Читать книгу A Bitter Heritage - John Bloundelle-Burton - Страница 6

The mustang halted on a little knoll up which the patient beast had been toiling for some quarter of an hour, because upon that knoll there grew a clump of gros-gros and moriche palms which threw a grateful shade over the white, glaring, and dusty track, and Julian Ritherdon, dropping the reins on its drenched and sweltering neck, drew out his cigar-case and struck a light. Also, the negro "boy"--a man thirty years old--who had been toiling along by its side, flung himself down, crushing crimson poinsettias and purple dracæna beneath his body, and grunted with satisfaction at the pause.

"So, Snowball," Julian said to this descendant of African kings, "this ends your journey, eh? I am in the right road now and we have got to say 'Good-bye.' I suppose you don't happen to be thirsty, do you, Pompey?"

"Hoop! Hoop!" grunted the negro, showing a set of ivories that a London belle would have been proud to possess, "always thirsty. Always hungry. Always want tobaccy. Money, too."

"Do you!" exclaimed Julian. "By Jove! you'd make a living as a London johnny. That's what they always want. Pity you don't live in London, Hannibal. Well, let's see."

Whereon he threw his leg over the great saddle, reached the ground, and began opening a haversack, from which he took a bottle, a packet, and a horn cup.

"Luncheon time," he said. "Sun's over the foremast! Come on, Julius Cæsar, we'll begin."

After which he opened the packet, in which was a considerable quantity of rather thickly cut sandwiches, divided it equally, and then filled the horn cup with the liquid from the bottle, which, after draining, he refilled and handed to his companion.

"I'm sorry it isn't iced, my lily-white friend," he said; "it does seem rather warm from continual contact with the mustang's back, but I daresay you can manage it. Eh?"

"Manage anything," the negro replied firmly, his mouth full of sandwich, "anything. Always----"

"Yes, I know. 'Thirsty, hungry, want tobacco and money.' I tell you, old chap, you're lost in this place. London's the spot for you. You're fitted for a more advanced state of civilization than this."

"Hoop. Hoop," again grunted the negro, and again giving the huge smile--"want----"

"This is getting monotonous, Sambo," Julian exclaimed. "Come, let's settle up;" whereon he again replenished the guide's cup, and then drew forth from his pocket two American dollars, which are by now the standard coin of the colony. "One dollar was the sum arranged for," Julian said, "but because you are a merry soul, and also because a dollar extra isn't ruinous, you shall have two. And in years to come, my daisy, you can bless the name of Mr. Ritherdon as that of a man both just and generous. Remember those words, 'just and generous.'"

The negro of many sobriquets--at each of which he had laughed like a child, as in absolute fact the negro is when not (which is extremely rare!) a vicious brute--seemed, however, to be struck more forcibly by some other words than those approving ones suggested by Julian as suitable for recollection, and, after shaking his woolly head a good deal, muttered: "Ritherdon, Ritherdon," adding afterwards, "Desolada." Then he continued: "Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man. Cruel man. Beat Blacky. Beat Whity, too, sometimes. Hard man. Cruel man."

"Sambo," said Julian, feeling (even as he spoke still jocularly to the creature--a pleasant way being the only one in which to converse with the African) that he would sooner not have heard these remarks in connection with his father, "Sambo, you should not say these things to people about their relatives. That would not do for London;" while at the same time he reflected that it would be little use telling his guide of the old Latin proverb suggesting that one should say nothing but good of the dead.

"You relative of Massa Ritherdon!" the other grunted now, though still with the unfailing display of ivories. "You relative. Oh! I know not that. Now," he said, thinking perhaps it was time he departed, and before existing amicable arrangements should be disturbed, "now, I go. Back to Belize. Good afternoon to you, sir. Good-bye. I hope you like Desolada. Fifteen miles further on;" and making a kind of shambling bow, he departed back upon the road they had come. Yet not without turning at every other three or four steps he took, and waving his hand gracefully as well as cordially to his late employer.

"A simple creature is the honest black!" especially when no longer a dweller in his original equatorial savagery.

"Like it," murmured Julian to himself, "Yes, I hope so. Since it is undoubtedly my chief inheritance, I hope I shall!"

He had left Belize that morning, by following a route which the negro knew of, had arrived in the neighbourhood of a place called Commerce Bight--a spot given up to the cultivation of the cocoanut-tree. And having proceeded thus far, he knew that by nightfall he would be at Desolada--the dreary hacienda from which, twenty-six years before, his uncle had ruthlessly kidnapped him from his father--the father who, he had learnt since he arrived in the colony, had been dead three months. Also he knew that this property called Desolada lay some dozen miles or so beyond a village named All Pines, and on the other side of a river termed the Sittee, and, as he still sat beneath the palm-trees on the knoll where they had halted for the midday meal, he wondered what he would find when he arrived there.

"It is strange," he mused to himself now, as from out of that cool, refreshing shade he gazed across groves upon groves of mangroves at his feet, to where, sparkling in the brilliant cobalt-coloured Caribbean Sea, countless little reefs and islets--as well as one large reef--dotted the surface of the ocean, "strange that, at Belize, I could gather no information of my late father. No! not even when I told the man who kept the inn that I was come on a visit to Desolada. Why, I wonder, why was it so? My appearance seemed to freeze them into silence, almost to startle them. Why? Why--this reticence on their part? Can it be that he was so hated all about here that none will mention him? Is that it? Remembering what the negro said of him, of his brutality to black and white, can that be it? Yet my uncle hinted at nothing of the kind."

Still thinking of this, still musing on what lay before him, he adjusted the saddle (which he had previously loosened to ease the mustang) once more upon the animal's back. Then, as his foot was in the stirrup there came, swift as a flash of lightning, an idea into his mind.

"I must be like him," he almost whispered to himself, "so like him, must bear such a resemblance to him, that they are thunderstruck. And, if any who saw me can recollect that, twenty-six years ago, his newborn child was stolen from him on the night his wife died, it is no wonder that they were thunderstruck. That is, if I do resemble him so much."

But here his meditations ceased, he understanding that his name, which he had inscribed in the visitor's book lying on the marble table of the hotel, would be sufficient to cause all who learnt it to refrain from speaking about the recently dead man--his namesake.

"Yet all the same," he muttered to himself, as now the mule bore him along a more or less good road which traversed copses of oleanders and henna plants, allamandas and Cuban Royal palms--the latter of which formed occasionally a grateful shade from the glare of the sun--"all the same, I wish that darkey had not spoken about my father's cruelty. I should have preferred never to learn that he bore such a character. He must have been very different from my uncle, who, in spite of the one error of his life, was the gentlest soul that ever lived."

All the way out from England to New Orleans, and thence to Belize by a different steamer, his thoughts had been with that dear uncle--who survived the disclosure he had made but eight days--he being found dead in his bed on the morning of the ninth day--and those thoughts were with him now. Gentle memories, too, and kindly, with in them never a strain of reproach for what had been done by him in his hour of madness and desire for revenge; and with no other current of ideas running through his reflections but one of pity and regret for the unhappiness his real father must have experienced at finding himself bereft at once of both wife and child. Regret and sorrow, too, for the years which that father must have spent in mourning for him, perhaps in praying that, as month followed month, his son might in some way be restored to him. And now he--that son--was in the colony; here, in the very locality where the bereaved man must have passed so many sad and melancholy years! Here, but too late!

Ere he died, George Ritherdon had bidden his nephew make his way to British Honduras and proclaim himself as what he was; also he had provided him with that very written statement which he had spoken of as being in preparation for Julian's own information in case he should die suddenly, ere the latter returned home.

"With that in your possession," he had said, two days before his death actually occurred, "what's there that can stand in the way of your being acknowledged as his son? He cannot have forgotten my handwriting; and even if he has, the proofs of what I say are contained in the intimate knowledge that I testify in this paper of all our surroundings and habits out there. That paper is a certificate of who you are."

"Suppose he is dead when I get there, or that he should have married again. What then?"

"He may be dead, but he has not married again. Remember what I told you last night. I know my brother has remained a widower."

"I wonder the paper did not also say that his son was stolen from him many years ago, or that there was no heir to his property, or something to that effect."

"It is strange perhaps that such a state of things is not mentioned. Yet, the Picayune's correspondent may have forgotten it, or not known it, or not have thought it worth mention--or have had other news which required to be published. Half a hundred things might have occurred to prevent mention of that one."

"And," said Julian, "presuming I do go out to British Honduras if I can get leave from the Admiralty, on 'urgent private affairs'----"

"You must go out. It is a fortune for you. Your father cannot be worth less than forty thousand pounds. You must go out, even though you have to leave the navy to do so."

Julian vowed inwardly that in no circumstances should the latter happen, while, at the same time, he thought it by no means unlikely that the necessary leave would be granted. He had already fifty days' leave standing to his credit, and he knew that not only his captain, but all his superiors in the service, thought well of him. The "urgent private affairs," when properly explained to their lordships, would make that matter easy.

"When I go to British Honduras, then," said Julian, putting now the question which he had been about to ask in a slightly different form, but asking it nevertheless, "what am I to do supposing he is dead? I may have many obstacles to encounter--to overcome."

"There can be none--few at least, and none that will be insurmountable. I had you baptised at New Orleans as his son, and, with my papers, you will find the certificate of that baptism, while the papers themselves will explain all. Meanwhile, make your preparations for setting out. You need not wait for my death----"

"Don't talk of that!"

"I must talk of it. At best it cannot be far off. Let us face the inevitable. Be ready to go as soon as possible. If I am alive when you set out, I will give you the necessary documents; if I die before you start, they are here," and as he spoke he touched lightly the desk at which he always wrote.