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PECULIAR

A Tale of the Great Transition

By EPES SARGENT

NEW YORK

CARLETON, PUBLISHER, 413 BROADWAY

M DCCC LXIV

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by

EPES SARGENT,

in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

University Press:

Welch, Bigelow, and Company,

Cambridge.

CONTENTS.

PECULIAR.

CHAPTER I.
A GLANCE IN THE MIRROR.

“Wed not for wealth, Emily, without love,—’tis gaudy slavery; nor for love without competence,—’tis twofold misery.”—Colman’s Poor Gentleman.

It is a small and somewhat faded room in an unpretending brick house in one of the streets that intersect Broadway, somewhere between Canal Street and the Park. A woman sits at a writing-table, with the fingers of her left hand thrust through her hair and supporting her forehead, while in her right hand she holds a pen with which she listlessly draws figures, crosses, circles and triangles, faces and trees, on the blotting-paper that partly covers a letter which she has been inditing.

A window near by is open at the top. March, having come in like a lion, is going out like a lamb. A canary-bird, intoxicated with the ambrosial breath and subduing sunshine of the first mild day of spring, is pouring forth such a Te Deum laudamus as Mozart himself would have despaired of rivalling. Yesterday’s rain-storm purified the atmosphere, swept clean the streets, and deodorized the open gutters, that in warm weather poison with their effluvium the air of the great American metropolis.

On the wall, in front of the lady at the table, hangs a mirror. Look, now, and you will catch in it the reflection of her face. Forty? Not far from it. Perhaps four or five years on the sunny side. Fair? Many persons would call her still beautiful. The features, though somewhat thin, show their fine Grecian outline. The hair is of a rich flaxen, the eyes blue and mild, the mouth delicately drawn, showing Cupid’s bow in the curve of the upper lip, and disclosing, not too ostentatiously, the whitest teeth.

Her dress is significant of past rather than present familiarity with a fashionable wardrobe. If she ever wore jewels, she has parted with all of them, for there is not even a plain gold ring on her forefinger. Her robe is a simple brown cashmere, not so distended by crinoline as to disguise her natural figure, which is erect, of the average height, and harmoniously rounded. We detect this the better as she rises, looks a moment sorrowfully in the glass, and sighs to herself, “Fading! fading!”

There is a gentle knock at the door, and to her “Come in,” an old black man enters.

“Good morning, Toussaint,” says the lady; “what have you there?”

“Only a few grapes for Madame. They are Black Hamburgs, and very sweet. I hope Madame will relish them. They will do her good. Will she try some of them now?”

“They are excellent, Toussaint. And what a beautiful basket you have brought them in! You must have paid high for all this fruit, so early in the season. Indeed, you must not run into such extravagances on my account.”

“Does Madame find her cough any better?”

“Thank you, Toussaint, I do not notice much change in it as yet. Perhaps a few more mild days like this will benefit me. How is Juliette?”

“Passablement bien. Pretty well. May I ask—ahem! Madame will excuse the question—but does her husband treat her with any more consideration now that she is ill?”

“My good Toussaint, I grieve to say that Mr. Charlton is not so much softened as irritated by my illness. It threatens to be expensive, you see.”

“Ah! but that is sad,—sad! I wish Madame were in my house. Such care as Juliette and I would take of her! You look so much like your mother, Madame! I knew her before her first marriage. I dressed her hair the day of her wedding. People used to call her proud. But she was always kind to me,—very kind. And you look like her so much! As I grow old I think all the more of my old and early friends,—the first I had when I came to New York from St. Domingo. Most of them are dead, but I find out their children if I can; and if they are sick I amuse myself by carrying them a few grapes or flowers. They are very good to indulge me by accepting such trifles.”

“Toussaint, the goodness is all on your side. These grapes are no trifle, and you ought to know it. I thank you for them heartily. Let me give you back the basket.”

“No, please don’t. Keep it. Good morning, Madame! Be cheerful. Le bon temps reviendra. All shall be well. Bon jour! Au revoir, Madame!”

He hurries out of the room, but instantly returns, and, taking a leaf of fresh lettuce out of his pocket, reaches up on tiptoe and puts it between the bars of the bird-cage. “I was nigh forgetting the lettuce for the bird,” says he. “Madame will excuse my gaucherie.” And, bowing low, he again disappears.

The story of Emily Bute Charlton may be briefly told. Her mother, Mrs. Danby, was descended from that John Bradshaw who was president of the court which tried Charles the First, and who opposed a spirited resistance to the usurpation of Cromwell in dissolving the Parliament. Mrs. Danby was proud of her family tree. In her twentieth year she was left a widow, beautiful, ambitious, and poor, with one child, a daughter, who afterwards had in Emily a half-sister. This first daughter had been educated carefully, but she had hardly reached her seventeenth year when she accepted the addresses of a poor man, some fifteen years her senior, of the name of Berwick. The mother, with characteristic energy, opposed the match, but it was of no use. The daughter was incurably in love; she married, and the mother cast her off.

Time brought about its revenges. Mr. Berwick had inherited ten acres of land on the island of Manhattan. He tried to sell it, but was so fortunate as to find nobody to buy. So he held on to the land, and by hard scratching managed to pay the taxes on it. In ten years the city had crept up so near to his dirty acres that he sold half of them for a hundred thousand dollars, and became all at once a rich man. Meanwhile his wife’s mother, Mrs. Danby, after remaining fourteen years a widow, showed the inconsistency of her opposition to her daughter’s marriage by herself making an imprudent match. She married a Mr. Bute, poor and inefficient, but belonging to “one of the first families.” By this husband she had one daughter, Emily, the lady at whose reflection in the mirror we have just been looking.

Emily Bute, like her half-sister, Mrs. Berwick, who was many years her senior, inherited beauty, and was quite a belle in her little sphere in Philadelphia, where her family resided. Her mother, who had repelled Berwick as a son-in-law in his adversity, was too proud to try to propitiate him in his prosperity. She concealed her poverty as well as she could from her daughter, Mrs. Berwick, and the latter had often to resort to stratagem in order to send assistance to the family. At last the proud mother died; and six months afterwards her firstborn daughter, Mrs. Berwick, died, leaving one child, a son, Henry Berwick.

Years glided on, and Mr. Bute had hard work to keep the wolf from the door. He was one of those persons whose efforts in life are continual failures, from the fact that they cannot adapt themselves to circumstances,—cannot persevere during the day of small things till their occupation, by gradual development, becomes profitable. He would tire of an employment the moment its harvest of gold seemed remote. Forever sanguine and forever unsuccessful, he at last found himself reduced, with his daughter, to a mode of life that bordered on the shabby.

In this state of things, Mr. Berwick, like a timely angel, reappeared, rich, and bearing help. He was charmed with Emily, as he had formerly been with her half-sister. He proposed marriage. Mr. Bute was enchanted. He could not conceive of Emily’s hesitating for a moment. Were her affections pre-engaged? No. She had been a little of a flirt, and that perhaps had saved her from a serious passion. Why not, then, accept Mr. Berwick? He was so old! Old? What is a seniority of thirty years? He is rich,—has a house on the Fifth Avenue, and another on the North River. What insanity it would be in a poor girl to allow such a chance to slip by!

Still Emily had her misgivings. Her virginal instincts protested against the sacrifice. She had an ideal of a happy life, which certainly did not lie all in having a freestone house, French furniture, and a carriage. She knew the bitterness of poverty; but was she quite ready to marry without love? Her father’s distresses culminated, and drove her to a decision. She became Mrs. Berwick; and Mr. Bute was presented with ten thousand dollars on the wedding-day. He forthwith relieved himself of fifteen hundred in the purchase of a “new patent-spring phaeton” and span. “A great bargain, sir; splendid creatures; spirited, but gentle; a woman can drive them; no more afraid of a locomotive than of a stack of hay; the carriage in prime order; hasn’t been used a dozen times; will stand any sort of a shock; the property of my friend, Garnett; he wouldn’t part with the horses if he could afford to keep them; his wife is quite broken-hearted at the idea of losing them; such a chance doesn’t occur once in ten years; you can sell the span at a great advance in the spring.”

This urgent recommendation from “a particular friend, entirely disinterested,” decided Bute. He bought the “establishment.” The next day as he was taking a drive, the shriek of a steam-whistle produced such an effect upon his incomparable span, that they started off at headlong speed, ran against a telegraph-pole, smashed the “new patent-spring phaeton,” threw out the driver, and broke his neck against a curb-stone; and that was the end of Mr. Bute for this world, if we may judge from appearances.

Emily’s marriage did not turn out so poorly as the retributions of romance might demand. But on Mr. Berwick’s death she followed her mother’s example, and married a second time. She became Mrs. Charlton. Some idea of the consequences of this new alliance may be got from the letter which she has been writing, and which we take the liberty of laying before our readers.

CHAPTER II.
A MATRIMONIAL BLANK.

“Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,

And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow.”

Shakespeare.

To HENRY BERWICK, Cincinnati.

Dear Henry: You kindly left word for me to write you. I have little of a cheering nature to say in regard to myself. We have moved from the house in Fourteenth Street into a smaller one nearer to the Park and to Mr. Charlton’s business. His complaints of his disappointment in regard to my means have lately grown more bitter. Your allowance, liberal as it is, seems to be lightly esteemed. The other day he twitted me with setting a snare for him by pretending to be a rich widow. O Henry, what an aggravation of insult! I knew nothing, and of course said nothing, as to the extent of your father’s wealth. I supposed, as every one else did, that he left a large property. His affairs proved to be in such a state that they could not be disentangled by his executors till two years after his death. Before that time I was married to Mr. Charlton.

Had I but taken your warning, and seen through his real feelings! But he made me think he loved me for myself alone, and he artfully excited my distrust of you and your motives. He represented his own means as ample; though for that I did not care or ask. Repeatedly he protested that he would prefer to take me without a cent of dowry. I was simpleton enough to believe him, though he was ten years my junior. I fell foolishly in love, soon, alas! to be rudely roused from my dream!

It seems like a judgment, Henry. You have always been as kind to me as if you were my own son. Your father was so much my senior, that you may well suppose I did not marry him from love. I was quite young. My notions on the subject of matrimony were unformed. My heart was free. My father urged the step upon me as one that would save him from dire and absolute destitution. What could I do, after many misgivings, but yield? What could I do? I now well see what a woman of real moral strength and determination could and ought to have done. But it is too late to sigh over the past.

I behaved passably well, did I not? in the capacity of your step-mother. I was loyal, even in thought, to my husband, although I loved him only with the sort of love I might have entertained for my grandfather. You were but two or three years my junior, but you always treated me as if I were a dowager of ninety. As I now look back, I can see how nobly and chivalrously you bore yourself, though at the time I did not quite understand your over-respectful and distant demeanor, or why, when we went out in the carriage, you always preferred the driver’s company to mine.

Your father died, and for a year and a half I conducted myself in a manner not unworthy of his widow and your mother. At the end of that period Mr. Charlton appeared at Berwickville. He dressed pretty well, associated with gentlemen, was rather handsome, and professed a sincere attachment for myself. Time had dealt gently with me, and I was not aware of that disparity in years which I afterwards learned existed between me and my suitor. In an unlucky moment I was subdued by his importunities. I consented to become his wife.

The first six months of our marriage glided away smoothly enough. My new husband treated me with all the attention which I supposed a man of business could give. If the vague thought now and then obtruded itself that there was something to me undefined and unsounded in his character, I thrust the thought from me, and found excuses for the deficiency which had suggested it. One trait which I noticed caused me some surprise. He always discouraged my buying new dresses, and grew very economical in providing for the household. I am no epicure, but have been accustomed to the best in articles of food. I soon discovered that everything in the way of provisions brought into the house was of a cheap or deteriorated quality. I remonstrated, and there was a reform.

One bright day in June, two gentlemen, Mr. Ken and Mr. Turner, connected with the management of your father’s estate, appeared at Berwickville. They came to inform me that my late husband had died insolvent, and that the house we then occupied belonged to his creditors, and must be sold at once. Mr. Charlton received this intelligence in silence; but I was shocked at the change wrought by it on his face. In that expression disappointment and chagrin of the intensest kind seemed concentrated. Nothing was to be said, however. There were the documents; there were the facts,—the stern, irresistible facts of the law. The house must be given up.

After these bearers of ill-tidings had gone, Mr. Charlton turned to me. But I will not pain you by a recital of what he said. He rudely dispelled the illusions under which I had been laboring in regard to him. I could only weep. I could not utter a word of retaliation. Whilst he was in the midst of his reproaches, a servant brought me a letter. Mr. Charlton snatched it from my hand, opened, and read it. Either it had a pacifying effect upon him, or he had exhausted his stock of objurgations. He threw the letter on the table and quitted the room.

It was your letter of condolence and dutiful regard, promising me an allowance from your own purse of a hundred dollars a month. What coals of fire it heaped on my head! To please Mr. Charlton I had quarrelled with you,—forbidden you to visit or write me,—and here was your return! The communication coming close upon the dropping of my husband’s disguise almost unseated my reason. What a night of tears that was! I recalled your warnings, and now saw their truth,—saw how truly disinterested you were in them all. How generous, how noble you appeared to me! How in contrast, alas! with him I had taken for better or worse!

I lay awake all night. Of course I could not think of accepting your offer. In the first place, my past treatment of you forbade it. And then I knew that your own means were narrow, and that you had just entered into an engagement of marriage with a poor girl. But when, the next day, I communicated my resolve to my husband, he calmly replied: “Nonsense! Write Mr. Berwick, thanking him for his offer, and telling him that, small as the sum is, considering your wants, you accept it.” What a poor thing you must have thought me, when you got my cold letter of acceptance. Do me the justice to believe me when I affirm that every word of it was dictated by my husband. How I have longed to see you in person, to tell you all that I have endured and felt! But this circumstances have prevented. And now I am possessed with the idea that I never shall see you in this life again. And that is why I make these confessions. Your marriage, your absence in Europe, your recent return, and your hurried departure for the West, have kept me uncertain as to where a message would reach you. Yesterday I got a few affectionate lines from you, telling me a letter, if mailed at once, would reach you in Cincinnati, or, if a week later, in New Orleans. And so I am devoting the forenoon to this review of my past, so painful and sad.

Let me think of your happier lot, and rejoice in it. So your affairs have prospered beyond all hope! Through your wife you are unexpectedly rich in worldly means. Better still, you are rich in affection. Your little Clara is “the brightest, the loveliest, the sunniest little thing in the wide world.” So you write me; and I can well believe it from the photograph and the lock of hair you send me. Bless her! What would I give to hug her to my bosom. And you too, Henry, you too I could kiss with a kiss that should be purely maternal,—a benediction,—a kiss your wife would approve, for, after all, you are the only child I have had. Mr. Charlton has always said he would have no children till he was a rich man. He and the female physician he employs have nearly killed me with their terrible drugs. Yes, I am dying, Henry. Even the breath of this sweet spring morning whispers it in my ear. Bless you and yours forever! What a mistake my life has been! And yet, how I craved to love and be loved! You will think kindly of me always, and teach your wife and child to have pleasant associations with my name.

All the rich presents your father made me have been sold by Mr. Charlton; but I have one, that he has not seen,—a costly and beautiful gold casket for jewels, which I reserve as a present for your little Clara. I shall to-morrow pack it up carefully, and take it to a friend, who I know will keep and deliver it safely. That friend, strange as it may sound to you, is the venerable old black hair-dresser, Toussaint, who lives in Franklin Street. Your father used to say he had never met a man he would trust before Toussaint; and I can say as much. Toussaint used to dress my mother’s hair; he is now my adviser and friend.

Born a slave in the town of St. Mark in St. Domingo in 1766, Pierre Toussaint was twelve years the junior of that fellow-slave, the celebrated Toussaint l’Ouverture, born on the same river, who converted a mob of undrilled, uneducated Africans into an army with which he successively overthrew the forces of France, England, and Spain. At the beginning of the troubles in the island, in 1801, Pierre was taken by his master, the wealthy Mons. Berard, to New York. Berard, having lost his immense property in St. Domingo, soon died, and Pierre, having learnt the business of a hair-dresser, supported Madame Berard by his labors some eight years till her death, though she had no legal claim upon his service. Bred up, as he was, indulgently, Pierre’s is one of those exceptional cases in which slavery has not destroyed the moral sense.

I know of few more truly venerable characters. A pious Catholic, he is one of the stanchest of friends. One of his rules through life has been, never to incur a debt,—to pay on the spot for everything he buys. And yet he is continually giving away large sums in charity. One day I said, “Toussaint, you are rich enough; you have more than you want; why not stop working now?” He answered, “Madame, I have enough for myself, but if I stop work, I have not enough for others!” By the great fire of 1835, Toussaint lost by his investments in insurance companies. The Schuylers and the Livingstons passed around a subscription-paper to repair his losses; but he stopped it, saying he would not take a cent from them, since there were so many who needed help more than he.

An old French gentleman, a white man, once rich, whom Toussaint had known, was reduced to poverty and fell sick. For several months Toussaint and his wife, Juliette, sent him a nicely cooked dinner; but Toussaint would not let him know from whom it came, “because,” said the negro, “it might hurt his pride to know it came from a black man.” Juliette once called on this invalid to learn if her husband could be of any help. “O no,” said the old Monsieur, “I am well known; I have good friends; every day they send me a dinner, served up in French style. To-day I had a charming vol-au-vent, an omelette, and green peas, not to speak of salmon. I am a person of some importance, you see, even in this strange land.” And Juliette would go home, and she and Toussaint would have a good laugh over the old man’s vauntings.[^[1]]

But what has possessed me to enter into all these details! I know not, unless it is the desire to escape from less agreeable thoughts.

I have a request to make, Henry. You will think me fanciful, foolish, perhaps fanatical; and yet I am impelled, by an unaccountable impression, to ask you to give up the tickets you tell me you have engaged in the Pontiac, and to take passage for New Orleans in some other boat. If you ask me why, the only explanation I can give is, that the thought besets me, but the reason of it I do not know. Do you remember I once capriciously refused to let your father go in the cars to Springfield, although his baggage was on board? Those cars went through the draw-bridge, and many lives were lost. Write me that you will heed my request.

And now, Henry, son, nephew, friend, good by! Tell little Clara she has an aunt or grandmother (which, shall it be?) in New York who loves to think of her and to picture the fair forehead over which the little curl you sent me once fell. By the way, I have examined her photograph with a microscope, and have conceived a fancy that her eyes are of a slightly different color; one perhaps a gray and the other a mixed blue. Am I right? Tell your wife how I grieve to think that circumstances have not allowed us to meet and become personally acquainted. You now know all the influences that have kept us apart, and that have made me seem frigid and ungrateful, even when my heart was overflowing with affection. What more shall I say, except to sum up all my love for you and all my gratitude in the one parting prayer, Heaven bless you and yours!

Your mother, Emily Charlton.

CHAPTER III.
THE WOLF AND THE LAMB.

“Bitten by rage canine of dying rich;

Guilt’s blunder! and the loudest laugh of hell!”

Young.

The poor little lady! First sold by a needy parent to an old man, and then betrayed by her own uncalculating affections to a young one, whose nature had the torpor without the venerableness of age! Her heart, full of all loving possibilities, had steered by false lights and been wrecked. Brief had been its poor, shattered dream of household joys and domestic amenities!

It was the old, old story of the cheat and the dupe; of credulous innocence overmatched by heartless selfishness and fraud.

The young man “of genteel appearance and address” who last week, as the newspapers tell us, got a supply of dry-goods from Messrs. Raby & Co., under false pretences, has been arrested, and will be duly punished.

But the scoundrel who tricks a confiding woman out of her freedom and her happiness under the false pretences of a disinterested affection and the desire of a loving home,—the swindler who, with the motives of a devil of low degree, affects the fervor and the dispositions of a loyal heart,—for such an impostor the law has no lash, no prison. To play the blackleg and the sharper in a matter of the affections is not penal. Success consecrates the crime; and the victim, when her eyes are at length opened to the extent of the deception and the misery, must continue to submit to a yoke at once hateful and demoralizing; she must submit, unless she is willing to brave the ban of society and the persecutions of the law.

Ralph Charlton, when he gave his wife Berwick’s letter the night before, had supposed she would sit down to pen an answer as soon as she was alone. And so the next morning, after visiting his office in Fulton Street, he retraced his steps, and re-entered his house soon after Toussaint had left, and just as Mrs. Charlton had put her signature to the last page of the manuscript, and, bowing her forehead on her palms, was giving vent to sobs of bitter emotion.

Charlton was that prodigy in nature,—a young man in whom an avarice that would have been remarkable in a senile miser had put in subjection all the other passions. Well formed and not ungraceful, his countenance was at first rather prepossessing and propitiatory. It needed a keener eye than that of the ordinary physiognomist to penetrate to the inner nature. It was only when certain expressions flitted over the features that they betrayed him. You must study that countenance and take it at unawares before you could divine what it meant. Age had not yet hardened it in the mould of the predominant bias of the character. Well born and bred, he ought to have been a gentleman, but it is difficult for a man to be that and a miser at the same time. There was little in his style of dress that distinguished him from the mob of young business-men, except that a critical eye would detect that his clothes were well preserved. Few of his old coats were made to do service on the backs of the poor.

Charlton called himself a lawyer, his specialty being conveyancing and real estate transactions. His one purpose in life was to be a rich man. To this end all others must be subordinate. When a boy he had been taught to play on the flute; and his musical taste, if cultivated, might have been a saving element of grace. But finding that in a single year he had spent ten dollars in concert tickets, he indignantly repudiated music, and shut his ears even to the hand-organs in the street. He had inherited a fondness for fine horses. Before he was twenty-five he would not have driven out after Ethan Allen himself, if there had been any toll-gate keepers to pay. His taste in articles of food was nice and discriminating; but he now bought fish and beef of the cheapest, and patronized a milkman whose cows were fed on the refuse of the distilleries.

Charlton was not venturous in speculation. The boldest operation he ever attempted was that of his marriage. Before taking that step he had satisfied himself in regard to the state of the late Mr. Berwick’s affairs. They could be disentangled, and made to leave a balance of half a million for the heirs, if a certain lawsuit, involving a large amount of real estate, should be decided the right way. Charlton burrowed and inquired and examined till he came to the conclusion that the suit would go in favor of the estate. On that hint he took time by the forelock, and married the widow. To his consternation matters did not turn out as he had hoped.

As Charlton entered his wife’s room, on the morning she had been writing the letter already presented, “What is all this, madam?” he exclaimed, advancing and twitching away the manuscript that lay before her.

The lady thus startled rose and looked at him without speaking, as if struggling to comprehend what he had done. At length a gleam of intelligence flashed from her eyes, and she mildly said, “I will thank you to give me back those papers: they are mine.”

“Mine, Mrs. Charlton! Where did you learn that word?” said the husband, really surprised at the language of his usually meek and acquiescent helpmate.

“Do you not mean to give them back?”

“Assuredly no. To whom is the letter addressed? Ah! I see. To Mr. Henry Berwick. Highly proper that I should read what my wife writes to a young man.”

“Then you do not mean to give the letter back, Charlton?”

Another surprise for the husband! At first she used to speak to him as “Ralph,” or “dear”; then as “Mr. Charlton”; then as “Sir”; and now it was plain “Charlton.” What did it portend?

The lady held out her hand, as if to receive the papers.

“Pooh!” said the husband, striking it away. “Go and attend to your housework. What a shrill noise your canary is making! That bird must be sold. There was a charge of seventy-five cents for canary-seed in my last grocer’s bill! It’s atrocious. The creature is eating us out of house and home. Bird and cage would bring, at least, five dollars.”

“The letter,—do you choose to give it back?”

“If, after reading it, I think proper to send it to its address, it shall be sent. Give yourself no further concern about it.”

Mrs. Charlton advanced with folded arms, looked him unblenchingly in the face, and gasped forth, with a husky, half-chocked utterance, “Beware!”

“Truly, madam,” said the astonished husband, “this is a new character for you to appear in, and one for which I am not prepared.”

“It is for that reason I say, Beware! Beware when the tame, the submissive, the uncomplaining woman is roused at last. Will you give me that letter?”

“Go to the Devil!”

Mrs. Charlton threw out her hand and clutched at the manuscript, but her husband had anticipated the attempt. As she closed with him in the effort to recover the paper, he threw her off so forcibly that she fell and struck her head against one of the protuberant claws of the legs of her writing-table.

Whatever were the effects of the blow, it did not prevent the lady from rising immediately, and composing her exuberant hair with a gesture of puzzled distress that would have excited pity in the heart of a Thug. But Charlton did not even inquire if she were hurt. After a pause she seemed to recover her recollection, and then threw up her head with a lofty gesture of resolve, and quitted the room.

Her husband sat down and read the letter. His equanimity was unruffled till he came to the passage where the writer alludes to the gold casket she had put aside for little Clara. At that disclosure he started to his feet, and gave utterance to a hearty execration upon the woman who had presumed to circumvent him by withholding any portion of her effects. He opened the door and called, “Wife!” No voice replied to his summons. He sought her in her chamber. She was not there. She had left the house. So Dorcas, the one overworked domestic of the establishment, assured him.

Charlton saw there was no use in scolding. So he put on his hat and walked down Broadway to his office. Here he wrote a letter which he wished to mail before one o’clock. It was directed to Colonel Delaney Hyde, Philadelphia. Having finished it and put it in the mail-box, Charlton took his way at a brisk pace to the house of old Toussaint.

That veteran himself opened the door. A venerable black man, reminding one of Ben Franklin in ebony. His wool was gray, his complexion of the blackest, showing an unmixed African descent. He was of middling height, and stooped slightly; was attired in the best black broadcloth, with a white vest and neckcloth, and had the manners of a French marquis of the old school.

“Is my wife here?” asked Charlton.

“Madame is here,” replied the old man; “but she suffers, and prays to be not disturbed.”

“I must see her. Conduct me to her.”

“Pardonnez. Monsieur will comprehend as I say the commands of Madame in this house are sacred.”

“You insolent old nigger! Do you mean to tell me I am not to see my own wife?”

“Precisement. Monsieur cannot see Madame Charlton.”

“I’ll search the house for her, at any rate. Out of the way, you blasted old ape!”

Here a policeman, provided for the occasion by Toussaint, and who had been smoking in the front room opening on the hall, made his appearance.

“You can’t enter this house,” said Blake, carelessly knocking the ashes from his cigar. Charlton had a wholesome respect for authority. He drew back on seeing the imperturbable Blake, with the official star on his breast, and said, “I came here, Mr. Blake, to recover a little gold box that I have reason to believe my wife has left with this old nigger.”

“Well, she might have left it in worse hands,—eh, Toussaint?” said Blake, resuming his cigar; and then, removing it, he added, “If you call this old man a nigger again, I’ll make a nigger of you with my fist.”

Toussaint might have taken for his motto that of the old eating-house near the Park,—“Semper paratus.” The gold box having been committed to him to deposit in a place of safety, he had meditated long as to the best disposition he could make of it. As he stood at the window of his house, looking thoughtfully out, he saw coming up the street a gay old man, swinging a cane, humming an opera tune, and followed by a little dog. As the dashing youth drew nearer, Toussaint recognized in him an old acquaintance, and a man not many years his junior,—Mr. Albert Pompilard, stock-broker, Wall Street.

No two men could be more unlike than Toussaint and Pompilard; and yet they were always drawn to each other by some subtle points of attraction. Pompilard was a reckless speculator and spendthrift; Toussaint, a frugal and cautious economist; but he had been indebted for all his best investments to Pompilard. Bold and often audacious in his own operations, Pompilard never would allow Toussaint to stray out of the path of prudence. Not unfrequently Pompilard would founder in his operations on the stock exchange. He would fall, perhaps, to a depth where a few hundred dollars would have been hailed as a rope flung to a drowning man. Toussaint would often come to him at these times and offer a thousand dollars or so as a loan. Pompilard, in order not to hurt the negro’s feelings, would take it and pretend to use it; but it would be always put securely aside, out of his reach, or deposited in some bank to Toussaint’s credit.

Toussaint stood at his door as Pompilard drew nigh.

“Ha! good morning, my guide, philosopher, and friend!” exclaimed the stock-broker. “What’s in the wind now, Toussaint? Any money to invest?”

“No, Mr. Pompilard; but here’s a box that troubles me.”

“A box! Not a pill-box, I hope? Let me look at it. Beautiful! beautiful, exceedingly! It could not be duplicated for twelve hundred dollars. Whose is it? Ah! here’s an inscription,—‘Henry Berwick to Emily.’ Berwick? It was a Henry Berwick who married my wife’s niece, Miss Aylesford.”

“This box,” interposed Toussaint, “was the gift of his late father to his second wife, the present Mrs. Charlton.”

“Ah! yes, I remember the connection now.”

“Mrs. Charlton wishes me to deposit the box where, in the event of her death, it will reach the daughter of the present Mrs. Berwick. Here is the direction on the envelope.”

Pompilard read the words: “For Clara Aylesford Berwick, daughter of Henry Berwick, Esq., to be delivered to her in the event of the death of the undersigned, Emily Charlton.”

“I will tell you what to do,” said Pompilard. “Here come Isaac Jones of the Chemical and Arthur Schermerhorn. Isaac shall give a receipt for the box and deposit it in the safe of the bank, there to be kept till called for by Miss Clara Berwick or her representative.”

“That will do,” said Toussaint.

The two gentlemen were called in, and in five minutes the proper paper was drawn up, witnessed, and signed, and Mr. Jones gave a receipt for the box.

Briefly Toussaint now explained to Charlton the manner in which the box had been disposed of. Charlton was nonplussed. It would not do to disgust the officials at the Chemical. It might hurt his credit. A consolatory reflection struck him. “Do you say my wife is suffering?” he asked.

“Madame will need a physician,” replied the negro. “I have sent for Dr. Hull.”

“Well, look here, old gentleman, I’m responsible for no debts of your contracting on her account. I call Mr. Blake to witness. If you keep her here, it must be at your own expense. Not a cent shall you ever have from me.”

“That will not import,” replied Toussaint, with the hauteur of a prince of the blood.

Felicitating himself on having got rid of a doctor’s bill, Charlton took his departure.

“The exceedingly poor cuss!” muttered Blake, tossing after him the stump of a cigar.

“Let me pay you for your trouble, Mr. Blake,” said Toussaint.

“Not a copper, Marquis! I have been here only half an hour, and in that time have read the newspaper, smoked one regalia, quality prime, and pocketed another. If that is not pay enough, you shall make it up by curling my hair the next time I go to a ball.”

“But take the rest of the cigars.”

“There, Marquis, you touch me on my weak point. Thank you. Good by, Toussaint!”

Toussaint closed the door, and called to his wife in a whisper, speaking in French, “How goes it, Juliette?”

“Hist! She sleeps. She wishes you to put this letter in the post-office as soon as possible. If you can get the canary-bird, do it. I hope the doctor will be here soon.”

Toussaint left at once to mail the invalid’s letter and get possession of her bird.

CHAPTER IV.
A FUGITIVE CHATTEL.

“The providential trust of the South is to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing, with freest scope for its natural development. We should at once lift ourselves intelligently to the highest moral ground, and proclaim to all the world that we hold this trust from God, and in its occupancy are prepared to stand or fall.”—Rev. Dr. Palmer of New Orleans, 1861.

The next morning Charlton sat in his office, calculating his percentage on a transaction in which he had just acted as mediator between borrower and lender. The aspect of the figures, judging from his own, was cheerful.

The office was a gloomy little den up three flights of stairs. All the furniture was second hand, and the carpet was ragged and dirty. No broom or dusting-cloth had for months molested the ancient, solitary reign of the spiders on the ceiling. A pile of cheap slate-colored boxes with labels stood against the wall opposite the stove. An iron safe served also as a dressing-table between the windows that looked out on the street; and over it hung a small rusty mirror in a mahogany frame with a dirty hair-brush attached. The library of the little room was confined to a few common books useful for immediate reference; a City Directory, a copy of the Revised Statutes, the Clerk’s Assistant, and a dozen other volumes, equally recondite.

There was a knock at the door, and Charlton cried out, “Come in!”

The visitor was a negro whose face was of that fuliginous hue that bespeaks an unmixed African descent. He was of medium height, square built, with the shoulders and carriage of an athlete. He seemed to be about thirty years of age. His features, though of the genuine Ethiopian type, were a refinement upon it rather than an exaggeration. The expression was bright, hilarious, intelligent; frank and open, you would add, unless you chanced to detect a certain quick oblique glance which would flash upon you now and then, and vanish before you could well realize what it meant. Across his left cheek was an ugly scar, almost deep enough to be from a cutlass wound.

“Good morning, Peculiar. Take a chair.”

“Not that name, if you please, Mr. Charlton,” said the negro, closing the door and looking eagerly around to see if there had been a listener. “Remember, you are to call me Jacobs.”

“Ah yes, I forgot. Well, Jacobs, I am glad to see you; but you are a few minutes before the time. It isn’t yet twelve. Just step into that little closet and wait there till I call you.”

The negro did as he was directed, and Charlton closed the door upon him. Five minutes after, the clock of Trinity struck twelve, and there was another knock at the door.

Before we suffer it to be answered, we must go back and describe an interview that took place some seven weeks previously, in the same office, between Charlton and the negro.

A year before that first interview, Charlton had, in some accidental way, been associated with a well-known antislavery counsel, in a case in which certain agents of the law for the rendition of fugitive slaves had been successfully foiled. Though Charlton’s services had been unessential and purely mercenary, he had shared in the victor’s fame; and the grateful colored men who employed him carried off the illusion that he was a powerful friend of the slave. And so when Mr. Peculiar, alias Mr. Jacobs, found himself in New York, a fugitive from bondage, he was recommended, if he had any little misgivings as to his immunity from persecution and seizure, to apply to Mr. Charlton as to a fountain of legal profundity and philanthropic expansiveness. Greater men than our colored brethren have jumped to conclusions equally far from the truth in regard not only to lawyers, but military generals.

Charlton’s primary investigations, in his first interview with Peek, had reference to the amount of funds that the negro could raise through his own credit and that of his friends. This amount the lawyer found to be small; and he was about to express his dissatisfaction in emphatic terms, when a new consideration withheld him. Affecting that ruling passion of universal benevolence which the fond imagination of his colored client had attributed to him, he pondered a moment, then spoke as follows:

“You tell me, Jacobs, you are in the delicate position of a fugitive slave. I love the slave. Am I not a friend and a brother, and all that? But if you expect me to serve you, you must be entirely frank,—disguise nothing,—disclose to me your real history, name, and situation,—make a clean breast of it, in short.”

“That I will do, sir. I know, if I trust a lawyer at all, I ought to trust him wholly.”

There was nothing in the negro’s language to indicate the traditional slave of the stage and the novel, who always says “Massa,” and speaks a gibberish indicated to the eye by a cheap misspelling of words. A listener who had not seen him would have supposed it was an educated white gentleman who was speaking; for even in the tone of his voice there was an absence of the African peculiarity.

“My friends tell me I may trust you, sir,” said Jacobs, advancing and looking Charlton square in the face. Charlton must have blenched for an instant, for the negro, as a slight but significant compression of the lip seemed to portend, drew back from confidence. “Can I trust you?” he continued, as if he were putting the question as much to himself as to Charlton. There was a pause.

Charlton took from his drawer a letter, which he handed to the negro, with the remark, “You know how to read, I suppose.”

Without replying. Peek took the letter and glanced over it,—a letter of thanks from a committee of colored citizens in return for Charlton’s services in the case already alluded to. Peek was reassured by this document. He returned it, and said, “I will trust you, Mr. Charlton.”

“Take a seat then, Jacobs, and I will make such notes of your story as I may think advisable.”

Peek did as he was invited; but Charlton seemed interested mainly in dates and names. A more faithful reporter would have presented the memorabilia of the narrative somewhat in this form:

“Was born on Herbert’s plantation in Marshall County, Mississippi. Mother a house-slave. When he was four years old she was sold and taken to Louisiana. His real name not Jacobs. That name he took recently in New York. The name he was christened by was Peculiar Institution. It was given to him by one Ewell, a drunken overseer, and was soon shortened to Peek, which name has always stuck to him. Was brought up a body servant till his fourteenth year. Soon found that the way for a slave to get along was to lie, but to lie so as not to be found out. Grew to be so expert a liar, that among his fellows he was called the lawyer. No offence to you, Mr. Charlton.

“As soon as he could carry a plate, was made to wait at table. Used to hear the gentlemen and ladies talk at meals. Could speak their big words before he knew their meaning. Kept his ears and eyes well open. An old Spanish negro, named Alva, taught him by stealth to read and write. When the young ladies took their lessons in music, this child stood by and learnt as much as they did, if not more. Learnt to play so well on the piano that he was often called on to show off before visitors.

“Was whipped twice, and then not badly, at Herbert’s: once for stealing some fruit, once for trying to teach a slave to read. Family very pious. Old Herbert used to read prayers every morning. But he didn’t mind making a woman give up one husband and take another. Didn’t mind separating mother and child. Didn’t mind shooting a slave for disobedience. Saw him do it once. Herbert had told Big Sam not to go with a certain metif girl; for Herbert was as particular about matching his niggers as about his horses and sheep. A jealous negro betrayed Sam. Old Herbert found Sam in the metif girl’s hut, and shot him dead, without giving him a chance to beg for mercy.[^[2]] Well, Sam was only a nigger; and didn’t Mr. Herbert have family prayers, and go to church twice every Sunday? Who should save his soul alive, if not Mr. Herbert?

“In spite of prayers, however, things didn’t go right on the plantation. The estate was heavily mortgaged. Finally the creditors took it, and the family was broken up. Peculiar was sold to one Harkman, a speculator, who let him out as an apprentice in New Orleans, in Collins’s machine-shop for the repair of steam-engines. But Collins failed, and then Peek became a waiter in the St. Charles Hotel. Here he stayed six years. Cut his eye-teeth during that time. Used to talk freely with Northern visitors about slavery. Studied the big map of the United States that hung in the reading-room. Learnt all about the hotels, North and South. Stretched his ears wide whenever politics were discussed.

“Having waited on the principal actors and singers of the day at the St. Charles, he had a free pass to the theatres. Used often to go behind the scenes. Waited on Blitz, Anderson, and other jugglers. Saw Anderson show up the humbug, as he called it, of spiritual manifestations. Went to church now and then. Heard some bad preachers, and some good. Heard Mr. Clapp preach. Heard Mr. Palmer preach. After hearing the latter on the duties of slaves, tried to run away. Was caught and taken to a new patent whipping-machine, recently introduced by a Yankee. Here was left for a whipping. Bought off the Yankee with five dollars, and taught him how to stain my back so as to imitate the marks of the lash. Thus no discredit was brought on the machine. A week after was sold to a Red River planter, Mr. Carberry Ratcliff.

“Can never speak of this man calmly. He had a slave, a woman white as you are, sir, that he beat, and then tried to make me take and treat as my wife. When he found I had cheated him, he just had me tied up and whipped till three strong men were tired out with the work. It’s a wonder how I survived. My whole back is seamed deep with the scars. This scar over my cheek is from a blow he himself gave me that day with a strip of raw hide. He sold me to Mr. Barnwell in Texas as soon as I could walk, which wasn’t for some weeks. I left, resolving to come back and kill Ratcliff. I meant to do this so earnestly, that the hope of it almost restored me. Revenge was my one thought, day and night. I felt that I could not be at ease till that man Ratcliff had paid for his barbarity. Even now I sometimes wake full of wrath from my dreams, imagining I have him at my mercy.

“I went to Texas with a bad reputation. Was put among the naughty darkies, and sent to the cotton-field. Braxton, the overseer, had been a terrible fellow in his day, but I happened to be brought to him at the time he was beginning to get scared about his soul. Soon had things my own way. Braxton made me a sort of sub-overseer; and I got more work out of the field-hands by kindness than Braxton had ever got by the lash.

“One day I discovered on a neighboring plantation an old woman who proved to be my mother. She had been brought here from Louisiana. She was on the point of dying. She knew me, first from hearing my name, and then from a cross she had pricked in India ink on my breast. She hadn’t seen me for sixteen years. Had been having a hard time of it. Her hut was close by a slough, a real fever-hole, and she had been sick most of the time the last three years.

“The old woman flashed up bright on finding me: gave me a long talk; told me little stories of when I was a child; told me how my father had been sold to an Alabama man, and shot dead for trying to break away from a whipping-post. All at once she said she saw angels, drew me down to her, and dropped away quiet as a lamb, so that, though my forehead lay on her breast, I didn’t know when she died.

“After this loss, I was pretty serious. Wasn’t badly treated. My master, an educated gentleman, was absent in New Orleans most of the time. Overseer Braxton, after the big scare he got about his soul, grew to be humane, and left almost everything to me. But I felt sick of life, and wanted to die, though not before I had killed Ratcliff. One day I heard that Corinna, a quadroon girl, a slave on the plantation, had fallen into a strange state, during which she preached as no minister had ever preached before. I had known her as a very ordinary and rather stupid girl. Went to see her in one of her trances. Found that report had fallen short of the real case. Was astonished at what I saw and heard. Saw what no white man would believe, and so felt I was wiser on one point than all the white men. My interviews with Corinna soon made me forget about Ratcliff; and when she died, six weeks after my first visit, felt my mind full of things it would take me a lifetime to think out and settle.

“After Corinna’s death, I stayed some months on the plantation, though I had a chance to leave. Stayed because I had an easy time and because I found I could be of use to the slaves; and further, because I had resolved, if ever I got free, it should be by freeing myself. A white man, a Mr. Vance, whose life I had saved, wanted to buy and free me. I made him spend his money so it would show for more than just the freeing of one man. But Braxton, the overseer, who was letting me have pretty much my own way, at last died; and Hawks, his successor, was of opinion that the way to get work out of niggers was to treat them like dogs; and so, one pleasant moonlight night, I made tracks for Galveston. Here, by means of false papers, I managed to get passage to New Orleans, and there hid myself on board a Yankee schooner bound for New London, Connecticut. When she was ten days out, I made my appearance on deck, much to the surprise of the crew. Fifteen days afterwards we arrived in the harbor of New London.

“Old Skinner, the captain, had been playing possum with me all the voyage,—keeping dark, and pretending to be my friend, meaning all the while to have me arrested in port. No sooner had he dropped anchor than he sent on shore for the officers. But the mate tipped me the wink. ‘Darkey,’ said he, ‘do you see that little green fishing-boat yonder? Well, that belongs to old Payson, an all-fired abolitionist and friend of the nigger. Our Captain and crew are all under hatches, and now if you don’t want to be a lost nigger, jest you drop down quietly astern, swim off to Payson, and tell him who you are, and that the slave-catchers are after you. If old Payson don’t put you through after that, it will be because it isn’t old Payson.’

“I did as the mate told me. Reached the fishing-boat. Found old Payson, a gnarled, tough, withered old sea-dog, who comprehended at once what was in the wind, and cried, ‘Ha! ha!’ like the war-horse that snuffs the battle. Just as I got into the boat, Captain Skinner came up on the schooner’s deck, and saw what had taken place. The schooner’s small boat had been sent ashore for the officers whose business it was to carry out the Fugitive-Slave Law. What could Skinner do? Visions of honors and testimonials and rewards and dinners from Texan slaveholders, because of his loyalty to the institution in returning a runaway nigger, suddenly vanished. He paced the deck in a rage. To add to his fury, old Payson, while I stood at the bows, dripping and grinning, came sailing up before a stiff breeze, and passed within easy speaking distance, Payson pouring in such a volley of words that Skinner was dumbfounded. ‘I’ll make New London too hot for you, you blasted old skinflint!’ cried Payson. ‘You’d sell your own sister just as soon as you’d sell this nigger, you would! Let me catch you ashore, and I’ll give you the blastedest thrashing you ever got yet, you infernal doughface, you! Go and lick the boots of slaveholders. It’s jest what you was born for.’

“And the little sail-boat passed on out of hearing. Payson got in the track of one of the spacious steamboats that ply between the cities of Long Island Sound and New York, and managed to throw a line, so as to be drawn up to the side. We then got on board. In six hours, we were in New York. Payson put me in the proper hands, bade me good by, returned to his sail-boat, and made the best speed he could back to New London, fired with hopes of pitching into that ‘meanest of all mean skippers, old Skinner.’

“This was three years ago. The despatch agents of the underground railroad hurried me off to Canada. As soon as I judged it safe, I returned to New York. Here I got a good situation as head-waiter at Bunker’s. Am married. Have a boy, named Sterling, a year old. Am very happy with my wife and child and my hired piano. But now and then I and my wife have an alarm lest I shall be seized and carried back to slavery.”

Here Mr. Institution finished his story, which we have condensed, generally using, however, his own words. Charlton did not subject him to much cross-questioning. He asked, first, what was the name of the schooner in which Peek had escaped from Texas. It was the Albatross. Charlton made a note. Second, did Mr. Barnwell, Peek’s late master, have an agent in New Orleans? Yes; Peek had often seen the name on packages: P. Herman & Co. And, third, did Peek marry his wife in Canada? Yes. Then she, too, is a fugitive slave, eh?

Peek seemed reluctant to answer this question, and flashed a quick, distrustful glance on Charlton. The latter assumed an air of indifference, and said, “Perhaps you had better not answer that question; it is immaterial.”

Again Peek’s mind was relieved.

“That is enough for the present, Mr. Jacobs,” continued Charlton. “If I have occasion to see you, I can always find you at Bunker’s, I suppose.”

“Yes, Mr. Charlton. Inquire for John Jacobs. Keep a bright lookout for me, and you sha’n’t be the loser. Will five dollars pay you?”

Charlton wavered between the temptation to clutch more at the moment, and the prospect of making his new client available in other ways. At length taking the money he replied, “I will make it do for the present. Good morning.”

CHAPTER V.
A RETROSPECT.

“Any slave refusing obedience to any command may be flogged till he submits or dies. Not by occasional abuses alone, but by the universal law of the Southern Confederacy, the existing system of slavery violates all the moral laws of Christianity.”—Rev. Newman Hall.

Before removing Peculiar from the closet which at Charlton’s bidding he has entered, we must go back to the time when he was a slave, and amplify and illustrate certain parts of his abridged narrative. His life, up to the period when he comes upon our little stage, divides itself into three eras, all marked by their separate moral experiences. In the first, he felt the slave’s crowning curse,—the absence of that sense of personal responsibility which freedom alone can give; and he fell into the demoralization which is the inherent consequence of the slave’s condition. In the second era, he encountered his mother, and then the frozen fountain of his affections was unsealed and melted. In the third, he met Corinna, and for the first time looked on life with the eyes of belief.

It will seem idle to many advanced minds in this nineteenth century to use words to show the wrong of slavery. Why not as well spend breath in denouncing burglary or murder? But slavery is still a power in the world. We are daily told it is the proper status for the colored man in this country; that he ought to covet slavery as much as a white man ought to covet freedom. Besides, since Peek has confessed himself at one time of his life a liar, we must show why he ought logically to have been one.

To blame a slave for lying and stealing, is about as fair as it would be to blame a man for using strategy in escaping from an assassin. For the slaveholder, if not the assassin of the slave’s life, is the assassin of his liberty, his manhood, his moral dignity.

Mr. Pugh of Ohio, Vallandigham’s associate on the gubernatorial ticket for 1863, presents his thesis thus: “When the slaves are fit for freedom, they will be free.”

The profundity of this oracular proposition is only equalled in the remark of the careful grandmother, who declared she would never let a boy go into the water till he knew how to swim.

“When the slaves are fit!” As if the road were clear for them to achieve their fitness! Why, the slave is not only robbed of his labor, but of his very chances as a thinking being. Yes, with a charming consistency, the slavery barons, the Hammonds and the Davises, while they tell us the negro is unfitted for mental cultivation, institute the severest penal laws against all attempts to teach the slave to read!

The first natural instinct of the slave, black or white, towards his master is, to cheat and baffle that armed embodiment of wrong, who stands to him in the relation of a thief and a tyrant. Thus, from his earliest years, lying and fraud become legitimate and praiseworthy in the slave’s eyes; for slavery, except under rare conditions, crushes out the moral life in the victim.

Any conscience he may have, being subordinate to the conscience of his master, is kept stunted or perverted. The slave may wish to be true to his wife; but his master may compel him to repudiate her and take another. He may object to being the agent of an injustice; but the snap of the whip or the revolver may be the reply to any conscientious scruples he may offer against obedience.

In the first stage of his slave-life, Peculiar probably gave little thought to the moral bearings of his lot; although old Alva, his instructor, who was something of a casuist, had offered him not a few hard nuts to crack in the way of knotty questions. But Peculiar did precisely what you or I would have done under similar circumstances: he taxed his ingenuity to find how he could most safely shirk the tasks that were put upon him. Knowing that his taskmasters had no right to his labor, that they were, in fact, robbing him of what was his own, he did what he could to fool and circumvent them. Thus he grew to be, by a necessity of his condition, the most consummate of hypocrites and the most intrepid and successful of liars. At eighteen he was a match for Talleyrand in using speech to conceal his thoughts.

He saw that, if slaves were well treated, it was because the prudent master believed that good treatment would pay. Humanity was gauged by considerations of cotton. Thus the very kindnesses of a master had the taint of an intense selfishness; and Peculiar, while readily availing himself of all indulgences, correctly appreciated the spirit in which they were granted.

The devotional element seems to be especially active in the negro; but it has little chance for rational development, dwarfed and kept from the light as the intellect is. The uneducated slave, like the Italian brigand,—indeed, like many worthy people who go to church,—thinks it an impertinence to mix up morality with religion. He agrees fully with the distinguished American divine, who the other Sunday began his sermon with these words, “Brethren, I am not here to teach you morality, but to save your souls.” As if a saving faith could exist allied to a corrupt morality!

Peculiar could not come in contact with a sham, however solemn and pretentious, without applying to it the puncture of his skeptical analysis. He saw his master, Herbert, go to church on a Sunday and kneel in prayer, and on a Monday shoot down Big Sam for attaching himself to the wrong woman. He saw the Rev. Mr. Bloom take the murderer by the hand, as if nothing had happened more tragical than the shooting of a raccoon.

And then Peculiar cogitated, wondering what religion could be, if its professors made such slight account of robbery and murder. Was it the observance of certain forms for the propitiation of an arbitrary, capricious, and unamiable Power, who smiled on injustice and barbarity? The more he thought of it, the more inexplicable grew the puzzle. Herbert evidently regarded himself as one of the elect; and Mr. Bloom encouraged him in his security. If heaven was to be won by such kind of service as theirs, Peculiar concluded that he would prefer taking his chances in hell; and so he became a scoffer.

His residence in New Orleans, in enlarging the sphere of his experiences, did not bring him the light that could quicken the devotional part of his nature. Dwelling most of the time in a hotel which frequently contained three or four hundred inmates, he was thrown among white men of all grades, intellectual and moral. He instinctively felt his superiority both ways to not a few of these. It was therefore a swindling lie to say that the blacks were born to be the thrall of the whites, that slavery was the proper status of the black in this or any country. If it were true that stupid blacks ought to be slaves, so must it be true of the same order of whites.

He heard preachers stand up in their pulpits, and, like the Rev. Dr. Palmer, blaspheme God by calling slavery a Divine institution. “Would it have been tolerated so long, if it were not?” they asked, with the confidence of a conjurer when he means to hocus you. To which Peek might have answered, “Would theft and murder have been tolerated so long, if they were not equally Divine?” The Northern clergymen he encountered held usually South-side views of the subject, and so his prejudices against the cloth grew to be somewhat too sweeping and indiscriminate. Judged of by its relations to slavery, religion seemed to him an audacious system of impositions, raised to fortify a lie and a wrong by claiming a Divine sanction for merely human creeds and inventions.

This persuasion was deepened when he found there were intelligent white men utterly incredulous as to a future state, and that the people who went to church were many of them practically, and many of them speculatively, infidels. The remaining fraction might be, for all he knew, not only devout, but good and just. Indeed, he had met some such, but they could be almost counted on his ten fingers.

One day at the St. Charles he overheard a discussion between Mr. James Sterling, an English traveller, and the Rev. Dr. Manners of Virginia. Slaves are good listeners; and Peculiar had sharpened his sense of hearing by the frequent exercise of it under difficulties. He was an amateur in key-holes. On this occasion he had only to open a ventilating window at the top of a partition, and all that the disputants might say would be for his benefit.

“Will you deny, sir,” asked the reverend Doctor, “that slavery has the sanction of Scripture?”

“I exclude that inquiry as impertinent at present,” said Sterling. “If Scripture authorized murder, then it would not be murder that would be right, but Scripture that would be wrong. And so in regard to slavery. On that particular point Scripture must not be admitted as authoritative. It cannot override the enlightened human conscience. It cannot render null the deductions of science and of reason on a question that manifestly comes within their sphere.”

“Ah! if you reject Scripture, then I have nothing more to say,” retorted the Doctor. But, after a pause, he added, “Have you not generally found the slaves well treated and contented?”

“A system under which they are well treated and made content,” replied Sterling, “is really the most to be deplored and condemned. If slavery could so brutalize men’s minds as to make them hug their chains and glory in degradation, it would be, in my eyes, doubly cursed. But it is not so; the slaves are not happy, and I thank God for it. There is manhood enough left in them to make them at least unhappy.”[^[3]]

“You assume the equality of the races,” interposed the Doctor.

“It is unnecessary for my argument to make any such assumption,” said Sterling. “I have found that many black men are superior to many white men, and some of those white men slaveholders. I do not assume this. I know it. I have seen it. But even if the black men were inferior, I hold, that man, as man, is an end unto himself, and that to use him as a brute means to the ends of other men is to outrage the laws of God. I take my stand far above the question of happiness or unhappiness. Have you noticed the young black man, called Peek, who waits behind my chair at table?”

“Yes, a bright-looking lad. He anticipates your wants well. You have fed[fed] him, I suppose?”

“I have given him nothing. I have put a few questions to him, that is all; and what I have to say is, that he is superior in respect to brains to nine tenths of the white youth who suck juleps in your bar-rooms or kill time at your billiard-tables.”

“As soon as the Abolitionists will stop their infatuated clamor,” replied the Doctor, “the condition of the slave will be gradually improved, and we shall give more and more care to his religious education.”

“So long as the negro is ruled by force,” returned Mr. Sterling, “no forty-parson power of preaching can elevate his character. It is a savage mockery to prate of duty to one in whom we have emasculated all power of will. We cannot make a moral intelligence of a being we use as a mere muscular force.”

“All that the South wants,” exclaimed the Doctor, “is to be let alone in the matter of slavery. If there are any alleviations in the system which can be safely applied, be sure they will not be lacking as soon as we are let alone by the fanatics of the North. Leave the solution of the problem to the intelligence and humanity of the South.”

“Not while new cotton-lands pay so well! Be sure, reverend sir, if the South cannot quickly find a solution of this slave problem, God will find one for them, and that, trust me, will be a violent one. American civilization and American slavery can no longer exist together. One or the other must be destroyed. For my part, I can’t believe it to be the Divine purpose that a remnant of barbarism shall overthrow the civilization of a new world. Slavery must succumb.”[^[4]]

“I recommend you, Mr. Sterling, not to raise your voice quite so high when you touch upon these dangerous topics here at the South. I will bid you good evening, sir.”

CHAPTER VI.
PIN-HOLES IN THE CURTAIN.

“The reader will here be led into the great, ill-famed land of the marvellous.”

Ennemoser.

The conversation between the English traveller and the Virginia Doctor of Divinity was brought to a close, and Peek jumped down from the table on which he had been listening, refreshed and inspired by the eloquent words he had taken in.

A week afterwards he made a second attempt to escape from bondage. He was caught and sold to Mr. Carberry Ratcliff, who had an estate on the Red River. Here, failing in obedience to an atrocious order, he received a punishment, the scars of which always remained to show the degree of its barbarity. He was soon after sent to Texas, where he became the slave of Mr. Barnwell.

Here he was at first put to the roughest work in the cotton-field. It tasked all his ingenuity to slight or dodge it. Luckily for him, about the time of his arrival he found an opportunity to make profitable use of the ecclesiastical knowledge he had derived from the Rev. Messrs. Bloom and Palmer.

Braxton, the overseer, had been frightened into a concern for his soul. He had a heart-complaint which the doctor told him might carry him off any day in a flash. A travelling preacher completed the work of terror by satisfying him he was in a fair way of being damned. The prospect did not seem cheerful to Braxton. He had found exhilaration and comfort in whipping intractable niggers. The amusement now began to pall. Besides, the doctor had told him to shun excitement.

In this state of things, enter Mr. Peculiar Institution. That gentleman soon learnt what was the matter; and he contrived that the overseer, seemingly by accident, should overhear him at prayers. Braxton had heard praying, but never any that had the unction of Peek’s. From that time forth Peek had him completely under his control.

Peek did not abuse his authority. He ruled wisely, though despotically. At last the accidental encounter with his dying mother introduced a new world of thoughts and emotions. Short as was his opportunity for acquaintance with her, such a wealth of tenderness and love as she lavished upon him developed a hitherto inactive and undreamed-of force in his soul. The affectional part of his nature was touched. She told him of the delight his father used to take in playing with him, an infant; and when he thought of that father’s fate, shot down for resisting the lash, he felt as if he could tear the first upholder of slavery he might meet limb from limb, in his rage.

The mother died, and then all seemed worthless and insipid to Peek. Having seen how little heed was paid to the feelings of slaves in separating those of opposite sex who had become attached to each other, he early in life resolved to shun all sexual intimacies, till he should be free. He saw that in slavery the distinction between licit and illicit connections was a playful mockery. The thought of being the father of a slave was horrible to him; and neither threats of the lash nor coaxings from masters and overseers could induce him to enter into those temporary alliances which Mr. Herbert used pleasantly to call “the holy bonds of matrimony.” His resolution grew to be a passion stronger even than desire.

Thus the affections were undeveloped in him till he encountered his mother. He knew of no relative on earth, after her, to love,—no one to be loved by. Life stretched before him flat, dull, and unprofitable; and death,—what was that but the plunge into nothingness?

True, Mr. Herbert and the clergyman who drank claret with Mr. Herbert after the latter had shot down Big Sam talked of a life beyond the grave; but could such humbugs as they were be believed? Could the stories be trustworthy, which were based mainly on the truth of a book which all the preachers (so he supposed) declared was the all-sufficient authority for slavery? Well might Peek distrust the promise that was said to rest only on writings that were made to supply the apology of injustice and bloody wrong!

While in this state of mind, he heard of Corinna, the quadroon girl. Unattractive in person, slow of apprehension, and rarely uttering a word, she had hitherto excited only his pity. But now she fell into trances during which she seemed to be a new and entirely different being. At his first interview with her when she fell into one of these inexplicable states, she seized his hand, and imitating the look, actions, and very tone of his dying mother, poured forth such a flood of exhortations, comfortings, warnings, and encouragements, that he was bewildered and confounded.

What could it all mean? The power that spoke through Corinna claimed to be his mother, and seemed to identify itself, as far as revelations to the understanding could go. It recalled the little incidents that had passed between them in the presence of no other witness. It pierced to his inmost secrets,—secrets which he well knew he had communicated to no human being.

And yet Peek saw upon reflection that, though a preternatural faculty was plainly at work,—a faculty that took possession of his mind as a photographer does of all the stones, flaws, and stains in the wall of a building,—there was no sufficient identification of that faculty with the individual he knew as his mother. Little that might not already have been in his own mind, long hidden, perhaps, and forgotten, was revealed to him.

He also concluded that the intelligence, whatever it might be, was a fallible one, and that it would be folly to give up to its guidance his own free judgment.

He renewed his interviews daily as long as the quadroon girl lived. Skeptical, cautious, and meditative, he must test all these phenomena over and over again. And he did test them. He established conditions. He made records on the spot. He removed all possibilities of collusion and deception. And still the same phenomena!

Nor were they confined to the imperfect wonders of clairvoyance and prophecy. Once in the broad daylight, when he was alone with the invalid girl in her hut, and no other human being within a distance of a quarter of a mile, she was lifted horizontally before his eyes into the air, and kept there swaying about at least a third of a minute, while the drapery of her dress clung to her person as if held by an invisible hand.[^[5]]

A bandore—a stringed musical instrument the name of which has been converted by the negroes into banjo—hung on a nail in the wall. One moonlight evening, when no third person was present, this African lute was detached by some invisible force and carried by it through the room from one end to the other! It would touch Peek on the head, then float away through the air, visible to sight, and sending forth from its chords, smitten by no mortal fingers, delectable strains. The same invisible power would tune the instrument, tightening the strings and trying them with a delicate skill; and then it would hang the banjo on its nail.

After this improvised concert, Peek felt all at once a warm living hand upon his forehead, first lovingly patting it and then passing round his cheek, under his chin, and up on the other side of his face. He grasped the hand, and it returned his pressure. It was a hand much larger than Corinna’s, and she lay on her back several feet from him, too far to touch him with any part of her person. Plainly in the moonlight he could see it,—a perfect hand, resembling his mother’s! It shaded off into vacuity above the wrist, and, even while he held it solid and flesh-like, melted all at once, like an impalpable ether, in his grasp.[^[6]]

These phenomena, with continual variations, were repeated day after day and night after night. Flowers would drop from the ceiling into his hands, delicious odors of fruits would diffuse themselves through the room. A music like that of the Swiss bell-ringers would break upon the silence, continuing for a minute or more. A pen would start up from the table and write an intelligible sentence. A castanet would be played on and dashed about furiously, as if by some invisible Bacchante. A clatter, as of the hammering of a hundred carpenters, would suddenly make itself heard. A voice would speak intelligible sentences, sometimes using a tin trumpet for the purpose. Articles of furniture would pass about the room and cross each other with a swiftness and precision that no mortal could imitate. The noise of dancers, using their feet, and keeping time, would be heard on the floor.

Once Corinna asked him to leave his watch with her. He did so. When he was several rods from the house she called to him, “You are sure you haven’t your watch?” “Yes, sure,” replied Peek. He hurried home, a distance of two miles, without meeting a human being. On undressing to go to bed, he found his watch in his vest pocket.

These physical thaumaturgies produced upon Peek a more astounding effect than all the evidences of mind-reading and clairvoyance. In the communications made to him by the “power,” there was generally something unsatisfying or incomplete. He would, for instance, think of some departed friend,—a white man, perhaps,—and, without uttering or writing a word, would desire some manifestation from that friend. Immediately Corinna would strip from her arm the drapery, and show on her skin, written in clear crimson letters, some brief message signed by the right name. And then the supposed bearer of that name (speaking through Corinna) would correctly recall incidents of his acquaintance with Peek.[^[7]]

Thus much was amazing and satisfactory; but when Peek analyzed it all in thought, he found that no sufficient proof of identification had been given. A “power,” able to probe his own mind, might get from it all that was spoken relative to the individual claiming identity; might even know how to imitate that individual’s handwriting. Peek concluded that one must be himself in a spiritual state in order to identify a spirit. The so-called “communications” he found, for the most part, monotonous. They were, some of them, above Corinna’s capacity, but not above his own. Erroneous answers were not unfrequently given, especially in reply to questions upon matters of worldly concern. He was repeatedly told of places where he could find silver and gold, and never truly.

He concluded that to surrender one’s faith implicitly to the word of a spirit out of the flesh, either on moral or on secular questions, was about as unwise as it would be to give one’s self up to the control of a spirit in the flesh,—a mere mortal like himself. He was satisfied by his experience that it was not in the power of spirits to impair his own freedom of will and independence of thought, so long as he exercised them manfully. And this assurance was to his mind not only a guaranty of his own spiritual relationship, but it pointed to a supreme, omniscient Spirit, the gracious Father of all. If the words that came through Corinna had proved, in every instance, infallible, what would Peek have become but a passive, unreasoning recipient, as sluggish in thought as Corinna herself!

We have said that the “communications” were generally on a level with Peek’s own mind. There was once an exception. Said a very learned spirit (learned, as to him it seemed) one night, speaking through Corinna:—

“Attend, even if you do not understand all that I may utter. The great purpose of creation is to exercise and develop independent, individual thought, and through that, a will in harmony with the Supreme Wisdom. Men are subjected to the discipline of the earth-sphere, not to be happy there, but to qualify themselves for happiness,—to deserve happiness.

“What would all created wonders be without thought to appreciate and admire them? Study is worship. Admiration is worship. Of what account would be the starry heavens, if there were not mind to study and to wonder at creation, and thus to fit itself for adoration of the Creator?

“My friend Lessing, when he was on your earth, once said, that, if God would give him truth, he would decline the gift, and prefer the labor of seeking it for himself. But most men are mentally so inert, they would rather believe than examine; and so they flatter themselves that their loose, unreasoning acquiescence is a saving belief. Pernicious error! All the mistakes and transgressions of men arise either from feeble, imperfect thinking, or from not thinking at all.

“The heart is much,—is principal; but men must not hope to rise until they do their own thinking. They cannot think by proxy. They must exercise the mind on all that pertains to their moral and mental growth. You may perhaps sometimes wish that you too, like this poor, torpid, parasitical creature, Corinna, might be a medium for outside spirits to influence and speak through. But beware! You know not what you wish. Learn to prize your individuality. The wisdom Corinna may utter does not become hers by appropriation. In her mind it falls on barren soil.

“We all are more or less mediums; but the innocent man is he who resists and overcomes temptation, not he who never felt its power; and the wise man is he who, at once recipient and repellent, seeks to appropriate and assimilate with his being whatever of good he can get from all the instrumentalities of nature, divine and human, angelic and demoniac.”

Peek derived an indefinable but awakening impression from these words, and asked, “Is the Bible true?”

The reply was: “It is true only to him who construes it aright. If you find in it the justification of American slavery, then to you it is not true. All the theologies which would impose, as essentials of faith, speculative dogmas or historical declarations which do not pertain to the practice of the highest human morality and goodness, as taught in the words and the example of Christ, are, in this respect at least, irreverent, mischievous, and untrue.”

“How do I know,” asked Peek, “that you are not a devil?”

“I am aware of no way,” was the reply, “by which, in your present state, you can know absolutely that I am not a devil,—even Beelzebub, the prince of devils. Each man’s measure of truth must be the reason God has given him. But of this you may rest assured: it is a great point gained to be able to believe really even in a devil. Given a devil, you will one day work yourself so far into the light as to believe in an angel.”

“Is there a God?” asked the slave.

“God is,” said the spirit, “and says to thee, as once to Pascal, ‘Be consoled! Thou wouldst not seek me, if thou hadst not found me.’”

These were almost the only words Peek ever received through Corinna that struck him by their superiority to what he himself could have imagined; and he was impressed by them accordingly. Though they were above his comprehension at the moment, he thought he might grow up to them, and he caused them to be repeated slowly while he wrote them down.

Corinna died, and Peek kept on thinking.

What rapture in thought now! What a new meaning in life! What a new universe for the heart was there in love! Henceforth the burden and the mystery of “all this unintelligible world” was lightened if not dissolved; for death was but the step to a higher plane of life. The old, trite emblem of the chrysalis was no mere barren fancy. Continuous life was now to his mind a certainty; arrived at, too, by the deductions of experience, sense, and reason, as well as intimated by the eager thirst of the heart.

The process by which he made the phenomena he had witnessed conduce to this conclusion was briefly this. An invisible, intelligent force had lifted heavy articles before his eyes, played on musical instruments, written sentences, and spoken words. This force claimed to be a human spirit in a human form, of tissues too fine to be visible to our grosser senses. It could pass, like heat and electricity, through what might seem material impediments. It had a plastic power to reincarnate itself at will, and imitate human forms and colors, under certain circumstances, and it gave partial proof of this by showing a hand, an arm, or a foot undistinguishable from one of flesh and blood. On one occasion the human form entire had been displayed, been touched, and had then dissolved into invisibility and intangibility before him.

Now he must either take the word of this intelligent “force,” that it was an independent spiritual entity, or he must account for its acts by some other supposition. The “force,” in its communications to his mind, had shown it was not infallible; it had erred in some of its predictions, although in others it had been wonderfully correct. If its explanation of itself was untrue,—if no outside intelligent force were operating,—the other supposition was, that the phenomena were a proceeding either from himself, the spectator, or from Corinna. And here, without knowing it, Peek found himself speculating on the theory of Count Gasparin,[^[8]] who has had the candor to brave the laugh of modern science (a very different thing from scientia) by recounting as facts what Professor Faraday and our Cambridge savans denounce as impositions or delusions.

Peek was therefore reduced to these two explanations: either the “force” was a spirit (call it, if you please, an outside power), as it claimed to be, or it was a faculty unconsciously exerted by the mortals present. In either case, it supplied an assurance of spirit and immortality; for it might fairly be presumed that such wonderful powers would not be wrapt up in the human organism except for a purpose; and that purpose, what could it be but the future development of those powers under suitable conditions? So either of Peek’s hypotheses led to the same precious and ineffable conviction of continuous life,—of the soul’s immortality!

On one occasion a Northern Professor, who had given his days to the positive sciences, and who believed in matter and motion, and nothing else, passed a week, while visiting the South for his health, with his old friend and classmate, Mr. Barnwell; and Peek overheard the following conversation.

“How do you get rid of all this testimony on the subject?” asked Mr. Barnwell.

“Stuff and nonsense!” exclaimed the Professor. “That a poor benighted nigger should believe this trash isn’t surprising. That poets, like Willis and Mrs. Browning, should give in to it may be tolerated, for they are privileged. In them the imaginative faculty is irregularly developed. But that sane and intelligent white men like Edmonds, and Tallmadge, and Bowditch, and Brownson, and Bishop Clark of Rhode Island, and Howitt, and Chambers, and Coleman, and Dr. Gray, and Wilkinson, and Mountford, and Robert Dale Owen, should gravely swallow these idiotic stories, is lamentable indeed. The spectacle becomes humiliating, and I sigh, ‘Poor human nature!’”

“But Peek is far from being a benighted nigger,” replied Barnwell; “he can read and write as well as you can; he is the best shot in the county; he is a good mechanic; for a time he waited on one of the great jugglers at the St. Charles; he can explain or cleverly imitate all the tricks of all the conjurers; he is not a man to be humbugged, especially by a poor sick girl in a hut with no cellar, no apparatus, no rooms where any coadjutor could hide. It has been the greatest puzzle of my life to know how to explain Peek’s stories.”

“Half that is extraordinary in them,” said the Professor, “is probably a lie, and the other half is delusion. Not one man in fifty is competent to test such occurrences. Men’s senses have not been scientifically trained; their love of the marvellous blinds them to the simplest solutions of a mystery. How to observe is one of the most difficult of arts; and one must undergo rigid scientific culture in the practical branches before he can observe properly.”

“Under your theory, Professor, ninety-eight men out of every hundred ought to be excluded as witnesses from our courts of justice. It strikes me that a fellow like Peek—with his senses always in good working trim, who never misses his aim, who can hit a mark by moonlight at forty paces, and shoot a bird on the wing in bright noonday, who can detect a tread or a flutter of wings when to your ear all is silence—is as competent to see straight and judge of sights and sounds as any blinkard from a college, even though he wear spectacles and call himself professor of mathematics. Remember, Peek is not a superstitious nigger. He will feel personally obliged to any ghost who will show himself. He shrinks from no haunted room, no solitude, no darkness.”

“Truly, Horace, you speak as if you half believed these absurdities.”

“No,—I wish I could. Peek once said to me, that he wouldn’t have believed these things on my testimony, and couldn’t expect me to believe them on his.”

“Our business,” said the Professor, “is with the life before us. I agree with Comte, that we ought to confine ourselves to positive, demonstrable facts; with Humboldt, that ‘there is not much to boast of after our dissolution,’ and that ‘the blue regions on the other side of the grave’[^[9]] are probably a poet’s dream. Let us not trouble ourselves about the inexplicable or the uncertain.”

“But you do not consider, Professor, that Peek’s facts are positive to his experience. Besides, to say, with Comte, that a fact is inexplicable, and that we can’t go beyond it, is not to demonstrate that the fact has its cause in itself; it is merely to confess the mystery of a cause unknown.”[^[10]]

“Well, Horace, I’m sleepy, and must retire. I’ll find an opportunity to cross-examine Peek before I go, and you shall see how he will contradict and stultify himself.”

Before the opportunity was found, the Professor had passed on. Less modest than Rabelais was in his last moments, he did not condescend to say, “I go to inquire into a great possibility.” The physician in attendance, who was a young man, and had recently “experienced religion,” asked the Professor if he had found the Lord Jesus. To which the Professor, making a wry face, replied, “Jargon!” “Have you no regard for your soul?” asked the well-meaning doctor. “Can you prove to me, young man, that I have a soul?” returned the Professor, trying to raise himself on his pillow, in an argumentative posture. “Don’t you believe in a future state?” asked the doctor. “I believe what can be proved,” said the Professor; “and there are two things, and only two, that can be proved,—though Berkeley thinks we can’t prove even those,—matter and motion.[^[11]] All phenomena are reducible to matter and motion,—matter and motion,—matter and mo-o-o—”

The effort was too much for the moribund Professor. He did not complete the utterance of his formula, at least on this side of the great curtain. Probably when he awoke in the next life, conscious of his identity, he felt very much in the mood of that other man of science, who, on being told that the microscope would confute an elaborate theory he had raised, refused to look through the impertinent instrument.

For several months Peek retained his place under Braxton. But even overseers, whip in hand, cannot frighten off Death. Braxton disappeared through the common portal. His successor, Hawks, had a theory that the true mode of managing niggers was to overawe them by extreme severity at the start, and then taper off into clemency. He had been lord of the lash a week or two, when he was asked by Mr. Barnwell how he got along with Peek.

“Capitally!” replied Hawks. “I took care to put him through his paces at our first meeting,—took the starch right out of him. He’d score his own mother now if I told him to. He’s a thorough nigger—is Peek. A nigger must fear a white man before he can like him. Peek would go through fire and water for me now. He has behaved so well, I have given him a pass to visit his sister at Carter’s.”

“I never knew before that Peek had a sister,” said Barnwell.

Peek did not come back from that visit.

CHAPTER VII.
AN UNCONSCIOUS HEIRESS.

“She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’”

Tennyson.

We left Peek (known in New York as Jacobs) in the little closet opening from the apartment where Charlton sat at his papers. The knock at the outer door was succeeded by the entrance of a person of rather imposing presence.

Mr. Albert Pompilard stood upwards of six feet in his polished shoes and variegated silk stockings. He was bulky, and could not conceal, by any art of dress, an incipient paunch. But whether he was a youth of twenty-five or a man of fifty it was very difficult to judge on a hasty inspection. He was in reality sixty-nine. He affected an extravagantly juvenile and jaunty style of dress, and was never twenty-four hours behind the extreme fashions of Young America.

On this occasion Mr. Pompilard was dressed in a light-colored sack or pea-jacket, with gaping pockets and enormous buttons, the cloth being a sort of shaggy, woollen stuff, coarse enough for a mat. His pantaloons and vest were of the same astounding fabric. He wore a new black hat, just ironed and brushed by Leary; a neckerchief of a striped red-and-black silk, loosely tied; immaculate linen; and a diamond on his little finger. A thick gold chain passed round his neck, and entered his vest pocket. He swung a gold-headed switch, and was followed by a little terrier dog of a breed new to Broadway.

Mr. Pompilard’s complexion was somewhat florid, and presented few marks of age. He wore his own teeth, which were still sound and white, and his own hair, including whiskers, although the hue was rather too black to be natural.

“I believe I have the honor of addressing Mr. Charlton,” said Pompilard, with the air of one who is graciously bestowing a condescension.

“That’s my name, sir. What’s your business?” replied Charlton, in the curt, dry manner of one who gives his information grudgingly.

“My name, sir, is Pompilard. You may not be aware that there is a sort of family connection between us.”

“Ah! yes; I remember,” said Charlton, looking inquiringly at his visitor, but not asking him to sit down.

Pompilard returned his gaze, as if waiting for something; then, seeing that nothing came, he lifted a chair, replaced it with emphasis on the floor, and sat down. If it was a rebuke, Charlton did not take it, though the terrier seemed to comprehend it fully, for he began to bark, and made a reconnoissance of Charlton’s legs that plainly meant mischief.

Pompilard refreshed himself for a moment with the lawyer’s alarm, then ordered Grip to lie down under the table, which he did with a quavering whine of expostulation.

“I see,” said Pompilard, “you almost forget the precise nature of the connection to which I allude. Let me explain: the lady who has the honor to be your wife is the step-mother, I believe, of Mr. Henry Berwick.”

“Both the step-mother and aunt,” interposed Charlton, somewhat mollified by the language of his visitor.

“Yes, she was half-sister to his own mother,” resumed Pompilard. “Well, the wife of Mr. Henry Berwick was Miss Aylesford of Chicago, and is the niece of my present wife.”

“I understand all that,” said Charlton; and then, as the thought occurred to him that he might make the connection useful, he rose, and, offering his hand, said, “I am happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Pompilard.” That gentleman rose and exchanged salutations; and Grip, under the table, gave a smothered howl, subsiding into a whine, as if he felt personally aggrieved by the concession, and would like to put his teeth in the calf of a certain leg.

“My object in calling,” said Pompilard, “is merely to inquire if you can give me the present address of Mrs. Henry Berwick. My wife wishes to communicate with her.”

Charlton generally either evaded a direct question or answered it by a lie. He never received a request for information, even in regard to the time of day, that he did not cast about in his mind to see how he could gain by the withholding or profit by the giving. He took it for granted that every man was trying to get the advantage of him; and he resolved to take the initiative in that game. And so, to Pompilard’s inquiry, Charlton replied:

“I really cannot say whether Mr. Berwick is in the country or not. The last I heard of him he was in Paris.”

“Then your intelligence of him is not so late as mine. He arrived in Boston some days since, but left immediately for the West by the way of Albany. I thought your wife might be in communication with him.”

“They seldom correspond.”

“I must inquire about him at the Union Club,” said Pompilard, musingly. “By the way, Mr. Charlton, you deal in real estate securities, do you not?”

“Occasionally. There are some old-fashioned persons who consult me in regard to investments.”

“Do you want any good mortgages?” asked Pompilard.

“Just at present, money is very scarce and high,” replied Charlton.

“That’s the very reason why I want it,” said his visitor. “Could you negotiate a thirty thousand dollar mortgage for me?”

“But that’s a very large sum.”

“Another reason why I want it,” returned Pompilard. “Supposing the security were satisfactory, what bonus should you require for getting me the money? Please give me your lowest terms, and at once, for I have an engagement in five minutes on ’Change.”

“Well, sir,” said Charlton, in the tone of a man to whom it is an ordinary act to drive the knife in deep, “I think in these times five per cent would be about right.”

“Pooh! I’ll bid you good morning, Mr. Charlton,” said Pompilard, with an air of unspeakable contempt. “Come, Grip.”

And Mr. Pompilard bowed and turned to leave, just as another knock was heard at the door. He opened it, encountering four men, one of whom kicked the unoffending terrier; an indignity which Pompilard resented by switching the aggressor smartly twice round the legs, and then passed on. He had not descended five steps when a bullet from a pistol grazed his whiskers. “Not a bad shot that, my Southern friend!” said the old man, deliberately continuing his descent.

Before losing sight of Pompilard we must explain why he was desirous that his wife should communicate with Mrs. Berwick.

Inheriting a fortune from his mother, Albert Pompilard had managed to squander it in princely expenditures before he was twenty-five years old. The vulgar dissipations of sensualists he despised. He abstained from wine and strong drink at a time when to abstain was to be laughed at. With the costliest viands and liquors on his table for guests, he himself ate sparingly and drank cold water. Had he been as scrupulously moral in the management of his soul as he was of his body, he would have been a saint. But he was a spendthrift and a gambler on a large scale.

Having ruined himself financially, he married. A little money which his wife brought him was staked entire on a stock operation, and won. Thence a new fortune larger than the first. At thirty-five he was worth half a million. He took his wife, two daughters, and a son to Paris, gave entertainments that made even royalty envious, and in ten years returned to New York a bankrupt. His wife died, and Pompilard appeared once more at the stock board. Ill-luck now pursued him with remorseless pertinacity, but never succeeded in disturbing his equanimity. He was frightfully in debt, but the consideration never for a moment marred his digestion nor his slumbers. The complacency of a man contented with himself and the world shed its beams over his features always.

At fifty, a widower, with three children, he carried off and married Miss Aylesford, who at the time was on a visit to New York,—a girl of eighteen, handsome, accomplished, and worth half a million. In vain had her brother tried to open her eyes to Pompilard’s character as an inveterate fortune-hunter and spendthrift. The wilful young lady would have her way. Pompilard took possession, paid his debts with interest, and, with less than one third of his wife’s property left, once more tried his fortune in Wall Street. This time he won. At sixty he was richer than ever. He became the owner of a domain of three hundred acres on the Hudson,—built palatial residences,—one in the country, and one on the favored avenue that leads to Murray Hill,—bought a steamboat to transport his guests to and from the city,—gave a series of fêtes, and kept open houses.

But soon one of those panics in the money-market which take place periodically to baffle the calculations and paralyze the efforts of large holders of stocks, occurred to confound Pompilard. In trying to hold his stocks, he was compelled to make heavy sacrifices, and then, in trying to hedge, he heaped loss on loss. He had to sell his acres on the Hudson,—then his town house,—finally his horses; and at sixty-nine we find him trying to get a mortgage for thirty thousand dollars on five or six poor little houses, the last remnant from the wreck of his wife’s property. In the hope of effecting this he had persuaded his wife to communicate with her niece, Mrs. Berwick.

The brother of Mrs. Pompilard, Robert Aylesford, had inherited a large estate, which he had increased by judicious investments in land on the site of Chicago, some years before that wonderful city had risen like an exhalation in a night from the marsh on which it stands. His wife had died in child-birth, leaving a daughter whom he named after her, Leonora. His own health was subsequently impaired by a malignant fever, caught in humane attendance on a Mr. Carteret, a stranger whom he had accidentally met at Cairo in Southern Illinois.

Deeply chagrined at his sister’s imprudent marriage, and feeling that his own health was failing, Aylesford conceived a somewhat romantic project in regard to his only child, Leonora. During a winter he had passed in Italy he had become acquainted with the Ridgways, a refined and intelligent family from Western Massachusetts. One of the members, a lady, kept a boarding-school of deserved celebrity in the town of Lenbridge.

To this lady Aylesford took his little girl, then only two years old, and said: “I wish you to bring her up under the name of Leonora Lockhart, her mother’s maiden name, and her own, though not all of it. When she is married, let her know that the rest of it is Aylesford. She is so young she will not remember much of her father. Keep both her and the world in ignorance of the fact that she is born to a fortune. My wish is that she shall not be the victim of a fortune-hunter in marriage; and you will take all needful steps to carry out my wish. I leave you the address of my man of business, Mr. Keep, in New York, who will supply you with a thousand dollars a year as your compensation for supporting and educating her. Neither she nor any one else must know that even this allotment is on her account. My physician orders me to pass the winter in Cuba, and I may not return. Should that be my lot, I look to you to be in the place of a parent to my child. Her relations may suppose her dead. I shall not undeceive them. Her nearest relative is her aunt, my sister, Mrs. Pompilard, who, in the event of my death, will be legally satisfied that such a disposition is made of my property that it cannot directly or indirectly fall into the hands of that irreclaimable spendthrift, her husband. As I have lived for the last twenty years at the West, I do not think you will have any difficulty in keeping my secret.”

Subsequently he said: “On the day of Leonora’s marriage, should she have passed her eighteenth year, the trustees of my property will have directions to hand over to her the income. Till that it is done, your lips must be sealed in regard to her prospects. In the event of her remaining single, I have made provisions which Mr. Keep will explain to you. I am resolved that my daughter shall not have to buy a husband.”

Mrs. Ridgway accepted the trust in the same frank spirit in which it was offered. Mr. Aylesford took leave of his little girl, and before the next spring she was fatherless. Her eighteenth birthday found her developed into a young lady of singular grace and beauty, with accomplishments which showed that the body had not been neglected in adorning the mind. But the mystery that surrounded her family and origin produced a shyness that kept her aloof from social intimacies. Vainly did her attentive friends try to overcome her fondness for solitary musings and rides. She was possessed with the idea that she was an illegitimate child, though to this suspicion she never gave utterance till candor seemed to compel it.

On a charming morning in June, as a young man, just escaped from a law-office in New York for a week’s recreation among the hills of Lenbridge, was entering “the cathedral road,” as it was called, overarched as it was by forest-trees, and spread with an elastic mat of pine-leaves, he saw a young lady riding a spirited horse, a bright-colored bay, exquisitely formed, and showing high blood in every step. The sagacious creature evidently felt the exhilaration of the fresh, balsamic air, for he played the most amusing antics, dancing and curvetting as if for the entertainment of a circus of spectators; starting lightly and feigning fright at little shining puddles of water, leaping over fallen stumps, but with such elastic ease and precision as not to stir his rider in her seat,—and frolicking much like a pet kitten when the ball of yarn is on the floor.

His mistress evidently understood his ways, and he hers, for she talked to him and patted his glossy neck and seemed to encourage him in his tricks. At last she said, “Come, now, Hamlet, enough of this,—behave yourself!” and then he walked on quite demurely. He traversed a cross-road newly repaired with broken stones, and entered on the forest avenue. But all at once Hamlet seemed to go lame, and the lady dismounted, and, lifting one of his fore-feet, tried to extract a stone that had got locked in the hollow of his sole. Her strength was unequal to the task. The pedestrian who had been watching her movements approached, bowed, and offered his assistance. The lady thanked him, and resigned into his hand the hoof of the gentle animal, who plainly understood that something for his benefit was going on.

“The stone is wedged in so tightly, I fear it will require a chisel to pry it out,” said the new acquaintance, whose name was Henry Berwick. Then, after a pause, he added, “But perhaps I can hammer it out with another stone.”

“Let me find one for you,” said Leonora, running here and there, and searching as she held up her riding-habit.

Henry looked after her with an interest he had never felt before for any one in the form of a young lady. How bewitchingly that black beaver with its ostrich plumes sat on her head, but failed to hide those luxuriant curls,—luxuriant by the grace of nature and not of the hair-dresser! And then that face,—how full of life and tenderness and mind! And how admirably did its red and white contrast with the surrounding blackness of its frame! And that figure,—how were its harmonious perfections brought out by the simple, closely fitting nankeen riding-habit trimmed with green!

While she was engaged in her search, Mr. Henry Berwick dishonestly did his best to loosen the shoe. All at once, in the most innocent manner, he exclaimed, “This shoe is loose,—it has come off,—look here!”

And he held it up, just as Leonora handed him a stone.

He took the stone, and with one blow knocked out the fragment that lay wedged in the hollow of the sole.

“Thank you, sir,” said Leonora.

“You are one of Mrs. Ridgway’s young ladies, I presume,” said Henry.

“Yes, I shall not be back in time for my music-lesson, if I do not hurry.”

“There is a blacksmith not a quarter of a mile from here. My advice to you is to stop and have this shoe refitted. Remember, you have a mile of a newly macadamized road to travel before you get home, and over that you will have to walk your horse slowly unless you restore him his shoe.”

Leonora seemed struck by these considerations. “I will take your advice,” she said, putting herself in the saddle with a movement so quick and easy that Berwick could not interpose to help her. But the horse limped so badly that she once more dismounted.

“Let me lead him for you,” said Berwick, “I shall not have to go a step out of my way.”

“You are very obliging,” replied the lady.

And the young man led the horse, while the young lady walked by his side.

The quarter of a mile was a remarkably long one. It was a full hour before the blacksmith’s shed was reached, and then Berwick, secretly giving the man of the anvil a dollar, winked at him, and said aloud, “Call us as soon as you have fitted the shoe”; and then added, in an aside, “Be an hour or so about it.”

The new acquaintances strolled together to a beautiful pond within sight among the hills.

O that exquisite June morning, with its fresh foliage, its clear sky, its pine odors, its wild-flowers, and its songs of birds! How imperishable in the memories of both it became! How much happier were they ever afterwards for the happiness of that swift-gliding moment!

Leonora spied some harebells in the crevices of the slaty rocks of a steep declivity, and pointed them out as the first of the season.

“I must get them for you,” cried Berwick.

“No, no! It is a dangerous place,” said Leonora.

“They shall be your harebells,” said Berwick, swinging himself, by the aid of a birch-tree that grew almost horizontally out of the cleft of a rock, over the precipice, and snatching the flowers. Leonora treasured them for years, pressed between the leaves of Shelley’s Poems.

Thus began a courtship which, three weeks afterwards, was followed by an offer of marriage. Early in the acquaintance, foreseeing the drift of Berwick’s eager attentions, Leonora had frankly communicated by letter her suspicions in regard to her own birth.

In his reply Berwick had written: “I almost wish it may be as you imagine, in order that I may the better prove to you the strength of my attachment; for I do not underrate the desirableness of an honorable genealogy. No one can prize more than I an unspotted lineage. But I would not marry the woman who I did not think could in herself compensate me for the absence of all advantages of family position and wealth; and whose society could not more than m—flittedake up for the loss of all social attractions that could be offered outside of the home her presence would sanctify. You are the one my heart points to as able to do all this; and so, Leonora, whether it be the bar sinister or the ducal coronet that ought to be in your coat of arms, it matters not to me. No herald’s pen can make you less charming in my eyes. Under any cloud that could be thrown over your origin, to me you would always be, as Portia was to Brutus, a fair and honorable wife;—

‘As dear to me as are the ruddy drops

That visit this sad heart.’

And yet not sad, if you were mine! So do not think that any future development in regard to the antecedents of yourself or of your parents can detract from an affection based on those qualities which are of the soul and heart, and the worth of which no mortal disaster can impair.”

To all which the imprudent young lady returned this answer: “Do not think to outdo me in generosity. You judge me independently of all social considerations and advantages; I will do the same by you; for I know as little of you as you do of me.”

They met the next morning, and Berwick said: “Is not this a very dangerous precedent we are setting for romantic young people? What if I should turn out to be a swindler or a bigamist?”

“My heart would have prescience of it much sooner than my head,” replied Leonora. “Women are not so often misled into uncongenial alliances by their affections as by their passions or their calculations. The lamb, before he has ever known a wolf, is instinctively aware of an enemy’s presence, even while the wolf is yet unseen. If the lamb stopped to reason with himself, he would be very apt to say, ‘Nonsense! it is no doubt a very respectable beast who is approaching. Why should I imagine he wants to harm me?’”

“But what if I am a wolf disguised as a lamb?” asked Berwick.

“I am so good a judge of tune,” replied Leonora, “that I should detect the sham the moment you tried to cry baa. Nay, a repugnant nature makes itself felt to me by its very presence. There are some persons the very touch of whose hand produces an impression, I generally find to be true, of their character.”

“An ingenious plea!” said Berwick with an affectation of sarcasm. “But it does not palliate your indiscretion.”

“Very well, sir,” replied Leonora, “since you disapprove my precipitancy, we will—”

Berwick interrupted the speech at the very portal of her mouth, by surprising its warders, the lips.

And so it was a betrothal.

How admirably had Mrs. Ridgway behaved through it all! How scrupulous she had been in withholding all intimations of Leonora’s prospective wealth! There were young men among the Ridgways, handsome, accomplished, just entering the hard paths of commercial or professional toil. How easy it would have been to have hinted to some of them, “Secure this young lady, and your fortune is made. Let a hint suffice.” But Mrs. Ridgway was too loyal to her trust to even blindly convey by her demeanor towards Leonora a suspicion that the child was aught more than the dowerless orphan she appeared.

Berwick took a small house in Brooklyn, and prepared for his marriage. Clients were as yet few and poor, but he did not shrink from living on twelve hundred a year with the woman he loved. He was not quite sure that his betrothed was even rich enough to refurnish her own wardrobe. So he delicately broached the question to Mrs. Ridgway. That lady mischievously told him that if he could let Leonora have fifty dollars, it might be convenient. The next day Berwick sent a check for ten times that amount.

But after the wedding, an elderly gentleman, named Keep, to whom Berwick had been introduced a few days before, took him and the bride aside, and delivered to him a schedule of the title-deeds of an estate worth a million, the bequest of the bride’s father, and the income of which was to be subject to her order.

“But this deranges all our little plans!” exclaimed the bride, with delightful naïveté.

“Well, my children, you must put up with it as well as you can,” said Mr. Keep.

Berwick took the surprise gravely and thoughtfully. With this great enlargement of his means and opportunities, were not his responsibilities proportionably increased?

CHAPTER VIII.
A DESCENDANT OF THE CAVALIERS.

“Pride of race, pride in an ancestry of gentlemen, pride in all those habitudes and instincts which separated us so immeasurably from the peddling and swindling Yankee nation,—all this pride has been openly cherished and avowed in all simplicity and good faith.”—Richmond (Va.) Enquirer.

Peek sat in the little closet which opened into Charlton’s office. Suddenly he heard the crack of a pistol, followed by a volley of ferocious oaths. Efforts seemed to be made to pacify the utterer, who was with difficulty withheld by his companions from following the person who had offended him. At these sounds Peek felt a cold, creeping sensation down his back, and a tightness in his throat, as if it were grasped by a hand. The pistol-shot and the nature of the oaths brought before him the figure of the overseer with his broad-brimmed hat, his whip, and his revolver.

All the negro’s senses were now concentrated in the one faculty of hearing. He judged that five persons had entered the room. The angry man had cooled down, and the voices were not raised above a whisper.

“Is he here?” asked one.

No answer was heard in reply. Probably a gesture had sufficed.

“Will he resist?”

“Possibly. These fugitives usually go armed.”

“What shall we do if he threatens to fire?”

Here an altercation ensued, during which Peek could understand little of what was uttered. But he had heard enough. His thoughts first reverted to his wife and his infant boy, and he pictured to himself their destitute condition in the event of his being taken away. Then the treachery of Charlton glared upon him in all its deformity, and he instinctively drew from the sheath in an inside pocket of his vest a sharp, glittering dagger-like knife. He looked rapidly around, but there was nothing to suggest a mode of escape. The only window in the closet was one over the door communicating with the office.

Suddenly it occurred to him that, if he were to be hemmed in in this closet, his chances of escape would be small. It would be better for him to be in the larger room, whether he chose to adopt a defensive or an offensive policy. Seeing an old rope in a corner of the closet, he seized it with the avidity a drowning man might show in grasping at a straw.

He listened intently once more to the whisperers. A low susurration, accompanied with a whistling sound, he identified at once as coming from Skinner, the captain of the schooner in which he had made his escape. Then some one sneezed. Peek would have recognized that sneeze in Abyssinia. It must have proceeded from Colonel Delancy Hyde.

Standing on tiptoe on a coal-box, the negro now looked through a hole in the green-paper curtain covering the glass over the door, and surveyed the whole party. He found he was right in his conjectures. The captain was there with one of his sailors,—an old inebriate by the name of Biggs, both doubtless ready to swear to the slave’s identity. And the Colonel was there as natural as when he appeared on the plantation, strolling round to take a look at the “smart niggers,” so as to be able to recognize them in case of need. Two policemen, armed with bludgeons, and probably with revolvers; and Charlton, with a paper tied with red tape in his hand, formed the other half of this agreeable company. Peek marked well their positions, put his knife between his teeth, and descended from the box.

Colonel Delancy Hyde is a personage of too much importance to be kept waiting while we describe the movements of a slave. Colonel Delancy Hyde must be attended to first. Tall, lank, and gaunt in figure, round-shouldered and stooping, he carried his head very much after the fashion of a bloodhound on the scent. Beard and moustache of a reddish, sandy hue, coarse and wiry, concealed much of the lower part of a face which would have been pale but for the floridity which bad whiskey had imparted. The features were rather leonine than wolfish in outline (if we may believe Mr. Livingstone, the lion is a less respectable beast than the wolf). But the small brownish eyes, generally half closed and obliquely glancing, had a haughty expression of penetration or of scorn, as if the person on whom they fell would be too much honored by a full, entire regard from those sublime orbs.

The Colonel wore a loosely fitting frock-coat and pantaloons, evidently bought ready made. They were of a grayish nondescript material which he used to boast was manufactured in Georgia. He generally carried his hands in his pockets, and bestowed his tobacco-juice impartially on all sides with the abandon of a free and independent citizen who has not been used to carpets.

There were two things of which Colonel Delancy Hyde was proud: one, his name, the other, his Virginia birth. It is interesting to trace back the genealogy of heroes; and we have it in our power to do this justice to the Colonel.

In the year 1618 there resided in London a stable-keeper of doubtful reputation, and connected with gentlemen of the turf who frequented Hyde Park and Newmarket in the early days of that important British institution, the horse-race. This man’s name was Hyde. He had a patron in Sir Arthur Delancy, a dissipated nobleman, whom he admired, naming after him a son who was early initiated in all the mysteries of jockeyship and gambling.

Unfortunately for the youth, he did not have the wit to keep out of the clutches of the law. Twice he was arrested and imprisoned for swindling. A third offence of a graver character, consisting in the theft of a pocket-book containing thirteen shillings, led to his arraignment for grand larceny, a crime then punishable with death. The gallows began to loom in the not remote distance with a sharpness of outline not pictorially pleasant to the ambition of the Hyde family.

About that time the “London Company,” whose colony in Virginia was in a languishing condition, petitioned the Crown to make them a present of “vagabonds and condemned men” to be sent out to enforced labor. The senior Hyde applied to Sir Arthur Delancy to save his namesake; and that nobleman laid the case before his friend, Sir Edward Sandys, treasurer of the company aforesaid. By their joint influence the Hydes were spared the disgrace of seeing their eldest hung; and King James having graciously granted the London Company’s petition for a consignment of “vagabonds and condemned men,” a hundred were sent out (a mere fraction of the numbers of similar gentry who had preceded them), and of this precious lot the younger Hyde made one.[^[12]] Just a year afterwards, namely, in 1620, a Dutch trading-vessel anchored in James River with twenty negroes, and this was the beginning of African slavery in North America.

Neither threats nor lashes could induce young Mr. Hyde, this “founder of one of the first families,” to work. Soon after his arrival on the banks of the Chickahominy he stole a gun, and thenceforth got a precarious living by shooting, fishing, and pilfering. He took to himself a female partner, and faithfully transmitted to his descendants the traits by which he was distinguished.

Not one of them, except now and then a female of the stock, was ever known to get an honest living; and even if the poor creatures had desired to do so, the state of society where their lot was cast was such as to deter them from learning any mechanical craft or working methodically at any manual employment.

Slavery had thrown its ban and its slime over white labor, branding it with disrepute. To get bread, not by the sweat of your own brow, but by somebody else’s sweat, became the one test of manhood and high spirit. To be a gentleman, you must begin with robbery.

The Hydes were hardly an educated race. There was a tradition in the family that one of them had been to school, but if he had, the fruits of culture did not appear. They seemed to have shared the benediction of Sir William Berkeley, once Governor of Virginia, who wrote: “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years.”

It is true that our Colonel Delancy Hyde could read and write, although indifferently. The labor of acquiring this ability had been enormous and repugnant; but before his eighteenth year he had achieved it; and thenceforth he was a prodigy in the eyes of the rest of his kin. He got his title of Colonel from once receiving a letter so addressed from Senator Mason, who had employed him to buy a horse. Among the Colonel’s acquaintances who could read, this brevet was considered authoritative and sufficient.

Not being of a thrifty and forehanded habit, the Colonel’s father never rose to the possession of more than three slaves at a time; but he made up for his deficiency in this respect by beating these three all the more frequently. They were a miserable set, and, to tell the truth, deserved many of the whippings they got. The owner was out of pocket by them, year after year, but was too shiftless a manager to provide against the loss, and was too proud to get rid of the encumbrances altogether. He and his children and his neighbors were kept poor, squalid, and degraded by a system that in effect made them the serfs of a few rich proprietors, who, by discrediting white labor, were able to buy up at a trifling cost the available lands, and then impoverish them by the exhausting crops wrung from the generous soil by large gangs of slaves under the rule of superior capital and intelligence.

And yet no lord of a thousand “niggers” could be a more bigoted upholder than the Hydes of “our institutions, sir.” (Living by jugglery, Slavery usually speaks of the institution as our institutions.) They would foam at the mouth in speaking of those men of the North who dared to question the divinity and immutability of slavery. To deny its right to unlimited extension was the one kind of profanity not to be pardoned. It was worse than atheism to say that slavery was sectional and freedom national.

To the Colonel’s not very clear geographical conceptions the white Americans south of Mason and Dixon’s line were, with hardly an exception, descendants of noblemen and gentlemen; while all north were, to borrow the words of Mr. Jefferson Davis, either the “scum of Europe” or “a people whose ancestors Cromwell had gathered from the bogs and fens of Ireland and Scotland.”[^[13]]

Colonel Delancy Hyde revelled in those genealogical invectives of a similar tenor by a Richmond editor, whose fatuous and frantic iterations that the Yankees were the descendants of low-born peasants and blackguards, while the Southern Americans are the progeny of the English cavaliers, betrayed a ludicrous desire to strengthen his own feeble belief in the asseveration by loud and incessant clamor; for he had faith in Sala’s witty saying, that, if a man has strong lungs, and will keep bawling day after day that he is a genius or a gentleman, the public will at last believe him.

The Colonel never tired of denouncing the Puritans:—“A canting, hyppercritical set of cusses, sir; but they had some little fight in ’em, though they couldn’t stahnd up agin the caval’yers,—no sir-r-r!—the caval’yers gev ’em particular hell; but the Yankee spawn of these cusses,—they hev lost the little pluck the Puritans wonst had, and air cowards, every mother’s son on ’em. One high-tone Southern gemmleman—one descendant of the caval’yers—can clare out any five on ’em in a fair fight.”

By a fair fight for a descendant of the cavaliers, the Colonel meant one of two things: either a six-barrelled revolver against an unarmed antagonist, or an ambush in which the aforesaid descendant could hit, but be secure against being hit in return. One of the Colonel’s maxims was, “Never fire unless you can take your man at a disadvantage.”

His sire having been unluckily cast in a petty lawsuit, “by a low-born Yankee judge, sir,” Colonel Delancy Hyde drifted off to the Southwest, and gradually emerged into the special vocation for which the unfortunate habits of life, which the Southern system had driven him to, seemed to qualify him. He became a sort of agent for the recovery of runaway slaves, and in this capacity had the freedom of the different plantations, and was frequently applied to for help by bereaved masters. Every man is said to have his specialty: the Colonel had at last found his.

In the survey which Peculiar took of the assemblage in Charlton’s office, he saw that Charlton himself was separated from the rest in being behind a small semicircular counter, an old piece of furniture, bought cheap at a street auction. By getting in the lawyer’s place the negro would have a sort of barrier, protecting him in front and on two sides against his assailants. Behind him would be the stove.

Stealthily throwing open the closet-door he glided out, and before any one could intercept him, he had fastened Charlton’s arms in a noose, and was standing over him with upraised knife. So rapid, so sudden, so unexpected had been the movement, that it was all completed before even an exclamation was uttered. The first one to break the silence was Charlton, who in a paroxysm of terror cried out, “Mercy! Save me, officers! save me!”

Iverson, one of the policemen, started forward and drew a revolver; but Peek made a shield of the body of the lawyer, who now found himself threatened with a pistol on one side and a knife on the other, much to his mortal dismay.

“Put down your pistol, Iverson!” he stammered. “Don’t attempt to do anything, any of you. This g-g-gentleman doesn’t mean to do any harm. He will listen to reason. The gentleman will listen to reason.”

“Gentleman be damned!” exclaimed Colonel Delancy Hyde. “Officer, put down your pistol. This piece of property mustn’t be damaged. I’m responsible for it. Peek, you imperdent black cuss, drop that rib-tickler,—drop it right smart, or yer’ll ketch hell.”

The Colonel advanced, and Peek brought down his knife so as to inflict on Charlton’s shoulder a gentle puncture, which drew from him a cry of pain, followed by the exclamation, in trembling tones: “Keep off, keep off, Colonel! Peek doesn’t mean any harm.”

Iverson made an attempt to get in the negro’s rear, but a shriek of remonstrance from Charlton drove the officer back.

Finding now that he was master of the situation, Peek let his right arm fall gradually to his side, and, still holding Charlton in his grasp, said: “Gentlemen, there are just five chairs before you. Be seated, and hear what I have to say.”

The company looked hesitatingly at one another, till Blake, one of the policemen, said, “Why not?” and took a seat. The rest followed his example.

And then Peek, crowding back the rage and anguish of his heart, spoke as follows: “My name is Peculiar Institution. I came to this lawyer some seven weeks ago for advice. I paid him money. He got me to tell him my story. He pretended to be my friend; but thinking he could make a few dollars more out of the slaveholder than he could out of me, he sends on word to the man who calls himself my master;—in short, betrays me. You see I have him in my power. What would you do with him if you were in my place?”

“I’d cut off his dirty ears!” exclaimed Blake, carried beyond all the discretion of a policeman by his indignation.

“What do you say, Colonel Hyde?” asked Peek.

“Wall, Peek, I don’t car’ what yer do ter him, providin’ yer’ don’t damage yerself; but I reckon yer’d better drop that knife dam quick, and give in. It’s no use tryin’ to git off. We’ve three witnesses here to swar you’re the right man. The Yankees put through the Fugitive Law right smart now. Yer stand no chance.”

“That’s all true, Colonel,” replied Peek, speaking as if arguing aloud to himself. “The law was executed in Boston last week, where there wasn’t half the proof you have. To do it they had to call out the whole police force, but they did it; and if such things are done in Boston, we can’t expect much better in New York. But you see, Colonel, with this knife in my hand, I can now do one of two things: I can either kill this man, or kill myself. In either case you lose. The law hangs me if I kill him, and if I kill myself the sexton puts all of me he can lay hold of under the ground. Now, Colonel, if you refuse my terms, I’m fully resolved to do one of these two things,—probably the first, for I have scruples about the second.”

“The cussed nigger talks as ef he was readin’ from a book!” exclaimed Hyde, in astonishment. “Wall, Peek, what tairms do yer mean?”

“You must promise that, on my letting this man go, you’ll allow me to walk freely out of this room, and go where I please unattended, on condition that I’ll return at five o’clock this afternoon and deliver myself up to you to go South with you of my own accord, without any trial or bother of any kind.”

The Colonel gave a furtive wink at the policeman Iverson, and replied: “Wall, Peek, that’s no more nor fair, seein’ as you’re sich a smart respectible nigger. But I reckon yer’ll go and stir up the cussed abolitioners.”

“I’ll promise,” returned Peek, “not to tell any one what’s going on.”

Hyde whispered in Iverson’s ear, and the latter nodded assent.

“Wall, Peek,” said Colonel Hyde, “if yer’ll swar, so help yer Gawd, yer’ll do as yer say, we’ll let yer go.”

“Please write down my words, sir,” said Peek, addressing Blake.

The policeman took pen and paper, and wrote, after Peek’s dictation, as follows:—

“We the undersigned swear, on our part, so help us God, we will allow Peculiar Institution to quit this room free and unfollowed, on his promise that he will return and give himself up at five o’clock this P. M. And I, Peculiar Institution, swear, on my part, so help me God, I will, if these terms are carried out, fulfil the above-named promise.”

“Sign that, you five gentlemen, and then I’ll sign,” said Peek.

The five signed. The paper and pen were then handed to Peek, and he added his name in a good legible hand, and gave the paper to Blake.

Having done this, he pulled the rope from Charlton’s arms, and threw it on the floor, then returned his knife to the sheath, and picked up his cap.

But as he started for the door, Colonel Hyde drew his revolver, stood in his way, and said: “Now, nigger, no more damn nonsense! Did yer think Delancy Hyde was such a simple cuss as to trust yer? Officers, seize this nigger.”

Iverson[Iverson] stepped forward to obey, but Blake, with the assured gesture of one whose superiority has been felt and admitted, motioned him aside, and said to Hyde, “I’ll take your revolver.”

The Colonel, either thrown off his guard by Blake’s cool air of authority, or supposing he wanted the weapon for the purpose of overawing the negro, gave it up. Blake then walked to the door, threw it open, and said: “Peculiar Institution, I fulfil my part of the contract. Now go and fulfil yours; and see you don’t come the lawyer over me by breaking your word.”

Before Colonel Delancy Hyde could recover from the amazement and wrath into which he was put by this act, Peculiar had disappeared from the room, and Blake, closing the door after him, had locked it, and taken out the key and thrust it in his pocket.

“May I be shot,” exclaimed the Colonel, “but this is the damdest mean Yankee swindle I ever had put on me yit,—damned if it ain’t! Here I’ve been to a hunderd dollars expense to git back that ar nigger, and now I’m tricked out of my property by the very man I hired to help me git it. This is Yankee all through,—damned if it ain’t!”

Charlton, still pale and trembling from his recent shock, had yet strength to put in these words: “I must say, Mr. Blake, your conduct has been unprofessional and unhandsome. There isn’t another officer in the whole corps that would have committed such a blunder. I shall report you to your superiors.”

Blake shook his finger at him, and replied, “Open your lips again, you beggarly hound, and I’ll slap your face.”

Charlton collapsed into silence. Blake took a chair and said, “Amuse yourselves five minutes, gentlemen, and then I’ll open the door.”

“A hell of a feller fur an officer!” muttered the Colonel. “To let the nigger slide in that ar way, afore I’d ever a chance to take from him his money and watch, which in course owt to go to payin’ my expenses. Cuss me if I—”

“Silence!” exclaimed Blake in a voice of thunder.

Cowed by the force of a reckless and impulsive will, all present now kept quiet. Colonel Hyde, who, deprived of his revolver, felt his imbecility keenly, went to the window and looked out. Iverson, who was a coward, tried to smile, and then, seeing the expression on Blake’s face, looked suddenly grave. Captain Skinner gave way to melancholy forebodings. His companion, Biggs, refreshed himself with a quid of tobacco, and stood straddling and bracing himself on his feet as if he thought a storm was brewing, and expected a lurch to leeward to take him off his legs. As for Charlton, he drew a slip of paper toward him, and appeared to be carelessly figuring on it; although, when he thought Blake was not looking, his manner changed to an eager and anxious consideration of the matter before him.

The five minutes had nearly expired when Blake rose, turned his back to Charlton, and seemed to be lost in reverie. Charlton took this opportunity to hastily finish what he had been writing. He then enclosed it in an envelope, and directed it. This done, he motioned to Iverson, and held up the letter. The latter nodded, and pointed with a motion of the thumb to a newspaper on the table. Charlton placed the letter under it, coughed, and turned to warm himself at the stove. Iverson sidled toward the newspaper, but before he could reach it, Blake turned and dashed his fist on it, took up the letter, and whispered menacingly to Charlton, “Utter a single word, and I’ll choke you.”

Then unlocking and opening the door, he said to the other persons in the room, “Go! you can return, if you choose, at five o’clock.”

“Give me my revolver,” demanded the Colonel.

“Say two words, and I’ll have you arrested for trying to shoot an unarmed man,” replied Blake.

The Colonel swallowed his rage and left the room, followed by Iverson and the two witnesses. Blake again locked the door and took the key.

“What’s the meaning of all this?” asked Charlton, seriously alarmed.

“It means that if you open that traitor’s mouth of yours till I tell you to, you’ll come to grief.”

Charlton subsided and was silent.

Blake unfolded the paper he had seized, and read as follows: “You will probably find Peek, either at Bunker’s in Broadway, or at his rooms in Greenwich Street, the side nearest the river, third or fourth house from the corner of Dey Street.”

Blake thrust the paper back into his pocket, and, wholly regardless of Charlton’s presence, began pacing the floor.

CHAPTER IX.
THE UPPER AND THE LOWER LAW.

“There is a law above all the enactments of human codes,—the same throughout the world, the same in all times: it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine and abhor bloodshed, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy than man can hold property in man.”—Lord Brougham.

The policeman, Blake, was a Vermonter whose grandsire had been one of the eighty men under Ethan Allen at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. The traditions of the Revolution were therefore something more than barren legends in Blake’s mind. They had inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration of the republic and its institutions. His patriotism was a sentiment which all the political and moral corruption, with which a New York policeman is inevitably brought in contact, could not corrode or enfeeble.

Even slavery, being tolerated by the Constitution of the United States, was, in his view, not to be spoken of lightly. He shut his eyes and his ears to all that could be said in its condemnation; he opened them to all its palliating features and facts. Did not statistics prove that the blacks, in a state of slavery, increase in double the proportion they do in a state of freedom, surrounded by whites? This comforting argument was eagerly seized by Blake as a moral sedative.

The Fugitive-Slave Law he was satisfied was strictly in accordance with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States. Therefore it must be honestly enforced. The Abolitionists, who were striving to defeat the execution of the law, were almost as bad as Mississippi repudiators who were swindling their foreign creditors. So long as we were enjoying the benefits of the Constitution, was it not mean and dastardly to undertake to jockey the South out of the obvious protection of that clause in it which has reference to the “person held to service or labor,” which we all knew to mean the slave?

Considerations like these had made Blake one of the most earnest advocates of the enforcement of the law among his brethren of the police; and when at last he was called on to carry it out in the case of Peek, he felt that obedience was a duty which it would be poltroonery to evade. He went forth, therefore, with alacrity that morning, resolved to allow no mawkish sensibility to interfere with his obligations as an officer and a citizen.

Accompanied by Iverson, he waited on Colonel Delancy Hyde at the New York Hotel. They found that worthy in the smoking-room, seated at a small marble table, with a cigar in his mouth and an emptied tumbler, which smelt strongly of undiluted whiskey, before him. The Colonel graciously asked the officers to “liquor.” Iverson assented, but Blake declined.

A refusal to “liquor,” the Colonel had been bred to regard as a personal indignity; and so, turning to Blake, he said: “Look here, stranger! I’m Colonel Delancy Hyde. Virginia-born, be Gawd! From one of the oldest families in the State! None of yer interloping Yankee scum! No Puritan blood in me! My ahncestor was one of the cavalyers. My father was one of the largest slave-owners in the State. Now if yer want to put an affront on me, I’d jest have yer understand fust who yer’ve got to deal with.”

“Bah!” said Blake, turning on his heel, and walking to the window.

Iverson, who dreaded a scene, smoothed over the affront with a lie. “The fact is, Colonel,” whispered he, “Blake wouldn’t be fit for duty if he were to drink with us. A spoonful upsets him; but he’s ashamed to confess it. A weak head! You understand?”

The explanation pacified the Colonel. Indeed, his sympathies were at once wakened for the unhappy man who couldn’t drink. This representative of the interests of slavery certainly did not prepossess Blake in favor of his mission; but justice must be done, notwithstanding the character of the claimant.

An addition was now made to the circle. Captain Skinner and Biggs, the sailor already mentioned,—a short, thick-set stump of a man, with only one eye, and that black and overarched by a bushy, gray eyebrow,—a very wicked-looking old fellow,—entered and made themselves known to the Colonel. They had come up from New London, to serve as witnesses. As a matter of policy, the Colonel could not do less than ask them to join in the raid on the whiskey decanter; and this they did so effectually that the last drop disappeared in Biggs’s capacious tumbler.

As it was not yet time for the appointment at Charlton’s office, the party, all but Blake, took chairs and lighted cigars, and the Colonel asked Captain Skinner to narrate the circumstances of Peek’s appearance on board the Albatross.

“Well, you see, Colonel,” said Skinner, “we had been ten days out, when one night the second mate, as he was poking about between decks, caught a strange nigger creeping into a cotton-bale just for’ard of the store-room. We ordered the nigger out, and he came into the cabin, and pretended to be a free nigger, and said he’d pay his passage as soon as he could git work in New York. In course I knew he was lyin’, but I didn’t let on that I suspected him. I played smooth; and cuss me, if the nigger didn’t play smooth too; for he made as if he believed me; and so when we got to New London, afore I could git the officers on board, he jumped into the water and swam to old Payson’s boat, and Payson he got him on board one of the Sound steamers, and had him put through to New York that same night. The next day Payson attakted me in the street, knocked me down, and stamped on me, and afore I could have him tuk up, he was on board that infernal boat of his, and off out of sight. There’s the scar of the gash Payson left on my skull.”

Blake, at these words, left the window, and came and looked at the scar with evident satisfaction. Colonel Hyde, with a lordly air of patronage, held out his hand to Skinner, and said: “Capting, the scar is an honor. Capting, yer hand. I love to meet a high-tone gemmleman, and you’re one. Capting, allow me to shake yer hand.”

“With pleasure,” said Biggs, taking the Colonel’s hand and shaking it in his own big, coarsely-seamed flipper, before the Captain had a chance to reach out. The Colonel smiled grimly at Biggs’s playfulness, but said nothing.

“Come! it’s time to go,” exclaimed Iverson, looking at his watch. The party rose, and proceeded down Broadway to Charlton’s office. We have already seen what transpired on their arrival. Our business is now with what happened after their departure.

Three o’clock struck. The small hand on the dial of Trinity was fast moving toward four; and still Blake paced the floor in Charlton’s office. Every now and then there would be a knock at the door, and Blake, with a menacing shake of his head, would impose silence on the conveyancer, till the applicant for admission, tired of knocking, would go away.

Blake’s thoughts were in the condition of a chopping sea where wind and tide are opposing each other. Reflections that reached to the very foundation of human society—questions of abstract right and wrong—were combating old notions adopted on the authority of others, and as yet untested in the cupel of his own conscience.

Brought for the first time face to face with the law for the rendition of fugitive slaves,—encountering it in its practical operation,—he found in it a barbarous necessity from which his heart recoiled with horror and disgust. Must he disregard that pleading cry of conscience, that voice of God and Christ in his soul, calling on him to do in righteousness unto others as he would have them do unto him? Could any human enactment exempt him from that paramount obedience?

How had he felt dwarfed in another’s presence that day! He had seen a man, and that man a negro, putting forth his manhood in the best way he could to parry the arm of a savage oppression, doubly fiendish in its mockery, coming as it did under the respectable escort of the law. Surely the negro showed himself better worthy of freedom than any white man among his hunters.

Would the fellow keep his pledge? Would he come back? Blake now earnestly hoped he would not. Was not any stratagem justifiable in such a case? Should we mind resorting to deception in order to rescue ourselves or another from a madman or a murderer? Why, then, might not Peek violate his written promise, made as it was to men who were trying to rob him of a freedom more precious than life to such a soul as his?

But had not he himself—he, Blake—made use of his poor show of generosity to impress it on Peek that he must prove worthy the trust reposed in him? This recollection brought bitter regret to the policeman. Instead of encouraging the negro to escape, he had put scruples of conscience or of generosity in his way, which might induce him to return. Would Blake have done so to his own brother, under similar circumstances? Would he not have bidden him cheat his persecutors, and make good his flight? Assuredly yes! And yet to the poor negro he had practically said, Return!

These reflections wrought powerfully upon Blake. Why not run and urge the negro to escape? It was still more than an hour to five o’clock. Yes, he would do it!

Then came a consideration to check the impulse. He, a sworn officer of the law, should he lend himself to the defeat of the very law he had taken it upon himself to execute? Was there not something intensely dishonest in such a course?

Well, he could do one thing at least: he could resign his office, and then try to undo the mischief he had perhaps done the negro by his injunction. Yes, he would do that.

Impulsive in all his movements, Blake looked at his watch, and found he would have just an hour in which to crowd all the action he proposed to himself. Turning to Charlton, he said: “Your conduct to this runaway slave will make your life insecure if I choose to go to certain men in this city and tell them what I can with truth. What you now are intending to do is to have the slave intercepted. I don’t ask you to promise, simply because you will lie if you think it safe; but I say this to you: If I find that any measures are taken before five o’clock to catch the slave, I shall hold you responsible for them, and shall expose you to parties who will see you are paid back for your rascality. Take no step for an arrest, and I hold my tongue.”

Glad of such a compromise, Charlton replied: “I’m agreed. Up to five o’clock I’ll do nothing, directly or indirectly, to intercept the nigger.”

Blake was speedily in the street after this. He hurried to the City Hall, found the Chief of Police, gave in his resignation, deposited Colonel Hyde’s pistol among the curiosities of the room, and said that another man must be found to attend to the case at Charlton’s office. Having in this way eased his conscience, Blake ran as far as Broadway, and jumped into an omnibus. But the omnibus was too slow, so he jumped out and ran down Broadway to Bunker’s. How the precious time flew by! Before he could be satisfied at Bunker’s that Peek was not there, the clock indicated five minutes of five. He rushed out in the direction of the slave’s lodgings. An old woman with wrinkled face, and bent form, and carrying a broom, was showing the apartments to an applicant who thought of moving from the story below. Where were the negro and his wife? Gone! How long ago? More than two hours! The clock struck five.

Wholly disheartened, Blake ran back to Charlton’s office. He found it locked. No one answered to his knock. Raising his foot he kicked open the door with a single effort. The office was deserted. No one there! He ran to the Jersey City ferry-boat that carries passengers for the Philadelphia cars; it had left the wharf some twenty minutes before. Baffled in all directions, he took his way to the police-station to find Iverson; but that officer was on duty, nobody knew where. After waiting at the station till nearly midnight, Blake at last, worn out with discouragement and fatigue, went home.

What had become of Peek all this time?

Anticipating that he and his wife might at any moment find it prudent to leave for Canada at half an hour’s notice, Peek had always kept his affairs in a state to enable him to do this conveniently. He had hired his rooms, furniture, and piano-forte by the week, paying for them in advance. Two small trunks were sufficient to contain all his movable property; and these might be packed in five minutes.

Flora, his wife, who like Peek was of unmixed blood, had been lady’s maid in a family in Vicksburg. Here she had become an expert in washing and doing up muslins and other fine articles of female attire. But the lady she served died, and Flora became the property of Mr. Penfield, a planter, who, looking on her with the eyes that a cattle-breeder might turn on a Durham cow, ordered her to marry one Bully Bill, a lusty African with a neck like the cylinder of a steam-engine. Flora objected, and learning that her objections would not be respected, she ran away, and after various fortunes settled at Montreal. Here she married Peek, who taught her to read and write. She had been bred a pious Catholic, and Peek, finding that they agreed in the essentials of a devout and believing heart, never undertook to disturb her faith.

They moved to New York, and Peek with his wages as waiter, and Flora with the money she got for doing up muslins, earned jointly an income which placed them far above want in the region of absolute comfort and partial refinement. Few more happy and loyal couples could have been found even in freestone palaces on the Fifth Avenue.

“Well, Flora, how long will it take you to get ready?” said Peek, entering the neat little kitchen, where she was at work at her ironing-board, while little Sterling sat amusing himself on the floor in building a house with small wooden bricks.

Flora, at once comprehending the intent of the question, replied, “I sha’n’t want more ’n half an hour.”

“Well, a boat leaves for Albany at five,” said Peek, taking the Sun newspaper, and cutting out an advertisement. “We’d better quit here, and go on board just as soon as we can.”

“Le ’m me see,” said Flora, meditatively. “The grocer at the corner will send round these muslins, ’specially if we pay him for it. My customers owe me twenty dollars,—how shall we collek that?”

“You can write to them from Montreal.”

“Lor! so I can, Peek. Who’d have thought of it but you?”

“Come, then! Be lively. Tumble the things into the trunks. We’ll give poor old Petticum the odds and ends we leave behind; and she’ll notify the landlord, and take care of the rooms.”

In less than an hour’s time they had made all their preparations, and were all three in a coach with their luggage, rattling up Greenwich Street towards one of the Twenties. Here they went on board an old steamer, recently taken from the regular line for freighting purposes, and carrying only a few passengers. Having seen Flora and Sterling safely bestowed with the luggage, and given the former his watch and all his money, except a dollar in change, Peek said: “Now, Flora, I’ve got to go ashore on business. If I shouldn’t be here when the boat starts, do you keep straight on to Montreal without me. Go to the post-office regularly twice a week to see if there’s a letter for you.”

“What is it, Peek? Tell me all about it,” said Flora, who painfully felt there was a secret which her husband did not choose to disclose.

“Now, Flora, don’t be silly,” replied Peek, wiping the tears from her face with his handkerchief. “I tell you, I may be aboard again before you start,—haven’t made up my mind yet,—only, if you shouldn’t see me, never you mind, but just keep on. Find out your old customers in Montreal, and wait patiently till I join you. So don’t cry about it. The Lord will take care of it all. Here’s a handbill that tells you the best way to get to Montreal. Look out for pickpockets. I shouldn’t leave you if I didn’t have to, Flora. I’ll tell you everything about it when we meet. So good by.”

Having no suspicion of the actual cause of Peek’s leaving her, and confident, through faith in him, that it must be for a right purpose, Flora cheered up, and said: “Well, Peek, I ’spec you’ve got some little debts to pay; but do come back to-day if you can; and keep clar’ of the hounds, Peek,—keep clar’ of the hounds.”

And so, kissing wife and child, with an overflowing heart Peek quitted the boat. He did not at once leave the vicinity. There was a pile of fresh lumber not far off. Dodging out of sight behind it, and then sitting down in a little enclosure formed by the boards, where he could see the boat and not be seen, he tried to orient his conscience as to his duty under the extraordinary circumstances in which he found himself.

Go back to the life of a slave? Leave wife and child, and return to bondage, degradation, subordination to another’s will? He looked out on the beautiful river, flashing in the warm spring sunshine; to the opposite shore of Hoboken, where he and Flora used to stroll on Sundays last summer, dragging Sterling in his little carriage. Was there to be no more of that pleasant independent life?

A slave? Liable to be kicked, cuffed, spit on, fettered, scourged by such a creature as Colonel Delancy Hyde? No! To escape the pursuing fiends who would force such a lot on an innocent human being, surely any subterfuge, any stratagem, any lie, would be justifiable!

And Peek thought of the joy that Flora would feel at seeing him return, and he rose to go back to the boat.

A single thought drew him back to his covert. “So help me God.” Had he not pledged himself,—pledged himself in sincerity at the moment in those words? Had he not by his act promised Blake, who had befriended him, that he would return, and might not Blake lose his situation if the promise were broken?

As Peek found conscience getting the better of inclination in the dispute, he bowed his head in his hands, and wept sobbingly like a child. Such anguish was there in the thought of a surrender! Then, extending himself prostrate on the boards, his face down, and resting on his arms, he strove to shut out all except the voice of God in his soul. He uttered no word, but he felt the mastery of a great desire, and that was for guidance from above. Tender thoughts[thoughts] of the sufferings and wants of the poor slaves he had left on Barnwell’s plantation stole back to him. Would he not like to see them and be of service to them once more? What if he should be whipped, imprisoned? Could he not brave all such risks, for the satisfaction of keeping a pledge made to a man who had shown him kindness? And he recalled the words, once spoken through Corinna, “Not to be happy, but to deserve happiness.”

Besides, might he not again escape? Yes! He would go back to Charlton’s office. He would surrender himself as he had promised. The words which Colonel Hyde had conceived to be of no more binding force than a wreath of tobacco-smoke were the chain stronger than steel that drew the negro back to the fulfilment of his pledge. “So help me God!” Could he profane those words, and ever look up again to Heaven for succor?

And so he rose, took one despairing look at the boat, where he could see Flora pointing out to her little boy the wonders of the river, and then rushed away in the direction of Broadway. There was no lack of omnibuses, but no friendly driver would give him a seat on top, and he was excluded by social prejudice from the inside. It was twenty minutes to five when he reached Union Park. Thence running all the way in the middle of the street with the carriages, he reached Charlton’s office before the clock had finished striking the hour.

There had been wrangling and high words just before his entrance. Colonel Delancy Hyde was ejecting his wrath against the universal Yankee nation in the choicest terms of vituperation that his limited vocabulary could supply. The loss of both his nigger and his revolver had been too much for his equanimity. Captain Skinner and his companion, Biggs, were sturdily demanding their fees, which did not seem to be forthcoming. Charlton, in abject grief of heart, was silently lamenting the loss of his fifty dollars, forfeited by the non-delivery of the slave; and Iverson, the policeman, was delicately insinuating in the ear of the lawyer that he should look to him for his pay.

Peek, entering in this knotty condition of affairs, was the Deus ex machina to disentangle the complication and set the wheels smoothly in motion. No one believed he would come back, and there issued from the lips of all an exclamation of surprise, not unseasoned with oaths to suit the several tastes.

“Cuss me if here ain’t the nigger himself come back!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Wall, Peek, I didn’t reckon you was gwine to keep yer word, and it made me swar some to see how I’d been chiselled fust out of my revolver and then out of my nigger, by a damned Yankee policeman. But here you air, and we’ll fix things right off, so’s to be ready for the next Philadelphy train, if so be yer’ll go without any fuss.”

“Yes, I’ll go, Colonel,” said Peek, “but you’ll have an officer to see I don’t escape from the cars.”

“Thar’s seventy-five dollars expense, blast yer!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Yes, be Gawd! I’ve got to pay this man for goin’ to Cincinnati and back. O, but old Hawks will take your damned hide off when we git you back in Texas,—sure!”

Peek, to serve some purpose of his own, here dropped his dignity entirely, and assumed the manner and language of the careless, rollicking plantation nigger. “Yah! yah!” laughed he. “Wall, look a-he-ah, Kunnle Delancy Hyde. Les make a trade,—we two,—and git rid of the policeman altogedder. I can sabe yer fifty dollars, shoo-er-r-r, Kunnle Delancy Hyde, if you’ll do as how dis nigger tells yer to.”

“How’ll yer do it, Peek?” asked the Colonel, much pacified by the slave’s repetition of his entire name and title.

“I’ll promise to be a good nigger all the way to Cincinnati, and not try to run away,—no, not wunst,—if you’ll pay me twenty-five dollars.”

“Will yer sign to that, Peek, and put in, ‘So help me Gawd’?” asked the Colonel.

Peek started, and looked sharply at Hyde; and then quietly replied, “Yes, I’ll do it, if you’ll gib me the money to do with as I choose; but you must agree to le’m me write a letter, and put it in the post-office afore we leeb.”

The Colonel considered the matter a moment, then turned to Charlton, and said, “Draw up an agreement, and let the nigger sign it, and be sure and put in, ‘So help me Gawd.’”

The arrangement was speedily concluded. The witnesses and the officers were paid off. Charlton received his fifty dollars and Peek his twenty-five. The slave then asked for pen, ink, and paper, and placed five cents on the table as payment. In two minutes he finished a letter to Flora, and enclosed it with the money in an envelope, on which he wrote an address. Charlton tried hard to get a sight of it, but Peek did not give him a chance to do this.

The Colonel and Peek then walked to the post-office, where the slave deposited his letter; after which they passed over to Jersey City in the ferry-boat, and took the train to Philadelphia.

As for Charlton, no sooner had his company left him, than he seized his hat, locked up his office, and hurried to Greenwich Street, where he proceeded to examine the lodgings vacated by Peek. He found Mrs. Petticum engaged in collecting into baskets the various articles abandoned to her by the negroes,—old dusters, a hod of charcoal, kindling-wood, loaves of bread, and small collections of groceries, sufficient for the family for a week. Mrs. Petticum appeared to have been weeping, for she raised her apron and wiped her eyes as Charlton came in.

“Well, have they gone?” asked he.

“Yes, sir, and the wuss for me!” said the old woman.

Charlton took his cue at once, and replied: “They were excellent people, and I’m sorry they’ve gone. What was the matter? Were the slave-catchers after them?”

“I don’t know,” sighed Petticum; “I shouldn’t wonder. Poor Flora! That was all she worried about. I’d like to have got my hands in the hair of the man that would have carried her off. Where’ll you find the white folks better and decenter than they was?”

“Not in New York, ma’am,” said Charlton, stealthily looking about the room, examining every article of furniture, and opening the drawers.

“The furniture belongs to Mr. Craig; but all in the drawers is mine,” said the old woman, not favorably impressed by Charlton’s inquisitiveness.

“O, it’s all right,” replied Charlton; “I didn’t know but I could be of some help. You’ve no idea where they went to?”

“They didn’t tell me, and if I knowed, I shouldn’t tell you, without I knowed they wanted me to.”

“O, it’s no sort of consequence. I’m a particular friend, that’s all,” said Charlton. “Did you notice the carriage they went off in?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Could you tell me the number?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Seeing an old handkerchief in one of the baskets, Charlton took it out, and looked at the mark. He could get nothing from that; so he threw it back. An old shoe lay swept in a corner. He took it up. Stamped on the inner sole were the words, “J. Darling, Ladies’ Shoes, Vicksburg.” Charlton copied the inscription in his memorandum-book before putting the shoe back where he had found it. The Sun newspaper lay on the floor. Taking it up, he found that an advertisement had been cut out. Selecting an opportunity when Mrs. Petticum was not looking, he thrust the paper in his pocket.

And then, after examining an old stove-funnel, he went out.

“He’s no gentleman, anyhow,” said Mrs. Petticum; “and I don’t believe he ever was a friend of the Jacobses.”

CHAPTER X.
GROUPS ON THE DECK.

“Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable.”—Coleridge.

The Pontiac had passed New Madrid on the Mississippi. She was advertised as a first-class high-pressure boat, bound to beat any other on the river in the long run, but with a captain and officers who were “teetotalers,” and never raced.

The weather had been stormy for several days; but it was now a delightful April forenoon. The sun-bright atmosphere was at once fresh and soft, exhilarating and luxurious, in a combination one rarely enjoys so fully as on a Western prairie. The delicate spring tracery of the foliage was fast expanding into a richer exuberance on either bank of the great river. The dogwood, with its blossoms of an alabaster whiteness, here and there gleamed forth amid the tender green of the surrounding trees,—maples, sycamores, and oaks. All at once a magnolia sent forth a gush of fragrance from its snowy flowers. With every mile southward the verdure grew thicker and the blossoms larger.

Two miles in the rear of the Pontiac, ploughing up the tawny waters with her sharp and pointed beak, came the Champion, a new boat, and destined, as many believed, to prove the fastest on the river. Whatever her capacities, she had thus far shown herself inferior to the Pontiac in speed. She kept within two or three miles, but failed to get much nearer. Captain Crane of the Pontiac, a small, thin, wiry man, who had acquired a great reputation for sagacity by always holding his tongue, kept puffing away at a cigar, looking now and then anxiously at his rival, but evidently happy in the assurance of victory.

The passengers of the Pontiac were distributed in groups about different parts of the boat. Some were in the cabin playing at euchre or brag. Some, regardless of the delicious atmosphere which they could drink in without money and without price, were imbibing fiery liquors at the bar, or puffing away at bad cigars on the forward part of the lower deck. A few were reading, and here and there a lady might be seen busy with her needle.

On the hurricane deck were those who had come up for conversation or a promenade. Smokers were requested to keep below. The groups here were rather more select and less numerous than on the main deck. They were mostly gathered aft, so that the few promenaders could have a clear space.

Among these last were a lady and two gentlemen, one on either side of her; the younger, a man apparently about thirty-two, of middle height, finely formed, handsome, and with the quiet, unarrogating air of one whose nobility is a part of his nature, not a question of convention. (The snob’s nonchalance is always spurious. He hopes to make you think he is unconscious of your existence, and all the while is anxiously trying to dazzle or stun you by his appearance.)

The other gentleman was also one to whom that much-abused name would be unhesitatingly applied. He seemed to be about fifty-five, with a person approaching the portly, dignified, gray-haired, and his face indicating benevolence and self-control.

The lady, who appeared to be the wife of the younger man, was half a head shorter than he, and a model of delicate beauty in union with high health. Personally of a figure and carriage which Art and Grace could hardly improve, she was dressed in a simple gray travelling-habit, with a velvet hat and ostrich-plumes of the same color. But she had the rare skill of making simplicity a charm. Flounces, jewels, and laces would have been an impertinence. While she conversed, she seemed to take a special interest in a group that occupied two “patent life-preserving stools” near the centre of the deck. A young boy held in his lap a little girl, seemingly not more than two years old, and pointed out pictures to her from a book, while a mulatto woman, addressed as Hattie, who appeared to have the infant in charge, joined in their juvenile prattle, and placed her arm so as to assist the boy in securing his hold.

“Your son seems to know how to fascinate children,” said the lady, addressing the elder gentleman; “he has evidently won the heart of my little Clara.”

“He has a sister just about her age in Texas,” replied the father; “he is glad to find in your little girl a substitute for Emily.”

“You live in Texas then?” asked the younger gentleman.

“Yes; let me introduce myself, since I was the first to broach conversation. My name is John Onslow, and my home is in Southwestern Texas, though I was born in Mississippi, whence I removed some six or seven years ago. My family consists of a wife, two sons, and a daughter. The younger of my sons, Robert, sits yonder. The elder, William Temple, is a student at Yale. I inherited several hundred slaves. I have gradually liberated them all. In Texas I am trying the experiment of free labor; but it is regarded with dislike by my slave-holding neighbors, and they do not scruple, behind my back, to call me an Abolitionist. I have been North to buy farming implements, and to offer inducements to German immigrants. There, sir, you have my story; and if you are a Yankee, you will appreciate my candor.”

“And requite it, I suppose you think,” returned the younger gentleman, laughing. “It strikes me that it is you, Mr. Onslow, who are playing the Yankee. You have been talking, sir, with one Henry Berwick, New-Yorker by birth, retired lawyer by profession, and now on his way to New Orleans to attend to some real estate belonging to his wife. That little girl is his daughter. This lady is his wife. My dear, this is our fellow-passenger, Mr. Onslow. Allow me to introduce him to your better acquaintance.”

The lady courtesied, flashing upon the stranger a smile that said as eloquently as smile could say, “I need no vouchers; I flatter myself I can distinguish a gentleman.”

As she turned aside her glance it met that of a third person, till then unnoticed. He was pacing the deck and held an opera-glass in his hand, with which he looked at places on either bank. He was slightly above the middle height, compactly built, yet rather slender than stout, erect, square-shouldered, neatly limbed. He might be anywhere between thirty and thirty-five years of age. His hair was here and there threaded with gray, and his cheeks were somewhat sunken, although there was nothing to suggest the lassitude of ill-health in his appearance. His complexion was that of a man who leads an active out-of-door life; but his hands were small and unmarked by toil. He wore his beard neatly trimmed. His finely curved Roman features and small expressive mouth spoke refinement and strength of will, not untempered with tenderness; while his dark gray eyes seemed to penetrate without a pause straight to their object. A sagacious physiognomist would have said of him, “That man has a story to tell; life has been to him no holiday frolic.” In the expression of his eyes Mrs. Berwick was reminded of Sir Joshua’s fine picture of “The Banished Lord.” This stranger, as he passed by, looked at her gravely but intently, as if struck either by her beauty or by a fancied resemblance to some one he had known. There was that in his glance which so drew her attention, she said to her husband, “Who is that man?”

“I have not seen him before,” replied Mr. Berwick. “Probably he came on board at New Madrid.”

They walked to the extent of their promenade forward, and turning saw this stranger leaning against the bulwarks. His low-crowned hat of a delicate, pliable felt, with its brims half curled up, his well-cut pantaloons of a coarse but unspotted fabric, and his thin overcoat of a light gray, showed that the Broadway fashions of the hour were not unfamiliar to the wearer. This time he did not look up as the three passed. His gaze seemed intent on the children; and the soft smile on his lips and the dewy suffusion in his eyes betrayed emotion and tender meditation.

“Well, Leonora, what is your judgment? Is he, too, a gentleman?” asked Mr. Berwick of his wife.

“Yes; I will stake my reputation as a sibyl on it,” she replied.

“Ah! you vain mother!” said Berwick, laughing. “You say that, because he seems lost in admiration of our little Clara. Isn’t her weakness transparent, Mr. Onslow? What think you of this new-comer?”

“He certainly has the air of a gentleman,” said Onslow “and yet he looks to me very much like a fellow I once had up before me for horse-stealing. Was he too much interested in looking at your wife, or did he purposely abstain from letting me catch his eye? I shouldn’t wonder if he were either a steamboat gambler or a horse-thief!”

“Atrocious!” exclaimed Mrs. Berwick. “I don’t believe a word of it. That man a horse-thief! Impossible!”

“On closer examination, I think I must be mistaken,” rejoined Mr. Onslow. “If I remember aright, the fellow with whom I confound him had red hair.”

“There! I knew you must be either joking or in error,” said the lady.

“And now,” continued Mr. Onslow, “I have a vague recollection of meeting him at the hotel where I stopped in Chicago last week.”

“Ah! if he is a Chicago man, I must be right in my estimate of him,” said Mrs. Berwick.

“Why so? Why should you be partial to Chicago?”

“Because my father was one of the first residents of the place.”

“What was his name?”

“Robert Aylesford.”

As she uttered this word they repassed the stranger. To their surprise he repeated, in a tone of astonishment, “Aylesford!” then seemed to fall into a fit of musing. Before they again reached the spot, he had walked away, and taken a seat in an arm-chair aft, where he occupied himself in wiping the opera-glass with his handkerchief. If he had recognized Onslow, he had not betrayed it.

Here the attention of all on the upper deck was arrested by an explosion of wrathful oaths.

A tall, gaunt, round-shouldered man, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of some coarse, home-made cloth, had ascended the stairs with a lighted cigar in his mouth. One of the waiters of the boat, a bright-looking mulatto, followed him, calling, “Mister! Mister!”

The tall man paid no heed to the call, and the mulatto touched him on the shoulder, and said, “We don’t allow smoking on this deck,” whereupon the tall man angrily turned on him and, with eyes blazing with savage fire, exclaimed: “What in hell air yer at, nigger? Ask my pardon, blast yer, or I’ll smash in yer ugly profile, sure!”

“Ask your pardon for what?”

“For darrin’ to put yer black hand on me, confound yer!”

The mulatto replied with spirit: “You don’t bully this child, Mister. I merely did my duty.”

“Duty be damned! I’ll stick yer, sure, if yer don’t apologize right off, damned lively!” And the tall man unsheathed a monstrous bowie-knife.

Mr. Onslow approached, and mildly interposed with the remark, “It was natural for the waiter to touch you, since he couldn’t make you hear.”

“Who the hell air you, sir?” said the tall man. “I reckon I kn settle with the nigger without no help of yourn.”

“Yes,” said another voice; “if the gentleman demands it, the nigger must ask his pardon.”

Mr. Onslow turned, and to his surprise beheld the stranger with the opera-glass.

“Really, sir,” said Mr. Onslow, “I hope you do not wish to see a man degrade himself merely because he isn’t white like ourselves.”

“The point can’t be argued, sir,” said the stranger, putting his glass in his pocket. Then seizing the mulatto by the throat, he thrust him on his knees. “Down, you black hound, and ask this gentleman’s pardon.”

To everybody’s surprise, the mulatto’s whole manner changed the minute he saw the stranger; and, sinking on his knees, he crossed his arms on his breast, and, with downcast eyes, said, addressing the tall man, “I ask pardon, sir, for putting my hand on you.”

“Wall, that’s enough, nigger! I pardon yer,” said the mollified tall man, returning his bowie-knife to its sheath. “Niggers mus’ know thar places,—that’s all. Ef a nigger knows his place, I’d no more harm him nor I’d harm a val’able hoss.”

The mulatto rose and walked away; but with no such show of chagrin as a keen observer might have expected; and the tall man, turning to him of the opera-glass, said, “Sir, ye ’r a high-tone gemmleman; an’ cuss me but I’m proud of yer acquaint. Who mowt it be I kn call yer, sir?”

“Vance of New Orleans,” was the reply.

“Mr. Vance, I’m yourn. I know’d yer mus’ be from the South. Yer mus’ liquor with me, Mr. Vance. Sir, ye’r a high-tone gemmleman. I’m Kunnle Hyde,—Kunnle Delancy Hyde. Virginia-born, be Gawd! An’ I’m not ashamed ter say it! My ahnces’tors cum over with the caval’yers in King James’s time,—yes, sir-r-r! My father was one of the largest slave-owners in the hull State of Virginia,—yes, sir-r-r! Lost his proputty, every damned cent of it, sir, through a low-lived Yankee judge, sir!”

“I could have sworn, Colonel Hyde, there was no Puritan blood in your veins.”

“That’s a fak!” said the Colonel, grimly smiling his gratification. Then, throwing his cigar overboard, he remarked: “The Champion’s nowhar, I reckon, by this time. She ain’t in sight no longer. What say yer to a brandy-smash? Or sh’l it be a julep?”

“The bar is crowded just now; let’s wait awhile,” replied Vance.

Here Mr. Onslow turned away in disgust, and, rejoining the Berwicks, remarked to the lady, “What think you of your gentleman now?”

“I shall keep my thoughts respecting him to myself for the present,” she replied.

“My wife piques herself on her skill in judging of character by the physiognomy,” said Mr. Berwick, apologetically; “and I see you can’t make her believe she is wrong in this case. She sometimes gets impressions from the very handwriting of a person, and they often turn out wonderfully correct.”

“Has Mrs. Berwick the gift of second-sight? Is she a seeress?”

“Her faculty does not often show itself in soothsaying,” said Berwick. “But I have a step-mother who now and then has premonitions.”

“Do they ever find a fulfilment?”

“One time in a hundred, perhaps,” said Berwick. “If I believed in them largely, I should not be on board this boat.”

“Why so?” inquired Onslow.

“She predicts disaster to it.”

“But why did you not tell me that before?” asked Mrs. Berwick.

“Simply, my dear, because you are inclined to be superstitious.”

“Hear him, Mr. Onslow!” said Mrs. Berwick. “He calls me superstitious because I believe in spirits, whereas it is that belief which has cured me of superstition.”

“I can readily suppose it,” replied Onslow. “The superstitious man is the unbeliever,—he who thinks that all these phenomena can be produced by the blind, unintelligent forces of nature, by a mechanical or chemical necessity.”

“I may believe in spirits in their proper places,” said Berwick, “and not believe in their visiting this earth.”

“But what if their condition is such that they are independent of those restrictions of space or place which are such impediments to us poor mortals?”

“Do you, too, then, believe in ghosts?” asked Berwick.

“Yes; I am a ghost myself,” said Onslow.

Berwick started at the abruptness of the announcement, then smiled, and replied, “Prove it.”

“That I will, both etymologically and chemically,” rejoined Onslow. “The words ghost and gas are set down by a majority of the philologists as from the same root, whether Gothic, Saxon, or Sanscrit, implying vapor, spirit. The fermenting yeast, the steaming geyser, are allied to it. Now modern science has established (and Professor Henry will confirm what I say) that man begins his earthly existence as a microscopic vesicle of almost pure and transparent water. It is not true that he is made of dust. He consists principally of solidified air. The ashes which remain after combustion are the only ingredient of an earthy character that enters into the composition of his body. All the other parts of it were originally in the atmosphere. Nay, a more advanced science will probably show that even his ashes, in their last analysis, are an invisible, gaseous substance. Nine tenths of a man’s body, we can even now prove, are water; and water, we all know, may be decomposed into invisible gases, and then made to reappear as a visible liquid. Science tells me, dear madam, that as to my body I am nothing but forty or fifty pounds of carbon and nitrogen, diluted by five and a half pailfuls of water. Put me under hydraulic pressure, and you can prove it. So I do seriously maintain, that I am as much entitled to the appellation of a ghost (that is, a gaseous body) as was the buried majesty of Denmark, otherwise known as Hamlet’s father.”

“And I assert that Mr. Onslow has proved his point admirably,” said Mrs. Berwick, clapping her little hands.

“I confess I never before considered the subject in that light,” rejoined her husband.

“If science can prove,” continued Mr. Onslow, “that nine tenths of my present body may be changed to a gaseous, invisible substance (invisible to mortal eyes), with power to permeate what we call matter, like electricity, is it so very difficult to imagine that a spirit in a spiritual body may be standing here by our side without our knowing it?”

“I see you haven’t the fear of Sir David Brewster and the North British Review before your eyes, Mr. Onslow.”

“No, for I do not regard them as infallible either in questions of physical or of metaphysical science. Rather, with John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, would I say, ‘With my latest breath will I bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world, that, namely, of witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all ages.’”

While this discussion was proceeding, Colonel Hyde and his new acquaintance were pacing the larboard side of the deck, pausing now and then at the railing forward of the wheel-house and looking down on the lower deck, where, seated upon a coil of cables, were four negroes, one of them, and he the most intelligent-looking of the lot, being handcuffed.

“How are niggers now?” asked Mr. Vance.

“Niggers air bringin’ fust-rate prices jest now,” replied the Colonel; “and Gov’nor Wise he reckons ef we fix Californy and Kahnsas all right, a prime article of a nigger will fotch twenty-five hunderd dollars, sure.”

“What’s the prospect of doing that?”

“Good. The South ain’t sleeping,—no, not by a damned sight. Californy’s bound to be ourn, an’ the Missouri boys will take car’ of Kahnsas.”

“I see the North are threatening to send in armed immigrants,” said Vance; “and one John Brown swears Kansas shall be free soil.”

“John Brown be damned!” replied the Colonel. “One common Suthun man is more’n a match fur five of thar best Yankees, any day. Kahnsas must be ourn, ef we hev to shoot every white squatter in the hull terrertory. By the way, that’s a likely yuller gal, sittin’ thar with the bebby. That gal ud bring sixteen hunderd dollars sure in Noo Orleenz.”

“Whose niggers are those I see forward there, on the cables?” asked Vance.

“Them niggers, Mr. Vance, air under my car’, an’ I’m takin’ ’em to Texas fur Kunnle Barnwell. The feller yer see han’cuffed thar an’ sleepin’, run away three or four yars ago. At last the Kunnle heerd, through Hermin & Co., that Peek (that’s his name) was in New York; an’ so the Kunnle gits me ter go on fur him; an’ cuss me ef I didn’t ketch him easy. The other three niggers air a lot the Kunnle’s agent in St. Louis bowt fur him last week.”

“How did you dodge the Abolitionists in New York?” inquired Vance. “You went before the United States Commissioner, I suppose, and proved your claim to the article.”

“Damned ef I did! Arter I’d kotched Peek, he said, ef as how I’d let him go home, an’ settle up, he’d return, so help him Gawd, an’ give hisself up without no fuss or trial. Wall, I’m a judge of niggers,—kn see right through ’em,—kn ollerz tell whan a nigger’s lying. I seed Peek was in airnest, and so I let him go; and may I be shot but he cum back jest at the hour he said he would.”

“Very extraordinary!” said Vance, musingly. “You must be a great judge of character, Colonel Hyde.”

“Wall, what’s extrordinerer still,” continued the Colonel, “is this: Peek wanted money ter send ter his wife, and cuss me ef he didn’t offer ter go the hull way ter Cincinnati without no officers ter guard him, ef I’d give him twenty-five dollars. In coorse I done it, seein’ as how I saved fifty dollars by the operation. The minute he got on board this ’ere boat I hahd him han’cuffed, fur I knowed his promise wahn’t good no longer, anyhow.”

“Colonel, what’s your address?” asked Mr. Vance. “If ever I lose a nigger, you’re the man I must send for to help me find him.”

The Colonel drew forth from his vest pocket a dirty card, and presented it to Mr. Vance. It contained these words: “Colonel Delancy Hyde, Agent for the Recovery of Escaped Slaves. Address him, care of J. Breckenridge, St. Louis; Hermin & Co., New Orleans.”

“Shall be proud to do yer business, Mr. Vance,” said the Colonel.

“I must have a talk with that handcuffed fellow of yours by and by,” remarked Vance.

“Do!” returned the Colonel. “Yer’ll find him a right knowin’ nigger. He kn read an’ write, an’ that air’s more ’n we kn say of some white folks in our part of the kintry.”

“Do the owners hereabouts lose many slaves now-a-days?”

“Not sence old Gashface was killed last autumn.”

“Who’s Gashface? Is it a real name?” asked Vance.

“Nobody ever knowed his raal name,” returned the Colonel; “an’ so we called him Gashface, seem’ as he’d a bad gash over his left cheek. He was a half mulatto, with woolly hair, an’ so short-sighted he weared specs. Wall, that bloody cuss hahz run off more niggers nor all the abolitioners in the Northwest,—damned ef he haint! Two millions of dollars wouldn’t pay fur all the slaves he’s helped across the line. He guv his hull time ter the work, an’ was crazy mad on that one pint. Last yar the planters clubbed together an’ made up a pus of five thousand dollars fur the man that ’ud shoot the cuss. Two gemmlemen from Vicksburg went inter the job, treed him, shot him dead, an’ tuk the five thousand dollars. An almighty good day’s work!”[^[14]]

“How did the planters know they had got the right man?” asked Vance.

“Wall, there wah n’t much doubt about that, yer see,” said the Colonel. “Them as shot him war’ high-tone gemmlemen, both on ’em, an’ knowed the cuss well. So did I, an’ they paid me a cool hunderd,—damned if they didn’t!—to come on an’ swar ter the body.”

“Let’s go and have a talk with your smart nigger,” interrupted Vance.

“Agreed!” replied the Colonel with an oath; and the two descended a short ladder, and stood on the lower deck in front of Peek, who was leaning against a green sliding box of stones, used for keeping the boat rightly trimmed.

“Wake up here, Peek,” said Hyde, kicking him not very gently; “here’s my friend, Mr. Vance, come ter see yer.”

The slave started, and his eyes had a lurid glitter as they turned on Hyde; but they opened with a wild and pleased surprise as they caught the quick, intelligible glance of Vance, whose right hand was pointing to an inner pocket of his coat. The change of expression in the slave was, however, too subtle and evanescent for any one except Vance himself to recognize it; and he was not moved by it to take other notice of the negro than to imitate the Colonel’s example by pushing Peek with his foot, at the same time saying, “I wish I had you on a sugar-plantation down in Louisiana, my fine fellow! I’d teach you to run away! You wouldn’t try it more than once, I’m thinking.”

“Look he-ah, stranger,” exclaimed Peek, rising to his feet, with a look of savage irritation, and clenching his fists, in spite of the irons on his wrists, “you jes’ put yer foot on me agin, and I’ll come at yer, shoo-ar!”

“You’ll do that, will you,” said Vance, laying both hands on the slave’s throat, shaking him, and muttering words audible to him only.

Peek, seeming to struggle, thrust his fettered hands into the bosom of his antagonist, as if to knock him down; but Vance pushed him up against the bulwarks of the boat, and held him there, with his grasp on his throat, till the slave begged humbly for mercy. Vance then let him go, and turning to Colonel Hyde, with perfect coolness, said, “That’s the way to let a nigger know you’re master.” To which the Colonel, unable to repress his admiration, replied: “I see as how yer understand ’em, from hide to innards, clar’ through. A nigger’s a nigger, all the world over. Now let’s liquor.”

They went to the bar, around which a motley group of smokers and drinkers were standing. The bar-keeper was a black man, and between him and Vance there passed a flash of intelligence.

“What shall it be, Mr. Vance?” asked the Colonel.

“Gin for me,” was the reply.

“Make me a whiskey nose-tickler,” said the Colonel, who seemed to be not unfamiliar with the fancy nomenclature of the bar-room.

The bar-keeper, with that nimbleness and dexterity which high art alone could have inspired, compounded a preparation of whiskey, lemon, and sugar with bitters, crushed ice, and a sprig of mint, and handed it to the Colonel, at the same time placing a decanter labelled “Gin” before Vance. The latter poured out two thirds of a tumbler of what seemed to be the raw spirit, and, adding neither water nor sugar, touched glasses with the Colonel, and swallowed it off as if it had been a spoonful of eau sucré. So overpowered with admiration at the feat was the Colonel, that he paused a full quarter of a minute before doing entire justice to the “nose-tickler” which had been brewed for him.

Some of the loungers now drew round the Colonel, and asked him to join them in a game of euchre. He looked inquiringly at Vance, and the latter said, “Go and play, Colonel; I’ll rejoin you by and by.” Then, in a confidential whisper, he added, “I must find out about that yellow girl,—whether she’s for sale.”

The Colonel winked, and answered, “All right,” and Vance walked away.

“Who’s that?” asked Mr. Leonidas Quattles, a long-haired, swarthy youth, who looked as if he might be half Indian.

“That’s Mr. Vance of Noo Orleenz,” replied the Colonel; “he’s my partik’lar friend, an’ a perfek high-tone gemmleman, I don’t car’ whar’ the other is.”

“How stands the Champion now?” said another of the party.

“Three miles astern, and thar she’ll stick,” exclaimed Quattles.

As Vance reascended to the upper deck, he encountered the children at play. Little Clara Berwick, in high glee, was running as fast as her infantile feet could carry her, pursued by Master Onslow, while Hattie, the mulatto woman in attendance, held out the child’s bonnet, and begged her to come and have it on. But Clara, with her light-brown ringlets flying on the breeze, was bent on trying her speed, and the boy, fearful that she would fall, was trying to arrest her. Before he could do this, his fears were realized. Clara tripped and fell, striking her forehead. Vance caught her up, and her parents, with Mr. Onslow and Hattie, gathered round her, while the boy looked on in speechless distress.

The little girl was so stunned by the blow, that for nearly a minute she could neither cry nor speak. Then opening her eyes on Mr. Vance, who, seating himself, held her in his lap, she began to grieve in a low, subdued whimper.

“The dear little creature! How she tries to restrain her tears!” said Vance. “Cry, darling, cry!” he added, while the moisture began to suffuse his own eyes.

Then, taking from his pocket a small morocco case, he said to Mrs. Berwick, “I have some diluted arnica here, madam, the best lotion in the world for a bruise. With your permission I will apply it.”

“Do so,” said the mother. “I know the remedy.”

And, pulling from a side pocket of his coat a fresh handkerchief of the finest linen, he wet it with the liquid, and applied it tenderly to the bruise, all the while engaging the child’s attention with prattle suited to her comprehension, and telling her what a brave good little girl she was.

“What is your name?” he asked.

She tried to utter it, but, failing to make herself understood, the mother helped her to say, “Clara Aylesford Berwick.”

“Aylesford!” said Vance, thoughtfully. Then, gazing in the child’s face, he rejoined: “How strange! Her eyes are dissimilar. One is a decided gray, the other a blue.”

“Yes,” said Berwick; “she gets the handsome eye from me; the other from her mamma.”

“Conceited man! cease your trifling!” interposed the lady.

Vance picked up from the deck a little sleeve-button of gold and coral. It had been dropped in the child’s fall.

“This must belong to Miss Clara,” said Vance, “for it bears the initials C. A. B.”

The mother took it and fixed it in the little dimity pelisse which the child wore.

Hattie now offered to receive Miss Clara from Vance’s arms; but, with an utterance and gesture of remonstrance, the child signified she did not choose to be parted without a kiss; so he bent down and kissed her, while she threw her little arms about his neck. Then seeing the boy, who felt like a culprit for chasing her, she called him to her and gave him absolution by the same token. Thanking Vance for his service, Mr. Berwick walked away with Leonora.

“That’s a noble boy of yours, sir,” said Vance, addressing himself to Mr. Onslow.

All the father’s displeasure vanished with the compliment, and he replied, “Yes, Robert is a noble boy; that’s the true word for him.”

“I fear,” resumed Vance, “I gave you some cause just now to form a bad opinion of me because of my conduct to one of the waiters.”

“To be frank,” replied Onslow, “I did feel surprise that you should take not only the strong side, but the wrong one.”

“Mr. Onslow, did you ever read Parnell’s poem of the ‘Hermit’?”

“Yes, it was one of the favorites of my youth.”

“And do you remember how many things seemed wrong to the hermit that he afterwards found to be right?”

“I perceive the drift of your allusion, sir,” returned Onslow; “but I am puzzled, nevertheless.”

“Perhaps one of these days you will be enlightened.” Then, changing the subject, Vance remarked, “How do you succeed in Texas in your attempt to substitute free labor for that of slaves?”

“My success has been all I could have hoped; but the more successful I am, the more imminent is my failure.”

“Why so? That sounds like a paradox.”

“The rich slave-owners look with fear and dislike on my experiment.”

“What else could you expect, Mr. Onslow? Take a case, publicly vouched for as true. Not long since a New York capitalist purchased mineral lands in Virginia, with a view to working them. He went on the ground and hired some of the white inhabitants of the neighborhood as laborers. All promised well, when lo! a committee of slaveholders, headed by one Jenkins,[^[15]] waited on him, and told him he must discharge his hands and hire slaves. The white laborers offered to work at reduced wages rather than give up their employment, but they were overawed, and their employer was compelled by the slave despots to abandon his undertaking and return to a State where white laborers have rights.”

“And yet,” said Onslow, “there are politicians who try to persuade the people that the enslaving of a black man removes him from competition with white labor; whereas the direct effect of slavery is to give to slaveholders the monopoly and control of the most desirable kinds of labor, and to enable them to degrade and impoverish the white laboring man!”

Here the furious ringing of a bell called the gentlemen to dinner.

CHAPTER XI.
MR. ONSLOW SPEAKS HIS MIND.

“How faint through din of merchandise

And count of gain

Has seemed to us the captive’s cries!

How far away the tears and sighs

Of souls in pain!”

Whittier.

An opportunity for resuming the conversation did not occur till long after sundown, and when many of the passengers were retiring to bed.

“I have heard, Mr. Onslow,” said Vance, “that since your removal to Texas you have liberated your slaves.”

“You have been rightly informed,” replied Onslow.

“And how did they succeed as freedmen?”

“Two thirds of them poorly, the remaining third well.”

“Does not such a fact rather bear against emancipation, and in favor of slavery?”

“Quite the contrary. I am aware that the enthusiastic Mr. Ruskin maintains that slavery is ‘not a political institution at all, but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance of a large portion of the human race.’ But as his theory would involve the enslaving of white men as well as black, I think we may dismiss it as the sportive extravagance of one better qualified to dogmatize than argue.”

“But is he not right in the application of his theory to the black race?”

“Far from it. Look at the white men you and I knew some twenty-five years ago. How many of them have turned out sots, gluttons, thieves, incapables! Shall the thrifty and wise, therefore, enslave the imprudent and foolish? Assuredly not, whatever such clever men as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thomas Carlyle may say in extenuation of such a proceeding.”

“Do not escaped or emancipated negroes often voluntarily return to slavery?”

“Not often, but occasionally; and so occasionally a white man commits an offence in order that he may be put in the penitentiary. A poor negro is emancipated or escapes. He goes to Philadelphia or New York, and has a hard time getting his grub. In a year or two he drifts back to his old master’s plantation, anxious to be received again by one who can insure to him his rations of mush; and so he declares there’s no place like ‘old Virginny for a nigger.’ Then what pæans go up in behalf of the patriarchal system! What a conclusive argument this that ‘niggers will be niggers,’ and that slavery is right and holy! Slave-drivers catch at the instance to stiffen up their consciences, and to stifle that inner voice that is perpetually telling them (in spite of the assurances of bishops, clergymen, and literary dilettanti to the contrary) that slavery is a violation of justice and of that law of God written on the heart and formulized by Christ, that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and that therefore liberty is the God-given right of every innocent and able-minded man. Instances like that I have supposed, instead of being a palliation of slavery, are to my mind new evidences of its utter sinfulness. A system that can so degrade humanity as to make a man covet repression or extinction for his manhood must be devilish indeed.”

“But, Mr. Onslow, do not statistics prove that the blacks increase and multiply much more in a state of slavery than in any other? Is not that a proof they are well treated and happy?”

“That is the most hideous argument yet in favor of the system. In slavery women are stimulated by the beastly ambition of contending which shall bear ‘the most little nigs for massa’! Among these poor creatures the diseases consequent upon too frequent child-bearing are dreadfully prevalent. Surely the welfare of a people must be measured, not by the mere amount of animal contentment or of rapid breeding with which they can be credited, but by the sum of manly acting and thinking they can show. A whole race of human beings is not created merely to eat mush, hoe in cotton-fields, and procreate slaves. The example of one such escaped slave as Frederick Douglas shows that the blacks are capable of as high a civilization as the whites.”[whites.”]

“Do they not seem to you rather feeble in the moral faculty?”

“No more feeble than any race would be, treated as they have been. The other day there fell into my hands a volume of sermons for pious slaveholders to preach to their slaves. It is from the pen of the excellent Bishop Meade of Virginia. The Bishop says to poor Cuffee: ‘Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to; but your precious souls are still your own.’ What impious cajolery is this? The master has an unlimited, irresponsible power over the slave, from childhood up,—can force him to act as he wills, however conscience may protest! The slave may be compelled to commit crimes or to reconcile himself to wrongs, familiarity with which may render his soul, like his body, the mere unreasoning, impassive tool of his master. And yet a bishop is found to try to cozen Cuffee out of the little common sense slavery may have left him, by telling him he is responsible for that soul, which may be stunted, soiled, perverted in any way avarice or power may choose.”

“Well, Mr. Onslow, will you deny that slavery has an ennobling effect in educating a chivalrous, brave, hospitable aristocracy of whites, untainted by those meannesses which are engendered by the greed of gain in trading communities?”

“I will not deny,” replied Onslow, “that the habit of irresponsible command may develop certain qualities, sometimes good, sometimes bad, in the slave-driver; and so the exercise of the lash by the overseer may develop the extensor muscles of the arm; but the evils to the whites from slavery far, far outbalance the benefits. First, there are the five millions of mean, non-slaveholding whites. These the system has reduced to a condition below that of the slave himself, in many cases. Slavery becomes at once their curse and their infatuation. It fascinates while it crushes them; it drugs and stupefies while it robs and degrades.”

“But may we not claim advantages from the system for the few,—for the upper three hundred thousand?”

“That depends on what you may esteem advantages. Can an injustice be an advantage to the perpetrator? The man who betrays a moneyed trust, and removes to Europe with his family, may in one sense derive an advantage from the operation. He may procure the means of educating and amusing himself and his children. So the slaveholder, by depriving other men of their inherent rights, may get the means of benefiting himself and those he cares for. But if he is content with such advantages, it must be because of a torpid, uneducated, or perverted conscience. Patrick Henry was right when he said, ‘Slavery is inconsistent with the religion of Christ.’ O’Connell was right when he declared, ‘No constitutional law can create or sanction slavery.’ I have often thought that Mississippians would never have been reconciled to that stupendous public swindle, politely called repudiation, if slavery had not first prepared their minds for it by the robbery of labor. And yet we have men like Jefferson Davis,[^[16]] who not only palliate, but approve the cheat. O the atrocity! O the shame! With what face can a repudiating community punish thieves?”

“Shall we not,” asked Vance, “at least grant the slaveholder the one quality he so anxiously claims,—that which he expresses in the word chivalry?”

Mr. Onslow shrugged his shoulders, and replied: “Put before the chivalrous slaveholder a poor fanatic of an Abolitionist, caught in the act of tampering with slaves, and then ask this representative of the chivalry to be magnanimous. No! the mean instincts of what he deems self-interest will make him a fiend in cruelty. He looks upon the Abolitionist very much as a gunpowder manufacturer would look upon the wandering Celt who should approach his establishment with a lighted pipe in his mouth; and he cheerfully sees the culprit handed over to the tender mercies of a mob of ignorant white barbarians.”

“Do you, then, deny that slavery develops any high qualities in the master?”

“And if it did, what right have I to develop my high qualities at another’s expense? Yes! Jefferson is right when he says: ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and his morals undepraved by such circumstances.’”

Mr. Onslow paced the deck for a moment, and then, returning, exclaimed: “O the unspeakable crimes, barbarities, and deviltries to which the system has educated men here at the South during the last thirty years! Educated not merely the poor and ignorant, but the rich and refined! The North knows hardly a tithe of the actual horrors. Worse than the wildest religious fanaticism, slavery sees men tortured, hung, mutilated, subjected to every conceivable indignity, cruelty, agony, simply because the victim is unsound, or suspected to be unsound, on the one supreme question. I myself have been often threatened, and sometimes the presentiment is strong upon me that my end will be a bloody one. I should not long be safe, were it not that in our region there are brave men who, like me, begin to question the divinity of the obscene old hag.”

Mr. Onslow again walked away, and then, coming close up to Vance, said in low tones: “But retribution must come,—as sure as God lives, retribution must come, and that speedily! Slavery must die, in order that Freedom and Civilization may live. I see it in all the signs of the times, in all the straws that drift by me on the current of events. Retribution must come,—come with bloodshed, anguish, and desolation to both North and South,—to Slavery, with spasms of diabolical cruelty, violence, and unholy wrath, and to Freedom with trials long and doubtful, but awaking the persistent energy which a righteous cause will inspire, and leading ultimately to permanent triumph and to the annihilation on this continent of the foul power which has ruled us so long, and which shall dare to close in deadly combat with the young genius of universal Liberty.”

Vance grasped Onslow by the hand, but seemed too excited to speak. Then, as if half ashamed of his emotion, he said, “Will there be men at the South, think you, to array themselves on the side of freedom, in the event of a collision?”

“There will be such men, but, until the slave-power shall be annihilated forever, they will be a helpless minority. A few rich leaders control the masses which Slavery has herself first imbruted. Crush out slavery, and there will be regenerators of the land who will spring up by thousands to welcome their brethren of the North, whose interests, like theirs, lie in universal freedom and justice.”

“You do not, then, believe those who tell us there is an eternal incompatibility between the people of the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States?”

“Bah! These exaggerations, the rhetoric of feeble spirits, and the logic of false, are stuff and rubbish to any true student of human nature. There is no incompatibility between North and South, except what slavery engenders and strives to intensify. Strike away slavery, and the people gravitate to each other by laws higher than the bad passions of your Rhetts, Yanceys, and Maurys. The small-beer orators and forcible-feeble writers of the South, who are eternally raving about the mean, low-born Yankees, and laboring to excite alienation and prejudice, are merely the tools of a few plotting oligarchs who hope to be the chiefs of a Southern Confederacy.”

“And must civil war necessarily follow from a separation?”

“As surely as thunder follows from the lightning-rent! Yes, Webster is undoubtedly right: there can be no such thing as peaceable secession, and I rejoice that there cannot be.”

“But would not a civil war render inevitable that alienation which these Richmond scribblers are trying to antedate?”

“No. Enmity would be kept up long enough for the slave-power to be scotched and killed, and then the people of both sections would see that there was nothing to keep them apart, that their interests are identical. The true people of the South would soon realize that the three hundred thousand slaveholders are even more their enemies than enemies of the North. A reaction against our upstart aristocracy (an aristocracy resting on tobacco-casks and cotton-bales) would ensue, and the South would be republicanized,—a consummation which slavery has thus far prevented. South Carolina was Tory in the Revolution, just as she is now. Abolish slavery, and we should be United States in fact as well as in name. Abolish slavery, and you abolish sectionalism with it. Abolish slavery, and you let the masses North and South see that their welfare lies in the preservation of the republic, one and indivisible.”

“And do you anticipate civil war?”

“Yes, such a civil war as the world has never witnessed.[^[17]] The devil of slavery must go out of us, and as it is the worst of all the devils that ever afflicted mankind, it can go out only through unprecedented convulsions and tearings and agonies. The North must suffer as well as the South, for the North shares in the guilt of slavery, and there are thousands of men there who shut their eyes to its enormities. Believe me, their are high spiritual laws underlying national offences; and the Nemesis that must punish ours is near at hand. Slavery must be destroyed, and war is the only instrumentality that I can conceive of energetic enough to do it. Through war, then, must slavery be destroyed.”

“And I care not how soon!” said Vance. Then, lowering his tone, he remarked: “Have you not been imprudent in confiding your views to a stranger, who could have you lynched at the next landing-place by reporting them?”

“Perhaps. But I bide the risk; you have not been so shrewd an actor, sir, that I have not seen behind the mask.”

Vance started at the word actor, then said, looking up at the stars: “What a beautiful night! Does not the Champion seem to be gaining on us?”

“I have been thinking so for some minutes,” replied Onslow. “Good night, Mr.——. Excuse me. I haven’t the pleasure of knowing your name.”

“And yet we have met before, Mr. Onslow, and under circumstances that ought to make me remembered.”

“To what do you allude?”

“I was once brought before you for horse-stealing, and, what is more, you found me guilty of the charge, and rightly.”

“Then my recollection was not at fault, after all!” exclaimed Onslow, astonished. “But were you indeed guilty?”

“I certainly took a horse, but it was a case of necessity. A friend of mine, a colored man, in defence of his liberty, had wounded his master, so called, and was flying for life. To save him I robbed the robber,—took his horse and gave it to his victim, enabling the latter to get off safely. The fact of my taking the horse was clearly proved, but my motive was not discovered. If it had been, Judge Lynch would surely have relieved you of the care of me. You, as justice of the peace, remanded me to prison for trial. That night I escaped. In an outer room of the jail I found a knife and half of a slaughtered calf. The knife I put in my pocket. The carcass I threw over my shoulder, and ran. In the morning I found five valuable bloodhounds on my track. I climbed a tree, and when they came under it, I fed them till they were all tame, and allowed me to descend; and then I cut their throats, lest they should be used to hunt down fugitives from slavery. Two days afterwards I was safe on board a steamboat, on my way North.”

“Who, then, are you, sir?” asked Onslow.

Vance whispered a word in reply.

Mr. Onslow seemed agitated for a moment, and then exclaimed, “But I thought he was dead!”

“The report originated with those who took the reward offered for his head. Mr. Onslow, I have repaid your frankness with a similar frankness of my own. To-morrow morning, at ten o’clock, meet me here, and you shall hear more of my story. Good night.”

The gentlemen parted, each retiring to his state-room for repose.

CHAPTER XII.
THE STORY OF ESTELLE.

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair,

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields

And thinking of the days that are no more.”

Tennyson.

Balmy, bright, and beautiful broke the succeeding morning. Every passenger as he came on deck looked astern to see what had become of the Champion. She still kept her usual distance, dogging the Pontiac with the persistency of a fate. Captain Crane said nothing, but it was noticeable that he puffed away at his cigar with increased vigor.

Mr. Vance encountered the Berwicks once more on the hurricane deck and interchanged greetings. Little Clara recognized her friend of the day before, and, jumping from Hattie’s lap, ran and pulled his coat, looking up in his face, and pouting her lips for a kiss.

“I fancy I see two marked traits in your little girl, already,” said Vance to the mother, after he had saluted the child; “she is strong in the affections, and has a will-power that shows itself in self-control.”

“You are right,” replied the mother; “I have known her to bite her lips till the blood came, in her effort to keep from crying.”

“Such is her individuality,” continued Vance. “I doubt if circumstances of education could do much to misshape her moral being.”

“Ah! that is a fearful consideration,” said the lady; “we cannot say how far the best of us would have been perverted if our early training had been unpropitious.”

“I knew your father, Mrs. Berwick. He found me, a stranger stricken down by fever, forsaken and untended, in a miserable shanty called a tavern, in Southern Illinois, in the sickly season. He devoted himself to me till I was convalescent. I shall never forget his kindness. Will you allow mg to look at that little seal on your watch-chain? It ought to bear the letters ‘W. C. to R. A.’ Thank you. Yes, there they are! I sent him the seal as a memento. The cutting is my own.”

“I shall regard it with a new interest,” said Mrs. Berwick, as she took it back.

Mr. Onslow here appeared and bade the party good morning.

“I feel that I am among friends,” said Vance. “I last night promised Mr. Onslow a story. Did you ever hear of the redoubtable Gashface, Mr. Berwick?”

“Yes, and I warn you, sir, that I am quite enough of an Abolitionist to hold his memory in a sort of respect.”

“Bold words to utter on the Southern Mississippi! But do not be under concern: I myself am Gashface. Yes. The report of his being killed is a lie. Are you in a mood to hear his story, Mrs. Berwick?”

“I shall esteem it a privilege, sir.”

“The last time I told it was to your father. Be seated, and try and be as patient as he was in listening.”

The party arranged themselves in chairs; and Mr. Vance was about to take up his parable, when the figure of Colonel Delancy Hyde was seen emerging from the stairs leading from the lower deck.

“Hah! Mr. Vance, I’m yourn,” exclaimed the Colonel, with effusion. “Been lookin’ fur yer all over the boat. Introduce yer friends ter me.”

Vance took from his pocket the Colonel’s card, and read aloud the contents of it.

“From Virginia, ma’am,” supplemented the Colonel, who was already redolent of Bourbon; “the name of Delancy Hyde hahz been in the family more ’n five hunderd yarz. Fak, ma’am! My father owned more slaves nor he could count. Ef it hahdn’t been fur a damned Yankee judge, we sh’d hahv held more land nor you could ride over in a day. Them low-born Yankees, ma’am, air jes’ fit to fetch an’ carry for us as air the master race; to larn our childern thar letters an’ make our shoes, as the Greeks done fur the Romans, ma’am. Ever read the Richmond newspapers, ma’am? John Randolph wunst said he’d go out of his way to kick a sheep. I’d go out of my way, ma’am, to kick a Yankee.”

“If you’re disposed to listen to a story, Colonel,” said Vance, “take a chair.” And he pointed to one the furthest from Mrs. Berwick. “I am about to read an autobiography of the fellow Gashface, of whom you have heard.”

And Vance drew from his pocket a small visiting card crowded close with stenographic characters in manuscript.

“An’ that’s an auter—what d’ yer call it,—is it?” asked the Colonel. “Cur’ous!”

The Colonel reinforced himself with a plug of tobacco, and Vance began to recite what he called, for the occasion, “The Autobiography of Gashface.” But we prefer to name it

The Story of Estelle.

I was born in New Orleans, and am the son of William Carteret. He was a Virginian by birth, the younger son of a planter, whose forefather, a poor Yorkshire gentleman, came over from England with Sir Thomas Dale in the year 1611. You might think me false to my father’s native State if I did not vindicate my claim to a descent from one of the first Virginia families. You must be aware that all the gentle blood that flowed from Europe to this continent sought Virginia as its congenial reservoir. It would be difficult to find a low-born white man in the whole eastern section of the State.

[“That’s a fak!” interposed the Colonel.]

My grandfather died in 1820, leaving all his property to his eldest son, Albert. (Virginia then had her laws of primogeniture.) Albert generously offered to provide for my father, but the latter, finding that Albert could not do this without reducing the provision for his sisters, resolved to seek fortune at the North. He went to New York, where he studied medicine. But here he encountered Miss Peyton, a beautiful girl from Virginia, nobly supporting herself by giving instruction in music. He married her, and they consoled themselves for their poverty by their fidelity and devotion to each other. The loss of their first child, in consequence, as my father believed, of the unhealthy location of his house, induced him to make extraordinary efforts to earn money.

After various fruitless attempts to establish himself in some lucrative employment, he made his début, under an assumed name, at the Park Theatre, in the character of Douglas, in Home’s once famous tragedy of that name. My father’s choice of this part is suggestive of the moderate but respectable character of his success. He played to the judicious few; but their verdict in his favor was not sufficiently potent to make him a popular actor. He soon had to give up the high starring parts, and to content himself with playing the gentleman of comedies or the second part in tragedies. In this humbler line he gained a reputation which has not yet died out in theatrical circles. He could always command good engagements for the theatrical season in respectable stock-companies. He was fulfilling one of these engagements in New Orleans when I was born.

A month afterwards he ended his career in a manner that sent a thrill through the public heart. He was one evening playing Othello for his own benefit. Grateful for a crowded house, he was putting forth his best powers, and with extraordinary success. Never had such plaudits greeted and inspired him. The property-man, whose duty it is to furnish all the articles needed by the actor, had given him at rehearsal a blunted dagger, so contrived with a spring that it seemed to pierce the breast when thrust against it. At night this false dagger was mislaid, and the property-man handed him a real one, omitting in the hurry of the moment to inform him of the change. In uttering the closing words of his part,—

“I took by the throat the circumci-sed dog,

And smote him thus,”—

my father inflicted upon himself, not a mimic, but a real stab, so forcible that he did not survive it ten minutes.

Great was my mother’s anguish at her loss. She was not left utterly destitute. My father had not fallen into the besetting sins of the profession. He saw in it a way to competence, if he would but lead a pure and thrifty life. In the seven years he had been on the stage he had laid up seven thousand dollars. Pride would not let him allow my mother to labor for her support. But now she gladly accepted from the manager an offer of twenty-five dollars a week as “walking lady.” On this sum she contrived for seventeen years to live decently and educate her son liberally.

At last sickness obliged her to give up her theatrical engagement. She had invested her seven thousand dollars in bonds of the Planters’ Bank of Mississippi, to the redemption of which the faith of that State was pledged. The repudiation of the bonds by the State authorities, under the instigation of Mr. Jefferson Davis, deprived her of her last resource. Impoverished in means, broken in health, and unable to labor, she fell into a decline and died.

The humane manager gave me a situation in his company. I became an actor, and for seven years played the part of second young gentleman in comedies and melodramas; also such parts as Horatio in “Hamlet” or Macduff in “Macbeth.” But my heart was not in my vocation. It had chagrins which I could not stomach.

One evening I was playing the part of a lover. The dramatis persona of whom I was supposed to be enamored was represented by Miss B——, rather a showy, voluptuous figure, but whom I secretly disliked for qualities the reverse of those of Cæsar’s wife. Instead of allowing my aversion to appear, I played with the appropriate ardor. In performing the “business” of the part, I was about to kiss her, when I heard a loud, solitary hiss from a person in an orchestra box. He was a man of a full face, very fair red-and-white complexion, and thick black whiskers,—precisely what a coarse feminine taste would call “a handsome fellow.” Folding my arms, I walked towards the foot-lights, and asked what he wanted. “None of your business, you damned stroller!” replied he; “I have a right to hiss, I suppose.” “And I have a right to pronounce you a blackguard, I suppose,” returned I. The audience applauded my rebuke, and laughed at the handsome man, who, with scarlet cheeks, rose and left the house. I learned he was a Mr. Ratcliff, a rich planter, and an admirer of Miss B——.

Soon after this adventure I quitted the profession, and for some time gave myself up to study. My tastes were rather musical than histrionic; and having from boyhood been a proficient on the piano-forte, I at last, when all my money was exhausted, offered my services to the public as a teacher.

My first pupil was Henri Dufour, the only son of the widow of a French physician. It was soon agreed that, for the greater convenience of Henri, and in payment for his tuition, I should become a member of the family, which was small, consisting only of himself, his mother, Jane, a black slave, and Estelle, a white girl who occupied the position of a humble companion of the widow.

[At this point in the narrative, Mr. Quattles appeared at the head of the stairs, and, with his forefinger placed on the side of his long nose, winked expressively at Colonel Hyde. The latter rose, and said, “Sorry to go, Mr. Vance; but the fak is, I’m in fur a hahnd at euchre, an’ jest cum up ter see ef you’d jine us.”

“You’re too gallant a man, Colonel Delancy Hyde,” replied Vance, “not to agree with me, when I say, Duty to ladies first.”

“Yer may bet yer pile on that, Mr. Vance; the ladies fust ollerz; but Madame will ’scuze me, I reckon. Hahd a high old time, ma’am, last night, an’ an almighty bahd streak of luck. Must make up fur it somehow.”

“Business before pleasure, Colonel,” said Vance. “We’ll excuse you.”

And the Colonel, with a lordly sweep of his arm, by way of a bow, joined his companion, Quattles, to whom he remarked, “A high-tone Suthun gemmleman that, and one as does credit to his raisin’.” The companions having disappeared, Vance proceeded with his story.]

Let me call up before you, if I can, the image of Estelle. In person about three inches shorter than I (and I am five feet six), slender, lithe, and willowy, yet compactly rounded, straight, and singularly graceful in every movement; a neck and bust that might have served Powers for a model when the Greek Slave was taking form in his brain; a head admirably proportioned to all these symmetries; a face rather Grecian than Roman, and which always reminded me of that portrait of Beatrice Cenci by Guido, made so familiar to us through copies and engravings; a portrait tragic as the fate of the original in its serene yet mournful expression. But Estelle’s hair differed from that of Beatrice in not being auburn, but of a rare and beautiful olive tint, almost like the bark of the laburnum-tree, and exquisitely fine and thick. In complexion she could not be called either a blonde or a brunette; although her dark blue eyes seemed to attach her rather to the former classification. She was one of the few beautiful women I have seen, whose beauty was not marred by a besetting self-consciousness of beauty, betrayed in every look and movement, and even in the tones of the voice. In respect to her personal charms Estelle was as unconscious as a moss-rose.

Mrs. Dufour was an invalid, selfish, parsimonious, and exacting; but Estelle, in devotion to that lady’s service and in adaptation to her caprices, showed a patience and a tact so admirable that it was difficult to guess whether they were the result of sincere affection or of a simple sense of duty.

Henri, my pupil in music, was a youth of sixteen, who inherited not only his mother’s morbid constitution, but her ungenerous qualities of heart and temper. Arrogant and vain, he seemed to regard me in the light of a menial, and I could not find in him intellect enough to make him sensible of his folly.

I spent my last twenty dollars in advertising; but no new pupil appeared in answer to my insinuating appeal. My wardrobe began to get impaired; my broadcloth to lose its nap, and my linen to give evidence of premeditated poverty. One day I marvelled at finding in my drawer a shirt completely renovated, with new wristbands, bosom, and collar. The next week the miracle was repeated. Had Mrs. Dufour opened her heart and her purse? Impossible! Had Jane, my washerwoman, slyly performed the service? She honestly denied it. I pursued my investigations no further.

The next Sunday, in putting on my best pantaloons, I found in the right pocket two gold quarter-eagles. Yes! There could now be no doubt. I had misjudged Mrs. Dufour. Her stinginess was all a pretence. Touched with gratitude, yet humiliated, I went to return the gold. It was plain that Madame knew nothing about it. I looked at Estelle, who sat at a window mending a muslin collar.

“Can you explain, Mademoiselle?” I asked.

“Explain what?” she inquired, as if she had been too absorbed in her own thoughts to hear a word of the conversation.

“Can you explain how those gold pieces came into my pocket?”

Without the least sign of guilt, she replied, “I cannot explain, sir.”

Was she deceiving me? I thought not. Though we had met twice a day at meals for weeks, her demeanor towards me had been always distant and reserved.

It was my habit daily, after giving a morning lesson to my pupil, to walk a couple of hours on the Levee. One forenoon, on account of the heat of the weather, I returned home an hour earlier than usual. Henri and his mother were out riding. As I entered the house I heard the sound of the piano, and stopped in the hall to listen. It was Estelle at the instrument.

I had left on the music-stand a rough score of my arrangement of that remarkable composition, then newly published in Europe, the music and words of which Colonel Pestal wrote with a link of his fetters on his prison-wall the day before his execution. I had translated the original song, and written it on the same page with the music. What was my astonishment to hear the whole piece,—this new De Profundis, this mortal cry from the depths of a proud, indignant heart,—a cry condensed by music into tones the most apt and fervid,—now reproduced by Estelle with such passionate power, such reality of emotion, that I was struck at once with admiration and with horror.

They were not, then, for Pestal so much as for Estelle,—those utterances of holy wrath and angelic defiance! The words by themselves are simple,—commonplace, if you will.[^[18]] But, conveyed to the ear through Pestal’s music and Estelle’s voice, they seemed vivid with the very lightning of the soul. As she sang, the victim towered above the oppressor like an archangel above a fiend. The prison-walls fell outward, and the welcoming heavens opened to the triumphant captive.

I entered the room. She turned suddenly. Her face had not yet recovered from the expression of those emotions which the song had called up. She rose with the air of an avenging goddess. Then, seeing me, she drew up her clasped hands to her bosom with a gesture full of grace and eloquent with deprecation, and said, “Forgive me if I have disturbed your papers.”

“Estelle!” I began. Then, seeing her look of surprise, I said, “Excuse me if the address is too familiar; but I know you by no other name.”

“Estelle is all sufficient,” she replied.

“Well, then, Estelle, you have moved me by your singing as I was never moved before,—so terribly in earnest did you seem! What does it mean?”

“It means,” she replied, “that you have adapted the music to a faithful translation of the words.”

“I have heard you play,” said I, “but why have you kept me in ignorance of your powers as a singer?”

“My powers, such as they are,” she said, “have been rarely used since I left the convent. I can give little time now to music. Indeed, the hour I have given to it this morning was stolen, and I must make up for it. So good by.”

“Stay, Estelle,” said I, seizing her hand. “There is a mystery which hangs over you like a cloud. Tell me what it is. Your eyes look as if a storm of unshed tears were brooding behind them. Your expression is always sad. Can I in any way help you? Can I render a true brother’s service?”

She stood, looking me in the face, and it was plain, from a certain convulsed effort at deglutition, that she was striving to swallow back the big grief that heaved itself up from her heart. She wavered as if half inclined to reveal something. There was the noise of a carriage at the door; and, pressing my hand gently, she said, with an effort at a smile that should have been a sob, “Thank you; you cannot—help me; my mistress is at the door; good by.” And dropping my hand, she glided out of the room.

I can never forget her as she then appeared in her virginal, spring-like beauty, with her profuse silky hair parted plainly in front, and folded in a classic knot behind, with her dress of a light gauze-like material, and an unworked muslin collar about her neck having a simple blue ribbon passing under it and fastened in front with a little cross of gold. How unpretending and unadorned,—and yet what a charm was lent to her whole attire by her consummate grace of person and of action!

Mrs. Dufour entered, and I did not see Estelle again that day.

It was that fearful summer when the fever seemed to be indiscriminate in its ravages. Not only transient visitors in the city, but old residents long acclimated, natives of the city, physicians and nurses, were smitten down. Many fled from the pest-ridden precincts. Whole blocks of houses were deserted. There were few doors at which Death did not knock for one or more of the inmates.

My pupil, Henri Dufour, was taken ill on a Saturday, and on Wednesday his mortal remains were conveyed to the cemetery. I had tended him day and night, and was much worn down by watchings and anxiety. Jane, a hired black domestic, was wanted by her owner, and left us. All the work of our diminished household now fell on Estelle. As for Madame Dufour, she lived in a hysterical fear lest the inevitable summoner should visit her next. She was continually imagining that the symptoms were upon her. One day she fell into an unusual state of alarm. I was alone with her in the house. Estelle had gone out without asking permission,—an extraordinary event. I did what I could for the invalid, and, by her direction, called in a physician whose carriage she had seen standing at a neighboring door.

The poor little doctor seemed flurried and overworked, and an odor of brandy came from his breath. He assured Mrs. Dufour that her symptoms were wholly of the imagination, and that if she would keep tranquil, all danger would speedily pass. He administered a dose of laudanum. It afterwards occurred to me that he had given three times the usual quantity. He received his fee and departed; and I sat down behind the curtain of an alcove so as to be within call.

Three minutes had not elapsed when Estelle burst into the room, and in a voice low and husky, as if with overpowering agitation, exclaimed: “You have deceived me, Madame! Mr. Semmes tells me you never gave him any orders about a will. Do you mean to cheat me? Beware! Tell me this instant! tell me! Will you do it? Will you do it?”

“Estelle! how can you?” whined Mrs. Dufour. “At such a time, when the slightest agitation may bring on the fever, how can you trouble me on such a subject?”

“No evasion!” exclaimed Estelle, in imperious tones. “I demand it,—I exact it,—now—this instant! You shall—you shall perform it!”

Madame had some vague superstitious notion connected with the signing of a will, and she murmured: “I shall do nothing at present; I’m not in a state to sign my name. The doctor said I must be tranquil. How can you be so selfish, Estelle? Do you imagine I’m going to die, that you are so urgent just now?”

“You told me three months ago,” replied Estelle, “that the will had been regularly signed and witnessed. You lied! If you now refuse to make amends, do not hope for peace either in this world or the next. No priest shall attend you here, and my curses shall pursue you down to hell to double the damnation your sin deserves! Will you sign, if I bring the notary?”

Mrs. Dufour began to moan, and complain of her symptoms, while I could hear Estelle pacing the room like a caged tigress. Suddenly she stood still, and cried, “Do you still refuse?”

The moaning of the invalid had been succeeded by a stertorous breathing, as if she had been suddenly overcome by sleep.

“She is stone,—stone! She sleeps!—she has no heart!” groaned Estelle.

I now left the alcove. Estelle knelt weeping with her face on the sofa. I touched her on the head, and she started up alarmed. She saw tears of sympathy on my cheek. I drew her away with my arm about her waist, and said, “Come! come and tell me all.”

She let me lead her down-stairs into the parlor. I placed her in an arm-chair, and sat on a low ottoman at her feet. “Tell me all, Estelle,” I repeated. “What does it mean?”

I then drew from her these facts. Her mother, though undistinguishable from a white woman, had been a slave belonging to a Mr. Huger, a sugar-planter. She was reputed to be the daughter of what the Creoles call a meamelouc, that is, the offspring of a white man and a metif mother, a metif being the offspring of a white and a quarteron. This account of the genealogy of Estelle’s mother I never had occasion to doubt till years afterwards. The father of Estelle was Albert Grandeau, a young Parisian of good family. Being suddenly called home from Louisiana to France by the death of his parents, he left America, promising to return the following winter, and purchase the prospective mother of his child and take her to Paris. This he honestly intended to do; but alas for good intentions! It is good deeds only that are secure against the caprices of Fate. The vessel in which Grandeau sailed foundered at sea, and he was among the lost. Estelle’s mother died in child-birth.

And then Estelle,—on the well-known principle of Southern law, “proles sequitur ventrem,”—in spite of her fair complexion, was a slave. Mr. Huger dying, she fell to the portion of his unmarried daughter, Louise, who was a member of the newly established Convent of St. Vivia. She took Estelle, then a mere child, with her to bring up. Fortunately for Estelle, there were highly accomplished ladies in the convent, to whom it was at once a delight and a duty to instruct the little girl. French, English, and Italian were soon all equally familiar to her, and before she was seventeen she surpassed, in needlework and music, even her teachers. But the convent of St. Vivia had been cheated in the title of its estate; and through failure of funds, it was at length broken up. Soon afterwards, Louise Huger, whose health had always been feeble, died suddenly, leaving Estelle to her sister, Mrs. Dufour, with the request that measures should be at once taken to secure the maiden’s freedom, in the contingency of Mrs. Dufour’s demise. It was the failure of the latter to take the proper steps for Estelle’s manumission that now roused her anger and anxiety.

These disclosures on the part of Estelle awoke in me conflicting emotions.

Shall I confess it? Such was the influence of education, of inherited prejudice, and of social proscription, that when she told me she was a slave, I shuddered as a high-caste Brahmin might when he finds that the man he has taken by the hand is a Pariah. Estelle was too keen of penetration not to detect it; and she drew her robe away from my touch, and moved her chair back a little.

My ancestors, with the exception of my father, had been slaveholders ever since 1625. I had lived all my life in a community where slavery was held a righteous and a necessary institution. I had never allowed myself to question its policy or its justice. Skepticism as to a God or a future state was venial, nay, rather fashionable; but woe to the youth who should play the Pyrrhonist in the matter of slavery!

Yet it was not fear, it was not self-interest, that made me acquiesce; it was simply a failure to exercise my proper powers of thought. I took the word of others,—of interested parties, of social charlatans, of sordid, self-stultified fanatics,—that the system was the best possible one that could be conceived of, both for blacks and whites. From the false social atmosphere in which I had grown up I had derived the accretions that went to build up and solidify my moral being.

And so if St. Paul or Fenelon, Shakespeare or Newton, had come to me with ebonized faces, I should have refused them the privileges of an equal. To such folly are we shaped by what we passively receive from society! To such outrages on justice and common sense are we reconciled simply by the inertness of our brains, not to speak of the hollowness of our hearts!

Estelle paused, and almost despaired, when she saw the effect upon me of her confession. But I pressed her to a conclusion of her story, and then asked, “Who has any claim upon you, in the event of Madame Dufour’s dying intestate?”

“Nearly all her property,” replied Estelle, “is mortgaged to her nephew, Carberry Ratcliff, and he is her only heir.”

“Give me some account of him.”

“He is a South Carolinian by birth. Some years ago he married a Creole lady, by whom he got a fine cotton-plantation on the Red River, stocked with several hundred slaves. He has a house and garden in Lafayette, but lives most of the time on his plantation at Loraine.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“Yes; the first time only ten days ago, and he has been here four times since to call on Madame Dufour, though he rarely used to visit her oftener than twice a year.”

As Estelle spoke, her eyes flashed, and her breast heaved.

“How did he behave to you, Estelle?”

“How should the lord of a plantation behave to a comely female slave? Of course he insulted me both with looks and words. What more could you expect of such a connoisseur in flesh and blood as the planter who recruits his gangs at slave-auctions? Do not ask me how he behaved.”

I rose, deeply agitated, and paced the room.

“What sort of a looking man is this Mr. Ratcliff?”

She went to an étagère in a corner, opened a little box, and took from it a daguerrotype, which she placed in my hand.

Looking at the likeness, I recognized the man who once insulted me at the theatre.

“I must go and attend to Madame Dufour,” said Estelle.

“Let me accompany you,” said I.

She made no objection. We went together into the chamber. Estelle rushed to the bedside,—shook the invalid,—called her aloud by name,—put her ear down to learn if she breathed,—put her hand on the breast to find if the heart beat,—then turned to me, and shrieked, “She is dead!”

What was to be done?

I led Estelle into the parlor. She sat down. Her face was of a frightful pallor; but there was not the trace of a tear in her eyes. The expression was that of blank, unmitigated despair.

“Poor, poor child!” I murmured. “What can I do for her? Estelle, you must be saved,—but how?”

My words and my look seemed to inspire her with a hope. She rose, sank upon both knees before me, lifted up her clasped hands, and said: “O sir! O Mr. Carteret! as you are a man, as you reverence the recollection of your mother, save me,—save me from the consequences of this death! I am now the slave of Mr. Ratcliff; and what that involves to me you can guess, but I, without a new agony, cannot explain. Save me, dear sir! Good sir, kind sir, for God’s love, save me!” And then, with a wild cry of despair, she added: “I will be yours,—body and soul, I will be yours, if you will only save me! I will be your slave,—your anything,—only let me belong to one I can love and respect. Do not, do not cast me off!”

“Cast you off, dear child? Never!” said I, and, raising her to her feet, I kissed her forehead.

That first kiss! How shall I analyze it? It was pure and tender as a mother’s, notwithstanding the utter abandonment signified in the maiden’s words. That very self-surrender was her security. Had she been shy, I might have been less cold. But her look of disappointment showed she attributed that coldness to some less flattering cause,—plainly to indifference, if not to personal dislike. She could not detect in me the first symptom of what she instinctively knew would be a guaranty of my protection, stronger than duty.

Like all the slaves and descendants of slaves in Louisiana, of all grades of color, she had been bred up to a knowledge that it was a consequence of her condition that there could be no marriage union between her and a respectable white man. Impressed with this conviction, she had pleaded to be allowed to remain in some convent, though it were but as a servant, for the remainder of her life. The selfishness of her mistress and owner, Miss Huger, put it out of her power to make this choice effectual. Her kind-hearted Catholic instructors consoled her, as well as they could, by the assurance that, being a slave, the sin of any mode of life to which she might be forced would be attended with absolution. But she had the horror which every pure nature, strong in the affections, must feel, under like circumstances, at the prospect of constraint. Since her life was to be that of a slave, O that her master might be one she could love, and who could love her! The first part of the dream would be realized if I could buy her. What misery to think that the latter part must remain unfulfilled!

I led her to a chair. She sat down and burst into a passion of tears. In vain I tried to console her by words. Supporting her head with one hand, I then with the other smoothed back the beautiful hair from her forehead. Gradually she became calm. I knelt beside her, and said: “Estelle, compose yourself. I promise you I will risk everything, life itself, to save you from the fate you abhor. Now summon your best faculties, and let us together devise some plan of proceeding.”

She lifted my hand to her lips in gratitude, made me take a seat by her side, and said: “Mr. Ratcliff or his agent may be here any minute, and then you would be powerless. The first step is to leave this house, and seek concealment.”

“Do you know any place of refuge?”

“Yes; I know a mulatto woman, named Mallet, who has a little stall on Poydras Street for the sale of baskets. She occupies a small tenement near by, and has two spare rooms. I think we can trust her, for I once tended one of her children who died; and she does not know that I am a slave.”

“But, Estelle, I grieve to say it,—I am poor, almost destitute. My friends are chiefly theatrical people, poor like myself, and most of them are North at this season.”

“Do not let that distress you,” she said; “I am the owner of a gold watch, for which we can get at least fifty dollars.”

“And mine will bring another fifty,” returned I. “Let us go, then, at once, since here you are in danger.”

An old negro, well known to the family, and who carried round oranges for sale, at this moment stopped at the door. I gave him a dollar, on condition that he would occupy and guard the house till some one should come to relieve him. I then, at Estelle’s suggestion, sent a letter to the Superintendent of Burials, announcing Madame Dufour’s death, and requesting him to attend to the interment. I also enclosed the address of Mr. Ratcliff and Mr. Semmes as the persons who would see all expenses paid. To this I signed my real name.

It was agreed that Estelle should leave at once. She gave me written directions for finding our place of rendezvous. There was before it an old magnolia-tree which I was particularly to note. I was to follow soon with such articles of attire, belonging to her and to myself, as I could bring, and I was to return for more if necessary. We parted, and I think she must have read something not sinister in the expression of my face, for her own suddenly brightened, and, with a smile ineffably sweet in its thankfulness, she said, “Au revoir!”

Our plans were all successfully carried out. The wardrobe of neither of us was extensive. Two visits to the house enabled me to remove all that we required. My letter to the Superintendent of Burials I had dropped into his box, and that afternoon I saw him enter the house, so that I knew the proper attentions to the dead would not be wanting.

Mrs. Mallet gladly received us on our own terms. Estelle had appropriated for me the better of the two little rooms, and had arranged and decked it so as to wear an appearance of neatness and comfort, if not of luxury. I expostulated, but she would not listen to my occupying the inferior apartment. Her own preferences must rule.

Ever dear to memory must be that first evening in our new abode! There was one old fauteuil in her room, and, placing Estelle in that, I sat on a low trunk by her side, where I could lean my elbow on the arm of the chair. It was a warm, but not oppressive July evening, with a bright moon. The window was open, and in the little area upon which it looked a lemon-tree rustled as the breeze swelled, now and then, to a whisper.

We were alone. I asked a thousand questions. I extorted the secret of my mended clothes and the mysterious gold pieces. That air of depression which had always been so marked in Estelle had vanished. She spoke and looked like a new being. I put a question in French, and she answered in that language with a fluency and a purity of accent that put me to the blush for my own lingual shortcomings. I spoke of books, and was surprised to find in her a bold, detective taste in recognizing the peculiarities, and penetrating to the spiritual life, of the higher class of thinkers and literary artists, whether French, English, or American.

I asked her to sing. In subdued tones, but with an exquisite accuracy, she sang some of the favorite airs by Mozart, Bellini, and Donizetti, using the Italian as if it were her native tongue.

And there, in that atmosphere of death, while the surrounding population were being decimated by the terrible pestilence, I drank in my first draughts of an imperishable love.

I looked at my watch. It was half an hour after midnight. How had the hours slipped by! We must part.

“Estelle!” I exclaimed with emotion; but I could not put into words what I had intended to say. Then, taking her hand, I added, “You have given me the most delightful evening of my life.”

No light was burning in the room, but by the moonbeams I could see her face all luminous with joy and triumph. My second kiss was bestowed; but this time it was on her lips,—brief, but impassioned. “Good night, Estelle!” I whispered; and, forcing myself instantly away, I closed the door.

I entered my apartment, and went to bed, but not to sleep. Tears that I could not repress gushed forth. A strange rapture possessed me. Nature had proved itself stronger than convention. The impulsive heart was more than a match for the calculating head. For the first time in my life I saw the new heavens and the new earth which love brings in. Estelle now seemed all the dearer to me for her very helplessness,—for the degradation and isolation in which slavery had placed her. Were she a princess, could I love her half as well? But she shall be treated with all the consideration due to a princess! Passion shall take no advantage of her friendlessness and self-abandonment.

Then came thoughts of the danger she was in,—of what I should do for her rescue; and it was not till light dawned in the east that I fell into a slumber.

We gave up nearly the whole of the next day to the discussion of plans. In pursuance of that on which we finally fixed, Estelle wrote a letter to Mr. Ratcliff in these words:—

“To Carberry Ratcliff, Esq.:—Sir: By the time this letter reaches you I shall be out of your power, and with my freedom assured. Still I desire to be at liberty to return to New Orleans, if I should so elect, and therefore I request you to name the sum in consideration of which you will give me free papers. A friend will negotiate with you. Let that friend have your answer, if you please, in the form of an advertisement in the Picayune, addressed to

Estelle.”

Two days afterwards we found the following answer in the newspaper named:—

“To Estelle: For fifty dollars, I will give you the papers you desire.

C. R.”

Long and anxiously we meditated on this reply. I dreaded a trap. Was it not most likely that Ratcliff, in naming so low a figure, hoped to secure some clew to the whereabouts of Estelle?

While I was puzzling myself with the question, Estelle suggested an expedient. The answer to the advertisement undoubtedly came from Ratcliff, and we had a right to regard it as valid. Why not address a letter, with fifty dollars, to Ratcliff, and have it legally registered at the post-office?

“Admirable!” exclaimed I, delighted at her quickness.

“No, it is not admirable,” she replied. “An objection suggests itself. Some one will have to go to the post-office to register the letter, and he may be known or tracked.”

I reflected a moment, and then said: “I think I can guard against such a danger. Having been an actor, I am expert at disguises. I will go as an old man.”

The plan was approved and put into effect. The two watches were disposed of at a jeweller’s for a hundred and ten dollars. In an altered hand I wrote Ratcliff a letter, enclosed in it a fifty-dollar bill, and bade him direct his answer simply to Estelle Grandeau, Cincinnati, Ohio. I added one dollar for the purpose of covering any expense he might be at for postage. Then, at the shop of a theatrical costumer, I disguised myself as a man of seventy, and went to the post-office. There I had the letter and its contents of money duly registered.

As I was returning home in my disguise, I saw the old negro I had left in charge at Mrs. Dufour’s. He did not recognize me, and was not surprised at my questions. From him I learned, that before he left the house a gentleman (undoubtedly Ratcliff) had called, and had seemed to be in a terrible fury on finding that Estelle had gone away some hours before; but his rage had redoubled when he further ascertained that a young man was her attendant.

The interesting question now was, Had Ratcliff any clew to my identity? My true name, William Carteret, under which I had been known at Mrs. Dufour’s, was not the name I had gone by on the stage. Here was one security. Still it was obvious the utmost precaution must be used.

My plans were speedily laid. Not having money enough to pay the passage of both Estelle and myself up the Mississippi, I decided that Estelle should go alone, disguised as an old woman. I engaged a state-room, and paid for it in advance. I had much difficulty in persuading her to accede to the arrangement, so painful was the prospect of a separation; but she finally consented. At my friend the costumer’s I fitted her out in a plain, Quaker-like dress. She was to be Mrs. Carver, a schoolmistress, going North. The next morning I covered her beautiful hair with a grayish wig; and then, by the aid of a hare’s foot and some pigments, added wrinkles and a complexion suitable to a maiden lady of fifty. With a veil over her face, she would not be suspected.

The hour of parting came. I put a plain gold ring on her finger. “Be constant,” I said. “Forever!” she solemnly replied, pressing the ring to her lips with tears of delight. The carriage was at the door. The farewell kiss was exchanged. Her little trunk was put on the driver’s foot-board. Mrs. Mallet entered and took a seat, and Estelle was about to follow, when suddenly a faintness seized me. She detected it at once, turned back, and exclaimed in alarm: “You are not well. What is the matter?”

“Nothing, that a glass of wine will not cure,” I replied. “There! It is over already. Do not delay. Your time is limited. Driver! Fast, but steady! Here’s a dollar for you! There! Step in, Estelle.”

She looked at me hesitatingly. I summoned all my will to check my increasing faintness. Urging her into the carriage, I closed the door, and the horses started. Estelle watched me from the window, till an angle in the street hid me from her view. Then, staggering into the house, I crawled up-stairs to my chamber, and sank upon the bed.

The next ten days were a blank to consciousness. Fever and delirium had the mastery of my brain. On the eleventh morning I seemed to wake gradually, as if from some anxious dream. I lay twining my hands feebly one over the other. Then suddenly a speck in the ceiling fixed my attention. Raising myself on the pillow, I looked around. Very gently and slowly recollection came back. The appearance of Mrs. Mallet soon seemed a natural sequence. She smiled, gave an affirmative shake of the head, as if to tell me all was well, and at her bidding, I lay down and slept. The following day I was strong enough to inquire after Estelle.

“Be good, and you shall see her,” was the reply.

“What! Did she not take passage in the boat?”

“There! Do not be alarmed; she will explain it all.”

And as she spoke, Estelle glided in, held up her forefinger by way of warning, and, smiling through her tears, kissed my forehead. I felt a shock of joy, followed by anxiety. “Why did you not go?” I asked.

“I found I could dispose of my state-room, and I did it, for I was too much concerned about your health to go in peace. It was fortunate I returned. You have had the fever, but the danger is over.”

“How long have I lain thus?”

“This is the twelfth day.”

“Have I had a physician?”

“No one but Estelle; but then she is an expert; she once walked the hospitals with the Sisters of Charity.”

My convalescence was rapid. By the first of September I was well enough to take long strolls in the evening with Estelle. On the fifth of that month, early one starlit night, I said to her, “Come, Estelle, put on your bonnet and shawl for a walk.”

She brought them into my room, and placed them on the bed.

“Where shall we go?” she inquired.

“To the Rev. Mr. Fulton’s,” I replied; “that is, if you will consent to be—”

“To be what?” she asked, not dreaming of my drift.

“To be married to me, Estelle!”

The expressions that flitted over her face,—expressions of doubtful rapture, pettish incredulity, and childlike eagerness,—come back vividly to my remembrance.

“You do not mean it!” at length she murmured, reproachfully.

“From my inmost heart I mean it, and I desire it above all earthly desires,” I replied.

She sank to the floor, and, clasping my knees with her arms, bowed her head upon them, and wept. Then, starting up, she said: “What! Your wife? Really your wife? Mistress and wife in one? Me,—a slave? Can it be, William, you desire it?”

It was the first time she had called me by my first name.

“Have you considered it well?” she continued. “O, I fear it would be ungenerous in me to consent. Such an alliance might jeopard all your future. You are young, well-connected, and can one day command all that the best society of the country can offer. No, William, not for me,—not for me the position of your wife!”

I replied to these misgivings by putting on her shawl, then her bonnet, the tying of which I accompanied with a kiss that brought the roses to her cheeks.

“Estelle,” I said, “unless we are very different from what we believe, the step is one we shall not regret. I must be degenerate indeed, if I can ever find anything in life more precious than the love you give and inspire. But perhaps you shrink from so binding a tie.”

“Shrink from it?” she repeated, in a tone of abandonment to all that was rapturous and delightful in her conceptions, though the tears gushed from her eyes. “O, generous beyond my dreams! Would I might prove to you of what my love is capable, and how you have deepened its unfathomable depths by this last proof of your affection!”

We went forth under the stars that beautiful evening to the well-known minister’s house. He received us kindly, asked us several questions, and, having satisfied himself of our intelligence and sincerity, united us in marriage. We gave him our real names,—William Carteret and Estelle Grandeau,—and he promised to keep the secret.

Six weeks flew by, how swiftly! The pressure which circumstances had put upon Estelle’s buoyancy of character being taken away, she moved the very embodiment of joy. It was as if she was making up for the past repression of her cheerfulness by an overflow, constant, yet gentle as the superflux of a fountain. Her very voice grew more childlike in its tones. A touching gratitude that never wearied of making itself felt seemed added to an abounding tenderness towards me.

She had a quick sense of the humorous which made hers an atmosphere of smiles. She would make me laugh by the odd and childish, yet charming pet phrases she would lavish upon me. She would amuse me by her anxiety in catering for me at meal-time, and making her humble fare seem sumptuous by her devices of speech, as well as by her culinary arts. The good nuns with whom she had lived had made her a thorough housekeeper, and a paragon of neatness. She wanted further to be my valet, my very slave, anticipating my wants, and forestalling every little effort which I might put forth.

My object now was to raise the sum necessary for our departure from the city. I took pupils in music among the humblest classes,—among the free blacks and even the slaves. I would be absent from nine o’clock in the morning till five in the afternoon. Estelle aided me in my purpose. She learned from Mrs. Mallet the art of making baskets, and contrived some of a new pattern which met a ready sale. We began to lay up five, sometimes six dollars a day.

Once I met Mr. Ratcliff in Carondelet Street. He evidently recognized me, for he turned on me a glance full of arrogance and hate. The encounter made me uneasy, but, thinking the mention of it might produce needless anxiety, I said nothing about it to Estelle. We were sitting that very evening in our little room. Estelle, always childlike, was in my lap, questioning me closely about all the incidents of the day,—what streets I had walked through; what persons I had seen; if I had been thinking of her, &c. I answered all her questions but one, and she seemed content; and then whispered in my ears the intelligence that she was likely to be the mother of my child. Delightful announcement! And yet with the thrill of satisfaction came a pang of solicitude.

“Do you believe,” prattled Estelle, “there ever were two people so happy? I can’t help recalling those words you read me the other night from your dear father’s last part, ‘If it were now to die, ’t were now to be most happy.’ It seems to me as if the felicity of a long life had been concentrated into these few weeks, and as if we were cheating our mortal lot in allowing ourselves to be quite so happy.”

Was this the sigh of her presaging heart?

I resolved on immediate action. The next day (a Wednesday) I passed upon the Levee. After many inquiries, I found a ship laden with cotton that would sail the following Sunday for Boston. The captain agreed to give up his best state-room for a hundred dollars. It should be ready for our occupancy on Saturday. I closed with his offer at once. Estelle rejoiced at the arrangement.

“What has happened to-day?” I asked her.

“Nothing of moment,” she replied. “Two men called to get names for a Directory.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That if they wanted my husband’s name, they must get it from him personally.”

“You did well. Were they polite?”

“Very, and seemed to seek excuses for lingering; but, getting no encouragement, they left.”

Could it be they were spies? The question occurred to me, but I soon dismissed it as improbable.

And yet they were creatures employed by Carberry Ratcliff to find out what they could about the man who had offended him.

Ratcliff was the type of a class that spring from slavery as naturally as certain weeds spring from a certain quality of manure. He was such a man as only slavery could engender. The son of a South Carolina planter, he was bred to believe that his little State—little in respect to its white population—was yet the master State of the Union, and that his family was the master family of the State. The conclusion that he was the master man of his family, and consequently of the Union, was not distant or illogical. As soon as he could lift a pistol he was taught to fire at a mark, and to make believe it was an Abolitionist. Before he was twelve years old he had fired at and wounded a free negro, who had playfully answered an imperious order by mimicking the boy’s strut. Of this achievement the father was rather proud.

Accustomed to regard the lives and persons of slaves as subject to his irresponsible will, or to the caprices of his untrained and impure passions, he soon transferred to the laboring white man and woman the contempt he felt for the negro. We cannot have the moral sense impaired in one direction without having it warped and corrupted throughout.

Wrong feeling must, by an inexorable law, breed wrong thinking. And so Ratcliff looked upon all persons, whether white or black, who had to earn their bread by manual labor, as (in the memorable words of his friend Mr. Hammond, United States Senator from South Carolina) “Mudsills and slaves.” For the thrifty Yankee his contempt was supreme, bitter, almost frantic.

By mismanagement and extravagance his family estate was squandered, and, the father having fallen in a duel with a political adversary, Ratcliff found himself at twenty-one with expensive tastes and no money. He borrowed a few hundred dollars, went to Louisiana, and there married a woman of large property, but personally unattractive. Revengeful and unforgetting as a savage where his pride was touched, and more cruel than a wolf in his instincts, Ratcliff had always meant to requite me for the humiliation I had made him experience. He had lost trace of me soon after the incident at the theatre. No sooner had I passed him in Carondelet Street than he put detectives on my track, and my place of abode was discovered. He received such a report of my wife’s beauty as roused him to the hope of an exquisite revenge. Doubtless he found an opportunity of seeing Estelle without being seen; and on discovering in her his slave, his surprise and fury reached an ungovernable height.

Let me not dwell on the horrors of the next few days. We had made all our arrangements for departure that Saturday morning.

Estelle, in her simple habit, never looked so lovely. A little cherry-colored scarf which I had presented her was about her neck, and contrasted with the neutral tint of her robe. The carriage for our conveyance to the ship was at the door. Our light amount of luggage was put on behind. We bade our kind hostess good by. Estelle stepped in, and I was about to follow, when two policemen, each with a revolver in his hand, approached from a concealment near by, shut the carriage door, and, laying hands upon me, drew me back. At the same moment, from the opposite side of the street, Ratcliff, with two men wearing official badges, came, and, opening the opposite door of the coach, entered and took seats. So sudden were these movements, that they were over before either Estelle or I could offer any resistance.

The coachman at once drove off. An imploring shriek from Estelle was followed by a frantic effort on her part to thrust open the door of the coach. I saw her struggling in the arms of the officers, her face wild with terror, indignation, rage. Ratcliff, who had taken the seat opposite to her, put his head out of the coach, and bowed to me mockingly.

One of my stalwart captors held a pistol to my head, and cautioned me to be “asy.” For half a minute I made no resistance. I was calculating how I could best rescue Estelle. All the while I kept my eyes intently on the departing carriage.

My captors held me as if they were prepared for any struggle. But I had not been seven years on the stage without learning something of the tricks of the wrestler and the gymnast. Suddenly both policemen found their legs knocked from under them, and their heads in contact with the pavement. A pistol went off as they fell, and a bullet passed through the crown of my hat; but before they could recover their footing, I had put an eighth of a mile between us.

Where was the carriage? The street into which it had turned was intersected by another which curved on either side like the horns of a crescent. To my dismay, when I reached this curve, the carriage was not to be seen. It had turned into the street either on the right or on the left, and the curve hid it from view. Which way? I could judge nothing from the sound, for other vehicles were passing. I stopped a man, and eagerly questioned him. He did not speak English. I put my question in French. He stopped to consider,—believed the carriage had taken the left turning, but was not quite certain. I ran leftward with all my speed. Carriages were to be seen, but not one with the little trunk and valise strapped on behind. I then turned and ran down the right turning. Baffled! At fault! In the network of streets it was all conjecture. Still on I ran in the desperate hope of seeing the carriage at some cross street. But my efforts were fruitless.

Panting and exhausted, I sought rest in a “magasin” for the sale of cigars. A little back parlor offered itself for smokers. I entered. A waiter brought in three cigars, and I threw a quarter of a dollar on the table. But I was no lover of the weed. The tobacco remained untouched. I wanted an opportunity for summoning my best thoughts.

Even if I had caught the coach, would not the chances have been against me? Clearly, yes. Further search for it, then, could be of no avail. Undoubtedly Ratcliff would take Estelle at once to his plantation, for there he could have her most completely in his power. Let that calculation be my starting-point.

How stood it in regard to myself? Did not my seizure by the policemen show that legal authority for my arrest had been procured? Probably. If imprisoned, should I not be wholly powerless to help Estelle? Obviously. Perhaps the morning newspapers would have something to say of the affair? Nothing more likely. Was it not, then, my safest course to keep still and concealed for the present? Alas, yes! Could I not trust Estelle to protect her own honor? Ay, she would protect it with her life; but the pang was in the thought that her life might be sacrificed in the work of protection.

The “magasin” was kept by Gustave Leroux, an old Frenchman, who had been a captain under Napoleon, and was in the grand army in its retreat from Moscow. A bullet had gone through his cheeks, and another had taken off part of his nose.

I must have sat with the untouched cigars before me nearly three hours. At last, supposing I was alone, I bowed my forehead on my hand, and wept. Suddenly I looked up. The old Frenchman, with his nose and cheek covered with large black patches, was standing with both hands on the table, gazing wistfully and tenderly upon me.

“What is it, my brave?” he asked in French, while tears began to fill his own eyes. I looked up. There was no resisting the benignity of that old battered face. I took the two hands which he held out to me in my own. He sat down by my side, and I told him my story.

After I had finished, he sat stroking his gray moustache with forefinger and thumb, and for ten minutes did not speak. Then he said: “I have seen this Mr. Ratcliff. A bad physiognomy! And yet what Mademoiselle Millefleurs would call a pretty fellow! Let us see. He will carry the girl to Lorain, and have her well guarded in his own house. As he has no faith in women, his policy will be to win her by fine presents, jewels, dresses, and sumptuous living. He will try that game for a full month at least. I think, if the girl is what you tell me she is, we may feel quite secure for a month. That will give us time to plan a campaign. Meanwhile you shall occupy a little room in my house, and keep as calm as you can. My dinner will be ready in ten minutes. You must try to coax an appetite, for you will want all your health and strength. Courage, mon brave!”

This old soldier, in his seventieth year, had done the most courageous act of his life. Out of pure charity he had married Madame Ponsard, five years his elder, an anti-Bonapartist, and who had been left a widow, destitute, and with six young parentless grandchildren. Fifty years back he had danced with her when she was a belle in Paris, and that fact was an offset for all her senile vanity and querulousness. It reconciled him, not only to receiving the lady herself, large, obese, and rubicund, and, worst of all, anti-Bonapartist, but to take her encumbrances, four girls and two boys, all with fearful appetites and sound lungs. But the old Captain was a sentimentalist; and the young life about him had rejuvenated his own. After all, there was a selfish calculation in his lovely charities; for he knew that to give was to receive in larger measure.

I accepted his offer of a shelter. The next morning he brought me a copy of the Delta. It contained this paragraph:

“We regret to learn that Mr. Julian Talbot, formerly an actor, and well known in theatrical circles, was yesterday arrested in the atrocious act of abducting a female slave of great personal beauty, belonging to the Hon. Carberry Ratcliff. The slave was recovered, but Talbot managed to escape. The officers are on his track. It is time an example was made of these sneaking Abolitionists.”

“O insupportable, O heavy hour!” I tried to reconcile myself to delay. I stayed a whole fortnight with Leroux. At last I procured the dress of a laboring Celt, and tied up in a bundle a cheap dress that would serve for a boy. I then stuck a pipe through my hat-band, and put a shillelah under my arm. A mop-like red wig concealed a portion of my face. Lamp-black and ochre did the rest. Leroux told me I was premature in my movements, but, without heeding his expostulations, I took an affectionate leave of him and of Madame, whose heart I had won by talking French with her, and listening to her long stories of the ancient régime.

I went on board a Red River boat. One of the policemen who arrested me was present on the watch; but I stared him stupidly in the face, and passed on unsuspected.

Ratcliff was having a canal dug at Lorain for increasing the facilities of transporting cotton; and as the work was unhealthy, he engaged Irishmen for it. The killing an Irishman was no loss, but the death of a slave would be a thousand dollars out of the master’s pocket. I easily got a situation among the diggers. How my heart bounded when I first saw Ratcliff! He came in company with his superintendent, Van Buskirk, and stood near me some minutes while I handled the spade.

For hours, every night during the week, I watched the house to discover the room occupied by Estelle. On Sunday I went in the daytime. From the window of a room in the uppermost story a little cherry-colored scarf was flaunting in the breeze. I at once recognized its meaning. Some negroes were near by under a tree. I approached, and asked an ancient black fellow, who was playing on an old cracked banjo, what he would take for the instrument.

“Look yere, Paddy,” said he, “if yer tink to fool dis chile, yer’ll fine it airn’t to be did. So wood up, and put off ter wunst, or yer’ll kotch it, shoo-ah.”

“But, Daddy, I’m in right earnest,” replied I. “If you’ll sell that banjo at any price within reason, I’ll buy it.”

“It’ll take a heap more’n you kn raise ter buy dis yere banjo; so, Paddy, make tracks, and jes’ you mine how yer guv dis yere ole nigger any more ob yer sarss.”

“I’ll pay you two dollars for that banjo, Daddy. Will you take it?” said I, holding out the silver.

The old fellow looked at me incredulously; then seized the silver and thrust the banjo into my hand, uttering at the same time such an expressive “Wheugh!” as only a negro can. Then, unable to restrain himself, he broke forth: “Yah, yah, yah! Paddy’s got a bargain dis time, shoo-ah. Yah, yah, yah! Look yere, Paddy. Dat am de most sooperfinest banjo in dese parts; can’t fine de match ob it in all Noo Orleenz. Jes’ you hole on ter dem air strings, so dey won’t break in two places ter wonst, and den fire away, and yer’ll ’stonish de natives, shoo-ah. Yah, yah, yah! Takes dis ole nigg to sell a banjo. Yah! yah!”

Every man who achieves success finds his penalty in a train of parasites; and Daddy’s case was not exceptional. As he started in a bee line for his cabin, to boast of his acuteness in trade to an admiring circle, he was followed by his whole gang of witnesses.

All this time I could see Ratcliff with a party of gentlemen on his piazza. They were smoking cigars; and, judging from the noise they made, had been dining and drinking. I slipped away with the banjo under my arm.

That night I returned and played the air of “Pestal” as near to the house as I deemed it prudent to venture. I would play a minute, and then pause. I had not done this three times, when I heard Estelle’s voice from her chamber, humming these words in low but audible tones:

“Hark! methinks I hear celestial voices sing,

Soon thou shalt be free, child of misery,—

Rest and perfect joy in heaven are waiting thee;

Spirit, plume thy wings and flee!”

I struck a few notes, by way of acknowledgment, and left.

The next night I merely whistled the remembered air in token of my presence. A light appeared for a moment at the window, and then was removed. I crept up close to the house. On that side of it where Estelle was confined there were no piazzas. I had not waited two minutes when something touched my head and bobbed before my eyes. It was a little roll of paper. I detached it from the string to which it was tied; and then, taking from my pocket an old envelope, I wrote on it in the dark these words: “To-morrow night at ten o’clock down the string. If prevented, then any night after at the same hour. Love shall find a way. Forever.”

The letter which I found folded in the paper lies yet in my pocket-book, but I need not look at it in order to repeat it entire. It is in these words:—‚Î

“What shall I call thee? Dearest? But that word implies a comparative; and whom shall I compare with thee? Most precious and most beloved? O, that is not a tithe of it! Idol? Darling? Sweet? Pretty words, but insufficient. Ah! life of my life, there are no superlatives in language that can interpret to thee the unspeakable affection which swells in my heart and moistens my eyes as I commence this letter! Can we by words give an idea of a melody? No more can I put on paper what my heart would be whispering to thine. Forgive the effort and the failure.

“I have the freedom of the upper story of the house, and my room is where you saw the scarf. Two strong negro women, with sinister faces, and employed as seamstresses, watch me every time I cross the threshold. At night I am locked in. The windows, as you may see, are always secured by iron bars.

“Ratcliff hopes to subdue me by slow approaches. O, the unutterable loathing which he inspires! He has placed impure books in my way. He sends me the daintiest food and wines. I confine myself to bread, vegetables, and cream. He cannot drug me without my knowledge. Twice and sometimes three times a day he visits me, and, finding me firm in my resolve, retires with a self-satisfied air which maddens me. He evidently believes in my final submission. No! Sooner, death! on my knees I swear it.

“Yesterday he sent splendid dresses, laces, jewels, diamonds. He offers me a carriage, an establishment, and to settle on me enough to make me secure for the future. How he magnifies my hate by all these despicable baits!

“Sweet, be very prudent. While steadily maintaining towards this wretch, whom the law calls my master, the demeanor that may best assure him of my steadfast resolve, I take care not to arouse his anger; for I know what you want is opportunity. He may any time be called off suddenly to New Orleans. Be wary. Tell me what you propose. A string shall be let down from my window to-morrow night at ten by stealth, for I am watched. God keep thee, my husband, my beloved! How I shudder at thought of all thy dangers! Be sure, O William, tender and true, my heart will hold eternally one only image. Adieu!

Estelle.”

The next night I put her in possession of a rope and a boy’s dress, also of two files, with directions for filing apart the iron bars. I saw it would not be difficult to enable her to get out of the house. The dreadful question was, How shall we escape the search which will at once be made? For a week we exchanged letters. At last she wrote me that Ratcliff would the next day leave for New Orleans for his wife. I wrote to Estelle to be ready the ensuing night, and on a signal from me to let herself down by the rope.

These plans were successfully carried out. Disguised as a laboring boy, Estelle let herself down to the ground. Once more we clasped each other heart to heart. I had selected a moonless night for the escape. In order to baffle the scent of the bloodhounds that would be put on our track, I took to the river. In a canoe I paddled down stream some fifteen miles till daylight. There, at a little bend called La Coude, we stopped. It now occurred to me that our safest plan would be to take the next boat up the river, and return on our course instead of keeping on to the Mississippi. Our pursuers would probably look for us in any direction but that.

The Rigolette was the first boat that stopped. We went on board, and the first person we encountered was Ratcliff! He was returning, having learnt at the outset of his journey that his wife had left New Orleans the day before. Estelle was thrown off her guard by the suddenness of the meeting, and uttered a short, sharp cry of dismay which betrayed her. Poor child! She was little skilled in feigning. Ratcliff walked up to her and removed her hat.

I had seen men in a rage, but never had I witnessed such an infuriated expression as that which Ratcliff’s features now exhibited. It was wolfish, beastly, in its ferocity. His smooth pink face grew livid. Seizing Estelle roughly by the arm, he—whatever he was about to do, the operation was cut short by a blow from my fist between his eyes which felled him senseless on the deck.

The spectacle of a rich planter knocked down by an Irishman was not a common one on board the Rigolette. We were taken in custody, Estelle and I, and confined together in a state-room.

Ratcliff was badly stunned, but cold water and brandy at length restored him. At Lorain the boat stopped till Van Buskirk and half a dozen low whites, his creatures and hangers-on, could be summoned to take me in charge. Ratcliff now recognized me as his acquaintance of the theatre, and a new paroxysm of fury convulsed his features. I was searched, deprived of my money, then handcuffed; then shackled by the legs, so that I could only move by taking short steps. Estelle’s arms were pinioned behind her, and in that state she was forced into an open vehicle and conveyed to the house.

I was placed in an outbuilding near the stable, a sort of dungeon for refractory slaves. It was lighted from the roof, was unfloored, and contained neither chair nor log on which to sit. For two days and nights neither food nor drink was brought to me. With great difficulty, on account of my chain, I managed to get at a small piece of biscuit in my coat-pocket. This I ate, and, as the rain dripped through the roof, I was enabled to quench my thirst.

On the third day two men led me out to an adjoining building, and down-stairs into a cellar. As we entered, the first object I beheld sent such a shock of horror to my heart that I wonder how I survived it. Tied to a post, and stripped naked to her hips, her head drooping, her breast heaving, her back scored by the lash and bleeding, stood Estelle. Near by, leaning on a cotton-bale, was Ratcliff smoking a cigar. Seated on a block, his back resting against the wall, with one leg over the other, was a white man, holding a cowskin, and apparently resting from his arduous labors as woman-whipper. Forgetting my shackles, and uttering some inarticulate cry of anguish, I strove to rush upon Ratcliff, but fell to the ground, exciting his derision and that of his creatures, the miserable “mean” whites, the essence of whose manhood familiarity with slavery had unmoulded till they had become bestial in their feelings.

Estelle, roused by my voice, turned on me eyes lighted up by an affection which no bodily agony could for one moment enfeeble, and said, gaspingly: “My own husband! You see I keep my oath!”

“Husband indeed! We’ll see about that,” sneered Ratcliff. “Fool! do you imagine that a marriage contracted by a slave without the consent of the master has any validity, moral or legal?”

I turned to him, and uttered—I know not what. The frenzy which seized me lifted me out of my normal state of thought, and by no effort of reminiscence have I ever since been able to recall what I said.

I only remember that Ratcliff, with mock applause, clapped his hands and cried, “Capital!” Then, lighting a fresh cigar, he remarked: “There is yet one little ceremony more to be gone through with. Bring in the bridegroom.”

What new atrocity was this?

A moment afterwards a young, lusty, stout, and not ill-looking negro, fantastically dressed, was led in with mock ceremony, by one of the mean whites, a whiskey-wasted creature named Lovell. I looked eagerly in the face of the negro, who bowed and smirked in a manner to excite roars of laughter on the part of Ratcliff and his minions.

“Well, boy, are you ready to take her for better or for worse?” asked the haughty planter.

The negro bowed obsequiously, and, jerking off his hat, scratched his wool, and, with a laugh, replied: “’Scuze me, massa, but dis nigger can’t see his wife dat is to be ’xposed in dis onhan’some mahnner to de eyes of de profane. If Massa Ratcliff hab no ’jection, I’ll jes’ put de shawl on de bride’s back. Yah, yah, yah!”

“O, make yourself as gallant as you please now,” said the planter, laughing. “Let’s see you begin to play the bridegroom.”

Gracious heavens! Was I right in my surmises? Under all his harlequin grimaces and foolery, this negro, to my quickened penetration, seemed to be crowding back, smothering, disguising, some intense emotion. His laugh was so extravagantly African, that it struck me as imitative in its exaggeration. I had heard a laugh much like it from the late Jim Crow Rice on the stage. Was the negro playing a part?

He approached Estelle, cut the thongs that bound her to the post, threw her shawl over her shoulders, and then, falling on one knee, put both hands on his heart, and rolled up his eyes much after the manner of Bombastes Furioso making love to Distaffina. The Ratcliffites were in ecstasies at the burlesque. Then, rising to his feet, the negro affectedly drew nearer to Estelle, and, putting up his hand, whispered, first in one of her ears, then in the other. I could see a change, sudden, but instantly checked, in her whole manner. Her lips moved. She must have murmured something in reply.

“Look here, Peek, you rascal,” cried Ratcliff, “we must have the benefit of your soft words. What have you been saying to her?”

“I’ze been tellin’ her,” said the negro, with tragic gesticulation, pointing to himself and then at me, “to look fust on dis yere pikter, den on dat. Wheugh!”

Still affecting the buffoon, he came up to me, presenting his person so that his face was visible only to myself. There was a divine pity in his eyes, and in the whole expression of his face the guaranty of a high and holy resolve. “She will trust me,” he whispered. “Do you the same.”

To the spectators he appeared to be mocking me with grimace. To me he seemed an angel of deliverance.

“Now, Peek, to business!” said Ratcliff. “You swear, do you, to make this woman your wife in fact as well as in name; do you understand me, Peek?”

“Yes, massa, I understan’.”

“You swear to guard her well, and never to let that white scoundrel yonder come near or touch her?”

“Yes, massa, I swar ter all dat, an’ ebber so much more. He’ll kotch what he can’t carry if he goes fur to come nare my wife.”