The White Squall | Page 3

to make them appear without motion; broad-backed butterflies, with black stripes across their yellow uniforms, floated lazily about, purposelessly, doing nothing, as if they could not make up their minds to anything; and the scent of heliotropes and of big cabbage roses, that blossomed in profusion on trees larger than shrubs, almost intoxicated the senses. The eye, too, was charmed at the same time by the pinky prodigality of the "Queen of Flowers," and the purple profusion of the convolvulus, their colours contrasting with the soft green foliage of the bay-tree; while great masses of scarlet geranium, and myriad hues of different varieties of the balsam and Bird of Paradise plant were harmonised by the snowy chastity of the Cape jessamine and a hundred other sorts of lilies, of almost every tint, which encircled a warm-toned hibiscus, that seemed to lord it over them, the king of the floral world.
I was watching a little procession of "umbrella ants," as they are called, that were promenading across the marble flooring of the verandah, each of the tiny insects carrying above its head a tinier piece of the green leaf of some plant, apparently for the purpose of shielding itself from the sun, for they held up their shades just in the same way as a lady carries her parasol; when, all at once, I heard a heavy step outside, advancing along the terrace from the direction of the stables.
Without turning my head, or consulting watch or clock--or, even without looking up at the scorching sun overhead, had my eyes been sufficiently glare-proof to have stood the ordeal--I knew who the intruder was, and could have also told you that it was exactly mid-day.
Why?--you may ask perhaps.
You will learn in a moment.
The heavy footstep came a pace nearer, and then paused; when, looking round, I beheld an old negro, with a withered monkey-like face, clad in the ordinary conventional costume of an African labourer in the West Indies. His dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow to frighten off the birds from his fields.
This was Pompey, Jake's rival; and, as he politely doffed his ragged head-gear with one hand, in deference to my dignity as "the young massa," he held out to me with his other paw a wine-glass whose foot, if ever it had one, had been broken-off at some remote period of time.
I knew what Pompey wanted as well as he did himself, but for my own amusement, and in order to hear him make his usual stereotyped announcement, I asked him a leading question.
"Well, what is it?" I said.
"U'm come, rum!" was his laconic rejoinder--nothing more, but the sentence was sufficiently expressive.
Every day of the week, with the exception of Sundays, it had been always Pompey's privilege to have a quartern of rum served out to him, as if he were on board ship, at twelve o'clock, the ordinary grog-time; and, punctually at that hour every day, in the wet season or dry, he never failed to come up to the house for his allowance, bringing with him the footless wine-glass to receive the grateful liquor. His appearance, consequently, was an unfailing token that the sun had crossed the zenith and that it was time to "make it eight bells."
Unlike the majority of his dark-complexioned brethren, who are generally loquacious in the extreme, Pompey was singularly reticent of speech, never varying this parrot-like formula of his when coming at twelve o'clock for his daily stimulant, without which he would never set about his afternoon work.
"U'm come, rum!" was all he would say ever since he had been taken over by my father with the other belongings of the plantation; and, as he was an old "hand," the former proprietor related, and had always been similarly indulged with a quartern of rum at mid-day as far back as he could recollect, old Pompey--and precious old he must have been by this reckoning--had evidently grown into the habit, so that it was part of himself.
Entering the house through one of the low window-less windows which opened out on to the verandah, like the ports in the side of a ship-- ventilation being everything in the tropics and closed doors and shut-up rooms unheard of, as everybody was free to walk in and out of the different apartments just as they pleased--I soon brought out a case- bottle from the sideboard where it stood handy for the purpose. Then, filling the old darkey's footless wine-glass, which he held with a remarkably steady hand considering his age, he