I woke early in the morning, after having passed the night in
dreamless slumber. Not a memory of the day's doings--not a vague
shadow of thoughts, or words, or deeds--flitted across the chasm of
sleep. When I opened my eyes, however, the daylight--faint and
unconfirmed--was streaming in at the windows; and, for half an hour or
more, I enjoyed one of those pleasant, idle lapses of existence which
we so rarely have leisure to indulge, when life, like a river between
its cataracts and rapids, rests unruffled by thought or action,
without a ripple to mark that it is flowing on; and with nothing
reflected from its tranquil surface but the faint, glistening images
of the quiet things which surround it.
I saw a patch of the blue sky through the window, and a soft white
cloud float slowly across. I looked at the large, brass-topped
andirons in the wide fireplace, and contemplated the lions' heads
which adorned them. I made a human face out of the sleeve of my coat,
as it hung over the back of a chair, with a large nose and a heavy
eye-brow; and it looked so sleepy, that I had almost dropped into
slumber again, out of mere sympathy, when suddenly the door of the
room opened, and in came a nice-looking black boy, with a clean white
jacket and apron, and a tray with several well-filled glasses upon it.
He walked composedly up to my bedside, and presented the tray.
"What is this, my friend?" I said, taking one of the glasses, which
appeared full of a clear brownish liquid, some lumps of ice and some
fresh green herbs.
"The mint juleps, sir," replied the boy, waiting for me to drink, in
order to take the glass away.
"The mint juleps!" I thought. "I wonder if it is one of the laws of
the land that every one must drink a mint julep before he rises."
However, I tasted the beverage, and it was delicious and most
refreshing, at least for the time. The coolness imparted by the ice
effectually screened the palate from all the hotter things which it
contained; and it was not till afterwards that I found it would be
advisable not to drink brandy with mint steeped in it so early in the
morning.
Hardly had the little _limonadier_ gone, when my friend Zed appeared,
and, while he was engaged with great skill and assiduity in putting
all my dressing things to wrongs with true negro officiousness, he
opened his morning budget of gossip by telling me that we could not
have arrived at a better time, for there was soon to be a great
camp-meeting in the immediate neighbourhood, where some very godly men
were to hold forth.
I had long wished to see one of these curious assemblages, and I
accordingly took care to inform myself of the day and place where the
exercises were to be held. Zed then proceeded, while I dressed, to
tell me the whole politics of the family, with the business-like
manner and volubility of a Spanish barber. From him I thus learned
that Mr. Byles--or bold Billy Byles--was a suitor for the hand of
Louisa, Mr. Thornton's eldest daughter, but that it was the general
opinion of the kitchen and adjacent domains that he would not succeed
in his suit, for that young Mr. Whitehead, the Presbyterian minister,
came often to see Miss _Lou_ in the morning, and was a very gentle,
engaging young man. Master Harry, he said, my cousin's eldest boy, was
a wild young dog, showing the true Virginian fondness for horse-flesh
and fire-arms, having broken the knees of one of his father's best
steeds, and burst two guns already, besides setting fire to the
stables by exploding a percussion-cap with a hammer.
How long he would have gone on I know not, had my dressing
not been brought to an end; when, telling him to be within call
after breakfast, I went down to the lower floor. I found the
drawing-room--or parlour as they call it here--vacant, and sauntered
out into the porch, where the first thing I saw was Mr. Lewis, walking
his horse quietly along the road from the overseer's house towards the
highway. The next instant I perceived one of the servants start out
upon him, like a spider from the corner of his web upon an entangled
blue-bottle, and hand him a paper.
I knew well enough what sort of document it was, namely, a caveat
against the sale or purchase of any of the slaves of good Aunt Bab,
signed by Mr. Thornton as agent, and Mr. Hubbard as attorney of Sir
Richard Conway, under a power which had been drawn up the night
before. This power had been rapidly and informally executed, and
probably was invalid; but my presence rendered it unnecessary, except
inasmuch as it enabled me to remain incognito for some time longer,
and watch the proceedings of the conspirators. I must remark, it was
not dated, and was merely alluded to in the caveat, so that no
immediate indication of my visit to Virginia was afforded by that
document.
Mr. Lewis had just passed on his way, after reading the paper with
feelings which of course I could not divine, when, from the other
side, I saw approaching a pretty little female figure, dressed in a
peculiar style, or rather in a medley of a great number of styles and
fashions, outraging all of them in some respects. She had no bonnet
on, but merely a parasol over her head; the length of her dress,
instead of being of that extensive flow which has succeeded the short
petticoats of a few years ago, was brief enough to show an exceedingly
pretty foot and ankle, but it was so conspicuously full as to put me
in mind of the costume of some of the Swiss cantons. Her shoes had
minute buckles in them instead of being sandalled in modern style; and
her hair, instead of being propped up to a towering height with a
scaffolding of tortoise-shell, lay flat, and was gathered into a knot
behind, in the antique Greek mode. As soon as her parasol was turned a
little aside, I perceived it was Miss Davenport; and though she came
quietly on, with her eyes bent upon the path, apparently unconscious
that I was in the porch, I was, I am afraid, unjust to her, and
imagined that there was a good deal of coquetry in both dress and
manner. She had puzzled me the night before--she puzzled me still.
There was something of frankness, something of archness, which was not
displeasing; but something also of daring, of independence, of
wilfulness, which I did not like. Pretty she certainly was, nay,
beautiful; for the more one examined the small features and delicate
form, the more symmetry and the more grace were apparent.
But I never was one of those who can fall in love with pictures, or
statues, or even marionettes. Pygmalion's statue might have remained
ivory to the great conflagration, before I would have sighed or prayed
it into life; and as for actresses, I always feel a green curtain
falling between me and them, even before the end of the play.
It seemed that morning as if some peculiar demon had seized upon me,
and made me resolve, for my sins, to see what really was in Bessy
Davenport--to tease her, to worry her, and to bring out the latent
soul. I went forward to meet her; and, as soon as she really saw me,
her whole aspect and manner changed. A gay, light, half-sarcastic
smile played upon her lip, her eyes sparkled, and, holding out her
hand, she said,--
"Good morning, cousin; I hope your aristocratic head has been able to
repose quietly in this democratic community."
I might feel a little staggered by this easy salutation. It was rather
like a small masked battery opening upon one when marching gaily up to
an attack; but I rallied my forces at once, and replied, "As well as
if all the coronets that ever were lined with ermine had rested beside
me on the pillow. Democracy is not a catching disease, I should
imagine, from all I have seen of it. But may I ask how _you_ slept? I
trust without any painful visions of slaughtered swains and
disconsolate lovers, or any twinges of remorse for all the woes you
have and will inflict upon mankind."
"None, in truth," she answered at once. "Do you know I once killed a
rattlesnake?--yes, with my own hand; and when I saw the shining
reptile lie dead before me, I remembered he had given honourable
warning before he sprang, and then I might feel a little regret that I
had struck him so hastily with the butt of my riding-whip. But man is
a very different sort of reptile: he gives no warning, and is far more
venomous."
A strange sort of painful feeling was produced in my mind by her
words. I asked myself, "Can this young girl, apparently not twenty,
have already tasted of that bitter cup which man so often holds to
woman's lip?"
The shadow of the thought must have crossed my face, for I was roused
from my half-reverie by a clear, gay laugh. "Now I will show you," she
said, "how women can divine. I am no love-lorn maiden, pining for some
faithless swain--no man-hater from personal experience of man's
unworthiness. I never saw the man yet, and never shall, who could
raise my pulse one beat to hear his coming or his going step. But let
me do justice to both sides. No man ever said to me in a sweet maudlin
tone, 'Bessy, will you marry me?' nor even, to my face, declared I was
the most charming of my sex, or anything of that kind. But I judge men
from what I have seen of their conduct towards others; and I believe
them to be the most thoroughly selfish class of beings--at least as
far as women are concerned--that God ever created."
"And when it becomes your case to listen and have sweet words spoken,"
I replied, "you will think you and the speaker are two bright
exceptions."
She coloured a little, and looked almost angry, saying, "Never! I will
never give any one the opportunity; for I go very much with the old
saying, 'no _gentleman_ was ever refused by a _lady_.' I mean, no man
who is really a gentleman would propose to a lady who had not given
him such encouragement as would preclude her, if really a lady, from
refusing him if he did propose."
"Then you would have a lady," I said, "give a man encouragement before
she knows whether he really loves her or not. Or you would have her
advance step by step with him, like two armies in battle-array,
watching each other's movements, and each taking care that the other
did not get the slightest advantage; sure to get upon some slippery
ground before they have done, my dear young lady!"
Her face was now glowing like a rose, and she answered quite
impatiently, "Pshaw! you know what I mean; and every man of common
tact will, in his heart, admit that I am right."
"In neither one or the other of the two cases," I replied.
"What two cases?" she asked.
"Two assertions, I should have called them," answered I; "the one you
just now made, and the preceding one, that men are entirely selfish in
all that concerns women. I have seen cases in which no selfish motive
could be discerned in the beginning, in the course, or in the end of
such matters; and, being a good deal older than you are, I have had
more means of judging."
"Why, how old are you?" she asked abruptly.
"Seven-and-twenty," I answered.
"I thought so!" she cried, with a joyous laugh; "but you look a good
deal older."
"Indeed!" I answered, perhaps a little mortified; "but what makes you
seem to rejoice that I am seven-and-twenty only?"
"Excuse me," she replied, dropping a low curtsy. "I might say, because
that makes you just a fit age for myself, or a hundred other civil
things. But I would rather say nothing, Sir Richard."
"Sir Richard!" I exclaimed. "How came you to give me that name, Miss
Davenport?"
"Because you are just seven-and-twenty; and because there is 'Richard
Conway' printed in white letters upon the black trunks you left at
Norfolk," she replied, with an air of funny malice, adding, "at least
so your servant told the cook, and the cook told my maid, and my maid
told me, dear cousin; and so there's my 'how.'"
"Good heaven, this babbling is very provoking!" I exclaimed, greatly
annoyed; "it may spoil all our plans."
"No fear," she answered; "we are so surrounded by woods and wilds that
the secret will keep till next Sunday at least; for the negroes will
not see those of any other plantation till then."
"And _you_ will tell no one?" I inquired.
"Honour!" she replied, in a tone of mock solemnity.
"If you do," I said, laughing. "I will tell your uncle, whom I see
coming up there, that you and I have been standing this quarter of an
hour at the edge of the porch, talking of love all the time."
"Love!" she cried, "what is that? I declare such an antediluvian
monster has never been once mentioned between us till you brought it
this minute out of the blue mud of your own imagination."
"A very savoury figure," I answered. "But as to love, if we have not
been talking about it, notwithstanding all circumlocutions, we have
been thinking about it."
"Not a bit," she replied. "We have been talking, and thinking too, of
the most opposite things--of the very antipodes of love. Courtship and
marriage, if you like; but what has love to do with them, cousin?"
And she fixed her full dark eyes upon my face, with a look of the most
perfect simplicity--assumed, of course, but very well put on.
I felt somewhat revengeful, and I almost longed to try if I could not
make the boasting little beauty know something of the power she
scoffed at. But just then Mr. Thornton came up, and began jesting with
his fair relation upon her morning reveries beside the stream.
"I saw you, Bessy," he said; "and if I had met with Mr. Howard, I
should have sent him down to try if he could not break up your
visions."
"I dare say he would have succeeded," she answered; "for he has been
amusing me here with some of the driest subjects in the world."
"Of what kind, little hypocrite?" asked Mr. Thornton.
"Arithmetic--arithmetic," she replied gaily. "As, for example, how
many ganders' heads are required to make one goose's. But, here comes
Mr. Hubbard slowly down stairs; and there is Mr. Alsiger's back at the
end of the passage; so I had better go in to get breakfast ready, for
Lou won't be down this hour."
And away she ran, casting her parasol into a cane seat in the hall.
Mr. Thornton paused, and fell into a reverie for a moment or two,
which he concluded by saying, as if to himself,--
"The poets are wrong."
I knew not what he meant, of course; and whether those few words
directed his and my thoughts, or not, I cannot tell; but at breakfast
we got into a discussion of poets and poetry.
"It is wonderful," Mr. Thornton observed, after a few other remarks
upon the subject, "that with all the superabundant energies which this
country possesses, and all the imagination which she expends upon
other themes, we have, as yet, produced no very remarkable poet."
I ventured to say that I did not think it wonderful; and, of course,
there was a call for my reasons.
"In the first place," I replied, "the energies of the people have
other objects, and those principally material. In the next place, the
imaginative faculty finds other occupation."
"How so, how so?" asked Mr. Hubbard.
"In orations, speeches, declamations," I answered, and then continued,
with a smile, "perhaps I might add, in finding causes for offence in
the acts of other nations; and without offence, let me say, Mr.
Alsiger, in religious exercises which perhaps touch the fancy rather
than inform the heart."
"Too true, too true!" said the good clergyman, with a sigh.
"Then again," I continued, "poetry is generally the offspring of
leisure. Now, there is--at least it seems so to me--no such thing as
leisure in America, and----"
"Excuse me," interrupted Mr. Thornton, laughing; "we have plenty of
leisure in Virginia, if we did but know what to do with it. But you
were going to add something."
"I was merely going to remark, as a matter of history, that poetry
rarely flourishes in republics. Monarchies are its congenial soil. It
is a flower that requires a hot-house."
"Oh, heresy, heresy!" cried Bessy Davenport. "What! can such noble and
inspiring things as freedom and independence have no power to awaken
great thoughts, or even to clothe them in immortal verse?"
"Your pardon, fair lady," I answered; "but you are assuming the
premises. Freedom and independence, I would contend, can exist as
well--nay, better--in a well-ordered monarchy than in any republic.
The tyranny of a number--or of a majority, if you please,--is always
more terrible than the tyranny of an individual--the tyranny of public
opinion, more potent than the rule of a monarch, and more likely to be
wrong. But all that is beside the question. I merely spoke of an
historical fact. With an exception here and there, you find no very
remarkable poets under republics: many under monarchs."
"I have never considered the facts," said Mr. Hubbard; "but let us
test it, my dear sir; and to begin with the beginning, there is Homer.
It is very true he lived under a whole host of kings, if there is any
faith at all to be placed in the tales regarding him; but what say you
to the whole batch of Athenian poets?"
"That they lived under archons, which were tantamount to kings," I
answered. "And then, again, Pindar; he could not even endure the sort
of mitigated republicanism of Greece, but fled to the court of a
tyrant. Virgil, Horace--every great Roman poet, in short--flourished
about the time of the emperors. In England, Gower, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, all lived, and wrote, under monarchs; and it has even
seemed to me that the greater the despotism, the better the poet."
"But Milton! Milton!" cried Mr. Alsiger; "he was a republican in heart
and spirit."
"But he never wrote a line of poetry," I answered, "under the Long
Parliament, or at least very few. Not much did he write under the
tyranny of Cromwell; and all his best compositions date from the reign
of one or the other of the Charleses."
"But Dante," said Mr. Thornton; "I cannot indeed, discuss his merits
with you; for I have well nigh forgotten all the Italian I knew thirty
years ago. He, however, lived under a republic."
"He is an exception," I replied; "although I can hardly look upon the
constitution of Florence, at that time, as a republican form of
government. It was rather oligarchical; and even then, shadows of an
emperor and a pope overhung it. But Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio, and all
the rest of the Italian poets were the mere creatures of courts. The
same is the case with France, although she never had but two poets;
and the same with Germany."
"May it not be," asked Mr. Hubbard, "that monarchies, up to the
present day, have been much more frequent than republics?"
"Perhaps so," I answered; "yet it is very strange that we find no poet
of mark actually springing from a pure republic. Where is the Swiss
poet? although every accessory of country, history, climate, and
natural phenomena seems to render the very air redolent of poetry."
Bessy Davenport sprang up from the table, shaking her head at me, with
a laugh, and saying,--
"I abominate your theory. You are worse than an abolitionist; and if
you preach such doctrines here, we will have you tried for high
treason."
As soon as she was gone, and Mr. Alsiger had trotted home on his pony,
which was brought up shortly afterwards, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Thornton,
and myself fell into secret conclave, and debated what was next to be
done.
"I think," said my host, "the best thing we can do, before the day
becomes too hot, will be to ride over to Beavors, take a look at the
plantation, see the house, which is vacant just now, and, after having
got some dinner at the little village hard by, return in the evening
by my worthy and respected cousin's house, just to let him know that
we have an eye upon his motions. I dare say some of the girls will
accompany us on horseback; and their presence will make our visitation
of the old place less formal and less business-like. There are two or
three things worth seeing by the way; and we may as well spend the day
after this fashion as any other."
"You will find no dinner there that you can eat," said Mr. Hubbard.
"Leave that to me--leave that to me," returned Mr. Thornton, with a
nod of his head. "I will cater for you; and if you do not like so long
a ride, you can come in the carriage."
"Perhaps that will be better," said Mr. Hubbard; "and, I suppose, it
would be as well to have me with you, in case of your needing legal
advice."
Thus was it soon settled; and while Mr. Thornton went to order horses
and carriages, and a great many things besides, I mounted to my own
room to make some change in my dress, and to give my good friend Zed a
hearty scolding for babbling about my affairs in a strange house. I
might as well have left it alone; for though he promised and vowed all
manner of things, and assured me, with many a grin, that he had not an
idea he was doing any harm in what he had said, I have since found
that the propensity to gossip is too strong in the negro composition
to be curbed by any reasoning or by any fear. Indeed, I am inclined to
believe it is part and parcel of the original sin; for certainly, if
Eve had not got gossiping with the serpent, she would not have made
such a fool of herself as she did.