“ ‘Marie Bonavita. Mary of the Good Life, Mary the Pure.’
“ ‘My wife gave her the name, and always cherished her. After they had killed everybody, she was going to be one of the Negro queens. It came out at the enquiry. Quite a few of these girls were in it. Most of them got away with a whipping. Twenty-five lashes. Marie Bonavita got a little more than that, and she has to wear that ten-pound iron ring on her right ankle. The blacksmith made it for her. She is all right now. She’s not dangerous. She’s calmed down. She always asks after my wife.’
“ ‘How long will she have to wear the ring for?’
“ ‘Forever.’ ”
“MY EVER dear Genl, Your rebuke gratefully accepted, your good words about friendship striking straight into my Heart. Mr. Turnbull heartbroken by your news, after all the High Hopes, and he came here to sit in the Little Library for a quiet half hour he said and to think of his old dear Friend far away. He exprest Sorrow and Regret for the unkind Words he had passed in my Presence. He said he had since gone into the matter and only three booksellers Accounts not paid up Dulau, White, Evans, and he had told them that if they pressed Gen M too hard their Goods wld be returned to them without any Thanks. He said there was still Hope, all the Manufacturing Towns of England were ready to send supplies to my dear G for a new attempt. But this time with an adequate force of reliable men. So my Gen must be patient.
“Both Mr. Turnbull and Colonel Rutherfurd are keeping an eye on the politics here with the new ministers. My Gen can imagine the to-ing and fro-ing, and Mr. Rutherfurd says that being on the spot as my dear Sir is and ready to move is more than half the battle. Mr. Turnbull sends a messenger with fifty pounds the first of every month from the money you left with him I never have to ask. It was Mellancolic my dear Sir the old greyhaired man angry with the Gen when things were going well and now grieving for my dear Sir’s misfortune. Colonel Rutherfurd came with Colonel Williamson in a post chaise, such a commotion in Grafton Street, Leander thought it was his Father coming home as he continuly dreams and he was Overjoyed. He stared all the time at Colonel Williamson and the colonel said he was affected seeing the face and actions of my Gen in the boys every movement. I find much Conciliation in my boys in the absence of my dear Sir who must learn to find Patience as we do here.”
“AFTER ALL these weeks Bernard is still friendly and protective. His estate is like a private domain, and the Leander people and others have to keep their distance. No one hisses me here. I haven’t heard from Rouvray in London. I don’t know what the new politics are like there now. I am ready to wait. It is something I have learned, but I have less to do here than I have ever had, and it is hard to be idle in the middle of this very busy estate routine. Bernard is on his feet from morning till night.
“Bernard’s wife sometimes has dinner with us. There is something wrong with her bones — Bernard doesn’t say what, and perhaps no one knows. She doesn’t move easily, and it is a strain for her to sit with a stranger and make conversation. She has a pretty young-woman’s face on an old, heavy body. Bernard is devoted to her. They have no children. He loves serving her and looking after her. He loves everything about her — her name, her estate, her fragility, her old-fashioned French. When I first met Bernard in Paris he was a firebrand. That was why I thought him good for my purpose. I never thought of him as a tender person. The tenderness I have seen in him here has probably been brought out by this lady.
“I have not seen any member of the lady’s family in the house. Nor have I seen anyone like the Baron de Montalembert. The story here is that Bernard’s head was turned by these people of title and he didn’t press at the time of the marriage for all that he might have got. They say that among the Gourvilles he is a kind of subordinate, hardly more than the manager of his wife’s estate. There is more to his position than that, but there is nonetheless something in the story.
“The people who tell me these things are people to whom Bernard introduced me. Bernard would think of such people as his friends. I don’t think they can see the effect they are having on me when they tell me these stories. I cannot conceal from myself — and I wish the idea hadn’t occurred to me — that through my association with Bernard I have fallen among the second rank of people in this place. That’s not my judgement alone. That’s the way they judge themselves. They instinctively put themselves in the second rank. So far as they are concerned, Hislop and Cochrane and even Briarly are people of authority, way above, out of reach. They tell bloodcurdling stories about Briarly and Cochrane and absurd stories about Hislop’s gluttony, and they think they are being very frank and critical. But, really, they never question the authority of these people.
“The people they try to damage are people like themselves. As soon as they get you alone — and you have just met them — they tell stories against their friends. So I am nervous of their welcome now. They are so very warm when they meet you; and then you see the other side so soon. I feel that when they offer friendship it is a way not only of claiming me, but also of pulling me down, and when they appear to be sympathizing with my misfortunes they are speaking as good and proper people who have never got above themselves.
“I feel they will soon start telling stories about me. Sometimes when I am with them I find it hard to remember that when I first came here, and was staying at Government House, I looked upon Hislop as a minor local official.
“I have been out of touch, on a tour in the countryside, but have now come back and still find no news from London. It was a month-long tour of English-owned estates with Colonel Downie and Miss McLurie and some others. It was good to get out for a little. It was Downie’s idea — he has hopes of serving in my army when the time comes, and his interest makes me feel that things may not be as hopeless in London as I sometimes think. The English are very recent immigrants here, and some of the newer places we went to were very rough. In one place on a Sunday afternoon the whole atelier were mustered in clean brown-linen clothes in front of the house and they sang English hymns. I couldn’t of course show any interest and this caused a certain amount of bad feeling.
“When I was on the Leander coming south from the United States I made a point of not showing myself too often to the men, for the sake of discipline. On this small island you see the same people all the time. It is like being on a ship, and I began to feel half-way through the tour that I had shown myself too often here and was getting a little too well known. I felt that my reputation was dwindling, and that people were already criticizing me, as they criticized their friends.
“At the end of the tour, at a dinner at Miss McLurie’s, Colonel Downie presented me with the journal he had made of the tour. I was touched by the gesture — I had grown so melancholy towards the end of the tour, yet never able to show anything — but as soon as I opened the roughly bound book I saw that the journal was the work of an uneducated man. I saw that I had been taken in by Downie’s manner and accent, having very few British people of quality here to set him against.
“I looked up. Miss McLurie (who was in her famous transparency, showing her bosom perfectly) was waiting to catch my eye. She said, ‘You know, of course, that he’s not a colonel.’ I didn’t know — I had been cherishing him because of the shine he gave to my own hopes. And I had always thought that he and Miss McLurie were special friends. And he was right there still, one of the guests, at the other end of the table.