THE GORDON FAMILY.
A week or two had passed over the head of Nina Gordon since she was
first introduced to our readers, and during this time she had become
familiar with the details of her home life. Nominally, she stood at the
head of her plantation, as mistress and queen in her own right of all,
both in doors and out; but, really, she found herself, by her own youth
and inexperience, her ignorance of practical details, very much in the
hands of those she professed to govern.
The duties of a southern housekeeper, on a plantation, are onerous
beyond any amount of northern conception. Every article wanted for daily
consumption must be kept under lock and key, and doled out as need
arises. For the most part, the servants are only grown-up children,
without consideration, forethought, or self-control, quarrelling with
each other, and divided into parties and factions, hopeless of any
reasonable control. Every article of wear, for some hundreds of people,
must be thought of, purchased, cut and made, under the direction of the
mistress; and add to this the care of young children, whose childish
mothers are totally unfit to govern or care for them, and we have some
slight idea of what devolves on southern housekeepers.
Our reader has seen what Nina was on her return from New York, and can
easily imagine that she had no idea of embracing, in good earnest, the
hard duties of such a life.
In fact, since the death of Nina's mother, the situation of the mistress
of the family had been only nominally filled by her aunt, Mrs. Nesbit.
The real housekeeper, in fact, was an old mulatto woman, named Katy, who
had been trained by Nina's mother. Notwithstanding the general
inefficiency and childishness of negro servants, there often are to be
found among them those of great practical ability. Whenever owners,
through necessity or from tact, select such servants, and subject them
to the kind of training and responsibility which belongs to a state of
freedom, the same qualities are developed which exist in free society.
Nina's mother, being always in delicate health, had, from necessity,
been obliged to commit much responsibility to "Aunt Katy," as she was
called; and she had grown up under the discipline into a very efficient
housekeeper. With her tall red turban, her jingling bunch of keys, and
an abundant sense of the importance of her office, she was a dignitary
not lightly to be disregarded.
It is true that she professed the utmost deference for her young
mistress, and very generally passed the compliment of inquiring what she
would have done; but it was pretty generally understood that her assent
to Aunt Katy's propositions was considered as much a matter of course as
the queen's to a ministerial recommendation. Indeed, had Nina chosen to
demur, her prime minister had the power, without departing in the
slightest degree from a respectful bearing, to involve her in labyrinths
of perplexity without end. And as Nina hated trouble, and wanted, above
all things, to have her time to herself for her own amusement, she
wisely concluded not to interfere with Aunt Katy's reign, and to get by
persuasion and coaxing, what the old body would have been far too
consequential and opinionated to give to authority.
In like manner, at the head of all out-door affairs was the young
quadroon, Harry, whom we introduced in the first chapter. In order to
come fully at the relation in which he stood to the estate, we must,
after the fashion of historians generally, go back a hundred years or
so, in order to give our readers a fair start. Behold us, therefore,
assuming historic dignity, as follows.
Among the first emigrants to Virginia, in its colonial days, was one
Thomas Gordon, Knight, a distant offshoot of the noble Gordon family,
renowned in Scottish history. Being a gentleman of some considerable
energy, and impatient of the narrow limits of the Old World, where he
found little opportunity to obtain that wealth which was necessary to
meet the demands of his family pride, he struck off for himself into
Virginia. Naturally of an adventurous turn, he was one of the first to
propose the enterprise which afterwards resulted in a settlement on the
banks of the Chowan River, in North Carolina. Here he took up for
himself a large tract of the finest alluvial land, and set himself to
the business of planting, with the energy and skill characteristic of
his nation; and, as the soil was new and fertile, he soon received a
very munificent return for his enterprise. Inspired with remembrances of
old ancestral renown, the Gordon family transmitted in their descent all
the traditions, feelings, and habits, which were the growth of the
aristocratic caste from which they sprung. The name of Canema, given to
the estate, came from an Indian guide and interpreter, who accompanied
the first Colonel Gordon as confidential servant.
The estate, being entailed, passed down through the colonial times
unbroken in the family, whose wealth, for some years, seemed to increase
with every generation.
The family mansion was one of those fond reproductions of the
architectural style of the landed gentry in England, in which, as far as
their means could compass it, the planters were fond of indulging.
Carpenters and carvers had been brought over, at great expense, from the
old country, to give the fruits of their skill in its erection; and it
was a fancy of the ancestor who built it, to display, in its wood-work,
that exuberance of new and rare woods with which the American continent
was supposed to abound. He had made an adventurous voyage into South
America, and brought from thence specimens of those materials more
brilliant than rose-wood, and hard as ebony, which grow so profusely on
the banks of the Amazon that the natives use them for timber. The floor
of the central hall of the house was a curiously-inlaid parquet of these
brilliant materials, arranged in fine block-work, highly polished.
The outside of the house was built in the old Virginian fashion, with
two tiers of balconies running completely round, as being much better
suited to the American climate than any of European mode. The inside,
however, was decorated with sculpture and carvings, copied, many of
them, from ancestral residences in Scotland, giving to the mansion an
air of premature antiquity.
Here, for two or three generations, the Gordon family had lived in
opulence. During the time, however, of Nina's father, and still more
after his death, there appeared evidently on the place signs of that
gradual decay which has conducted many an old Virginian family to
poverty and ruin. Slave labor, of all others the most worthless and
profitless, had exhausted the first vigor of the soil, and the
proprietors gradually degenerated from those habits of energy which were
called forth by the necessities of the first settlers, and everything
proceeded with that free-and-easy abandon, in which both master and
slave appeared to have one common object,--that of proving who should
waste with most freedom.
At Colonel Gordon's death, he had bequeathed, as we have already shown,
the whole family estate to his daughter, under the care of a servant, of
whose uncommon intelligence and thorough devotion of heart he had the
most ample proof. When it is reflected that the overseers are generally
taken from a class of whites who are often lower in ignorance and
barbarism than even the slaves, and that their wastefulness and rapacity
are a by-word among the planters, it is no wonder that Colonel Gordon
thought that, in leaving his plantation under the care of one so
energetic, competent, and faithful, as Harry, he had made the best
possible provision for his daughter.
Harry was the son of his master, and inherited much of the temper and
constitution of his father, tempered by the soft and genial temperament
of the beautiful Eboe mulattress, who was his mother. From this
circumstance Harry had received advantages of education very superior to
what commonly fell to the lot of his class. He had also accompanied his
master as valet during the tour of Europe, and thus his opportunities of
general observation had been still further enlarged, and that tact, by
which those of the mixed blood seem so peculiarly fitted to appreciate
all the finer aspects of conventional life had been called out and
exercised; so that it would be difficult in any circle to meet with a
more agreeable and gentlemanly person. In leaving a man of this
character, and his own son, still in the bonds of slavery, Colonel
Gordon was influenced by that passionate devotion to his daughter which
with him overpowered every consideration. A man so cultivated, he argued
to himself, might find many avenues opened to him in freedom; might be
tempted to leave the estate to other hands, and seek his own fortune. He
therefore resolved to leave him bound by an indissoluble tie for a term
of years, trusting to his attachment to Nina to make this service
tolerable.
Possessed of very uncommon judgment, firmness, and knowledge of human
nature, Harry had found means to acquire great ascendency over the hands
of the plantation, and, either through fear or through friendship, there
was a universal subordination to him. The executors of the estate
scarcely made even a feint of overseeing him; and he proceeded, to all
intents and purposes, with the perfect ease of a free man. Everybody,
for miles around, knew and respected him; and, had he not been possessed
of a good share of the thoughtful, forecasting temperament derived from
his Scottish parentage, he might have been completely happy, and
forgotten even the existence of the chains whose weight he never felt.
It was only in the presence of Tom Gordon--Colonel Gordon's lawful
son--that he ever realized that he was a slave. From childhood, there
had been a rooted enmity between the brothers, which deepened as years
passed on; and, as he found himself, on every return of the young man to
the place, subjected to taunts and ill-usage, to which his defenceless
position left him no power to reply, he had resolved never to marry, and
lay the foundation for a family, until such time as he should be able to
have the command of his own destiny, and that of his household. But the
charms of a pretty French quadroon overcame the dictates of prudence.
The history of Tom Gordon is the history of many a young man grown up
under the institutions and in the state of society which formed him.
Nature had endowed him with no mean share of talent, and with that
perilous quickness of nervous organization, which, like fire, is a good
servant, but a bad master. Out of those elements, with due training,
might have been formed an efficient and eloquent public man; but,
brought up from childhood among servants to whom his infant will was
law, indulged during the period of infantile beauty and grace in the
full expression of every whim, growing into boyhood among slaves with
but the average amount of plantation morality, his passions developed at
a fearfully early time of life; and, before his father thought of
seizing the reins of authority, they had gone out of his hands forever.
Tutor after tutor was employed on the plantation to instruct him, and
left, terrified by his temper. The secluded nature of the plantation
left him without that healthful stimulus of society which is often a
help in enabling a boy to come to the knowledge and control of himself.
His associates were either the slaves, or the overseers, who are
generally unprincipled and artful, or the surrounding whites, who lay in
a yet lower deep of degradation. For one reason or another, it was for
the interest of all these to flatter his vices and covertly to assist
him in opposing and deceiving his parents. Thus an early age saw him an
adept in every low form of vice. In despair, he was at length sent to an
academy at the North, where he commenced his career on the first day by
striking the teacher in the face, and was consequently expelled. Thence
he went to another, where, learning caution from experience, he was
enabled to maintain his foothold. There he was a successful colporteur
and missionary in the way of introducing a knowledge of bowie-knives,
revolvers, and vicious literature. Artful, bold, and daring, his
residence for a year at a school was sufficient to initiate in the way
of ruin perhaps one fourth of the boys. He was handsome, and, when not
provoked, good-natured, and had that off-hand way of spending money
which passes among boys for generosity. The simple sons of hard-working
farmers, bred in habits of industry and frugality, were dazzled and
astonished by the freedom with which he talked, and drank, and spit, and
swore. He was a hero in their eye, and they began to wonder at the
number of things, to them unknown before, which went to make up the
necessaries of life. From school he was transferred to college, and
there placed under the care of a professor, who was paid an exorbitant
sum for overlooking his affairs. The consequence was, that while many a
northern boy, whose father could not afford to pay for similar
patronage, was disciplined, rusticated, or expelled, as the case might
be, Tom Gordon exploited gloriously through college, getting drunk every
week or two, breaking windows, smoking freshmen, heading various sprees
in different parts of the country, and at last graduating nobody knew
how, except the patron professor, who received an extra sum for the
extra difficulties of the case. Returned home, he went into a lawyer's
office in Raleigh, where, by a pleasant fiction, he was said to be
reading law, because he was occasionally seen at the office during the
intervals of his more serious avocations of gambling, and horse-racing,
and drinking. His father, an affectionate but passionate man, was wholly
unable to control him, and the conflicts between them often shook the
whole domestic fabric. Nevertheless, to the last Colonel Gordon indulged
the old hope for such cases made and provided, that Tom would get
through sowing his wild oats, some time, and settle down and be a
respectable man; in which hope he left him the half of his property.
Since that time, Tom seemed to have studied on no subject except how to
accelerate the growth of those wings which riches are said to be
inclined to take, under the most favorable circumstances.
As often happens in such cases of utter ruin, Tom Gordon was a much
worse character for all the elements of good which he possessed. He had
sufficient perception of right, and sufficient conscience remaining, to
make him bitter and uncomfortable. In proportion as he knew himself
unworthy of his father's affection and trust, he became jealous and
angry at any indications of the want of it. He had contracted a settled
ill-will to his sister, for no other apparent reason except that the
father took a comfort in her which he did not in him. From childhood, it
was his habit to vex and annoy her in every possible way; and it was for
this reason, among many others, that Harry had persuaded Mr. John
Gordon, Nina's uncle and guardian, to place her at the New York
boarding-school, where she acquired what is termed an education. After
finishing her school career, she had been spending a few months in a
family of a cousin of her mother's, and running with loose rein the
career of fashionable gayety.
Luckily, she brought home with her unspoiled a genuine love of nature,
which made the rural habits of plantation life agreeable to her.
Neighbors there were few. Her uncle's plantation, five miles distant,
was the nearest. Other families with whom the Gordons were in the habit
of exchanging occasional visits were some ten or fifteen miles distant.
It was Nina's delight, however, in her muslin wrapper and straw hat, to
patter about over the plantation, to chat with the negroes among their
cabins, amusing herself with the various drolleries and peculiarities to
which long absence had given the zest of novelty. Then she would call
for her pony, and, attended by Harry, or some of her servants, would
career through the woods, gathering the wild-flowers with which they
abound; perhaps stop for a day at her uncle's, have a chat and a romp
with him, and return the next morning.
In the comparative solitude of her present life her mind began to clear
itself of some former follies, as water when at rest deposits the
sediment which clouded it. Apart from the crowd, and the world of
gayeties which had dizzied her, she could not help admitting to herself
the folly of much she had been doing. Something, doubtless, was added to
this by the letters of Clayton. The tone of them, so manly and sincere,
so respectful and kind, so removed either from adulation or
sentimentalism, had an effect upon her greater than she was herself
aware of. So Nina, in her positive and off-hand way, sat down, one day,
and wrote farewell letters to both her other lovers, and felt herself
quite relieved by the process.
A young person could scarce stand more entirely alone, as to sympathetic
intercourse with relations, than Nina. It is true that the presence of
her mother's sister in the family caused it to be said that she was
residing under the care of an aunt.
Mrs. Nesbit, however, was simply one of those well-bred, well-dressed
lay-figures, whose only office in life seems to be to occupy a certain
room in a house, to sit in certain chairs at proper hours, to make
certain remarks at suitable intervals of conversation. In her youth this
lady had run quite a career as a belle and beauty. Nature had endowed
her with a handsome face and figure, and youth and the pleasure of
admiration for some years supplied a sufficient flow of animal spirits
to make the beauty effective. Early married, she became the mother of
several children, who were one by one swept into the grave. The death of
her husband, last of all, left her with a very small fortune alone in
the world; and, like many in similar circumstances, she was content to
sink into an appendage to another's family.
Mrs. Nesbit considered herself very religious; and, as there is a great
deal that passes for religion, ordinarily, of which she may be fairly
considered a representative, we will present our readers with a
philosophical analysis of the article. When young, she had thought only
of self in the form of admiration, and the indulgence of her animal
spirits. When married, she had thought of self only in her husband and
children, whom she loved because they were _hers_, and for no other
reason.
When death swept away her domestic circle, and time stole the beauty and
freshness of animal spirits, her self-love took another form; and,
perceiving that this world was becoming to her somewhat _passé_, she
determined to make the best of her chance for another.
Religion she looked upon in the light of a ticket, which, being once
purchased, and snugly laid away in a pocket-book, is to be produced at
the celestial gate, and thus secure admission to heaven.
At a certain period of her life, while she deemed this ticket
unpurchased, she was extremely low-spirited and gloomy, and went through
a quantity of theological reading enough to have astonished herself, had
she foreseen it in the days of her belleship. As the result of all, she
at last presented herself as a candidate for admission to a Presbyterian
church in the vicinity, there professing her determination to run the
Christian race. By the Christian race, she understood going at certain
stated times to religious meetings, reading the Bible and hymn-book at
certain hours in the day, giving at regular intervals stipulated sums to
religious charities, and preserving a general state of leaden
indifference to everybody and everything in the world.
She thus fondly imagined that she had renounced the world, because she
looked back with disgust on gayeties for which she had no longer
strength or spirits. Nor did she dream that the intensity with which her
mind travelled the narrow world of self, dwelling on the plaits of her
caps, the cut of her stone-colored satin gowns, the making of her tea
and her bed, and the saving of her narrow income, was exactly the same
in kind, though far less agreeable in development, as that which once
expended itself in dressing and dancing. Like many other apparently
negative characters, she had a pertinacious intensity of an extremely
narrow and aimless self-will. Her plans of life, small as they were,
had a thousand crimps and plaits, to every one of which she adhered with
invincible pertinacity. The poor lady little imagined, when she sat,
with such punctilious satisfaction, while the Rev. Mr. Orthodoxy
demonstrated that selfishness is the essence of all moral evil, that the
sentiment had the slightest application to her; nor dreamed that the
little, quiet, muddy current of self-will, which ran without noise or
indecorum under the whole structure of her being, might be found, in a
future day, to have undermined all her hopes of heaven. Of course, Mrs.
Nesbit regarded Nina, and all other lively young people, with a kind of
melancholy endurance--as shocking spectacles of worldliness. There was
but little sympathy, to be sure, between the dashing, and out-spoken,
and almost defiant little Nina, and the sombre silver-gray apparition
which glided quietly about the wide halls of her paternal mansion. In
fact, it seemed to afford the latter a mischievous pleasure to shock her
respectable relative on all convenient occasions. Mrs. Nesbit felt it
occasionally her duty, as she remarked, to call her lively niece into
her apartment, and endeavor to persuade her to read some such volume as
Law's Serious Call, or Owen on the One Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm; and
to give her a general and solemn warning against all the vanities of the
world, in which were generally included dressing in any color but black
and drab, dancing, flirting, writing love-letters, and all other
enormities, down to the eating of pea-nut candy. One of these scenes is
just now enacting in this good lady's apartment, upon which we will
raise the curtain.
Mrs. Nesbit, a diminutive, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned little woman, of
some five feet high, sat gently swaying in that respectable asylum for
American old age, commonly called a rocking-chair. Every rustle of her
silvery silk gown, every fold of the snowy kerchief on her neck, every
plait of her immaculate cap, spoke a soul long retired from this world
and its cares. The bed, arranged with extremest precision, however, was
covered with a _mélange_ of French finery, flounces, laces, among which
Nina kept up a continual agitation like that produced by a breeze in a
flower-bed, as she unfolded, turned, and fluttered them, before the eyes
of her relative.
"I have been through all this, Nina," said the latter, with a melancholy
shake of her head, "and I know the vanity of it."
"Well, aunty, I _haven't_ been through it, so _I_ don't know."
"Yes, my dear, when I was of your age, I used to go to balls and
parties, and could think of nothing but of dress and admiration. I have
been through it all, and seen the vanity of it."
"Well, aunt, I want to go through it, and see the vanity of it too.
That's just what I'm after. I'm on the way to be as sombre and solemn as
you are, but I'm bound to have a good time first. Now, look at this pink
brocade!"
Had the brocade been a pall, it could scarcely have been regarded with a
more lugubrious aspect.
"Ah, child! such a dying world as this! To spend so much time and
thought on dress!"
"Why, Aunt Nesbit, yesterday you spent just two whole hours in thinking
whether you should turn the breadths of your black silk dress upside
down, or down side up; and this was a dying world all the time. Now, I
don't see that it is any better to think of black silk than it is of
pink."
This was a view of the subject which seemed never to have occurred to
the good lady.
"But now, aunt, do cheer up, and look at this box of artificial flowers.
You know I thought I'd bring a stock on from New York. Now, aren't these
perfectly lovely? I like flowers that _mean_ something. Now, these are
all imitations of natural flowers, so perfect that you'd scarcely know
them from the real. See--there, that's a moss-rose; and now look at
these sweet peas, you'd think they had just been picked; and,
there--that heliotrope, and these jessamines, and those orange-blossoms,
and that wax camelia"--
"Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity!" said Mrs. Nesbit, shutting her
eyes, and shaking her head:--
"'What if we wear the richest vest,--
Peacocks and flies are better drest;
This flesh, with all its glorious forms,
Must drop to earth, and feed the worms.'"
"Aunt, I do think you have the most horrid, disgusting set of hymns, all
about worms, and dust, and such things!"
"It's my duty, child, when I see you so much taken up with such sinful
finery."
"Why, aunt, do you think artificial flowers are sinful?"
"Yes, dear; they are a sinful waste of time and money, and take off our
mind from more important things."
"Well, aunt, then what did the Lord make sweet peas, and roses, and
orange-blossoms for? I'm sure it's only doing as he does, to make
flowers. He don't make everything gray, or stone-color. Now, if you only
would come out in the garden, this morning, and see the oleanders, and
the crape myrtle, and the pinks, the roses, and the tulips, and the
hyacinths, I'm sure it would do you good."
"Oh, I should certainly catch cold, child, if I went out doors. Milly
left a crack opened in the window, last night, and I've sneezed three or
four times since. It will never do for me to go out in the garden; the
feeling of the ground striking up through my shoes is very unhealthy."
"Well, at any rate, aunt, I should think, if the Lord didn't wish us to
wear roses and jessamines, he would not have made them. And it is the
most natural thing in the world to want to wear flowers."
"It only feeds vanity and a love of display, my dear."
"I don't think it's vanity, or a love of display. I should want to dress
prettily, if I were the only person in the world. I love pretty things
because they _are_ pretty. I like to wear them because they make me look
pretty."
"There it is, child; you want to dress up your poor perishing body to
look pretty--that's the thing!"
"To be sure I do. Why shouldn't I? I mean to look as pretty as I can, as
long as I live."
"You seem to have quite a conceit of your beauty!" said Aunt Nesbit.
"Well, I know I am pretty. I'm not going to pretend I don't. I like my
own looks, now, that's a fact. I'm not like one of your Greek statues, I
know. I'm not wonderfully handsome, nor likely to set the world on fire
with my beauty. I'm just a pretty little thing; and I like flowers and
laces, and all of those things; and I mean to like them, and I don't
think there'll be a bit of religion in my not liking them; and as for
all that disagreeable stuff about the worms, that you are always telling
me, I don't think it does me a particle of good. And, if religion is
going to make me so _poky_, I shall put it off as long I can."
"I used to feel just as you do, dear, but I've seen the folly of it!"
"If I've got to lose my love for everything that is bright, everything
that is lively, and everything that is pretty, and like to read such
horrid stupid books, why, I'd rather be buried, and done with it!"
"That's the opposition of the natural heart, my dear."
The conversation was here interrupted by the entrance of a bright,
curly-headed mulatto boy, bearing Mrs. Nesbit's daily luncheon.
"Oh, here comes Tomtit," said Nina; "now for a scene. Let's see what he
has forgotten, now."
Tomtit was, in his way, a great character in the mansion. He and his
grandmother were the property of Mrs. Nesbit. His true name was no less
respectable and methodical than that of Thomas; but, as he was one of
those restless and effervescent sprites, who seem to be born for the
confusion of quiet people, Nina had rechristened him Tomtit, which
sobriquet was immediately recognized by the whole household as being
eminently descriptive and appropriate. A constant ripple and eddy of
drollery seemed to pervade his whole being; his large, saucy black eyes
had always a laughing fire in them, that it was impossible to meet
without a smile in return. Slave and property though he was, yet the
first sentiment of reverence for any created thing seemed yet wholly
unawakened in his curly pate. Breezy, idle, careless, flighty, as his
woodland namesake, life to him seemed only a repressed and pent-up
ebullition of animal enjoyment; and almost the only excitement of Mrs.
Nesbit's quiet life was her chronic controversy with Tomtit. Forty or
fifty times a day did the old body assure him "that she was astonished
at his conduct;" and as many times would he reply by showing the whole
set of his handsome teeth, on the broad grin, wholly inconsiderate of
the state of despair into which he thus reduced her.
On the present occasion, as he entered the room, his eye was caught by
the great display of finery on the bed; and, hastily dumping the waiter
on the first chair that occurred, with a flirt and a spring as lithe as
that of a squirrel, he was seated in a moment astride the foot-board,
indulging in a burst of merriment.
"Good law, Miss Nina, whar on earth dese yer come from? Good law, some
on 'em for me, isn't 'er?"
"You see that child!" now said Mrs. Nesbit, rocking back in her chair
with the air of a martyr. "After all my talkings to him! Nina, you ought
not to allow that; it just encourages him!"
"Tom, get down, you naughty creature you, and get the stand and put the
waiter on it. Mind yourself, now!" said Nina, laughing.
Tomtit cut a somerset from the foot-board to the floor, and, striking
up, on a very high key, "I'll bet my money on a bobtail nag," he danced
out a small table, as if it had been a partner, and deposited it, with a
jerk, at the side of Mrs. Nesbit, who aimed a cuff at his ears; but, as
he adroitly ducked his head, the intended blow came down upon the table
with more force than was comfortable to the inflictor.
"I believe that child is made of air!--I never can hit him!" said the
good lady, waxing red in the face. "He is enough to provoke a saint!"
"So he is, aunt; enough to provoke two saints like you and me. Tomtit,
you rogue," said she, giving a gentle pull to a handful of his curly
hair, "be good, now, and I'll show you the pretty things, by and by.
Come, put the waiter on the table, now; see if you can't walk, for
once!"
Casting down his eyes with an irresistible look of mock solemnity,
Tomtit marched with the waiter, and placed it by his mistress.
The good lady, after drawing off her gloves and making sundry little
decorous preparations, said a short grace over her meal, during which
time Tomtit seemed to be holding his sides with repressed merriment;
then, gravely laying hold of the handle of the teapot she stopped short,
gave an exclamation, and flirted her fingers, as she felt it almost
scalding hot.
"Tomtit, I do believe you intend to burn me to death, some day!"
"Laws, missus, dat are hot? Oh, sure I was tickler to set the nose round
to the fire."
"No, you didn't! You stuck the handle right into the fire as you're
always doing!"
"Laws, now, wonder if I did," said Tomtit, assuming an abstracted
appearance. "'Pears as if never can 'member which dem dare is nose, and
which handle. Now, I's a studdin on dat dare most all de morning--was
so," said he, gathering confidence, as he saw, by Nina's dancing eyes,
how greatly she was amused.
"You need a sound whipping, sir--that's what you need!" said Mrs.
Nesbit, kindling up in sudden wrath.
"Oh, I knows it," said Tomtit. "We's unprofitable servants, all on us.
Lord's marcy that we an't 'sumed, all on us!"
Nina was so completely overcome by this novel application of the text
which she had heard her aunt laboriously drumming into Tomtit, the
Sabbath before, that she laughed aloud, with rather uproarious
merriment.
"Oh, aunt, there's no use! He don't know anything! He's nothing but an
incarnate joke, a walking hoax!"
"No, I doesn't know nothing, Miss Nina," said Tomtit, at the same time
looking out from under his long eyelashes. "Don't know nothing at
all--never can."
"Well, now, Tomtit," said Mrs. Nesbit, drawing out a little blue cowhide
from under her chair, and looking at him resolutely, "you see, if this
teapot handle is hot again, I'll give it to you! Do you hear?"
"Yes, missis," said Tomtit, with that indescribable sing-song of
indifference, which is so common and so provoking in his class.
"And, now, Tomtit, you go down stairs and clean the knives for dinner."
"Yes, missis," said he, pirouetting towards the door. And once in the
passage, he struck up a vigorous "Oh, I'm going to glory, won't you go
along with me;" accompanying himself, by slapping his own sides, as he
went down two stairs at a time.
"Going to glory!" said Mrs. Nesbit, rather shortly; "he looks like it, I
think! It's the third or fourth time that that child has blistered my
fingers with this teapot, and I know he does it on purpose! So
ungrateful, when I spend my time, teaching him, hour after hour,
laboring with him so! I declare, I don't believe these children have got
any souls!"
"Well, aunt, I declare, I should think you'd get out of all patience
with him; yet he's so funny, I cannot, for the life of me, help
laughing."
Here a distant whoop on the staircase, and a tempestuous chorus to a
Methodist hymn, with the words, "Oh come, my loving brethren," announced
that Tomtit was on the return; and very soon, throwing open the door, he
marched in, with an air of the greatest importance.
"Tomtit, didn't I tell you to go and clean the knives?"
"Law, missis, come up here to bring Miss Nina's love-letters," said he,
producing two or three letters. "Good law, though," said he, checking
himself, "forgot to put them on a waity!" and, before a word could be
said, he was out of the room and down stairs, and at the height of
furious contest with the girl who was cleaning the silver, for a waiter
to put Miss Nina's letters on.
"Dar, Miss Nina," appealing to her when she appeared, "Rosa won't let me
have no waity!"
"I could pull your hair for you, you little image!" said Nina, seizing
the letters from his hands, and laughing while she cuffed his ears.
"Well," said Tomtit, looking after her with great solemnity, "missis in
de right on't. An't no kind of order in this here house, 'pite of all I
can do. One says put letters on waity. Another one won't let you have
waity to put letters on. And, finally, Miss Nina, she pull them all
away. Just the way things going on in dis yer house, all the time! I
can't help it; done all I can. Just the way missus says!"
There was one member of Nina's establishment of a character so marked
that we cannot refrain from giving her a separate place in our picture
of her surroundings,--and this was Milly, the waiting-woman of Aunt
Nesbit.
Aunt Milly, as she was commonly called, was a tall, broad-shouldered,
deep-chested African woman, with a fulness of figure approaching to
corpulence. Her habit of standing and of motion was peculiar and
majestic, reminding one of the Scripture expression "upright as the
palm-tree." Her skin was of a peculiar blackness and softness, not
unlike black velvet. Her eyes were large, full, and dark, and had about
them that expression of wishfulness and longing which one may sometimes
have remarked in dark eyes. Her mouth was large, and the lips, though
partaking of the African fulness, had, nevertheless, something decided
and energetic in their outline, which was still further seconded by the
heavy moulding of the chin. A frank smile, which was common with her,
disclosed a row of most splendid and perfect teeth. Her hair, without
approaching to the character of the Anglo-Saxon, was still different
from the ordinary woolly coat of the negro, and seemed more like an
infinite number of close-knotted curls, of brilliant, glossy blackness.
The parents of Milly were prisoners taken in African wars; and she was a
fine specimen of one of those warlike and splendid races, of whom, as
they have seldom been reduced to slavery, there are but few and rare
specimens among the slaves of the South.
Her usual head-dress was a high turban, of those brilliant colored
Madras handkerchiefs in which the instinctive taste of the dark races
leads them to delight. Milly's was always put on and worn with a regal
air, as if it were the coronet of the queen. For the rest, her dress
consisted of a well-fitted gown of dark stuff, of a quality somewhat
finer than the usual household apparel. A neatly-starched white muslin
handkerchief folded across her bosom, and a clean white apron, completed
her usual costume.
No one could regard her, as a whole, and not feel their prejudice in
favor of the exclusive comeliness of white races somewhat shaken. Placed
among the gorgeous surroundings of African landscape and scenery, it
might be doubted whether any one's taste could have desired, as a
completion to her appearance, to have blanched the glossy skin whose
depth of coloring harmonizes so well with the intense and fiery glories
of a tropical landscape.
In character, Milly was worthy of her remarkable external appearance.
Heaven had endowed her with a soul as broad and generous as her ample
frame. Her passions rolled and burned in her bosom with a tropical
fervor; a shrewd and abundant mother wit, united with a vein of
occasional drollery, gave to her habits of speech a quaint vivacity.
A native adroitness gave an unwonted command over all the functions of
her fine body, so that she was endowed with that much-coveted property
which the New Englander denominates "faculty," which means the intuitive
ability to seize at once on the right and best way of doing everything
which is to be done. At the same time, she was possessed of that high
degree of self-respect which led her to be incorruptibly faithful and
thorough in all she undertook; less, as it often seemed, from any fealty
or deference to those whom she served, than from a kind of native pride
in well-doing, which led her to deem it beneath herself to slight or
pass over the least thing which she had undertaken. Her promises were
inviolable. Her owners always knew that what she once said would be
done, if it were within the bounds of possibility.
The value of an individual thus endowed in person and character may be
easily conceived by those who understand how rare, either among slaves
or freemen, is such a combination. Milly was, therefore, always
considered in the family as a most valuable piece of property, and
treated with more than common consideration.
As a mind, even when uncultivated, will ever find its level, it often
happened that Milly's amount of being and force of character gave her
ascendency even over those who were nominally her superiors. As her ways
were commonly found to be the best ways, she was left, in most cases, to
pursue them without opposition or control. But, favorite as she was, her
life had been one of deep sorrows. She had been suffered, it is true, to
contract a marriage with a very finely-endowed mulatto man, on a
plantation adjoining her owner's, by whom she had a numerous family of
children, who inherited all her fine physical and mental endowments.
With more than usual sensibility and power of reflection, the idea that
the children so dear to her were from their birth not her own--that they
were, from the first hour of their existence, merchantable articles,
having a fixed market value in proportion to every excellence, and
liable to all the reverses of merchantable goods--sank with deep weight
into her mind. Unfortunately, the family to which she belonged being
reduced to poverty, there remained, often, no other means of making up
the deficiency of income than the annual sale of one or two negroes.
Milly's children, from their fine developments, were much-coveted
articles. Their owner was often tempted by extravagant offers for them;
and therefore, to meet one crisis or another of family difficulties,
they had been successively sold from her. At first, she had met this
doom with almost the ferocity of a lioness; but the blow, oftentimes
repeated, had brought with it a dull endurance, and Christianity had
entered, as it often does with the slave, through the rents and fissures
of a broken heart. Those instances of piety which are sometimes, though
rarely, found among slaves, and which transcend the ordinary development
of the best-instructed, are generally the results of calamities and
afflictions so utterly desolating as to force the soul to depend on God
alone. But, where one soul is thus raised to higher piety, thousands are
crushed in hopeless imbecility.