Strange Stories

"No, thank you," I answered decidedly; "Isaac is escort enough. We shall meet again this evening."

"Perhaps then," he suggested, "I may have the pleasure of a dance with you. Of course it's quite irregular of me to ask you now, but we shall be formally introduced no doubt to-night, and I'm afraid if you lunch at the Venns' your card will be filled up by the 99th men before I can edge myself in anywhere for a dance. Will you allow me?"

"Certainly," I said; "what shall it be? The first waltz?"

"You are very kind," he answered, taking out a pencil. "You know my name – Carvalho; what may I put down for yours? I haven't heard it yet."

"Miss Hazleden," I replied, "of Palmettos."

Mr. Carvalho gave a little start of surprise. "Miss Hazleden of Palmettos," he said half to himself, with a rather pained expression. "Miss Hazleden! Then, perhaps, I'd better – well, why not? why not, indeed? Palmettos – Yes, I will." Turning to me, he said, louder, "Thank you; till this evening, then;" and, raising his hat, he hurried sharply round the corner of the hill.

What was there in my name, I wondered, which made him so evidently hesitate and falter?

Fat little Mrs. Venn was very kind, and not a very strict chaperon, but I judged it best not to mention to her this romantic episode of the handsome stranger. However, during the course of lunch, I ventured casually to ask her husband whether he knew of any family in Jamaica of the name of Carvalho.

"Carvalho," answered the Major, "bless my soul, yes. Old settled family in the island; Jews; live down Savannah-la-Mar way; been here ever since the Spanish time; doocid clever fellows, too, and rich, most of them."

"Jews," I thought; "ah, yes, Mr. Carvalho had a very handsome Jewish type of face and dark eyes; but, why, yes, surely I heard him speak several times of having been to church, and once of the Cathedral at Spanish Town. This was curious."

"Are any of them Christians?" I asked again.

"Not a man," answered the Major; "not a man, my dear. Good old Jewish family; Jews in Jamaica never turn Christians; nothing to gain by it."

The dance took place in the big mess-room, looking out on the fan-palms and tree-ferns of the regimental garden. It was a lovely tropical night, moonlight of course, for all Jamaican entertainments are given at full moon, so as to let the people who ride from a distance get to and fro safely over the breakneck mountain horse-paths. The windows, which open down to the ground, were flung wide for the sake of ventilation; and thus the terrace and garden were made into a sort of vestibule where partners might promenade and cool themselves among the tropical flowers after the heat of dancing. And yet, I don't know how it is, though the climate is so hot in Jamaica, I never danced anywhere so much or felt the heat so little oppressive.

Before the first waltz, Mr. Carvalho came up, accompanied by my old friend Dr. Wade, and was properly introduced to me. By that time my card was pretty full, for of course I was a belle in those days, and being just fresh out from England was rather run after. But I will confess that I had taken the liberty of filling in three later waltzes (unasked) with Mr. Carvalho's name, for I knew by his very look that he could waltz divinely, and I do love a good partner. He did waltz divinely, but at the end of the dance I was really afraid he didn't mean to ask me again. When he did, a little hesitatingly, I said I had still three vacancies, and found he had not yet asked anybody else. I enjoyed those four dances more than any others that evening, the more so, perhaps, as I saw my cousin, Harry Verner of Agualta, was dying with jealousy because I danced so much with Mr. Carvalho.

I must just say a word or two about Harry Verner. He was a planter pur sang, and Agualta was one of the few really flourishing sugar estates then left on the island. Harry was, therefore, naturally regarded as rather a catch; but, for my part, I could never care for any man who has only three subjects of conversation – himself, vacuum-pan sugar, and the wickedness of the French bounty system, which keeps the poor planter out of his own. So I danced away with Mr. Carvalho, partly because I liked him just a little, you know, but partly, also, I will frankly admit, because I saw it annoyed Harry Verner.

At the end of our fourth dance, I was strolling with Mr. Carvalho among the great bushy poinsettias and plumbagos on the terrace, under the beautiful soft green light of that tropical moon, when Harry Verner came from one of the windows directly upon us. "I suppose you've forgotten, Edith," he said, "that you're engaged to me for the next lancers. Mr. Carvalho, I know you are to dance with Miss Wade; hadn't you better go and look for your partner?"

He spoke pointedly, almost rudely, and Mr. Carvalho took the hint at once. As soon as he was gone, Harry turned round to me fiercely and said in a low angry voice, "You shall not dance this lancers, you shall sit it out with me here in the garden; come over to the seat in the far corner."

He led me resistlessly to the seat, away from the noise of the regimental band and the dancers, and then sat himself down at the far end from me, like a great surly bear that he was.

"A pretty fool you've been making of yourself to-night, Edith," he said in a tone of suppressed anger, "with that fellow Carvalho. Do you know who he is, miss? Do you know who he is?"

"No," I answered faintly, fearing he was going to assure me that my clever new acquaintance was a notorious swindler or a runaway ticket-of-leave man.

"Well, then, I'll tell you," he cried angrily. "I'll tell you. He's a coloured man, miss! that's what he is."

"A coloured man?" I exclaimed in surprise; "why, he's as white as you and I are, every bit as white, Harry."

"So he may be, to look at," answered my cousin; "but a brown man's a brown man, all the same, however much white blood he may have in him; you can never breed the nigger out. Confound his impudence, asking you to dance four times with him in a single evening! You, too, of all girls in the island! Confound his impudence! Why, his mother was a slave girl once on Palmettos estate!"

"Oh, Harry, you don't mean to say so," I cried, for I was West Indian enough in my feelings to have a certain innate horror of coloured blood, and I was really shocked to think I had been so imprudent as to dance four times with a brown man.

"Yes, I do mean it, miss," he answered; "an octaroon slave girl, and Carvalho's her son by old Jacob Carvalho, a Jew merchant at the back of the island, who was fool enough to go and actually marry her. So now you see what a pretty mess you've gone and been and made of it. We shall have it all over Kingston to-morrow, I suppose, that Miss Hazleden, a Hazleden and a Verner, has been flirting violently with a bit of coloured scum off her own grandfather's estate at Palmettos. A nice thing for the family, indeed!"

"But, Harry," I said, pleading, "he's such a perfect gentleman in his manners and conversation, so very much superior to a great many Jamaican young men."

"Hang it all, miss," said Harry – he used a stronger expression, for he was not particular about swearing before ladies, but I won't transcribe all his oaths – "hang it all, that's the way of you girls who have been to England. If I had fifty daughters I'd never send one of 'em home, not I. You go over there, and you get enlightened, as you call it, and you learn a lot of radical fal-lal about equality and a-man-and-a-brother, and all that humbug: and then you come back and despise your own people, who are gentlemen and the sons of gentlemen for fifty generations, from the good old slavery days onward. I wish we had them here again, I do, and I'd tie up that fellow Carvalho to a horse-post and flog him with a cow-hide within an inch of his life."

I was too much accustomed to Harry's manners to make any protest against this vigorous suggestion of reprisals. I took his arm quietly. "Let us go back into the ballroom, Harry," I said as persuasively as I was able, for I loathed the man in my heart, "and for heaven's sake don't make a scene about it. If there is anything on earth I detest, it's scenes."

Next morning I felt rather feverish, and dear fat little Mrs. Venn was quite frightened about me. "If you go down again to Liguanca with this fever on you, my dear," she said, "you'll get yellow Jack as soon as you are home again. Better write and ask your mamma to let you stop a fortnight with us here."

I consented, readily enough, for, of course, no girl of eighteen ever in her heart objects to military society, and the 99th were really very pleasant well-intentioned young fellows. But I made up my mind that if I stayed I would take particular care to see no more of Mr. Carvalho. He was very clever, very fascinating, very nice, but then – he was a brown man! That was a bar that no West Indian girl could ever be expected to get over.

As ill-luck would have it, however – I write as I then felt – about three days after, Mrs. Venn said to me, "I've invited Mr. Cameron, one of our sub-lieutenants, to dine this evening, and I've had to invite his guest, young Carvalho, as well. By the way, Edie, if I were you, I wouldn't talk quite so much as you did the other evening to Mr. Carvalho. You know, dear, though he doesn't look it, he's a brown man."

"I didn't know it," I answered, "till the end of the evening, and then Harry Verner told me. I wouldn't have danced with him more than once if I'd known it."

"Wonderful how that young fellow has managed to edge himself into society," said the major, looking up from his book; "devilish odd. Son of old Jacob Carvalho: Jacob left him all his coin, not very much; picked up his ABC somewhere or other; got into Government service; asked to Governor's dances; goes everywhere now. Can't understand it."

"Well, my dear," says Mrs. Venn, "why do we ask him ourselves?"

"Because we can't help it," says the major, testily. "Cameron goes and picks him up; ought to be in the Engineers, Cameron; too doocid clever for the line and for this regiment. Always picks up some astronomer fellow, or some botanist fellow, or some fellow who understands fortification or something. Competitive examination's ruin of the service. Get all sorts of people into the regiment now. Believe Cameron himself lives upon his pay almost, hanged if I don't."

That evening, Mr. Carvalho came, and I liked him better than ever. Mr. Cameron, who was a brother botanist and a nice ingenuous young Highlander, made him bring his portfolio of Jamaica ferns and flowers, the loveliest things I ever saw – dried specimens and water-colour sketches to accompany them of the plants themselves as they grew naturally. He told us all about them so enthusiastically, and of how he used to employ almost all his holidays in the mountains hunting for specimens. "I'm afraid the fellows at the office think me a dreadful muff for it," he said, "but I can't help it, it's born in me. My mother is a descendant of Sir Hans Sloane's, who lived here for several years – the founder of the British Museum, you know – and all her family have always had a taste for bush, as the negroes call it. You know, a good many mulatto people have the blood of able English families in their veins, and that accounts, I believe, for their usual high average of general intelligence."

I was surprised to hear him speak so unaffectedly of his ancestry on the wrong side of the house, for most light coloured people studiously avoid any reference to their social disabilities. I liked him all the better, however, for the perfect frankness with which he said it. If only he hadn't been a brown man, now! But there, you can't get over those fundamental race prejudices.

Next morning, as the Major and I were out riding, we came again across Mr. Cameron and Mr. Carvalho. Fate really seemed determined to throw us together. We were going to the Fern Walk to gather gold and silver ferns, and Mr. Carvalho was bound in the same direction, to look for some rare hill-top flowers. At the Walk we dismounted, and, while the two officers went hunting about among the bush, Mr. Carvalho and I sat for a while upon a big rock in the shade of a mountain palm. The conversation happened to come round to somewhat the same turn as it had taken the last evening.

"Yes," said Mr Carvalho, in answer to a question of mine, "I do think that mulattos and quadroons are generally cleverer than the average run of white people. You see, mixture of race evidently tends to increase the total amount of brain power. There are peculiar gains of brain on the one side, and other peculiar gains, however small, on the other; and the mixture, I fancy, tends to preserve or increase both. That is why the descendants of Huguenots in England, and the descendants of Italians in France, show generally such great ability."

"Then you yourself ought to be an example," I said, "for your name seems to be Spanish or Portuguese."

"Spanish and Jewish," he answered, laughing, "though I didn't mean to give a side-puff to myself. Yes, I am of very mixed race indeed. On my father's side I am Jewish, though of course the Jews acknowledge nobody who isn't a pure-blooded descendant of Abraham in both lines; and for that reason I have been brought up a Christian. On my mother's side I am partly negro, partly English, partly Haitian French, and, through the Sloanes, partly Dutch as well. So you see I am a very fair mixture."

"And that accounts," I said, "for your being so clever."

He blushed and bowed a little demure bow, but said nothing.

It's no use fighting against fate, and during all that fortnight I did nothing but run up against Mr. Carvalho. Wherever I went, he was sure to be; wherever I was invited, he was invited to meet me. The fact is, I had somehow acquired the reputation of being a clever girl, and, as Mr. Cameron was by common consent the clever man of his regiment, it was considered proper that he (and by inference his guest) should be always asked to entertain me. The more I saw of Mr. Carvalho the better I liked him. He was so clever, and yet so simple and unassuming, that one couldn't help admiring and sympathizing with him. Indeed, if he hadn't been a brown man, I almost think I should have fallen in love with him outright.

At the end of a fortnight I went back to Palmettos. A few days after, who should come to call but old General Farquhar, and with him, of all men in the world, Mr. Carvalho! Mamma was furious. She managed to be frigidly polite as long as they stopped, but when they were gone she went off at once into one of her worst nervous crisises (that's not the regular plural, I'm sure, but no matter). "I know his mother when she was a slave of your grandfather's," she said; "an upstanding proud octaroon girl, who thought herself too good for her place because she was nearly a white woman. She left the estate immediately after that horrid emancipation, to keep a school of brown girls in Kingston. And then she had the insolence to go and get actually married at church to old Jacob Carvalho! Just like those brown people. Their grandmothers never married." For poor mamma always made it a subject of reproach against the respectable coloured folk that they tried to live more decently and properly than their ancestors used to do in slavery times.

Mr. Carvalho never came to Palmettos again, but whenever I went to Kingston to dances I met him, and in spite of mamma I talked to him too. One day I went over to a ball at Government House, and there I saw both him and Harry Verner. For the first time in my life I had two proposals made me, and on the same night. Harry Verner's came first.

"Edie," he said to me, between the dances, as we were strolling out in the gardens, West Indian fashion, "I often think Agualta is rather lonely. It wants a lady to look after the house, while I'm down looking after the cane pieces. We made the best return in sugar of any estate on the island, last year, you know; but a man can't subsist entirely on sugar. He wants sympathy and intellectual companionship." (This was quite an effort for Harry.) "Now, I've not been in a hurry to get married. I've waited till I could find some one whom I could thoroughly respect and admire as well as love. I've looked at all the girls in Jamaica, before making my choice, and I've determined not to be guided by monetary considerations or any other considerations except those of the affections and of real underlying goodness and intellect. I feel that you are the one girl I have met who is far and away my superior in everything worth living for, Edie; and I'm going to ask you whether you will make me proud and happy for ever by becoming the mistress of Agualta."

I felt that Harry was really conceding so very much to me, and honouring me so greatly by offering me a life partnership in that flourishing sugar-estate, that it really went to my heart to have to refuse him. But I told him plainly I could not marry him because I did not love him. Harry seemed quite surprised at my refusal, but answered politely that perhaps I might learn to love him hereafter, that he would not be so foolish as to press me further now, and that he would do his best to deserve my love in future. And with that little speech he led me back to the ballroom, and handed me over to my next partner.

Later on in the evening, Mr. Carvalho too, with an earnest look in his handsome dark eyes, asked leave to take me for a few turns in the garden. We sat down on a bench under the great mango tree, and he began to talk to me in a graver fashion than usual.

"Your mother was annoyed, I fear, Miss Hazleden," he said, "that I should call at Palmettos."