“Mackenzie,” said Susan one evening, some four days after she had been to Colon, “you ever see Jones?”
“No,” he replied, “I don’t think him ever come this way. An’ I never hear anything of him; perhaps he gone back home.”
“I don’t think so,” Susan said, “for Kate tell me when I was in Colon this week that Jones go to see them sometimes. I was thinking that maybe him will get married himself.”
“Cho!” laughed Mackenzie, “Jones is never goin’ to do anything. Some girl may marry him if she really want to get married, and can take him to a church, but it will be she who will do it. You take my word for it, some day Jones is going to go back to Jamaica widout a cent in his pocket. He will have nothing to show for all the time him spend here.”
“I think so meself,” agreed Susan; “he don’t steady at all like you, Mac.”
This direct compliment, at the expense of Jones too, pleased Mackenzie not the less because he felt it was deserved. He smiled complacently.
“I always thought from the first time I see you in Colon, Sue,” he said, “that you was too good for a fellow like Jones. He has his good points, for he can work hard an’ he know his work. But him like to show off too much, an’ he never know his own mind.”
“You think I should speak to him if I ever meet him? You see, he may go to see me family when I am there, an’ I wouldn’t like to speak to him if you didn’t like it.”
“Why, of course you can speak to him; I don’t see why you shouldn’t. He don’t do you nothing, an’ I don’t see why he should vex because you leave him to get married. If I see him meself I will speak to him: an’ if him don’t choose to answer it will be all the same to me.”
“You right, Mac. If you hold out the hand of friendship an’ Jones don’t choose to take it, that’s ‘up to him’ as the American people here say. An’ I will follow your advice and speak to him if I ever see him, for I don’t bear anybody malice.”
“Malice is foolishness,” said Mackenzie emphatically. “If I was to meet Jones up here I would invite him to come an’ spend a evening in me house. I don’t know if him would come, but that would show him that I have no bad feelings towards him.”
She said nothing to her husband of her having already met Samuel Josiah. But now she felt that she could with a clear conscience be polite to Jones when next she should see him; and perhaps, after that meeting, she might tell Mackenzie of it . . . that would be wise. She was going to see her people again, but she must not seem in any hurry to do so; she must force herself to wait. She allowed two weeks to elapse before she went, taking care to let Catherine know by letter beforehand the day on which to expect her.
She arrived in Colon in the afternoon, and that evening Jones came round to the house. He expected to meet her.
For a little while they discussed indifferent topics; then suddenly Susan gave a sharp turn to the conversation and surprised everybody by saying:
“I hear that I have to congratulate you, Mr. Jones.”
“Me? What for?” he asked.
“I hear you goin’ to get married.”
“You don’t say!” exclaimed Mr. Proudleigh, immediately becoming interested. Jones had been coming so often to see them, and had been so obliging in the matter of the loans, that the old gentleman had begun to think that a match might be arranged between the young man and Catherine.
“I never hear of it before,” said Jones, “but people always know a man’s business better than he know it himself.” (Mr. Proudleigh’s face lighted up with pleasure.) “I have nothing more to do with any woman, Mrs. Mackenzie, an’ don’t intend to.” (Here Mr. Proudleigh’s hopes fell to zero—a common enough occurrence.) “Women do me enough already in this world. I have been fooled once, but that was not my fault. If I allow anybody to fool me again, however, I would be more than stupid.”
Susan’s question had been deliberately put for the purpose of finding out if Samuel’s affections were still unengaged. She was therefore delighted with his reply. But she answered to the point. “I didn’t know you ever was married before, Mr. Jones, so you couldn’t have been fooled.”
“P’rhaps it is a very good thing him was never married,” observed Miss Proudleigh caustically, leaving her meaning to be understood by Susan.
“Perhaps so,” replied Susan promptly, “for if Mr. Jones was married him might have all his wife’s old relations wanting to live on him.”
“It’s not a matter of relations,” said Jones, “for when I put me hand into me pocket, I can always find money there to help anybody. But females are not to be trusted; and as I don’t take away anybody’s wife, I wouldn’t like anybody to take away mine.”
“I agree wid you, Mister Jones,” said Mr. Proudleigh; “but you don’t have no occasion to worry you’self, for as you not married, nobody can teck away you’ wife.” He laughed as he ceased, being proud of his logic.
“Well, marriage is not everything,” said Susan; “but as I hear that Mr. Jones was goin’ to get married—I forget who tell me—I thought I would mention it so as to congratulate him. But since it isn’t true, I congratulate him all de same.”
“I thank you kindly,” said Jones with a sweeping bow, “and without indulging in any process of vituperation, I venture to submit that some people would have a better life with Samuel Josiah Jones than with other men I could mention. Some married people have it dull, you know. Now I am a sport, an’ anybody who is along with me must enjoy themself.”
Susan immediately credited her aunt with having been talking about her to Jones. Her suspicions were just. Yet Jones had said enough to indicate that he was still regretting her desertion of him, and this established a sympathetic understanding between them: they were both partners in misfortune.
“What that word, ‘vituperation,’ mean, Mister Jones?” inquired Mr. Proudleigh, who was interested in polysyllables but sometimes found that Jones’s terms left him bewildered in a maze of hopeless conjecture.
“It means,” said Jones, beginning an explanation which might have left the old man no wiser than before, when a shout in the street attracted their attention, and they heard a babble of voices and the sound of hurrying feet.
“Fire!” cried Mr. Proudleigh, moving quickly towards the veranda. “What a place Colon is for fire! Almost every week dere is one.”
“They say the American doctors burn down the houses when they can’t cure the fever any other way,” said Jones, hurriedly following Mr. Proudleigh to the veranda.
“The people burn it down themself when them want to rob,” was Miss Proudleigh’s hypothesis, which probably did account for many of the fires which afflicted Colon.
From the veranda they could see a red glare against the north-western sky, and a great volume of smoke surging upwards. The glare grew brighter every moment; denser became the smoke.
“It’s a big fire!” cried Susan excitedly, “an’ nearly all the house in Colon is of wood. It may burn down de whole town!”
“I gwine to see it!” Mr. Proudleigh exclaimed. “I never miss a fire yet.” He hurried into the room for his hat, spurred to unusual activity by the prospect of enjoying one of his favourite amusements.
“But suppose it come this way, pupa?” cried Catherine in a frightened tone of voice. “What about we clothes and other things?”
But Mr. Proudleigh was already half-way down the stairs, and calling out loudly to ask if they were not going with him. Miss Proudleigh refused to move, not being willing to leave her room to the mercy of wandering thieves. Catherine, after a moment’s hesitation, ran after her father. Jones and Susan went out together.
The street below was crowded. Half the people in Colon were running towards the scene of the conflagration, shouting “Fire!” with all the power of their lungs. Cabs tore through the narrow thoroughfare, mounted men appeared from nowhere and began to urge their horses through the hurrying throng with a fine disregard of other people’s safety. The excitement was contagious; it infected Susan and Jones, who, hand in hand, began to run also, immediately losing sight of Catherine and Mr. Proudleigh and thinking only of themselves. Soon they came to the spot where a huge crowd was collected near a block of wooden buildings, some of which were now blazing furiously. Fortunately there was no wind, so the sparks were not carried to any considerable distance. But they rose to a tremendous height in the heated air, and at that moment thousands of anxious people were wondering whether a single house would be left standing in Colon when morning dawned.
The fire brigades were on the spot, the town brigade as well as that from Christobal. The men worked like demons. Long silver streams poured upon the blazing buildings; uniformed men in shining helmets swarmed up the sides of the doomed structures, splintering and smashing the woodwork with their axes, giving fierce battle to the yellow monster which leaped from roof to roof, roaring dully as if glorying in destruction. The Panamanian police were everywhere, the little fellows running about and clubbing out of the way whoever ventured too near the burning houses. Soon it was seen that the flames were threatening to leap across a narrow street, the houses in which were already warping and blistering under the terrible heat. If those houses should once ignite, it would be with the greatest difficulty that they could be saved.
A sudden scattering of the crowd indicated that the police were impressing men to help them fight the fire. They seized every able-bodied man they could lay their hands upon, tolerating no show of resistance; people on the outskirts of the crowd, knowing that an unpleasant time would be in store for them if once they were impressed, were hastily making off, and Jones, who was among them, thought it eminently wise to follow their example as quickly as possible. Pulling Susan by the hand, he hurried away. When he thought that he had put sufficient ground between himself and the police he halted. From where they now stood they could still see the flames fighting their way upwards, and the huge masses of heavy black smoke spreading like a pall over the town.
“I hope them won’t hold pupa,” panted Susan, staring with wide-open eyes at the curling smoke and lurid sky.
“They wouldn’t bother with him,” Jones assured her; “he is too feeble; in fact, he shouldn’t be in that crowd at all. It is the strong men they looking for to-night. They will try to hold people like me an’ Mackenzie.”
Mackenzie’s name slipped out almost without Jones knowing that he had pronounced it. It showed that Mackenzie occupied a large portion of his thoughts in these days. The mention of the name also led to a question which seemed strangely out of place at a time when Colon appeared to be threatened with wholesale destruction.
“You an’ you’ husband ever talk about me?” he asked Susan.
She was surprised at this question, so out of keeping it was with her thoughts just then. Still staring towards the fire, she said, “Why you ask that now?”
“Because I would like to know what you say about me, an’ this is the only time I can ask you. I suppose Mackenzie laugh at me an’ think I am a fool to let him take you away from me so easy?”
“Why you always like to talk disagreeable things, Sam?” she answered, unconsciously dropping back into her old familiar way of addressing him. There was no pretence now; there was a touch of regret in her voice as she went on:
“Mackenzie is quite up at Culebra, an’ you is down here. I going back to-morrow. What’s de good of talkin’ about him?”
“But can you tell me now that you don’t sorry you leave me, Sue; that you are as happy as you used to be? I don’t make any pretence like you. I miss you, an’ I tell you so plain.”
“It was your fault, Sam. Before I went away I ask you if you was going to keep you’ promise to marry me, an’ you say I was talking foolishness. I knew Mackenzie was going to act differently, and, after all, him do for me what you would never do.”
“That is the way you put it. But you didn’t tell me Mackenzie offered to marry you. You stole away from me like a thief in the night. If you had told me you were going, and why you were going, I wouldn’t have made you go, an’ we would have been married to-day. But you didn’t give me a chance to know. Why? I could have done you nothing if you had told me.”
There was so much in what he said, that for the space of a few seconds Susan remained silent. Then she answered.
“You talk like that now, Sam, but you would have talked different if I had told you. I was afraid.”
“Afraid,” he repeated bitterly, “though I never lift me hand to you in me life! An’ suppose it had come to a big quarrel or a fight. You was living in the same house with a lot of people: what could I do you? An’ if I did make a fight, the wrong would have been on my side, an’ you could have left me with a clear conscience. How is it now? You mean to tell me that every day of you’ natural life you going to be content with the same sort of life you living now? I know all about it. You can’t prevent you’ people from talking. Besides, I know something about Culebra; and I know Mackenzie. An’ if it is bad now, what is it goin’ to be later on? You are going to be miserable, you going to fret, you going to wish you were dead; an’ so, for all your name is Mrs. Mackenzie, an’ you have a ring on you’ finger, and all the comforts you want, I don’t see that you are as well off as before you got married. So what is the good of it?”
Out there, in the streets of Colon, in the town where, as she now so keenly remembered, she had had so many hours of happiness, Susan felt the full force of Samuel’s words. Both of them had forgotten the fire. Their own affairs were of supremest importance in all the world.
“It is no use talkin’ now,” she said dismally. “What is done can’t be undone.”
“That is true. You make your own bed an’ must lie on it.”
“We live an’ learn,” said Susan. “You can’t know if you don’t try.”
“What’s the sense of tryin’ once if you can never try again?”
She said nothing, and he continued, as if talking to himself:
“You can’t marry again, once you’re married; that’s the hard part of it. You leave me, but you can’t leave Mackenzie. . . . You can’t. . . . But, Sue, you can! Let us go away from here to Jamaica!”
No such proposition had definitely formed itself in his mind when he first began to speak. The suddenness of it was a revelation to himself. Yet the idea must have been lurking somewhere at the back of his mind, for he had never entirely given up Susan. Now too he went on as though the whole course of their future conduct had been carefully thought out by him.
“We can go to Jamaica, Sue, an’ we’ll be all right there. I will arrange all about the passage; you can come down here from Culebra the night before the ship sail, and we can leave in the morning. You needn’t say a word to anybody, not even your own people; you can write them when you are in Jamaica. When we get there, Mackenzie can only divorce you, for he can’t do you anything in Jamaica. But even if he divorce you, it won’t matter, for I will marry you then. Mackenzie take you away from me, so it is only fair if I take you away from him. What you say?”
“No, Sam! This is different. When I leave you I wasn’t married; I was me own woman; now I am not. It would be a disgrace for me to go away wid you an’ leave me lawful husband. Besides, it would be a sin. Don’t you know that if a married woman ’ave anything to do with another man it is seven years’ trouble for both of them?”
It came into Jones’s mind at that moment that, if such were the case, there must be large numbers of persons in Central America and the West Indies enduring long seven-year periods of tribulation just then; but he only said, “That’s all foolishness, Sue.”
“It is not. Marriage is a different thing from every other thing; that is what I learn, and that is what nobody can take out of me head. An’ suppose Mackenzie was to divorce me. You think I would like to have me name disgrace like that?”
“Then what we going to do?”
For answer, Susan began to walk slowly in the direction of her people’s house. There were many persons in the streets now. The fire was burning still, but had been mastered; the fear that it might consume the whole town had passed away. People were beginning to return to their homes, all talking about the danger which they had escaped. The street in which they were was filled with the murmur of excited voices.
They walked on, Jones at her side. “Pupa must be gone home,” she remarked. “We better go back too.”
As she spoke she saw a man who was passing in the opposite direction turn and look at her and her companion. She glanced over her shoulder to look at him, Jones also turning to stare. The man had stopped and was staring.
They both recognized who it was, and Susan nodded her head. The man returned the bow, but Jones looked at him as if he were a post. “That is the jackass,” he said, “who cause all this trouble;” and he spoke loudly enough for Tom Wooley to hear.
They continued on their way, arriving at the house in a few minutes. There they found Mr. Proudleigh relating his wonderful experiences at the scene of the fire. He and Catherine had been separated in the crowd, and he related how the police had tried to induce him to assist in extinguishing the fire, and with what arguments he had effectually prevented them from laying sacrilegious hands upon his venerable person. A story which showed that the old man had in him the makings of an ingenious newspaper reporter, and which was listened to by his sister with every manifestation of profound disbelief.
Mr. Thomas Wooley had never been credited with strong moral convictions by anyone who knew him. Among his mild boasts, uttered in the company of congenial companions, certain alleged breaches by him of the seventh commandment had frequently flourished: to gain a reputation for gallantry he had not scrupled to libel himself. But on that night when he saw Susan and Jones together in the streets of Colon the sacredness of the marriage tie appealed to him strongly; he felt that a great wrong was being done to marriage as a civil and religious institution, and he remembered that he himself had been badly treated by Susan and by Jones. That, he decided in his mind, had been freely forgiven. He was magnanimous. But Susan was now a wife, and it was clearly wrong that she should have anything whatever to do with Jones, who was, in Tom’s opinion, a desperate and malignant character who pretended to be friendly with you at first for the purpose of ill-treating you afterwards.
Tom argued that, shocked though he was, he had no right to interfere personally with Jones. He would not remonstrate with him on the evil tenor of his way. But he reflected with intense satisfaction that Mackenzie was, if anything, Jones’s physical superior, as well as the rightful lord and master of Susan. Mackenzie, then, could read to Jones a much-needed moral lesson, could deal with Susan as an outraged husband should, and, generally, could do all those things which Tom wanted to see done, but could not do himself.
The problem was, how to acquaint Mackenzie with the atrocious actions of Susan and her lover? Tom felt that he had been a martyr. He had suffered much because of Susan. But martyrdom, he was convinced, should not be allowed to go beyond reasonable limits, and should, as a general rule, be carefully avoided whenever possible. He had lost his situation in Kingston, he had been roughly handled and fined in Colon. These things he had endured without murmuring. He was now prepared to become an active agent in the work of Susan’s moral redemption, and, incidentally, in the deserved punishment of Jones; he had no doubt whatever that in endeavouring to call Mackenzie’s attention to the wrongs of which that injured man was still ignorant, he would be performing a highly meritorious act. But caution must be displayed. Jones was very likely to take a singularly narrow-minded view of his action, if he should ever think that he, Tom, had meddled with his affairs. There was only one way in which to approach Mackenzie, and that was through the medium of an anonymous letter—a letter so worded that suspicion could not possibly fall on Tom Wooley. Tom had been removed to Christobal. Early the next morning, with a fine feeling of noble endeavour, somewhat mingled with apprehension lest, in spite of all his efforts, his identity should be disclosed, he sat down and wrote to Mackenzie.
The morning after this, on calling at the Post Office on his way to work, Mackenzie was handed a letter which he opened and read as he slowly walked away.
“Dear Sir,” it ran, “this is to inform you that things are not quite straight. Everybody has a respect for you, and it would be a shame if a friend of yours do not let you know that your wife is not behaving towards you as she should.” Here Mackenzie stopped reading and glanced at the end of the letter to see from whom it came. It was signed, “A True Friend,” a signature that left him none the wiser. He continued reading.
“Your wife is always in Colon with Jones, the young man she was with when you married her. I see them together over and over, and this is not right, for she is your wife and should think of your feelings. I therefore take this opportunity of making you acquainted with the facts.”
Mackenzie read the letter twice, then studied the handwriting: it told him nothing. He folded the letter, carefully placed it in its envelope, put it away in his pocket, and went thoughtfully to his work.
Susan had returned the day before. She had told him all about the fire, of which he had already read a sensational account in that morning’s papers. She had told him that she and her relatives had run out to see the fire (which is what he knew they would have done), that they had met Jones in the crowd, and that she had spoken to Jones. There was nothing improbable whatever in her story. He remembered that he himself had advised her to speak to Jones if she should ever meet him. This anonymous letter said that she was often in Colon with Jones. But he, Mackenzie, knew that Susan had only been twice to Colon since she had been his wife. So that assertion was a lie. The person who had written the letter, whoever it was, must have seen Susan speaking to Jones on the night of the fire, but Susan had not kept that a secret. This man too, who signed himself “A True Friend,” must surely bear Susan a grudge, and perhaps was also an enemy of himself. For the fellow evidently wanted to make mischief, and that no true friend would do. Mackenzie did not like the letter; it worried him a little. He did not care to have Susan’s name coupled with that of Jones: the association was not pleasant. But he did not, for he could not, believe the story. He decided he would show the letter to Susan later on.
He handed it to her when he went home for lunch.
“You have some enemy in Colon, Sue,” he said; “or it is my enemy. I get this letter to-day, an’ it is no good person write it. I wonder if it is a woman?”
Susan took the letter and glanced at the handwriting. She knew it at once. Although Tom had tried to disguise his handwriting, and believed he had succeeded, his endeavour had been at best a clumsy one; she gave no sign, however, that she knew the author of the anonymous communication; she did not wish Mackenzie to seek out Tom and demand an explanation, which might be very inconvenient to her. She read the letter slowly. She realized that the attempt to make it appear that she was continually meeting Samuel had defeated its own end. She felt that only a fool like Tom could have blundered so badly. He hadn’t even mentioned the fire, so eager was he to conceal his identity. Her heart was beating quickly, though she tried to appear unconcerned. She strove to control her voice when she spoke.
“It’s a wonder the person who writes this letter didn’t say I was two weeks wid Jones,” she said, as she handed the letter back to her husband. “That’s the way that worthless people tell lies on other people! They want to rob me of me character because them is envious of me!”
“Well, it is what you have to expect,” said Mackenzie philosophically. “I know you only go twice to Colon to see you’ family, an’ Jones have his work to do during the day, so he couldn’t be with you.”
He said this more for the purpose of setting her mind at ease than because he was any longer interested in the subject of the letter; but Susan was inwardly too anxious to let the matter rest there. None of her relatives, not even her aunt, would betray her; but suppose some other person should follow Tom’s example? A bold idea suggested itself to her. “I wonder if it is Jones himself write it?” she remarked. Mackenzie was surprised at the suggestion.
“Why y’u think so?” he asked. “Jones wouldn’t tell a lie on himself?”
“I don’t know about that. P’rhaps him think you couldn’t say anything to him, but might want to quarrel wid me. Men are bad, an’ Jones might want to get me into trouble because I wouldn’t take much notice of him the other night when I saw him at the fire, as I told you.”
Mackenzie looked at the letter he still held in his hand. He shook his head; the handwriting was not like Jones’s.
“He may have begged one of his friend to write it,” urged Susan.
“Maybe,” admitted Mackenzie; “it may be Jones. But I wouldn’t like to accuse him till I was sure: that would be foolishness.”
“Well, don’t notice it, then,” said Susan, pleased with Mackenzie’s prudence. “I don’t care what anybody say about me, so long as me conscience don’t trouble me an’ it don’t put you out. But I wouldn’t like anybody else do me a thing like this again, for my character is all dat I have, and what one person do another may do.”
But as Mackenzie preferred always to deal with facts and not with possibilities, he let the subject drop, and by the time he returned to his work that afternoon he had ceased to think about the letter.
Not for an instant, however, did Susan cease to think of it. She was desperately frightened. As she had said to Mackenzie, what one person had done another might do, and then Mackenzie would begin to grow suspicious. She feared to meet Samuel again, yet she wanted to see him at least once more: she wanted to warn him. How could she see him? . . . If she risked a meeting some enemy of hers might learn about it, and this time she might not be able to find a ready excuse. It is true that Mackenzie had told her she should be polite to Jones if she should see him, but at that time no anonymous letter had coupled her name with that of her former lover. And to meet Jones the very next time she went to Colon would of a surety have a suspicious look.
Should she write to him? Letters went astray sometimes, and Samuel was careless.
Then what was she to do?
She worried herself all that afternoon, trying to think a way out of the difficulty. Suppose Mackenzie should meet Jones and mention the letter to him? Jones might say something about his meeting her at her people’s house . . . and then!
She felt sick of the difficult position in which she found herself, wearied to death; she had a sensation of being tied hand and foot, of being a prisoner; she longed for release, and she knew that only one avenue of escape was open to her. She could leave Culebra, leave Panama, and go back to Jamaica with Jones. She would be happier there, free, more like what she used to be before her marriage. What did the hardships and discontents of that time now seem to her? They were as nothing; she remembered only that she had been happier, and what was the good of marriage if it brought but boredom and disgust? But there was the divorce court to think of also, and her terrible fall from respectability. Even if Mackenzie did not take the trouble to divorce her, she would be a byword amongst those persons who should know her as a woman who had left her husband for another man. She could not face that shame.
She decided that she must wait. Nothing might happen in the next couple of weeks. At the end of that time it would not seem at all strange if she went to Colon to see her people; then, if she met Samuel, she would tell him of the letter and put him on his guard.
She felt grateful to Mackenzie for his confidence in her. Such confidence displayed by a man like Tom would merely have awakened her contempt; but she saw that her husband was perfectly sincere, and determined to take her part against her traducers. Had he doubted her he would have shown it at once, he would have made inquiries, and the sequel would have been terrible. That, she argued, would have been unjust to her. She had done nothing deserving of blame. She had met Jones twice; she had not told her husband the truth about those meetings; but on the other hand she had refused to fly with Samuel, and on that demonstration of virtuous feeling she greatly preened herself. She had behaved splendidly; after such conduct it would have been most unjust if Mackenzie had acted any differently from how he had acted. And to think that it was Tom who had tried to injure her; to think too that nothing painful could be done to him! She thirsted for revenge, yet she knew that Tom must escape scot-free. The slightest attempt at reprisals might but lead to exposure. The thought that she could not pay back Tom with heavy interest was like wormwood to her soul.
When Mackenzie came home that evening she again brought up the subject of the letter. She thought that if she dwelt upon it, showed no anxiety that it should be forgotten, her husband’s mind would be cleared of any shadow of suspicion that, unknown to himself, might be lingering in some dark corner there. Mackenzie laughed as he listened to her extravagantly expressed wonder that anyone should be base enough to lie against another person anonymously.
“I remember,” he said, “about eight years ago, when I was workin’ at the Jamaica railway, somebody write a letter about me to de manager. He didn’t sign his name, but I knew all the time who it was, an’ the manager knew it too. The man wanted me job, an’ he accuse me of robbin’ the railway’s goods an’ sellin’ them outside. But I was more than a match for him. I could account for every screw that pass through me hand. All that man ever get for his lie was to lose his job, an’ that teach him not to write letters against other people in future.”
Mackenzie had never forgotten that incident. It had much to do with his disbelief in anonymous letters.
“So it is not me alone that them try to injure,” said Susan, glad that her husband had also been attacked by an anonymous scribe. “However, I not going back to Colon.”
“That’s stupidness,” said Mackenzie. “You goin’ to make a lie trouble y’u? You must go an’ see you’ people sometimes.”
This remark was just what she wanted to hear; her husband himself had now advised her to go to Colon when she wanted! But she would not avail herself of this advice to rush off to Colon. Although her inclination was to do so, she fought against it, forcing herself to wait. Her patience and prudence were rewarded when, five days after, her sister Catherine appeared at Culebra.
Catherine had come by one of the afternoon trains; as she had calculated, she found Susan alone.
“I bet you you don’t tell me why I come here to-day?” she said to her sister, dropping her voice as though she had an important secret to impart.
Susan expressed her inability to guess, but, with the anonymous letter always in her mind, became feverishly curious to know what had brought Catherine up to Culebra. Was some scandal about her being circulated in Colon?
Catherine produced a sealed, unaddressed envelope and placed it in her sister’s hand; Susan broke the seal; the letter was from Jones.
Catherine observed Susan’s start of surprise and alarm. She hastened to explain that Jones had not posted the letter because he would not take the risk of its falling into any other hands except those of Susan. He had not even addressed the envelope, lest, inadvertently, the handwriting should be seen and recognized.
“Samuel pay my trainage from Colon to up here, an’ back again,” said Catherine. “I didn’t want to come, but he beg me hard, an’ I thought it was better I bring the letter than that him should ask anybody else.”
She looked inquiringly at Susan, anxious to learn what Jones had written about.
Susan said nothing. She was reading and re-reading the letter. It was written in Samuel’s most grandiloquent style, and opened with a declaration of his intention to poison himself, throw himself on a railway track to be run over by a train, drown himself, or commit suicide in some other unpleasant manner if he were compelled to endure much longer his present agony of mind. He wanted to see Susan to tell her “something very important.” He had to see her, and he begged her to go to Colon as early as she could. He ended by saying that he was leaving for Jamaica in a week’s time, wishing as he did to die in his own country, and that she would never cease to regret it if she let him leave Panama without seeing her. She must tell Catherine if she would go to Colon, and when.
There was a postscript: “And when I am departed hence, forlorn and forsaken, you will eventually come to find that your desertation of me was a catastrophe worse than ever you have known; but alas! it will be too late.”
“You know what Sam write to me about?” said Susan, searching Catherine’s face with her eyes.
Catherine shook her head negatively. “Him want you to leave Mackenzie?”
“Not exactly. Him want to see me, but I can’t go to Colon just now at all.”
“Why? No harm can be done. Nobody will know why y’u go.”
“Wait till I tell you something,” said Susan, and she told Catherine of her conversation with Jones on the night of the fire, of their accidental meeting with Tom, and of how Tom had acted. She had intended to keep all this secret, but now was glad to have some one to whom she could confide her cares.
Catherine listened, breathless, but not surprised at what she heard about Jones. She had never been deceived by the formal conversations he had carried on with Susan on the two occasions they had met at the house in Colon. But with Tom’s treachery she was disgusted. She had once entertained a kindly feeling for him; now she felt contempt. All her sympathies were with her sister, and she agreed that it might indeed be a risk for Susan to go just then to Colon; she had better wait for some time longer.
She proposed to return to Colon the next morning, and she promised to explain to Samuel why Susan could not see him just then; she also promised to warn him against Tom, at the same time impressing upon him that any rash action on his part could do no good but might merely create an unpleasant scandal. All this agreed upon, Susan professed herself satisfied, then immediately added, “But suppose Sam go away without I see him?”
That was possible. She did not take seriously his threats of suicide; they were merely intended to frighten her. But that he was thinking of returning to Jamaica she could well believe. His restlessness and impatience might easily cause him to do that, and quickly, and . . . and she wanted to see him again.
“Tell him,” she said to Catherine after a pause, “that he must ’ave patience.”
“But patience for what?” asked Catherine, and Susan could give no answer.
The following morning Catherine returned to Colon. That evening, when Jones came round to the house as agreed, she quietly took him out on the veranda and told him the result of her mission.
When they went back into Mr. Proudleigh’s room, Jones solemnly walked up to Mr. Proudleigh and shook hands with him.
“Old massa, you have nothing to do with it,” he said—“nothing at all.”
Mr. Proudleigh immediately agreed that he hadn’t, and then anxiously inquired what it was with which he was so entirely unconnected.
“You know that I loved your daughter, didn’t you?” asked Jones.
“In course!” agreed Mr. Proudleigh briskly. “Dat is what I always say. I ’ave seen many a young man all in love all times, but I never see one like you. Your love is true love, Mister Jones, like mine when I was young an’ good-lookin’. I remember I was in love wid three different young lady at one time, an’ I couldn’t say which one I love de most. One day——”
“Very well,” said Jones, who was more anxious to air his grievances than to listen to the youthful idylls of Mr. Proudleigh. “Y’u know that I take her away from Kingston, Jamaica, an’ bring her here?”
“Sartinly. I was down at de wharf de day you leave. Sun was hot that day, me friend!”
“Very well. And y’u know that I bring her here an’ look after her kindly, an’ nearly went to prison for her?”
“Yes, y’u tell me all about it. But she say it was your fault; but, as I tell her, a young man——”
“Very well. Now tell me fair an’ square: do you think Susan acted right to leave me in ruinate in the manner visible?”
“Well, to tell y’u de truth, Mister Jones, you is looking very well just now. Ef I was you, I wouldn’t bodder me head about a young lady that act so foolish as to leave me an’ go an’ married. De same thing happen to me once, but it didn’t make a tooth in me head ache. An’ if you want another han’some intended, there is Miss Catherine——”
“Please to leave me out of you’ conversation, pupa!” came peremptorily from Catherine, and Mr. Proudleigh halted promptly in the midst of his matchmaking endeavour.
“It don’t matter how I look,” said Jones angrily: “it’s how I feel. If it wasn’t for one thing, I would throw meself in the sea this very night.”
“That would not be Christianlike, Mister Jones,” said Miss Proudleigh, who had been listening attentively to the conversation. “We must patiently bear our crosses. Besides, I don’t see what you worrying you’self about, for there is some things that is a good riddance. Y’u don’t see it now, but you will see it later on.”
“That may be true, but I am speaking of now an’ not of later on,” said Jones. “I want you all to understand that I have been driven like a lamb to the slaughter by Susan Mackenzie. She get married without my knowledge; she took away all the money I give her, an’ what she used to take from me when she thought I didn’t know; an’ now she is living like a king at Culebra. If it wasn’t for me she might have been in Jamaica to-day keeping a little shop, without an extra five shillin’s. Yet when I send her sister to ask her——”
“What y’u going to say now?” cried Catherine, seeing he was on the verge of blurting out what he had agreed should be kept a secret.
“What I am going to say I am going to say,” replied Jones impetuously. “I am goin’ away to Jamaica, an’ I send an’ ask Susan to come an’ tell me good-bye and have a talk before I go. What she do? She say she can’t come! Is that a decent way to treat a man, especially a man like me? When she left me I bear it in silence, though I might have been very disagreeable. Yet now she treat me like if I was a dog!”
This angry outburst was received in silence by those who heard it. They had never seen Jones in a temper before.
“You know what I am going to do now?” he asked after a moment’s pause. “I am going straight up to Culebra to tell Susan what I think of her!”
“Y’u can’t do that at all, Mr. Jones,” said Catherine firmly. “I told you already why Sue can’t come now, an’ you must remember she is married an’ dat her husband wouldn’t like y’u to bring no confusion into his house.”
“Her husband can go to the devil!” exclaimed Jones. “Who is her husband?”
“But suppose him meet you an’ have a fight?” said Mr. Proudleigh, thinking that such a prospect might have a deterrent effect upon Jones.
“If Mackenzie can fight, I can fight too,” replied the young man. “If he don’t interfere with me, I won’t interfere with him. But I am going to Culebra.”
“Well, Mister Jones,” said Mr. Proudleigh, “if you determine to go, I can’t stop y’u. But do, I beg you, don’t say dat we know anyt’ing at all about it. You see, I don’t ’fraid of any man in de world, but quarrel is a thing I keep out of. Mackenzie is me son-in-law, so I can’t say nothing against him, but y’u know what I think; an’ if you take my foolish advice you wouldn’t go to Culebra.”
“Don’t call my name, whatever you do,” said Catherine. “I sorry I have anything to do wid your business, for I can see you going to act like a fool. And after all, what can y’u expect Susan to do? If you go an’ make any trouble now, her husband will believe what that liar, Tom, write an’ tell him.”
“What is dat?” asked Mr. Proudleigh quickly, but Catherine refused to reply. Her reticence, coming after her allusion to Tom and Mackenzie, caused the old man to feel that the situation was more perilous than he had thought it was.
As for Miss Proudleigh, she loudly lifted up her voice in denunciation of sin and its consequences, this time with a good deal of sincerity born of fear.
“Susan have much to answer for,” she cried; “she bring all this trouble on herself an’ her husband an’ Mr. Jones. Your sin will find you out, an’ who shall flee from the wrath to come! I have nothing to do with it. She is me niece, but she never treat me respectfully. She deserve all she going to suffer, and she going to suffer for true! But I sympathize wid her, for we are told not to bear any malice.”
As the old lady seemed to be trying to qualify for the position of a modern Jeremiah, Catherine brusquely demanded if she wanted all the people in the house to hear what she was saying.
“They will all hear soon enough,” replied Miss Proudleigh grimly. “There is going to be war an’ rumours of war.”
“An’ I am going to make the war,” said Jones fiercely. “I make up my mind to die.”
“Don’t do that, me son,” implored Mr. Proudleigh. “Death is not a thing to meck fun with. Wait an’ have patience.”
“Patience for what?”
As Mr. Proudleigh could not say, he merely suggested that Jones had better not act rashly, but Samuel would not allow his mind to be affected by such advice.
He took his hat.
“When you goin’ to Culebra?” asked Catherine, wondering if she would have time to warn Susan.
“Why you want to know?”
“Never mind, if y’u don’t want to tell me!” she snapped, “but take care what you doin’.”
“I know what I am doing,” answered Jones, and left the room.
“You think him will really go?” Mr. Proudleigh inquired anxiously of Catherine, after the door had closed behind Jones.
Catherine pondered a moment.
“If him could go to-night, him would go,” she said; “but he can’t go to-night. To-morrow him may change his mind. Jones is a man that will do a thing in a temper, but not otherwise.”
Catherine’s estimate of Samuel’s character was shrewd. But it is not always possible to foresee the actions of any human being.
It was raining at Culebra—had been raining for days. For miles and miles the sky was overcast, hour after hour the rain came down, now swiftly and in showers, now in a light drizzle which gave to the surrounding country an aspect of greyness, a cheerless, depressing hue.
It was between eight and nine o’clock in the forenoon; her husband had gone to his work and Susan was busying herself with her household duties. She was pensive, moving about as one who had no energy; her mind was not set about what she was doing, her thoughts were far away.
She knew that Catherine must have told Jones on the previous night her answer to his letter: she was wondering what he had said, whether he had determined to go back to Jamaica without seeing her, whether all was over between them now. . . .
There was a knock at the front door: she went to answer it. She opened the door: on the veranda stood Samuel, the last person in the world she expected to see at Mackenzie’s house that day.
“You!” she exclaimed. “What y’u doing up here?”
She stood guarding the doorway, as if to prevent him from entering; she was trembling all over with fear, not of Jones, but lest her husband should unexpectedly return and find Samuel there.
“You not going to let me in?” asked Jones, with a note of pleading in his voice; “I have only come to have a talk with you.”
“You shouldn’t come,” she answered. “What a trial is this! I told Kate to tell you I couldn’t come to Colon now, an’ here you come to Culebra to make trouble. What’s the good of all this, Sam?”
She did not wait for him to answer.
“You must go right back,” she insisted, “for the neighbours goin’ to tell Mackenzie dat a strange man come here to-day, an’ if you stay an’ him find out it is you, he will believe what Tom write an’ tell him. You can’t remain here, Sam.”
Her words, her earnest manner, her evident determination not to let him enter, left Jones at a loss what to do. He had taken the early morning train to Culebra; he had left Colon for the purpose of speaking his mind to her: he wanted to relieve his feelings. While in the train he had kept his courage up to the sticking point; again and again he had rehearsed to himself his grievances; even when he left the train and was climbing the hill he felt that he would be able to go through with the scene which he had pictured. But when he neared the house which was pointed out to him as Susan’s, he had been conscious of some hesitation in his mind, of an inclination to pause and consider whether he was acting wisely. He had fought down that inclination; he was now standing face to face with Susan. But she, though frightened, was resolute, and he stood before her perplexed, uncertain what to do.
“You going to stay at the door all day?” he asked her.
“No, for I don’t expect you goin’ to remain here.”
“You not even going to ask me to take a seat?”
“What for?”
“I am tired. I didn’t sleep all last night; I walk from the train station to this house, and all you do is to insult me like a dog. I only came here to tell you good-bye. I am taking the steamer to Jamaica to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes. I don’t want to stop here any longer.”
Her eyelids fluttered; she gazed at him in blank silence; she felt that he had spoken the truth, had made up his mind to leave Panama. In a little while he would return to the station, in a few hours he would be on his way . . . home.
The patter of the rain on the roofs and ground played a heavy accompaniment to the beating of her heart. Through the thick atmosphere came steadily the booming sound of dynamite explosions in the Cut. Boom, boom, boom: the heavy noise assaulted the ear, but she herself was conscious only of a deadly stillness within her. Suddenly Jones put out his hand. “Good-bye,” he said.
For answer, she stepped backwards. “Come in and sit down a little, if you tired,” she said.
He entered, glanced carelessly around him, and sat down. She left the door open, threw open all the windows also, as if there were a dead body in the house. Anyone passing could see them, no one could imagine or say that she was entertaining Jones clandestinely. “Mackenzie shouldn’t come back before half-past twelve,” she remarked; “but if he come you must tell him that you come up here to tell him an’ me good-bye.”
She sat at some distance from him, and by one of the open windows.
“What you going to do in Jamaica?” she asked.
“I don’t know, an’ I don’t care. I should never have come to this place. In fact,” he added, breaking out a little, “I am goin’ to kill meself!”
“Stop talking stupidness, Sam,” she said quietly: “you know y’u not goin’ to do nothing of the sort. I suppose at first you thought you would make a quarrel wid me up here?”
He feebly protested that such a thought had never entered his mind, but knew that he did not convince her. He was aware now that a quarrel at Culebra would have been a hopelessly foolish thing.
Both of them fell into silence after this. There seemed nothing more to say. Both of them appeared to be listening to the rain, to that persistent booming of the explosions; both of them were wondering if this were really their last leave-taking.
One question formed itself again and again in Susan’s mind: “Would it not be better to sacrifice respectability, religion, and go with him?” Sitting face to face with him, knowing that to-morrow he would be on his way to Jamaica, the answer “Yes” was whispered to her from her heart. As if he knew what was passing in her mind, he asked her suddenly:
“And you won’t make up you’ mind to come with me, Sue?”
If “Yes” rose to her lips, she resolutely shut them. A few seconds passed before she replied.
“Something tell me, ‘Better not,’ Sam. But I am sorry.”
She covered her face with her hands.
“Kiss me an’ tell me good-bye, Sue.”
He had risen and was standing over her. She got up, glanced quickly outside: no one was passing. She kissed him.
He left the house, walking hurriedly away. She fell back into her chair, crying as she had never cried before.
Jones walked rapidly in the direction of the Culebra station. He knew that Susan cared for him still; he believed that if he waited and persisted he would be able to break down her resolution. But he might have long to wait, and he did not feel equal to that. His work at Christobal had become a dreary drudgery. It would be better to go back to Jamaica, and that he would do the next day.
He did not blame Susan now; he felt for her nothing but kindness and affection. It was Mackenzie he blamed; Mackenzie it was who had inveigled her away from him: Mackenzie was the cause of her unhappiness and his. But even while he thought this, he felt in his heart of hearts that he himself had been the first cause of Susan’s desertion of him. He had promised to marry her and had broken his word. He had made a fool of himself in Colon. He sought for excuses for his conduct; he found many; yet his self-accusation persisted: conscience was by no means dead in Samuel Josiah.
He reached the station; there he learnt that there would be no train leaving for the next couple of hours. This delay he had not foreseen: he wondered what he should do with himself in the meantime. He could not return to Susan’s house.
He lounged about the station for a few minutes, but his thoughts troubled him and inaction was irksome. He must do something, he would walk about a little: he turned his back to the station and took the road leading down into the Culebra Cut. He had never been inside the Cut before. Troubled in mind as he was, the scene there made demands on his attention. Soon he was looking about him with wondering eyes.
On either hand of him rose lofty walls of rock and earth, carved into wide terraces which formed the buttresses of the mighty Cut. He was walking along one of these terraces; on it and on all the others train lines were laid. The trains were passing up and down, powerful engines dragging twenty, thirty, forty dump-cars laden with the stones and dirt that had been dug out of this part of the Canal; and at the bottom of the ditch and along the sides of it steam shovels were at work.
He watched these shovels curiously. He saw long cranes attached to engines, and at the end of each crane an iron box with a movable lid and bottom. The crane swung round, was lowered, the iron box or mouth bit into a pile of earth and rock shattered by dynamite, gorged itself, swung round again until it hovered over a dump-car. Then the bottom of the box opened slowly and a mass of earth and stones was poured into the car. Again the shovel swung back, and again and again was this process repeated. He remembered that Mackenzie was engaged on one of those steam shovels, and thought that perhaps he was, without knowing it, watching Mackenzie’s shovel at work. Then he resumed his walk, thankful that he had worn his waterproof that day, for now black and heavy rain-clouds were brooding over the Cut.
He walked along rapidly, knowing that he had not much more time to spare. The farther on he went, the more intense became the activity of the works, the more impressive the scene around him. Thousands of men were earnestly at work; groups of West Indians were manipulating the air-drills which bored the holes for the dynamite charges, scores of steam shovels were toiling to remove the heaped-up debris, dozens of steam-engines were hurrying to and fro and sending forth shrill screams. From the escapes of the steam shovels came puffs of greyish smoke, from the funnels of the engines a thick black smoke was belched, from the air-drills little spurts of steam darted, and from all around came the heavy detonation of dynamite discharges, shaking the earth.
Penned in by the high walls on either side, the smoke drifted hither and thither, forming a gloomy pall. The cliffs of Culebra flung back the deep boom of the explosions, the hurrying trains seemed to threaten at every moment to come into violent collision. Jones saw West Indian labourers carelessly carrying boxes of dynamite on their heads and shoulders, and remembered that many a man had, through his carelessness, been shattered to pieces in an instant. He saw more than one of them trip and the boxes they carried almost hurled to the ground. The men laughed. Familiarity with danger had rendered them contemptuous of it; but Jones shuddered; he could not appreciate the indifference and recklessness of these workers.
Boom, boom, boom: that sound dominated every other. It was answered soon by a thunder-crash from above, and then the driving rainstorm burst over Culebra. The rain came roaring down, an opaque volume of rushing water; objects a yard or two away were completely blotted out of sight; the blackness of night was above. But still he heard the whistling scream of the trains, still the heavy detonations warned him that the dynamite was blasting the solid rock. Nothing could be allowed to stay this work; the men, clad in their waterproofs, toiled on; the deafening noise ceased never for a moment.
He was drenched in spite of his cloak. Yet, because of the awful heat, he was in a profuse perspiration. He began to think he had lost his train after all; he would have to wait until another one came in from the city of Panama. Happily the downpour was ceasing; it was too violent to last. He waited until it became a drizzle, cast a regretful glance before him, for he wished he had been able to go farther on, and was about to retrace his steps when a shout from some men in front of him caused him to look hurriedly opposite, towards where these men were pointing with wild gestures.
Then he saw a sight that almost paralysed his heart. The mountain-side immediately opposite to him was slipping, coming down with a rush, as though it had been struck by an invisible hand and was being hurled to the bottom of the chasm. Hundreds of tons of loosened rock and earth were crashing down-wards, and the horror-stricken men who saw what was happening were shouting, screaming, gesticulating, for well they knew the fate of any who should be struck unawares by the swift-descending mass. Jones started to run, then stopped, apprehensive of what might happen next; he could not be certain that the wall which towered above him, or even the terrace on which he stood, might not also suddenly slip away. His mind was dazed; he felt that he had been very near to death, and, for all he knew, might be near to it still.
He looked about him; hundreds of men were running towards the huge pile of debris below. He noticed that the train lines down there had been torn away and twisted as if they were merely wire; some machinery had been dashed to pieces. Was anyone killed? he wondered.
People were clambering down the sides of the terraces; he ran towards them, joined them, and found that he could descend without great difficulty. All the men seemed to know in what direction they should go; he heard them saying to one another that the rock-fall had not been unexpected, that the engineers had noticed cracks some days before, which had led them to believe that once again Culebra would put their patience to the test. He gathered that on this particular section much work was not being done; perhaps, then, no one had lost his life. But the men were not certain; the slide was a bigger one than ordinary. Thus talking in snatches and exclamations, slipping, climbing, running, they reached the bottom of the Cut.
Here a crowd was already collected, a crowd working with might and main, digging away at something as if their lives depended upon it. Jones pushed his way to the front; he saw that the diggers were at work upon the earth and shattered rock that covered a steam shovel partly. This shovel had been in operation when the slide occurred; had it been a few yards farther back it must have entirely escaped. As it was, the men who manned it had had no warning, had not been able to leap clear of the machine and get away in time. It was doubtful if they were yet alive; but nothing was being left undone to save them, if they could be saved.
“Who are they?” Jones heard one American in the crowd ask another. “Any white men?”
“Two, and a coloured man,” was the answer: “poor fellows.”
The news spread; dark faces turned ashen with horror. A thousand people waited to hear if there was any hope—or none.
“What’s their name?” Jones kept on asking of persons who paid no attention to him. At last one of them who worked in this part of the Cut, hearing the question, replied, “The white men name Jackson an’ Campbell; the black man is Mackenzie.”
Jones went suddenly cold. “Mackenzie?” he repeated. “Mackenzie being suffocated to death?” He fought his way to where the men were digging. The thought uppermost in his mind was that his old friend was dying, dying horribly. “Good God!” he exclaimed, and the next instant, seizing a shovel from the heaps which had been hurriedly brought up, he was digging amongst the labourers like a man gone wild.
Not as his rival, not as the husband of Susan, did he think of Mackenzie now. For those few moments of his life Jones was utterly unselfish.
Somebody caught him by the shoulder and pushed him back; his assistance was not needed.
“Careful now,” said a commanding voice; “bring ’em out carefully.”
“Here’s one,” cried a man, an American like the first.
“Back there, back!” came a peremptory order. Four doctors were already on the spot; the crowd was being forced back; the same remarkable organization that made the building of the great Canal a matter of routine and order was in evidence at this tragedy too. It took less than a minute for the doctors to pronounce their verdict. The men had been killed instantly, could not have realized what was happening.
The bodies were placed upon stretchers, and the stretchers were hoisted into a railway car. The people began to return to their temporarily interrupted work. Tragedies were not rare at Culebra. One cannot build a great canal without loss of life.
Wet, muddied, horror-stricken still, Jones slowly followed the returning labourers, intending to get out of the Cut as quickly as possible. He realized that the man who had stood between him and Susan had been removed; but the manner of Mackenzie’s removal terrified him. Had Mackenzie sickened and died, it is possible that Jones would have seen the hand of Providence in the circumstance. But this sudden death—a death, too, which might so easily have overtaken himself had he been on the opposite side of the chasm—seemed to him to be somewhat devilish; he was afraid. He vehemently told himself that he had never wished Mackenzie dead, though he knew he had often done so; then he said to himself that he had never meant his wish. Whether he had meant it or not, it was realized. He was startled by the fact. This was no good thing: why should Mackenzie have died like that, just then? He forgot the two white men entirely.
He got out of the Cut at last, wondering if he should go and tell Susan the terrible news. He decided that he would not: she would probably have heard it already, and he was not exactly the one to inform her how Mackenzie had come to his end. But there was something he could do. He hurried to the telegraph station and dispatched a message to Susan’s people in Colon, telling them what had happened and advising them to come over to Culebra without delay. After that he went to the coloured section of the town; he saw many people in and about Mackenzie’s house. So Susan knew. He went back to the railway station to await the arrival of Susan’s relatives.
He sat down on the edge of the platform, thinking of all that had happened that day. If Susan had left the house with him and they had afterwards heard of this death! What a narrow escape it had been! And then with his mind’s eye he saw Mackenzie as Mackenzie had greeted him on the day of his arrival in Colon, a cordial, helpful friend. He saw him as a visitor, always contented and happy in the house. He saw him as a corpse on the stretcher, suddenly struck dead. “Poor Mac,” he muttered again and again, “poor Mac; poor fellow.” And he cried like a child in contrition and sorrow.
When the train from Colon came in, Miss Proudleigh was one of the first to step on to the platform, closely followed by her niece and brother. The old man was dressed in a suit once black, but now of a greenish tint and shiny as though it had been polished; he also wore a bowler hat of a pattern that had probably been fashionable thirty years before, but of which few specimens could at this time have been extant.
Catherine and her aunt were attired in white ironed dresses and new straw hats trimmed with black ribbon. Samuel saw that they had come ready-dressed for the funeral, which must take place on the following morning. The severity of Miss Proudleigh’s demeanour indicated that she was about to officiate at a very important function, and the large straw fan which she carried in her right hand would have informed anyone who knew the lady that she had not brought forth her favourite symbol of authority without a determination to establish her claim to precedence and power at any cost.
Jones approached the little group. “I was waiting for you,” he said.
“Then you mean to tell me y’u not arrested?” was the startling question of Miss Proudleigh. “There seems to be no law at all in Panama!”
She edged away from Jones as she spoke, looking as she did so towards an American policeman who was strolling about the platform.
“What am I to be arrested for?” asked the young man, surprised. “What’s the matter with you’ aunt?” he said to Catherine. “She takin’ leave of her senses?”
“Didn’t you’ telegram say that Mackenzie dead?” asked Catherine.
“Yes; but what is that to do with me?”
“I know it wasn’t you dat kill him, me son,” Mr. Proudleigh now observed. “When I get you’ telegram, I said to meself: ‘Mister Jones is a man like me. Him talk a lot, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly: him is too afraid of de court-house.’ But Deborah would insist it was you dat kill Mackenzie, for you leave the house last night in a blind temper, an’ you come up here to-day, an’ Mackenzie dead very sudden.”
“It is very suspicious,” said Miss Proudleigh. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“Well, it is not everything y’u can understand,” said Catherine practically; “and it couldn’t be Mr. Jones that kill Mackenzie, otherwise him would be in jail.”
“Dat is so,” agreed her father; “only, I hear dat in Panama y’u can pay ten dollars an’ kill anybody you like.”
“That is all stupidness,” said Jones impatiently; “it is the Canal that kill Mackenzie, not me. What was I goin’ to kill him for?”
A snort from Miss Proudleigh was her only comment on this speech. She was not willing to be persuaded that Mackenzie had not been a victim of the machinations of Samuel and her niece.
As they went on, Jones explained how Mackenzie had come by his death, and how he himself had been a witness of the tragedy. All of them had heard before of the lives which the Culebra Cut had claimed, and now as Jones spoke doubts rose once more in the minds of Mr. Proudleigh and his sister as to the wisdom and propriety of human beings attempting to unite two oceans.
“I always thought that some great disaster would occur because of the iniquity of man in trying to join what God separate,” said Miss Proudleigh; “but I never dream that de disaster was to come on me own family; for, after all, Mackenzie was my nephew-in-law.”
But she did not seem unduly oppressed by the calamity. She found abundant comfort in the prospect of a funeral, and in the opportunity now given her of bewailing in public her irreparable loss. She could now proclaim her past forebodings and hint at other tragedies that would shortly follow upon this one. Properly managed, this funeral could not fail to afford some edifying exhibitions of religious fortitude, Christian resignation, and personal piety, mingled discreetly with an insulting attitude towards those whom she might happen to dislike.
As for Mr. Proudleigh, at that moment he was chiefly afflicted with fears for his personal safety. If a landslide or something like it could kill Mackenzie, there was nothing to prevent a landslide from killing him. This was a dangerous country.
“We will have to leave this place as soon as poor Mackenzie is in de grave,” he remarked, as he laboured on. “What y’u goin’ to do wid you’self, Mister Jones?”
“When?”
“To-morrow. After we bury me son-in-law.”
“I don’t know,” said Jones.
“You staying up here wid Miss Susan?”
“That would not be proper,” observed Miss Proudleigh sternly. “It is none of my business, an’ I don’t want to interfere. But if the day after Mackenzie bury, a young man should stay in the same place with the widder, them will put her out of any church she belong to.”
“I don’t think Susan can stay here much longer, now that Mackenzie is dead,” said Jones. “She will have to leave soon, for the American people will want the premises.”
“Well, she better come back to Colon wid me,” said Mr. Proudleigh; “an’ now that Mac is dead, Mister Jones——”
But Samuel, guessing the nature of the old man’s forthcoming proposition, hastily interrupted him with another recital of that day’s tragedy. He was still speaking when they arrived at Susan’s house.
All the doors and windows were open, and three or four persons were moving about within. These were friendly neighbours who had come over to help Susan with her dead.
She was expecting her family. As a matter of fact she had telegraphed to them. But having received Jones’s message earlier, they had left for Culebra before Susan’s telegram was delivered at their house.
She was very quiet and composed. When the news of Mackenzie’s death had been broken to her she had shrieked in terror. Her first thought was that there had been a fight between Samuel and her husband, and that the latter had been murdered. A few words of explanation relieved her mind of this horrible fear, then she wept bitterly as if stricken to the heart. She had never cared greatly for her husband; but his sudden death, the overwhelming memory of how, that very day, she had had to fight against the temptation to abandon him, the recollection of all his kindnesses, touched her to genuine sorrow and regret. She recovered her self-possession a little later on and straightway set about making preparations for the funeral. She was still engaged on these when Samuel and her family arrived.
She hardly appeared to notice Jones, who kept himself in the background. She suffered herself to be embraced by her father, who thought it proper to assure her that he had hastened to comfort her, though he himself was grief-stricken and could not say when he should be able to take an interest in life any more. Mr. Proudleigh then deposited his hat on a table and elaborately wiped his eyes. This ceremony being gone through, he sat down.
But Miss Proudleigh would not sit down. She took Susan by the hand. “It is the will of God,” she loudly proclaimed, “an’ men can only say, ‘Thy will be done.’ We must be prepared to meet our God. We must take up our cross an’ follow Him. Husband-o, son-o, mother-o, wife-o, when the call come we must give them all up to Him who gave them life. We cannot rebel, for the Lord gave an’ the Lord taketh away—blessed be the name of the Lord. We cannot prevent the tears from flowing, for that is nature; but the heart must be submissive.”
She paused to note the effect of her words, which she considered sufficiently stirring to move Susan to tears and the other people in the house to sympathy. But most of the people there did not know Miss Proudleigh and were paying no attention to her; Susan remained dry-eyed; Catherine appeared unsympathetic. Only her brother seemed attentive, and as she did not regard him as an audience worth having, she concluded that spiritual consolations had better be reserved for a later occasion.
“You can go into the dining-room an’ wash you’ hands an’ face if you like, Aunt Deborah,” said Susan quietly. “It is fixed up.”
“What about the body?” demanded Miss Proudleigh.
“The body fixed up already. Everything is arranged. Some of Mackenzie’s friends looking after the funeral.”
It was bitterly disappointing to Miss Proudleigh to find that she had been forestalled; still, opportunities for usefulness might present themselves later on. She went into the dining-room as invited, feeling that Susan’s calmness was most unbecoming at such a moment. A widow, with a proper sense of what was expected of her, should have given way to a wild outburst of grief at the sight of her sympathizing family.
Presently Susan asked her aunt to go into the room where Mackenzie’s body was laid out. Mackenzie had been struck mainly by descending masses of earth; thus he had escaped disfigurement. Miss Proudleigh glanced at the set face, saying with real feeling, “Poor fellow; just as if he was sleeping.” Then she mastered this inclination to weakness, and, laying her hand upon the cold, sheeted figure, she shook her head determinedly. “Not enough ice,” she said.
“Quite enough,” replied one of Susan’s helpers, a young woman who had developed a marked fondness for assisting at funerals.
“You will excuse me,” said Miss Proudleigh with great firmness. “I bury a lot of my relatives an’ friends, an’ therefore it stands to reason that I must know about de treatment of corpses.
“Mr. Mackenzie was my nephew-in-law, an’ I know he would like to bury decently an’ in a good condition; in consequence of which I would advise his wife to take my foolish advice an’ get some more ice. Susan, ’ave you a little gurl?”
“One is outside,” Susan answered.
“Send ’er for more ice!”
“All right, Aunt Deborah,” said Susan resignedly; “you can send ’er.”
This was a victory of considerable importance; it placed Miss Proudleigh in charge of all arrangements affecting the corpse. She adapted her voice to suit her new dignity and now spoke in impressive stage whispers.
But where was Samuel? Susan had lost sight of him; he had quietly slipped out of the house after observing how she was conducting herself; he was glad to see her calm and collected, but a certain delicacy of feeling warned him that he should not remain in the house just now. He was damp and dirty; but there were shops in the town where he could buy some ready-made clothing. He bought a suit and was allowed to put it on in a room behind the shop; if it did not fit him well, at least it was clean and dry.
The day’s work was over in the Cut; everybody he met was talking about the accident. He noticed that they all spoke well of Mackenzie; he wondered whether, if he had died like Mackenzie, his acquaintances would have spoken like that of him.
The rain had ceased entirely, but the sky was sombre still. He remembered that he had eaten nothing from morning, but he had no appetite, did not feel like eating. He lingered about the houses and the shops till long after darkness had fallen. At about eight o’clock, he went back to Susan’s house.
He entered and silently took one of the many chairs that had been borrowed from friendly neighbours for the accommodation of the people who had come and were coming to sit up for a few hours with Susan. Every one was quiet and reverential, and those who talked did so in low and mournful tone.
A solitary light was burning in the room where the body of the dead man lay. Those who wished to do so, stole into the room and peeped at it, then stole back gloomily to their seats. The subdued conversation was about Mackenzie in particular and death in general, and when an elderly woman remarked that Mackenzie was a man who could always be depended upon, and groaned by way of emphasizing her remark, Miss Proudleigh groaned also, as though parting with Mackenzie had been one of the most awful experiences of her life.
Then the young woman who had contradicted Miss Proudleigh in the matter of the ice felt it incumbent upon her to say something.
“I remember poor Mr. Mackenzie when he first come up to Culebra,” she said. “Such a quiet, mannerly gentleman. And to think he die so sudden!”
“In the midst of life we are in death!” retorted Miss Proudleigh aggressively.
“I not stayin’ here one day longer than I can help it,” said Mr. Proudleigh earnestly. “I never did want much to come to Colon at any time; but me children wishin’ to see if them could make a good living over here, I say to meself, ‘I mustn’t desert them. Don’t care what happen to me, it is me juty to go wid dem.’ So I come here, but I not goin’ to stop any longer, because it must be a very funny country where a hill-side broke down without nothing do it, and kill me son-in-law. Ef I are to die, I want to die in me bed in Jamaica.”
“Parents must devote themselves to their children,” said one of Susan’s neighbours.
“That is what I ’ave always done,” said Mr. Proudleigh with dignity. “But if Susan take my advice, she will go back wid me to Jamaica as soon as she bury her husban’. I can’t teck any more risk in Panama.”
“The Lord is strong to save, wherever His people are,” remarked Miss Proudleigh rebukingly. Her laundry was proving very profitable, and she needed no further evidence to assure her of the omnipresent care of Providence.
Just then the young woman who had already angered Miss Proudleigh, feeling that she was being eclipsed, went up to Susan, and, throwing her arms about the widow’s neck, exclaimed, “My heart bleed for you,” and audibly wept. But Miss Proudleigh was mistress of ceremonies, and Susan herself was now subject to her aunt’s authority. That a stranger, an insolent stranger, should have dared to set the example of tears in the midst of a conversation, was more than Miss Proudleigh could stand. Extraneous sympathy must not be allowed to pass the bounds set by decorum and established practice. Happily Miss Proudleigh knew that she was equal to any emergency. Whipping out of her pocket a hymn-book which she had thoughtfully brought with her from Colon, in a shrill and belligerent treble she began to sing “Peace, Perfect Peace.” The hymn sounded like a declaration of war without quarter, and the sobbing young lady recognized it as such and struggled by means of louder sobs to maintain the position she had won. But Miss Proudleigh had great allies. For most of the guests, tired of talking or sitting still, joined in the hymn, singing with genuine feeling.
Rising and falling in measured cadence, the sound floated far away, and men and women in other houses listened, thinking perhaps of the days when they too had watched beside the corpse of some one dear to them. Perhaps their memory was touched, and they thought of a grave somewhere on a mountain-side, under the shade of rustling trees, in some far-off West Indian island which they called home.
The singing ceased; then another hymn, even more pathetic than the first, was started: All took it up, singing softly:
“Days and moments quickly flying
?Blend the living with the dead,
?Soon shall you and I be lying
?Each within his narrow bed.”
A picture of Mackenzie lying alone in the room, cold, motionless, swathed in dripping cerements; a picture of him as he went forth that morning, cheerful, confident, strong, with never a thought of death in his mind, rose before Susan’s mental vision.
She broke down and cried.
Jones wiped his eyes repeatedly.
Others were crying quietly. For the first time that night they felt themselves to be strangers in a strange land, men and women who had come to seek a livelihood in a foreign country from which, for all they knew, they might never return.
When Susan lifted her head a little while after, her eyes caught those of Jones. Each knew what the other was thinking of. In the forenoon of that same day they had wronged Mackenzie in thought, almost in act, and he had died without knowing it. But did he not know? Did he not know now? Neither one could boast of being free from superstition: what if Mackenzie’s spirit were near, reading all that was passing in their minds and hearts? Susan shuddered. Samuel’s heart failed him in spite of his desperate inward struggle with his fears. They lowered their eyes again.
Twelve o’clock came, and most of the people rose to leave. Only a few would remain until the morning. Some, however, would return in time for the funeral. They all endeavoured to persuade Susan to go and lie down, and try to sleep, but she was afraid. She might dream. In her sleep Mackenzie’s spirit might accuse her!
So all night she and Samuel sat in the same room, wakeful, alert, thinking over and over again of what had taken place between them a few hours before, and of the tragedy in Culebra Cut.
At six o’clock in the morning Miss Proudleigh began to set things in order, and, shortly after, the men who were looking after Mackenzie’s funeral arrived. They worked quickly: by seven the body was in the coffin, which was lifted into the sitting-room uncovered, in order that all who knew Mackenzie might take last leave of him. Flowers were scarce at Culebra, but the mourners had gathered a few. These they strewed over the corpse, and the evergreens they had brought were arranged here and there about the room, giving to it a fresh and verdant appearance.
One by one the men and women who had come to attend the funeral stepped up to the coffin, gazed a little while at the dead man’s face, and turned away. Then the minister, a young Englishman connected with Jamaica, who had followed the people to Panama that they might still be kept in touch with the religion of their own country, arrived. The people made way for him respectfully, glancing at him with pride and admiration; he went up to Susan and shook hands with her sympathetically, speaking a few words which he meant to be consoling, but feeling, not for by any means the first time in his life, how poorly words express real sympathy. Then he was taken possession of by Miss Proudleigh, who led him to a chair which she had covered, for no very obvious reason, with a white lace curtain.
“Ready?” he asked her quietly, book in hand.
“Yes, minister; but” (she hesitated a little) “don’t it is right to read the will first?”
“That depends,” said the parson. “Does Mrs. Mackenzie want it read? Is there a will?”
Miss Proudleigh looked at Susan inquiringly. It was not usual to read the will before a funeral; but Miss Proudleigh feared that if she did not make use of the present opportunity she might never know what Mackenzie had left, and whether he had bequeathed his property to Susan alone or not. As for Susan, she was not anxious that her private affairs should be exposed, but her aunt was now the predominant person in the house, and she did not want to appear secretive. “My husband used to keep his papers in his own trunk,” she said; “I will look.”
In a minute or two she returned with a document which she thought must be the will; which it was. Miss Proudleigh took it from her and handed it to the minister, asking him to read it.
So the will was read. A small house in Kingston, ten acres of land in St. Andrew (not far from Kingston), a life insurance policy worth a hundred pounds, and all the money lodged in Mackenzie’s name in a bank in Panama—everything was left to Susan. His will had been made three weeks after Mackenzie’s marriage, and Susan knew that he had at least eighty pounds in the bank. She was well-off! That was her thought as the parson ceased reading. “It is my old luck!”—the words formed themselves in her mind: her good fortune, her luck, never seemed to desert her for long. She was a woman with property, money. She saw in the faces of the people in the room that they were surprised that Mackenzie had left so much.
Miss Proudleigh was conscious of a feeling of resentment, born of envy. But with it struggled a feeling of pride: she was glad that she had asked that the will should be read. For was she not related to all these riches; was it not she who had directed the funeral arrangements in the house of a man who had left his widow in so comfortable a position? There was dignity in her look and voice as she said to the minister:
“Minister, will we proceed?”
The offices of the dead took up but little time. Six strong men lifted the coffin, and, headed by the minister, the funeral cortège moved slowly out of the house.
Susan and her father walked immediately behind the coffin, the rest of the mourners following without regard to precedence. Mr. Proudleigh’s thoughts were not of an unpleasant nature. Never had he heard of any young widow like Susan possessing so much riches. He concluded that she must be worth hundreds of pounds, and to a mind which, for some years, had been content to think financially in terms of sixpence, shilling and eighteenpence, a hundred pounds meant nearly as much as a million. Never had he thought so highly of Mackenzie, never had he felt so pleased with Susan’s marriage. Jones? What was Jones compared with Mackenzie? When would a man like Jones ever be able to accumulate a fortune? He was more likely to waste one; and here Mr. Proudleigh began seriously to think that Susan ought to be warned against having anything to do with Samuel Josiah in the future. Mr. Proudleigh saw his duty as a father plain before him, but gravely doubted whether he should ever muster enough courage to perform it. However, he, as Susan’s father, a parent too who had always been tender and considerate, should now be comfortable for life. He marched bravely on, forgetting to be fatigued. Panama was not such a bad place after all, if you knew just when to leave it.
Catherine wondered at her sister’s luck. She was not of an envious disposition; she felt quite able to make her own way in the world. But Susan seemed to be extraordinarily lucky; even incidents that at first appeared unfortunate were afterwards seen to have contributed to Susan’s good fortune. Catherine wondered why this was so. She had been told at school that there was no such thing as luck, that one only got what one worked for or deserved. She was by no means assured that that was true.
And Jones? He too since the reading of the will had realized that a great change had taken place in Susan’s financial situation. She was actually better off than he was—very much better off. She might care for him. But he could not forget that she had left him to marry Mackenzie, and only yesterday had refused to desert Mackenzie for him. Now therefore that she knew herself to be independent, how would she act? Many men would be glad enough to marry her now: she could afford to wait, and to pick and choose. She was vain; she would try to make the most of her improved position. She was very lucky. But there seemed no end to his ill fortune.
Susan alone, during that procession to the cemetery, did not dwell on her good fortune. After her first thrill of pleasure on hearing the terms of the will, she had become depressed and sad: she was again realizing that Mackenzie’s kindness and thoughtfulness were of sterling worth. And he was dead, dead and gone for ever, this man who had done so much for her, and it was of him she thought. Soon they came to the cemetery. The funeral service was read, the grave filled, and Susan turned away, the one real mourner there that morning. But not the most demonstrative, for Miss Proudleigh, feeling that full justice had not been done to Mackenzie’s memory, burst into loud sobs when the last spadeful of earth was thrown upon the grave, and had to be led away by two unnecessarily sympathetic men.
“What a lot of things happen to me since I come to Panama,” said Susan, as with her hands she smoothed out the black skirt, heavily trimmed with crape, which she wore.
“This is a world where y’u don’t know to-day what goin’ to happen to-morrow,” remarked her father, his tone suggesting that in better-regulated worlds one would know beforehand everything that was likely to occur.
“A few months ago I was only Susan Proudleigh,” the widow continued, “an’ I had to work for me living; now I am a widow and everybody respect me an’ sympathize with me.”
“You are more than a widder,” said Mr. Proudleigh; “you are a young ooman of property, an’ there is very few that can say de same thing.”
“For which we must be thankful,” Miss Proudleigh interposed. “Providence is always looking after the widow an’ the orphant; but sometimes they don’t deserve it, and that is why, peradventure, that some widows with their money go like butter against the sun. But Sue is not goin’ to be one of those.”
Since the reading of Mackenzie’s will Miss Proudleigh had come to see qualities in Susan which she had not been able to perceive during all the previous months she had lived in Panama. Cordial relations had therefore been re-established between the two, and Miss Proudleigh had now reverted to her long-ignored habit of seeing most things that concerned Susan from Susan’s point of view.
“I am glad y’u make up you’ mind to go back home, Sue, now that you not married any more, for the house which you’ husband, who is now in heaven, leave to you in Kingston, needs somebody to look after it, an’ you ’ave other property in Jamaica to see about. An’ you can’t trust no strange person to do it, for them will rob your eye out of you’ head; and if you take them to law the judge may tell you to make up the case peacefully, like that time when you bring up Maria. Therefore,” Miss Proudleigh concluded, “go and look after your business you’self.”
“I ’ave nothing more to do with court-house,” said Susan, “nor wid Maria and her mother either. They can’t trouble me again.”
“They have not troubled you at all,” said her aunt. “All their wickedness have been turned aside, an’ you have not dashed your foot against a stone. That is what I say from the first. You see what it is to ’ave faith?”
In her cheap black muslin dress (provided by Susan) Miss Proudleigh looked as though, by faith, she would be able to move mountains, if only she should determine to exert herself to that extent.
“Even Tom try to make mischief against me,” continued Susan, still bent upon recounting her experiences; “but he didn’t succeed any more than Maria an’ her mother.”
“Well, me dear daurter,” said Mr. Proudleigh, “dat was because I was always having y’u in me thoughts. I don’t know what you could do without me. Tom was a bad young man; but when I kneel down every night an’ thoughted about him, an’ pray dat some harm would befall him because he was tryin’ to disturb y’u, I felt that my pr’yer would be answered.”
“Anything happen to him?” asked Susan.
“Not exactly—yet,” replied her father; “but I hear this morning that him gone away to de capital with a female who used to beat her other intended; an’ don’t you see dat if she could beat one, she will do de same with Tom?”
Susan, knowing Tom as she did, thought it highly probable.
“Let him go about his business,” she said, thus dismissing Tom and his affairs from her mind. “I am sorry, Aunt Deborah, that you an’ Kate won’t come home with me; but of course you can do better here.”
Miss Proudleigh nodded affirmatively. “But next year, please God,” she said, “I will take a trip home to see how everybody is getting on.”
It was the ninth day after Mackenzie’s death. Susan had been allowed to remain for a few days in the house at Culebra, during which she had made arrangements for her departure from Panama. She had determined to go to Jamaica without delay, to see after her property there, and she was leaving to-morrow. But before going there was one function to be attended to; this was Mackenzie’s Ninth Night, the final taking leave of Mackenzie’s spirit, the last ceremony to be held in his honour. For this purpose she had come to Colon.
This Ninth Night is a survival of an African purification ceremony, the origin and meaning of which neither Susan nor her relatives knew. All that they did know was that the Ninth Night was a custom which it was not considered altogether proper to neglect, and yet which it was not considered altogether proper to observe after the manner of the lower classes. With these it tended sometimes to degenerate into an orgy; in Miss Proudleigh’s view it should only be a quiet prayer-meeting, a sort of love-feast, eminently respectable and edifying. The theory was that Mackenzie’s spirit, though ultimately destined for heaven, was for some nine days fated to hover near those who had been connected with him, and might continue so to do for years unless the Ninth Night ceremony was performed. This theory not being countenanced by the churches, Miss Proudleigh defended it by pointing out that the soul was not the spirit; and that though the soul went straight to heaven or to hell, after the decease of the body, the spirit, assuming the form of a ghost, might be unpleasantly present on earth. When this explanation was held to be unsatisfactory by some sceptic, Miss Proudleigh took refuge in asserting that it was all very well to scoff, but that plenty of people had seen ghosts and every one was afraid of them. Then she would instance the raising of Samuel’s spirit by the Witch of Endor, a fact which could only be got rid of by being dismissed as untrue.
On Ninth Nights both Susan and Catherine looked with some disrespect; they were of the younger generation. But Mr. Proudleigh stood up for them, not only on religious grounds, but because he knew from experience that much good cheer was provided at them, and many opportunities afforded for oratory. Therefore a Ninth Night was highly desirable. So Susan had decided to wait for the Ninth Night; and Jones, knowing that, had waited also, and had booked his passage by the same steamer in which she was going to Jamaica.
Susan and her people were now waiting for the guests. The room in which they sat was provided with a number of extra chairs; in the centre was a table covered with a white cloth; on the table were a few hymn-books and a Bible. The lamps were lighted, for it was already dark.
“Everything is prepared,” said Miss Proudleigh, after she had announced her intention of going to Jamaica on a visit in the following year. “The chocolate is good chocolate, an’ I parch ah’ grind the coffee meself.”
“You ’ave any rum?” inquired Mr. Proudleigh anxiously.
“Plenty. You think we could ask people to come an’ have a little quiet pr’yer and talk with us, and don’t treat them decently?”
“No,” agreed her brother heartily, and would have launched out into a lengthy account of those Ninth Nights at which he had not been treated decently, but that his sister refused him the chance of doing so.
“We have bread, an’ bun, an’ cake, an’ fish, cheese, bananas, an’ rum, an’ a bottle of whisky, an’ lemonade, besides coffee an’ chocolate,” recited Miss Proudleigh with pride. “Mackenzie can’t feel ashamed to-night!”
Mr. Proudleigh inwardly determined that, when the time came, he would make all these good things “look foolish.” He complacently disposed himself to wait for that happy hour.
Presently Catherine came in, accompanied by a tall young man of her own complexion, who appeared to be very attentive to her. These were followed by other persons, and then the ceremony of the evening began.
Miss Proudleigh suggested a hymn, which was sung; then she volunteered to lead in prayer. This she did, taking the opportunity of reminding her audience, under guise of a general supplication, that she was not as other women were, but might more properly be likened to the ancient Deborah or to some other equally superior character, having been strenuous in following the light, and having, beyond the shadow of a doubt, set a noble example to all with whom she had come in contact.
She prayed for Susan, Catherine, and for all her other relatives, and she informed the angelic host that she knew that Mackenzie was in heaven, enjoying all the felicities prepared for the righteous before the foundations of the world were laid. Then she proceeded to review the events of the times as she had heard of them, and asked earnestly that peace should be established on earth. She did not forget the King and all the Royal Family. Jamaica was included as a place which sadly needed regeneration. It seemed as if she would never cease, and her brother, who himself had prepared a nice little prayer for the occasion, began to feel jealous; Deborah had touched upon every subject he had intended to deal with, and more besides. Susan felt decidedly bored. The guests began to shuffle uneasily on their knees. Warned by certain slight though ominous sounds, Miss Proudleigh at last brought her eloquence to a close. As she rose from her knees she began chanting the Hundredth Psalm. Everybody joined her. At that moment Samuel Josiah Jones entered the room.
Jones had left Culebra immediately after the burial of Mackenzie, and, yielding to the urgent advice of Miss Proudleigh, had not returned thither to see Susan. He had written to her, and had received in reply a brief letter telling him that she was going to Colon, to her relatives, as soon as her affairs at Culebra were settled. It was from Mr. Proudleigh that he had learnt when Susan was leaving for Jamaica. Susan’s aloofness, he thought, might be due to grief, or to the circumstance that her husband was only a few days dead, or to her improved financial position, and a determination, the result of that improved position to have nothing more to do with Samuel Josiah. Well, he would find out what it was. No woman should say that her money frightened him. He could always earn a good living, either in Jamaica or in Panama; in a few years he could save as much as Mackenzie had saved, though he did not see any good reason why he should.
All eyes were turned on him as he entered the room and deliberately asked a youth to let him have his chair. The youth had been sitting next to Susan. Jones installed himself in his place.
“Sorry I am late,” he whispered, wishing at the same time that the people would sing more loudly. Miss Proudleigh seemed to divine his wish. Her voice shrilled out astonishingly.
“You are quite in time,” said Susan quietly.
“No; I miss you every minute I am not with y’u.”
“Sh-h. People will hear y’u.”
“It is all in camera.”
“You mustn’t talk, Mr. Jones.”
The “Mr. Jones” was disconcerting. But he would not be repulsed.
“I want to talk to you,” he said.
“Later on,” she answered, and would not pursue the conversation.
Hymn followed hymn, and the good things so freely provided by Miss Proudleigh (who had received an advance for that purpose from Susan) were duly handed round. The guests enjoyed them, eating and drinking to their hearts’ content; and Mr. Proudleigh, reflecting that it might be long before he should assist at another Ninth Night, worthily led them on in this satisfactory effort. Then, when it was nearly twelve o’clock, he thought he saw his opportunity, and, forestalling his sister, he rose and intimated that it was his intention to make a few remarks.
“It is shortly toward midnight, dear friends,” he began, “an’ before we finish an’ terminate this firs’ part of our gathering, we must call to mind certain things. Every meeting have an end, an’ every end has a termini.” (He paused to allow this term to have its full effect upon the audience. It was one he had learnt from Jones.) “But before we proceed to bid Mackenzie good-bye,” he went on, “an’ the younger folkses begin to enjie themself, which is natural, for I remember that in de old days, which I always tell my fambily, for none of them know what I know, an’ so to speak a man like me is expected to ’ave experience, an’ as I was saying——” But the difficulty was that he could not for the life of him remember what he had been saying. His sister had given him no opportunity of speaking earlier that night, and in the meantime sundry glasses of rum and water had inflamed his ambition without strengthening his mind. There was now, therefore, a struggle between the orator and the liquor, and his refusal to own himself vanquished as he strove to recall what he had intended to say would have been magnificent had it not appeared to the audience supremely ludicrous. Mr. Proudleigh wanted to pronounce a eulogy upon Mackenzie. He had an idea that Mackenzie’s spirit was hovering near, and he would have liked it to hear his speech. He felt that Mackenzie deserved special posthumous praise for having left Susan so comfortably off. He bravely began once more.
“Mackenzie was me son-in-law. He was a very kind young man. An’ when he write me for Miss Susan” (here Susan stared) “I wouldn’t refuse him. I say to him . . . I say . . .” Once again Mr. Proudleigh halted, and in the midst of the momentary silence the little clock on the shelf just above his head struck the midnight hour. A hush fell on the company as Miss Proudleigh sank upon her knees. That lady afterwards declared that as the last stroke of the clock died away she had felt something like a cold wind rushing by her, as though an invisible presence were leaving this mundane sphere for ever; and after hearing of her experience Mr. Proudleigh also asserted that he too had been touched by Mackenzie’s departing spirit that night. His sister, recollecting his condition, secretly doubted his story; but as moral support is always of value when proof is not forthcoming, she never contradicted him.
“Let us pray,” said Miss Proudleigh when the clock had ceased to strike.
This time she prayed that all wandering spirits might find eternal rest, and that the dead might never be allowed to intervene in the affairs of the living. She made it known to all and sundry whose place was another world that, however much their company may have been pleasant and interesting when they were alive, the proper sphere for their activities now was heaven, where, she indirectly assured them, they would be far more happy than if they returned to earth. This prayer closed with a loud Amen from the assembled guests, who entirely shared the sentiments expressed by Miss Proudleigh. “Well, we are done wid poor Mackenzie now,” she said, satisfied, as she rose from her knees.
Mr. Proudleigh, with his undelivered speech still in mind, understood from these words that the end of that speech would never be heard by that audience. He felt that an advantage had been taken of him, and his bitterness was intense.
It was a relief to the younger guests and members of the family when Miss Proudleigh signified that the religious portion of the Ninth Night ceremony was over, and Mackenzie finally dismissed to his last home. In a moment their emotions changed from grave to gay, and they all settled themselves down to gossip, joke, laugh, and otherwise enjoy themselves, while more refreshments were handed round. Every one present addressed Susan punctiliously as Mrs. Mackenzie. Jones still sat by her side, and his gestures and movements were marked by the company, whose chief diversion was to discuss the private affairs of their neighbours and friends.
“We can’t always mourn,” sententiously observed one young lady, who saw in Samuel a suitor for Susan’s hand, and who wished to gain merit by indirectly suggesting that she personally knew of no reason for unlimited grief. “Life is short, an’ when we ’ave done our best, we must do what we can.”
An enigmatical speech, but well understood by those who heard it, and who saw the significant glance which the speaker directed towards Susan and Jones.
“Sorrow endureth for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” commented Miss Proudleigh. “Sue, will you take a little ginger-wine? Or do you prefer chocolate?”
“She prefer love,” said Jones shamelessly. “Love is better than wine.”
“Behave you’self!” cried Susan. “Y’u forget where you are?”
“After a storm there comes a calm, after a funeral, why not a wedding?” said the lady who had previously suggested the futility of endless weeping.
“That’s not the sort of conversation for a Nine-Night,” primly suggested Susan. “I will never marry again, an’ so what y’u say don’t concern me; but still, this is not the time to talk about weddings.”
“I don’t know dat I agrees wid Sue,” said her father. “Mister Mac is dead, an’ if Mister Jones write me for y’u, I——”
But the old man, doomed it would appear to perpetual interruptions, was not allowed to complete his remark. Miss Proudleigh felt that the limits of decorum were in danger of being overstepped. She immediately and loudly began to tell of an arrest she had witnessed a day or two before in Colon, an arrest which had almost caused the death of the prisoner, he having been unmercifully clubbed by the policemen. This was an interesting topic of conversation, and while the company were discussing the demerits of the Republic’s peace officers, Jones quietly suggested to Susan that they might go and sit together for a little while on the veranda.
She agreed, and they went out, remarked by all. But such pairings-off were customary; it was felt, moreover, that the widow had the right to do as she pleased, on account of her youth and her superior financial position.
She and Samuel sat on the chairs they took out with them, and, leaning over the veranda, looked down into the silent street. They had placed themselves where they could not easily be seen by the people in the room, though the door stood open. After a few seconds Jones stretched out his hand and placed it on Susan’s shoulder. “Sue,” he whispered, “when you going to Jamaica?”
“To-morrow. Don’t you know it already?”
“I am going with you.”
“I can’t stop y’u, Sam. The ship is for you as well as for me.”
“Stop that foolishness, Sue. It is all very well when you makin’ fun to talk like that. But now I am talking in the Predicate and in the verb To Be; I am serious. I am going to marry you.”
“But suppose I don’t want to get married again? I know what marriage mean, an’ you don’t. Besides that, I am all right now, an’ I can live comfortable without anybody. When you could marry me y’u didn’t, and I don’t forget how y’u used to leave me in the night when we was together. It’s better we remain apart, for what ’appen once will ’appen again.”
“You know you don’t mean what y’u say,” replied Jones with conviction. “Jamaica is not Colon, and it will be all right when we get there. I will be steadier. I was steady there.”
“Cho!” exclaimed Susan, but there was something in her voice which denoted satisfaction. “Y’u going to go on the same way in Jamaica as you went on here,” she added.
“Well, we will have to make the best of it,” said Jones philosophically, “though you know quite well I am not a drunkard. We will get married in Parish Church.”
Fully a minute passed before she replied—
“As poor Mackenzie is just dead, don’t tell anybody here about it.”
When, two days after the Ninth Night ceremony, Susan and Jones, with Mr. Proudleigh standing between them, saw the grey-green mountains of Jamaica rising into view as the ship drew nearer the shore, they felt for the first time in their lives what a homecoming meant. Susan eagerly pointed out object after object as her eyes roved over the scene stretched out in front of her; Jones was enthusiastic; Mr. Proudleigh, contrary to his habit, was silent. But when the ship entered the harbour, and Kingston appeared, and he saw again the houses and the piers with which he had been familiar all his life, he broke his silence and spoke the thoughts that were in his mind.
“Fancy a old man like me go quite to Colon an’ come back,” he said reflectively. “Who is to tell what is gwine to happen in dis world! An’ I leave me second daurter and me sister behind me! Well, God will take care of them, same as Him take care of me. I am glad to come back. I really glad.”
“No place like home,” said Jones heartily.
“That’s a fact,” was Susan’s sincere comment.
The End