"Wonderful! wonderful!" he thought to himself; "that poor corn-bred fellow has already made more impression on this girl's pride than a hundred cavalier gallants. Truly, we are a republic, Vesta," he continued aloud, "and you lay down the Custis character as easily as our old connection, Lord Fairfax, accepted the democracy of his hired surveyor, Mr. Washington, before he died."
"I laid down the Custis name yesterday," Vesta said, "though not their better character, I hope. Papa, there is only one law of marriage; it is where the wife follows the husband."
She looked a little archly at him, wiping her eyes of recent tears, and though she may not have meant it, he was reminded of his own fear of his wife.
Aunt Hominy now came in, having been told by Virgie to prepare coffee, and she followed Roxy, who brought it into the library. The old cook had a strange look, as of one who had been up all night at a fire, or a "protracted meeting," and she poked her head in as if afraid to come farther, till Vesta went out and kissed her kindly.
"Poor Aunty Hominy! did you think I was sold, or abused, because I had been married? Dear old aunty, I shall never leave you!"
Aunt Hominy had a countenance of profound, almost vacant, melancholy, mixed with a fear that, the Judge remarked, "he had seen on the faces of niggers that had stolen something."
"Miss Vessy," she stammered, at last, "is you measured in by ole Meshach? Is he got you, honey? Dat he has, chile! He's gwyn to bury you under dat pizen hat. Po' little girl! Po' Miss Vessy!"
"Oh, Aunt Hominy," Vesta said, "he will be a kind master in spite of his queer hat, and take good care of you and all the children; for he is my husband, and will love you all for me."
A dumb, terrified look adhered to the old black woman's face.
"No, he won't be kind to nobody," she gasped. "You has gwyn been lost, Miss Vessy. You is measured in. De good Lord try an' bress you! Hominy ain't measured in yit. Hominy's kivered herseff wid cammermile, an' drunk biled lizzer tea. Hominy's gone an' got Quaker."
"What'sQuaker, Aunt Hominy?"
"Quaker," the old woman repeated, backing out and looking down, "Quaker's what keeps him from a measurin' of me in!"
Then, as Vesta drew on her bonnet and shawl, having taken her coffee and toast, the old servant, gliding back in the depths of Teackle Hall, raised a wild African croon, as over the dead, giving her voice a musical inflection like the jingle of Juba rhyme:
"Good-bye, Miss Vessy! Good-bye, Aunt Hominy's baby! Good-bye, dear young missis! Good-bye, my darlin' chile, furever, furever, an' O furever, little Vessy Custis, O chile, farewell!"
The tears raining upon her cheeks, her wild, wringing hands and upflung arms and shape convulsed, Vesta remembered long, and thought, as she left Teackle Hall with Virgie, that some African superstition had, by the aid of dreams, drawn into a passing excitement the faithful servant's brain.
At the corner of old Front Street, and extending almost out upon the little Manokin bridge, stood Meshach Milburn's two-story house and store, with a door upon both streets. Though planted low, in a hollow, it stood forward like Milburn's challenging countenance, unsupported by any neighbors.
"Don't it look like a witch's, Missy?" Virgie said, as Vesta took in its not unpicturesque outlines and crude plank carpentry, the weather-rotted roof, the decrepitchimney at the far end, the one garret window in the sharp gable, the scant little windows above stairs, and the doors low to the sand.
"It may have been the pride of the town fifty years ago, Virgie. I have passed it many a day, looking with mischievous curiosity for the steeple-hat, to show that to some city friend, little thinking I must ever enter the house. But hear that wilful bird singing so loud! Where is it?"
"I can't tell to save my life. It ain't in the tree yonder. It's the first bird up this mornin', Miss Vessy, sho'!"
"Is not that larger door standing ajar, the one with the four panels in it?" Vesta asked. "Yes, it is unfastened and partly open."
The blood left Vesta's heart a moment, as the thought ran through her mind: "He has been watched, followed home, and murdered!"
The idea seemed to explain his absence on his marriage night, and, like a sudden flame first seen upon a burning ship, lighting up the wide ocean with its bright terrors, Vesta saw the infinite relations of such a crime: her almost secret marriage, her custody of her father's notes, the record of them upon her husband's books, his last word at the church gate: "I will come soon, darling," and now, this silent abode, with its door ajar on Sunday dawn, before the town was up—they might bear the suspicion of a dreadful crime by the ruined debtor house of Custis against their friendless creditor.
This thought, personal to her father, was immediately dismissed in the feeling for a possibly murdered husband. If the idea barely touched her sense of self, that her tremendous sacrifice had been arrested by Heaven, and her purity saved between the altar and the nuptials by the bloodshed of her purchaser at the hands of some meaner avenger, though not until she had redeemed herfather from Milburn's clutch, this idea never passed beyond the portal of her mind; she repulsed it, entering, and began to think of the easy prey her husband might have been, hated by so many, defended by none, known to be very rich, no loss to the community, as it might think, in its financial ignorance, and his only guard a stalwart negro notorious for fighting.
Believing Milburn to deserve better than his present fame, Vesta advanced towards the door of the old wooden store with a spirit of commiseration and awe, and still the wild bird from somewhere poured out a shriek, a chuckle, a hurrah, enough to turn her blood to ice.
As Vesta pushed open the old, seasoned door it dragged along the floor, and the loose iron bar and padlock, dropping down, made a ring that brought an echo like a tomb's out of the hollow interior.
"'Deed, Miss Vessy, I'm 'fraid to go in there," Virgie said.
"You are not to come in till I call you. But hear that bird rioting in song! Does Mr. Milburn keep birds?"
"I can't tell, Miss Vessy. That bird's a Mocker. It must be in there somewhere. Oh, don't go in, Miss Vessy; something will catch you, dear Missy, sho'."
But Vesta was already gone, following the piercing sound of the native bird, that seemed to be in the loft.
She saw a little counter of pine, and a pine desk built into it, and bundles of skins, some cord-wood, a pile of lumber and boxes, a few barrels of oil or spirits, and dust and cobwebs thick on everything; and a little way in from the door the light and darkness made weird effects upon each other, increasing the apparent distances, and changing the forms; and the sun, now risen, made turning cylinders of gold-dust at certain knot-holes in the eastern gable, across whose film she saw two lean mice stand upon the floor unalarmed, and tamely watch her come.
The screaming of the bird was conveyed through the thin floor from above with loud distinctness, and every note of singing things seemed to be imitated by it, from the hawk's gloating cry to the swallow's twittering alarm, with the most rapid versatility, and even hurry, as if the creature was trying over every bird language, with the hope of finding one mankind could understand. It was idle to expect to be heard amid such clamor, and Vesta, having pounded on the floor a few times, made her way to a sort of cupboard, that might turn out to be a stairway, and, sure enough, a door opened on its dark side, and light from above flickered down.
At this moment the bird's notes abruptly ceased, and a voice, unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, yet human, spoke in response to a more natural human voice, both issuing from above.
The second voice seemed to be Milburn's; the first voice was something like it, yet not like anything from the throat of man, and the superstition she had been rebuking in her servant came with a thrilling influence upon her entire nature. She was about to fly, but called out one word as she arrested herself:
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!"
The loud, unclassifiable voice above immediately answered:
"Gent! Gent-gent-gent-en! t-chee, t-chee! Gents, tss-tss-tss! Ha! ha! Gentlemen!"
"May I come up?" Vesta cried.
"Come, p-chee! Come chee! come tsee! See me! see me! see me! Come p-chee! come see! come see me!"
The last accentuation, in spite of the bird's interference, was sufficiently distinct to amount to an invitation, and with a raising of her eyelids once dependently to heaven, Vesta went up the stairs.
She put her head into a large, long room, which took upthe whole contents of the second story, and was lighted on three sides by the small windows she had seen without. It had no carpet or floor-covering of any kind; the fire was gone out upon the chimney-hearth in the end, and the atmosphere, a little chill, was melting before the sunshine which now streamed in at both sides of the fireplace and clearly revealed every object in the apartment,—some clothes-pegs, a wooden table with a blue plate, a blue cup and saucer and a saucepan upon it, and a coarse knife and fork; a large green chest, and a leather hat-box; an old hair trunk fifty years old, and nearly falling to pieces; black silhouettes, in little round ebony frames, of a woman and a man hung over the mantel, and between them a silhouette of a face she had no difficulty in recognizing to be intended for her own.
Stretched upon a low child's bed, of the sort called trundle-bed in those days, which could be wheeled under the high-legged bed of the parents, lay the bridegroom, in his wedding-dress and gaitered shoes, with his steeple-crowned hat upon the faded calico quilt beside him, and his face as red as burning fever could make it.
Vesta only verified the particulars of the inventory of Milburn's lodge afterwards, her instant attention being drawn to the motionless form of her husband, whose flushed face seemed to indicate a death by strangulation or apoplexy. She went forward and put her hand upon him.
"Mr. Milburn!" she spoke.
"Milburn!" echoed a voice of piercing strength, though ill articulated. She looked around in astonishment, and saw nobody.
"Husband!" Vesta spoke, louder, stooping over him.
"S'band! s'band! See! see!" shouted the wanton voice, almost at her elbow.
Vesta, with one hand on the helpless man's brow, turned again, almost indignantly, for the tone seemed to addresssome sense of neglect or shame in her, which she had not been guilty of. Still, nothing was to be seen.
At the far corner of the room was a step-ladder leading to a hole in the loft above; but this was not the place of the interruption, for she heard the voice now come as from the chimney at the opposite end of the room, nearer the bed, and accompanied with a fluttering and scratching, as if some spirit of evil, with the talons of a rat or a bat, was trying to break in where the prostrate man lay on the bed of oblivion.
"Meshach! Meshach!" rang the half-human cry, "Hoo! hoo! Vesty! Vesty! Sweet! sweet! sweet! Ha, ha! See me! See me! Meshach, he! Vesty, she! She! she! she! Hoot! hoot! ha!"
Rapidly changing her view, with her ears no less than her heart tingling at the use of her own name, Vesta saw on the dusty wooden mantel a common bird of a gray color, with dashes of brown and black upon his wings, and a whitish breast, and he was greatly agitated, as if he meant to fly upon her or upon some other intruder she could not see.
His eyes, of black pupils upon yellowish eyeballs, sparkled with nervous activity. He flung himself into the air above her head, uttering sounds of such mellow richness and such infinite fecundity of modulation, that the old hovel almost burst with intoxicated song, combining gladness, welcome, fear, defiance, superstition, horror, and epithalamium all together, like Orpheus gone mad, and losing the continuity of his golden notes.
The bird's upper bill was beaked like a hawk's, his lower was sharp as a lance, and between them issued that infuriated melody and cadence and epithet that old Patrick Henry's spirit might have migrated into from his grave in the Virginia woods. He suddenly flung himself from his vortex of song upon the bed of the sick man, with a twitching hop and rapid opening and shutting of the tail,like the fan of a disturbed beauty, and thence perched upon Milburn's peaked hat, and with a convulsive struggle of his throat and body, as if he were in superhuman labor, brought out, distinct as man could speak, the words,
"'Sband! 'sband! Vesty! Vesty! Sweet! sweet! Come see! come see!"
Vesta, by a quick, expert movement, grasped the bird, and smoothed it against her bosom, and soothed its excitement.
She had heard verified what Audubon avowed, and had but recently published in the beautiful edition of his works her father was a subscriber to, that some said the American mocking-bird could imitate the human voice, though the naturalist remarked that he himself had never heard the bird do it.
The present verification, Vesta thought, of the mocking-bird's supremest power, might have issued from its excitement at the silent and helpless condition of its master—that master who had told Vesta that no bird in the woods ever resisted his seductions and mystic influence.
"If that be true," Vesta said to herself, "there is no danger of this vociferous pet making his escape if I put him out of the window till I can see if his master speaks or lives."
So she raised the window, and flung the mocking-bird up into the air, and it came down and dropped into the old willow-tree beneath, and there set up a concert the Sabbath morning might have been proud of, when, in the corn-fields, the free-footed Saviour went plucking the milky ears. Vesta could but stop a minute and listen.
The liquid notes chased each other around in circles of dizzy harmony, as if angels were at hide-and-seek on the blue branches of the air, eluding each other in pure-heartedness, chasing each other with eager love, sighing praise and happiness as their supernal hearts emittedmusic in the glow of ecstasy, and carrying upward the loveliest emotions of the earth in yearning sympathy for nature. No language, now, that Vesta could identify, was woven into that maze of morning song, which challenged, with its fulness and golden weight, the floods of sunshine, matching light with sound, spontaneous both, and rivals for the favors of the soft atmosphere. Singing with all its heart, outdoing all it knew, forgetting imitation in wild improvisation, watching her window as it danced upon the twigs and fluttered into the air, conscious of her listening as it purled and warbled towards her, and sounded every pipe and trumpet, virginal and clarion, hautboy and castanet, in the orchestra of its rustic bosom, the mocking-bird's ode seemed almost supernatural this morn to Vesta, and she thought to herself:
"Oh, what wedding music in the cathedral at Baltimore could equal that? and this poor man receives it for his epithalamium, without cost, as truly as if nature were greeting my coming to him in the old poet's spirit:
"'Now all is done; bring home the bride againe;Bring home the triumph of our victory;Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,With joyance bring her and with jollity:Sing, ye sweet angels, Alleluia sing,That all the woods may answer, and your echo ring.'"
Relieved from the agitation of the mocking-bird, Vesta now gave her whole attention to her husband; and the high heat of his brain and circulation, and his muttering, like delirium, seemed to indicate that he had an intense attack of intermittent fever. She heard the words several times repeated by him: "I will come soon, darling!" and the simplicity of his devotion to her, unloved as he was, had such flavor of pathos in it that the tears started to Vesta's eyes.
"Poor soul!" she said, "it will be long before I can love him.There, his hunger must be enduring. But myduty is not the less clear to stay by his side and nurse him, as his wife."
At this conclusion she looked Milburn over carefully, to see if any wound or sign of violence, whether by accident or an enemy, appeared upon him, and finding none, and he all the time wandering in his sleep, she climbed the ladder and peeped into the garret, to see if his servant might be there. Samson's bed, as she supposed it was, had not been disturbed, and so, descending, she raised the window over the larger door she had entered by, and beckoned Virgie to come up.
"Take this tin cup," she said to the quadroon, "and go to the spring, near here, and bring it to me full of water."
Then, as the girl tripped away, Vesta found a piece of paper, and wrote her father a note, telling him to come to her; and to the girl, when she returned, her mistress said:
"I want you to get a roll of new rag-carpet at Teackle Hall, and have it brought here, to spread upon this floor. Send me, too, a pair of our brass andirons, and pack in a basket some glass, table-ware, and linen. Tell papa to bring one of his own night-shirts, and to take down my picture in the sewing-room, and wrap it up, and have it sent. I must have mamma's medicine-box and a wheelbarrow of ice; and let Hominy make some strong tea and hot-water toast. Virgie, do not forget that this sick gentleman is my husband, and a part of our own family!"
"The girl's face preserved its respect with difficulty as she heard the last part of the sentence, but she replied to What she understood to be a warning by saying:
"Miss Vessy, I never tell anybody tales."
"No, dear, you do not. I only feared you might forget the very different view we must take of Mr. Milburn from his former life here."
Being again left alone, Vesta took the tin cup of spring-water, and, raising the disturbed man's head, she gavehim a drink, and, as he opened his eyes to see whom it was, she heard him say, with an articulate sigh:
"Heaven."
With the remainder of the water and her handkerchief she washed his hot skin and kept it moist, and fitful murmurs, as "Darling!" "Angel!" "Beautiful lady!" came from his roving brain as perception and poison contended for his mind. The inborn sense in woman of happiness after doing good offices and being appreciated was attended with a certain intellectual elation, and even amusement, at having witnessed what was altogether new to her,—the life of the meaner class of white people. She looked at the dexterous silhouette of herself, cut, probably, from memory, long ago, by the man, no doubt, who never knew her until yesterday, and, guessing the companion profiles to be his mother and father, she exclaimed, mentally:
"I cannot see anything insincere about this man's statement to me. Here are all the proofs of his deep attachment to me long before he forced my name upon papa with such apparent insolence. If papa could see these proofs with a woman's interest, he would have a full apology in them. Here, too, is the bird that sings my name. What strength of prepossession the master must have had to make the feathered pupil repeat the sound of 'Vesta,' and call me 'sweet!' What resources, too, without the use of money or social aids! He knows the story of our English beginning, while we make it an idle boast; but to him Cromwell and Milton, Raleigh and Vane, are men of to-day. Ah!" Vesta thought, "I think I see now one of those Puritans in my husband, of whom I have heard as sprinkled through Virginia. We are the Cavaliers. There is the Roundhead, even to the King James hat."
As she was led onward in these probabilities, Vesta took up the demure old Hat and looked it over without any superstition, and reflected:
"Do we not exaggerate trifles? Why should this man be so derided because he covers his head with an old hat? What of it? Suppose it shows some vanity or eccentricity, why is there more merit in covering that up than in expressing it in the dress? The styles we wear to-day are the derision even of the current journals, and what will be thought of them fifty years hence, when the fashion magazines show me as I look,—the envy of my moment, the fright of my grandchildren?"
With rising color, she put the hat in the leather hat-box, and shut it up.
Judge Custis made his way up the dark stairs in a little while, and, as soon as he looked at Milburn, exclaimed,
"Curses come home to roost! It was only night before last that I said, in the presence of Meshach's negro, 'May the ague strike him and the bilious sweat from Nassawongo mill-pond!' He slept by it that night, while I was tossing in misery. The next night it was his turn. Daughter, he has the bilious intermittent fever, the legacy of all his fathers. He exposed himself, I suppose, extraordinarily that night, and I hear that he burned the old cabin in the morning. Now he will burn, in memory of it, for the next ten weeks; for he has, I suspect, from the time of day the burning and delirium came, what is called the double quotidian type of the fever, with two attacks in the twenty-four hours."
"Poor man!" exclaimed Vesta.
"Now I can account for his appearance at the marriage ceremony last night. The fever was on him, but he went through it by hard grit, and, probably, returning here to get some relief, he just fell over on that bed, and his head left him for some hours. The paroxysm goes away during sleep, and returns in the morning; so, before he could get abroad to-day, even if he could walk, to report himself at Teackle Hall, another fever came, and a furious one, too, and he will have good luck to surviveforty days of fever, with probably eighty sweats in that time."
"He must be doctored at once, papa."
"Well, I am good enough doctor for the bilious fever. He wants plenty of cold lemonade, cold sponging, and ice to suck when the fever is on him. When the chills intervene he wants blanketing, hot bottles at his feet, and hot tea, or something stronger. In the rest between the attacks of fever and chill, he wants calomel and Peruvian bark, and if these delirious spells go on, he may want both bleeding and opium."
"Here are some of the things he immediately needs, then," Vesta said, as a tall white man she had never seen before came up the stairs with Virgie, bringing some Susquehanna ice in a blanket, and a roll of carpet, and other articles she had sent for. The man's face wore a large bruise that heightened his savage appearance.
"Judge," exclaimed the stranger, "I'm doin' a little work to pay fur my board. Who's your whiffler? He'll know me when he sees me next time."
Following the stranger's eyes, Vesta and her father saw Meshach Milburn, half raised up from the low trundle-bed, staring at Joe Johnson as if trying to get at him. His lips moved, he partly articulated:
"Catch the—scoundre—him!"
"Joe," said the Judge, "slip away! He recognizes you as the assailant yesterday. Don't hesitate: see how he glares at you!"
"Oh, it's the billy-noodle with the steeple nab-cheat, him that settled me with the brick," said the stranger, in a low voice. "So I have piped him. Ah! that's plumby!"
As the tall man started to go Milburn's countenance relaxed, he wandered again in his head, and fell back upon the bed.
"I told you he was a hard hater, Mr. Johnson," the Judge remarked.
"Them shakes is the equivvy for the bruise he give me,—that is, till we both heal up. He's painted the ensigns of all nations on my stummick, Judge. But a blow is cured by a blow!"
With a look of admiring computation upon the girl Virgie, Joe Johnson drew his long figure down the stairs, like a pole.
"What a brutal giant," Vesta said; "and how came he to be doing our errands?"
"Why, Aunt Hominy hadn't nobody to bring the wheelbarrow load, and this man said he'd come, and he would come, Miss Vesty, so I couldn't say anything."
"He's a man of a good deal of influence," said the Judge, uneasily, "in the upper part of our county, and in Delaware. Last night, after the wedding, he slapped Meshach's hat, and old Samson knocked him down for it, and he would have killed Samson, I hear, but for your bridegroom, who felled him with a timely brick. It's a hard team to pass on a narrow road,—Meshach and Samson; hey, Virgie?"
"I'm glad old Samson beat him, anyway," the pretty quadroon said, showing her white teeth.
"Oh, what troubles will not that hat bring upon us!" Vesta thought; and then spoke: "If Mr. Milburn was strong, I think he would hardly let that man get out of the county before night."
"Well, daughter, what are you going to do with these articles he has brought?"
"They are to make this room comfortable. See, he has my picture here, cut by his own hands: I want to put a better one before him: help me hang it, papa!"
In a few minutes the bright oil portrait, but recently painted by Mr. Rembrandt Peale, was taking the sunlight upon its warm brunette cheeks, in full sight of the bridegroom, and the thick rag carpet warmed the floor, and Virgie had made a second errand to Teackle Hall,and brought back the lady's rocking-chair that Milburn so much affected, and toilet articles, and some dark cloth to hide the bare boards in places, and the old loft soon wore a reasonable appearance of habitable life. Virgie made up the fire, and the brass andirons took the cheerful flame upon them, while Vesta sweetened the lemonade after her father had cut and squeezed the lemons, and added some magnesia to make the drink foam.
"Really," said Judge Custis, "this miserable den takes the rudimentary form of a home. I suppose there are now more comforts in his sight than Meshach's whole race ever collected. What is your next move, Vesta?"
"To stay right here, darling papa, till it is safe and convenient to carry Mr. Milburn home."
"Oh, folly! it will excite scandal, and be repulsive to my feelings. This loft over a former groggery is no place for you: the news will spread from Chincoteague to Arlington. Every Custis that lives will censure me and outlaw you."
"I think you had best see Mr. Tilghman before the service, papa, and have the marriage announced from the desk this morning: that will settle the excitement before night. As for staying here, my home, you know, is where he needs me. At his will I should have to stay here altogether. But I wish to do this, dear father. It is of the greatest necessity to my nature to improve my intercourse with my husband while he is sick, that the hasty marriage we made may still have its period of acquaintance and good understanding. I want to sound the possibilities of my happiness. He will be less my master now than in his strength and possession. Perhaps—" Vesta's voice fell, and she turned to gaze upon the bridegroom, whose fever still consumed his wits—"perhaps I can influence his dress,—his appearance."
"You mean the steeple top!" Judge Custis exclaimed, petulantly.
At the loud sound of this familiar word, the feverish man's ears were pierced as through some ever-open ventricle, like an old wound.
"Steeple-top! Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see I'm married.Shehears it. Oh, spare and pity her!"
He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched, yet oppressed.
"How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that nickname. In public he never appeared to flinch before it; but you see it inflicted a never-healing wound. Who has not his vulture?"
"And how unjust to pursue this man with such frivolous inhospitality so many years," Vesta exclaimed, her splendid eyes flashing. "No account has been made of his private reasons, his family piety, or his stern taste, perhaps; for he must have a reason for his wardrobe, that being, it would seem, the only thing there can be no independence about. Did you hear, papa, his feeling for me but this moment? Strangely enough, my own mind was thinking of that hat. It seems to be bigger than the very steeples of the churches: it rises between the people and worship, yes, between us and Charity, and Faith,—I had almost said Hope, too."
"The colored people all say that hat he has to wear, because the devil makes him," the trim, fawn-footed Virgie said; "Aunt Hominy says the Bad Man wouldn't let him make no mo' money if he didn't go to church in that hat. Some of the white people says so, too."
"You don't believe such foolish tales as that, Virgie?" Vesta asked.
"'Deed, I don't believe anything you say is a story, Miss Vessy. Hominy believes it. She's 'most scared out of her life about Mr. Milburn coming to the house, an' she's got all the little ones a' most crazy with fear."
"Poor, dark, ignorant soul!" Vesta said; "she is, however, more excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition."
"If he is a good man to you, Miss Vessy," the slave girl said, "I'll think the Bad Man hasn't got anything to do with him. If he treats you bad, I'll think the Bad Man has."
"Sometimes I feel as if men ought to have been left wild, like the animals," the Judge said, rinsing out Milburn's mouth with a piece of ice, "for the obstacles to liberty raised by fashion and civilization are Asiatic in their despotism. Think of the taxes we pay to fashion when we refused less to kings. Think of the aristocracy based upon dress, after we have formally extirpated it by statute! Think of the influence the boot-makers and mantua-makers of Europe, proceeding from the courts we have renounced, exert upon our Presidents and Senators, and, through the women of this country, upon all the men in the land! A million women who do not know that there are two houses of Congress, know just what bonnet the Duchess d'Angoulême is wearing, and how Charles X. in Paris ties his cravat. So the devil always gets a worm in every apple. The French Revolution abolished feudality, titles, great landed property, and only omitted to abolish fashion, and that worm—a silkworm it is—is devastating republican government everywhere, using the women to infect us."
"Yet, in the nature of woman," said Vesta, "is the love of dress as strongly as the love of woman is in man. Some righteous purpose is in it, papa,—to ornament ourselves like the birds, and let art be born."
"God knows his own mysteries," Judge Custis said. "But Vesta, go home with me to your own comfortable home, and let Virgie stay here to keep watch."
"Master, I'm afraid to stay here," the girl exclaimed, sidling towards her young mistress.
"Then I will stay, and be nurse," the Judge said. "Fear not! I will give him only wholesome medicine, whatever poison he has given me and mine. You stay in Teackle Hall, my precious child! Indeed, I must command it."
Vesta smiled sadly and pointed to her husband.
"He commands me now, papa. You were too indulgent a master, and spoiled me. No, Virgie and I will both remain, and you conciliate mamma. All is going well. Really, I am happy and grateful to my Heavenly Father that he is smoothing the way so gently, that I thought would be so hard."
"Oh, the conditions of this disease are repulsive, my child. You are a lady."
"No, I am a woman," said Vesta; "that man and I must see one or the other die. You do not know how easy it is for a woman to nurse a man. Though love might make the task more grateful, yet gratitude will do much to sweeten it. He has loved me and taken the shadow from your old age for me. Shall I leave him here to feel that I despise him? No."
She kissed her father, and gave him his cane.
"Come back this afternoon, my love," she said to him.
"Nothing on earth is like you!" exclaimed the old man. "I fear you are not mine."
"Yes," Vesta said, "you are full of good, wherever you may have strayed."
As the sound of his feet passed from the doorway below, the sick man, with a sigh as from burning fire, opened his eyes and looked around. They fell upon her picture.
"What is that?" he murmured; "I dreamed nothing like that, just now."
"It is my picture. I am here," Vesta said, bending over him. "Don't you know me?"
"Who are you, dear lady?" he breathed, with fever-weakened eye-sockets, and mind struggling up to his distended orbs, "do I know you?"
"Yes, I am Vesta—Vesta Custis, I was. I am your wife."
His eyes opened wide, as if hearing some wonderful news.
"Wife? what is that? My wife? No."
"Yes, I am Vesta Milburn, your wife."
He seemed to remember, and, with compassion for him, she stooped and kissed him.
"God bless you!" he sighed, and passed away into the Upas shades again.
At that minute the mocking-bird flew in the open window and fluttered above the lowly bed, and perched upon the headboard and began to sing:
"'Sband! 'sband! see! see! Vesty, sweet! Vesty, sweet! Ha, ha! hurrah!"
It seemed to Judge Daniel Custis as he walked abroad into the Sunday sunshine, that he had never seen a more perfect day. The leaves were turning on the great sycamore-trees, and the maples along the rise in the road wore their most delicate garments of nankeen, while some young hickories, loaded with nuts, and a high gum-tree, splendid in finery, beckoned him out their way, across the Manokin bridge to the opposite hill, where the Presbyterian church overlooked the town.
The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real relief to his circumstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to theman who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.
While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady, and listened with something between courtesy and piety.
As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some passed him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.
They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison from it.
Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel, when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:
"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"
His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of swine. His agony increased.
"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes hunting coons by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life left me to do it in, but by God's help I will try! Yes, this golden Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"
He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church, and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"
He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that might be owned and settled this day.
Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his wife—the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he loved her at all with the ardor of old times.
She had fretted his passion away in little sticklings for little proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.
Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance, her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.
"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and wonder that she is not wordly-wise."
He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this morning.
"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this day."
The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to wander along its sluices as this morn.
"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said, restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other! But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits. But I have been a truant husband, and my tongue is parched by dusty rovings in prodigal ways. Let me woo her again with all my might!"
He walked through Princess Anne, worship now having commenced in all the churches, and saw nobody upon the street except a divided group before the tavern. There he heard Jimmy Phœbus speak to Levin Dennis sharply:
"Levin, what you doin' with that nigger buyer? Ain't you got no Dennis pride left in you?"
The Judge saw that Joe Johnson, safe from civil process on Sunday, even if his enemy had not been helpless in bed, was washing Levin Dennis's brandy-sickened head under the street pump, plying the pump-handle and shampooing him with alternate hands.
"Jimmy," answered Levin, when he was free from the spout, "this gentleman's give me a job. I'm goin' to take him out for tarrapin on the Sound. He's goin' to pay me for it."
"Tarrapin-catchin' on a Sunday ain't no respectable job for a Dennis, nohow," cried Jimmy Phœbus, bluntly; "an' doin' it with a nigger buyer is a fine splurge fur you, by smoke! I can't see where your pride is, Levin, to save my life."
Jack Wonnell, wearing a bell-crown, looked on withtimid enjoyment of this plain talk, opening his mouth to grin, shutting it to shudder.
The big stranger, dropping Levin Dennis, strode in his long jack-boots, in which his coarse trousers were stuffed, right to the front of Jimmy Phœbus, and glared at him through his inflamed and unsightly eye. Jimmy met his scowl with a mildness almost amounting to contempt.
"Hark ye!" spoke the stranger, "you have been a picking a quarrel with me all yisterday, an' to-day air a beginnin' of it agin. Do you want to fight?"
"No," said Jimmy, whittling a stick; "I ain't fond of fighting, and I never do it of a Sunday. I wouldn't be guilty of fightin' you, by smoke!"
"I have tuk a bigger nug than you and nicked his kicks into the bottom of his gizzard till his liver-lights fell into my mauleys. So it's nish or knife betwixt us, my bene cove!"
He put his hand upon his hip, where he carried a sheath-knife.
"Raise that hand," said Jimmy Phœbus, with a quick pass of his whittling knife to the giant's throat. "Raise it or, by smoke! yer goes yer jugler."
As Phœbus spoke he lifted one foot, of a prodigious size, as deftly as an elephant hoisting his trunk, and kicked the man's hand from the hip pocket without moving either his own body or countenance. It was done so automatically that the other turned fiercely to see who kicked him, and his sheath-knife, partly raised, was flung by the force of the kick several yards away.
"Pick up his knife, Levin," Jimmy said, "or he'll hurt hisself with it."
At this moment Judge Custis came up and pushed the two powerful men apart.
"Fighting on Sunday in our public street," he exclaimed; "Phœbus, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"
"This yer bully, Judge," Jimmy said coolly, "started to take Prencess Anne the fust day, an' ole Meshach's Samson knocked him a sprawlin', an' Meshach hisself finished him. To-day he starts in to lead off yon poor imbecile, Levin Dennis, and, as I expresses my opinion of it, he draws his knife on me; so I takes my foot, Judge, that you have seen me untie a knot with, and I spiles his wrist with it. Take care of his knife, Levin,—he's a pore creetur without it."
"We'll have this out, nope for nope, or may I take the morning-drop!" growled the strange man.
"That kind of language ain't understood in honest company," Jimmy Phœbus said; "I s'pose it's thieves' lingo, used among your friends, or, maybe, big words you bully strangers with, when you want to cut a splurge. Now, as you've been licked by a nigger and kicked by a white man, maybe you can understand my language! Hark you, too, nigger buyer! Do you know where I saw you first?"
For the first time a flash of fire came from the pungy captain's black cherries of eyes, and his huge broad face of swarthy color expressed its full Oriental character:
"The last time I saw you, Joe Johnson, was not a-lurking in Judge Custis's kitchen fur no good, nor a-insultin' of the Judge's t'other visitor, Milburn of the steeple-top: it was a-huggin' the whippin'-post on the public green of Georgetown, State of Delaware, an' the sheriff a-layin' of it over your back; an' after he sot you up in the pillory I took the rottenest egg I could git, an' I bust it right on the eye where that nigger bruised you yisterday!"
The oppressive silence, as Joe Johnson slunk back, desperate with rage, yet unable to deny, was broken by Jack Wonnell's unthinking interjection:
"Whoop, Jimmy! Hooraw for Prencess Anne!"
"An' why did I git that egg an' make you smell it, Joe Johnson? Because, by smoke! you was a stinkin'kidnapper, robbing of the pore free niggers of their liberty, knowin' that they didn't carry no arms and couldn't make no good defense! That's your trade, an' it's the meanest an' most cowardly in the world. It's doin' what the Algerynes does in fair fighting. You're a fine American citizen, ain't you? I know your gang, and a bloody one it is, but you can't look a white man in the eye, because you're a thief and a coward!"
The Hellenic nature of the bay captain had never displayed itself to the Judge with this fulness, and he felt some natural admiration as he took Phœbus by the arm.
"Well, well!" said the Judge, "let him go now, Phœbus! Mr. Johnson, don't let me see you in Princess Anne again to-day. Continue your journey and disturb us no more, or I shall put criminal process upon you, and you see we have stout constables in Somerset."
As he led Phœbus around the corner of the bank, the Judge said:
"James, my wife is so sick that I must keep house with her this morning, and I want a little note left at the church for Mr. Tilghman. Will you take it?"
"Why, with pleasure, Judge," the nonchalant villager replied. "I don't look very handsome in the 'piscopal church, but I'll do a' arrand."
As the Judge wrote the note with his gold pencil on a leaf of his memorandum book, he said:
"James, did you identify that man yesterday?"
"Yes, I knowed him as soon as he come to the tavern. This mornin', seein' of him around town, I was afear'd Samson Hat would stumble on him, and the nigger buyer would kill him for yisterday's blow. Thinks I: 'Samson is too white a nigger to be killed that way, by smoke!' but the prejudice agin a nigger hittin' a white man is sich in this state that Joe Johnson, bloody as he is, would never have stretched hemp for Samson Hat; so I picked a quarrel with the nigger buyer to take the fight out ofhim before Samson should come. He won't fight nobody now in this town.Hishokey-pokey is doneyer."
"You took a great risk, Phœbus. He is such an evil fellow in his resentments, that I let him hide and eat in my quarters for fear of some ill requital if I refused. That gang of Patty Cannon's is the curse of the Eastern Shore."
"And if you'll pardon a younger and a porer man, Judge, it's jest sich gentlemen as you that lets it go on. You politicians give them people 'munity, an' let 'em alone because they fight fur you in 'lection times an' air popular with foresters an' pore trash, because they persecutes niggers an' treats to liquor. You know the laws is agin their actions on both sides of the Delaware line, but in Maryland they're a dead letter."
"You speak plain truth, James Phœbus, brave as your conduct. But the poor men must make a sentiment against these kidnappers, because among the ignorant poor they find their defenders and equals."
"Judge," the pungy captain said, "they'se a-makin' a pangymonum of all the destreak about Patty Cannon's. By smoke! it's a shame to liberty. In open day they lead free niggers, men, wimmin, an' little children, too, to be sold, who's free as my mommy and your daughter."
Judge Custis thought painfully of the scant freedom his daughter now enjoyed. Jimmy Phœbus continued:
"Now yer, we're raising hokey-pokey about the Algerynes and the Trypollytins capturin' of a few Christian people an' sellin' of 'em to Turkey, an' about the Turkey people makin' slaves of the Christian Greek folks. Henry Clay is cuttin' a big splurge about it. Money is bein' raised all over the country to send it to 'em. Commodo' Decatur was a big man for a-breakin' of it up. By smoke! they're sellin' more free people to death and hell along Mason and Dixon's line, than up the whole buzzum of the Mediterranean Sea."
The brown-skinned speaker was more excited now than he had been during all the collision with Joe Johnson.
"Indeed, Phœbus, they have kidnapped several thousand people, the Philadelphia abolitionists say, but the reports must be exaggerated. The demand for negroes is so great, since the cotton-gin and the foreign markets have made cotton a great staple, and the direct importation of slaves from Africa has been stopped, that there is a great run for border-state negroes, and free colored people seldom are righted when they have been pulled across the line."
"They never are righted, Judge Custis! I'm ashamed of my native state. Only a few years ago, when I was a boy, people around yer was a-freein' of their niggers, and it was understood that slavery would a-die out, an' everybody said, 'Let the evil thing go.' But niggers began to go up high; they got to be wuth eight hunderd dollars whair they wasn't wuth two hunderd; and all the politicians begun to say: 'Niggers is not fit to be free. Niggers is the bulrush, or the bulwork, or bull-something of our nation.' And then kidnapping of free niggers started, and the next thing they'll kidnap free American citizens!"
"Tut! tut! James! it will never go that far."
"Won't it? What did Joe Johnson say to me last night before the Washington Tavern? He said: 'I've sold whiter niggers than you, myself. I kin run you to market an' git my price for you!'"
The bay sailor took off his hat.
"Look at me!" he continued; "by smoke! look on my brown skin and black eyes an' coal black hair. Whair did they come from? They come from Greece, whair Leonidas an' Marky Bozarris and all them fellers came from: that's what my daddy said. He know'd better than me. I'm nothin' but a pore Eastern Shore mansailing my little vessel, but I'm a free-born man, and I tell you, Judge, it's a dangerous time when nothing but his shade of color protects a free man."
"James Phœbus," the Judge said, gravely, "I hope you believe me when I say that I think all these things outrages, and they grow out of the greater outrage of slavery itself. We are being governed by new states, hatched in the Southwest from the alligator eggs of old slavery, that had grown into political and moral disrepute with us in Maryland and Virginia."
"There's no nigger in me," Phœbus said, putting on his hat, "but I have taken these hints about my looking like a nigger to heart, and I'll take a nigger's part when he is imposed on, as if he was some of the body and blood of my Lord Jesus. Now you hear it!"
"And brave enough you are to mean it, my honest fellow. So do my errand, and good-morning, James."
As the Judge and Phœbus had turned the corner of the bank Samson Hat appeared, driving down Princess Anne's broad main street a young white girl.
"There's the nigger that set my peep in limbo," muttered the negro dealer, "but even he shall go past to-day. This accursed town is packed agin me."
He took a long look at Samson, however, who mildly returned it in the most respectful manner, as if he had never seen the strange gentleman before. "And now, my pals," Joe Johnson said, turning to Levin Dennis and Jack Wonnell, "we will all three go down to the bay and I'll pervide the lush, and pay the soap while you ketch the tarrapin, an' let me sleep my nazy off."
"I'll go an' no mistake!" cried Jack Wonnell, who had been taking a drink of pump-water out of his bell-crown. "So will you, Levin."
Levin Dennis hesitated; "I want to tell my mother first," he said, "maybe she won't like me fur to go of a Sunday. She'll send Jimmy Phœbus after me."
Joe Johnson took a bag of gold from inside his waist-band, hanging by a loop there, and held up a piece of five before the boy's bright eyes:
"Yer, kid! That's yourn if you don't have no mother about it. Pike away with me, pig widgeon, an' find your boat, and I pay you this pash at sundown."
Levin's credulous eyes shone, and with one reluctant look towards his mother's cottage he led the way into the country.
Little was said as they walked an hour or more towards the west, the stranger apparently brooding upon his indignities, and twice passing around the jug of brandy which Jack Wonnell was made to carry, and before noon they came to a considerable creek, out in which was anchored a small vessel bearing on her stern in illiterate, often inverted, letters the name:Ellenora Dennis.
"What's that glibe on yonder?" asked Johnson, pointing to the letters.
"That's his mother's name, boss," Jack Wonnell said, hitching at the stranger's breeches, "she's a widder, an' purty as a peach."
"Ain't you got no daddy, pore pap-lap?" Johnson asked coarsely.
"He's gone sence I was a baby," Levin answered; "he went on Judge Custis's uncle's privateer that never was heard of no mo'. We don't know if the British tuk him an' hanged him, or if theIdysunk somewhair an' drowned him, or if she's a-sailin' away off. I has to take care of mother."
"Humph!" growled Joe Johnson; "son of a gander and a gilflirt: purty kid, too—got the ole families into him. No better loll for me!"
Drawing a punt concealed under some marsh brush, young Levin pushed off to his vessel, made her tidy by a few changes, pulled up the jib, and brought her in to the bank.
"Mr. Johnson, I never ketched tarrapin of a Sunday befo', but I reckon tain't no harm."
"Harm? what's that?" Joe Johnson sneered. "Hark ye, boy, no funking with me now! When I begin with a kinchin cove I starts squar. If ye think it's wicked to ketch tarrapin, why, I want 'em caught. If youdon'tkeer, you kin jest stick up yer sail an' pint for Deil's Island, an' we'll make it a woyige!"
Not quite clear as to his instructions, Levin took the tiller, and Jack Wonnell superserviceably got the terrapin tongs, and stood in the bow while the cat-boat skimmed down Monie Creek before a good breeze and a lee tide. The chain dredge for terrapin was thrown over the side, but the boat made too much sail for Wonnell to take more than one or two tardy animals with his tongs, as they hovered around the transparent bottoms making ready for their winter descent into the mud.
"Take up your dredge," Johnson commanded in a few minutes. "It makes us go slow."
Jack Wonnell obediently made a few turns on the windlass, and as the bag came up, two terrapin of the then common diamond-back variety rolled on the deck, and a skilpot.
"That's enough tarrapins," Johnson said, "unless you're afraid it's doin' wrong, Levin. Say, spooney! is it wicked now?"
The boy laughed, a little pale of face, and Johnson closed his remark with:
"Nawthin' ain't wicked! Sunday is dustman's day tobe broke by heroes. D'ye s'pose yer daddy on the privateer wouldn't lick the British of a Sunday? The way to git rich, sonny, is to break all the commandments at the post, an' pick 'em up agin at the score!"
"That's the way, sho' as you're born. Whoop! Johnson, you got it right!" chuckled Jack Wonnell, not clear as to what was said.
Levin Dennis felt a little shudder pass through him, but he gave the stranger the helm, and by Wonnell's aid raised the main-sheet, and the light boat went winging across Monie Bay, starting the water-fowl as it tacked through them.
"Here's another swig all round," Joe Johnson exclaimed, "and then I'll go below to lollop an hour, for I'm bloody lush."
Levin drank again, and it took the shuddering instinct out of him, and Joe Johnson cried, as he disappeared into the little cabin:
"Ree-collect! You pint her for Deil's Island thoroughfare, and wake me, pals, at the old camp-ground, fur to dine."
The two Princess Anne neighbors felt relieved of the long man's company, and Jack Wonnell lay on his back astern and grinned at Levin as if there was a great unknown joke or coincidence between them, finally whispering:
"Where does he git all his gold?"
Levin shook his head:
"Can't tell, Jack, to save my life. Nigger tradin', I reckon. It must be payin' business, Jack."
"Best business in the world. Wish I had a little of his money, Levin. Hu-ue-oo!" giving a low shout, "then wouldn't I git my gal!"
"Who's yo' gal, Jack, for this winter?"
"You won't tell nobody, Levin?"
"No, hope I may die!"
Jack put his bell-crown up to the side of his mouth, executed another grin, winked one eye knowingly, and whispered:
"Purty yaller Roxy, Jedge Custis's gal."
"She won't have nothin' to do with you, Jack; she's too well raised."
"She ain't had yit, Levin, but I'm follerin' of her aroun'. There ain't no white gal in Princess Anne purty as them two house gals of Jedge Custis's."
"Well, what kin you do with a nigger, Jack? You never kin marry her."
"Maybe I kin buy her, Levin."
"She ain't fur sale, Jack. Jedge Custis never sells no niggers. You can't buy a nigger to save your life. When some of Jedge Custis's niggers in Accomac run away he wouldn't let people hunt for 'em."
Jack Wonnell put his bell-crown to the side of his mouth again, grinned hideously, and whispered:
"Kin you keep a secret?"
Levin nodded, yes.
"Hope a may die?"
"Hope I may die, Jack."'
"Jedge Custis is gwyn to be sold out by Meshach Milburn."
"What a lie, Jack!"
Levin let the tiller half go, and theEllenora Dennisswung round and flapped her sails as if such news had driven all the wind out of them.
"Jack," Levin exclaimed, "Jimmy Phœbus says you've turned out a reg'lar liar. Now I believe it, too."
"Hope I may die!" Jack Wonnell protested, "I never does lie: it's too hard to find lies for things when people comes an' tells you, or you kin see fur yourseff. Jimmy called me a liar fur sayin' Meshach Milburn was gone into the Jedge's front do', but we saw him come out of it, didn't we?"
"Yes, that was so; but this yer one is an awful lie."
"Well, Levin, purty yaller Roxy, she told me, an' she's too purty to tell lies. I loves that gal like peach-an'-honey, Levin, an' I don't keer whether she's white or no. She's mos' as white as me, an' a good deal better."
"So you do talk to Roxy some?"
"Levin, I'll tell you all about it, an' you won't tell nobody. Well, I picks magnoleys an' wild roses an' sich purty things fur Roxy to give her missis, an' Roxy gives me cake, an' chicken, an' coffee at the back door, knowin' I ain't got much to buy 'em with. Lord bless her! she don't half know I don't think as much of them cakes an' snacks an' warm rich coffee, as I do of her purty eyes. She's a white angel with a little coffee in her blood, but it's ole Goverment Javey an' more than half cream!"
Here Levin laughed loudly, and said that Jack must have learned that out of a book.
"Oh," said Jack, shutting one eye hard and joining in the grin, "sence I ben in love I kin say lots o' smart things like that. I have seen purty little Roxy grow up from a chile, an' as she begin to round up and git tall, says I: 'Nigger or no nigger, she's angel!' The white gals they all throwed off on me, caze I wasn't earnin' nothin', an' I sot my eyes on Roxy Custis an' I says: 'What kin I do fur to make her shine to me?' So I kept a-follerin' of her everywhere, an' I see her one day comin' along the road a-pickin' of the wild blossoms an' with her han' full of 'em, an' I says: 'Roxy, what you doin' of with them flowers?' 'They're fur my missis, Miss Vesty,' says she; 'she lives on wild flowers, an' they're all I has to give her, an' I want her to love me as much as Virgie.' You see Levin, the t'other gal, Virgie, waits on Miss Custis, an' Roxy she was a little jealous. Then I says: 'Roxy, I kin git you flowers for your missis. I know whair the magnoleys is bloomin' the whitest an' a-scentin' the whole day long.' 'Do you?'says she, 'Oh, Mr. Wonnell, I would like to have a bunch of magnoleys to put on Miss Vesty's toilet every day.' 'I'll git 'em fur you, Roxy,' says I, 'becaze I allus thought you was a little beauty.' Says she: 'I'd give most anything to surprise Miss Vesty with flowers every day,—rale wild ones!' 'Then,' says I, 'Roxy, I'll git' em fur you for a kiss!' An' she most a-blushed blood-red an' ran away."
"That's what I told you, Jack, she's raised too well to be talkin' to white fellers."
"Nobody's raised too well," rejoined Jack Wonnell, "to be deef to love and kindness. Says I to myself: 'Jack, you skeert that gal. Now say nothin' mo' about the kiss, an' go git her the flowers every day, an' she'll think mo' of you!' So away I went to King's Creek an' pulled the magnoleys, an' I come to the do' an' asked ole Hominy to bring down Roxy for a minute. Roxy she come, an' was gwyn to run away till she saw my flowers, an' she stopped a minute an' says I: 'I jest got 'em for you, Roxy, becaze I see you when you was a little chile.' She tuk 'em an' says: 'It was very kind of you, sir,' an' kercheyed an' melted away. Next day I was thar agin, Levin, an' I says, to make it seem like a trade: 'Roxy, kin ye give me a cup of coffee?' 'Law, yes!' she says, forgittin' her blushin' right away. So I kept shady on love an' put it on the groun's of coffee, an', Levin, I everlastin'ly fotched the wild flowers till that gal got to be a-lookin' fur me at the do' every day, an' I'd hide an' see her come to the window an' peep fur me. One day she says, as I was drinkin' of the coffee: 'Mr. Wonnell, what do you put yourself at sech pains fur to 'blige a pore slave girl that ain't but half white?' I thought a minute, so as to say something that wouldn't skeer her off, an' I says: 'Roxy, it's becaze I'm sech a pore, worthless feller that the white gals won't look at me!' The tears come right to her eyes, an' she says:'Mr. Wonnell, if I was white I would look at you.' 'I believe you would,' says I, 'becaze you've got a white heart, Roxy.'"
"Jack, you're a dog-gone smart lover," said Levin. "I didn't think you had no kind of sense."
"Love-makin' is the best sense of all," said Jack, "it's that sense that keeps the woods a-full of music, where the birds an' bees is twitterin' and hummin' an' a-matin'. Love is the last sense to come, after you can see, an' hear, an' feel, an' they're give to people to find out something purty to love. Love was the whole day's work in the garding of Eden befo' man got too industrious, an' it's all the work I do, an' I hope I do it well."
"Now what did Roxy tell you about Meshach Milburn and Judge Custis?"
"You see, Levin, as I kept up the flower-givin', I could see a little love start up in purty Roxy, but she didn't understand it, an' I was as keerful not to skeer it as if it had been a snow-bird hoppin' to a crumb of bread. She would talk to me about her little troubles, an' I listened keerful as her mammy, becaze little things is what wimmin lives on, an' a lady's man is only a feller patient with their little talk. The more I listened the more she liked to tell me, an' I saw that Roxy was a-thinkin' a great deal of me, Levin, without she or me lettin' of it on.
"This mornin' she came to the door with her eyes jest wiped from a-cryin'. Says I, 'Roxy, little dear, what ails you?' 'Oh, nothin',' says she, 'I can't tell you if thair is.' 'Here's your wild flowers for Miss Vesty,' says I, 'beautiful to see!' 'Oh,' says Roxy, 'Miss Vesty won't need 'em now.' Says I: 'Roxy, air you goin' to have all that trouble on your mind an' not let me carry some of it?' 'Oh, my friend,' she says, 'I must tell you, fur you have been so kind to me: don't whisper it! But my master is in debt to Meshach Milburn, an'he'smarried MissVesty, an' we think we're all gwyn to be sold or made to live with that man that wears the bad man's hat.' Says I: 'Roxy, darling, maybe I kin buy you.' 'Oh, I wish you was my master,' Roxy said. An' jest at that minute, love bein' oncommon strong over me this mornin', I took the first kiss from Roxy's mouth, an' she didn't say nothin' agin it."
Here Jack Wonnell kissed the atmosphere several times with deep unction, and ended by a low whoop and whistle, and looked at Levin Dennis with one eye shut, as if to get Levin's opinion of all this.
"Well," Levin said, "I never ain't been in love yet. I 'spect I ought to be. But mother is all I kin take keer of, and, pore soul! she's in so much trouble over me that she can't love nobody else. I git drunk, an' go off sailin' so long, an' spend my money so keerless, that if the Lord didn't look out for her maybe she'd starve."
"Yes, Levin, you likes brandy as much as I likes the gals. You go off for tarrapin, an' taters, an' oysters, an' peddles 'em aroun' Prencess Anne, an' then somebody pulls you in the grog-shops an' away goes your money, an' your mother ain't got no tea and coffee."
"Jack," said Levin, abruptly, "do you believe in ghosts?"
"I don't know, Levin. If I saw one maybe I would, but I'm too trashy for ghosts to see me."