At Princess Anne Vesta had moved her husband to Teackle Hall, and he occupied her father's room and seemed to be growing better, though the doctor said that he had best be sent to the hills somewhere.
The free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus sent to Vesta, had arrived very opportunely, and took Aunt Hominy's place in the kitchen, where all the children's echoes were gone, the poor woman's own bereavement thrilling the ears of Virgie, Roxy, and Vesta herself; but, alas! her tale was not legal testimony, because she was a little black.
Jack Wonnell had found unexpected favor in Meshach Milburn's eyes, and was appointed to sleep in the store and watch it; and there Roxy came down in the twilights, and, with pity more than affection, heard him weave the illusion of his love for her, willing to be amused by it, because it was so sincere with him; for Jack was all lover, and meek and artful, bold and domestic, soft and outlawed, as the houseless Thomas cat that makes highways of the fences, and wooes the demurest kitten forth by the magic of his purring.
"Roxy," said Jack, "I'm a-goin' to git you free, gal, fur I 'spect Meshach Milburn will give me a pile o' money fur a-watchin' of the sto'. Then we'll go to Canaday, whar, I hearn tell, color ain't no pizen, an' we'll love like the white doves an' the brown, that both makes the same coo, so happy they is."
"Jack," said the soft-eyed, pitying maid, "you're a pore foolish fellow, but I like to hear you talk. I reckon there is no harm in you. Virgie is in love, too, with a white man, but you mustn't breathe it."
"Never," said Jack, making solemn motions with his eyes, and cuddling closer in dead earnest of sympathy. "Hope I may die! Can't tell, to save my life! Who-oop! Tell me, Roxy!"
"Pore sister Virgie, she was made to love, and, though it's hopeless, I think she loves Mr. Tilghman, our minister, because he loved Miss Vesty once, and Virgie worships Miss Vesty like her sister."
Vesta told the story of Mary, the free woman, to her husband, who listened closely and said:
"I know of but one thing, my darling, that will make such ignorance and cruelty fade out in the forests of this peninsula: an iron road. A new thing, called the railroad-engine, has just been made by an Englishman, one George Stephenson, and a specimen of it has been sent to New York, where I have had it examined. The errand your father went to do for me, he has done well. I shall send him to Annapolis next, to get a charter for a railroad up this peninsula that will pass inside the line of Maryland, and penetrate every kidnapping settlement hidden there, and light, intercourse, and law shall exterminate such barracoons as Johnson's."
Vesta was glad to hear her father praised by her husband, and hopes rekindled of some happier family reunion, when she should feel the heartache die within her that now raged intermittently during her vestal honeymoon. A letter came on the fourth day which dashed these hopes to the ground, and it was as follows:
"DORCHESTER COUNTY, MD., October--, 1829.
"Darling Niece,--Idol of my heart, let me begin by entreating you to take a conservative course when I break the sad intelligence to you of the death of my dear sister, Lucy, at Cambridge, yesterday, of the heart disease. She was the star of the house of McLane. She is gone. 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, and I shall take a conservative though consistent course on the parties who have inflicted this injury upon you, my dear niece, and upon your calm and collected, if stricken, uncle.
"'The Lord moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform,' and his humble instruments require only to be inflexible and conservative to do all things well. Be assured that righteousness shall be done upon the adversaries of our family, and that right speedily. My own grief is composed in the satisfaction I shall take, and the assurance that your sainted mother is where the wicked cease from troubling.
"The financial arrangements of my dear sister were of the most conservative and high-toned character, as was to have been expected of her.
"You may be desirous, my outraged, but, I hope, still spirited, idol, to hear the particulars of Lucy's death. She did not reach Cambridge till near midnight, having made the long journey from Princess Anne without fitting companions, and, in the excited state of her feelings, after she left Vienna in the evening, a depression of the spirits, accompanied by a fluttering of the heart, came on, and rapidly increased, and, by the time she arrived at our relatives', she was nearly dead with nervous apprehension and weakness. On seeing me, she revived sufficiently to make her will in the most sisterly and conservative manner.
"A physician was procured, but he pronounced her system so debilitated and detoned as hardly probable to outride the shock, the nervous centres being depressed and atrophy setting in.
"She talked incessantly about the Entailed Hat, and said it was a permanent shadow and weight upon your heart, and made me promise to mash it, if it could conservatively be done.
"I read to my dear sister from the Book of Books, and tried to compose her feelings, but she broke out ever and anon, 'Oh, Brother Allan! to think I have raised children to be bought and sold, and married to foresters and trash.' She was deeply sensitive as to what would be said about it in Baltimore.
"Just before she died, she said, 'Do not bury me at Princess Anne, where that fiend can come near me with his frightful Hat! Take me to Baltimore, where there are no bog-ores, nor old family chattels, to disturb the respectability of death. Apologize for my daughter, and do her justice.'
"And so this grand woman died, in the confidence of a blessed immortality, leaving us to vindicate her motives and continue her conservative course, and to meet at her funeral next Friday, at our church in Baltimore, where Rev. John Breckenridge will preach the funeral sermon over this murdered saint.
"With conservative, yet proud, grief,
"Affectionately, your uncle,
"ALLAN McLANE."
"Oh, sir!" Vesta exclaimed, turning blindly towards her husband; "mother is dead. Where can I turn?"
"Where but to me, poor soul!" Milburn replied, knowing nothing of Mrs. Custis's late feelings against him. "Your father shall be notified, and I am able to attend the funeral with you."
"It is in Baltimore," Vesta sobbed.
"Well, honey, there I am ordered by the doctor to go, and get above the line of malaria, in the hills. I can make the effort now."
Her grief and loneliness deprived her of the will to refuse him. Roxy was selected to be her mistress's maid upon the journey, and William Tilghman and Rhoda Holland were to take them in the family carriage down to Whitehaven landing for the evening steamer.
Jack Wonnell, in officious zeal to be useful, gathered flowers, and hung around Teackle Hall to run errands; and, in order not to exasperate Vesta's husband, appeared bareheaded as the party set off, Milburn's hat-box being one of the articles of travel, and Milburn vouchsafing these words to Jack:
"There is a dollar for you, Mr. Wonnell. I rely upon you to watch my old store and conduct yourself like a man."
"I'll do it," answered Jack, grinning and blushing; "hope I may die! Good-bye, Miss Vesty. Purty Roxy, don't you forgit me 'way off thair in Balt'mer. I'll teach Tom to sing your name befo' you ever see me agin."
He waved his arms, with real tears dimming his vision, and Roxy affected to shed some tears also, as she waved good-bye to Virgie, whose eyes were turned with wistful pain upon the beautiful face of her mistress receding down the vista. Vesta threw her a kiss and reclined her head upon her husband's shoulder.
That evening, an hour before the carriage was to return, Virgie and the free woman, Mary, walked together down to Milburn's store, to see if Jack Wonnell was on the watch. As they trode in the soft grass and sand under the old storehouse they saw the bell-crowned hat--a new one, brought from the ancient stock that very day--shining glossily on Wonnell's high, eccentric head, as he sat in the hollow window of the old storehouse and talked to the mocking-bird, which he was feeding with a clam-shell full of boiled potato and egg, and some blue haws.
"Tom, say 'Roxy,' an' I'll give ye some, Tommy! Now, boy! 'Roxy, Roxy, purty Roxy! purty Roxy! Poor ole Jack! poor ole Jack!'"
The bird flew around Wonnell's head, biting at the hat which stood in such elegant irrelevance to the remainder of his dress, and cried, "Meshach, he! he! he! Vesty, she! Vesty, Meshach! Vesty, Meshach!" but said nothing the village vagrant would teach it. He showed the patience idleness can well afford, and, feeding it a little, or withholding the food awhile, continued to plead and teach:
"'Roxy, Roxy, purty Roxy! Poor, pore Jack! pore Jack!' Now, Tom, say 'Roxy, Roxy, pore Jack!'"
The bird flew and struck, and sang a little, very niggardly, and so, as the lights in the west sank and faded, the shiftless lover continued in vain to seek to give the bird one note more than the magician, his master, had taught.
The stars modestly appeared in the soft heavens, and Princess Anne gathered its roofs together like a camp of camels in the desert, and, with an occasional bleat or bark or human sound, seemed dozing out the soft fall night, absorbed, perhaps, in the spreading news of Mrs. Custis's death and Vesta's wedding-journey, that had to be taken at last.
"Miss Virgie," said the woman Mary--ten years her senior, but comely still--"have you ever loved like me? Oh, I had a kind husband, and, helpless as I was, I tried to love once more. Maybe it was a sin."
"I love my mistress as if she was myself," Virgie said; "I feel as if, in heaven, before we came here, I was with her, Mary! I love her father, too, as if he was not my master, but my friend. Oh, how I love them all! But what can I do to show my love--poor naked slave that I am? They say they will soon set me free. Mary, how do people feel when they are free?"
"They don't appreciate it," sighed Mary. "They go and put themselves in captivity again, like selfish things: they falls in love."
"But to love and be free!" Virgie said, her bosom glowing in the thought till her rich eyes seemed to shed warmth and starlight on her companion's face; "to give your own free love to some one and feel him grateful for it: what a gift and what a joy is that! He might be thankful for it, and, seeing how pure it was, he might respect me."
"Who is it, Virgie?" Mary said.
"Whoever would love me like a white girl!" the ardent slave softly exclaimed. "It must be some one who does not despise me. I hear Miss Vesta's beau, Master William, read the beautiful service, with his sweet, submissive face, and I think to myself, 'How freely he might have my heart to comfort his if he would take it like a gentleman!' I would be his slave to make him happy, if he could love me purely, like my mother! Oh, my mother, whose name I do not know! where is the tie that fastens me to heaven? Did my father love me?"
"Pore Jack! pore Jack! Sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy,' Tom!" coaxed Wonnell above to the sleepy bird.
"Whoever was your father, Virgie, your mother's love for you was pure. God makes the wickedest love their children, because he is the Father to all the fatherless."
"Oh! could my own father have brought me into the world and hated me?" Virgie said. "They say I am almost beautiful. Will he who gave me life never call me his, and say, 'My daughter, come to my respect, rest on my heart, and take my name'?"
"Poor Virgie!" sighed Mary; "remember we are black! We hardly ever have fathers: they is for white people."
"Dog my hide!" mumbled Wonnell, above, "ef a bird ain't a perwerse critter. Purty Roxy won't think I'm smart a bit ef I can't make Tom say 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack!'"
"I am almost white," Virgie continued; "I want to be all white. Why can't I be so? The Lord knows my heart is white, and full of holy, unselfish love."
"Pore chile!" Mary said; "we shall all be washed and made white in the Lamb's blood, Virgie. That's where your soul pints you to, dear young lady. I know it ain't pride and rebellion in you: it's like I'm looking at my baby, white as snow to me and God now."
"Hush!" said Virgie, trembling, "what voice is that?"
There was an old willow-tree in a recessed spot at the end of the store, and by it were two sheds or small buildings, now disused, into one of which, with a door low to the ground, Mary drew Virgie, and they listened to a low voice saying,
"Dave, air your pops well slugged?"
"Yes, Mars Joe."
"Allan McLane pays fur the job?"
"Yes, Mars Joe."
"You can't mistake him, Dave. No shap is worn like that nowadays. Look only fur his headpiece, and aim well!"
"Yes, Mars Joe."
"Fur me," continued the other voice, "I'll go right to the tavern an' prove an alibi. My lay is to take the house gal that old Gripefist's young wife thinks so much of. I'll snake her out to-night. She's the property of Allan McLane, left him in his sister's will. They found on her body the paper giving the gal to the dead woman only two days before. She's Allan's to-morrow, but to-night she's mine!"
A sensual, sucking, chuckling sound, like a kiss made upon the back of his own hand, followed this significant threat; and Mary, placing her hand over the sinking slave girl's mouth, held her motionless.
"There," whispered the white man, softly, and was gone.
Mary breathed only the words to Virgie, "Kidnappers--come!" and they glided from the old tenement unobserved, and entered the copse along the stream.
"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! His leetle Roxy's gone away. Pore Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" the mourner at the window above chattered sleepily to the nodding bird.
The negro at the corner of the old warehouse, half covered by the willow's shade, peered up with blood-shotten eyes to distinguish the covering on the bird-tamer's head.
He saw Jack Wonnell sitting backward on the window-frame, swaying in and out, as he lazily tempted the mocking-bird to sing, and once the bell-crown hat, so singular to view, came in full relief against the gray sky.
"It's ole Meshach," said the negro, silently, with desperate eyes. "I hoped it wasn't. Dar is de hat, sho!"
He cocked his huge horse-pistol, and took aim directly from below.
"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! I reckon Roxy won't have pore Jack, caze Tommy won't sing. Sing, Tommy, little Roxy's pet: 'Pore Jack! Pore--'"
The great horse-pistol boomed on the night, and in the smoke the negro rushed into the bush and sought the fields.
Down from his seat in the window-sill the witless villager came backward, all bestrewn, measuring his body in the sand, where he lay, silent as the other shadows, with his arms extended in the frenzy of death, and his mouth wide open and flowing blood.
Jack Wonnell had paid the penalty of being out of fashion.
The mocking-bird, aroused by the loud report, leaped into the empty window-sill to seek his tutor, and set up the lesson he had learned too late:
"Poor Jack! Poor Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" came screaming on the night, and all was still.
William Tilghman was driving back from Whitehaven in the melancholy thoughts inspired by the departure of his cousin, whom he had at last seen go into the great wilderness of the world the passive companion of her husband, like the wife of Cain, driven forth with him, when the carriage was arrested at the ancient Presbyterian church--which overlooked Princess Anne from the opposite bank of the little river--by a woman almost throwing herself under the wheels.
"Why, Lord sakes! it's our Virgie!" cried Rhoda Holland.
The girl, with all the energy of dread, sprang into the carriage by William Tilghman's side and threw her arms around him:
"Save me! Save me!"
"What ails you, Virgie?" cried the young man, assuringly. "You are in no danger, child!"
"I am sold," the girl gasped, with terror on her tongue and in her wild eyeballs. "Miss Vesty's sold me to her Uncle Allan. He's sent the kidnappers after me. They're yonder, in Princess Anne. Oh, drive me to the North, to the swamps, anywhere but there!"
"I know your mistress made you over to her mother, Virgie, for a precaution, fearing you might not be safe in her own hands. She told me so, and asked if the death of her mother could possibly affect you."
"Oh, it has!" the girl whispered. "Mary knows the kidnapper that's come for me. He is the same that stole Hominy and the children. He kept her chained on an island. He says he'll have me to-night, to do as he pleases. Master McLane lets him have me!"
The girl, in her terror, as the carriage had descended the hill already and crossed the Manokin, seized the reins in Tilghman's hands and drew them with such frenzy that the horses, as they came to Meshach Milburn's store, were pulled into the open area before it, where something in their surprise or lying on the ground gave them immediate fright, and they dashed at a gallop into Front Street, the wheels passing over an object by the old storehouse that nearly upset the carriage.
The street they took for their run crossed a small arm of the Manokin, and led up to a gentleman's gate; but before this brook was crossed Tilghman, an experienced horseman and driver, had reined the flying animals into a nearly unoccupied street, called Back Alley, parallel with the main street of Princess Anne, but hidden from it by houses and gardens, and almost in a moment of time the whole town had been cleared, with hardly a person in it aware of such a vehicle going past.
It was a real runaway, but Tilghman, in a cool, gentle voice, like a brook's music, told the girls to sit perfectly still, as they had a clear, level road; and, seeing that he could not stop the animals by any mere exercise of strength, without danger to his harness, he waited for their power to wear out, or their fears to subside.
Rhoda Holland was ashamed to scream, if her pride was not too well aroused already in the presence of the muscular young minister, sitting there like an artillery teamster driving into battle, and his nostrils and jaws delineated in the gray air, expressed almost the joy he had long put by of following the hounds in the autumn fox-hunts, where Judge Custis said he had been the perfect pattern of a rider.
As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving behind the bloody hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was herself alone, dashing at that frightful pace to destruction, until the young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions and kissed the slave girl pityingly.
Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands several miles east of Princess Anne.
"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is nobody knows whar, now. This yer Allan McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."
"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to Virgie.
"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick. He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will never go there again."
"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably is true. Vesta has no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade, with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs. Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to him."
"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"
"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought you safest, you were most in peril."
They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the Furnace village.
"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."
"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground Road to the free states."
"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"
"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free, and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving her a wild beast's chance to run."
"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"
"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor." The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."
As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in the night.
In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out, its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond, lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's foreclosure.
A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the ponds and night-damps?
The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.
Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.
"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart is bursting: what can I say?"
"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night," the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."
"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my freedom, or die on the road to it."
"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."
He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and hastened to his horses and the hotel.
As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne, the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.
"Thar!" she said, "I think you just looked magnificens last night, sittin' behine them critters, like Death on the plale horse, an' lovin' Aunt Vesty, though she's gone away an' quit you, enough to fight for her pore, bright-skinned gal. I wish somebody would love me like that!"
"So you could quit him, too, Rhoda?"
"Well, William, I likes beaus that's couragelis! You're splendid a-preachin', but I like you better drivin' and showin' your excitemins."
"You are a beautiful girl," the clergyman said; "suppose you try to like me better."
The great question, being thus opened, was not disposed of when they reached Princess Anne, and quietly stabled the horses.
