Page:Helen Leah Reed - Napoleons young neighbour.djvu/250

220 Lowe—that he helped gain freedom for the slaves—made him no better liked by Napoleon and his friends. From the first, indeed, the Governor was suspicious of Napoleon's friends, and the fear that they were plotting for Napoleon's escape was one of the reasons, probably, for the regulations that greatly annoyed Napoleon. It seemed as if he wished Napoleon to be surrounded entirely by English, for one of his early acts was to tell the French that they were at liberty to leave St. Helena whenever they wished. Every facility, he said, would be offered them to return to Europe. Had he known human nature better, Sir Hudson Lowe would have realized that persons who had given up so much to follow Napoleon would hardly desert him merely because conditions on the island did not suit them.

At last, on one pretext or another, he contrived to have several of Napoleon's attendants sent away,—Santini, the clever little lamplighter, the jack-of-all-trades, who had so often amused Betsy's small brothers with his toys; Rousseau, his artificer; and Archambaud, his coachman, whose reckless driving