Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica
Chapter 16
“I suppose you think you are smart, eh?”
“I doan’t understand y’u, Mr Curden.”
“You understand me well enough. You can’t tell me y’u didn’t see me yesterday, and y’u know I see you.”
“Yes, I did see you, when I were coming from de burial ground, but I doan’t know what that have to do wid smartness. I told you I was goin’ to a funeral on Saturday mornin’, an’ when you saw me yesterday I was comin’ from de funeral. So I doan’t see what you can mean about I think I am smart.”
“You needn’t form that you don’t understand what I am saying, for I see in your face that y’u do. Why didn’t you tell me plain the other day that you have an ‘intended’? First, y’u say you are living with you’ parents, and I find out that you’ parents are not in Kingston at all; now you want to talk about a funeral when I am talking about your young man. What you pretending for?”
“I have no young man, Mr Curden,” answered Jane. “The gentleman y’u saw me wid yesterday mornin’ was a young man dat living in the same yard wid meself, an’ him and me teck de dead baby to de cemetery. I never know him before.”
Mr Curden laughed scornfully, to intimate that whoever else might be deceived by such a story, he was not likely to be.
You look so quiet and so innocent, as if butter wouldn’t melt in you’ mouth; and you like to live with you’ parents, and you must go home early every evening! You belong to church too, don’t you? An’ your pupa take round the collection plate? And you teach in a Sunday school?”
Jane’s lips trembled with anger, and it was all she could do to keep from bursting into tears. It cut her to the quick to be ridiculed like this, and with her feeling of anger and sense of humiliation was mingled the fear lest the foreman should find some excuse for sending her about her business. She answered him nothing, but waited to hear what next he might have to say.
He saw that she was angry, and thought that, perhaps, she might be speaking the truth in regard to her relations with the young man with whom he had seen her the day before, though he was naturally inclined to be suspicious.
“If that young man is not your intended now,” he said after a moment’s silence, “I suppose him want to be?”
“I doan’t know anyt’ing about dat. I tell you I doan’t know noten about him. Him is a stranger, an’ it is only two days ago that we become acquaint. If it wasn’t dat de baby die in the yard I doan’t think we would have speak to one anoder. You promise?”
“That is easy,” returned Jane, heart-glad of the more favourable turn which the conversation was taking. “I doan’t believe him want to have anyt’ing to do wid me, an’ I know I doan’t partickiler to have noten to do wid him. I doan’t give him a thought!”
Curden did not think it at all likely that the young man should not wish to have anything to do with so prepossessing a girl as Jane: he argued from the particular to the general, and the particular was himself. But he thought it was just possible,