DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES--ALFRED THORNE'S IS TOLD BY THE WRITER.
Mr. Thorne of Brackenhill was a miserable man, who went through the world
with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture,
and unfortunately the circumstances of his daily life continually chafed
it.
It was only a common form of selfishness carried to excess. "I don't want
much," he would have said--truly enough, for Godfrey Thorne had never been
grasping--"but let it be my own." He could not enjoy anything unless he
knew that he might waste it if he liked. The highest good, fettered by any
condition, was in his eyes no good at all. Brackenhill was dear to him
because he could leave it to whom he would. He was seventy-six, and had
spent his life in improving his estate, but he prized nothing about it so
much as his right to give the result of his life's work to the first beggar
he might chance to meet. It would have made him still happier if he could
have had the power of destroying Brackenhill utterly, of wiping it off the
face of the earth, in case he could not find an heir who pleased him, for
it troubled him to think that some man _must_ have the land after him,
whether he wished it or not.
Godfrey Hammond had declared that no one could conceive the exquisite
torments Mr. Thorne would endure if he owned an estate with a magnificent
ruin on it, some unique and priceless relic of bygone days. "He should be
able to see it from his window," said Hammond, "and it should be his, as
far as law could make it, while he should be continually conscious that in
the eyes of all cultivated men he was merely its guardian. People should
write to the newspapers asserting boldly that the public had a right of
free access to it, and old gentlemen with antiquarian tastes should find a
little gap in a fence, and pen indignant appeals to the editor demanding to
be immediately informed whether a monument of national, nay, of world-wide
interest, ought not, for the sake of the public, to be more carefully
protected from injury. Local archæological societies should come and read
papers in it. Clergymen, wishing to combine a little instruction with the
pleasures of a school-feast, should arrive with van-loads of cheering boys
and girls, a troop of ardent teachers, many calico flags and a brass band.
Artists, keen-eyed and picturesque, each with his good-humored air of
possessing the place so much more truly than any mere country gentleman
ever could, should come to gaze and sketch. Meanwhile, Thorne should remark
about twice a week that of course he could pull the whole thing down if he
liked; to which every one should smile assent, recognizing an evident but
utterly unimportant fact. And then," said Hammond solemnly, "when all the
archæologists were eating and drinking, enjoying their own theories and
picking holes in their neighbors' discoveries, the bolt should fall in the
shape of an announcement that Mr. Thorne had sold the stones as building
materials, and that the workmen had already removed the most ancient and
interesting part. After which he would go slowly to his grave, dying of his
triumph and a broken heart."
It was all quite true, though Godfrey Hammond might have added that all the
execrations of the antiquarians would hardly have added to the burden of
shame and remorse of which Mr. Thorne would have felt the weight before the
last cart carried away its load from the trampled sward; that he would have
regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could
have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have
rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and
then proceeded to do it again.
For a great part of Mr. Thorne's life the boast of his power over
Brackenhill had been on his lips more frequently than the twice a week of
which Hammond talked. Of late years it had not been so. He had used his
power to assure himself that he possessed it, and gradually awoke to the
consciousness that he had lost it by thus using it.
He had had three sons--Maurice, a fine, high-spirited young fellow; Alfred,
good-looking and good-tempered, but indolent; James, a slim, sickly lad,
who inherited from his mother a fatal tendency to decline. She died while
he was a baby, and he was petted from that time forward. Godfrey Thorne was
well satisfied with Maurice, but was always at war with his second son, who
would not take orders and hold the family living. They argued the matter
till it was too late for Alfred to go into the army, the only career for
which he had expressed any desire; and then Mr. Thorne found himself face
to face with a gentle and lazy resistance which threatened to be a match
for his own hard obstinacy. Alfred didn't mind being a farmer. But his
father was troubled about the necessary capital, and doubted his son's
success: "You will go on after a fashion for a few years, and then all the
money will have slipped through your fingers. You know nothing of
farming."--"That's true," said Alfred.--"And you are much too lazy to
learn."--"That's very likely," said the young man. So Mr. Thorne looked
about him for some more eligible opening for his troublesome son; and
Alfred meanwhile, with his handsome face and honest smile, was busy making
love to Sarah Percival, the rector's daughter.
The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the
squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily
enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne was
not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse with the rector was
rather stormy and uncertain, they happened to be on tolerable terms just
then. Sarah was an only child, and would have a little money at Mr.
Percival's death, and Alfred was much more submissive and anxious to please
his father under these altered circumstances. The young people were not to
consider themselves engaged, Miss Percival being only eighteen and Alfred
one-and-twenty. But if they were of the same mind later, when the latter
should be in a position to marry, it was understood that neither his father
nor Mr. Percival would oppose it.
Unluckily, a parochial question arose near Christmas-time, and the squire
and the clergyman took different views of it. Mr. Thorne went about the
house with brows like a thunder-cloud, and never opened his lips to Alfred
except to abuse the rector. "You'll have to choose between old Percival and
me one of these days," he said more than once. "You'd better be making up
your mind: it will save time." Alfred was silent. When the strife was at
its height Maurice was drowned while skating.
The poor fellow was hardly in his grave before the storm burst on Alfred's
head. If Mr. Thorne had barely tolerated the idea of his son's marriage
before, he found it utterly intolerable now; and the decree went forth that
this boyish folly about Miss Percival must be forgotten. "I can do as I
like with Brackenhill," said Mr. Thorne: "remember that." Alfred did
remember it. He had heard it often enough, and his father's angry eyes gave
it an added emphasis. "I can make an eldest son of James if I like, and I
will if you defy me." But nothing could shake Alfred. He had given his word
to Miss Percival, and they loved each other, and he meant to keep to it.
"You don't believe me," his father thundered: "you think I may talk, but
that I sha'n't do it. Take care!" There was no trace of any conflict on
Alfred's face: he looked a little dull and heavy under the bitter storm,
but that was all. "I can't help it, sir," he said, tracing the pattern of
the carpet with the toe of his boot as he stood: "you will do as you
please, I suppose."--"I suppose I shall," said Mr. Thorne.
So Alfred was disinherited. "As well for this as anything else," he said:
"we couldn't have got on long." He had an allowance from his father, who
declined to take any further interest in his plans. He went abroad for a
couple of years--a test which Mr. Percival imposed upon him that nothing
might be done in haste--and came back, faithful as he went, to ask for the
consent which could no longer be denied. Mr. Percival had been presented to
a living at some distance from Brackenhill, and, as there was a good deal
of glebe-land attached to it, Alfred was able to try his hand at farming.
He did so, with a little loss if no gain, and they made one household at
the rectory.
He never seemed to regret Brackenhill. Sarah--dark, ardent, intense, a
strange contrast to his own fair, handsome face and placid
indolence--absorbed all his love. Her eager nature could not rouse him to
battle with the world, but it woke a passionate devotion in his heart: they
were everything to each other, and were content. When their boy was born
the rector would have named him Godfrey: at any rate, he urged them to call
him by one of the old family names which had been borne by bygone
generations of Thornes. But the young husband was resolved that the child
should be Percival, and Percival only. "Why prejudice his grandfather
against him for a mere name?" the rector persisted. But Alfred shook his
head. "Percival means all the happiness of my life," he said. So the child
received his name, and the fact was announced to Mr. Thorne in a letter
brief and to the point like a challenge.
Communications with Brackenhill were few and far between. From the local
papers Alfred heard of the rejoicings when James came of age, quickly
followed by the announcement that he had gone abroad for the winter. Then
he was at home again, and going to marry Miss Harriet Benham; whereat
Alfred smiled a little. "The governor must have put his pride in his
pocket: old Benham made his money out of composite candles, then retired,
and has gas all over the house for fear they should be mentioned. Harry, as
we used to call her, is the youngest of them--she must be eight or nine and
twenty; fine girl, hunts--tried it on with poor Maurice ages ago. I should
think she was about half as big again as Jim. Well, yes, perhaps I am
exaggerating a little. How charmed my father must be!--only, of course,
anything to please Jim, and it's a fine thing to have him married and
settled."
Alfred read his father's feelings correctly enough, but Mr. Thorne was
almost repaid for all he had endured when, in his turn, he was able to
write and announce the birth of a boy for whom the bells had been set
ringing as the heir of Brackenhill. Jim, with his sick fancies and
querulous conceit, Mrs. James Thorne, with her coarsely-colored splendor
and imperious ways, faded into the background now that Horace's little star
had risen.
The rest may be briefly told. Horace had a little sister who died, and he
himself could hardly remember his father. His time was divided between his
mother's house at Brighton and Brackenhill. He grew slim and tall and
handsome--a Thorne, and not a Benham, as his grandfather did not fail to
note. He was delicate. "But he will outgrow that," said Mrs. Middleton, and
loved him the better for the care she had to take of him. It was
principally for his sake that she was there. She was a widow and had no
children of her own, but when, at her brother's request, she came to
Brackenhill to make more of a home for the school-boy, she brought with her
a tiny girl, little Sissy Langton, a great-niece of her husband's.
Meanwhile, the other boy grew up in his quiet home, but death came there as
well as to Brackenhill, and seemed to take the mainspring of the household
in taking Sarah Thorne. Her father pined for her, and had no pleasure in
life except in her child. Even when the old man was growing feeble, and it
was manifest to all but the boy that he would not long be parted from his
daughter, it was a sombre but not an unhappy home for the child. Something
in the shadow which overhung it, in his grandfather's weakness and his
father's silence, made him grave and reserved, but he always felt that he
was loved. No playful home-name was ever bestowed on the little lad, but
it did not matter, for when spoken by Alfred Thorne no name could be so
tender as Percival.
The rector's death when the boy was fifteen broke up the only real home he
was destined to know, for Alfred was unable to settle down in any place for
any length of time. While his wife and her father were alive their
influence over him was supreme: he was like the needle drawn aside by a
powerful attraction. But now that they were gone his thoughts oscillated a
while, and then reverted to Brackenhill. For himself he was content--he had
made his choice long ago--but little by little the idea grew up in his mind
that Percival was wronged, for he, at least, was guiltless. He secretly
regretted the defiant fashion in which his boy had been christened, and
made a feeble attempt to prove that, after all, Percy was an old family
name. He succeeded in establishing that a "P. Thorne" had once existed, who
of course might have been Percy, as he might have been Peter or Paul; and
he tried to call his son Percy in memory of this doubtful namesake. But the
three syllables were as dear to the boy as the white flag to a Bourbon.
They identified him with the mother he dimly remembered, and proclaimed to
all the world (that is, to his grandfather) that for her sake he counted
Brackenhill well lost. He triumphed, and his father was proud to be
defeated. To this day he invariably writes himself "Percival Thorne."
Alfred, however, had his way on a more important point, and educated his
son for no profession, because the head of the house needed none. Percival
acquiesced willingly enough, without a thought of the implied protest. He
was indolent, and had little or no ambition. Since daily bread--and,
luckily, rather more than daily bread, for he was no ascetic--was secured
to him, since books were many and the world was wide, he asked nothing
better than to study them. He grew up grave, dreamy and somewhat solitary
in his ways. He seemed to have inherited something of the rector's
self-possessed and rather formal courtesy, and at twenty he looked older
than his age, though his face was as smooth as a girl's.
He was not twenty-one, when his father died suddenly of fever. When the
news reached Brackenhill the old squire was singularly affected by it. He
had been accustomed to contrast Alfred's vigorous prime with his own
advanced age, Percival's unbroken health with Horace's ailing boyhood, and
to think mournfully of the probability that the old manor-house must go to
a stranger unless he could humble himself to the son who had defied him.
But, old as he was, he had outlived his son, and he was dismayed at his
isolation. A whole generation was dead and gone, and the two lads, who were
all that remained of the Thornes of Brackenhill, stood far away, as though
he stretched his trembling hands to them across their fathers' graves. He
expressly requested that Percival should come and see him, and the young
man presented himself in his deep mourning. Sissy, just sixteen, looked
upon him as a sombre hero of romance, and within two days of his coming
Mrs. Middleton announced that her brother was "perfectly infatuated about
that boy."
The evening of his arrival he stood with his grandfather on the terrace
looking at the wide prospect which lay at their feet--ample fields and
meadows, and the silvery flash of water through the willows. Then he
turned, folded his arms and coolly surveyed Brackenhill itself from end to
end. Mr. Thorne watched him, expecting some word, but when none came, and
Percival's eyes wandered upward to the soft evening sky, where a glimmering
star hung like a lamp above the old gray manor-house, he said, with some
amusement, "Well, and what is your opinion?"
Percival came down to earth with the greatest promptitude: "It's a
beautiful place. I'm glad to see it. I like looking over old houses."
"Like looking over old houses? As if it were merely a show! Isn't
Brackenhill more to you than any other old house?" demanded Mr. Thorne.
"Oh, well, perhaps," Percival allowed: "I have heard my father talk of it
of course."
"Come, come! You are not such an outsider as all that," said his
grandfather.
The young man smiled a little, but did not speak.
"You don't forget you are a Thorne, I hope?" the other went on. "There are
none too many of us."
"No," said Percival. "I like the old house, and I can assure you, sir, that
I am proud of both my names."
"Well, well! very good names. But shouldn't you call a man a lucky fellow
if he owned a place like this?"
"My opinion wouldn't be half as well worth having as yours," was the reply.
"What do you call yourself, sir?"
"Do you think I own this place?" Mr. Thorne inquired.
"Why, yes--I always supposed so. Don't you?"
"No, I don't!" The answer was almost a snarl. "I'm bailiff, overlooker,
anything you like to call it. My master is at Oxford, at Christ Church. He
won't read, and he can't row, so he is devoting his time to learning how to
get rid of the money I am to save up for him. _I_ own Brackenhill?" He
faced abruptly round. "All that timber is mine, they say; and if I cut down
a stick your aunt Middleton is at me: 'Think of Horace.' The place was
mortgaged when I came into it. I pinched and saved--I freed it--for Horace.
Why shouldn't I mortgage it again if I please--raise money and live royally
till my time comes, eh? They'd all be at me, dinning 'Horace! Horace!' and
my duty to those who come after me, into my ears. Look at the drawing-room
furniture!"
"The prettiest old room I ever saw," said Percival.
"Ah! you're right there. But my sister doesn't think so. It's shabby, she
would tell you. But does she ask me to furnish it for her? No, no, it isn't
worth while: mine is such a short lease. When Horace marries and comes into
his inheritance, of course it must be done up. It would be a pity to waste
money about it now, especially as there's a bit of land lies between two
farms of mine, and if I don't go spending a lot in follies, I can buy it.
Think of that! I can buy it--_for Horace!_"
Percival was guarded in his replies to this and similar outbursts; and Mrs.
Middleton, seeing that he showed no disposition to toady his grandfather or
to depreciate Horace, told Godfrey Hammond that, though her brother was so
absurd about him, she thought he seemed a good sort of young man, after
all. "Time will show," was the answer. Now, this was depressing, for
Godfrey had established a reputation for great sagacity.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
ABBEYS AND CASTLES.
It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in England that the beauty
and interest of the country are private property, and that to get access to
them a key is always needed. The key may be large or it may be small, but
it must be something that will turn a lock. Of the things that charm an
American observer in the land of parks and castles, I can think of very few
that do not come under this definition of private property. When I have
mentioned the hedgerows and the churches I have almost exhausted the list.
You can enjoy a hedgerow from the public road, and I suppose that even if
you are a Dissenter you may enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If,
therefore, one talks of anything beautiful in England, the presumption will
be that it is private; and indeed such is my admiration of this delightful
country that I feel inclined to say that if one talks of anything private,
the presumption will be that it is beautiful. Here is something of a
dilemma. If the observer permits himself to commemorate charming
impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world the fruits of
friendship and hospitality. If, on the other hand, he withholds his
impression, he lets something admirable slip away without having marked its
passage, without having done it proper honor. He ends by mingling
discretion with enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not treating
a country ill to talk of its treasures when the mention of each connotes,
as the metaphysicians say, an act of private courtesy.
The impressions I have in mind in writing these lines were gathered in a
part of England of which I had not before had even a traveller's glimpse;
but as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite ready to agree
with a friend who lived there, and who knew and loved it well, when he said
very frankly, "I _do_ believe it is the loveliest corner of the world!"
This was not a dictum to quarrel about, and while I was in the neighborhood
I was quite of his mind. I felt that it would not take a great deal to make
me care for it very much as he cared for it: I had a glimpse of the
peculiar tenderness with which such a country may be loved. It is a capital
example of the great characteristic of English scenery--of what I should
call density of feature. There are no waste details; everything in the
landscape is something particular--has a history, has played a part, has a
value to the imagination. It is a country of hills and blue undulations,
and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are
interesting--interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small
country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that
outline and coloring have been retouched and refined, as it were, by the
hand of Time. Independently of its castles and abbeys, the definite relics
of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has human relations, and
it is intimately conscious of them. That little speech about the
loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his county, was made to me
by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill, or "edge," as
it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to
look away over half of England. Certainly I should have grown fond of such
a view as that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding
slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long
ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming
prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next
but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from such
a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across
the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So's woods?
Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial
umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in
shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore
not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst
out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never
see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part of his
county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite
jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think," he declared, "of saying my
western hand and my eastern."
I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental attachment
for this delightful region--for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses
lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great
houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the
horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of--was
conditioned upon having "property" in the neighborhood, so that the little
girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies to me in the street;
though that too would certainly have been pleasant. At the same time,
having a little property would without doubt have made the sentiment
stronger. People who wander about the world without money have their
dreams--dreams of what they would buy if their pockets were lined. These
dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood
in which the wanderer happens to find himself. For myself, I have never
been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity
to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New
England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large
mansion with Greek columns and a pediment of white-painted timber: in Italy
I should have made proposals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on
the roof. In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy myself in treaty
for the best house, but, short of this, I have never failed to feel that
ideal comfort for the time would be to call one's self owner of what is
denominated here a "good" place. Is it that English country life seems to
possess such irresistible charms? I have not always thought so: I have
sometimes suspected that it is dull; I have remembered that there is a
whole literature devoted to exposing it (that of the English novel "of
manners"), and that its recorded occupations and conversations occasionally
strike one as lacking a certain desirable salt. But, for all that, when, in
the region to which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place
being likely sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing
could be more delightful than to see the hammer fall upon an offer made by
one's self. And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places in
question would part with them because they could no longer afford to keep
them up. I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was possible, what
sort of income was implied by the possession of country-seats such as are
not in America a concomitant of even the largest fortunes; and if in these
interrogations I sometimes heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other
hand I was frequently surprised at the slenderness of the resources
attributed to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park. Then,
certainly, English country life seemed to me the most advantageous thing in
the world: on these terms one would gladly put up with a little dulness.
When I reflected that there were thousands of people dwelling in brownstone
houses in numbered streets in New York who were at as great a cost to make
a reputable appearance in those harsh conditions as some of the occupants
of the grassy estates of which I had a glimpse, the privileges of the
latter class appeared delightfully cheap.
There was one place in particular of which I said to myself that if I had
the money to buy it, I would simply walk up to the owner and pour the sum
in sovereigns into his hat. I saw this place, unfortunately, to small
advantage: I saw it in the rain. But I am rather glad that fine weather did
not meddle with the affair, for I think that in this case the irritation of
envy would have been really too acute. It was a rainy Sunday, and the rain
was serious. I had been in the house all day, for the weather can best be
described by my saying that it had been deemed an exoneration from
church-going. But in the afternoon, the prospective interval between lunch
and tea assuming formidable proportions, my host took me out to walk, and
in the course of our walk he led me into a park which he described as "the
paradise of a small English country gentleman." Well it might be: I have
never seen such a collection of oaks. They were of high antiquity and
magnificent girth and stature: they were strewn over the grassy levels in
extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon and down the slopes in a
fashion than which I have seen nothing more charming since I last looked at
the chestnut trees on the banks of the Lake of Como. It appears that the
place was not very vast, but I was unable to perceive its limits. Shortly
before we turned into the park the rain had renewed itself, so that we were
awkwardly wet and muddy; but, being near the house, my companion proposed
to leave his card in a neighborly way. The house was most agreeable: it
stood on a kind of terrace in the midst of a lawn and garden, and the
terrace looked down on one of the handsomest rivers in England, and across
to those blue undulations of which I have already spoken. On the terrace
also was a piece of ornamental water, and there was a small iron paling to
divide the lawn from the park. All this I beheld in the rain. My companion
gave his card to the butler, with the observation that we were too much
bespattered to come in; and we turned away to complete our circuit. As we
turned away I became acutely conscious of what I should have been tempted
to call the cruelty of this proceeding. My imagination gauged the whole
position. It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining. The house was
charming, the terrace delightful, the oaks magnificent, the view most
interesting. But the whole thing was--not to repeat the epithet "dull," of
which just now I made too gross a use--the whole thing was quiet. In the
house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was--by which I meant
_must be_--a lady, a charming English lady. There was, it seemed to me, no
fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not
please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to
her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore,
when, before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us,
I felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been. Of course we went
back, and I carried my muddy shoes into the drawing-room--just the
drawing-room I had imagined--where I found--I will not say just the lady I
had imagined, but--a lady even more charming. Indeed, there were two
ladies, one of whom was staying in the house. In whatever company you find
yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present is
"staying." I seldom hear this participle now-a-days without remembering an
observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of English
manners: "Ah, that dreadful word _staying!_ I think we are so happy in
France not to be able to translate it--not to have any word that answers to
it." The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked away over the
river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the rain was drizzling and
drifting. It was very quiet: there was an air of leisure. If one wanted to
do something here, there was evidently plenty of time--and indeed of every
other appliance--to do it. The two ladies talked about "town:" that is what
people talk about in the country. If I were disposed I might represent them
as talking about it with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked
myself how it was possible that one should live in this charming place and
trouble one's head about what was going on in London in July. Then we had
excellent tea.
I have narrated this trifling incident because there seemed to be some
connection between it and what I was going to say about the stranger's
sense of country life being the normal, natural, typical life of the
English. In America, however comfortably people may live in the country,
there is always, relatively speaking, an air of picnicking about their
establishments. Their habitations, their arrangements, their appointments,
are more or less provisional. They dine at different hours from their city
hours; they wear different clothing; they spend all their time out of
doors. The English, on the other hand, live according to the same system in
Devonshire and in Mayfair--with the difference, perhaps, that in
Devonshire, where they have people "staying" with them, the system is
rather more rigidly applied. The picnicking, if picnicking there is to be,
is done in town. They keep their best things in the country--their best
books, their best furniture, their best pictures--and their footing in
London is as provisional as ours is at our "summer retreats." The English
smile a good deal--or rather would smile a good deal if they had more
observation of it--at the fashion in which we American burghers stow
ourselves away for July and August in white wooden boarding-houses beside
dusty, ill-made roads. But it is fair to say that these improvised homes
are not immeasurably more barbaric than the human _entassement_ that takes
place in London "apartments" during the months of May and June. Whoever has
had unhappy occasion to look for lodgings at this period, and to explore
the mysteries of the little black houses in the West End which have a
neatly-printed card suspended in the door-light, will admit that from the
obligation to rough it our more luxurious kinsmen are not altogether
exempt. We rough it, certainly, more than they do, but we rough it in the
country, where Nature herself is rough, and they rough it in the heart of
the largest and most splendid of cities. In England, in the country, Nature
as well as civilization is smooth, and it seems perfectly consistent, even
at midsummer, to dress for dinner; albeit that when so costumed you cannot
conveniently lie on the grass. But in England you do not particularly
expect to lie on the grass, especially in the evening. The aspect of the
usual English country-houses sufficiently indicates the absence of that
informal culture of the open air into which the American _villeggiatura_
generally resolves itself; and one reason why I mentioned just now the
excellent dwelling which I visited in the rain was that, as I approached
it, it struck me as so good an example of all that, for American rural
purposes, a house should not be. It was indeed built of stone, or of brick
stuccoed over; which, as they say in England, is a "great pull." But except
that it was detached and gabled, it belonged quite to the class of city
houses. Its walls were straight and bare, and its windows, though wide,
were short. It might have been deposited in Belgravia without in the least
seeming out of place: it conformed to the rigid London model. It had no
external galleries, no breezy piazzas, no long windows opening upon them,
no doors disposed for propagating draughts. But, indeed, I have never seen
an English house furnished with what we call a piazza; and I must add that
I have rarely known an English summer day on which it would have been
convenient to sit in a propagated draught.
It seems, however, grossly unthankful to say that English country-houses
lack anything when one has received delightful impressions of what they
possess. What is a draughty doorway to an old Norman portal, massively
arched and quaintly sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of
fancy may see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass
noiselessly to and fro? What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory
of the thirteenth century--a long stone gallery or cloister repeated in two
stories, with the interstices of its carven lattice now glazed, but with
its long, low, narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque--with
its flags worn away by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched doorways
opening from its inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals? What
are the longest French windows, with the most patented latches, to narrow
casements of almost defensive aspect set in embrasures three feet deep and
ornamented with little grotesque mediæval faces? To see one of these small
monkish masks grinning at you while you dress and undress, or while you
look up in the intervals of inspiration from your letter-writing, is a
simple detail in the entertainment of living in an ancient priory. This
entertainment is inexhaustible, for every step you take in such a house
confronts you in one way or another with the remote past. You feast upon
picturesqueness, you inhale history. Adjoining the house is a beautiful
ruin, part of the walls and windows and bases of the piers of the
magnificent church administered by your predecessor the abbot. These relics
are very desultory, but they are still abundant, and they testify to the
great scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You may lie upon the grass
at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of the great stumps of
the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange
it is that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite
and elaborate a work of art should have arisen. It is but an hour's walk to
another great ruin, which has held together more completely. There the
central tower stands erect to half its altitude, and the round arches and
massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on the unencumbered turf.
You get an impression that when Catholic England was in her prime great
abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native amateurs, even now, the
region is called "wild," though to American eyes it seems thoroughly
suburban in its smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little railway
running through the valley, and there is an ancient little town at the
abbey gates--a town, indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly
brick houses, with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed cottages, and
with little girls, as I have said, bobbing courtesies in the street. But
even now, if one had wound one's way into the valley by the railroad, it
would be rather a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a spot
on the whole so natural and pastoral. How impressive then must the
beautiful church have been in the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim
came down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness
sensible! The abbey was in those days a great affair: as my companion said,
it sprawled all over the place. As you walk away from it you think you have
got to the end of its traces, but you encounter them still in the shape of
a rugged outhouse grand with an Early-English arch, or an ancient well
hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. It is noticeable that even if you
are a traveller from a land where there are no Early-English--and indeed
few Late-English--arches, and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest,
of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this
antiquity. Anything very old seems extremely natural: there is nothing we
accept so implicitly as the past. It is not too much to say that after
spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you
seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You seem yourself
to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak
with your touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks
used to pace, looking out of the Gothic window-places at their beautiful
church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to
what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by which you ascend to the
threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be: the lintels are cracked and
worn by the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual glance. You
look up and down the miniature cloister before you pass in: it seems
wonderfully old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you
find modern conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner.
The new life and the old have melted together: there is no dividing-line.
In the drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
inward, like a small casemate. You ask a lady what it is, but she doesn't
know. It is something of the monks: it is a mere detail. After dinner you
are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is seen in the
dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants see him, and
afterward go surreptitiously to sleep in the town. Then, when you take your
chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a short cut through empty rooms,
you are conscious of a peculiar sensation which you hardly know whether to
interpret as a desire to see the gray friar or as an apprehension that you
will see him.
A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to
fail, while I was in the neighborhood, to go to S----. "Edward I. and
Elizabeth," he said, "are still hanging about there." Thus admonished, I
made a point of going to S----, and I saw quite what my friend meant.
Edward I. and Elizabeth, indeed, are still to be met almost anywhere in the
county: as regards domestic architecture, few parts of England are still
more vividly Old English. I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the
sensation of dropping back personally into the past in a higher degree than
while I lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this
small castle, and idly appreciated the still definite details of mediæval
life. The place is a capital example of what the French call a small
_gentilhommière_ of the thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat, now
filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of a much later
period--the period when the defensive attitude had been wellnigh abandoned.
This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the habitation,
but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams protruding from
surfaces of coarse white stucco, is a very picturesque anomaly in regard to
the little gray fortress on the other side of the court. I call this a
fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily have been taken, and it
must have assumed its present shape at a time when people had ceased to
peer through narrow slits at possible besiegers. There are slits in the
outer walls for such peering, but they are noticeably broad and not
particularly oblique, and might easily have been applied to the uses of a
peaceful parley. This is part of the charm of the place: human life there
must have lost an earlier grimness: it was lived in by people who were
beginning to feel comfortable. They must have lived very much together:
that is one of the most obvious reflections in the court of a mediæval
dwelling. The court was not always grassy and empty, as it is now, with
only a couple of gentlemen in search of impressions lying at their length,
one of whom has taken a wine-flask out of his pocket and has colored the
clear water drawn for them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a
decent, rosy, smiling, talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the
gatehouse, and who has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about
on crutches in the sun and making no sign when you ask after his health.
This poor man has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which
even a chance to talk about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the
civil old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of
one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering
quaintness. The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay,
though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From one of the
windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree across a meadow, with her
knees up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair
paint-brush: the young lady is sketching. These are the only besiegers to
which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt
whether the young lady's aim is very good. We wandered about the empty
interior, thinking it a pity things should be falling so to pieces. There
is a beautiful great hall--great, that is, for a small castle (it would be
extremely handsome in a modern house)--with tall, ecclesiastical-looking
windows, and a long staircase at one end climbing against the wall into a
spacious bedroom. You may still apprehend very well the main lines of that
simpler life; and it must be said that, simpler though it was, it was
apparently by no means destitute of many of our own conveniences. The
chamber at the top of the staircase ascending from the hall is charming
still, with its irregular shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in
the walls, and its deep bay window formed of a series of small lattices.
You can fancy people stepping out from it upon the platform of the
staircase, whose rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid,
deeply-guttered hand-rail, still remain. They looked down into the hall,
where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers,
much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the
court. The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, æsthetic spot
which you may find it at present of a summer's day: there were beasts
tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into
puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could
pick out the man wanted and bawl down an order, with a threat to fling
something at his head if it were not instantly performed. The sight of the
groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken tables
spread, and the brazier in the middle,--all this seemed present again; and
it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through the rest of the
building--through the portion which connected the great hall with the tower
(here the confederate of the sketching young lady without had set up the
peaceful three-legged engine of his craft); through the dusky, roughly
circular rooms of the tower itself, and up the corkscrew staircase of the
same to that most charming part of every old castle, where visions must
leap away off the battlements to elude you--the sunny, breezy platform at
the tower-top, the place where the castle-standard hung and the vigilant
inmates surveyed the approaches. Here, always, you really overtake the
impression of the place--here, in the sunny stillness, it seems to pause,
panting a little, and give itself up.
It was not only at Stokesay--I have written the name at last, and I will
not efface it--that I lingered a while on the quiet platform of the keep to
enjoy the complete impression so overtaken. I spent such another half hour
at Ludlow, which is a much grander and more famous monument. Ludlow,
however, is a ruin--the most impressive and magnificent of ruins. The
charming old town and the admirable castle form a capital object of
pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent example of a small English provincial
town that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry: I remember there
no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their attendant purlieus and
slums. The little city is perched upon a hill near which the goodly Severn
wanders, and it has a noticeable air of civic dignity. Its streets are wide
and clean, empty and a little grass-grown, and bordered with spacious,
soberly-ornamental brick houses, which look as if there had been more going
on in them in the first decade of the century than there is in the present,
but which can still, nevertheless, hold up their heads and keep their
window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant and their doorsteps whitened.
The place looks as if seventy years ago it had been the centre of a large
provincial society, and as if that society had been very "good of its
kind." It must have transported itself to Ludlow for the season--in
rumbling coaches and heavyish curricles--and there entertained itself in
decent emulation of that metropolis which a choice of railway-lines had not
as yet placed within its immediate reach. It had balls at the
assembly-rooms; it had Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss
Austin's and Miss Edgeworth's heroines might perfectly well have had their
first love-affair there: a journey to Ludlow would certainly have been a
great event to Fanny Price or Anne Eliot, to Helen or Belinda. It is a
place on which a provincial "gentry" has left a sensible stamp. I have
seldom seen so good a collection of houses of the period between the elder
picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such
relics and intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture with
a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its
characteristics. It is still easy for a stranger who has stayed a while in
England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of English
social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as all
observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that the
mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of the
things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar "notes"
of England infinitely exaggerated--the rigidly aristocratic constitution of
society, for instance; the unæsthetic temper of the people; the private
character of most kinds of comfort and entertainment. Let an old gentleman
of conservative tastes, who can remember the century's youth, talk to you
at a club _temporis acti_--tell you wherein it is that from his own point
of view London, as a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall
off for the last forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air of
decent sympathy, but privately you will be saying to yourself how
difficult a place of sojourn London must have been in those days for a
stranger--how little cosmopolitan, how bound, in a thousand ways, with
narrowness of custom. What is true of the metropolis at that time is of
course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one
I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even
then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of
the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in. They would effectually
have transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.
Ludlow Castle is an example of a great feudal fortress, as the little
castellated manor I spoke of a while since is an example of a small one.
The great courtyard at Ludlow is as large as the central square of a city,
but now it is all vacant and grassy, and the day I was there a lonely old
horse was tethered and browsing in the middle of it. The place is in
extreme dilapidation, but here and there some of its more striking features
have held well together, and you may get a very sufficient notion of the
immense scale upon which things were ordered in the day of its strength. It
must have been garrisoned with a small army, and the vast _enceinte_ must
have enclosed a stalwart little world. Such an impression of thickness and
duskiness as one still gets from fragments of partition and chamber--such a
sense of being well behind something, well out of the daylight and its
dangers--of the comfort of the time having been security, and security
incarceration! There are prisons within the prison--horrible unlighted
caverns of dismal depth, with holes in the roof through which Heaven knows
what odious refreshment was tossed down to the poor groping _détenu_. There
is nothing, surely, that paints one side of the Middle Ages more vividly
than this fact that fine people lived in the same house with their
prisoners, and kept the key in their pocket. Fancy the young ladies of the
family working tapestry in their "bower" with the knowledge that at the
bottom of the corkscrew staircase one of their papa's enemies was sitting
month after month in mouldy midnight! But Ludlow Castle has brighter
associations than these, the chief of which I should have mentioned at the
outset. It was for a long period the official residence of the
governors--the "lords presidents" they were called--of the Marches of
Wales, and it was in the days of its presidential splendor that Milton's
_Comus_ was acted in the great hall. Wandering about in shady corners of
the ruin, it is the echo of that enchanting verse that we should try to
catch, and not the faint groans of some encaverned malefactor. Other verse
was also produced at Ludlow--verse, however, of a less sonorous quality. A
portion of Samuel Butler's _Hudibras_ was composed there. Let me add that
the traveller who spends a morning at Ludlow will naturally have come
thither from Shrewsbury, of which place I have left myself no space to
speak, though it is worth, and well worth, an allusion. Shrewsbury is a
museum of beautiful old gabled, cross-timbered house-fronts.
H. JAMES, JR.
LITTLE LIZAY.
Alston was a Virginia slave--a tall, well-built half-breed, in whom the
white blood dominated the black. When about thirty-seven years of age he
was sold to a Mississippi plantation, in the north-western part of the
State and on the river. The farm was managed by an overseer, the
master--Horton by name--being a practising physician in Memphis, Tenn.
Alston had been on the plantation a few weeks when, toward the last of
September, the cotton-picking season opened. The year had been, for the
river-plantations, exceptionally favorable for cotton-growing. On the
Horton place especially "the stand" had been pronounced perfect, there
being scarcely a gap, scarcely a stalk missing from the mile-long rows of
the broad fields. Then, the rainfall had not been so profuse as to develop
foliage at the bolls' expense, as was too frequently the case on the river.
Yet it had been plenteous enough to keep off the "rust," from which the
dryer upland plantations were now suffering. Neither the "boll-worm" nor
the dreaded "army-worm" had molested the river-fields; so the tall
pyramidal plants were thickly set with "squares" and green egg-shaped
bolls, smooth and shining as with varnish. On a single stalk might be seen
all stages of development--from the ripe, brown boll, parted starlike, with
the long white fleece depending, to the bean-sized embryo from which the
crimson flower had but just fallen. Indeed, among the wide-open bolls there
was an occasional flower, cream-hued or crimson according to its age, for
the cotton-bloom at opening resembles in color the magnolia-blossom, but
this changes quickly to a deep crimson.
There was, then, the promise, almost the certainty, of a heavy crop on the
Horton place. It was in view of this that the owner completed an
arrangement, for months under consideration, in which he increased his
working plantation-force by thirteen hands, of whom one was Alston. It was,
too, in view of this promised heavy crop that the overseer, Mr. Buck,
harangued the slaves at the opening of the picking-season. The burden of
his harangue was, that no flagging would be tolerated in cotton-gathering
during the season. The figures of the past year were on record, showing
what each hand did each day. There was to be no falling behind these
figures: indeed, they must be beaten, for the heavier bolling made the
picking easier. Any one falling behind was to be cowhided. As for the new
hands, they ought to lead the field, for they were all young, stout
fellows.
As has been said, Alston was tall, strong, well-made. Working in tobacco,
to whose culture he had been used, he could hold his hand with the best:
how would it be in this new business of cotton-picking? He had a strong
element of cheerful fidelity in his nature. The first day he worked
steadily and as rapidly as he was able at the unfamiliar employment. When
night came he reckoned he had done well. With a complacent feeling he stood
waiting his turn as the great baskets, one after another, were swung on the
steelyard and the weights announced. He found himself pitying some of the
pickers as light weights were called, wondering if they had fallen behind
last year's figures. When his basket was brought forward, it was by Big
Sam, who with one hand swung it lightly to the scales; yet Alston's thought
was, "How strong Big Sam is!" and never, "How light the basket!"
The weight was announced: Alston was almost stunned. He had strained every
nerve, yet here he was behind the children-pickers, behind the gray old
women stiff with rheumatism and broken with childbearing and with doing
men's work.
"Sixty-three pounds!" the overseer said with a threatening tone. "Min' yer
git a heap higher'n that ter-morrer, yer yaller raskel! Ef yer can't pick
cotton, yer'll be sol' down in Louzany to a sugar-plantation, whar' niggers
don't git nothin' ter eat 'cept cotton-seeds an' a few dreggy lasses."
Next to being sent to "the bad place" itself, the most terrible fate, to
the negro's imagination, was to be sold to a sugar-planter.
"Here's Big Sam," the overseer continued, "nigh unto three hunderd; an'
Little Lizay two hunderd an' fawty-seven.--That's the bigges' figger yer's
ever struck yit, Lizay: shows what yer kin do. Min' yer come up ter it
ter-morrer an' ev'ry other day."
"Days gits shawter 'bout Chrismus-time," Little Lizay ventured to suggest,
"an' it gits col', an' my fingers ain't limber."
"Don't give me none yer jaw. Reckon I knows 'nuff ter make 'lowances fer
col' an' shawt days an' scatterin' bolls an' sich like."
The next day, Alston, humiliated by his failure and by the brutal reprimand
he had received, went to the cotton-field before any of the other
hands--indeed, before it was fairly light. There he worked if ever a man
did work. When the other negroes came on the field there were laughing,
talking, singing, nodding and occasional napping in the shade of the
cotton-stalks. But Alston took no part in any of these. He had no interest
for anything apart from his work. At this all his faculties were engaged.
His lithe body was seen swaying from side to side about the widespreading
branches; he stood on tiptoe to reach the topmost bolls; he got on his
knees to work the base-limbs, pressing down and away the long grass with
his broad feet, tearing and holding back even with his teeth hindering
tendrils of the passion-flower and morning-glory and other creepers which
had escaped the devastating hoe when the crop was "laid by," and had made
good their hold on occasional stalks. Persistently he worked in this intent
way all through the hot day, every muscle in action. He lingered at the
work till after the last of the other pickers had with great baskets poised
on head joined the long, weird procession, showing white in the dusk, that
went winding through field and lane to the ginhouse. On he worked till the
crescent moon came up and he could hardly discern fleece from leaf. At
last, fearing that the basket-weighing might be ended before he could reach
the ginhouse, a half mile distant, he emptied his pick-sack, belted at his
waist, into the tall barrel-like basket, tramped the cotton with a few
movements of his bare feet, and then kneeling got the basket to his
shoulder: he was not used to the balancing on head which seemed natural as
breathing to the old hands. With long strides he hurried to the ginhouse.
He was not a minute too early. Almost the last basket had been weighed,
emptied and stacked when he climbed the ladder-like steps to the scaffold
where the cotton was sunned preparatory to its ginning. When he had pushed
his way through the crowd of negroes hanging about the door of the
ginhouse-loft he heard the overseer call, "Whar's that yaller whelp,
Als'on?"
"Here, sah," Alston answered, hurrying forward to put his basket on the
steelyard.
"Give me any mo' yer jaw an' I'll lay yer out with the butt-en' er this
whip," said Mr. Buck. Alston was wondering what he had said that was
disrespectful, when the man added, "Won't have none yer sahrin' uv me. I's
yer moster, an' that's what yer's got ter call me, I let yer know."
Alston's blood was up, but the slaves were used to self-repression. All
that was endurable in their lives depended on patience and submission.
"Beg poddon, moster," Alston said with well-assumed meekness. "In Ol'
Virginny we use ter say moster to jist our sho'-'nuff owners; but," he
added quickly, by way of mollifying the overseer, who could not fail to be
stung by the covert jeer, "it's a heap better ter say moster ter all the
white folks, white trash an' all: then yer's sho' ter be right."
At this speech there was in Mr. Buck's rear much grinning and eye-rolling.
But Mr. Buck was engaged with Alston's basket, which was now on the scales.
"Sixty-seven poun's," the overseer called.
The slave's heart sank: only four pounds' gain after all his toil early and
late! He was bitterly disappointed. He believed the overseer lied. Then his
heart burned. Couldn't he leave his basket unemptied, and weigh it himself
when the others were gone? No: the order of routine was peremptory. The
baskets must be emptied and stacked on the scaffold outside the
cotton-loft, so that there would be no chance the next morning for the
negroes to take away cotton in their baskets to the fields. And what if he
could reweigh his cotton, and prove Mr. Buck a liar? He would not dare
breathe the discovery.
So Alston emptied out the cotton he had worked so hard to gather, listening
moodily to the overseer's harsh threats: "Yer reckon I's goin' to stan'
sich figgers? Sixty-seven poun's! fou' poun's 'head uv yistiddy. Yer ought
ter be fawty ahead. I won't look at nothin' under a hunderd. Ef yer don't
get it ter-morrer I'll tie yer up, sho's yer bawn, yer great merlatto dog!
Yer's 'hin' the poo'es' gal in the fiel'."
"I never pick no cotton 'fo' yistiddy, an' its tolerbul unhandy. Rickon I
kin do better when I gits my han' in. I use ter could wuck fus'-rate in
tobaccy."
"Tobaccy won't save yer. We hain't got no use for niggers ef they can't
come up ter the scratch on cotton. I's made a big crop, an' I ain't goin'
ter let it rot in the fiel'. Yer ought ter pick three hunderd ev'ry day. I
know'd a nigger onct, a heap littler than Little Lizay, that picked five
hunderd ev'ry lick; an' I hearn tell uv a feller that went up ter seven
hunderd. I ain't goin' ter take no mo' sixties from yer: a good hunderd or
the cowhide. That's the talk!"
"I'll pick all I kin," said Alston: "I wuckt haud's I could ter-day."
"Ef yer don't hush yer lyin' mouth I'll cut yer heart out."
Alston went from the gin-loft, his blood tingling. On the sunning-scaffold
he encountered Little Lizay. She had been listening--had heard all that had
passed between the two men. She went down the scaffold-steps, and Alston
came soon after. She waited for him, and they walked to the "quarter"
together. "It's mighty haud, ain't it?" she said.
"I believe he tol' a lie 'bout my baskit. Anyhow, I wuckt haud's I could
ter-day. I can't pick no hunderd poun's uv the flimpsy stuff. He'll have
ter cowhide me: I don't kere."
But Alston did care keenly--not so much for the pain; he could bear worse
misery than the brutal arm could inflict, though the rawhide cut like a
dull knife; but it was the shame, the disgrace, of the thing. He was a
stranger on the place--only a few weeks there--and to be tied up and
flogged in the midst of strange, unsympathizing negroes! it was such
degradation to his manhood. Since he was a child he had not been struck. He
had been rather a favorite with his master in Virginia, but this master had
died in debt, leaving numerous heirs, and in the changes incident to a
partition of the estate Alston was sold.
Perceiving that he had Little Lizay's sympathy, Alston went on talking,
telling her that he could stand a lashing coming from his own master, but
that an overseer was only white trash, who never did "own a nigger," and
never would be able to. If he had to be flogged, he wanted it to be by a
gentleman.
"Never min'," said Little Lizay. "Maybe yer'll git mo' ter-morrer. When
yer's pickin' yer mus' quit stoppin' ter pick out the leaves an' trash. I
lets ev'rything go in that happens, green bolls an' all: they weighs
heavy."
The following day, Alston, as before, went to the cotton-field early, but
he found that Little Lizay had the start of him. She had already emptied
her sack into her pick-basket. "The cotton we get now'll weigh heavy," she
said: "it's got dew on it."
"That's so," Alston assented, "but yer mus'n't talk ter me, Lizay. I's got
ter put all my min' ter my wuck: I can't foad ter talk."
"I can't nuther," said Lizay. "Wish I didn't pick so much cotton the fus'
day: I's got ter keep on trottin' ter two hunderd an' fawty-seven."
She selected two rows beside Alston's. She wore a coarse dress of uncolored
homespun cotton, of the plainest and scantiest make, low in the neck, short
in the sleeves and skirt. Her feet and head were bare. A sack of like
material with her dress was tied about the waist, apron-like. This was to
receive immediately the pickings from the hand. When filled it was emptied
in a pick-basket, holding with a little packing fifty or sixty pounds. This
small basket was kept in the picker's vicinity, being moved forward
whenever the sack was taken back for emptying. Besides this go-between
pick-basket, there was at that end of the row nearest the ginhouse an
immense basket, nearly as tall as a barrel, and of greater circumference,
with a capacity for three hundred pounds.
Alston's pick-basket stood beside Little Lizay's, and between his row and
hers. She was carrying two rows to his one, and he perceived, without
looking and with a vague envy, that Lizay emptied three sacks at least to
his one. Yet she did not seem to be working half as hard as he was. With
light, graceful movements, now right, now left, she plucked the white tufts
and the candelabra-like pendants stretched by the wind and the expanding
lint till the dark seed could be discerned in clusters.
It was near nine o'clock when Alston emptied his first sack, some fifteen
pounds, in the pick-basket, which Little Lizay had brought forward with her
own. Soon after she went back to empty her sack. The baskets stood
hazardously near Alston for Lizay's game, but with her back turned to him
and the luxuriant cotton-stalks between she reckoned she might venture.
One-third of her sack she threw into Alston's basket--about five pounds.
And thus the poor soul did during the day, giving a third of her gatherings
to Alston. She would have given him more--the half, the whole, everything
she owned--for she regarded him with a feeling that would have been called
love in a fairer woman.
Alston had been in Virginia something of a house-servant, doing occasional
duty as coachman when the regular official was ill or was wanted elsewhere.
He was also a good table-waiter, and had served in the dining-room when
there were guests. So it came that though properly a field-hand, yet in
manner and speech he showed to advantage beside the slaves who were
exclusively field-hands. Little Lizay too occupied a halfway place between
these and the better-spoken, gentler-mannered house-servants. In the
winters, after Christmas, which usually terminated the picking-season,
Lizay was called to the place of head assistant of the plantation
seamstress. Indeed, she did little field-service except in times of special
pressure and during the quarter of cotton-picking. She was so
nimble-fingered and swift that she could not be spared from the field in
picking-season, especially if, as was the case this year, there was a heavy
crop. And occasionally in the winter, when there was unusual company at the
Hortons' in the city, Little Lizay was sent for and had the advantage of a
season in town. She felt her superiority to the average plantation-negro,
and had not married, though not unsolicited. When, therefore, Alston came
she at once recognized in him a companion, and she was not long in making
over her favor to the distinguished-looking stranger. He was, as she, a
half-breed, and Lizay liked her own color. Had Alston courted her favor,
she might have yielded it less readily, but he did not take easily to his
new companions. Some called him proud: others reckoned he had left a
sweetheart, a wife perhaps, in Virginia. Little Lizay's evident preference
laid her open to the rude jokes and sneers of the other negroes--in
particular Big Sam, who was her suitor, and Edny Ann, who was fond of
Alston. But Edny Ann did not care for Alston as Little Lizay did--could
not, indeed. She was incapable of the devotion that Lizay felt. She would
not have left her sleep and gone to the dew-wet field before daybreak for
the sake of helping Alston: she would not have taken the risk of falling
behind in her picking, and thus incurring a flogging, by dividing her
gatherings with him. And if she had helped him at all, it would not have
been delicately, as Lizay's help had been given. Edny Ann would have wanted
Alston to know that she had helped him: Little Lizay wished to hide it from
him, both because she feared he would decline her help, and because she
wanted to spare him the humiliation.
When night came not only Alston lingered, picking by moonlight, but Little
Lizay; and this gave rise to much laughing among the other pickers, and to
many coarse jokes. But to one who knew her secret it would have seemed
piteous--the girl's anxious face as the weighing proceeded, drawing on and
on to Alston's basket and hers at the very end of the line. Would he have
a hundred? would she fall behind? Would he be saved the flogging? would she
have to suffer in his stead? She dreaded a flogging at the hands of that
brutal overseer, and all her womanliness shrunk from the degradation of
being stripped and flogged in Alston's presence, or even of having him know
that she was to be cowhided. She bethought her of making an appeal to the
overseer. She knew she had some power with him, for he had been enamored,
in his brutish way, of her physical charms--her neat figure, her glossy,
waving hair, and the small, shapely hand and foot.
Just before the weighing had reached Alston's basket and hers she stepped
beside the overseer. "Please, Mos' Buck," she said in a low tone, "ef I
falls 'hin' myse'f, an' don't git up to them fus' figgers, an' has to git
cowhided--please, sah, don't let the black folks an' Als'on know 'bout it."
Mr. Buck took a hint from this request. He perceived that Lizay was
interested in Alston, as he had already guessed from the jokes of the
negroes, and that she was specially desirous to conceal her shame from the
man to whom she had given her favor. Mr. Buck resented it that Lizay should
rebuff him and encourage Alston; so he hoped that for this once, at any
rate, she would fall behind: he had thought of a capital plan of revenging
himself on her.
The next moment after her whispered appeal Lizay saw with intense interest
Alston's basket brought forward for weighing. She glanced at him. His eyes
were wide open, staring with eagerness, his head advanced, his whole
attitude one of absorbed anxiety. By the position of the weight or pea on
the steelyard she knew that it was put somewhere near the sixty notch. Up
flew the end of the yard, and up flew Lizay's heart with it: out went the
pea some ten teeth, yet up again went the impatient steel. Click! click!
click! rattled the weight. Out and out another ten notches, then another
and another--one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one
hundred and three--yet the yard still protested, still called for more.
Out one tooth farther, and the steel lay along the horizon. Everybody
listened.
"One hunderd an' fou'," Mr. Buck announced. "Thar' now, yer lazy dog! I
know'd yer wasn't half wuckin'. Now see ter it yer come ter taw arter this:
hunderd an' fou's yer notch."
It was a moment of supreme relief to Alston. He drew a long breath, and
returned some smiles of congratulation from the negroes. Then he sighed: he
felt hopeless of repeating the weight day after day. He had hardly stopped
to breathe from day-dawn till moon-rise: he would not always have the
friendly moonlight to help him. But now Little Lizay's basket was swinging.
He listened to hear its weight with interest, but how unlike this was to
the absorbed anxiety which she had felt for him!
"Two hunderd an' 'leven--thutty-six poun's behin'!" said Mr. Buck, smacking
his lips as over some good thing. Now he should have vent for his spite
against the girl. "Thutty-six lashes on yer bar' back by yer sweet'art."
Mr. Buck said this with a dreadful snicker in Little Lizay's face.
The word ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth that Little Lizay, the
famous picker, had fallen behind, and was to be flogged--by the overseer,
some said--by Big Sam, others declared. But Edny Ann reckoned the cowhiding
was to be done by Alston.
"An' her dersarves it, kase her's a big fool," said Edny Ann, "hangin'
roun' him, an' patchin' his cloze like her wus morred ter 'im--an' washin'
his shut an' britches ev'ry Saddy night."
All the hands were required to stop after the weighing and witness the
floggings, as a warning to themselves and an enhancement of punishment to
the convicts. There was but little shrinking from the sight. Human nature
is everywhere much the same: cruel spectacles brutalize, whether in Spain
or on a negro-plantation. But to-night there was a new sensation: the
slaves were on the _qui vive_ to see Little Lizay flogged, and to find out
whose hand was to wield the whip.
"Now hurry up yere, yer lazy raskels! an' git yer floggin'," Mr. Buck said
when the weighing was over.
From right and left and front and rear negroes came forward and stood, a
motley group, before the one white man. It was a weird spectacle that did
not seem to belong to our earth. Black faces, heads above heads, crowded at
the doorway--some solemn and sympathetic, others grinning in anticipation
of the show. Negroes were perched on the gin and in the corners of the loft
where the cotton was heaped. Others lay at full length close to the field
of action. In every direction the dusky figures dotted the cotton lying on
every hand about the little cleared space where the flogging and weighing
were done. In a close bunch stood the shrinking, cowering convicts, some
with heads white as the cotton all about them. Mr. Buck, the most
picturesque figure of the whole, was laying off his coat and baring his
arm, standing under the solitary lamp depending from the rafters, whose
faint light served to give to all the scene an indefinite supernatural
aspect.
"Now, come out yere," said Mr. Buck, moving from under the grease-lamp and
calling for volunteers.
One by one the negroes came forward and bared themselves to the
waist--children, strong men and old women. And then there was shrieking and
wailing, begging and praying: it was like a leaf out of hell.