No Defense, Volume 3.

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This eBook was produced by David Widger

NO DEFENSE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.

BOOK III

XVI. A LETTER
XVII. STRANGERS ARRIVE
XVIII. AT SALEM
XIX. LORD MALLOW INTERVENES
XX. OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE PHILISTINES
XXI. THE CLASH OF RACE
XXII. SHEILA HAS HER SAY
XXIII. THE COMING OF NOREEN
XXIV. WITH THE GOVERNOR
XXV. THEN WHAT HAPPENED

CHAPTER XVI

A LETTER

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

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

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

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

It was Dyck Calhoun.

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

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

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

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

MY DEAR FRIEND:

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

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

What to do was the question. I knew no one in Jamaica--no one at
all except the governor, Lord Mallow, and him I had fought with
swords in Phoenix Park five years before. I had not known he was
governor here. I came to know it when I first saw him riding over
the unpaved street into Kingston from Spanish Town with his suite,
ornate with his governorship. He was a startling figure in scarlet,
with huge epaulets on his lieutenant-general's uniform, as big a pot
as ever boiled on any fire-chancellor, head of the government and of
the army, master of the legislature, judging like one o'clock in the
court of chancery, controller of the affairs of civil life, and
maker of a policy of which he alone can judge who knows what
interests clash in the West Indies.

English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are all hereabout. All struggle
for place above the other in the world of commerce and society,
though chiefly it is the English versus the French in these days;
and the policy of the governor is the policy of the country. He
never knows whether there will be a French naval descent or whether
the blacks in his own island will do as the blacks in St. Domingo
did--massacre the white people in thousands. Or whether the free
blacks, the Maroons, who got their freedom by treaty with Governor
Trelawney, when the British commander changed hats with Cudjoe, the
Maroon chief, as the sealing of the bargain--whether they will rise
again, as they before have risen, and bring terror into the white
settlement; and whether, in that case, all negro-slaves will join
them, and Jamaica become a land of revolution.

Of what good, then, will be the laws lately passed regulating the
control of slaves, securing them rights never given before, even
forbidding lashes beyond forty-nine! Of what use, then, the
punishment of owners who have ill-used the slaves? The local
councils who have power to punish never proceed against white men
with rigour; and to preserve a fair balance between the white man up
above and the black down below is the responsibility of the fair-
minded governor. If, like Mallow, he is not fair-minded, then is
the lash the heavier, and the governor has burdens greater than
could easily be borne in lands where the climate is more friendly.

Lord Mallow did not see me when I passed him in the street, but he
soon came to know of me from the admiral and Captain Ivy, who told
him all my story since I was freed from jail. Then he said I should
be confined in a narrow space near to Kingston, and should have no
freedom; but the admiral had his way, and I was given freedom of the
whole island till word should come from the Admiralty what should be
done with me. To the governor's mind it was dangerous allowing me
freedom, a man convicted of crime, who had been imprisoned, had been
a mutineer, had stolen one of his majesty's ships, and had fled to
the Caribbean Sea. He thought I should well be at the bottom of the
ocean, where he would soon have put me, I make no doubt, if it had
not been for the admiral, and Captain Ivy--you do not know him, I
think--who played a good part to me, when men once close friends
have deserted me.

Well, we had, Michael and I, but twenty pounds between us; and if
there was not plenty of free food in the island, God knows what
would have become of us! But there it was, fresh in every field, by
every wayside, at every doorway. We could not starve, or die of
thirst, or faint for lack of sleep, since every bush was a bed in
spite of the garapatos or wood-ticks, the snore of the tree-toad,
the hoarse shriek of the macaw, and the shrill gird of the guinea-
fowl. Every bed was thus free, and there was land to be got for a
song, enough to grow what would suffice for two men's daily wants.
But we did not rest long upon the land--I have it still, land which
cost me five pounds out of the twenty, and for the rest there was an
old but on the little place--five acres it was, and good land too,
where you could grow anything at all. Heaven knows what we might
have become in that tiny plantation, for I was sick of life, and the
mosquitos and flying ants, and the chattering parroquets, the grim
gallinazo, and the quatre, or native bed--a wooden frame and canvas;
but one day at Kingston I met a man, one Cassandro Biatt, who had an
obsession for adventure, and he spoke to me privately. He said he
knew me from people's talk, and would I listen to him? What was
there to do? He was a clean-cut rogue, if ever there was one, but
a rogue of parts, as he proved; and I lent an ear.

Now, what think you was his story? Well, but this--that off the
coast of Haiti, there was a ship which had been sunk with every man
on board, and with the ship was treasure without counting-jewels
belonging once to a Spaniard of high place, who was taking them to
Paris. His box had been kept in the captain's cabin, and it could
be found, no doubt, and brought to the surface. Even if that were
not possible, there was plenty of gold on the ship, and every piece
of it was good money. There had been searching for the ship, but
none had found it; but he, Cassandro Biatt, had sure knowledge, got
from an obi-man, of the place where it lay. It would not be an
expensive business, but, cheap as it was, he had no means of raising
cash for the purpose; while I could, no doubt, raise the needed
money if I set about it. That was how he put it to me. Would I do
it? It was not with me a case of "no shots left in the locker, no
copper to tinkle on a tombstone." I was not down to my last
macaroni, or quarter-dollar; but I drank some sangaree and set about
to do it. I got my courage from a look towards Rodney's statue in
its temple--Rodney did a great work for Jamaica against Admiral de
Grasse.

Why should I tell Biatt the truth about myself? He knew it.
Cassandro was an accomplished liar, and a man of merit of his kind.
This obi-man's story I have never believed; yet how Biatt came to
know where that treasure-ship was I do not know now.

Yes, out we went through the harbour of Kingston, beyond the
splendid defences of Port Royal and the men-of-war there, past the
Palisadoes and Rock Fort, and away to the place of treasure-trove.
We found it--that lost galleon; and we found the treasure-box of the
captain's cabin. We found gold too; but the treasure-box was the
chief thing; and we made it ours after many a hard day. Three
months it was from the day Biatt first spoke to me to the day when,
with an expert diver, we brought the box to the surface and opened
it.

How I induced one of the big men of Jamaica to be banker and skipper
for us need not be told; but he is one of whom men have dark
sayings--chiefly, I take it, because he does bold, incomprehensible
things. That business paid him well, for when the rent of the ship
was met, and the few men on it paid--slaves they were chiefly--he
pocketed ten thousand pounds, while Biatt and I each pouched forty
thousand, and Michael two thousand. Aye, to be sure, Michael was in
it! He is in all I do, and is as good as men of ten times his birth
and history. Michael will be a rich man one day. In two years his
two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.

But those days when Biatt and I went treasure-ship hunting were not
without their trials. If we had failed, then no more could this
land have been home or resting-place for us. We should only have
been sojourners with no name, in debt, in disgrace, a pair of
braggart adventurers, who had worked a master-man of the island for
a ship, and money and men, and had lost all except the ship! Though
to be sure, the money was not a big thing--a, few hundred pounds;
but the ship was no flea-bite. It was a biggish thing, for it could
be rented to carry sugar--it was, in truth, a sugar-ship of four
hundred tons--but it never carried so big a cargo of sugar as it did
on the day when that treasure-box was brought to the surface of the
sea.

I'm bound to say this--one of the straightest men I ever met, liar
withal, was Cassandro Biatt. He took his jewels and vanished up the
seas in a flourish. He would not even have another try at the gold
in the bowels of the ship.

"I've got plenty to fill my paunch, and I'll go while I've enough.
It's the men not going in time that get left in the end"--that's
what he said.

And he was right; for other men went after the gold and got some of
it, and were caught by French and South American pirates and lost
all they had gained. Still another group went and brought away ten
thousand pounds, and lost it in fighting with Spanish buccaneers.
So Biatt was right, and went away content, while I stayed here--
because I must--and bought the land and house where I have my great
sugar-plantation. It is an enterprise of volume, and all would be
well if I were normal in mind and body; but I am not. I have a past
that stinks to heaven, as Shakespeare says, and I am an outlaw of
the one land which has all my soul and name and heritage. Yes, that
is what they have done to me--made a convict, an outlaw of me. I
may live--but not in the British Isles; and if any man kills me, he
is not liable to the law.

Men do not treat me badly here, for I have property and money, and
this is a land where these two things mean more than anywhere else,
even more than in a republic like that where you live. Here men
live according to the law of the knife, fork, and bottle, yet
nowhere in the world is there deeper national morality or wider
faith or endurance. It is a land where the sea is master, where
naval might is the chief factor, and weighs down all else.

Here the navies of the great powers meet and settle their disputes,
and every being in the island knows that life is only worth what a
hundred-ton brig-of-war permits. I have seen here in Jamaica the
off-scourings of the French and Spanish fleets on parole; have seen
them entering King's House like loyal citizens; have even known of
French prisoners being used as guards at the entrance of King's
House, and I have informed the chief justice of dismal facts which
ought to have moved him. But what can you expect of a chief justice
who need not be a lawyer, as this one is not, and has other means of
earning income which, though not disloyal, are lowering to the
status of a chief justice? And not the chief justice alone. I have
seen French officers entertained at Government House who were guilty
of shocking inhumanities and cruelties. The governor, Lord Mallow,
is much to blame. On him lies the responsibility; to him must go
the discredit. For myself, I feel his enmity on every hand. I
suffer from his suggestions; I am the victim of his dark moods.

If I want a concession from a local council, his hand is at work
against me; if I see him in the street, I get a courtesy tossed, as
you would toss a bone to a dog. If I appear at the king's ball,
which is open to all on the island who are respectable, I am treated
with such disdain by the viceroy of the king that all the island is
agog. I went one day to the king's ball the same as the rest of the
world, and I went purposely in dress contrary to the regulations.
Here was the announcement of the affair in the Royal Gazette, which
was reproduced in the Chronicle, the one important newspaper in the
island:

KING'S HOUSE,
October 27th, 1797.

KING'S BALL.

There will be a Ball given by His Honour the Lieutenant-
Governor, on Tuesday evening, the 6th day of December next,
in honour of

HIS MAJESTY'S BIRTHDAY.

To prevent confusion, Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to
order their carriages to come by the Old Court House, and go
off by the Long Room.

N.B.--No gentlemen can possibly be admitted in boots, or
otherwise improperly dressed.

Well, in a spirit of mutiny--in which I am, in a sense, an expert--
I went in boots and otherwise "improperly dressed," for I wore my
hair in a queue, like a peasant. What is more, I danced with a
negress in the great quadrille, and thereby offended the governor
and his lady aunt, who presides at his palace. It matters naught to
me. On my own estate it was popular enough, and that meant more to
me than this goodwill of Lord Mallow.

He does not spare me in his recitals to his friends, who carry his
speech abroad. His rancour against me is the greater, I know,
because of the wealth I got in the treasure-ship, to prevent which
he tried to prohibit my leaving the island, through the withholding
of a leave-ticket to me. His argument to the local authorities was
that I had no rights, that I am a murderer and a mutineer, and
confined to the island, though not on parole. He almost succeeded;
but the man to whom I went, the big rich man intervened,
successfully--how I know not--and I was let go with my permit-
ticket.

What big things hang on small issues! If my Lord Mallow had
prevented me leaving the island, I shouldn't now own a great
plantation and three hundred negroes. I shouldn't be able to pay
my creditors in good gold Portuguese half-johannes and Spanish
doubloons, and be free of Spanish silver, and give no heed to the
bitt, which, as you perhaps know, is equal to fivepence in British
money, such as you and I used to spend when you were Queen of
Ireland and I was your slave.

Then I worshipped you as few women have been worshipped in all the
days of the world--oh, cursed spite of life and time that I should
have been jailed for killing your bad father! Aye, he was a bad
man, and he is better in his grave than out of it, but it puts a
gulf between you and me which nothing will ever bridge--unless it
should some day be known I did not kill him, and then, no doubt, it
will be too late.

On my soul, I don't believe I put my sword into him; but if I did,
he well deserved it, for he was worse than faithless to your mother,
he was faithless to his country--he was a traitor! I did not tell
that story of his treachery in court--I did not tell it because of
you. You did not deserve such infamy, and the truth came not out at
the trial. I, in my view, dared not, lest it might injure you, and
you had suffered enough--nay, more than enough--through him.

I wonder how you are, and if you have changed--I mean in appearance.
I am sure you are not married; I should have felt it in my bones,
if you were. No, no, my sweet lass, you are not married. But
think--it is more than seven long years since we met on the hills
above Playmore, and you put your hand in mine and said we should be
friends for all time. It is near three years since a letter came to
me from you, and in the time I have made progress.

I did not go to the United States, as you asked me to do. Is it not
plain I could not? My only course was to avoid you. You see, your
mother knows the truth--knows that I was jailed for killing your
father and her divorced husband. Therefore, the only way to do was
as I did. I could not go where you were. There should be hid from
you the fact that Erris Boyne was a traitor. This is your right, in
my mind. Looking back, I feel sure I could have escaped jail if I
had told what I knew of Erris Boyne; and perhaps it would have been
better, for I should, no doubt, have been acquitted. Yet I could
not have gone to you, for I am not sure I did not kill him.

So it is best as it is. We are as we are, and nothing can make all
different for us. I am a dissolute planter of Jamaica who has
snatched from destiny a living and some riches. I have a bad name
in the world. Yet by saving the king's navy from defeat out here I
did a good turn for my country and the empire.

So much to the good. It brought me freedom from the rope and pardon
for my chief offence. Then, in company with a rogue, I got wealth
from the depths of the sea, and here I am in the bottom of my
luxury, drunken and obscene--yes, obscene, for I permit my overseers
and my manager to keep black women and have children by them. That
I do not do so myself is no virtue on my part, but the virtue of a
girl whom I knew in Connemara. I fill myself with drink. I have a
bottle of madeira or port every night, and pints of beer or claret.
I am a creature of low habits, a man sodden with self-indulgence.
And when I am in drink, no slaver can be more cruel and ruthless.

Yet I am moderate in eating. The meals that people devour here
almost revolt me. They eat like cormorants and drink like dry
ground; but at my table I am careful, save with the bottle. This
is a land of wonderful fruits, and I eat in quantities pineapple,
tamarind, papaw, guava, sweet-sop, star-apple, granadilla, hog-plum,
Spanish-gooseberry, and pindal-nut. These are native, but there are
also the orange, lemon, lime, shaddock, melon, fig, pomegranate,
cinnamon, and mango, brought chiefly from the Spanish lands of South
America. The fruit-market here is good, Heaven knows, and I have my
run of it. Perhaps that is why my drink does not fatten me greatly.
Yes, I am thin--thinner even than when you saw me last. How
wonderful a day it was! You remember it, I'm sure.

We stood on the high hills, you and I, looking to the west. It was
a true Irish day. A little in front of us, in the sky, were great
clusters of clouds, and beyond them, as far as eye could see, were
hills so delicately green, so spotted with settlements, so misty and
full of glamour, and so cheerful with the western light. And the
storm broke--do you remember it? It broke, but not on us. It fell
on the middle of the prospect before us, and we saw beyond it the
bright area of sunny country where men work and prophesy and slave,
and pray to the ancient gods and acclaim the saints, and die and
fructify the mould; where such as Christopher Dogan live, and men a
thousand times lower than he. Christopher came to the jail the day
I was released--with Michael Clones he came. He read me my bill of
life's health--what was to become of me--the black and the white of
it, the good and the bad, the fair and the foul. Even the good
fortune of the treasure from the sea he foresaw, and much else that
has not come to me, and, as I think, will never come; for it is too
full a cup for me so little worthy of it.

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