Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered, willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.
Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of old Snow Hill in London.
Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian, which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling tide of blood; andWorcester was the name of the county, as the court and jail might tell.
Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke. Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.
"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."
"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of town before any of the white people are up to see you."
At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her husband.
"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good Lord pay you back!"
"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard, because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."
"How came you free?" Virgie asked, wistfully.
"I saved a sick gentleman's life, and he bought me for it, and gave me my freedom. See, I have a pass that tells the color of my eyes and skin, my weight, and everything. With this I can go into Delaware and the free states. I wish you had one, Miss Virgie."
"Oh, Mrs. Hudson, I dearly wish I had. Let me read it. Why, I could almost pass for you, from this description."
"Indeed you could," the housewife said; "we are not of the same age, but white people don't read a pass very careful."
"How I would love anybody that could get me such a pass!"
"I have given my word of honor that I will never lend it. Much as I like to help my color to freedom, I cannot break my word. To-morrow I have to go into Delaware with my pass to nurse a lady."
"You attend the sick, Mrs. Hudson?"
"Yes, I have a kind of call that way, Miss Virgie. Ever since I was a girl I pulled herbs and tried them on myself, and studied 'tendin' on people, watchin' their minds, that is so much of sickness, and how to wrap and rub them. My husband oysters down in the inlets. Here is his wagon."
"The Lord remember you in need, dear Mrs. Hudson."
The old wagon, an open thing, to peddle oysters and fish, was driven across the town to the south, and soon was in the open country, going towards Virginia. A smell of salt bay seemed in the air; the hawks' nests in dead trees indicated the element that subsisted everything, and the trees in the fields were often lordly in size, though sand and small oak and pine woods were seldom out of sight. As they turned into a lane near a little roadside place of worship, a young white man rode by on horseback, and, seeing Virgie, reined in and shouted,
"Purty, purty, purty as peaches and cream! Ole Virginny blood is in them eyes, by the Ensign!"
The colored man muttered, "Go 'long, Mr. Wise!"
"By the Ensign now," continued the man, who was young, but of a cadaverous countenance, "if 'tis a Maryland huzzy, she is marvellous. What's the name, angel gal?"
"She's a Miss Spence. I'm a takin' her home yer," the mulatto man interposed, hastily, and went in the gate, while the horseman, with a shout like one intoxicated, gallopped towards the north.
"I'm sorry he seen you, sho'!" the conductor said; "that's Henry A. Wise, the big lawyer from Accomac.Maybe he'll inquire at Snow Hill, where he's goin' to court."
"What house is this, Mr. Hudson?" Virgie asked, seeing at the end of the short lane a thick-set house and porch, with small farm-buildings around it.
"That's ole Spring Hill, built by the first of the Milburns; by the one that made the will leavin' his hat and nothin' else to be son. It's got brick ends. I 'spect they had money when they come here, Virgie."
The quickened mettle of the girl noticed that he had ceased to call her "Miss."
"Now," said Hudson, "I'm goin' to leave you here with my sister till I see about gittin' a boat. If you is tracked to Snow Hill, it'll be found you come out this way, now. The inlets run up along the coast yer past the Delaware line. I'm a goin' to sail you past Snow Hill agin an' double on 'em. Yes, Miss Virgie, I'll git you away if it costs all I have got together."
An excited light seemed to be in his eyes.
Virgie was put in a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.
She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features, and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back, and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.
Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher, higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting flames.
Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her, till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the kidnapper had taken away.
"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if with red-hot eyeballs.
She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.
The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the skiff, covered with the man's large coat.
It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.
A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally seemed almost to meet, as the skiff, scraping the bottom, darted through a narrow strait.
Then the stars were shining over her, and the watersgrew wide again, and, lying in a trance of flying lights and images, she thought she felt her lips kissed, and a voice say "Darling!"
Finally, she felt lifted up and carried, and, when she could realize the situation, she found herself lying on a pile of shingles at an old wharf, and the man, beside her, was weeping, as he watched the boat receding down a moonlit aisle of wave.
"My boy, my poor ole woman," she heard her conductor mutter, "I never can come back to you no mo'!"
"Why?" spoke Virgie, hardly realizing what she said.
"Because—because—youdid it!" the man exclaimed, with ardent eyes, seen through his streaming tears.
"Oh, tell me where I am!" Virgie said. "Is it far to freedom now?"
She looked at the sky, all agitated with clouds and stars moving across each other, and it seemed the nearest world of all.
"Is my father there?" thought Virgie, "my dear white father? Can he see me here, sick and lonely, and hate me?"
"We're at de Shingle landing; yonder is St. Martin's," said the negro, cautiously; "there's two roads nigh whar we air, goin' to the North, dear Virgie; one is the stage-road, and t'other is the shingle-trail through the Cypress Swamp.
"Take the road that's the safest to Freedom," Virgie sighed.
In a few moments, walking over the ground, they came to a place where the cart-trail crossed a sandy road, and went beyond it, along the edge of a small stream. The man walked a few steps up the better road undecidedly, and suddenly drew Virgie back into the bushes, but not quick enough to be unobserved by two men coming on in an old, rattling wagon.
"My skin!" cried the man driving, a youngish man,of sharp, but not unkindly eyes, "thar's a sniptious gal. Come out yer and show yourself!"
Virgie felt the man's eyes resting on her, but not with the coarse ardor of his companion, who wore a wide slouched hat and red shirt, and was bandaged around the head and throat, yet from his ghastly pale face, like death, on which some blood seemed to be smeared, and to stain the bandage at his neck, lay a coarse leer, and he kissed his mouth at her, and uttered:
"O flexuosa! esquisita!It is dainty, Sorden!"
"Now ef we was a going t'other way, Van Dorn," the driver said, "we could give them a lift. Boy, what are you out fur? Where's your passes?"
"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."
"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same woman! where did you get this pass?"
"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."
His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,
"I love him as I never loved A male!"
"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon started south.
"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy Hudson for assisting a runaway!"
"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only road!"
He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the swampy branch.
"What have you done?" cried Virgie.
"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."
With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the reptile.
Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal dream.
The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each insist upon the last word to say:
"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't!" "You did, you did!"
Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born, had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night, till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan disputing for her soul.
As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!" groaned back.
"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"
She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"
The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.
He stared at her in wonder, but too wistfully. The cat-briers hung across the opening, and grapevines, like cables of sunken ships, fell many a fathom through the crystal waves of night; but the North Star seemed to find a way to peep through everything, and Virgie heard the words from Hudson, once, of—
"Jess over this branch a bit we is in Delaware!"
Then the crickets and tree-frogs, the bullfrogs and the whippoorwills, the owls and everything, seemed to drown his voice and halloo for hours, "We is in Delaware! we is, we is! we is in Del-a-a-ware!"
A little warming, kindly light at length began to blaze their trail along, as if some gentle predecessor, with a golden adze, had chipped the funereal trees and made them smile a welcome. Small fires were burning in the vegetable mould or surface brush, and the opacity of the forest yielded to the pretty flame which danced and almost sang in a household crackle, like a young girl in love humming tunes as she kindles a fire.
The mighty swamp now grew distinct, yet more inaccessible, as its inner edges seemed transparent in the line of fires, like curtains of lace against the midnight window-panes. The Virginia creeper, light as the flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers in bed.
Suddenly the man took Virgie up and carried her through a stream of running water, brown with the tannin matter of the swamp.
"We is in Delaware," he said, soon after, as they reached a camp of shingle sawyers, all deserted, and lighted by the fire, the golden chips strewn around, and the sawdust, like Indian meal, that suggested good, warm pone at Teackle Hall to Virgie.
She put her feet, soaked with swamp water, at a burning log to warm, and hardly saw a mocasson snake glide round the fire and stop, as if to dart at her, and glide away; for Virgie's mind was attributing this kindly fire to the presence of Freedom.
"Oh, I should like to lie here and go to sleep," she said, languidly; "I am so tired."
The man Hudson, wringing wet with the journey's difficulties, threw his arms around her and drew her to his damp yet fiery breast.
"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!"
The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her guide was drunken with passion.
She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a maniac's hands.
"I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuatedruffian sighed; "you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!"
A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her dying strength to preserve her modesty.
"Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!"
"My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it."
"Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever, though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done."
"Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states together and live for each other. Kiss me!"
He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen braids of her silky hair.
The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them.
"Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you."
As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke. The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed,
"It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!"
He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path.
They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning earth dodged and chased each other.
"Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must love me or we'll die together."
He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead of them.
Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn.
Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains were in her legs and feet, but she could walk.
"Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought.
A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked, burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water.
"Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to repent and be a better man."
He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and hideous to see.
"Merciful Lord!" exclaimed Virgie; "what ails you, pore man?"
"The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you must lead me now; I am gone blind."
"Can you walk, Hudson?" asked Virgie, when her horror would permit.
"Yes, child, I can walk, I reckon; but both my eyes is burned out. Oh, my pore old wife: she could nurse me so well. I have lost her."
The girl comforted the sightless man, and led him on, indifferent to danger. He waded the deep places, where the water soothed his wounds and filled his blistered sockets with cool mud.
"Blessed is the pure in heart," he murmured, as they reached some sandy ground and sank down. "You, Virgie, can see God; I never can."
The great Cypress Swamp of Delaware—counterpart of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia—the northern border of which they had now reached, had probably been once a great inlet or shallow bay in the encroaching sand-bar of the peninsula, and was filled with oysters and fish, which in time were imprisoned and became the manure of a cypress forest that soon started up when springs of water flowed under the sand and moistened the seed; and for ages these forests had been growing, and had been prostrated, and had dropped their leaves and branches in the great inlet's bed, until a deep ligneous mass of combustible stuff raised higher and higher the level of the swamp, and, dried with ages more of time than dried the mummies of the Pharaohs, it often opened tunnels to burrowing fire, which at some point of its course belched forth and lighted the hollow trees, and raged for weeks. Such a fire they had come through.
Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a little cart and ox.
"Are you a colored boy?" Virgie asked.
"No," answered the boy, proudly. "I'm Indian-river Indian; reckon I'm alittlenigger."
"Take this poor man in and I will pay you. Where are you going?"
"To Dagsborough landing, for salt."
"Leave me at Dagsborough, at the old Clayton house," spoke up the blind man; "it's empty. I can die thar or git a doctor."
Before the people were up they entered a little hamlet, on that stage road from which they had made the night's detour, and saw a few small houses and a little shingle-boarded church near by among the woods, and one large house of a deserted appearance was at the town's extremity. The man said, "This is John M. Clayton's birthplace: my wife used to work yer."
"Virgie!" exclaimed a familiar voice.
The girl turned, her ears still ringing with the echoes of the swamp, and saw a face she knew, and ran to the breast beneath it, crying,
"Samson Hat! Oh, friend, love me like my mother. I am very ill."
"Pore, darlin' child," Samson said; "no love will I ever bodder you wid agin but a father's. Why air you so fur from home?"
"I'm sold, Samson: I'm trying to get free. The kidnappers is after me. Oh, save me!"
"I've jist got away from 'em, Virgie. The ole woman, Patty Cannon, set me free. I promised her I would kidnap somebody younger dan ole Samson. Bless de Lord! I come dis way!"
He led her into the oak-trees of the old church grove, where English worship had been celebrated just a hundred years; and she gave him money to buy medicineand get a doctor for the blind man, and to purchase her a shawl at the store. Then Virgie sank into a fevered sleep under the old oak-trees, and, when she knew more, was gliding in a boat that Samson was sailing down a broad piece of water, and her head was in his lap.
"You air pure as an angel yit, my little creatur," Samson said; "and now I'm a-takin' you down the Indian River into Rehoboth Bay; and arter dark I'll git you up the beach to Cape Hinlopen, and maybe I kin buy you a passage on some of dem stone boats dat's buildin' de new breakwater dar, and dat goes back to de Norf."
"Oh, Samson, if I could love any man it would be you," Virgie said; "but I cannot love any now except my dear white father. Who is he?"
"De Lord, I reckon, has got yo' pedigree, Virgie."
"Am I dying, Samson?" asked the girl, wistfully, with her brilliant eyes full of fever. "Oh, friend, let me die so good that Miss Vesty and my father can come and kiss me!"
"Tell me about Princess Anne an' my dear old Marster Meshach Milburn, dat I'se leff so long, Virgie!" the old pugilist said, wiping his eyes of tears.
She began to try to remember, but faces and events ran into each other, and she felt aware that her mind was wandering, but could not bring it back; and so the boat, sailing in sight of the ocean and the stately ships there, grounded after noon almost within sound of the surf.
Sheltered in a piece of woods for some hours, Virgie found herself, at dark, carried in old Samson's arms up a beach of the sea where the sand was yielding and seldom firm, except at the very edge of the surf, which rolled ominously and at times became a roar, and often swept to the low, sedgy bank. Lightning played across the black sea, lifting it up, as it seemed, and showing vessels making either out or in, and finally thunder burst upon the gathering confusion, and Samson said:
"Dar's a gun in dat thunder!"
The next flash of lightning showed a vessel close to the shore, coming rapidly in on the southeaster, and her gun was fired again, and feeble hailing was heard; but the storm now broke all at once, and a wave threw Samson to the ground and nearly carried Virgie back with it to the boiling sea; but the faithful old man fought for her, and she ran at his side, uttering no complaint, till once, as they stopped to get breath, and the heavenly fire drew into sight every foot, as it seemed, of that vast ocean, cannonading it also with majestic artillery, the girl sighed,
"Freedom is beautiful!"
"Oh, Virgie," Samson answered, covering her with his own coat, "if I could buy you free, pore chile, I'd a-mos' go into slavery to save you from dis night."
"I can die in there," Virgie said, pointing to the waves; "they must not catch me."
A wail came out of the storm, so close before that it hushed them both, and the lightning lifted upon their eyes a stranding vessel, so close, it seemed, that they could touch it, and she was full of people, hallooing, but not in any intelligible tongue.
As the black night fell upon this magic-lantern sketch they heard a crash of wave and wood, and falling spars and awful shrieks, and, when the next vivid flash of lightning came, nothing was visible but floating substance, and spluttering cries came out of the bosom of the sea, and a black man, flung, as if out of a cannon, upon a wave that drenched these wanderers, struck the ground at their feet, and looked into Samson's eyes as the convulsion of death seized his chest and feet.
Before they could speak to each other, the beach was full of similar corpses, a moment before alive as themselves, and every one was naked and black.
"It's a slave-ship, foundered yer," cried Samson.
He caught at a yawl-boat driving past him, in the manythings that drifted around their feet, and Virgie saw painted upon its bow the word "Ida."
"Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again, and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and shipwrecked."
When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like little twigs in amber.
Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side, peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in life.
"Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father. Father, do love me before I die!"
She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till she, too, lost her knowledge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old man at her side to say,
"Samson, why cannot these angels sing?"
The old man looked up and faintly smiled:
"Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and swans. Dey can't sing like angels."
"Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"
"Jesus, maybe," the negro answered, looking at her, his eyes full of tears.
The great Breakwater, which required forty years andnearly a million tons of stone to build it, was then just commencing, and where it was to be, within the shallow bight of Henlopen, they saw the wrecks of many vessels, some sunken, some shattered in collision, some stranded in the marsh, proving the needs of commerce for such a work, and also the fury of the storm that had so innocently vanished, like a sleeping tiger after his bloody meal.
In the gentle sunshine floated the American flag upon several vessels there—the flag that first kissed the breeze upon that spot in the year 1776, when Esek Hopkins raised over theAlfredthe dyes of the peach and cream in the centre of his little squadron. And there, along the low bluff of the Kill, still lay the shingle-boarded town of Lewes, in the torpor of nearly two hundred years, or since the Dutch De Vries had settled it in 1631. Lord Delaware, Argall, and the Swede, Penn, Blackbeard, Paul Jones, Lord Rodney, a thousand heroes, had known it well; the pilots, like sea-gulls, had their nests there; the Marylanders had invaded it, the Tories had seized it, pirates had been suckled there; and now the courts and lawyers had forsaken it, to go inland to Georgetown.
"Virgie," said Samson, "I'll try to buy some of de stone-boat captains to carry you to Phildelfy."
He waded the Kill, carrying her, and left her in an old Presbyterian church at the skirt of Lewes, and procured medicine for her, and then labored in vain nearly all day to get her passage to a free state. The reply was invariable: "Can't take the risk of the whippin'-post and pillory for no nigger. Can't lose a long job like bringin' stone to the Breakwater to save one nigger."
At the hotel a colored man beckoned Samson aside—a fine-looking man, of a gingerbread color—and they went into the little old disused court-house, in the middle of a street, where there was a fire.
"Brother," said the stranger, "I see by your actionsthat you're trying to git a passage North. Is it fur yourself?"
"No," Samson said, taking an inventory of the other's fine chest and strength, and mentally wishing to have a chance at him; "I'm a free man, and kin go anywhere; but I have a friend."
"Why, old man," spoke the other, frankly, "I'm the agent of our society at this pint."
"What is it?" asked Samson, warily.
"The Protection Society. They educated me right yer. I went to school with white boys. Now, where is your friend?"
"What kin you do fur her?" asked Samson.
"It's a gal, is it? Why, I can just put her in my buggy, made and provided for the purpose, and drive her to the Quaker settlement."
"Where's that?"
"Camden—only thirty miles off. I've got free passes all made out. Give yourself, brother, no more concern."
Samson looked at the handsome person long and well. The man stood the gaze modestly.
"Oh, if I had some knowledge!" spoke Samson; "I might as well be a slave if I know nothin'. I can't read. I wish I could read your heart!"
"I wish you could," said the man; "then you would trust me."
"What is your name?"
"Samuel Ogg."
"I want you to hold up your hand and swear, Sam Ogg, that you will never harm the pore chile I bring you. Say, 'Lord, let my body rot alive, an' no man pity me, if I don't act right by her.'"
"It's a severe oath," said the stranger, "but I see your kind interest in the lady. Indeed, I'm only doing my duty."
He repeated the words, however, and Samson added,"God deal with you, Sam Ogg, as you keep dat oath. Now come with me!"
The girl was found asleep, but delirious, her large eyes, in which the blue and brown tints met in a kind of lake color, being wide open, and almost lost in their long lashes, while flood and fire, sun and frost, had beaten upon the slender encasement of her gentle life, that still kept time like some Parian clock saved from a conflagration, in whose crystal pane the golden pendulum still moves, though the hands point astray in the mutilated face.
Her teeth were shown through the loving lips she parted in her stormy dreams, like waves tossing the alabaster sails of the nautilus, or like some ear of Indian corn exposed in the gale that blows across the tasselled field.
Her raiment, partly torn from her, showed her supple figure and neck, and, beneath her mass of silky hair, her white arm, like an ivory serpent, sustained her head, her handsome feet being fine and high-bred, like the soul that bounded in her maiden ambition.
There had been days when such as she called Antony away from his wife, and Cæsar from his classical selfishness; when on many an Eastern throne such beauty as this stirred to murmurous glory armies beyond compute, and clashed the cymbals of prodigious conquests. She lay upon the altar-cushions of the church, like young Isaac upon his father's altar, and where the mourners knelt to pray for God's reconcilement, the cruelty of their law flashed over her like Abraham's superstitious knife.
Priceless was this young creature, in noble hands, as wife or daughter, human food or fair divinity, and all the precious mysteries of woman awake in her to love and conjugality, like song and seed in the spring bird; yet a hard, steely prejudice had shut her out from every institution and equality, let every crime be perpetrated upon her, made the scent of freedom in her nostrils worse thanthe incentive of the thief, and has outlasted her half a century, and is self-righteous and inflexible yet.
In that old churchyard that enclosed her slept revolutionary officers, who helped to gain freedom: they might be willing to rise with her, not to be buried in the same enclosure.
How small is religion, how false democracy, how far off are the judgments of heaven! There stood over the pulpit an inscription, itself presumptuous with aristocracy, saying, "The dead in Christ shall rise first;" as if those truly dead in the humility of Christ would not prefer to rise last!
Samson watched his new friend narrowly, whose countenance was profoundly piteous, and his teeth and lip made a "Tut-tut!" Satisfied with the man, Samson knelt by Virgie and kissed her once.
"Pore rose of slavery," said Samson, "forgive me dat I courted you like a gal, instead of like an angel. I am old, and ashamed of myself. Dear, draggled flower, we may never meet agin. May the Lord, if dis is his holy temple, save you pure and find you a home, Virgie. Good-bye!"
"Come," said the man, as Samson sat bowed and weeping, "the buggy is ready; I'll wrap you warm, Miss."
"Freedom!" spoke the girl, awakening; "oh, I must find it."
The next that Virgie knew, she was in a cabin loft, and voices were heard speaking in a room below.
"See me!" said one; "we sell you, dat's sho'! See me now! You make de best of it. Sam Ogg yer, we sold twenty-two times. Sam will be sold wid you and teach yo' de Murrell game."
"Politely, gentlemen," said a feminine voice; "I don't know that I have the nerve for it. My occupation hasbeen marrying them. It is true that the hue-and-cry has made that branch dull, but I had great talent for it."
"Kidnapping," said a third voice, "is running low. It surrounds the whole slave belt from Illinois to Delaware. The laws of Illinois were made in our interests till Governor Harrison, whose free man was kidnapped, raised an excitement out there six years ago. Newt Wright, Joe O'Neal, and Abe Thomas were the smartest kidnappers along the Kentucky line. But Joe Johnson, who is getting ready to go south, will be the last man of enterprise in the business. John A. Murrell's idea is to divide fair with black men, sell and steal them back, and I think it is sagacious. It's safer, any way, than Patty Cannon's other plan."
"What is that, Mr. Ogg?" said the feminine-voiced negro.
"Making away with the negro-traders, they say."
"See me! see me!" exclaimed the first voice. "Dey'll hang her some day fur dat."
"Now," resumed Mr. Ogg, "a man of intelligence like you and me, Mr. Ransom—pardon, sir, does your shackle incommode you? I'll stuff it with some wool—"
"Politely, Mr. Ogg; I'm ironed rather too tight."
"I say, Mr. Ransom, you and I can always play the average slaveholder for a fool. Why, I hardly get into any family before I make love to some member of it, and if I don't vamose with a black wench, it's with her mistress."
"Ah, Mr. Ogg, they are perfectly fiendish in resentingthat!"
"Of course, but there's a grand tit-for-tat going through all nature. Why, sir, the pleasures of the far South, to a man of art and enterprise like you, far exceed this poor, plain region. Take the roof off slavery and the blacks have rather the best of it; the whites would think so if they could see what is going on."
"Politely, Mr. Ogg; will not the entire institution some day blow itself out, like one of their Western steamboats?"
"No doubt of it, Mr. Ransom. When we have disposed of you, and you can see the country for yourself, observe how sensitive slaveholding is! A thousand anxieties lie in it. They believe in insurrections, rapes, and incendiaries. A perfect sleep they hardly know, but go prowling around night and day, driven by their suspicions. It makes them warlike, yet unhappy, and the slaves eat the ground poor. Besides, they have terrible enemies in the negro-traders, whom they look down on socially, and really drive them into sympathy with the negroes. Mr. Murrell, for instance, has a grand plan for a slave insurrection. He says white society is all against him, and he'll get even with it."
"See me, see me!" hoarsely chimed in another voice. "Slavery is bad scared, sho'! Joe Leonard Smith, Catholic, over on de western sho', has jess set twelve niggers free. Governor Charley Ridgely has set two hundred and fifty free. John Randolph, dey say, is gwyn to set more dan three hundred free. Dar's fifty abolition societies in Nawf Carolina, eleven in Maryland, eight in ole Virginny, two in Delaware. Ho, ho! dey set' em free and we'll steal' em back! Ole Derrick Molleston will never be out of pork an' money!"
"Politely, gentlemen," said the individual with the shackle. "Have you heard of the incendiary proclamation issued in Boston by David Walker, telling all slaves that it is their religious duty to rise?"
"Yes, and rise they will, but to what end? It will be a big scare, but no war. The next thing they will stop reading among all slaves, prevent emancipation by law, and watch the colored meeting-houses. The fire will be buried under the amount of the fuel, yet all be there."[6]
"Mr. Ogg, your experience is remarkable. And you have been sold and run away in nearly every slave state? Politely, sir, are they not kidnapping white men, too? Who is this Morgan that was stolen last year in the State of New York?"
"Oh, that's a renegade Free Mason, Mr. Ransom. As much fuss is made over him as if we did not steal a hundred free people every day. It only shows that kidnapping of all sorts is getting to be unpopular. If a new political party can be made on stealing one white Morgan, don't you think another party will some day rise on stealing several millions of black Morgans?"
"See me! see me!" exclaimed the hoarse voice, suddenly.
"Escaping, are you?" cried the second voice.
"Politely, gentlemen, politely!" was heard from the third voice, some distance off in the dark, and then chasing footsteps followed, and Virgie arose and peeped below.
A fire was burning in a clay chimney beside a table, on which were meat and liquor. The girl swung herself out of the loft to the ground-floor, and, seizing the meat and bread, rushed noiselessly into the night.
She hardly knew what she was doing until she had crossed a bridge and come to the edge of a small town, around which she took a road to the right that led into another country road, and this she followed a mile or more, till she saw a small brick house, by a stile and pole-well, in the edge of woods.
The light from a little dormer-window in the garret beamed so brightly that it charmed Virgie's soul with the fascination of warmth and home, and, without thinking, she crossed the stile, bathed her hot temples at the well, and walked into the kitchen before the fire.
"Freedom!" said Virgie, wanderingly; "have I come to it?" She fell upon the rag carpet before the fire, saying, "Father, dear father," and did not move.
"Well," spoke a man of large paunch and black snake's eyes, sitting there, "it's not often people in search of freedom walk into Devil Jim Clark's!"
"She is white," exclaimed a woman, looking compassionately upon the stranger, "and she is dying."
"No," retorted the man, "she is too pretty to be white. This is the bright wench Sam Ogg was seen with. She belongs to Allan McLane, and there's a reward of five hundred dollars for her, but she'll bring two thousand in New Orleans for a mistress."
"Hush!" said the woman; "you may bring a judgment upon your daughters."
"Joe Johnson is about to sail," remarked Devil Jim Clark; "he shall take her with him."
The girl had heardthatname through the thick chambers of oblivion. She rose and shrieked, and rushed into the woman's arms:
"Save me, mother, save me from that man!"
The woman's heart was pierced by the cry, and she folded Virgie to her breast and kissed her, saying:
"She shall sleep in our daughter's bed and rest her poor feet this night—our daughter, James, that we buried."
The man's mouth puckered a little; he looked uneasy, and drew his handkerchief to his eyes.
"You're all agin me! you're all agin me!" he bellowed, and rushed from the room.
The wife of Devil Jim Clark was a pious Methodist, and, with her rich-eyed daughter, spent the next day at Virgie's bedside, hearing her broken mutterings for fatherly love and Vesta's cherished remembrance.
"Your father is out for mischief," Mrs. Clark said. "Jump on your saddle-horse, my daughter, and ride to the Widow Brinkley's, just over the Camden line. Tell her to send for this girl."
"Mamma, they say she's an abolitionist."
"That's what I send you for. It's a race between you and your father. Be with me or with him!"
The girl tied on her hood, took her riding-whip, and departed.
In an hour she returned with a tidy black woman, whom Mrs. Clark took into Virgie's chamber.
"My heart bleeds for this poor girl," the hostess said. "They say your son spirits negroes North. Mr. Clark says so. I do not ask you if it is true, but, as one mother to another, I give you this girl. She is too white to be sold. She looks like a dead child of mine."
"Bill is not due home till sunset. If she is alive by that time, he has just time to drive her to Mr. Zeke Hunn's vessel at the mouth of the creek, which lies there every trip one hour—"
"To let runaways come aboard?"
"I have never been accused of helping them, Mrs. Clark."
The trader's wife slipped a bank-bill into the colored woman's hand.
"Lend to the Lord!" she said. "I depend upon you to save us the sin of selling this girl."
There came to the little black house that lurked by the woods two riding-horses, and stopped at the stile.
"Wait here!" said the voice of Devil Jim Clark. "Will you take her if she is still delirious?"
"Bingavast! Why not? I'm delirious myself, Jim, fur it's my wedding-night. I'll rest her at Punch Hall."
The herculean ruffian coolly proceeded to prepare some saddle-ropes to tie his victim before him on his horse. He was interrupted by a woman:
"Come and see your work, Joe Johnson!"
Following up the short cupboard stairs, the kidnapper was pointed to an object on the bed, with peaked faceand sharpened feet, as it lay white as lime, with eyelashes folded and the arms drawn to its sides.
"Take her to Patty Cannon now," said Mrs. Clark, "who is only fit for dead company."
"The dell dead and undocked?" the ruffian exclaimed, slightly shrinking from the body; "maybe she's counterfeited the cranke. I'll search her cly. But, hark!"
A wagon and hoofs were heard.
"Joe," whispered the woman's husband, "you're only four mile from Dover. Maybe it's warrants for both of us?"
"Hike, then!" hissed the pallid murderer; "the world's agin me," and he slipped away with his companion.
"Now, Bill Brinkley," the wife of Devil Jim whispered, as a tall, ingenuous-looking colored boy came in the room, "you are just in time. She has had laudanum enough to keep her still; my daughter powdered her; let me kiss her once before she goes."
As the woman departed, the black boy, looking around him, muttered:
"Whar is dat loft? I've hearn about it."
Some movements overhead in the low dwelling directed his attention to a small trap-door, and, standing on a stool, he unbolted it and pushed it upwards, whispering,
"Any passengers for Philadelfy? De gangplank's bein' pulled in!"
First a woolly head, then another, and next two pairs of legs appeared above.
"Take hold yer and carry de sick woman to de dearborn," the boy said, not a particle disturbed, as two frightened blacks dropped from the loft, with handcuffs upon them.
In the clear evening a wagon sped along towards the east, through the saffron marshes, tramping down thestickweed and ironweed and the golden rod, and, while the people in it cowered close, the negro driver sang, as carelessly as if he was the lord of the country:
"De people of TuckyhoeDey is so lazy an' loose,Dey sows no buttons upon deir clothes,And goes widout deir use;So nature she gib dem buttons,To grow right outen deir hides,Dat dey may take life easy,And buy no buttons besides."But de people of TuckyhoeRefuse to button deir warts,Unless dey's paid a salaryFor practisin' of sech arts;Like de militia sogers,Dat runs to buttons an' pay,De folks is truly shifless,On Tuckyhoe side of de bay."
A sail was seen in the starlight, rising out of the marshes at an old landing in the last elbow of Jones's Creek, and hardly had the fugitives been put on board when the anchor was weighed and the packet stood out for the broad Delaware, her captain a negro, her owner a Quaker.
The girl was awakened by the cold air of the bay striking her face.
"Freedom!" she murmured; "it must be this. Oh, I am faint for father's arms to take me."
Was this Teackle Hall that Virgie looked upon—a square, bright room, and her bed beside a window, and below her stretching streets of cobblestone and brick, and roofs of houses, to green marshes filled with cows, and a river that seemed blue as heaven, which sipped it from above like a boy drinking head downward in a spring? How beautiful! It must be freedom, Virgie thought, butwhy was she so cold? Her eyes, looking around the room, fell upon a lady in a cap, reading a tract to a large, shaven, square-jawed man, and this woman was of a silver kind of beauty, as if her mind had overflowed into her heart, and, not affecting it, had made her face of argent and lily, milk and sheen.
"What sayeth Brother Elias, Lucretia?"
"He sayeth, Thomas: 'This noble testimony, of refusing to partake of the spoils of oppression, lies with the dearly beloved young people of this day. We can look for but little from the aged, who have been accustomed to these things, like second nature. Without justice there can be no virtue. Oh, justice, justice, how art thou abused everywhere! Men make justice, like a nose of wax, to satisfy their desires. If the soul is possessed of love, there is quietness.'"
"Yes," said the girl, from the bed, thinking aloud; "love is quietness. Will father come!"
She dreamed and heard and looked forth again upon the hill descending to the river, the stately sails, the farther shore, so like her native region, and asked with her eyes what land they might be in.
"Wilmington," said the beautiful woman. "This is the house of Thomas Garrett, the friend of slaves. When you can be moved, it shall be to the green hills of the Brandywine, where all are free."
"Hills? What are they?" mused Virgie, looking at her wasted hand. "Must I climb any more? Must I wade the swamps again? I know I have a father somewhere."
She dreamed and wept unconsciously, and told of many things at Teackle Hall, being, indeed, a little child again, playing with her little mistress, Vesta. The stars stood in the sky right over her pillow, and she talked to them, and some she seemed to know, as little Vince, or little Roxy, or Master Willy Tilghman, all playmates of herchildhood; but ever and anon these vanished, and the young Quaker woman was reading again from the sermons of Elias Hicks, and the words were: "Love is quietness;" "Light only can qualify the soul;" "If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you."
"What Comforter?" sighed Virgie, and there seemed a great blank, and then she heard a scream—was it she that screamed so?—and she was trying with all her might to get somewhere, and was fainting in the labor, but trying again and again, and then a calmness that was like gentle awe, strange because so painless, spread into her nature, and she only listened.
"My daughter," said a voice, "my own child! Call me 'father,' and say I am forgiven."
"Father! forgiven!" she murmured, and felt a warm face, that yet could not warm her own, shedding tears and kissing her, and close to it her arms were thrown tight, as if she never could let go, and everything was music, but wonderful.
She feared she must fall if she did not hold to him. Who was it that called her "daughter"? Why came those cold stars so close, as if to spy upon him?
Oh, holy purity, that held so fast and did not know, but trusted nature's quivering embrace! She wrestled with something, like a rock of ice, to move her eyes and see, or ere she was dashed down forever, the eyes that gushed for her. They were her master's.
"Master," she said, "whose am I?"
"Mine before God. Pure to my heart as your white sister, Vesta! White as young love, in fondness and trust forever!"
"And mother?" gurgled the girl's low notes; "where is she?"
"Yonder," said the Judge, "in Heaven, that will judge me, whither she winged in bearing thee to me!"
A happy light came over Virgie's face. She kissedher father twice, as if the second kiss was meant for her happier sister, and, raising her arms towards the sky he pointed to, whispered, "Freedom!" and died upon his breast.
Owen Daw brought the news of the repulse from Cowgill House and the wounding of Captain Van Dorn.
"Where is the little tacker, Levin?" asked Patty Cannon, furiously.
"Arrested, I 'spect," cried O'Day, boldly; "Van Dorn's hit in the throat."
"He'll not talk much, then," muttered the woman; "his time had to come. Where will I find another lover at my age? Why, honey," she chuckled to herself, in a looking-glass, "that son of his'n may come back. He's took a shine to Huldy: why not to me?"
At the idea another hideous thought came to her mind: to settle Hulda's fate in her young lover's absence, and monopolize the corrupting power over Levin Dennis, if he ever lived to see Johnson's Cross-roads again.
As individual fugitives returned, confirming the decisive repulse of the band, Patty Cannon's face grew dark, and her oaths low and deep; Cyrus James heard her say:
"If I could only hang some one for this! Joe Johnson's the white-livered sneak that would not go. I've hanged a better son-in-law."
"Aunt Patty, I love your grandchild, Huldy," Cy James ventured to say. "The Captain's wounded and Joe's going away to Floridy. Maybe I kin git you up another band."
Without an instant's consideration of this ambitiousproposition, Mrs. Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar, into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry her yet."
With this reflection Mr. James hid himself for the remainder of the afternoon in some secluded part of the Hotel Johnson.
Mrs. Cannon, however, had instantly resumed her monologue on business.
"They all think to give the old woman the go-by: a sick man's no good, and there's that wife of Van Dorn's hopin' to git him yit. By God! she sha'n't have him in his shroud. No; I'll recruit from young material. Ruin 'em when they's boys, and, while you kin pet 'em, they'll do your work! I have one nigger in the garret Joe wants to burn: he's my nigger, and I'll let him loose to bring me more niggers. Money is what I need to put on a bold front: Huldy must fetch it!"
With this resolution Patty Cannon mounted the stairs to a room on the second floor, and, without knocking, pushed her way in.
A man of a voluptuous form and face, like one overfed, yet on the best, and with stiff, military shoulders, and of colors warm in tint, yet cold in expression, blue eyes, and rich, wine-lined cheeks and lips, that still seemed hard and self-indulged, spoke up at once:
"Always knock, Patty! it's more conservative. My way in life is to reach my point, but respect all the forms. What do you want?"
"When do you leave for Baltimore, Cunnil McLane?"
"As soon as Joe returns with my dear sister's property: to-morrow, I hope."
"You can take Huldy Bruington if you pay my price for her: two thousand dollars down. If you won't give it, she shall be married to some young kidnapper, whowill fetch twice that pile for her in niggers. They'll all fight their weight in black wildcats to git her."
"Very, very abrupt proposition, Patty; not conservative at all. What's the matter with you, dame, to-day. Van Dorn not lucky, heigh?"
He gave her a vitreous smile and watched her over his round paunch, on which a crystal watch-seal hung, like a more human eye than his own. Her color began to rise.
"I'm mad," said Patty Cannon; "don't worry me; don't Jew me! Do you mind? Yes, Van Dorn has been whipped—by niggers, too. Will you pay my price or not?"
"Tut, tut, good woman! What can I want with a white girl. It wouldn't look conservative at all in Baltimore."
Patty Cannon stamped her foot.
"Don't rouse me with any of your hypocritical cant, Cunnil McLane! What have you been teachin' that child to read an' write fur—out of your Bible, too? What do you bring her presents fur, and hang around us when we know you despise us all, except fur the black folks we can sell you cheap? Haven't I been sold to men like you time and again before I was a woman, and don't I know the sneaking pains that old men take to look benevolent when youth an' beauty is fur sale; and how they pet it to keep it pure fur their own selfish enjoyment? God knows I do!"
"Patty, you shock me!" the rubicund gentleman observed. "I have always found you conservative before. Now, go and send sweet Hulda here, and, for Heaven's sake, Patty, don't reveal this bargain to her."
"Is it a bargain, Cunnil?"
"It is, if she can be made willing to it."
"That she shall, or make her bed in the forest, where good looks are not safe around yer."
Hulda was found at a window, looking out upon herformer home, and at a ploughman who had nearly completed the furrows in a large field, sparing only some low places piled with brush, over one of which some buzzards circled, lofty, yet intent as anglers watching their tackle. Hard as that home had been to Hulda, she regretted leaving it for this men's tavern, where her grandmother's saucy temperament found so many incentives to bravado, and her caution, that had to be exercised in Delaware, was quite unnecessary on the Maryland side of the line.
At the little hip-roofed white cottage Hulda had felt a sense of privacy pleasing to her growing life, and her ability to read often charmed Patty Cannon to a stillness that was like the hyena's sleep, and even made her acquiescent and cordial.
But where she met men alone, unmodified by modest women's example, the bold tendency of Patty was to out-do men, and lead them on to audacities they would have feared to follow in but for her courage and policy; for she could coax either young or coarse natures, as well as she could drive.
These feats of strength and cunning, statecraft and desperation, reminded Hulda of a book she had read about the Norman knights in England kidnapping and robbing the poor Saxons; and one description of King William the Conqueror suggested to Hulda that he was perhaps a Patty Cannon in his times, as his body and legs were short and powerful, like hers, and he could bend a bow riding on horseback that no other knight could bend on foot with the legs planted firmly. He could not read nor write, and was superstitious, yet cruel as the grave. All this was true of Patty Cannon, whose feat of standing in a bushel measure and putting three hundred pounds of grain on her shoulder has been related.
She often wrestled and bound, without assistance, strong black men fighting for their liberties. She could ridehorseback, sitting like men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel.
Hulda was dressed in her best clothes, her hair was tied in wide braids, her fine features and large, tender, yet seeking, gray eyes, never had been turned on Patty Cannon so directly.
Her grandmother abandoned in a moment an attempt to be complaisant, and sternly ordered her to attend to Colonel McLane's chamber.
"I can support you no longer, huzzy," said the dark-eyed woman, her cheeks full of blood. "Make haste to find some easy life or Joe shall get you a husband. We are ruined. You must make money, do you hear!"
"Here is money, grandma!" said Hulda, producing some of the shillings of 1815.
At the first glance of these Patty Cannon turned pale, but, in an instant, the hot blood rushed to her face again, and she swore a dreadful oath and chased Hulda, with uplifted hands, into the chamber of Allan McLane.
"Ah, Hulda, inflaming your poor grandmother again!" said that carefully clad and game-fed gentleman. "Now, now, lovely girl, it's not conservative. Honor thy father and mother, and grandmother, of course; didn't I teach you that?"
"What is it to be conservative?" Hulda asked, sitting before the fire, while the Colonel ran over her straight feet and tall, willowy figure, and stopped, a little chilled by her clear, dewy eyes.
"Conservative? why, it's never to rush on anything; to oppose rushing; to—to be a bulwark against innovations. To prefer something you have tried, and know."
"Like you?" asked Hulda.
"Yes, your benefactor, instead of having some impulsive passion. Of course, you never loved in this place?"
"It is the only place I know. To be conservative, asyou call it, I must take my life and opportunity as I find them, like something I have tried and know."
"Ah, Hulda! I see you have a radical, perverse something in you, to twist my meaning so close. You do not belong to this vile spot, except by consanguinity. It would be perfectly conservative for you to look to a better settlement."
"You have hinted that before," Hulda said, serene in his presence as a young woman used to proposals. "I do want to change this life, but I cannot do it and be conservative. I must fasten upon a free impulse, a natural chance of some kind. God has kept my heart pure in this dreadful place, where I was born. Why are you here, if you are conservative? It is not a gentleman's resort."
He grew a little angry at this thrust, but she continued to look at him quietly, unaware that she was impertinent.
"I often have business, Hulda, with Joe and Patty; negroes are very high, and we must buy them where they are to be had. But a deepening religious interest in you often attracts me here."
"Why religious as well as conservative, sir?"
"I have been afraid that the sights you see here, after the good instructions I have given you, might make you an infidel."
"What is an infidel?"
"One who, being unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man. Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position on a Great First Cause."
Here McLane drew out his gold spectacles, and turned the leaves of his Bible over, and pointed Hulda a place to read, beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart,There is no God." At his command she read it, with faith, yet observation, her mind being fully alert to the warning Van Dorn had left her, that in his absence her great trial was to be.
McLane was wearing a gray English suit, with full round paunch, sleek all over the body, his hair a little gray, his gold glasses dangling in his hand, patent varnished slippers and silk stockings, and a silk scarf and cameo pin in it, and a cameo of his deceased sister upon his finger-ring, marking his attire; his eyes, of a pop kind, much too far forward, and blue as old china, and yet an animal, not a spiritual blue—the tint of washing-blue, not of distance; a hare-lip somewhere in his talk, though the fulness of his very red lips hardly allowed place for it; and his nose and brows stern and military, as if he had been a pudding stamped with the die of a Roman emperor or General Jackson.
He watched her reading with censorship, yet desire, patronage, and oiliness together.