“There was consolation for me too. I had his solemn promise to come back again, and I’ll never believe but he would have kept it had he been alive. Nothing shall persuade me that my brave, blue-eyed Englishman has not been sleeping many a year, rolled in his hammock, under the deep, dark sea. It was well the conviction came on me by degrees that I was never to see him again. I should have gone mad if I had known it that last night when he bade me keep my heart up, and trust him to the end. After a while I fretted less, for my time was near, and my beautiful boy was born. Such an angel never lay on a mother’s knees. My son, my son, you have the same eyes, and the same sweet smile still. I knew you that day in the street, long before I turned your collar down, and saw the little white mark like an anchor on your neck. How proud I was of you, and how I longed to show my sturdy, blue-eyed boy, who began to speak at eleven months, to every mother in the island, but I dared not—I dared not, for your sake more than for my own. I was cunning then—ay, cunning, and brave, and enduring as a panther. They never found me out—they never so much as suspected me. I had money, plenty of it, and influence too, with one man at least, who would have put his hand in the fire, coward as I think he is, if I had only made him a sign. With his help, I concealed the existence of my boy from every creature on the plantation—black or white. In his house I used to come and nurse you, dear, and play with you by the hour together. That man is my husband now, and I think he deserves a better fate.
“At last he was forced to leave the island, and then came another parting, worse than the first. It was only for myself I grieved when I lost your father, but when I was forced to trust my beautiful boy to the care of another, to cross the sea, to sleep in strange beds, to be washed and dressed by other hands, perhaps to meet with hard words and angry looks, or worse still, to clasp his pretty arms about a nurse’s neck, and to forget the mother that bore him, I thought my heart would break. My boy, there is no such thing—I tell you again, these are fables—grief does not kill.
“For a long time I heard regularly of your welfare, and paid liberally for the good news. I was sure the man to whom I had entrusted you looked upon me as his future wife, and though I hated him for the thought, I—who loved that bold, strong, outspoken sailor—I permitted it, I encouraged it, for I believed it would make him kinder to my boy. When you were a little older, I meant to buy my own freedom, and take you with me to live in Europe—wherever you could be safe.