Part 13

"I had to see him about a matter of business which had been intrusted to me. I went there the day I left you. If I had known how it was with him, I should have tried to find a deputy. It is an awful sight, a man who never had compassion needing it, a man who never felt sympathy claiming and repelling it in one.

"When I entered the room, where he was sitting alone, he looked up at me with a glare like a tiger-cat's. He was tamed for the moment by the mention of my errand, which was simply to make him a payment. He counted the money carefully, locked it up, and gave me a receipt. Then he began to talk to me, or rather to himself before me. I could acquiesce in all he said. I knew what Giles Rasey was, and understood that the loss of such a son, to such a father, was irreparable.

"'Another self! another self!' he repeated, until I hardly knew whether to pity him more for having had a son so like himself, or for having him no longer. It was an injustice that he felt himself suffering,--a bitter injustice. He had counted on this son as his successor, and the miscalculation was one with which he was not chargeable. 'Not thirty-five! I am past sixty, and a young man yet! My father lived to be ninety!'

"His rage against this wrong which had been done him was aggravated by another which he had done himself, a weakness into which he had been led by his son,--the only one, probably, in which they had ever been partners. The son had a slave whose ability made him valuable, whose probity made him invaluable.

"'I gave him to Giles myself,' said the old man. 'He was such as you don't find one of in a thousand; no, not in ten thousand. I could have had any money for him, if money could have bought him. It couldn't. I gave him to Giles.'

"Giles, on the death-bed where he found himself with very little warning, exacted of his father a promise that this man should be made free.

"'What could I refuse him then?' asked old Rasey.

"The man in whose behalf the promise was made, and who was present when it was made, took it in earnest.

"'A fellow whom we had trusted!' cried the old man. 'A fellow in whose attachment we had believed! We have let him carry away and pay large sums of money for us; have even let him go into Free States to pay them, and he always came back faithfully! You may know these people a life long and not learn them out! A fellow whom we had trusted!'

"The fellow bade good-day as soon as the funeral services were over. His master was sufficiently himself to surmise his purpose and to make an attempt to baffle it. But the intended freedman was too agile for him; he disappeared without even claiming his manumission-papers. Imagine Rasey's outraged feelings! It was like the Prince of Hell in the old legend, complaining of the uncivil alacrity with which Lazarus obeyed the summons to the upper air:--'He was not to be held, but, giving himself a shake, with every sign of malice, immediately he went away.'"

"So Rasey has lost Syphax! he has lost Syphax!" repeated Westlake, thoughtfully. "Rasey is not a good master, but he was good to him. It was hard, even for Rasey."

"Rasey has lost Syphax, and Syphax has found him," said the Doctor, dryly.

"You do not understand. You see in the rupture of these ties only a loss of service to the master. We feel it to be something more."

"The human heart is framed sensible to kindness; that you should have an attachment for the man who devotes his life to yours without return has nothing miraculous for me. I can believe that even Rasey is capable of feeling the loss of what has been useful to him."

"No, you do not understand the relation between us and this affectionate subject race."

"Frankly, I do not. I cannot enter into it on either side. If I were even as full of the milk of human kindness as we are bound to suppose these soft-tempered foreigners to be, it seems to me I should still like to choose my beneficiaries; and, in your place, I should have quite another taste in benefactors. When I indue myself in imagination with a black skin, and try to think and feel conformably, I find my innate narrowness too much for me; I cannot disguise from myself that I should prefer to lavish my benefits on my own flesh and blood. Resuming my personality, I can as little divest myself in fancy of my pride of race. If I must accept a state of dependence, I would take the bounty of a white man, hard and scanty though it might be, rather than receive luxurious daily bread at the hands of blacks."

"Borrow, you always had the knack of making a fellow feel uncomfortable. I would rather talk with Dudley than with you. I do not see that you are any better friend to our institutions than he is."

"A friend to slavery? Distrust the man not born and bred to it who calls himself one!

"I suppose I am as much of a pro-slavery man as you will easily find in New England,--for an unambitious, private man, I mean. Slavery does not mean for me power or place. What does slavery mean for me when I oppose its opponents? It means you, Westlake, my old schoolmate,--you and your wife and children. It means Harvey and his wife and children. I have the weakness to care more for you than for your slaves. I cannot resolve to see you deprived of comforts and luxuries that use has made necessary to you, that they may rise to wants they have no sense of as yet. As to your duties to your humble neighbors, and the way you fulfil them, that account is kept between you and your Maker. He has not made me a judge or a ruler over you."

Westlake's deep red deepened. "I leave religious matters to those whose charge it is. I have been instructed to hold the place which has been awarded me, without asking why I have been made to differ from others. And the teaching which is good enough for me is, I suppose, good enough for my servants. As for the rest, we know that our people are as well off as the same class in any part of the world, not excepting New England."

"I dare say such a class would be no better off there than here. But come and learn for yourself how it is there."

"I could not learn there how to live here. And I do not pretend that we can understand you better than you can us. But, Borrow, you are hard to suit. You twit us with our waste and improvidence, and yet you are not better pleased with Rasey, who follows gain like a New-Englander."

"Rasey follows gain from the blind impulse of covetousness. The New-Englander's zeal is according to knowledge. Rasey's greed is the inherited hunger of a precarious race. The New-Englander thrives because he has always thriven. He has in his veins 'the custom of prosperity.'

"Fuller tells us, that, in his time, 'a strict inquiry after the ancient gentry of England' would have found 'most of them in the class moderately mounted above the common level'; the more ambitious having suffered ruin in the national turmoils, while these even-minded men, 'through God's blessing on their moderation, have continued in their condition.' It was from this old stock that the planters of New England were chiefly derived, mingled with them some strong scions of loftier trees."

"Do we not know that there is no such thing as birth in New England? There, even if a man had ancestry, he would not dare to think himself the better for it."

"Disabuse yourself; the New-Englander is perfectly human in this respect, and only a very little wiser than the rest of the world. But he disapproves waste, even of so cheap a thing as words: he does not speak of his blood, because his blood speaks for itself.

"Rasey thinks whatever is held by others to be so much withheld from him. To make what is theirs his is all his aim. He has no conception of a creative wealth, of a diffusive prosperity. To live and make live is an aristocratic maxim. Rasey, and such as he, grudge almost the subsistence of their human tools. With the New-Englander, parsimony is not economy. The aristocratic household law is a liberal one, and it is his. He lives up to his income as conscientiously as within it. Rasey and his like think what is theirs, enjoyed by another, wasted;--they think it wasted, enjoyed by themselves. The New-Englander's rule of personal indulgence is the same with that given to the Persian prince Ghilan by his father, the wise Kyekyawus, who, warning him against squandering, adds, 'It is not squandering to spend for anything which can be of real use to thee either in this world or the next.'

"Together with the inherited habit of property, the well-descended have and transmit an inherited knowledge of the laws which govern its acquisition and its maintenance: laws older than legislation; as old as property itself; as old as man; a part of his primitive wisdom; always and everywhere the common lore of the established and endowed. If Rasey had inherited or imbibed this knowledge, perhaps he would have been more cautious. 'Beware of unjust gains,' says an Eastern sage, an ancient member of our Aryan race; 'for it is the nature of such, not only to take flight themselves, but to bear off all the rest with them.' 'Do not think,' it is set down in the book of Kabus, a compendium of Persian practical wisdom, 'Do not think even a good use of what has been ill acquired can make it thine. It will assuredly leave thee, and only thy sin will remain to thee.'

"The well-born would not dare to amass a fortune by such means as Rasey uses; amassed, they would not expose it to such hazards. 'The same word in the Greek'--I am citing now an English worthy, the contemporary of our New-England fathers--'The same word in the Greek--[Greek: ios]--means both rust and poison; and a strong poison is made of the rust of metals; but none more venomous than the rust of the laborer's wages detained in his employer's purse: it will infect and corrode a whole estate.'

"A man's descent is written on his life yet more plainly than on his features. In New England you shall see a youth come up from the country to the metropolis of his State with all his worldly goods upon his back. Twenty years later you shall find him as much at ease in the position he has retaken rather than gained, as he was in the farm-house where he was born, or on the dusty road he trudged over to the scene of his fortunes. His house is elegant, not fine; it is furnished with paintings not bought on the advice of the picture-dealer, with a library not ordered complete from the bookseller. He is simple in his personal habits, laborious still, severe to himself, lenient and liberal to those who depend upon him, munificent in his public benefactions, in his kindly and modest patronage. If he enters public life, it is not because he wants a place there, but because there is a place that wants him. He takes it to work, and not to shine; lays it down when he can, or when he must; and takes hold of the nearest duty, great or small as may be, with the same zeal and conscience. Such a man is called a self-made man. He is what ages of culture and highest discipline have made him,--ages of responsibility and thought for others.

"Stealthy winning and sterile hoarding are the marks of a degraded and outlawed caste. When these tendencies show themselves in a member of an honest race, they have come down from some forgotten interloper. The Raseys are the true representatives of the transported wretches who, and whose progeny, have been a dead weight upon the States originally afflicted with them, and upon those into which they have wandered out. In their native debasement, they furnish material for usurpation to work upon and with; raised here and there into fitful eminence, they infect the class they intrude upon with meannesses not its own.

"Thomas Dudley, writing to England from New England in its earliest days, when, as he frankly owns, it offered 'little to be enjoyed and much to be endured,' is explicit as to the class of men he and his colleagues would have join them. He invites only godly men of substance. Such, he says, 'cannot dispose of themselves and their estates more to God's glory.' Those who would 'come to plant for worldly ends' he dissuades altogether; for 'the poorer sort' it was 'not time yet.' As for reckless adventurers and the destitute idle, who sought the New World for gold or an indolent subsistence, when these, 'seeing no other means than by their labor to feed themselves,' went back discouraged, or off to find some more indulgent plantation, the colony felt itself 'lightened, not weakened.'

"The chief distinctive mark of high race is the quality the Romans called _fortitudo_,--a word of larger meaning than we commonly intend by ours derived from it: that strength of soul, namely, which gives way as little before work as before danger or under suffering. A Roman has defined this Roman fortitude as the quality which enables a man fearlessly to obey the highest law, whether by enduring or by achieving.

"Another mark of high race is its trust in itself. The early heads of New England did not try to secure a position to their children. They knew that blood finds its level just as certainly as water does. Degenerate sons they disowned in advance.

"Westlake, you ought to know New England better. Even if your memory did not prompt you to do it justice, there ought to be a voice to answer for it in your heart. But I find ancestry is very soon lost in the mists of antiquity down here. You come early into the advantages of a mythical background. Must I teach you your own descent?"

"I thank you. I am acquainted with it. My great-grandfather was an Englishman,--a man of some consideration, as I have been informed. He went over to Massachusetts; but my grandfather left it, as soon as he was of age, for a newer State, where he could enjoy greater freedom."

"Your great-grandfather came from England to New England, as you say. He fixed himself in that part of our Massachusetts town of Ipswich which used to go by the name of 'The Hamlet.' What he was before he came out I do not know; but I suppose he brought credentials, for he married his wife from a family both old and old-fashioned. Your grandfather, Simeon Symonds Westlake, at seventeen found the Hamlet too narrow for him, and the paternal, or perhaps the maternal, rule too strict. He walked over into New Hampshire one morning, without mentioning that he was not to be back for dinner. New Hampshire did not suit him: he went to Rhode Island; then tried New York for a year or so: it did not answer. His father died, and Simeon made experiment of life at home again, but only again to give it up in disgust. Finally he emigrated to Georgia, taking with him a little money and a great deal of courage; invested both in a small farm which was soon a large plantation; added a yet larger by marriage; died, a great landholder and a great slaveholder.

"Simeon--I must call him by that name, historical for me, although I know that the first initial disappeared from his signature after his marriage--Simeon left two sons, Reginald and Edwin. He had the ambition of founding a dynasty; so left his whole estate to the elder, yet with certain restrictions and conditions, which, doubtless, he had good reasons for imposing, and which the intended heir lost no time in justifying. By some law of inheritance which statutes cannot supersede nor wills annul, this son of a father in whom no worst enemy could have detected a trace of the Puritan, was born in liberal Georgia, in the last half of the enlightened eighteenth century, as arrogant a bigot and as flaming a fanatic as if he had come over in the Mayflower. He refused his father's bequest, on the ground that God has given man dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over the cattle,--but none over his fellow-man, except such as he may win through affection or earn by service. He went back to New England, where he belonged. I knew a son of his, a respectable mason. You need not blush for him, though he was your own cousin and worked with his hands. He was never conscious of any cause for shame, himself, unless it were the sin of his slaveholding grandfather; and that did not weigh on him, for he believed the entail of the curse cut off with that of the rest of the inheritance.

"If I have grieved the shade of Simeon by pronouncing that rejected name, I will soothe it again by stating that this name has not been perpetuated by his New-England descendants. That branch of his house has already a third Reginald, about a year younger than yours. He is now a Freshman in college. You may hear of him some day."

"He is in college? That is well. He has, then, recovered, or will recover, the rank of a gentleman?"

"No need of that, if he ever had a claim to it. You, who know so much about birth, should know that its rights are ineffaceable. This was well understood by those whom it concerned, in the time of our first ancestors. We have it on high heraldic authority of two hundred years ago, that a gentleman has a right so to be styled in legal proceedings, 'although he be a husbandman.' 'For, although a gentleman go to the plough and common labor for a maintenance, yet he is a gentleman.' The New-England founders had no fear of derogating in taking hold of anything that needed to be done; had no fear that their children could derogate in following any calling for which their tastes and their abilities qualified them. Carrying to it the ideas, feelings, and manners of the gentle class, they could ennoble the humblest occupation; it could not lower them.

"It is out of this respect that good blood has for itself, that the true New-Englander, whatever his station, is not ashamed of a humbler relative. You are amazed down here at the hardihood of a Northern man who speaks coolly of a cousin of his who is a blacksmith, it may be, or a small farmer; and you bless yourselves inwardly for your greater refinement. But you are English, you say, not New-English.

"When I was in Perara, dining with one of the great folks there, I happened to inquire after a cousin of his, an unlucky fellow, who, after trying his fortune in half the cities of the Union, had had the indiscretion to settle down in a very humble business, within a stone's throw of his wealthy namesake. I had known him formerly, and could not think of leaving Perara without calling on him. To my surprise, my question threw the family into visible confusion. They gave me his address, indeed, but in a way as if they excused themselves for knowing it. This may be English, but it is not Old-English.

"In the Old England which we may call ours,--for it was before, and not long before, she founded the New,--a laboring man came to the Earl of Huntingdon, Lieutenant of Leicestershire, to pray for the discharge of his only son, the staff of his age, who had been 'pressed into the wars.' The Earl inquires the name of his petitioner. The old man hesitates, fearing to be presumptuous, for his family name is the same with that of the nobleman he addresses; but being urged, he takes courage to pronounce it. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl then, 'my kinsman, your son, shall not be pressed.' This 'modesty in the poor man and courtesy in the great man' were found in that day 'conformable to the gentle blood in both.' Those who know New England know that this absence of assumption and of presumption, this modest kindliness and this dignified reserve, are characteristic there, testifying to the sources from which it derives.

"I am a cosmopolite. I could never see why I should think the better or the worse of a place, for my happening to draw my first breath there. I am of the company of the truth-seekers. A fact, though it were an ugly one, is of more worth to me than a thousand pleasantest fancies. But a fact is not the less one for being agreeable: the extension of a fine race is an agreeable fact to a naturalist.

"The earlier emigrations to New England were emphatically aristocratic emigrations. Their aim was to found precisely what you claim to show here. Their aim was to found a community of gentlemen,--a community, that is to say, religious, just, generous, courteous. They proposed equality, but equality on a high plane. Their work has been hindered by its very success. The claimants for adoption have crowded in faster than full provision could be made for them. They cannot instantly be assimilated. Their voices sometimes rise above those of the true children. But New England is there, strong and tranquil. Her heart has room for all that ask a place in it. She welcomes these orphans to it motherly, and will make them all thoroughly her own with time.

"Come to us, Westlake. I have planned out a tour for you."

And Dr. Borrow, tracing the route he had marked out for his friend, sketched the country it led through, comparing what came before us with reminiscences of other travels. No contrasts here of misery with splendor rebuke a thoughtless admiration. Nowhere the picturesqueness of ruin and squalor; everywhere the lovely, living beauty of healthfulness, dignity, and order.

With what a swell of feeling does the distant New-Englander listen to accounts of family life in the old home! How dear every detail, making that real again which had come to be like a sweet, shadowy dream!

Dr. Borrow led us through the beautiful street of a New-England village, under the Gothic arches of its religious elms. He did not fear to throw open for us the willing door. He showed us the simple, heartsome interior, with its orderly ease, its unambitious hospitality, its refined enjoyments. Other travellers have drawn for us other pictures. They have told us of a pomp and state which have reconciled us to our rudeness. But Dr. Borrow sketched the New-England home, such as we know it by tradition, such as it still exists among those who are content to live as their fathers lived before them.

"Hold on, Borrow!" cried Westlake; "you don't suppose you are going to persuade me that there is neither poverty nor overwork in New England! I have heard, and I think I have seen, that there are hard lives lived there,--harder than those of our slaves, of my slaves, for example;--and that not by foreigners, who, you may say, are not up to the mark yet, but by Americans born and bred."

"There are very hard lives lived there. The human lot is checkered there as everywhere. Death sometimes arrests a man midway in his course and leads him off, leaving his wife and children to struggle along the road they never knew was rough before. It happened thus to your Cousin Reginald. His wife and children were thus left. You are right. His son, the boy I told you of, is as much a slave as any of yours: almost as poorly fed, and twice as hardly worked. He lives at a distance from his college, to have a cheaper room; his meals he prepares himself;--no great fatigue this, to be sure, for they are frugal, and he contents himself with two. In what ought to be his vacation, he delves away at his books harder than ever, and is besides a hewer of wood and a drawer of water,--all without wages. His only pay is his mother's pride in him, and the joy of sometimes calling back the old smiles to her face."

"How did he get to college? How does he stay there, if he has nothing?"

"He has less than nothing. To go to college, he has incurred debts,--debts for which he has pledged himself, body and soul. He was ten when his father died. His sister was sixteen. She assumed the rights of guardian over him, kept him up to his work at school, sent him to college when he was fourteen, and maintains him there.