Chapter 41

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.

Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited, though she had not revealed them--her modesty having received a stab that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter--Vesta fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from the slave-pen.

"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"

She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the jail.

"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."

"Three men, one old woman, and some little things, makes the present contents of Pangymonum," spoke up a rough, cheery voice, "an', by smoke! it's jess enough."

"Is it the white man that talks?"

"He says he's white, but they think it's goin' to be easy hokey-pokey to pass him off for a nigger."

Her eyes soon recognized the speaker as he said, "By smoke! miss, you're not much like a Johnson. I reckon you're Huldy."

"Yes, and you, sir?"

"I was Jimmy Phoebus before I was a nigger."

The girl went rapidly up to him, and put her arms around him.

"Thank God!" she said, "you are not dead. Levin Dennis, my dear friend, wept to think you were at the river bottom. But, quick, sir; I may be caught here. Are you all true to each other?"

"Yes, the traitor's cut his wizzen. Speak out, Huldy!"

"I heard Patty Cannon mutter that she was going to set her black man free to kidnap for her. Hark! I must fly."

Hulda descended the ladder in time to surprise Cy James coming up. He bent his goose neck down as he leaned his hands upon his knees, and, looking up into her face, ejaculated,

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! And Pangymonum, too."

* * * * *

"Samson," said Jimmy Phoebus, as soon as Hulda disappeared, "git ready to be a first-class liar; I want you to take up Patty Cannon's offer."

"An' leave you yer alone, Jimmy? I can't do it."

"Don't be a fool, Samson. Ironed here, we can't help nobody. Make your way to Seaford and Georgetown, and go round the Cypress Swamp to Prencess Anne. Alarm the pungy captains; fur Johnson'll try to run us by sail, I reckon, down the bay to Norfolk. I've got a file that cymlin-headed feller give me, an' I reckon I'll git out of my irons about the time you git to Judge Custis's. There! ole Patty's coming."

"Go, Samson," spoke the Delaware colored man. "I'm younger than you, and I'll fight as heartily under Mr. Phoebus's orders."

Aunt Hominy's voice came in blank monologue out of the background:

"He tuk dat debbil's hat, chillen, an' measured us in wid little Vessy."

* * * * *

That evening there was a long, free conference between Samson and Patty Cannon, in her kitchen, next to the bar, where Hulda heard laughing and invitations to drink, and all the sounds of perfect equality, the negro's piquant sayings and _bonhommie_ seeming to disarm and please the designing woman, whose familiarity was at once her influence and her weakness, and she lavished her sociable nature on blacks and whites. Samson was so fearless and observing that he betrayed no interest in escaping, and came slowly into the range of her temperament; but, as Hulda peeped, towards midnight, into the kitchen, she saw old Samson kindly patting juba, while Patty was executing a drunken dance.

As the latter dropped upon a pallet bed she had there, and fell into a doze, the colored man quietly raised the latch and walked off the tavern porch.

* * * * *

In the morning dawn horses and voices were heard by Hulda, and she recognized Joe Johnson's steps in the house. He shook Patty Cannon, but could not awaken her; then looked into Van Dorn's room, and found Hulda, apparently sound asleep, and heard his name called by Allan McLane across the hall:

"Joe! not so loud. Be conservative. Come in; I'm waiting for you. Is all done and fetched?"

"The bloke with the steeple felt will never snickle," spoke the ruffian.

"Good, good, Joe! Vengeance is mine, and it's a conservative saying. My dear sister is at peace."

"The two yaller pullets have slipped you; the abigail mizzled to the funeral with your niece, and t'other dell must have smelt us, and hopped the twig."

"Not tasteful language at all, Joe. I don't understand you. Where are the two bright wenches, Virgie and Roxy?"

"Roxie's in Baltimore; Virgie's run away."

"Run? Where? Don't trifle with me, Joe Johnson! Conservative as I am, I don't like it, sir. Where could she have run?"

"There's no way for her to slip us but by water or through the Cypress Swamp, Colonel. She ain't safe this side of Cantwell's bridge. Word has gone out, and every road is watched."

"But Van Dorn is beaten back; he hasn't made a single capture; the niggers drove him out of Dover with firearms, and he is wounded somewhere."

The tall kidnapper turned pale, and then consigned Van Dorn's shade to eternal torment.

"Don't swear before me, sir!" McLane, also irritated, exclaimed. "It's not conservative, and I won't permit it. How do I know Meshach Milburn is dead? who did it?"

"Black Dave fired the barker, and saw him settled."

"Send him here!"

The negro came in, red-eyed, and hoarse with diseased lungs, and stood, the wreck of a once gigantic and regular man.

"Gi' me a drink," he muttered; "I'm mos' dead wi' misery an cold."

"Tell this man what you did," Joe Johnson spoke; "you waited till you saw the hat at the window, and fired, and fetched hat an' man to the ground?"

Swallowing a thimbleful of McLane's brandy, the negro grunted "Blood!" and looked tremblingly at his hands.

"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely; "was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.

Black Dave looked, and shook his head.

"Not like that? Damnation!"

"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson; "what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."

"Like dis, I reckon." He modelled the crown into a bell form with his finger.

Joe Johnson and McLane looked at each other a minute with mutual accusation and confusion, and the former unceremoniously knocked the negro down with his great fist.

"No gold of mine for this job, Joe Johnson," said Allan McLane; "in your conservatism to save your own skin, you have let your tool kill an innocent man."

He waved his hand, with all his strong will, towards the door, and shut it in the kidnapper's face. Then, in haughty emotion, not like fear, but disappointed pride and revenge, McLane sat down, glanced around him as if to determine the next movement, and instinctively reached his hand towards his Bible, which he opened at a marked page, and softly read, till tears of baffled vindictiveness and counterfeited humility stopped his voice, as follows:

"'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up ... God requireth that which is past ... man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity.... a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?'"

When tears of pious vindictiveness had closed the reading, Colonel McLane spread his pongee handkerchief on the bare floor, and knelt in silent and comfortably assured prayer.

* * * * *

Black Dave had crawled into the room where Hulda partly heard these revelations, and he entered the large closet under the concealed shaft to the prison pen, where his groans and mental agony touched Hulda's commiseration. She opened the trap, and crawled there too.

"Hush, Dave!" she whispered. "What makes you so miserable?"

"Missy, I'se killed a man. Dey made me do it. I'll burn in torment. Lord save me!"

"Dave," said Hulda, "my poor father died for his offences. You can do no more; but, like him, you can repent."

"Oh, missy, I's black. Rum an' fightin' has ruined me. Dar's no way to do better. De law won't let me bear witness agin de people dat set me on. How kin I repent unless I confess my sin? De law won't let me confess."

"Confess your poor, wracked soul to me, Dave. The Lord will hear you, though you dare not turn your face to him."

"Missy, once I was in de Lord's walk. My han's was clean, my face clar, my stummick unburnt by liquor. I stood in no man's way; at de church dey put me fo'ward. My soul was happy. One day I licked a man bigger dan me. It made me proud an' sassy. I backslid, an' wan't no good to be hired out to steady people; so de taverns got me, an' den de kidnappers used me, an' now de blood of Cain an' Abel is on my forehead forever."

Hulda knelt by the murderer, and prayed with all her heart; not the self-conscious, special pleading of the prayer across the hall, but the humble prayer of the penitent on Calvary: "Lord, we, of this felon den, ask to be with thee in Paradise."

* * * * *

The whole of the next day was spent in preparations for flight by Patty and her son-in-law.

A boat of sufficient size, and crew to man it, had to be procured down the river, and this necessitated two journeys, one of Patty, to Cannon's Ferry, another by Joe, to Vienna and Twiford's wharf.

During their absence Cy James was equally intent on something, and Hulda saw him in the ploughed field near the old Delaware cottage, under the swooping buzzards, directing the farmer where to guide his plough, and it seemed, in a little while, that one of the horses had fallen into a pit there.

Later on Hulda observed Cy James, with a spade, digging at various places near Patty Cannon's former cottage.

"All are at work for themselves," Hulda thought, "except Levin and me. How often have I seen Aunt Patty slip to secret places in the night, or by early dawn, when she looked every window over to see if she was watched. Her beehives were her greatest care."

A sudden thought made Hulda stand still, and cast the color from her cheeks.

"They are all going away. I shall be taken, too, or kept for worse evil here. My mother, in Florida, hates me; she has told me so. I know the marriage Allan McLane means for me--to be his white slave! Levin is poor, and his mother is poor, too; they say Patty Cannon has buried gold. Perhaps God will point it out to me."

She slipped down the Seaford road, and walked up the lane in the fields she knew so well. No person was in the hip-roofed cottage. Hulda went among the outbuildings, and began to inspect the beehives, made of sections of round trees, and the big wooden flower-pots Patty Cannon had left behind her.

She was only interrupted by a gun being fired in the ploughed field, and saw the pertinacious buzzards there fall dead from the air as they exasperated the ploughman.

* * * * *

"I shall have one piece of fun in Maryland before I go," Hulda heard her stepfather say, as he went past her bed to ascend the hatchway at morn, "and that is to burn the nigger who mugged me. This is his day."

Almost immediately he came, cursing, down the ladder, followed by a jeering laugh from above, and the cry, "We'll all see you hanged yit, by smoke! an' mash another egg on your countenance, nigger-buyer!"

In a moment or two a tremendous quarrel was going on below stairs between the kidnapper and his wife's mother, and Hulda believed they were murdering each other; and, peeping once to see, beheld Johnson holding Patty to the floor, and stuffing her elegant hair, which had been torn out in the scuffle, into her mouth.

"I'll be the death of you, old fence, before I go," he shouted; "the verdict would be, 'I did the county a service.'"

"Come away there!" cried Allan McLane, pushing past Hulda and between the combatants. "Shame on you, Joe! To whip your grandmother is hardly conservative. Here is an errand that will pay you well: my wench Virgie has been caught."

The kidnapper released the woman and turned to his guest.

"Good news!" he said; "ef it puts my neck in the string, I'll fetch her fur you."

His countenance had begun to assume a sensual expression, when Patty Cannon, to whom his back was turned, rushed upon him like a tornado, lifted him from his feet, and threw him through the back door into the yard and bolted him out. McLane retreated by the other door.

"Thank heaven!" reflected Hulda, looking down in terror, "no one is murdered yet, and I have another day of grace to wait for Levin."

* * * * *

"Cunnil McLane," said Patty Cannon, in his room that night, "what interest have you in the quadroon gal an' Huldy, too? You don't want' em both, Cunnil?"

"No, Aunt Patty. All my views are conservative. Quite so! Hulda I want to reform and model to my needs. She'll ornament me. By taking the girl Virgie from my niece Vesta, I desire to punish the latter for consenting to the degradation of our family, and marrying the forester, Milburn. She loves this quadroon; therefore, I want to deprive her of the girl: Joe is to bring her to me, do you see?"

His face expressed the indifference he felt to Virgie's safety on the way, and the coarse suggestion gave Patty Cannon her opportunity:

"Cunnil, there's but three in the house to-night; I am one."

"I am two, Patty."

"And three is purty Huldy, Cunnil!"

They looked at each other a few minutes in silence.

"There is two to one," said Patty Cannon, with a giggle. "We have no neighbors that air not used to noises yer."

The silence was restored while the two products of men-dealing read each other's countenances.

"I made a very conservative and liberal proposition to her, Patty, and she insulted me, yet beautifully. But I owe her a grudge for it."

"Insulted you, Cunnil? The ongrateful huzzy! Can't you insult her back? She never dared to disobey _me_. Her pride once broke down, she'll be like other gals, I reckon."

"That's true, no doubt. But, Patty, haven't you a little remorse about it, considering she's your grandchild?"

"My mother had none fur me, honey," the old woman chuckled, familiarly.

"What is that story I have heard something of, about your origin, Patty?"

"I don't know no more about it, Cunnil, than a pore, ignorant gal would, you know. I've hearn my grandfather was a lord. A gypsy woman enticed his son and he married her. His father drove him from his door, an' his wife fetched him on her money to Canady, where she went into the smugglin' business at St. John's, half-way between Montreal and the United States."

"And he was hanged there for assassinating a friend who detected him?"

"They says so, honey. Anyhow, he was hanged. We gals was beautiful. Says mother: 'It's a hard world, but don't let it beat you, gals! Marry ef you kin. Anyway, you must live, and you can't live off of women.' I married a Delaware man, and so I quit bein' Martha Hanley and became Patty Cannon."[7]

"And what a career you have led, Aunt Patty! Lived anywhere but in this old pocket between the bays, you would have had the reputation of Captain Kidd. Tell me now, conservatively, was not your own helpless childhood the cause of your mistakes, and does it never make you feel for other sparrow-birds like Hulda?"

The black-haired woman, with a certain evil-thinking, like one reflected upon harshly, finally clapped her bold black eyes on McLane's, and replied, chuckling:

"I don't know as it do, Cunnil. Before my mother pinted the way, I loved the men. I loved 'em to be bad. Mommy tuk us as we drifted. An' as fur Huldy yer, her mother throws her onto me; she's not like the Cannons an' Johnsons; she's full of pride, and," with an oath, "let it be tuk out of her! Will you pay my price?"

He hesitated.

"It's not the price, Patty; it's the way. Isn't it cowardly?"

"Yes," said Patty, saucily, "it's kidnappin'. That's the trade yer. Pay down the money, Cunnil, an' this bare room will brighten to be your wedding chamber. Pah! are you a man!"

Her words aroused the visions self-love can reluctantly repulse, and which, entertained but an instant, grow irresistible.

The limber, maturing, rounding form of Hulda stepped on the footstool of his mind, touched his knee, and exhaled the aroma of her youth like a subtile musk, till he leaned back languidly, as if he smoked a pipe and on its bowl her bust was painted, and all her modesties dissolved into the intoxication. Brutality itself grew natural to this vision, as a fiercer joy and substitute for the deceit he could no longer practice. The child had flown from her in the instant of his grasping it, like a pale butterfly, but there remained where it had floated, a silken and nubile essence, fairy and humanity in one, clad in pure thoughts and sweet respect, the profanation of which would be as rare a game as Satan's struggle with the soul of Eve.

Her innocence and spirit, self-respect and awakened womanly consciousness, weakness and sensibility, mettle and beauty, presented themselves by turns; and the cold, woodeny room, the neglected tavern, the autumn night wind coming down the chimney and starting the fire, all seemed instinctive, like him, with mischief, as if Patty Cannon's soul flew astraddle of a broom and led a hundred witches.

McLane was fifty; his family was a stiff commercial one, that had generally kept demure, yet grasping, and practised the conservatism he also boasted of, but had departed from: he was the outlaw of the house, yet elevating its tenets into an aggressive shibboleth, the more so that he prospered by anti-progress.

He was a backer of domestic slave-dealers, and put his money into forms of gain men hesitated at; not only at the curbstone, for usury, but behind pawnbrokers and sporting men, in lottery companies and liquor-houses, and, it was said, in the open slave-trade, too, clippers for which occasionally stole out of the Chesapeake on affected trading errands to the East Indies, and came home with nothing but West India fruits.

He strove to maintain his credit by ostentatious abhorrence of novelties and heterodoxies, and of all liberal agitations, and had the sublime hardihood to carry his Bible into every sink of shame, as if it was the natural baggage of a gentleman, and expected with him; and he would rebuke "blasphemy" while bidding at the slave auction or sitting in a bar-room full of kidnappers, among many of whom he passed for a religious standard.

No portion of that Bible gave him any delight or occupation, however, except the Old Testament, with its thoroughgoing codes of servitude, concubinage, and an-eye-for-an-eye. He knew the Jewish laws better than the Scribes and Pharisees in the time of Herod and John, and had persuaded himself that the mental endorsement and, wherever possible, the practice of these, constituted a firm believer. Revenge, intolerance, formality, and self-sleekness had become so much his theory that he did not know himself whether he was capable of doing evil provided he wanted anything.

Not particularly courageous, he was so destitute of sensibility that he felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.

"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice, like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"

"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide from me yer by your fire, and my voice outside the door will keep her in yer till day."

McLane went to his portmanteau and unlocked it, and took out rolls of notes and a buckskin bag of gold.

The yellow lustre seemed to flash in Patty Cannon's rich black eyes, like the moon overhead upon a well.

"How beautiful it do shine, Cunnil!" she said. "Nothing is like it fur a friend. Youth an' beauty has to go together to be strong, but, by God! gold kin go it alone."

He counted out two piles, one of notes and one of gold, using his gold spectacles upon his hawk nose to do so, and said:

"Patty, I've bought many a grandchild _with_ the old woman, but this is the first child I have bought _from_ the grandmother. Now fulfil your contract and earn your money!"

He put his spectacles in his pocket, stretched his gaitered slippers before the fire, looked at his watch and let the crystal seal drop on his sleek abdomen, and his vitreous, blue-green eyes filled with color like twin vases in a druggist's window. He was ready and anxious to substitute the ruffian for the tempter.

Patty Cannon, glancing at the money on the table, and bearing a lamp, started at once through the house, calling "Huldy! Huldy!"

Nothing responded to the name.

She searched from room to room, peering everywhere, and made the circuit twice, and, taking a lantern, went into the windy night and round the bounds of the old tavern.

The house was easily explored, having no cellar nor outbuildings, and the trap to the slave-pen was locked fast. The girl's shawl and hat were also gone.

"She's heard us, I reckon," the old woman muttered; "she's run away an' ruined me. Joe's cruel to me; Van Dorn is gone; without gold I go to the poor-house. McLane is pitiless--"

She dwelt upon the sentence, and, with only an instant's hesitation, turned into the tavern again and buttoned the outer door.

Beneath her feather bed she reached her hand and drew out a large object, took a horn from the mantel and sprinkled it with something contained there, and then, in a bold, masculine walk, stamping hard went in the dark up the open stairs again, talking, as she advanced, loudly, complaisantly, or sternly, as if to some truant she was coaxing or forcing. Finally, at McLane's chamber, she knocked hard, crying:

"Open, Cunnil! Here's the bashful creatur! She daren't disobey no mo'. Step out and kiss her, Cunnil!"

"Ha!" said McLane, throwing open his door, out of which the full light of fire and candles gleamed, "conservative, is she? Well, let her enter!"

As he made one step to penetrate the darkness with his dazzled eyes, Patty Cannon silently thrust against his heart a huge horse-pistol and pulled the trigger: a flash of fire from the sharp flint against the fresh powder in the pan lit up the hall an instant, and the heavy body of the guest fell backward before his chair, and over him leaned the woman a moment, still as death, with the heavy pistol clubbed, ready to strike if he should stir.

He did not move, but only bled at the large lips, ghastly and unprotesting, and the cold blue eyes looked as natural as life.

Patty Cannon took the chair and counted the money.