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A short story by Edward Eggleston |
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The Redemptioner |
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Title: The Redemptioner Author: Edward Eggleston [More Titles by Eggleston] A STORY IN THREE SCENES. PROLOGUE. The stories we write are most of them love stories; but in the lives of men there are also many stories that are not love stories: some, truly, that are hate stories. The main incident of the one I am about to tell I found floating down from the eighteenth century on the stream of Maryland tradition. It serves to present some of our forefathers, not as they seem in patriotic orations and reverent family traditions, but as they appear to a student of the writings and prints of their own age. SCENE I. The time was a warm autumn day in the year 1751. The place was a plantation on the Maryland shore of the Potomac. A planter of about thirty years of age, clad in buckskin shortclothes, sat smoking his pipe, after his noonday meal, in the wide entry that ran through his double log house from the south side to the north, the house being of the sort called alliteratively "two pens and a passage." The planter's wife sat over against him, on the other side of the passage, carding home-grown cotton wool with hand cards. He had placed his shuck-bottom chair so as to see down the long reach to the eastward, where the widening Potomac spread itself between low-lying banks, with never a brown hill to break the low horizon line. Every now and again he took his cob pipe from his mouth, and scanned the distant water wistfully. "I know what you're looking for, Mr. Browne," said his wife, as she reversed her hand cards and rubbed the carded cotton between the smooth backs of the two implements to make it into a roll for spinning. "You're looking to see the Nancy Jane come sailing into the river one of these days." "That's just what I'm looking after," he answered. "Why should you care?" she said. "You don't expect her to fetch you a new bonnet and a hoop skirt seven feet wide." She laughed merrily at her own speech, which, after all, was but a trifling exaggeration of the width of a hoop skirt in that time. Sanford Browne did not laugh, but took his pipe from his mouth, and stood up a moment, straining his sight once more against the distant horizon, where the green-blue water of the wide estuary melted into the blue-green of the sky with hardly a line of demarcation. Then he sat down and took a dry tobacco leaf lying on a stool beside him and crushed it to powder by first chafing it between his open hands and then grinding it in the palm of his left hand, rubbing it with the thumb of his right in a mortar-and-pestle fashion. "I've a good deal more reason to look for the Nancy Jane than you have, Judy. I wrote my factor, you know, to find some trace of my father and mother, or of my sister Susan, if it took the half of my tobacco crop. I hope he'll find them this time." Saying this, he filled his cob pipe with the powdered tobacco, and then rose and walked into the large western room of the house, which served for kitchen and dining-room. It was also the weaving-room, and the great heavy-beamed loom stood in the corner. At the farther end was the vast, smoke-blackened stone fireplace, with two large rude andirons and a swinging crane. A skillet and a gridiron stood against the jamb on one side, a hoe for baking hoe cakes and a little wrought-iron trivet were in order on the other. The breakfast fire had burned out; only the great backlog, hoary with gray ashes, lay slumbering at the back of the fireplace. The planter poked the drift of ashes between the andirons with a green oak stick until he saw a live coal shining red in the gray about it. This he rolled out upon the hearth, and then took it between thumb and finger and deposited it within the bowl of his pipe by a deft motion, which gave it no time to burn him. Having got his pipe a-going, he strolled back into the wide passage and scanned the horizon once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless task by holding up her apron of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls, pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying: "Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever see better carding than that?" The young planter took a roll of the cotton in his hands, holding it gingerly, and essaying absentmindedly to yield to his wife's mood. Just at that moment Sanford Browne the younger, a boy about eight years of age, came round the corner of the house and stood in front of his father, with his feet wide apart, feeling among the miscellanies in the bottom of his pocket for a periwinkle shell. "How would you like to have him spirited away by a crimp, Judy?" demanded the husband, replacing the cotton and pointing to the lad. "I should just die, dear," said Judy Browne in a low voice. "That's what happened to my mother, I suppose," said Browne. "I hope she died; it would be too bad to think that she had to live all these twenty-two years imagining all sorts of things about her lost little boy. I remember her, Judy, the day I saw her last. I went out of a side street into Fleet Street, and then I grew curious and went on out through Temple Bar into the road they call the Strand. I did not know how far I had gone from the city until I heard the great bell of St. Martin's in the Fields chiming at five o'clock. I turned toward the city again, but stopped along the way to look at the noblemen's houses. Somehow, at last I got into Lincoln's Inn Fields and could not tell which way to go. Just then a sea captain came up to me, and, pretending to know me, told me he would fetch me to my father. I went with him, and he got me into a boat and so down to his ship below the bridge. The ship was already taking aboard a lot of kids and freewillers out of the cook houses, where some of them had been shut up for weeks. I cried and begged for my father, but the captain only kicked and cuffed me. It was a long and wretched voyage, as I have told you often. I was brought here and sold to work with negroes and convicts. I don't so much mind the beatings I got, or the hard living, but to think of all my mother has suffered, and that I shall never see her or my father again! If I ever lay eyes on that Captain Lewis, he will go to the devil before he has time to say any prayers." "I'd like to shoot him," said the boy, in sympathy with his father's mood. "I'll kill him when I get big enough, pappy." And he went off to seek the bow and arrow given him by an Indian who lingered in the region once occupied by his tribe. "Never mind," said the wife, stroking her husband's arm, "you are getting rich now, and your hard times are over." "Yes, but everybody will always remember that I was a bought redemptioner, and your folks will hardly ever forgive you for marrying me." "Oh, yes, they will some day. If you keep on as lucky as you are, I shall live in a bigger house than any of them, and drive to church behind six horses. That'll make a great difference. If the Nancy Jane fetches me a London bonnet and a wide, wide petticoat such as the Princess Augusta wears, so that I can brush against the pews on both sides with my silk frock when I go down the aisle, my folks will already begin to think that Sanford Browne is somebody," and she made little motions of vanity as she fancied her entrance into Duck Creek parish church on the Sunday after the arrival of the tobacco ship, arrayed in imitation of the Princess of Wales, the news of whose recent widowhood had not yet reached Judy Browne. "There comes the Nancy Jane now," called the boy from the dooryard, pointing to a sloop on the other side of the wide estuary, bowling in with topsail and jib furled, and her rusty mainsail bellying under pressure of a wind dead aft. "That's not the Nancy Jane," said the father; "only a sloop. But I don't know whose. Oh, yes; it must be that Yankee peddler back again. There's his codfish ensign at his masthead. He's making for the other side now, but he'll come over here to sell his rum and kickshaws before he goes out." "Hello, Mr. Browne!" It was a voice coming from the river in front of the house. The owner of the voice was concealed by some bushes at the margin of the water. "Hello!" answered Browne to the invisible caller. "Is that you, Mr. Wickford?" "I've got some letters for you, Mr. Browne," came back from the water. "The Nancy Jane ran in on the east wind this morning before daylight, and anchored in the little oyster bay below Manley's. She brings news that the Prince of Wales died last Spring. I happened to come past there this morning, and I brought some things Captain Jackson had for you. I reckon there's something pretty here for Mrs. Browne, too. Send one of your boys down." "I'll come myself," said Browne, going down the bank, followed eagerly by the little Sanford, who had also his interest in the arrival of the parcels from London. There came after them presently a lithe young negro boy of fifteen, not yet two years out of Africa. He was clad in nothing but his native blackness, which was deemed sufficient for a half-grown negro in that day. Mrs. Browne had sent black Jocko after the others with orders to bring up her things "without waiting for the gentlemen to get done talking." But the gentlemen did not talk very long. The neighbor was desirous of getting on to have the first telling of the news about the death of Prince Frederick, and Mr. Browne was impatient to open the packet from his factor. "Good-by, Mr. Wickford. Come down and see us some time, and bring all your family," he called as the neighbor's canoe shot away in answer to the lusty paddle strokes of his men. "I reckon we'll come, sir," answered the receding neighbor. "My wife'll want to see what Mrs. Browne got from London. Tell Mrs. Browne we're afraid she'll be too fine to know her neighbors when she puts on her new bonnet." The last words of this neighborly chaff were shouted over a wide sheet of water, and Sanford Browne, halfway up the bank, made no reply, but went back to his chair in the passage and opened his packet. Kid that he had been, Browne had contrived to learn to read and write from a convict bought for a schoolmaster by the planter to whom Browne had been sold. This lettered rogue took pity on the kidnaped child, and gave him lessons on nights and Sunday, because he was well born and not willing to sink to the condition of the servants about him. Browne found his factor's letter occupied at the outset with an account of the tobacco market and congratulations on the high price obtained for the last year's crop. Then the factor proceeded to give a bill of sales, and then a list of things purchased for Browne and his family, with the price set down for the hoop skirt and the new bonnet and the silk frock, as well as for a cocked hat and dress periwig necessary to Sanford Browne's increasing dignity, and some things for the little Sanford. Browne studied each successive page of the letter in hope of finding a word on the subject in which he was most deeply interested, stopping reluctantly now and then to look up when his wife would break in with: "Mr. Browne! Mr. Browne! won't you just look this way a minute? Isn't this fine?" "Yes, Judy; it surely is," he would say absently, keeping his thumb on the place in the factor's letter, and resuming his reading as soon as possible, without having any definite idea of what Mrs. Judith had been showing him. On the very last page he found these words: "I have made most diligent searche for your family as you There followed a memorandum of pounds, shillings, and pence paid to the "clarke" of the parish of St. Clement Danes, of money paid for advertisements in the gazettes, and of expenses incurred in further searches made by a solicitor. That was all--the end of hope to Sanford Browne. He went into the sitting-room and put the factor's letter into a little clothespress that stood beside the chimney, and then strode out into the air, giving no heed to Judith, who had gone up the stairs at the side of the passage, and come down again wearing a hideous pannier petticoat under her new frock. She guessed her husband's disappointment, and, though she longed for a word of admiration, or at least of wondering attention, for her square-rigged petticoat, she thought best to be content with the excited prattle of her maid, a young bond-servant bought off the Nancy Jane the year before. "Here, Jocko," said Browne, standing in front of his house and calling to the Adamite negro lad, "you go and call Bob, and get the sloop ready. I'm going down to the ship." "Get sloop, massa?" said the negro, speaking English with difficulty. "Massa say sloop?" Sanford Browne looked at the black figure inquiringly. It was not often that poor, cringing Jocko ventured to question him. "Yes, sloop," he said with an emphasis born of his irritating disappointment. "Much great big wind blow--blow right up river. Tack, tack, all day," muttered the black boy timidly. "You're right," said the planter, who had not observed that the strong wind would be dead ahead all the way to the anchorage. "Tell Bob to put the canoe in the water." And then to himself: "The negro is no fool." "Bob, Bob, massa him want can-noo go see great big ship mighty quick." "Come, Sanford; you may go too," said the planter to his son. "We'll carry the fowling piece: there'll be ducks on the water." SCENE II. The time is the same day, and the place the deck of the Nancy Jane, at anchor. The captain is giving orders to the cook: "I want a good bowl of bumbo set here on deck against the planters come aboard." Then turning to the mate: "Have the decks squeegeed clean, an' everything shipshape. Put the rogues in as good garb as you can. You'll find a few wigs in a box in my cabin. But these on the likeliest, and make 'em say they're mechanics, or merchants' clerks, and housemaids. Tell 'em if they don't put out a good foot and get off our hands soon we'll tie 'em up and make 'em understand that it's better to lie to a planter than to stick on shipboard too long. Make the women clean themselves up and look tidy like ancient housemaids, and don't allow any nonsense. Tell 'em if they swear or quarrel while the planters are aboard they'll get a cat-o'-nine-tails well laid on. We've got to make 'em more afraid of the ship than they are of the plantations." The convicts were in the course of an hour or two ranged up against the bulwarks forward, and they were with much effort sufficiently browbeaten to bring them into some kind of order. "They're a sorry lot of Newgate birds," said the captain to the mate. "I'm afraid we'll have a time of it before we change 'em off for merchantable tobacco. Here, you Cappy," he said to one of the older convicts. "Look here! Don't you tell anybody to-day that you're a seaman. They'll swear you are a pirate, and that you'll be off with one of their country sloops, and go a-blackbearding it down the coast. You're to be a schoolmaster to-day." "I can't read much, and I can't hardly write a word," said the man, a burly fellow of about sixty, whose heavy jaws and low brows would look brutal in spite of the brand-new periwig put on him that very morning to make him salable. "That don't matter," said the captain. "You're schoolmaster enough for a tobacco country. You can navigate a ship by the sun and compass, and that's education enough. If you go and let it out that you're a sailor, I'll--well, you've been a captain or mate, and you know devilish well what I'll do with you. I'll serve you as you have served many a poor devil in your time." Then, catching sound of a quarrel between two of the women, the captain called the mate, and said: "Give both of the wenches a touch off with your rope's end. Don't black their eyes or hit 'em about the face, but let 'em just taste the knot once over the shoulders to keep 'em peaceable. Be in haste, or they'll scratch one another's eyes." The mate proceeded to salute the two women with a sharp blow apiece of the knotted rope, and thus changed their rising fury into sullenness. Planters came and went during the forenoon, and cross-questioned the convicts, threatening to make it hard for them if they did not tell the truth. The visitors drank the captain's bumbo, but the convicts were slow of sale. Some of the planters announced their intention not to buy any more convicts, meaning for the future to purchase only freewillers, or bond servants voluntarily selling themselves, and some had made up their minds not to buy any more Christian servants at all, but to stock their places with blacks. It was mid-afternoon when Sanford Browne arrived in his dugout, propelled against a head wind and heavy seas by Bob, the white redemptioner, and Jocko, the negro boy. The planter himself sat astern steering, with little Sanford crouched between his knees. Leaving the two servants in the canoe, the planter and his son went aboard the ship, while the convicts crowded against the guard rail to get a look at the naked figure of Jocko, his black skin being a novel sight to their English eyes. There was recognition between the captain of the Nancy Jane, who had sailed to the Potomac for many years, and Sanford Browne. While the two stood in conversation by the bowl of strong rum punch, little Sanford strolled about the deck, shyly scrutinizing the faces of the convicts and being scrutinized by them. The women tried to talk with him, but their rather battered countenances frightened the boy, and he slipped away. At last he planted himself before old Cappy, whose bronzed face under a new powdered wig produced a curious effect. "Where did you come from?" demanded the child, with awakened curiosity. The would-be schoolmaster started at this question, gazed a moment at the child, and said, "God!" between his teeth. "Lawr! 'e's one uv yer scholars, Cappy," said one of the women, in derision. "Ye'll be a-l'arnin' 'im lots uv words 'e ain't never 'eerd uv afore. Yer givin' the young un a prime lesson in swearin' to begin." But Cappy made no reply. He only looked more eagerly at the child, and wiped his brow with his sleeve, disarranging his periwig in doing so. Then, changing the form of his exclamation but not its meaning, he muttered, "The devil!" "W'atever's the matter?" said the woman. "You're fetching in God an' the devil both. Is the young un one uv yer long-lost brothers, Cappy?" "What's your name?" demanded Cappy of the boy, without heeding the woman's gabble. "Sanford Browne." The perspiration stood in beads on the man's forehead, and the veins were visibly distended. "Looks like as if he hadn't got any bigger in more'n twenty years," he soliloquized. Then he said to the boy in an eager whisper, for his voice was dry and husky, "What's yer pappy's name, lad?" "He's Sanford Browne, too. That's him a-talking to Captain Jackson at t'other end of the ship. He was stole when he was a little boy by a mean old captain, and brought over here and sold, just like you folks," and the lad made the remark general by looking around him. "He's got rich now, and he's got more'n a thousand acres of land," said the little Sanford, boastfully, thinking perhaps that his father's success might encourage the woe-begone set before him. "But I reckon that mean old captain'll ketch it if pappy ever sets eyes on to him," he added. "Lawr! now w'atever's the matter uv you, Cappy?" put in the woman again. "A body'd think you must 'a' been that very cap'n yer own self." The man turned fiercely upon the garrulous woman and seized her throat with his left hand, while he threatened her with a clenched fist and growled like a wild beast. "Another word of that, Poll, and I'll knock the life out of you." Poll gave a little shriek, which brought the mate on the scene with his threatening rope's end, and restored Cappy to a sort of self-control, though with a strange eagerness of terror his eyes followed the frightened lad as he retreated toward his father. The planter, after discussing with Captain Jackson the death of the Prince of Wales in the preceding March, was explaining to the captain that he did not mean to buy any more white servants. The blacks were better, and were good property, while the black children added to a planter's estate. White servants gave you trouble, and in four or seven years at most their time expired, and you had to break in new ones. But still, if he could pick up a fellow that would know how to sail his sloop in a pinch, he might buy. "There's one, now," said Captain Jackson; "that chap leaning on the capstan; he's been a captain, I believe." "How'd they come to convict a captain?" demanded the planter, laughing. "We planters have always thought that all captains were allowed to steal a little." "They mustn't steal from their owners," said Captain Jackson good-naturedly. "Passengers and shippers we do clip a little when we can, but that old fool must have tried to get something out of the owners of the ship. He's too old to run away now, or cut up any more deviltry. Go and talk with him." "What's his bob-wig for?" "Oh, that's some of my mate's nonsense. He thought planters wouldn't want to buy a seaman, so he rigged the old captain up like a schoolmaster, and told him to say that he had always taught arithmetic. He'll tell you he's a schoolmaster, according to the mate's commands; but he isn't. He's been a ship's captain, I believe, and he helped me take observations on the voyage, and he seemed to know the river when he got in last night." There ensued some talk as to how many hogsheads of tobacco the convict was worth, and then Browne went forward to inspect the man and question him. "What's your name?" said the planter. "James Palmer," said Cappy, with his head down. "Lawr!" muttered Polly under her breath. "What's your business?" "Schoolmaster." "Come, don't lie to me," said Browne. "You are a sailor, or a captain maybe." This set the old fellow to trembling visibly, and Polly again said "Lawr!" loud enough for him to hear it and give her one fierce glance that quieted her. "Who said I was a sailor, sir?" "Captain Jackson." "That's because you want a sailor," stammered the convict. "Mighty little I ever knew about a ship till I got aboard this thing. Captain would 'a' told you I was a carpenter or a preacher if he thought that was what you wanted." The man spoke gaspingly, and a dim sense of having known him began to make its way into the mind of the planter. He was going to ask him where he had taught school, but all at once a rush of memories crowded his mind, and a strange suspicion came to him. He stood silent and staring at the convict half a minute. Then he walked round him, examining him from this side and that. "Let me see your left hand, you villain!" he muttered, approaching the man. The convict had kept his left hand shoved down under his belt. He shook now as with an ague, and made no motion. "Out with it!" cried the planter. Slowly the old man drew out his hand, showing that one joint of the little finger was gone. "You liar!" said the planter, at the same time pulling the bob-wig from the convict's head, and flinging it on the deck. "Your name is not James Palmer, but Jim Lewis, Captain Jim Lewis of the Red Rose--'Black Jim,' as everybody called you behind your back!" Here Poll broke out again with "Lawr!" while Sanford Browne paused, fairly choked with emotion. Then he began again in a low voice: "You thought I wouldn't know you. I've been watching out for you these ten years, to send you to hell with my own hands! You robbed my poor mother of her boy." The wretch cowered beneath the planter's gaze, and essayed to deny his identity, but his voice died in his throat. Browne at length turned on his heel, and strode rapidly toward the captain. "I'll take him at the price you fixed," he called out as he advanced. The captain wondered what gold mine Browne had discovered in Cappy to make him so eager to accept the first price named. He for his part was equally eager to be rid of a convict whom he regarded as rather a dangerous man, so he said promptly, "He belongs to you," and shook hands according to the custom in "closing a bargain." A moment later Black Jim Lewis, having regained his wits, rushed up to the captain entreating hoarsely not to be sold to Browne. "Now, don't let him have me, Captain Jackson; for God's sake, don't, now! He's my enemy. He'll beat me and starve me to death. I'm one of your own kind; I'm a sea captain, and it's a shame for you, a sea captain too, to sell me to a man that hates me and only wants to make me miserable. I'm ruinated anyhow, and you ought to take some pity on me." This plea for a freemasonry among sea captains had influence with the captain of the Nancy Jane. But he said, "W'y, Jim Lewis, I've sold to you the best master in the province of Maryland. You don't know when you're well off. Mr. Browne feeds his people well, and he never beats 'em bad, like the rest." "I tell you, he'll flay me alive, that man will! You'd better shoot me dead and put me out of misery." While the wretch was making this appeal, Browne was silently engaged in emptying the priming of his flintlock fowling piece, picking open the tube, and then filling the pan with fresh powder from the horn at his side. When he had closed the pan, he struck the stock of the gun one or two blows to shake the powder well down into place, that the gun might not miss fire. Then turning to the captain, he said, "A bargain is a bargain." Then to the convict he said: "Black Jim Lewis, you belong to me. Get into that boat, or it'll be worse for you," and he slowly raised the snaphance with his thumb on the hammer. Lewis had aged visibly in ten minutes. With trembling steps he walked to the ship's side, and clambered over the bulwarks into the dugout. The boy followed, and then the master took his seat in the stern, with his flintlock fowling piece within reach. "My dead body'll float down here past the Nancy Jane," said Jim Lewis to the captain; "and I'll ha'nt your ship forever--see if I don't!" He half rose and waved his hand threateningly as he said this in a hoarse, sepulchral voice. "Mr. Browne," interposed the captain of the Nancy Jane, as the lifted canoe paddles were ready to dip into the water, "don't be too hard on the old captain. You see how old and shaken he is. You'll show moderation, now, won't you?" "I'll care for him," answered Browne unbendingly. "Away with the canoe! Good-by, captain. My tobacco will be ready for you." And Poll, the convict, as she leaned over the rail and watched the fast-receding canoe pitching up and down on the seas, said, "Lawr!" SCENE III. The time is the late afternoon of the same day, and the place is again Sanford Browne's plantation. Judith Browne, having exhausted her experiments on the frock, the bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the sloop heel over under a beam wind and shoot steadily forward, while the waves dashed fair against her weather side and splashed the water from time to time to the top of her free board. It was a pleasant sight to mark her approach by the gradual increase in her size and the growing distinctness with which the details of her rigging could be made out. At length, when her bow appeared to Judith Browne to be driving so straight on the bank that nothing could prevent the vessel's going ashore Captain Perkins called to his only man, standing at the helm, "Hard down!" and the sloop swung her nose into the waves, and gracefully rounded head into the wind just in time to lie close under the bank, rocking fore and aft like a duck. As soon as she had swung into the wind enough for her sail to flap, the captain called to the boy who was the third member of the crew to let go the halyards; and as the sail ran rattling down, the captain heaved the anchor at the bow with his own hands. Then a plank was run out, a line made fast forward, and Perkins climbed the bank and greeted Mrs. Browne. His manner combined strangely the heartiness of the seaman with the sinuous deference of the peddler. His speech was that which one hears only in the most up-country New England regions and among London small shopkeepers. The uttering of his vowel sounds taper end first greatly amused his customers in the Chesapeake regions, while their abrupt clipping of both vowels and liquids was equally curious to Perkins, who regarded all people outside of New England as natives to be treated with condescending kindness alike for Christian and for business reasons, and as people who were even liable to surprise him by the possession of some rudimentary virtues in spite of their unlucky outlandishness. "Glad to see yeh again, Mis' Braown," he said when he reached the top of the bank. "Where's Mr. Braown?" "He's gone down to the Nancy Jane. Won't you come in, Captain Perkins? Come in and sit down a while." "Wal, yes. And how's your little gal?" Seeing a dubious look on Mrs. Browne's face, he said: "Or is it a boy, now? I call at so many houses I git confused. Fine child, I remember." "The lad's gone off with his father," said Judith, giving Perkins a seat in the passage. After more preliminary talk the peddler got to his main point, that he had lots of nice notions and things this year cheaper'n they could be had in London. All the folks agreed that his things were "cheaper, considerin' quality, Mis' Braown, than you could git 'em in London." Judith knew by experience that his things were neither very good nor very cheap, but her only chance in life to know anything of the delights of shopping lay in the coming of peddling sloops. One might order a frock, a bonnet, or a petticoat from London, but one must wait nearly a year till the tobacco ship returned to get what had been sent for. It was better to be cheated a little in order to get the pleasure of making up her mind and then changing it, of fancying herself possessor now of this and now of that, and finally getting what she liked best after having had the usufruct of the whole stock. She was soon examining the goods that Perkins's boy had brought up to her--fancy things for herself and young Sanford, and coarse cloth for her servants. She concluded nothing about staple trading till her husband should return; for prices were to be fixed on the corn and bacon which must be paid in exchange. But there were articles that she craved, and of which she preferred not to speak to her husband, for a while at least, and these she paid for from her little hoard of pieces of eight, or Spanish dollars. The change she made in fractions of these coins--actual quarters of dollars cut like pieces of pie. These were tested in Perkins's little money scales. Less than a quarter of a dollar was usually disregarded in the South; and as for Perkins, he never seemed to have any fractional silver to give back in change, but always proposed some little article that he would put in at cost just to fill up to the value of a piece of eight. * * * * * Paddling with the wind, Sanford Browne's cedar canoe made good speed, and as the sun was setting and the wind falling it glided past the Yankee sloop into shoal water farther up, where its inmates disembarked, and beached their craft. Sanford Browne walked rapidly up the bank, followed by his son, the servants, and the old convict. He approached Perkins and greeted him, but in a manner not cordial and hardly courteous. He looked at Judith so severely that she fancied him offended with her. She reflected quickly that he could not have known anything of her surreptitious trading with the peddler. Uriah Perkins concluded that a storm was brewing between husband and wife, and found it necessary to return to the sloop to make her fast astern, against the turn of the tide and the veering of the wind. When Perkins had disappeared, Sanford Browne pointed to the convict and said slowly and with fierceness: "Judy, that's the man. That's Black Jim Lewis, that stole me away from home and sold me for a redemptioner. Jocko, go fetch the manacles." Judith stood speechless. It was a guiding maxim with her that women should not meddle with men's business, and it was an article of faith that whatever her husband did was right. She sympathized with his resentment against the man who had kidnaped him. But the sight of the terror-stricken face of the cowardly brute smote her woman's heart with pity as the manacles were put on the convict's wrists. "See that he doesn't get away," said Browne to Bob. "He can't pound his corn with them things," said Bob, pointing to the handcuffs. "Shall I get him some meal?" "Not to-night," said Browne. "He didn't give me a crust to eat the first night I was on ship. Turn about's fair play, Captain Lewis. Take him to the quarters." When the convict found himself manacled, his terror increased. He pulled away from Bob and approached Browne. "Let me speak a word, master," he began tremulously. "I'm all broke up and ruinated, anyhow. I know the devil must 'a' been in me the day I took you away. I've thought of it many a time, and I've said, 'Jim Lewis, something dreadful'll come to you for stealin' a good little boy that way.'" Here he paused. Then he resumed in a still more broken voice: "When I was put on to a transport to come to this country I remembered you, and I says, 'That's what's come of it.' Soon as I saw that little fellow, the very picture of you the day when I coaxed you away, I says to myself, 'O my God, I'm done fer now! I'm ruinated for a fact; I might as well be in hell as in Maryland.' But, master, if you'll only have just a little pity on an old man that's all broke up and ruinated, I'll--I'll--be a good servant to you. I promise you, afore Almighty God. Don't you go and be too hard on a poor ruinated old man. I'm old--seems to me I'm ten year older than I wuz afore I saw you this mornin'. I know you hate me. You've got strong reasons to hate me. I hate myself, and I keep sayin' to myself, says I, 'Jim Lewis, what an old devil you are!' But please, master, if you won't be too hard on me, I think I'll be better. I can't live long nohow. But----" "There, that'll do," said Browne. "Please, Mr. Browne," interposed Judy. "Lewis, do you remember when you woolded a sailor's head?" demanded the planter. "I don't know, master. I have done lots of things a little hard. Sailors are a hard lot." "If you'd had pity on that poor sailor when he begged for mercy, I'd have pity on you to-night But I cried over that sailor that you wouldn't have mercy on, and now I can't pity you a bit. You've made your own bed. Your turn has come." Saying this, Sanford Browne went into the house, while the old sea captain followed Bob in a half-palsied way round the south end of the house toward the servants' quarters, muttering, "Well, now, Jim Lewis, you're done fer." "Mr. Browne, what are you going to do with that old man?" asked Judy, with more energy than she usually showed in speaking to her husband. "I don't know, Judy. Something awful, I reckon." Browne could not make up his mind to any distinct act of cruelty beyond sending the convict supperless to bed. "I don't like you to be so hard on an old man. I know he's bad--as bad as can be, but that's no reason why you should be bad." "I wouldn't be bad, Judy. Just think how he sold me, like Joseph, away from my family!" "But Joseph wasn't really very unkind to his brothers, Mr. Browne; and you won't be too hard on the poor old wretch, now will you?" "Judy, I mean to make him suffer. When I think of my mother, and all she must have suffered, I haven't a drop of pity in me. He's got to suffer for his crimes now. That's what he was thrown into my hands for, I reckon, Judy." "Then you won't be the man you have been. Time and again you've bought some poor kid from a hard master like old Hoak, to save him from suffering. Now you'll get to be hard and hateful like old Hoak yourself." "Judy, remember my mother." "Do you think your mother, if she is alive, would like to think of your standing over that old wretch while he was whipped and whipped and washed with salt water, maybe? If your mother has lived, she has been kept alive just by thinking what a good boy you were; and she says to herself, 'My Sanford wouldn't hurt anything. If he was run off to the plantations, he has grown to be the best man in all the country.' Do you think she'd like to have you turn a kind of public whipper or hangman for her sake?" Browne looked at his wife in surprise. Her eyes flashed as she spoke, and the little womanly body, whose highest flight had seemed to end in a London frock and petticoat, had suddenly become something much more than he had fancied possible to her. She had taken the first place, and he felt himself overshadowed. He looked up at her with a sort of reverence, but he held stubbornly to a purpose that had been ossifying for twenty years. "That's all well enough for a woman, Judy. But you know that any other man would do just what I am going to do, under the same circumstances. I don't like to do what you don't want me to do, but I sha'n't let old Lewis off. I reckon he'll find my hand hard on him as long as he holds out. Any other man would do just the same, Judy." Judith Browne stood still and looked at her husband in silence. Then she spoke in a repressed voice: "Sanford Browne, what do you talk to me that way for? Any other man might worry this old wretch out of his life, but you won't do it. What did I marry you for? Why did I leave my father's house to take you, a poor redemptioner just out of your time? It was because you weren't like other men. I knew you were kind and good-hearted when other men were cruel and unfeeling. From that day to this you have never made me sorry that I left home and turned my father against me. But if you do this thing you have in mind to a poor old wretch that can't help himself, then you won't be Sanford Browne any more. You'll have that old man's blood on your hands, and Judy will never get over being sorry that she left her friends to go with you." The woman's voice had broken as she spoke these last words, and now she broke down completely, and sobbed a little. "What shall I do, Judy?" said her husband softly. "God knows, if I keep him in sight I shall kill him some day." "Sell him. Sell him right off. There's Captain Perkins coming up the bank now." "You sell him, Judy. Perkins has things you want. I give Lewis to you. Make any trade you please." Then, as his wife moved away, he followed her, and said in a smothered voice: "Sell him quick, Judy. Don't stand on the price. Get him out of sight before I kill him." Judith went out to meet the peddling captain, who was now strolling toward the house in hope of an invitation to supper, knowing that Mrs. Browne's biscuit and fried chicken were better than the salt pork and hoecake cooked by the boy on the sloop. The wind had fallen, and the water view was growing dim in the gloaming. Judith explained to the peddler that the convict her husband had bought proved to be an old enemy of his. She stammered a little in her endeavor not to betray the real reasons for selling him, and Perkins, who was proud of his own penetration, inferred that Browne was afraid of his life if he should keep the new servant. He saw in this an unexpected chance for profit. When Mrs. Browne offered to sell him if Perkins would take him to the eastern shore or some other place away off, he said that servants wuz a thing he didn't deal in--a leetle dangerous at sea where the crew wuz so small as his. Hard to sell an old fellow; the planters wanted young men. But he wanted to accommodate, you know, an' seein' as how Mis' Braown had been a good customer, he would do what he could. He would have to make a run over to the eastern shore perticular to sell this man. Folks on the eastern shore didn't buy much. Hadn't sold 'em a hat, for instance. They all wore white cotton caps, men an' women; an' they made the caps themselves out of cotton of their own raisin'. But, as he wuz a-sayin', Mis' Braown had been a good customer, an' he wanted to accommodate. But he'd have to put the price low enough so as he wouldn't be poorer by the trade. Thus he faced about on his disjunctive conjunction, now this way, now that, until he had time to consider what was the very lowest figure he could offer as a basis for his higgling. He couldn't offer much, but he would give a price which he named in pieces of eight, stipulating that he should pay it in goods. He saw in this a chance for elastic profits in both directions. Judith hardly gave a thought to the price he named; but as soon as she perceived that he had disentangled himself from his higgling preamble so far as to offer a definite sum, she accepted it. This lack of hesitation on her part disconcerted the peddler, who had a feeling that a bargain made without preliminary chaffering had not been properly solemnized. He was suspicious now that he was the victim of some design. "That is to say, Mis' Braown, I only dew this to accommodate ole friends. It ain't preudent to make such a trade in the dark. I'll dew it if I find the man sound in wind and limb, and all satisfactory, when I come to look him over." "Of course that's what I mean," said Judith. "Now come in and take supper with us, captain," she continued, her voice still in a quiver with recent emotions. "Well, I don't keer if I dew, jest fer to bind the bargain, you knaow. I told the boy I'd be back, but I reckon they won't wait long. Ship folks don't wait much on nobody." Judith turned toward the house, followed by the peddler. Sanford Browne was still sitting in the entry just as Judith had left him, surprised and in a sense paralyzed by the sudden and effective opposition which his wife had offered to the gratification of his only grudge. "Mr. Browne!" called Judith, almost hysterically, her tense nerves suddenly shaken again. "What's that? Something's happened down at the quarters." Looking through the wide passage into the dim twilight beyond, she could see running figures like shadows approaching the house. Sanford Browne rose at his wife's summons in time to meet the convict Lewis, still manacled, as he rushed into the passage at the back of the house and dashed out again at the front. Browne attempted to arrest his flight, crying out, as he made an effort to seize him, "Stop, you old villain, or I'll kill you!" But the momentum of the flying figure rendered Browne's grasp ineffectual, and in a moment he was out of doors, just as Bob and Jocko and the other servants entered the passage in a pell-mell pursuit. As the running man emerged from the darkness of the passage, Perkins, thinking his profit in jeopardy, threw himself athwart his path, and cried: "Here! Where be you a-goin' so fast with them things on your wrist?" "To hell and damnation!" yelled Lewis, striking the peddler fair in the breast with both manacled hands, and sending him rolling on the ground. The convict did not pause a moment in his flight, but, with the whole pack in full cry after him, dashed onward to the bank and down it. Before any of his pursuers could lay hands on him he was aboard the sloop. "Ketch him! Ketch him!" cried Captain Perkins, once more on his feet, and giving orders from the top of the bank. The cabin boy had just emerged from the cabin to call the man to supper. He and the sailor tried hard to seize the fleeing man, but Captain Lewis swerved to one side and ran round the gunwale of the sloop with both men after him. When he reached the stern he leaped beyond their reach, and plunged head first into the water, sinking out of sight where the fast-ebbing tide was now gurgling round the rudder. In vain the boy and the sailorman looked with all their might at the place where he had gone down; in vain they poked a long pole into the water after him; in vain did Bob and Jocko paddle in the canoe all over the place where Black Jim Lewis had sunk. Perkins took the precaution, before descending the bank, to say: "You'll remember, Mis' Braown, that I only bought him on conditions, and stipple-lated I wuz to be satisfied when I come to look him over. 'Tain't no loss of mine." This caveat duly lodged, he descended to the deck of his sloop, where he found the cabin boy shaking as with an ague. "What be you a-trimblin' abaout, naow? Got a fever 'n' agur a'ready? Y' ain't afeard of a dead man, be yeh, Elkanah?" "I don't noways like the idear," said Elkanah, "of sleepin' aboard, an' him dead thar by his own will, a-layin' closte up to the sloop." "He ain't nowher's nigh the sloop," responded Perkins. "This ebb-tide's got him in tow, an' he'll be down layin' ag'in' the Nancy Jane afore mornin'. That's the ship he'll ha'nt, bein' kind uv used to her." Browne had remained standing at the top of the bank, without saying a single word. He turned at last, and started slowly toward the house. Judith, forgetting her invitation to the peddler, went after her husband and took his hand. "I'm so glad he's dead," said she. "I know the cruel man deserved his fate. He'll be off your mind, now, dear; and nobody can say you did it." [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |