According to all his preconceived notions, this marriage ought to have
been the acme of uncle Wellington's felicity. But he soon found that it
was not without its drawbacks. On the following morning Mr. Todd was
informed of the marriage. He had no special objection to it, or interest
in it, except that he was opposed on principle to having husband and
wife in his employment at the same time. As a consequence, Mrs. Braboy,
whose place could be more easily filled than that of her husband,
received notice that her services would not be required after the end of
the month. Her husband was retained in his place as coachman.
Upon the loss of her situation Mrs. Braboy decided to exercise the
married woman's prerogative of letting her husband support her. She
rented the upper floor of a small house in an Irish neighborhood. The
newly wedded pair furnished their rooms on the installment plan and
began housekeeping.
There was one little circumstance, however, that interfered slightly
with their enjoyment of that perfect freedom from care which ought to
characterize a honeymoon. The people who owned the house and occupied
the lower floor had rented the upper part to Mrs. Braboy in person, it
never occurring to them that her husband could be other than a white
man. When it became known that he was colored, the landlord, Mr. Dennis
O'Flaherty, felt that he had been imposed upon, and, at the end of the
first month, served notice upon his tenants to leave the premises. When
Mrs. Braboy, with characteristic impetuosity, inquired the meaning of
this proceeding, she was informed by Mr. O'Flaherty that he did not care
to live in the same house "wid naygurs." Mrs. Braboy resented the
epithet with more warmth than dignity, and for a brief space of time the
air was green with choice specimens of brogue, the altercation barely
ceasing before it had reached the point of blows.
It was quite clear that the Braboys could not longer live comfortably in
Mr. O'Flaherty's house, and they soon vacated the premises, first
letting the rent get a couple of weeks in arrears as a punishment to the
too fastidious landlord. They moved to a small house on Hackman Street,
a favorite locality with colored people.
For a while, affairs ran smoothly in the new home. The colored people
seemed, at first, well enough disposed toward Mrs. Braboy, and she made
quite a large acquaintance among them. It was difficult, however, for
Mrs. Braboy to divest herself of the consciousness that she was white,
and therefore superior to her neighbors. Occasional words and acts by
which she manifested this feeling were noticed and resented by her
keen-eyed and sensitive colored neighbors. The result was a slight
coolness between them. That her few white neighbors did not visit her,
she naturally and no doubt correctly imputed to disapproval of her
matrimonial relations.
Under these circumstances, Mrs. Braboy was left a good deal to her own
company. Owing to lack of opportunity in early life, she was not a woman
of many resources, either mental or moral. It is therefore not strange
that, in order to relieve her loneliness, she should occasionally have
recourse to a glass of beer, and, as the habit grew upon her, to still
stronger stimulants. Uncle Wellington himself was no tee-totaler, and
did not interpose any objection so long as she kept her potations within
reasonable limits, and was apparently none the worse for them; indeed,
he sometimes joined her in a glass. On one of these occasions he drank a
little too much, and, while driving the ladies of Mr. Todd's family to
the opera, ran against a lamp-post and overturned the carriage, to the
serious discomposure of the ladies' nerves, and at the cost of his
situation.
A coachman discharged under such circumstances is not in the best
position for procuring employment at his calling, and uncle Wellington,
under the pressure of need, was obliged to seek some other means of
livelihood. At the suggestion of his friend Mr. Johnson, he bought a
whitewash brush, a peck of lime, a couple of pails, and a hand-cart, and
began work as a whitewasher. His first efforts were very crude, and for
a while he lost a customer in every person he worked for. He
nevertheless managed to pick up a living during the spring and summer
months, and to support his wife and himself in comparative comfort.
The approach of winter put an end to the whitewashing season, and left
uncle Wellington dependent for support upon occasional jobs of unskilled
labor. The income derived from these was very uncertain, and Mrs. Braboy
was at length driven, by stress of circumstances, to the washtub, that
last refuge of honest, able-bodied poverty, in all countries where the
use of clothing is conventional.
The last state of uncle Wellington was now worse than the first. Under
the soft firmness of aunt Milly's rule, he had not been required to do a
great deal of work, prompt and cheerful obedience being chiefly what was
expected of him. But matters were very different here. He had not only
to bring in the coal and water, but to rub the clothes and turn the
wringer, and to humiliate himself before the public by emptying the tubs
and hanging out the wash in full view of the neighbors; and he had to
deliver the clothes when laundered.
At times Wellington found himself wondering if his second marriage had
been a wise one. Other circumstances combined to change in some degree
his once rose-colored conception of life at the North. He had believed
that all men were equal in this favored locality, but he discovered
more degrees of inequality than he had ever perceived at the South. A
colored man might be as good as a white man in theory, but neither of
them was of any special consequence without money, or talent, or
position. Uncle Wellington found a great many privileges open to him at
the North, but he had not been educated to the point where he could
appreciate them or take advantage of them; and the enjoyment of many of
them was expensive, and, for that reason alone, as far beyond his reach
as they had ever been. When he once began to admit even the possibility
of a mistake on his part, these considerations presented themselves to
his mind with increasing force. On occasions when Mrs. Braboy would
require of him some unusual physical exertion, or when too frequent
applications to the bottle had loosened her tongue, uncle Wellington's
mind would revert, with a remorseful twinge of conscience, to the _dolce
far niente_ of his Southern home; a film would come over his eyes and
brain, and, instead of the red-faced Irishwoman opposite him, he could
see the black but comely disk of aunt Milly's countenance bending over
the washtub; the elegant brogue of Mrs. Braboy would deliquesce into the
soft dialect of North Carolina; and he would only be aroused from this
blissful reverie by a wet shirt or a handful of suds thrown into his
face, with which gentle reminder his wife would recall his attention to
the duties of the moment.
There came a time, one day in spring, when there was no longer any
question about it: uncle Wellington was desperately homesick.
Liberty, equality, privileges,--all were but as dust in the balance when
weighed against his longing for old scenes and faces. It was the natural
reaction in the mind of a middle-aged man who had tried to force the
current of a sluggish existence into a new and radically different
channel. An active, industrious man, making the change in early life,
while there was time to spare for the waste of adaptation, might have
found in the new place more favorable conditions than in the old. In
Wellington age and temperament combined to prevent the success of the
experiment; the spirit of enterprise and ambition into which he had been
temporarily galvanized could no longer prevail against the inertia of
old habits of life and thought.
One day when he had been sent to deliver clothes he performed his
errand quickly, and boarding a passing street car, paid one of his very
few five-cent pieces to ride down to the office of the Hon. Mr. Brown,
the colored lawyer whom he had visited when he first came to the city,
and who was well known to him by sight and reputation.
"Mr. Brown," he said, "I ain' gitt'n' 'long very well wid my ole 'oman."
"What 's the trouble?" asked the lawyer, with business-like curtness,
for he did not scent much of a fee.
"Well, de main trouble is she doan treat me right. An' den she gits
drunk, an' wuss'n dat, she lays vi'lent han's on me. I kyars de marks er
dat 'oman on my face now."
He showed the lawyer a long scratch on the neck.
"Why don't you defend yourself?"
"You don' know Mis' Braboy, suh; you don' know dat 'oman," he replied,
with a shake of the head. "Some er dese yer w'ite women is monst'us
strong in de wris'."
"Well, Mr. Braboy, it 's what you might have expected when you turned
your back on your own people and married a white woman. You were n't
content with being a slave to the white folks once, but you must try it
again. Some people never know when they 've got enough. I don't see that
there 's any help for you; unless," he added suggestively, "you had a
good deal of money."
'"Pears ter me I heared somebody say sence I be'n up heah, dat it wuz
'gin de law fer w'ite folks an' colored folks ter marry."
"That was once the law, though it has always been a dead letter in
Groveland. In fact, it was the law when you got married, and until I
introduced a bill in the legislature last fall to repeal it. But even
that law did n't hit cases like yours. It was unlawful to make such a
marriage, but it was a good marriage when once made."
"I don' jes' git dat th'oo my head," said Wellington, scratching that
member as though to make a hole for the idea to enter.
"It 's quite plain, Mr. Braboy. It 's unlawful to kill a man, but when
he 's killed he 's just as dead as though the law permitted it. I 'm
afraid you have n't much of a case, but if you 'll go to work and get
twenty-five dollars together, I 'll see what I can do for you. We may be
able to pull a case through on the ground of extreme cruelty. I might
even start the case if you brought in ten dollars."
Wellington went away sorrowfully. The laws of Ohio were very little more
satisfactory than those of North Carolina. And as for the ten
dollars,--the lawyer might as well have told him to bring in the moon,
or a deed for the Public Square. He felt very, very low as he hurried
back home to supper, which he would have to go without if he were not on
hand at the usual supper-time.
But just when his spirits were lowest, and his outlook for the future
most hopeless, a measure of relief was at hand. He noticed, when he
reached home, that Mrs. Braboy was a little preoccupied, and did not
abuse him as vigorously as he expected after so long an absence. He also
perceived the smell of strange tobacco in the house, of a better grade
than he could afford to use. He thought perhaps some one had come in to
see about the washing; but he was too glad of a respite from Mrs.
Braboy's rhetoric to imperil it by indiscreet questions.
Next morning she gave him fifty cents.
"Braboy," she said, "ye 've be'n helpin' me nicely wid the washin', an'
I 'm going ter give ye a holiday. Ye can take yer hook an' line an' go
fishin' on the breakwater. I 'll fix ye a lunch, an' ye need n't come
back till night. An' there 's half a dollar; ye can buy yerself a pipe
er terbacky. But be careful an' don't waste it," she added, for fear she
was overdoing the thing.
Uncle Wellington was overjoyed at this change of front on the part of
Mrs. Braboy; if she would make it permanent he did not see why they
might not live together very comfortably.
The day passed pleasantly down on the breakwater. The weather was
agreeable, and the fish bit freely. Towards evening Wellington started
home with a bunch of fish that no angler need have been ashamed of. He
looked forward to a good warm supper; for even if something should have
happened during the day to alter his wife's mood for the worse, any
ordinary variation would be more than balanced by the substantial
addition of food to their larder. His mouth watered at the thought of
the finny beauties sputtering in the frying-pan.
He noted, as he approached the house, that there was no smoke coming
from the chimney. This only disturbed him in connection with the matter
of supper. When he entered the gate he observed further that the
window-shades had been taken down.
"'Spec' de ole 'oman's been house-cleanin'," he said to himself. "I
wonder she did n' make me stay an' he'p 'er."
He went round to the rear of the house and tried the kitchen door. It
was locked. This was somewhat of a surprise, and disturbed still further
his expectations in regard to supper. When he had found the key and
opened the door, the gravity of his next discovery drove away for the
time being all thoughts of eating.
The kitchen was empty. Stove, table, chairs, wash-tubs, pots and pans,
had vanished as if into thin air.
"Fo' de Lawd's sake!" he murmured in open-mouthed astonishment.
He passed into the other room,--they had only two,--which had served as
bedroom and sitting-room. It was as bare as the first, except that in
the middle of the floor were piled uncle Wellington's clothes. It was
not a large pile, and on the top of it lay a folded piece of yellow
wrapping-paper.
Wellington stood for a moment as if petrified. Then he rubbed his eyes
and looked around him.
"W'at do dis mean?" he said. "Is I er-dreamin', er does I see w'at I
'pears ter see?" He glanced down at the bunch of fish which he still
held. "Heah 's de fish; heah 's de house; heah I is; but whar 's de ole
'oman, an' whar 's de fu'niture? _I_ can't figure out w'at dis yer all
means."
He picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it. It was written on one
side. Here was the obvious solution of the mystery,--that is, it would
have been obvious if he could have read it; but he could not, and so his
fancy continued to play upon the subject. Perhaps the house had been
robbed, or the furniture taken back by the seller, for it had not been
entirely paid for.
Finally he went across the street and called to a boy in a neighbor's
yard.
"Does you read writin', Johnnie?"
"Yes, sir, I 'm in the seventh grade."
"Read dis yer paper fuh me."