VIRGIE'S FLIGHT.
Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on
snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though
the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered,
willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great
speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to
heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.
Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind
from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now
covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had
called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of
old Snow Hill in London.
Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of
English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian,
which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new
world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor
might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the
Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling
tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court
and jail might tell.
Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a
golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its
old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old
brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke.
Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the
lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.
"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."
"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of
Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of
town before any of the white people are up to see you."
At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her
husband.
"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good
Lord pay you back!"
"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard,
because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."
"How came you free?" Virgie asked, wistfully.
"I saved a sick gentleman's life, and he bought me for it, and gave me
my freedom. See, I have a pass that tells the color of my eyes and skin,
my weight, and everything. With this I can go into Delaware and the free
states. I wish you had one, Miss Virgie."
"Oh, Mrs. Hudson, I dearly wish I had. Let me read it. Why, I could
almost pass for you, from this description."
"Indeed you could," the housewife said; "we are not of the same age, but
white people don't read a pass very careful."
"How I would love anybody that could get me such a pass!"
"I have given my word of honor that I will never lend it. Much as I like
to help my color to freedom, I cannot break my word. To-morrow I have to
go into Delaware with my pass to nurse a lady."
"You attend the sick, Mrs. Hudson?"
"Yes, I have a kind of call that way, Miss Virgie. Ever since I was a
girl I pulled herbs and tried them on myself, and studied 'tendin' on
people, watchin' their minds, that is so much of sickness, and how to
wrap and rub them. My husband oysters down in the inlets. Here is his
wagon."
"The Lord remember you in need, dear Mrs. Hudson."
The old wagon, an open thing, to peddle oysters and fish, was driven
across the town to the south, and soon was in the open country, going
towards Virginia. A smell of salt bay seemed in the air; the hawks'
nests in dead trees indicated the element that subsisted everything, and
the trees in the fields were often lordly in size, though sand and small
oak and pine woods were seldom out of sight. As they turned into a lane
near a little roadside place of worship, a young white man rode by on
horseback, and, seeing Virgie, reined in and shouted,
"Purty, purty, purty as peaches and cream! Ole Virginny blood is in them
eyes, by the Ensign!"
The colored man muttered, "Go 'long, Mr. Wise!"
"By the Ensign now," continued the man, who was young, but of a
cadaverous countenance, "if 'tis a Maryland huzzy, she is marvellous.
What's the name, angel gal?"
"She's a Miss Spence. I'm a takin' her home yer," the mulatto man
interposed, hastily, and went in the gate, while the horseman, with a
shout like one intoxicated, gallopped towards the north.
"I'm sorry he seen you, sho'!" the conductor said; "that's Henry A.
Wise, the big lawyer from Accomac. Maybe he'll inquire at Snow Hill,
where he's goin' to court."
"What house is this, Mr. Hudson?" Virgie asked, seeing at the end of the
short lane a thick-set house and porch, with small farm-buildings around
it.
"That's ole Spring Hill, built by the first of the Milburns; by the one
that made the will leavin' his hat and nothin' else to be son. It's got
brick ends. I 'spect they had money when they come here, Virgie."
The quickened mettle of the girl noticed that he had ceased to call her
"Miss."
"Now," said Hudson, "I'm goin' to leave you here with my sister till I
see about gittin' a boat. If you is tracked to Snow Hill, it'll be found
you come out this way, now. The inlets run up along the coast yer past
the Delaware line. I'm a goin' to sail you past Snow Hill agin an'
double on 'em. Yes, Miss Virgie, I'll git you away if it costs all I
have got together."
An excited light seemed to be in his eyes.
Virgie was put in a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her
contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of
sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and
soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.
She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced
child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features,
and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back,
and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two
vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.
Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with
fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round
and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher,
higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting
flames.
Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall
kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt
Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her,
till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced
around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her
head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into
the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and
nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little
grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the
kidnapper had taken away.
"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and
hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if
with red-hot eyeballs.
She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was
in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she
was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and
was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with
mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.
The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy
steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the
skiff, covered with the man's large coat.
It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she
heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a
stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and
she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.
A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with
corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally seemed
almost to meet, as the skiff, scraping the bottom, darted through a
narrow strait.
Then the stars were shining over her, and the waters grew wide again,
and, lying in a trance of flying lights and images, she thought she felt
her lips kissed, and a voice say "Darling!"
Finally, she felt lifted up and carried, and, when she could realize the
situation, she found herself lying on a pile of shingles at an old
wharf, and the man, beside her, was weeping, as he watched the boat
receding down a moonlit aisle of wave.
"My boy, my poor ole woman," she heard her conductor mutter, "I never
can come back to you no mo'!"
"Why?" spoke Virgie, hardly realizing what she said.
"Because--because--_you_ did it!" the man exclaimed, with ardent eyes,
seen through his streaming tears.
"Oh, tell me where I am!" Virgie said. "Is it far to freedom now?"
She looked at the sky, all agitated with clouds and stars moving across
each other, and it seemed the nearest world of all.
"Is my father there?" thought Virgie, "my dear white father? Can he see
me here, sick and lonely, and hate me?"
"We're at de Shingle landing; yonder is St. Martin's," said the negro,
cautiously; "there's two roads nigh whar we air, goin' to the North,
dear Virgie; one is the stage-road, and t'other is the shingle-trail
through the Cypress Swamp.
"Take the road that's the safest to Freedom," Virgie sighed.
In a few moments, walking over the ground, they came to a place where
the cart-trail crossed a sandy road, and went beyond it, along the edge
of a small stream. The man walked a few steps up the better road
undecidedly, and suddenly drew Virgie back into the bushes, but not
quick enough to be unobserved by two men coming on in an old, rattling
wagon.
"My skin!" cried the man driving, a youngish man, of sharp, but not
unkindly eyes, "thar's a sniptious gal. Come out yer and show yourself!"
Virgie felt the man's eyes resting on her, but not with the coarse ardor
of his companion, who wore a wide slouched hat and red shirt, and was
bandaged around the head and throat, yet from his ghastly pale face,
like death, on which some blood seemed to be smeared, and to stain the
bandage at his neck, lay a coarse leer, and he kissed his mouth at her,
and uttered:
"_O flexuosa! esquisita!_ It is dainty, Sorden!"
"Now ef we was a going t'other way, Van Dorn," the driver said, "we
could give them a lift. Boy, what are you out fur? Where's your passes?"
"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."
"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy
Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same
woman! where did you get this pass?"
"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."
His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The
driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,
"I love him as I never loved A male!"
"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon
started south.
"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy
Hudson for assisting a runaway!"
"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only
road!"
He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the
swampy branch.
"What have you done?" cried Virgie.
"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."
With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her
impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in
frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and
scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of
pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the
reptile.
Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up
their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high
tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and
stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their
beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal
dream.
The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon
were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to
industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden
every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums
of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their
contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each
insist upon the last word to say:
"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you
didn't!" "You did, you did!"
Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born,
had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night,
till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan
disputing for her soul.
As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these
warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels
cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of
spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!"
groaned back.
"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"
She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"
The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing
sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere
ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the
man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and
puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or
again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the
light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if
from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man
often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some
treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in
the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.
He stared at her in wonder, but too wistfully. The cat-briers hung
across the opening, and grapevines, like cables of sunken ships, fell
many a fathom through the crystal waves of night; but the North Star
seemed to find a way to peep through everything, and Virgie heard the
words from Hudson, once, of--
"Jess over this branch a bit we is in Delaware!"
Then the crickets and tree-frogs, the bullfrogs and the whippoorwills,
the owls and everything, seemed to drown his voice and halloo for hours,
"We is in Delaware! we is, we is! we is in Del-a-a-ware!"
A little warming, kindly light at length began to blaze their trail
along, as if some gentle predecessor, with a golden adze, had chipped
the funereal trees and made them smile a welcome. Small fires were
burning in the vegetable mould or surface brush, and the opacity of the
forest yielded to the pretty flame which danced and almost sang in a
household crackle, like a young girl in love humming tunes as she
kindles a fire.
The mighty swamp now grew distinct, yet more inaccessible, as its inner
edges seemed transparent in the line of fires, like curtains of lace
against the midnight window-panes. The Virginia creeper, light as the
flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen
giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared
beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some
kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers
in bed.
Suddenly the man took Virgie up and carried her through a stream of
running water, brown with the tannin matter of the swamp.
"We is in Delaware," he said, soon after, as they reached a camp of
shingle sawyers, all deserted, and lighted by the fire, the golden chips
strewn around, and the sawdust, like Indian meal, that suggested good,
warm pone at Teackle Hall to Virgie.
She put her feet, soaked with swamp water, at a burning log to warm, and
hardly saw a mocasson snake glide round the fire and stop, as if to dart
at her, and glide away; for Virgie's mind was attributing this kindly
fire to the presence of Freedom.
"Oh, I should like to lie here and go to sleep," she said, languidly; "I
am so tired."
The man Hudson, wringing wet with the journey's difficulties, threw his
arms around her and drew her to his damp yet fiery breast.
"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!"
The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the
young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her
guide was drunken with passion.
She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a
maniac's hands.
"I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuated ruffian sighed;
"you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!"
A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose
them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her
dying strength to preserve her modesty.
"Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for
insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!"
"My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we
shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough
fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it."
"Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever,
though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not
keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would
rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done."
"Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would
not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states
together and live for each other. Kiss me!"
He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen
braids of her silky hair.
The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the
winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them.
"Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you."
As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke.
The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed,
"It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!"
He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a
moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path.
They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of
lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up
the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning
earth dodged and chased each other.
"Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must
love me or we'll die together."
He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not
breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead
of them.
* * * * *
Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the
sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn.
Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains
were in her legs and feet, but she could walk.
"Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought.
A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked,
burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water.
"Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to
repent and be a better man."
He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and
hideous to see.
"Merciful Lord!" exclaimed Virgie; "what ails you, pore man?"
"The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you
must lead me now; I am gone blind."