if they rise the
   danger is great to the white population of the island, who are
   outnumbered ten to one.
   The governor has been warned, but he gives no heed, or treats it all
   lightly, pointing out how few the Maroons are. He forgets that a
   few determined men can demoralize a whole state, can fight and
   murder and fly to dark coverts in the tropical woods, where they
   cannot be tracked down and destroyed; and, if they have made
   supporters of the slaves, what consequences may not follow!
   What do the Maroons look like? They are ferocious and isolated,
   they are proud and overbearing, they are horribly cruel, but they
   are potent, and are difficult to reach. They are not small and
   meagre, but are big, brawny fellows, clothed in wide duck trousers
   and shirts, and they are well-armed--cutlass, powder-horn,
   haversack, sling, shot-gun, and pouch for ball. They dress as the
   country requires, and they are strong fighters against our soldiers
   who are burdened with heavy muskets, and who defy the climate, with
   their stuffed coats, their weighty caps, and their tight cross-
   belts. The Maroons are not to be despised. They have brains, the
   insolence of freedom among natives who are not free, and vast
   cruelty. They can be mastered and kept in subjection, can be made
   allies, if properly handled; but Lord Mallow goes the wrong way
   about it all. He permits things that inflame the Maroons.
   One thing is clear to me--only by hounds can these people be
   defeated. So sure am I upon this point, that I have sent to Cuba
   for sixty hounds, with which, when the trouble comes--and it is not
   far off--we shall be able to hunt the Maroons with the only weapon
   they really fear--the dog's sharp tooth. It may be the governor may
   intervene on the arrival of the dogs; but I have made friends with
   the provost-marshal-general and some members of the Jamaica
   legislature; also I have a friend in the deputy of the provost-
   marshal-general in my parish of Clarendon here, and I will make a
   good bet that the dogs will be let come into the island, governor
   or no governor.
   When one sets oneself against the Crown one must be sure of one's
   ground, and fear no foe, however great and high. Well, I have won
   so far, and I shall win in the end. Mallow should have some respect
   for one that beat him at Phoenix Park with the sword; that beat him
   when he would have me imprisoned here; that beat him in the matter
   of the ship for Haiti, and that will beat him on every hazard he
   sets, unless he stoops to underhand acts, which he will not do.
   That much must be said for him. He plays his part in no small way,
   and he is more a bigot and a fanatic loyalist than a rogue.
   Suppose--but no, I will not suppose. I will lay my plans, I will
   keep faith with people here who trust me, and who know that if I am
   stern I am also just, and I will play according to the rules made by
   better men than myself.

But what is this I see? Michael Clones--in his white jean waistcoat,
white neckcloth and trousers, and blue coat--is coming up the drive in
hot haste, bearing a letter. He rides too hard. He has never carried
himself easily in this climate. He treats it as if it was Ireland. He
will not protect himself, and, if penalty followed folly, should now be
in his grave. I like you, Michael. You are a boon, but--

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