seen the house.”

“Was he good to you?” said Emmeline.

“Mostly, till he tuk sick. He’s lain sick, off and on, more than six
months, and been orful oneasy. ’Pears like he warnt willin’ to have
nobody rest, day or night; and got so curous, there couldn’t nobody
suit him. ’Pears like he just grew crosser, every day; kep me up nights
till I got farly beat out, and couldn’t keep awake no longer; and cause
I got to sleep, one night, Lors, he talk so orful to me, and he tell me
he’d sell me to just the hardest master he could find; and he’d
promised me my freedom, too, when he died.”

“Had you any friends?” said Emmeline.

“Yes, my husband,—he’s a blacksmith. Mas’r gen’ly hired him out. They
took me off so quick, I didn’t even have time to see him; and I’s got
four children. O, dear me!” said the woman, covering her face with her
hands.

It is a natural impulse, in every one, when they hear a tale of
distress, to think of something to say by way of consolation. Emmeline
wanted to say something, but she could not think of anything to say.
What was there to be said? As by a common consent, they both avoided,
with fear and dread, all mention of the horrible man who was now their
master.

True, there is religious trust for even the darkest hour. The mulatto
woman was a member of the Methodist church, and had an unenlightened
but very sincere spirit of piety. Emmeline had been educated much more
intelligently,—taught to read and write, and diligently instructed in
the Bible, by the care of a faithful and pious mistress; yet, would it
not try the faith of the firmest Christian, to find themselves
abandoned, apparently, of God, in the grasp of ruthless violence? How
much more must it shake the faith of Christ’s poor little ones, weak in
knowledge and tender in years!

The boat moved on,—freighted with its weight of sorrow,—up the red,
muddy, turbid current, through the abrupt tortuous windings of the Red
river; and sad eyes gazed wearily on the steep red-clay banks, as they
glided by in dreary sameness. At last the boat stopped at a small town,
and Legree, with his party, disembarked.

CHAPTER XXXII
Dark Places

“The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of
cruelty.”[1]

 [1] Ps. 74:20.

Trailing wearily behind a rude wagon, and over a ruder road, Tom and
his associates faced onward.

In the wagon was seated Simon Legree and the two women, still fettered
together, were stowed away with some baggage in the back part of it,
and the whole company were seeking Legree’s plantation, which lay a
good distance off.

It was a wild, forsaken road, now winding through dreary pine barrens,
where the wind whispered mournfully, and now over log causeways,
through long cypress swamps, the doleful trees rising out of the slimy,
spongy ground, hung with long wreaths of funeral black moss, while ever
and anon the loathsome form of the mocassin snake might be seen sliding
among broken stumps and shattered branches that lay here and there,
rotting in the water.

It is disconsolate enough, this riding, to the stranger, who, with
well-filled pocket and well-appointed horse, threads the lonely way on
some errand of business; but wilder, drearier, to the man enthralled,
whom every weary step bears further from all that man loves and prays
for.

So one should have thought, that witnessed the sunken and dejected
expression on those dark faces; the wistful, patient weariness with
which those sad eyes rested on object after object that passed them in
their sad journey.

Simon rode on, however, apparently well pleased, occasionally pulling
away at a flask of spirit, which he kept in his pocket.

“I say, _you!_” he said, as he turned back and caught a glance at the
dispirited faces behind him. “Strike up a song, boys,—come!”

The men looked at each other, and the “_come_” was repeated, with a
smart crack of the whip which the driver carried in his hands. Tom
began a Methodist hymn.

“Jerusalem, my happy home,
    Name ever dear to me!
When shall my sorrows have an end,
    Thy joys when shall—“[2]

 [2] _Jerusalem, my happy home_,” anonymous hymn dating from the latter
 part of the sixteenth century, sung to the tune of “St. Stephen.”
 Words derive from St. Augustine’s _Meditations_.

“Shut up, you black cuss!” roared Legree; “did ye think I wanted any o’
yer infernal old Methodism? I say, tune up, now, something real
rowdy,—quick!”

One of the other men struck up one of those unmeaning songs, common
among the slaves.

“Mas’r see’d me cotch a coon,
    High boys, high!
He laughed to split,—d’ye see the moon,
    Ho! ho! ho! boys, ho!
Ho! yo! hi—e! _oh!”_

The singer appeared to make up the song to his own pleasure, generally
hitting on rhyme, without much attempt at reason; and the party took up
the chorus, at intervals,

“Ho! ho! ho! boys, ho!
High—e—oh! high—e—oh!”

It was sung very boisterouly, and with a forced attempt at merriment;
but no wail of despair, no words of impassioned prayer, could have had
such a depth of woe in them as the wild notes of the chorus. As if the
poor, dumb heart, threatened,—prisoned,—took refuge in that
inarticulate sanctuary of music, and found there a language in which to
breathe its prayer to God! There was a prayer in it, which Simon could
not hear. He only heard the boys singing noisily, and was well pleased;
he was making them “keep up their spirits.”

“Well, my little dear,” said he, turning to Emmeline, and laying his
hand on her shoulder, “we’re almost home!”

When Legree scolded and stormed, Emmeline was terrified; but when he
laid his hand on her, and spoke as he now did, she felt as if she had
rather he would strike her. The expression of his eyes made her soul
sick, and her flesh creep. Involuntarily she clung closer to the
mulatto woman by her side, as if she were her mother.

“You didn’t ever wear ear-rings,” he said, taking hold of her small ear
with his coarse fingers.

“No, Mas’r!” said Emmeline, trembling and looking down.

“Well, I’ll give you a pair, when we get home, if you’re a good girl.
You needn’t be so frightened; I don’t mean to make you work very hard.
You’ll have fine times with me, and live like a lady,—only be a good
girl.”

Legree had been drinking to that degree that he was inclining to be
very gracious; and it was about this time that the enclosures of the
plantation rose to view. The estate had formerly belonged to a
gentleman of opulence and taste, who had bestowed some considerable
attention to the adornment of his grounds. Having died insolvent, it
had been purchased, at a bargain, by Legree, who used it, as he did
everything else, merely as an implement for money-making. The place had
that ragged, forlorn appearance, which is always produced by the
evidence that the care of the former owner has been left to go to utter
decay.

What was once a smooth-shaven lawn before the house, dotted here and
there with ornamental shrubs, was now covered with frowsy tangled
grass, with horseposts set up, here and there, in it, where the turf
was stamped away, and the ground littered with broken pails, cobs of
corn, and other slovenly remains. Here and there, a mildewed jessamine
or honeysuckle hung raggedly from some ornamental support, which had
been pushed to one side by being used as a horse-post. What once was a
large garden was now all grown over with weeds, through which, here and
there, some solitary exotic reared its forsaken head. What had been a
conservatory had now no window-shades, and on the mouldering shelves
stood some dry, forsaken flower-pots, with sticks in them, whose dried
leaves showed they had once been plants.

The wagon rolled up a weedy gravel walk, under a noble avenue of China
trees, whose graceful forms and ever-springing foliage seemed to be the
only things there that neglect could not daunt or alter,—like noble
spirits, so deeply rooted in goodness, as to flourish and grow stronger
amid discouragement and decay.

The house had been large and handsome. It was built in a manner common
at the South; a wide verandah of two stories running round every part
of the house, into which every outer door opened, the lower tier being
supported by brick pillars.

But the place looked desolate and uncomfortable; some windows stopped
up with boards, some with shattered panes, and shutters hanging by a
single hinge,—all telling of coarse neglect and discomfort.

Bits of board, straw, old decayed barrels and boxes, garnished the
ground in all directions; and three or four ferocious-looking dogs,
roused by the sound of the wagon-wheels, came tearing out, and were
with difficulty restrained from laying hold of Tom and his companions,
by the effort of the ragged servants who came after them.

“Ye see what ye’d get!” said Legree, caressing the dogs with grim
satisfaction, and turning to Tom and his companions. “Ye see what ye’d
get, if ye try to run off. These yer dogs has been raised to track
niggers; and they’d jest as soon chaw one on ye up as eat their supper.
So, mind yerself! How now, Sambo!” he said, to a ragged fellow, without
any brim to his hat, who was officious in his attentions. “How have
things been going?”

“Fust rate, Mas’r.”

“Quimbo,” said Legree to another, who was making zealous demonstrations
to attract his attention, “ye minded what I telled ye?”

“Guess I did, didn’t I?”

These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation.
Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically
as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty,
brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities. It is
a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against
the character of the race, that the negro overseer is always more
tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the
negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white. It is no
more true of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over.
The slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.

Legree, like some potentates we read of in history, governed his
plantation by a sort of resolution of forces. Sambo and Quimbo
cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all,
cordially hated them; and, by playing off one against another, he was
pretty sure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get
informed of whatever was on foot in the place.

Nobody can live entirely without social intercourse; and Legree
encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse familiarity
with him,—a familiarity, however, at any moment liable to get one or
the other of them into trouble; for, on the slightest provocation, one
of them always stood ready, at a nod, to be a minister of his vengeance
on the other.

As they stood there now by Legree, they seemed an apt illustration of
the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals. Their coarse,
dark, heavy features; their great eyes, rolling enviously on each
other; their barbarous, guttural, half-brute intonation; their
dilapidated garments fluttering in the wind,—were all in admirable
keeping with the vile and unwholesome character of everything about the
place.

“Here, you Sambo,” said Legree, “take these yer boys down to the
quarters; and here’s a gal I’ve got for _you_,” said he, as he
separated the mulatto woman from Emmeline, and pushed her towards
him;—“I promised to bring you one, you know.”

The woman gave a start, and drawing back, said, suddenly,

“O, Mas’r! I left my old man in New Orleans.”

“What of that, you—; won’t you want one here? None o’ your words,—go
long!” said Legree, raising his whip.

“Come, mistress,” he said to Emmeline, “you go in here with me.”

A dark, wild face was seen, for a moment, to glance at the window of
the house; and, as Legree opened the door, a female voice said
something, in a quick, imperative tone. Tom, who was looking, with
anxious interest, after Emmeline, as she went in, noticed this, and
heard Legree answer, angrily, “You may hold your tongue! I’ll do as I
please, for all you!”

Tom heard no more; for he was soon following Sambo to the quarters. The
quarters was a little sort of street of rude shanties, in a row, in a
part of the plantation, far off from the house. They had a forlorn,
brutal, forsaken air. Tom’s heart sunk when he saw them. He had been
comforting himself with the thought of a cottage, rude, indeed, but one
which he might make neat and quiet, and where he might have a shelf for
his Bible, and a place to be alone out of his laboring hours. He looked
into several; they were mere rude shells, destitute of any species of
furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt, spread confusedly
over the floor, which was merely the bare ground, trodden hard by the
tramping of innumerable feet.

“Which of these will be mine?” said he, to Sambo, submissively.

“Dunno; ken turn in here, I spose,” said Sambo; “spects thar’s room for
another thar; thar’s a pretty smart heap o’ niggers to each on ’em,
now; sure, I dunno what I ’s to do with more.”

It was late in the evening when the weary occupants of the shanties
came flocking home,—men and women, in soiled and tattered garments,
surly and uncomfortable, and in no mood to look pleasantly on
new-comers. The small village was alive with no inviting sounds;
hoarse, guttural voices contending at the hand-mills where their morsel
of hard corn was yet to be ground into meal, to fit it for the cake
that was to constitute their only supper. From the earliest dawn of the
day, they had been in the fields, pressed to work under the driving
lash of the overseers; for it was now in the very heat and hurry of the
season, and no means was left untried to press every one up to the top
of their capabilities. “True,” says the negligent lounger; “picking
cotton isn’t hard work.” Isn’t it? And it isn’t much inconvenience,
either, to have one drop of water fall on your head; yet the worst
torture of the inquisition is produced by drop after drop, drop after
drop, falling moment after moment, with monotonous succession, on the
same spot; and work, in itself not hard, becomes so, by being pressed,
hour after hour, with unvarying, unrelenting sameness, with not even
the consciousness of free-will to take from its tediousness. Tom looked
in vain among the gang, as they poured along, for companionable faces.
He saw only sullen, scowling, imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged
women, or women that were not women,—the strong pushing away the
weak,—the gross, unrestricted animal selfishness of human beings, of
whom nothing good was expected and desired; and who, treated in every
way like brutes, had sunk as nearly to their level as it was possible
for human beings to do. To a late hour in the night the sound of the
grinding was protracted; for the mills were few in number compared with
the grinders, and the weary and feeble ones were driven back by the
strong, and came on last in their turn.

“Ho yo!” said Sambo, coming to the mulatto woman, and throwing down a
bag of corn before her; “what a cuss yo name?”

“Lucy,” said the woman.

“Wal, Lucy, yo my woman now. Yo grind dis yer corn, and get _my_ supper
baked, ye har?”

“I an’t your woman, and I won’t be!” said the woman, with the sharp,
sudden courage of despair; “you go long!”

“I’ll kick yo, then!” said Sambo, raising his foot threateningly.

“Ye may kill me, if ye choose,—the sooner the better! Wish’t I was
dead!” said she.

“I say, Sambo, you go to spilin’ the hands, I’ll tell Mas’r o’ you,”
said Quimbo, who was busy at the mill, from which he had viciously
driven two or three tired women, who were waiting to grind their corn.

“And, I’ll tell him ye won’t let the women come to the mills, yo old
nigger!” said Sambo. “Yo jes keep to yo own row.”

Tom was hungry with his day’s journey, and almost faint for want of
food.

“Thar, yo!” said Quimbo, throwing down a coarse bag, which contained a
peck of corn; “thar, nigger, grab, take car on ’t,—yo won’t get no
more, _dis_ yer week.”

Tom waited till a late hour, to get a place at the mills; and then,
moved by the utter weariness of two women, whom he saw trying to grind
their corn there, he ground for them, put together the decaying brands
of the fire, where many had baked cakes before them, and then went
about getting his own supper. It was a new kind of work there,—a deed
of charity, small as it was; but it woke an answering touch in their
hearts,—an expression of womanly kindness came over their hard faces;
they mixed his cake for him, and tended its baking; and Tom sat down by
the light of the fire, and drew out his Bible,—for he had need for
comfort.

“What’s that?” said one of the woman.

“A Bible,” said Tom.

“Good Lord! han’t seen un since I was in Kentuck.”

“Was you raised in Kentuck?” said Tom, with interest.

“Yes, and well raised, too; never ’spected to come to dis yer!” said
the woman, sighing.

“What’s dat ar book, any way?” said the other woman.

“Why, the Bible.”

“Laws a me! what’s dat?” said the woman.

“Do tell! you never hearn on ’t?” said the other woman. “I used to har
Missis a readin’ on ’t, sometimes, in Kentuck; but, laws o’ me! we
don’t har nothin’ here but crackin’ and swarin’.”

“Read a piece, anyways!” said the first woman, curiously, seeing Tom
attentively poring over it.

Tom read,—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest.”

“Them’s good words, enough,” said the woman; “who says ’em?”

“The Lord,” said Tom.

“I jest wish I know’d whar to find Him,” said the woman. “I would go;
’pears like I never should get rested again. My flesh is fairly sore,
and I tremble all over, every day, and Sambo’s allers a jawin’ at me,
’cause I doesn’t pick faster; and nights it’s most midnight ’fore I can
get my supper; and den ’pears like I don’t turn over and shut my eyes,
’fore I hear de horn blow to get up, and at it agin in de mornin’. If I
knew whar de Lor was, I’d tell him.”

“He’s here, he’s everywhere,” said Tom.

“Lor, you an’t gwine to make me believe dat ar! I know de Lord an’t
here,” said the woman; “‘tan’t no use talking, though. I’s jest gwine
to camp down, and sleep while I ken.”

The women went off to their cabins, and Tom sat alone, by the
smouldering fire, that flickered up redly in his face.

The silver, fair-browed moon rose in the purple sky, and looked down,
calm and silent, as God looks on the scene of misery and
oppression,—looked calmly on the lone black man, as he sat, with his
arms folded, and his Bible on his knee.

“Is God HERE?” Ah, how is it possible for the untaught heart to keep
its faith, unswerving, in the face of dire misrule, and palpable,
unrebuked injustice? In that simple heart waged a fierce conflict; the
crushing sense of wrong, the foreshadowing, of a whole life of future
misery, the wreck of all past hopes, mournfully tossing in the soul’s
sight, like dead corpses of wife, and child, and friend, rising from
the dark wave, and surging in the face of the half-drowned mariner! Ah,
was it easy _here_ to believe and hold fast the great password of
Christian faith, that “God IS, and is the REWARDER of them that
diligently seek Him”?

Tom rose, disconsolate, and stumbled into the cabin that had been
allotted to him. The floor was already strewn with weary sleepers, and
the foul air of the place almost repelled him; but the heavy night-dews
were chill, and his limbs weary, and, wrapping about him a tattered
blanket, which formed his only bed-clothing, he stretched himself in
the straw and fell asleep.

In dreams, a gentle voice came over his ear; he was sitting on the
mossy seat in the garden by Lake Pontchartrain, and Eva, with her
serious eyes bent downward, was reading to him from the Bible; and he
heard her read.

“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and the
rivers they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the
fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon
thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.”

Gradually the words seemed to melt and fade, as in a divine music; the
child raised her deep eyes, and fixed them lovingly on him, and rays of
warmth and comfort seemed to go from them to his heart; and, as if
wafted on the music, she seemed to rise on shining wings, from which
flakes and spangles of gold fell off like stars, and she was gone.

Tom woke. Was it a dream? Let it pass for one. But who shall say that
that sweet young spirit, which in life so yearned to comfort and
console the distressed, was forbidden of God to assume this ministry
after death?

It is a beautiful belief,
    That ever round our head
Are hovering, on angel wings,
    The spirits of the dead.

CHAPTER XXXIII
Cassy

“And behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no
comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but
they had no comforter.”—ECCL. 4:1

It took but a short time to familiarize Tom with all that was to be
hoped or feared in his new way of life. He was an expert and efficient
workman in whatever he undertook; and was, both from habit and
principle, prompt and faithful. Quiet and peaceable in his disposition,
he hoped, by unremitting diligence, to avert from himself at least a
portion of the evils of his condition. He saw enough of abuse and
misery to make him sick and weary; but he determined to toil on, with
religious patience, committing himself to Him that judgeth righteously,
not without hope that some way of escape might yet be opened to him.

Legree took a silent note of Tom’s availability. He rated him as a
first-class hand; and yet he felt a secret dislike to him,—the native
antipathy of bad to good. He saw, plainly, that when, as was often the
case, his violence and brutality fell on the helpless, Tom took notice
of it; for, so subtle is the atmosphere of opinion, that it will make
itself felt, without words; and the opinion even of a slave may annoy a
master. Tom in various ways manifested a tenderness of feeling, a
commiseration for his fellow-sufferers, strange and new to them, which
was watched with a jealous eye by Legree. He had purchased Tom with a
view of eventually making him a sort of overseer, with whom he might,
at times, intrust his affairs, in short absences; and, in his view, the
first, second, and third requisite for that place, was _hardness_.
Legree made up his mind, that, as Tom was not hard to his hand, he
would harden him forthwith; and some few weeks after Tom had been on
the place, he determined to commence the process.

One morning, when the hands were mustered for the field, Tom noticed,
with surprise, a new comer among them, whose appearance excited his
attention. It was a woman, tall and slenderly formed, with remarkably
delicate hands and feet, and dressed in neat and respectable garments.
By the appearance of her face, she might have been between thirty-five
and forty; and it was a face that, once seen, could never be
forgotten,—one of those that, at a glance, seem to convey to us an idea
of a wild, painful, and romantic history. Her forehead was high, and
her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straight, well-formed
nose, her finely-cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head and
neck, showed that she must once have been beautiful; but her face was
deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance.
Her complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features
sharp, and her whole form emaciated. But her eye was the most
remarkable feature,—so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long
lashes of equal darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There
was a fierce pride and defiance in every line of her face, in every
curve of the flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her eye
was a deep, settled night of anguish,—an expression so hopeless and
unchanging as to contrast fearfully with the scorn and pride expressed
by her whole demeanor.

Where she came from, or who she was, Tom did not know. The first he did
know, she was walking by his side, erect and proud, in the dim gray of
the dawn. To the gang, however, she was known; for there was much
looking and turning of heads, and a smothered yet apparent exultation
among the miserable, ragged, half-starved creatures by whom she was
surrounded.

“Got to come to it, at last,—glad of it!” said one.

“He! he! he!” said another; “you’ll know how good it is, Misse!”

“We’ll see her work!”

“Wonder if she’ll get a cutting up, at night, like the rest of us!”

“I’d be glad to see her down for a flogging, I’ll bound!” said another.

The woman took no notice of these taunts, but walked on, with the same
expression of angry scorn, as if she heard nothing. Tom had always
lived among refined, and cultivated people, and he felt intuitively,
from her air and bearing, that she belonged to that class; but how or
why she could be fallen to those degrading circumstances, he could not
tell. The woman neither looked at him nor spoke to him, though, all the
way to the field, she kept close at his side.

Tom was soon busy at his work; but, as the woman was at no great
distance from him, he often glanced an eye to her, at her work. He saw,
at a glance, that a native adroitness and handiness made the task to
her an easier one than it proved to many. She picked very fast and very
clean, and with an air of scorn, as if she despised both the work and
the disgrace and humiliation of the circumstances in which she was
placed.

In the course of the day, Tom was working near the mulatto woman who
had been bought in the same lot with himself. She was evidently in a
condition of great suffering, and Tom often heard her praying, as she
wavered and trembled, and seemed about to fall down. Tom silently as he
came near to her, transferred several handfuls of cotton from his own
sack to hers.

“O, don’t, don’t!” said the woman, looking surprised; “it’ll get you
into trouble.”

Just then Sambo came up. He seemed to have a special spite against this
woman; and, flourishing his whip, said, in brutal, guttural tones,
“What dis yer, Luce,—foolin’ a’” and, with the word, kicking the woman
with his heavy cowhide shoe, he struck Tom across the face with his
whip.

Tom silently resumed his task; but the woman, before at the last point
of exhaustion, fainted.

“I’ll bring her to!” said the driver, with a brutal grin. “I’ll give
her something better than camphire!” and, taking a pin from his
coat-sleeve, he buried it to the head in her flesh. The woman groaned,
and half rose. “Get up, you beast, and work, will yer, or I’ll show yer
a trick more!”

The woman seemed stimulated, for a few moments, to an unnatural
strength, and worked with desperate eagerness.

“See that you keep to dat ar,” said the man, “or yer’ll wish yer’s dead
tonight, I reckin!”

“That I do now!” Tom heard her say; and again he heard her say, “O,
Lord, how long! O, Lord, why don’t you help us?”

At the risk of all that he might suffer, Tom came forward again, and
put all the cotton in his sack into the woman’s.

“O, you mustn’t! you donno what they’ll do to ye!” said the woman.

“I can bar it!” said Tom, “better ’n you;” and he was at his place
again. It passed in a moment.

Suddenly, the stranger woman whom we have described, and who had, in
the course of her work, come near enough to hear Tom’s last words,
raised her heavy black eyes, and fixed them, for a second, on him;
then, taking a quantity of cotton from her basket, she placed it in
his.

“You know nothing about this place,” she said, “or you wouldn’t have
done that. When you’ve been here a month, you’ll be done helping
anybody; you’ll find it hard enough to take care of your own skin!”

“The Lord forbid, Missis!” said Tom, using instinctively to his field
companion the respectful form proper to the high bred with whom he had
lived.

“The Lord never visits these parts,” said the woman, bitterly, as she
went nimbly forward with her work; and again the scornful smile curled
her lips.

But the action of the woman had been seen by the driver, across the
field; and, flourishing his whip, he came up to her.

“What! what!” he said to the woman, with an air of triumph, “You a
foolin’? Go along! yer under me now,—mind yourself, or yer’ll cotch
it!”

A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly flashed from those black eyes;
and, facing about, with quivering lip and dilated nostrils, she drew
herself up, and fixed a glance, blazing with rage and scorn, on the
driver.

“Dog!” she said, “touch _me_, if you dare! I’ve power enough, yet, to
have you torn by the dogs, burnt alive, cut to inches! I’ve only to say
the word!”

“What de devil you here for, den?” said the man, evidently cowed, and
sullenly retreating a step or two. “Didn’t mean no harm, Misse Cassy!”

“Keep your distance, then!” said the woman. And, in truth, the man
seemed greatly inclined to attend to something at the other end of the
field, and started off in quick time.

The woman suddenly turned to her work, and labored with a despatch that
was perfectly astonishing to Tom. She seemed to work by magic. Before
the day was through, her basket was filled, crowded down, and piled,
and she had several times put largely into Tom’s. Long after dusk, the
whole weary train, with their baskets on their heads, defiled up to the
building appropriated to the storing and weighing the cotton. Legree
was there, busily conversing with the two drivers.

“Dat ar Tom’s gwine to make a powerful deal o’ trouble; kept a puttin’
into Lucy’s basket.—One o’ these yer dat will get all der niggers to
feelin’ ’bused, if Masir don’t watch him!” said Sambo.

“Hey-dey! The black cuss!” said Legree. “He’ll have to get a breakin’
in, won’t he, boys?”

Both negroes grinned a horrid grin, at this intimation.

“Ay, ay! Let Mas’r Legree alone, for breakin’ in! De debil heself
couldn’t beat Mas’r at dat!” said Quimbo.

“Wal, boys, the best way is to give him the flogging to do, till he
gets over his notions. Break him in!”

“Lord, Mas’r’ll have hard work to get dat out o’ him!”

“It’ll have to come out of him, though!” said Legree, as he rolled his
tobacco in his mouth.

“Now, dar’s Lucy,—de aggravatinest, ugliest wench on de place!” pursued
Sambo.

“Take care, Sam; I shall begin to think what’s the reason for your
spite agin Lucy.”

“Well, Mas’r knows she sot herself up agin Mas’r, and wouldn’t have me,
when he telled her to.”

“I’d a flogged her into ’t,” said Legree, spitting, “only there’s such
a press o’ work, it don’t seem wuth a while to upset her jist now.
She’s slender; but these yer slender gals will bear half killin’ to get
their own way!”

“Wal, Lucy was real aggravatin’ and lazy, sulkin’ round; wouldn’t do
nothin,—and Tom he stuck up for her.”

“He did, eh! Wal, then, Tom shall have the pleasure of flogging her.
It’ll be a good practice for him, and he won’t put it on to the gal
like you devils, neither.”

“Ho, ho! haw! haw! haw!” laughed both the sooty wretches; and the
diabolical sounds seemed, in truth, a not unapt expression of the
fiendish character which Legree gave them.

“Wal, but, Mas’r, Tom and Misse Cassy, and dey among ’em, filled Lucy’s
basket. I ruther guess der weight ’s in it, Mas’r!”

“_I do the weighing!_” said Legree, emphatically.

Both the drivers again laughed their diabolical laugh.

“So!” he added, “Misse Cassy did her day’s work.”

“She picks like de debil and all his angels!”

“She’s got ’em all in her, I believe!” said Legree; and, growling a
brutal oath, he proceeded to the weighing-room.

Slowly the weary, dispirited creatures, wound their way into the room,
and, with crouching reluctance, presented their baskets to be weighed.

Legree noted on a slate, on the side of which was pasted a list of
names, the amount.

Tom’s basket was weighed and approved; and he looked, with an anxious
glance, for the success of the woman he had befriended.

Tottering with weakness, she came forward, and delivered her basket. It
was of full weight, as Legree well perceived; but, affecting anger, he
said,

“What, you lazy beast! short again! stand aside, you’ll catch it,
pretty soon!”

The woman gave a groan of utter despair, and sat down on a board.

The person who had been called Misse Cassy now came forward, and, with
a haughty, negligent air, delivered her basket. As she delivered it,
Legree looked in her eyes with a sneering yet inquiring glance.

She fixed her black eyes steadily on him, her lips moved slightly, and
she said something in French. What it was, no one knew; but Legree’s
face became perfectly demoniacal in its expression, as she spoke; he
half raised his hand, as if to strike,—a gesture which she regarded
with fierce disdain, as she turned and walked away.

“And now,” said Legree, “come here, you Tom. You see, I telled ye I
didn’t buy ye jest for the common work; I mean to promote ye, and make
a driver of ye; and tonight ye may jest as well begin to get yer hand
in. Now, ye jest take this yer gal and flog her; ye’ve seen enough on’t
to know how.”

“I beg Mas’r’s pardon,” said Tom; “hopes Mas’r won’t set me at that.
It’s what I an’t used to,—never did,—and can’t do, no way possible.”

“Ye’ll larn a pretty smart chance of things ye never did know, before
I’ve done with ye!” said Legree, taking up a cowhide, and striking Tom
a heavy blow cross the cheek, and following up the infliction by a
shower of blows.

“There!” he said, as he stopped to rest; “now, will ye tell me ye can’t
do it?”

“Yes, Mas’r,” said Tom, putting up his hand, to wipe the blood, that
trickled down his face. “I’m willin’ to work, night and day, and work
while there’s life and breath in me; but this yer thing I can’t feel it
right to do;—and, Mas’r, I _never_ shall do it,—_never_!”

Tom had a remarkably smooth, soft voice, and a habitually respectful
manner, that had given Legree an idea that he would be cowardly, and
easily subdued. When he spoke these last words, a thrill of amazement
went through every one; the poor woman clasped her hands, and said, “O
Lord!” and every one involuntarily looked at each other and drew in
their breath, as if to prepare for the storm that was about to burst.

Legree looked stupefied and confounded; but at last burst forth,—“What!
ye blasted black beast! tell _me_ ye don’t think it _right_ to do what
I tell ye! What have any of you cussed cattle to do with thinking
what’s right? I’ll put a stop to it! Why, what do ye think ye are? May
be ye think ye’r a gentleman master, Tom, to be a telling your master
what’s right, and what ain’t! So you pretend it’s wrong to flog the
gal!”

“I think so, Mas’r,” said Tom; “the poor crittur’s sick and feeble; ’t
would be downright cruel, and it’s what I never will do, nor begin to.
Mas’r, if you mean to kill me, kill me; but, as to my raising my hand
agin any one here, I never shall,—I’ll die first!”

Tom spoke in a mild voice, but with a decision that could not be
mistaken. Legree shook with anger; his greenish eyes glared fiercely,
and his very whiskers seemed to curl with passion; but, like some
ferocious beast, that plays with its victim before he devours it, he
kept back his strong impulse to proceed to immediate violence, and
broke out into bitter raillery.

“Well, here’s a pious dog, at last, let down among us sinners!—a saint,
a gentleman, and no less, to talk to us sinners about our sins!
Powerful holy critter, he must be! Here, you rascal, you make believe
to be so pious,—didn’t you never hear, out of yer Bible, ’Servants,
obey yer masters’? An’t I yer master? Didn’t I pay down twelve hundred
dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An’t
yer mine, now, body and soul?” he said, giving Tom a violent kick with
his heavy boot; “tell me!”

In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal oppression,
this question shot a gleam of joy and triumph through Tom’s soul. He
suddenly stretched himself up, and, looking earnestly to heaven, while
the tears and blood that flowed down his face mingled, he exclaimed,

“No! no! no! my soul an’t yours, Mas’r! You haven’t bought it,—ye can’t
buy it! It’s been bought and paid for, by one that is able to keep
it;—no matter, no matter, you can’t harm me!”

“I can’t!” said Legree, with a sneer; “we’ll see,—we’ll see! Here,
Sambo, Quimbo, give this dog such a breakin’ in as he won’t get over,
this month!”

The two gigantic negroes that now laid hold of Tom, with fiendish
exultation in their faces, might have formed no unapt personification
of powers of darkness. The poor woman screamed with apprehension, and
all rose, as by a general impulse, while they dragged him unresisting
from the place.

CHAPTER XXXIV
The Quadroon’s Story

And behold the tears of such as are oppressed; and on the side of their
oppressors there was power. Wherefore I praised the dead that are
already dead more than the living that are yet alive.—ECCL. 4:1.

It was late at night, and Tom lay groaning and bleeding alone, in an
old forsaken room of the gin-house, among pieces of broken machinery,
piles of damaged cotton, and other rubbish which had there accumulated.

The night was damp and close, and the thick air swarmed with myriads of
mosquitos, which increased the restless torture of his wounds; whilst a
burning thirst—a torture beyond all others—filled up the uttermost
measure of physical anguish.

“O, good Lord! _Do_ look down,—give me the victory!—give me the victory
over all!” prayed poor Tom, in his anguish.

A footstep entered the room, behind him, and the light of a lantern
flashed on his eyes.

“Who’s there? O, for the Lord’s massy, please give me some water!”

The woman Cassy—for it was she,—set down her lantern, and, pouring
water from a bottle, raised his head, and gave him drink. Another and
another cup were drained, with feverish eagerness.

[Illustration: CASSY MINISTERING TO UNCLE TOM AFTER HIS WHIPPING.]

“Drink all ye want,” she said; “I knew how it would be. It isn’t the
first time I’ve been out in the night, carrying water to such as you.”

“Thank you, Missis,” said Tom, when he had done drinking.

“Don’t call me Missis! I’m a miserable slave, like yourself,—a lower
one than you can ever be!” said she, bitterly; “but now,” said she,
going to the door, and dragging in a small pallaise, over which she had
spread linen cloths wet with cold water, “try, my poor fellow, to roll
yourself on to this.”

Stiff with wounds and bruises, Tom was a long time in accomplishing
this movement; but, when done, he felt a sensible relief from the
cooling application to his wounds.

The woman, whom long practice with the victims of brutality had made
familiar with many healing arts, went on to make many applications to
Tom’s wounds, by means of which he was soon somewhat relieved.

“Now,” said the woman, when she had raised his head on a roll of
damaged cotton, which served for a pillow, “there’s the best I can do
for you.”

Tom thanked her; and the woman, sitting down on the floor, drew up her
knees, and embracing them with her arms, looked fixedly before her,
with a bitter and painful expression of countenance. Her bonnet fell
back, and long wavy streams of black hair fell around her singular and
melancholy-face.

“It’s no use, my poor fellow!” she broke out, at last, “it’s of no use,
this you’ve been trying to do. You were a brave fellow,—you had the
right on your side; but it’s all in vain, and out of the question, for
you to struggle. You are in the devil’s hands;—he is the strongest, and
you must give up!”

Give up! and, had not human weakness and physical agony whispered that,
before? Tom started; for the bitter woman, with her wild eyes and
melancholy voice, seemed to him an embodiment of the temptation with
which he had been wrestling.

“O Lord! O Lord!” he groaned, “how can I give up?”

“There’s no use calling on the Lord,—he never hears,” said the woman,
steadily; “there isn’t any God, I believe; or, if there is, he’s taken
sides against us. All goes against us, heaven and earth. Everything is
pushing us into hell. Why shouldn’t we go?”

Tom closed his eyes, and shuddered at the dark, atheistic words.

“You see,” said the woman, “_you_ don’t know anything about it—I do.
I’ve been on this place five years, body and soul, under this man’s
foot; and I hate him as I do the devil! Here you are, on a lone
plantation, ten miles from any other, in the swamps; not a white person
here, who could testify, if you were burned alive,—if you were scalded,
cut into inch-pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up and
whipped to death. There’s no law here, of God or man, that can do you,
or any one of us, the least good; and, this man! there’s no earthly
thing that he’s too good to do. I could make any one’s hair rise, and
their teeth chatter, if I should only tell what I’ve seen and been
knowing to, here,—and it’s no use resisting! Did I _want_ to live with
him? Wasn’t I a woman delicately bred; and he,—God in heaven! what was
he, and is he? And yet, I’ve lived with him, these five years, and
cursed every moment of my life,—night and day! And now, he’s got a new
one,—a young thing, only fifteen, and she brought up, she says,
piously. Her good mistress taught her to read the Bible; and she’s
brought her Bible here—to hell with her!”—and the woman laughed a wild
and doleful laugh, that rung, with a strange, supernatural sound,
through the old ruined shed.

Tom folded his hands; all was darkness and horror.

“O Jesus! Lord Jesus! have you quite forgot us poor critturs?” burst
forth, at last;—“help, Lord, I perish!”

The woman sternly continued:

“And what are these miserable low dogs you work with, that you should
suffer on their account? Every one of them would turn against you, the
first time they got a chance. They are all of ’em as low and cruel to
each other as they can be; there’s no use in your suffering to keep
from hurting them.”

“Poor critturs!” said Tom,—“what made ’em cruel?—and, if I give out, I
shall get used to ’t, and grow, little by little, just like ’em! No,
no, Missis! I’ve lost everything,—wife, and children, and home, and a
kind Mas’r,—and he would have set me free, if he’d only lived a week
longer; I’ve lost everything in _this_ world, and it’s clean gone,
forever,—and now I _can’t_ lose Heaven, too; no, I can’t get to be
wicked, besides all!”

“But it can’t be that the Lord will lay sin to our account,” said the
woman; “he won’t charge it to us, when we’re forced to it; he’ll charge
it to them that drove us to it.”

“Yes,” said Tom; “but that won’t keep us from growing wicked. If I get
to be as hard-hearted as that ar’ Sambo, and as wicked, it won’t make
much odds to me how I come so; it’s the bein’ so,—that ar’s what I’m a
dreadin’.”

The woman fixed a wild and startled look on Tom, as if a new thought
had struck her; and then, heavily groaning, said,

“O God a’ mercy! you speak the truth! O—O—O!”—and, with groans, she
fell on the floor, like one crushed and writhing under the extremity of
mental anguish.

There was a silence, a while, in which the breathing of both parties
could be heard, when Tom faintly said, “O, please, Missis!”

The woman suddenly rose up, with her face composed to its usual stern,
melancholy expression.

“Please, Missis, I saw ’em throw my coat in that ar’ corner, and in my
coat-pocket is my Bible;—if Missis would please get it for me.”

Cassy went and got it. Tom opened, at once, to a heavily marked
passage, much worn, of the last scenes in the life of Him by whose
stripes we are healed.

“If Missis would only be so good as read that ar’,—it’s better than
water.”

Cassy took the book, with a dry, proud air, and looked over the
passage. She then read aloud, in a soft voice, and with a beauty of
intonation that was peculiar, that touching account of anguish and of
glory. Often, as she read, her voice faltered, and sometimes failed her
altogether, when she would stop, with an air of frigid composure, till
she had mastered herself. When she came to the touching words, “Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do,” she threw down the book,
and, burying her face in the heavy masses of her hair, she sobbed
aloud, with a convulsive violence.

Tom was weeping, also, and occasionally uttering a smothered
ejaculation.

“If we only could keep up to that ar’!” said Tom;—“it seemed to come so
natural to him, and we have to fight so hard for ’t! O Lord, help us! O
blessed Lord Jesus, do help us!”

“Missis,” said Tom, after a while, “I can see that, some how, you’re
quite ’bove me in everything; but there’s one thing Missis might learn
even from poor Tom. Ye said the Lord took sides against us, because he
lets us be ’bused and knocked round; but ye see what come on his own
Son,—the blessed Lord of Glory,—wan’t he allays poor? and have we, any
on us, yet come so low as he come? The Lord han’t forgot us,—I’m
sartin’ o’ that ar’. If we suffer with him, we shall also reign,
Scripture says; but, if we deny Him, he also will deny us. Didn’t they
all suffer?—the Lord and all his? It tells how they was stoned and sawn
asunder, and wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins, and was
destitute, afflicted, tormented. Sufferin’ an’t no reason to make us
think the Lord’s turned agin us; but jest the contrary, if only we hold
on to him, and doesn’t give up to sin.”

“But why does he put us where we can’t help but sin?” said the woman.

“I think we _can_ help it,” said Tom.

“You’ll see,” said Cassy; “what’ll you do? Tomorrow they’ll be at you
again. I know ’em; I’ve seen all their doings; I can’t bear to think of
all they’ll bring you to;—and they’ll make you give out, at last!”

“Lord Jesus!” said Tom, “you _will_ take care of my soul? O Lord,
do!—don’t let me give out!”

“O dear!” said Cassy; “I’ve heard all this crying and praying before;
and yet, they’ve been broken down, and brought under. There’s Emmeline,
she’s trying to hold on, and you’re trying,—but what use? You must give
up, or be killed by inches.”

“Well, then, I _will_ die!” said Tom. “Spin it out as long as they can,
they can’t help my dying, some time!—and, after that, they can’t do no
more. I’m clar, I’m set! I _know_ the Lord’ll help me, and bring me
through.”

The woman did not answer; she sat with her black eyes intently fixed on
the floor.

“May be it’s the way,” she murmured to herself; “but those that _have_
given up, there’s no hope for them!—none! We live in filth, and grow
loathsome, till we loathe ourselves! And we long to die, and we don’t
dare to kill ourselves!—No hope! no hope! no hope?—this girl now,—just
as old as I was!

“You see me now,” she said, speaking to Tom very rapidly; “see what I
am! Well, I was brought up in luxury; the first I remember is, playing
about, when I was a child, in splendid parlors,—when I was kept dressed
up like a doll, and company and visitors used to praise me. There was a
garden opening from the saloon windows; and there I used to play
hide-and-go-seek, under the orange-trees, with my brothers and sisters.
I went to a convent, and there I learned music, French and embroidery,
and what not; and when I was fourteen, I came out to my father’s
funeral. He died very suddenly, and when the property came to be
settled, they found that there was scarcely enough to cover the debts;
and when the creditors took an inventory of the property, I was set
down in it. My mother was a slave woman, and my father had always meant
to set me free; but he had not done it, and so I was set down in the
list. I’d always known who I was, but never thought much about it.
Nobody ever expects that a strong, healthy man is going to die. My
father was a well man only four hours before he died;—it was one of the
first cholera cases in New Orleans. The day after the funeral, my
father’s wife took her children, and went up to her father’s
plantation. I thought they treated me strangely, but didn’t know. There
was a young lawyer who they left to settle the business; and he came
every day, and was about the house, and spoke very politely to me. He
brought with him, one day, a young man, whom I thought the handsomest I
had ever seen. I shall never forget that evening. I walked with him in
the garden. I was lonesome and full of sorrow, and he was so kind and
gentle to me; and he told me that he had seen me before I went to the
convent, and that he had loved me a great while, and that he would be
my friend and protector;—in short, though he didn’t tell me, he had
paid two thousand dollars for me, and I was his property,—I became his
willingly, for I loved him. Loved!” said the woman, stopping. “O, how I
_did_ love that man! How I love him now,—and always shall, while I
breathe! He was so beautiful, so high, so noble! He put me into a
beautiful house, with servants, horses, and carriages, and furniture,
and dresses. Everything that money could buy, he gave me; but I didn’t
set any value on all that,—I only cared for him. I loved him better
than my God and my own soul, and, if I tried, I couldn’t do any other
way from what he wanted me to.

“I wanted only one thing—I did want him to _marry_ me. I thought, if he
loved me as he said he did, and if I was what he seemed to think I was,
he would be willing to marry me and set me free. But he convinced me
that it would be impossible; and he told me that, if we were only
faithful to each other, it was marriage before God. If that is true,
wasn’t I that man’s wife? Wasn’t I faithful? For seven years, didn’t I
study every look and motion, and only live and breathe to please him?
He had the yellow fever, and for twenty days and nights I watched with
him. I alone,—and gave him all his medicine, and did everything for
him; and then he called me his good angel, and said I’d saved his life.
We had two beautiful children. The first was a boy, and we called him
Henry. He was the image of his father,—he had such beautiful eyes, such
a forehead, and his hair hung all in curls around it; and he had all
his father’s spirit, and his talent, too. Little Elise, he said, looked
like me. He used to tell me that I was the most beautiful woman in
Louisiana, he was so proud of me and the children. He used to love to
have me dress them up, and take them and me about in an open carriage,
and hear the remarks that people would make on us; and he used to fill
my ears constantly with the fine things that were said in praise of me
and the children. O, those were happy days! I thought I was as happy as
any one could be; but then there came evil times. He had a cousin come
to New Orleans, who was his particular friend,—he thought all the world
of him;—but, from the first time I saw him, I couldn’t tell why, I
dreaded him; for I felt sure he was going to bring misery on us. He got
Henry to going out with him, and often he would not come home nights
till two or three o’clock. I did not dare say a word; for Henry was so
high spirited, I was afraid to. He got him to the gaming-houses; and he
was one of the sort that, when he once got a going there, there was no
holding back. And then he introduced him to another lady, and I saw
soon that his heart was gone from me. He never told me, but I saw it,—I
knew it, day after day,—I felt my heart breaking, but I could not say a
word! At this, the wretch offered to buy me and the children of Henry,
to clear off his gambling debts, which stood in the way of his marrying
as he wished;—and _he sold us_. He told me, one day, that he had
business in the country, and should be gone two or three weeks. He
spoke kinder than usual, and said he should come back; but it didn’t
deceive me. I knew that the time had come; I was just like one turned
into stone; I couldn’t speak, nor shed a tear. He kissed me and kissed
the children, a good many times, and went out. I saw him get on his
horse, and I watched him till he was quite out of sight; and then I
fell down, and fainted.

“Then _he_ came, the cursed wretch! he came to take possession. He told
me that he had bought me and my children; and showed me the papers. I
cursed him before God, and told him I’d die sooner than live with him.”

“‘Just as you please,’ said he; ‘but, if you don’t behave reasonably,
I’ll sell both the children, where you shall never see them again.’ He
told me that he always had meant to have me, from the first time he saw
me; and that he had drawn Henry on, and got him in debt, on purpose to
make him willing to sell me. That he got him in love with another
woman; and that I might know, after all that, that he should not give
up for a few airs and tears, and things of that sort.

“I gave up, for my hands were tied. He had my children;—whenever I
resisted his will anywhere, he would talk about selling them, and he
made me as submissive as he desired. O, what a life it was! to live
with my heart breaking, every day,—to keep on, on, on, loving, when it
was only misery; and to be bound, body and soul, to one I hated. I used
to love to read to Henry, to play to him, to waltz with him, and sing
to him; but everything I did for this one was a perfect drag,—yet I was
afraid to refuse anything. He was very imperious, and harsh to the
children. Elise was a timid little thing; but Henry was bold and
high-spirited, like his father, and he had never been brought under, in
the least, by any one. He was always finding fault, and quarrelling
with him; and I used to live in daily fear and dread. I tried to make
the child respectful;—I tried to keep them apart, for I held on to
those children like death; but it did no good. _He sold both those
children_. He took me to ride, one day, and when I came home, they were
nowhere to be found! He told me he had sold them; he showed me the
money, the price of their blood. Then it seemed as if all good forsook
me. I raved and cursed,—cursed God and man; and, for a while, I
believe, he really was afraid of me. But he didn’t give up so. He told
me that my children were sold, but whether I ever saw their faces
again, depended on him; and that, if I wasn’t quiet, they should smart
for it. Well, you can do anything with a woman, when you’ve got her
children. He made me submit; he made me be peaceable; he flattered me
with hopes that, perhaps, he would buy them back; and so things went
on, a week or two. One day, I was out walking, and passed by the
calaboose; I saw a crowd about the gate, and heard a child’s voice,—and
suddenly my Henry broke away from two or three men who were holding
him, and ran, screaming, and caught my dress. They came up to him,
swearing dreadfully; and one man, whose face I shall never forget, told
him that he wouldn’t get away so; that he was going with him into the
calaboose, and he’d get a lesson there he’d never forget. I tried to
beg and plead,—they only laughed; the poor boy screamed and looked into
my face, and held on to me, until, in tearing him off, they tore the
skirt of my dress half away; and they carried him in, screaming
’Mother! mother! mother!’ There was one man stood there seemed to pity
me. I offered him all the money I had, if he’d only interfere. He shook
his head, and said that the boy had been impudent and disobedient, ever
since he bought him; that he was going to break him in, once for all. I
turned and ran; and every step of the way, I thought that I heard him
scream. I got into the house; ran, all out of breath, to the parlor,
where I found Butler. I told him, and begged him to go and interfere.
He only laughed, and told me the boy had got his deserts. He’d got to
be broken in,—the sooner the better; ’what did I expect?’ he asked.

“It seemed to me something in my head snapped, at that moment. I felt
dizzy and furious. I remember seeing a great sharp bowie-knife on the
table; I remember something about catching it, and flying upon him; and
then all grew dark, and I didn’t know any more,—not for days and days.

“When I came to myself, I was in a nice room,—but not mine. An old
black woman tended me; and a doctor came to see me, and there was a
great deal of care taken of me. After a while, I found that he had gone
away, and left me at this house to be sold; and that’s why they took
such pains with me.

“I didn’t mean to get well, and hoped I shouldn’t; but, in spite of me
the fever went off and I grew healthy, and finally got up. Then, they
made me dress up, every day; and gentlemen used to come in and stand
and smoke their cigars, and look at me, and ask questions, and debate
my price. I was so gloomy and silent, that none of them wanted me. They
threatened to whip me, if I wasn’t gayer, and didn’t take some pains to
make myself agreeable. At length, one day, came a gentleman named
Stuart. He seemed to have some feeling for me; he saw that something
dreadful was on my heart, and he came to see me alone, a great many
times, and finally persuaded me to tell him. He bought me, at last, and
promised to do all he could to find and buy back my children. He went
to the hotel where my Henry was; they told him he had been sold to a
planter up on Pearl River; that was the last that I ever heard. Then he
found where my daughter was; an old woman was keeping her. He offered
an immense sum for her, but they would not sell her. Butler found out
that it was for me he wanted her; and he sent me word that I should
never have her. Captain Stuart was very kind to me; he had a splendid
plantation, and took me to it. In the course of a year, I had a son
born. O, that child!—how I loved it! How just like my poor Henry the
little thing looked! But I had made up my mind,—yes, I had. I would
never again let a child live to grow up! I took the little fellow in my
arms, when he was two weeks old, and kissed him, and cried over him;
and then I gave him laudanum, and held him close to my bosom, while he
slept to death. How I mourned and cried over it! and who ever dreamed
that it was anything but a mistake, that had made me give it the
laudanum? but it’s one of the few things that I’m glad of, now. I am
not sorry, to this day; he, at least, is out of pain. What better than
death could I give him, poor child! After a while, the cholera came,
and Captain Stuart died; everybody died that wanted to live,—and I,—I,
though I went down to death’s door,—_I lived!_ Then I was sold, and
passed from hand to hand, till I grew faded and wrinkled, and I had a
fever; and then this wretch bought me, and brought me here,—and here I
am!”

The woman stopped. She had hurried on through her story, with a wild,
passionate utterance; sometimes seeming to address it to Tom, and
sometimes speaking as in a soliloquy. So vehement and overpowering was
the force with which she spoke, that, for a season, Tom was beguiled
even from the pain of his wounds, and, raising himself on one elbow,
watched her as she paced restlessly up and down, her long black hair
swaying heavily about her, as she moved.

“You tell me,” she said, after a pause, “that there is a God,—a God
that looks down and sees all these things. May be it’s so. The sisters
in the convent used to tell me of a day of judgment, when everything is
coming to light;—won’t there be vengeance, then!

“They think it’s nothing, what we suffer,—nothing, what our children
suffer! It’s all a small matter; yet I’ve walked the streets when it
seemed as if I had misery enough in my one heart to sink the city. I’ve
wished the houses would fall on me, or the stones sink under me. Yes!
and, in the judgment day, I will stand up before God, a witness against
those that have ruined me and my children, body and soul!

“When I was a girl, I thought I was religious; I used to love God and
prayer. Now, I’m a lost soul, pursued by devils that torment me day and
night; they keep pushing me on and on—and I’ll do it, too, some of
these days!” she said, clenching her hand, while an insane light
glanced in her heavy black eyes. “I’ll send him where he belongs,—a
short way, too,—one of these nights, if they burn me alive for it!” A
wild, long laugh rang through the deserted room, and ended in a
hysteric sob; she threw herself on the floor, in convulsive sobbing and
struggles.

In a few moments, the frenzy fit seemed to pass off; she rose slowly,
and seemed to collect herself.

“Can I do anything more for you, my poor fellow?” she said, approaching
where Tom lay; “shall I give you some more water?”

There was a graceful and compassionate sweetness in her voice and
manner, as she said this, that formed a strange contrast with the
former wildness.

Tom drank the water, and looked earnestly and pitifully into her face.

“O, Missis, I wish you’d go to him that can give you living waters!”

“Go to him! Where is he? Who is he?” said Cassy.

“Him that you read of to me,—the Lord.”

“I used to see the picture of him, over the altar, when I was a girl,”
said Cassy, her dark eyes fixing themselves in an expression of
mournful reverie; “but, _he isn’t here!_ there’s nothing here, but sin
and long, long, long despair! O!” She laid her hand on her breast and
drew in her breath, as if to lift a heavy weight.

Tom looked as if he would speak again; but she cut him short, with a
decided gesture.

“Don’t talk, my poor fellow. Try to sleep, if you can.” And, placing
water in his reach, and making whatever little arrangements for his
comforts she could, Cassy left the shed.

CHAPTER XXXV
The Tokens

“And slight, withal, may be the things that bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside forever; it may be a sound,
A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,—
Striking the electric chain wherewith we’re darkly bound.”

_Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Can_. 4.

The sitting-room of Legree’s establishment was a large, long room, with
a wide, ample fireplace. It had once been hung with a showy and
expensive paper, which now hung mouldering, torn and discolored, from
the damp walls. The place had that peculiar sickening, unwholesome
smell, compounded of mingled damp, dirt and decay, which one often
notices in close old houses. The wall-paper was defaced, in spots, by
slops of beer and wine; or garnished with chalk memorandums, and long
sums footed up, as if somebody had been practising arithmetic there. In
the fireplace stood a brazier full of burning charcoal; for, though the
weather was not cold, the evenings always seemed damp and chilly in
that great room; and Legree, moreover, wanted a place to light his
cigars, and heat his water for punch. The ruddy glare of the charcoal
displayed the confused and unpromising aspect of the room,—saddles,
bridles, several sorts of harness, riding-whips, overcoats, and various
articles of clothing, scattered up and down the room in confused
variety; and the dogs, of whom we have before spoken, had encamped
themselves among them, to suit their own taste and convenience.

Legree was just mixing himself a tumbler of punch, pouring his hot
water from a cracked and broken-nosed pitcher, grumbling, as he did so,

“Plague on that Sambo, to kick up this yer row between me and the new
hands! The fellow won’t be fit to work for a week, now,—right in the
press of the season!”

“Yes, just like you,” said a voice, behind his chair. It was the woman
Cassy, who had stolen upon his soliloquy.

“Hah! you she-devil! you’ve come back, have you?”

“Yes, I have,” she said, coolly; “come to have my own way, too!”

“You lie, you jade! I’ll be up to my word. Either behave yourself, or
stay down to the quarters, and fare and work with the rest.”

“I’d rather, ten thousand times,” said the woman, “live in the dirtiest
hole at the quarters, than be under your hoof!”

“But you _are_ under my hoof, for all that,” said he, turning upon her,
with a savage grin; “that’s one comfort. So, sit down here on my knee,
my dear, and hear to reason,” said he, laying hold on her wrist.

“Simon Legree, take care!” said the woman, with a sharp flash of her
eye, a glance so wild and insane in its light as to be almost
appalling. “You’re afraid of me, Simon,” she said, deliberately; “and
you’ve reason to be! But be careful, for I’ve got the devil in me!”

The last words she whispered in a hissing tone, close to his ear.

“Get out! I believe, to my soul, you have!” said Legree, pushing her
from him, and looking uncomfortably at her. “After all, Cassy,” he
said, “why can’t you be friends with me, as you used to?”

“Used to!” said she, bitterly. She stopped short,—a word of choking
feelings, rising in her heart, kept her silent.

Cassy had always kept over Legree the kind of influence that a strong,
impassioned woman can ever keep over the most brutal man; but, of late,
she had grown more and more irritable and restless, under the hideous
yoke of her servitude, and her irritability, at times, broke out into
raving insanity; and this liability made her a sort of object of dread
to Legree, who had that superstitious horror of insane persons which is
common to coarse and uninstructed minds. When Legree brought Emmeline
to the house, all the smouldering embers of womanly feeling flashed up
in the worn heart of Cassy, and she took part with the girl; and a
fierce quarrel ensued between her and Legree. Legree, in a fury, swore
she should be put to field service, if she would not be peaceable.
Cassy, with proud scorn, declared she _would_ go to the field. And she
worked there one day, as we have described, to show how perfectly she
scorned the threat.

Legree was secretly uneasy, all day; for Cassy had an influence over
him from which he could not free himself. When she presented her basket
at the scales, he had hoped for some concession, and addressed her in a
sort of half conciliatory, half scornful tone; and she had answered
with the bitterest contempt.

The outrageous treatment of poor Tom had roused her still more; and she
had followed Legree to the house, with no particular intention, but to
upbraid him for his brutality.

“I wish, Cassy,” said Legree, “you’d behave yourself decently.”

“_You_ talk about behaving decently! And what have you been doing?—you,
who haven’t even sense enough to keep from spoiling one of your best
hands, right in the most pressing season, just for your devilish
temper!”

“I was a fool, it’s a fact, to let any such brangle come up,” said
Legree; “but, when the boy set up his will, he had to be broke in.”

“I reckon you won’t break _him_ in!”

“Won’t I?” said Legree, rising, passionately. “I’d like to know if I
won’t? He’ll be the first nigger that ever came it round me! I’ll break
every bone in his body, but he _shall_ give up!”

Just then the door opened, and Sambo entered. He came forward, bowing,
and holding out something in a paper.

“What’s that, you dog?” said Legree.

“It’s a witch thing, Mas’r!”

“A what?”

“Something that niggers gets from witches. Keeps ’em from feelin’ when
they ’s flogged. He had it tied round his neck, with a black string.”

Legree, like most godless and cruel men, was superstitious. He took the
paper, and opened it uneasily.

There dropped out of it a silver dollar, and a long, shining curl of
fair hair,—hair which, like a living thing, twined itself round
Legree’s fingers.

“Damnation!” he screamed, in sudden passion, stamping on the floor, and
pulling furiously at the hair, as if it burned him. “Where did this
come from? Take it off!—burn it up!—burn it up!” he screamed, tearing
it off, and throwing it into the charcoal. “What did you bring it to me
for?”

Sambo stood, with his heavy mouth wide open, and aghast with wonder;
and Cassy, who was preparing to leave the apartment, stopped, and
looked at him in perfect amazement.

“Don’t you bring me any more of your devilish things!” said he, shaking
his fist at Sambo, who retreated hastily towards the door; and, picking
up the silver dollar, he sent it smashing through the window-pane, out
into the darkness.

Sambo was glad to make his escape. When he was gone, Legree seemed a
little ashamed of his fit of alarm. He sat doggedly down in his chair,
and began sullenly sipping his tumbler of punch.

Cassy prepared herself for going out, unobserved by him; and slipped
away to minister to poor Tom, as we have already related.

And what was the matter with Legree? and what was there in a simple
curl of fair hair to appall that brutal man, familiar with every form
of cruelty? To answer this, we must carry the reader backward in his
history. Hard and reprobate as the godless man seemed now, there had
been a time when he had been rocked on the bosom of a mother,—cradled
with prayers and pious hymns,—his now seared brow bedewed with the
waters of holy baptism. In early childhood, a fair-haired woman had led
him, at the sound of Sabbath bell, to worship and to pray. Far in New
England that mother had trained her only son, with long, unwearied
love, and patient prayers. Born of a hard-tempered sire, on whom that
gentle woman had wasted a world of unvalued love, Legree had followed
in the steps of his father. Boisterous, unruly, and tyrannical, he
despised all her counsel, and would none of her reproof; and, at an
early age, broke from her, to seek his fortunes at sea. He never came
home but once, after; and then, his mother, with the yearning of a
heart that must love something, and has nothing else to love, clung to
him, and sought, with passionate prayers and entreaties, to win him
from a life of sin, to his soul’s eternal good.

That was Legree’s day of grace; then good angels called him; then he
was almost persuaded, and mercy held him by the hand. His heart inly
relented,—there was a conflict,—but sin got the victory, and he set all
the force of his rough nature against the conviction of his conscience.
He drank and swore,—was wilder and more brutal than ever. And, one
night, when his mother, in the last agony of her despair, knelt at his
feet, he spurned her from him,—threw her senseless on the floor, and,
with brutal curses, fled to his ship. The next Legree heard of his
mother was, when, one night, as he was carousing among drunken
companions, a letter was put into his hand. He opened it, and a lock of
long, curling hair fell from it, and twined about his fingers. The
letter told him his mother was dead, and that, dying, she blest and
forgave him.

There is a dread, unhallowed necromancy of evil, that turns things
sweetest and holiest to phantoms of horror and affright. That pale,
loving mother,—her dying prayers, her forgiving love,—wrought in that
demoniac heart of sin only as a damning sentence, bringing with it a
fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation. Legree burned
the hair, and burned the letter; and when he saw them hissing and
crackling in the flame, inly shuddered as he thought of everlasting
fires. He tried to drink, and revel, and swear away the memory; but
often, in the deep night, whose solemn stillness arraigns the bad soul
in forced communion with herself, he had seen that pale mother rising
by his bedside, and felt the soft twining of that hair around his
fingers, till the cold sweat would roll down his face, and he would
spring from his bed in horror. Ye who have wondered to hear, in the
same evangel, that God is love, and that God is a consuming fire, see
ye not how, to the soul resolved in evil, perfect love is the most
fearful torture, the seal and sentence of the direst despair?

“Blast it!” said Legree to himself, as he sipped his liquor; “where did
he get that? If it didn’t look just like—whoo! I thought I’d forgot
that. Curse me, if I think there’s any such thing as forgetting
anything, any how,—hang it! I’m lonesome! I mean to call Em. She hates
me—the monkey! I don’t care,—I’ll _make_ her come!”

Legree stepped out into a large entry, which went up stairs, by what
had formerly been a superb winding staircase; but the passage-way was
dirty and dreary, encumbered with boxes and unsightly litter. The
stairs, uncarpeted, seemed winding up, in the gloom, to nobody knew
where! The pale moonlight streamed through a shattered fanlight over
the door; the air was unwholesome and chilly, like that of a vault.

Legree stopped at the foot of the stairs, and heard a voice singing. It
seemed strange and ghostlike in that dreary old house, perhaps because
of the already tremulous state of his nerves. Hark! what is it?

A wild, pathetic voice, chants a hymn common among the slaves:

“O there’ll be mourning, mourning, mourning,
O there’ll be mourning, at the judgment-seat of Christ!”

“Blast the girl!” said Legree. “I’ll choke her.—Em! Em!” he called,
harshly; but only a mocking echo from the walls answered him. The sweet
voice still sung on:

“Parents and children there shall part!
Parents and children there shall part!
    Shall part to meet no more!”

And clear and loud swelled through the empty halls the refrain,

“O there’ll be mourning, mourning, mourning,
O there’ll be mourning, at the judgment-seat of Christ!”

Legree stopped. He would have been ashamed to tell of it, but large
drops of sweat stood on his forehead, his heart beat heavy and thick
with fear; he even thought he saw something white rising and glimmering
in the gloom before him, and shuddered to think what if the form of his
dead mother should suddenly appear to him.

“I know one thing,” he said to himself, as he stumbled back in the
sitting-room, and sat down; “I’ll let that fellow alone, after this!
What did I want of his cussed paper? I b’lieve I am bewitched, sure
enough! I’ve been shivering and sweating, ever since! Where did he get
that hair? It couldn’t have been _that!_ I burnt _that_ up, I know I
did! It would be a joke, if hair could rise from the dead!”

Ah, Legree! that golden tress _was_ charmed; each hair had in it a
spell of terror and remorse for thee, and was used by a mightier power
to bind thy cruel hands from inflicting uttermost evil on the helpless!

“I say,” said Legree, stamping and whistling to the dogs, “wake up,
some of you, and keep me company!” but the dogs only opened one eye at
him, sleepily, and closed it again.

“I’ll have Sambo and Quimbo up here, to sing and dance one of their
hell dances, and keep off these horrid notions,” said Legree; and,
putting on his hat, he went on to the verandah, and blew a horn, with
which he commonly summoned his two sable drivers.

Legree was often wont, when in a gracious humor, to get these two
worthies into his sitting-room, and, after warming them up with
whiskey, amuse himself by setting them to singing, dancing or fighting,
as the humor took him.

It was between one and two o’clock at night, as Cassy was returning
from her ministrations to poor Tom, that she heard the sound of wild
shrieking, whooping, halloing, and singing, from the sitting-room,
mingled with the barking of dogs, and other symptoms of general uproar.

She came up on the verandah steps, and looked in. Legree and both the
drivers, in a state of furious intoxication, were singing, whooping,
upsetting chairs, and making all manner of ludicrous and horrid
grimaces at each other.

She rested her small, slender hand on the window-blind, and looked
fixedly at them;—there was a world of anguish, scorn, and fierce
bitterness, in her black eyes, as she did so. “Would it be a sin to rid
the world of such a wretch?” she said to herself.

She turned hurriedly away, and, passing round to a back door, glided up
stairs, and tapped at Emmeline’s door.

CHAPTER XXXVI
Emmeline and Cassy

Cassy entered the room, and found Emmeline sitting, pale with fear, in
the furthest corner of it. As she came in, the girl started up
nervously; but, on seeing who it was, rushed forward, and catching her
arm, said, “O Cassy, is it you? I’m so glad you’ve come! I was afraid
it was—. O, you don’t know what a horrid noise there has been, down
stairs, all this evening!”

“I ought to know,” said Cassy, dryly. “I’ve heard it often enough.”

“O Cassy! do tell me,—couldn’t we get away from this place? I don’t
care where,—into the swamp among the snakes,—anywhere! _Couldn’t_ we
get _somewhere_ away from here?”

“Nowhere, but into our graves,” said Cassy.

“Did you ever try?”

“I’ve seen enough of trying and what comes of it,” said Cassy.

“I’d be willing to live in the swamps, and gnaw the bark from trees. I
an’t afraid of snakes! I’d rather have one near me than him,” said
Emmeline, eagerly.

“There have been a good many here of your opinion,” said Cassy; “but
you couldn’t stay in the swamps,—you’d be tracked by the dogs, and
brought back, and then—then—”

“What would he do?” said the girl, looking, with breathless interest,
into her face.

“What _wouldn’t_ he do, you’d better ask,” said Cassy. “He’s learned
his trade well, among the pirates in the West Indies. You wouldn’t
sleep much, if I should tell you things I’ve seen,—things that he tells
of, sometimes, for good jokes. I’ve heard screams here that I haven’t
been able to get out of my head for weeks and weeks. There’s a place
way out down by the quarters, where you can see a black, blasted tree,
and the ground all covered with black ashes. Ask anyone what was done
there, and see if they will dare to tell you.”

“O! what do you mean?”

“I won’t tell you. I hate to think of it. And I tell you, the Lord only
knows what we may see tomorrow, if that poor fellow holds out as he’s
begun.”

“Horrid!” said Emmeline, every drop of blood receding from her cheeks.
“O, Cassy, do tell me what I shall do!”

“What I’ve done. Do the best you can,—do what you must,—and make it up
in hating and cursing.”

“He wanted to make me drink some of his hateful brandy,” said Emmeline;
“and I hate it so—”

“You’d better drink,” said Cassy. “I hated it, too; and now I can’t
live without it. One must have something;—things don’t look so
dreadful, when you take that.”

“Mother used to tell me never to touch any such thing,” said Emmeline.

“_Mother_ told you!” said Cassy, with a thrilling and bitter emphasis
on the word mother. “What use is it for mothers to say anything? You
are all to be bought and paid for, and your souls belong to whoever
gets you. That’s the way it goes. I say, _drink_ brandy; drink all you
can, and it’ll make things come easier.”

“O, Cassy! do pity me!”

“Pity you!—don’t I? Haven’t I a daughter,—Lord knows where she is, and
whose she is, now,—going the way her mother went, before her, I
suppose, and that her children must go, after her! There’s no end to
the curse—forever!”

“I wish I’d never been born!” said Emmeline, wringing her hands.

“That’s an old wish with me,” said Cassy. “I’ve got used to wishing
that. I’d die, if I dared to,” she said, looking out into the darkness,
with that still, fixed despair which was the habitual expression of her
face when at rest.

“It would be wicked to kill one’s self,” said Emmeline.

“I don’t know why,—no wickeder than things we live and do, day after
day. But the sisters told me things, when I was in the convent, that
make me afraid to die. If it would only be the end of us, why, then—”

Emmeline turned away, and hid her face in her hands.

While this conversation was passing in the chamber, Legree, overcome
with his carouse, had sunk to sleep in the room below. Legree was not
an habitual drunkard. His coarse, strong nature craved, and could
endure, a continual stimulation, that would have utterly wrecked and
crazed a finer one. But a deep, underlying spirit of cautiousness
prevented his often yielding to appetite in such measure as to lose
control of himself.

This night, however, in his feverish efforts to banish from his mind
those fearful elements of woe and remorse which woke within him, he had
indulged more than common; so that, when he had discharged his sable
attendants, he fell heavily on a settle in the room, and was sound
asleep.

O! how dares the bad soul to enter the shadowy world of sleep?—that
land whose dim outlines lie so fearfully near to the mystic scene of
retribution! Legree dreamed. In his heavy and feverish sleep, a veiled
form stood beside him, and laid a cold, soft hand upon him. He thought
he knew who it was; and shuddered, with creeping horror, though the
face was veiled. Then he thought he felt _that hair_ twining round his
fingers; and then, that it slid smoothly round his neck, and tightened
and tightened, and he could not draw his breath; and then he thought
voices _whispered_ to him,—whispers that chilled him with horror. Then
it seemed to him he was on the edge of a frightful abyss, holding on
and struggling in mortal fear, while dark hands stretched up, and were
pulling him over; and Cassy came behind him laughing, and pushed him.
And then rose up that solemn veiled figure, and drew aside the veil. It
was his mother; and she turned away from him, and he fell down, down,
down, amid a confused noise of shrieks, and groans, and shouts of demon
laughter,—and Legree awoke.

Calmly the rosy hue of dawn was stealing into the room. The morning
star stood, with its solemn, holy eye of light, looking down on the man
of sin, from out the brightening sky. O, with what freshness, what
solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate
man, “Behold! thou hast one more chance! _Strive_ for immortal glory!”
There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the
bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to
him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning! What to him
the sanctity of the star which the Son of God has hallowed as his own
emblem? Brute-like, he saw without perceiving; and, stumbling forward,
poured out a tumbler of brandy, and drank half of it.

“I’ve had a h—l of a night!” he said to Cassy, who just then entered
from an opposite door.

“You’ll get plenty of the same sort, by and by,” said she, dryly.

“What do you mean, you minx?”

“You’ll find out, one of these days,” returned Cassy, in the same tone.
“Now Simon, I’ve one piece of advice to give you.”

“The devil, you have!”

“My advice is,” said Cassy, steadily, as she began adjusting some
things about the room, “that you let Tom alone.”

“What business is ’t of yours?”

“What? To be sure, I don’t know what it should be. If you want to pay
twelve hundred for a fellow, and use him right up in the press of the
season, just to serve your own spite, it’s no business of mine, I’ve
done what I could for him.”

“You have? What business have you meddling in my matters?”

“None, to be sure. I’ve saved you some thousands of dollars, at
different times, by taking care of your hands,—that’s all the thanks I
get. If your crop comes shorter into market than any of theirs, you
won’t lose your bet, I suppose? Tompkins won’t lord it over you, I
suppose,—and you’ll pay down your money like a lady, won’t you? I think
I see you doing it!”

Legree, like many other planters, had but one form of ambition,—to have
in the heaviest crop of the season,—and he had several bets on this
very present season pending in the next town. Cassy, therefore, with
woman’s tact, touched the only string that could be made to vibrate.

“Well, I’ll let him off at what he’s got,” said Legree; “but he shall
beg my pardon, and promise better fashions.”

“That he won’t do,” said Cassy.

“Won’t,—eh?”

“No, he won’t,” said Cassy.

“I’d like to know _why_, Mistress,” said Legree, in the extreme of
scorn.

“Because he’s done right, and he knows it, and won’t say he’s done
wrong.”

“Who a cuss cares what he knows? The nigger shall say what I please,
or—”

“Or, you’ll lose your bet on the cotton crop, by keeping him out of the
field, just at this very press.”

“But he _will_ give up,—course, he will; don’t I know what niggers is?
He’ll beg like a dog, this morning.”

“He won’t, Simon; you don’t know this kind. You may kill him by
inches,—you won’t get the first word of confession out of him.”

“We’ll see,—where is he?” said Legree, going out.

“In the waste-room of the gin-house,” said Cassy.

Legree, though he talked so stoutly to Cassy, still sallied forth from
the house with a degree of misgiving which was not common with him. His
dreams of the past night, mingled with Cassy’s prudential suggestions,
considerably affected his mind. He resolved that nobody should be
witness of his encounter with Tom; and determined, if he could not
subdue him by bullying, to defer his vengeance, to be wreaked in a more
convenient season.

The solemn light of dawn—the angelic glory of the morning-star—had
looked in through the rude window of the shed where Tom was lying; and,
as if descending on that star-beam, came the solemn words, “I am the
root and offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” The
mysterious warnings and intimations of Cassy, so far from discouraging
his soul, in the end had roused it as with a heavenly call. He did not
know but that the day of his death was dawning in the sky; and his
heart throbbed with solemn throes of joy and desire, as he thought that
the wondrous _all_, of which he had often pondered,—the great white
throne, with its ever radiant rainbow; the white-robed multitude, with
voices as many waters; the crowns, the palms, the harps,—might all
break upon his vision before that sun should set again. And, therefore,
without shuddering or trembling, he heard the voice of his persecutor,
as he drew near.

“Well, my boy,” said Legree, with a contemptuous kick, “how do you find
yourself? Didn’t I tell yer I could larn yer a thing or two? How do yer
like it—eh? How did yer whaling agree with yer, Tom? An’t quite so
crank as ye was last night. Ye couldn’t treat a poor sinner, now, to a
bit of sermon, could ye,—eh?”

Tom answered nothing.

“Get up, you beast!” said Legree, kicking him again.

This was a difficult matter for one so bruised and faint; and, as Tom
made efforts to do so, Legree laughed brutally.

“What makes ye so spry, this morning, Tom? Cotched cold, may be, last
night.”

Tom by this time had gained his feet, and was confronting his master
with a steady, unmoved front.

“The devil, you can!” said Legree, looking him over. “I believe you
haven’t got enough yet. Now, Tom, get right down on yer knees and beg
my pardon, for yer shines last night.”

Tom did not move.

“Down, you dog!” said Legree, striking him with his riding-whip.

“Mas’r Legree,” said Tom, “I can’t do it. I did only what I thought was
right. I shall do just so again, if ever the time comes. I never will
do a cruel thing, come what may.”

“Yes, but ye don’t know what may come, Master Tom. Ye think what you’ve
got is something. I tell you ’tan’t anything,—nothing ’t all. How would
ye like to be tied to a tree, and have a slow fire lit up around
ye;—wouldn’t that be pleasant,—eh, Tom?”

“Mas’r,” said Tom, “I know ye can do dreadful things; but,”—he
stretched himself upward and clasped his hands,—“but, after ye’ve
killed the body, there an’t no more ye can do. And O, there’s all
ETERNITY to come, after that!”

ETERNITY,—the word thrilled through the black man’s soul with light and
power, as he spoke; it thrilled through the sinner’s soul, too, like
the bite of a scorpion. Legree gnashed on him with his teeth, but rage
kept him silent; and Tom, like a man disenthralled, spoke, in a clear
and cheerful voice,

“Mas’r Legree, as ye bought me, I’ll be a true and faithful servant to
ye. I’ll give ye all the work of my hands, all my time, all my
strength; but my soul I won’t give up to mortal man. I will hold on to
the Lord, and put his commands before all,—die or live; you may be sure
on ’t. Mas’r Legree, I ain’t a grain afeard to die. I’d as soon die as
not. Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me,—it’ll only send me sooner
where I want to go.”

“I’ll make ye give out, though, ’fore I’ve done!” said Legree, in a
rage.

“I shall have _help_,” said Tom; “you’ll never do it.”

“Who the devil’s going to help you?” said Legree, scornfully.

“The Lord Almighty,” said Tom.

“D—n you!” said Legree, as with one blow of his fist he felled Tom to
the earth.

A cold soft hand fell on Legree’s at this moment. He turned,—it was
Cassy’s; but the cold soft touch recalled his dream of the night
before, and, flashing through the chambers of his brain, came all the
fearful images of the night-watches, with a portion of the horror that
accompanied them.

“Will you be a fool?” said Cassy, in French. “Let him go! Let me alone
to get him fit to be in the field again. Isn’t it just as I told you?”

They say the alligator, the rhinoceros, though enclosed in bullet-proof
mail, have each a spot where they are vulnerable; and fierce, reckless,
unbelieving reprobates, have commonly this point in superstitious
dread.

Legree turned away, determined to let the point go for the time.

“Well, have it your own way,” he said, doggedly, to Cassy.

“Hark, ye!” he said to Tom; “I won’t deal with ye now, because the
business is pressing, and I want all my hands; but I _never_ forget.
I’ll score it against ye, and sometime I’ll have my pay out o’ yer old
black hide,—mind ye!”

Legree turned, and went out.

“There you go,” said Cassy, looking darkly after him; “your reckoning’s
to come, yet!—My poor fellow, how are you?”

“The Lord God hath sent his angel, and shut the lion’s mouth, for this
time,” said Tom.

“For this time, to be sure,” said Cassy; “but now you’ve got his ill
will upon you, to follow you day in, day out, hanging like a dog on
your throat,—sucking your blood, bleeding away your life, drop by drop.
I know the man.”

CHAPTER XXXVII
Liberty

“No matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the
altar of slavery, the moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the
altar and the God sink together in the dust, and he stands redeemed,
regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal
emancipation.”—_Curran_.[1]

 [1] John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), Irish orator and judge who worked
 for Catholic emancipation.

A while we must leave Tom in the hands of his persecutors, while we
turn to pursue the fortunes of George and his wife, whom we left in
friendly hands, in a farmhouse on the road-side.

Tom Loker we left groaning and touzling in a most immaculately clean
Quaker bed, under the motherly supervision of Aunt Dorcas, who found
him to the full as tractable a patient as a sick bison.

Imagine a tall, dignified, spiritual woman, whose clear muslin cap
shades waves of silvery hair, parted on a broad, clear forehead, which
overarches thoughtful gray eyes. A snowy handkerchief of lisse crape is
folded neatly across her bosom; her glossy brown silk dress rustles
peacefully, as she glides up and down the chamber.

“The devil!” says Tom Loker, giving a great throw to the bedclothes.

“I must request thee, Thomas, not to use such language,” says Aunt
Dorcas, as she quietly rearranged the bed.

“Well, I won’t, granny, if I can help it,” says Tom; “but it is enough
to make a fellow swear,—so cursedly hot!”

Dorcas removed a comforter from the bed, straightened the clothes
again, and tucked them in till Tom looked something like a chrysalis;
remarking, as she did so,

“I wish, friend, thee would leave off cursing and swearing, and think
upon thy ways.”

“What the devil,” said Tom, “should I think of _them_ for? Last thing
ever _I_ want to think of—hang it all!” And Tom flounced over,
untucking and disarranging everything, in a manner frightful to behold.

“That fellow and gal are here, I s’pose,” said he, sullenly, after a
pause.

“They are so,” said Dorcas.

“They’d better be off up to the lake,” said Tom; “the quicker the
better.”

“Probably they will do so,” said Aunt Dorcas, knitting peacefully.

“And hark ye,” said Tom; “we’ve got correspondents in Sandusky, that
watch the boats for us. I don’t care if I tell, now. I hope they _will_
get away, just to spite Marks,—the cursed puppy!—d—n him!”

“Thomas!” said Dorcas.

“I tell you, granny, if you bottle a fellow up too tight, I shall
split,” said Tom. “But about the gal,—tell ’em to dress her up some
way, so’s to alter her. Her description’s out in Sandusky.”

“We will attend to that matter,” said Dorcas, with characteristic
composure.

As we at this place take leave of Tom Loker, we may as well say, that,
having lain three weeks at the Quaker dwelling, sick with a rheumatic
fever, which set in, in company with his other afflictions, Tom arose
from his bed a somewhat sadder and wiser man; and, in place of
slave-catching, betook himself to life in one of the new settlements,
where his talents developed themselves more happily in trapping bears,
wolves, and other inhabitants of the forest, in which he made himself
quite a name in the land. Tom always spoke reverently of the Quakers.
“Nice people,” he would say; “wanted to convert me, but couldn’t come
it, exactly. But, tell ye what, stranger, they do fix up a sick fellow
first rate,—no mistake. Make jist the tallest kind o’ broth and
knicknacks.”

As Tom had informed them that their party would be looked for in
Sandusky, it was thought prudent to divide them. Jim, with his old
mother, was forwarded separately; and a night or two after, George and
Eliza, with their child, were driven privately into Sandusky, and
lodged beneath a hospital roof, preparatory to taking their last
passage on the lake.

Their night was now far spent, and the morning star of liberty rose
fair before them!—electric word! What is it? Is there anything more in
it than a name—a rhetorical flourish? Why, men and women of America,
does your heart’s blood thrill at that word, for which your fathers
bled, and your braver mothers were willing that their noblest and best
should die?

Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not
also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but
freedom to the individuals in it? What is freedom to that young man,
who sits there, with his arms folded over his broad chest, the tint of
African blood in his cheek, its dark fires in his eyes,—what is freedom
to George Harris? To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to
be a nation. To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a
brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect
her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child;
the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character
of his own, unsubject to the will of another. All these thoughts were
rolling and seething in George’s breast, as he was pensively leaning
his head on his hand, watching his wife, as she was adapting to her
slender and pretty form the articles of man’s attire, in which it was
deemed safest she should make her escape.

“Now for it,” said she, as she stood before the glass, and shook down
her silky abundance of black curly hair. “I say, George, it’s almost a
pity, isn’t it,” she said, as she held up some of it, playfully,—“pity
it’s all got to come off?”

George smiled sadly, and made no answer.

Eliza turned to the glass, and the scissors glittered as one long lock
after another was detached from her head.

“There, now, that’ll do,” she said, taking up a hair-brush; “now for a
few fancy touches.”

“There, an’t I a pretty young fellow?” she said, turning around to her
husband, laughing and blushing at the same time.

“You always will be pretty, do what you will,” said George.

“What does make you so sober?” said Eliza, kneeling on one knee, and
laying her hand on his. “We are only within twenty-four hours of
Canada, they say. Only a day and a night on the lake, and then—oh,
then!—”

“O, Eliza!” said George, drawing her towards him; “that is it! Now my
fate is all narrowing down to a point. To come so near, to be almost in
sight, and then lose all. I should never live under it, Eliza.”

“Don’t fear,” said his wife, hopefully. “The good Lord would not have
brought us so far, if he didn’t mean to carry us through. I seem to
feel him with us, George.”

“You are a blessed woman, Eliza!” said George, clasping her with a
convulsive grasp. “But,—oh, tell me! can this great mercy be for us?
Will these years and years of misery come to an end?—shall we be free?

“I am sure of it, George,” said Eliza, looking upward, while tears of
hope and enthusiasm shone on her long, dark lashes. “I feel it in me,
that God is going to bring us out of bondage, this very day.”

“I will believe you, Eliza,” said George, rising suddenly up, “I will
believe,—come let’s be off. Well, indeed,” said he, holding her off at
arm’s length, and looking admiringly at her, “you _are_ a pretty little
fellow. That crop of little, short curls, is quite becoming. Put on
your cap. So—a little to one side. I never saw you look quite so
pretty. But, it’s almost time for the carriage;—I wonder if Mrs. Smyth
has got Harry rigged?”

The door opened, and a respectable, middle-aged woman entered, leading
little Harry, dressed in girl’s clothes.

“What a pretty girl he makes,” said Eliza, turning him round. “We call
him Harriet, you see;—don’t the name come nicely?”

The child stood gravely regarding his mother in her new and strange
attire, observing a profound silence, and occasionally drawing deep
sighs, and peeping at her from under his dark curls.

“Does Harry know mamma?” said Eliza, stretching her hands toward him.

The child clung shyly to the woman.

“Come Eliza, why do you try to coax him, when you know that he has got
to be kept away from you?”

“I know it’s foolish,” said Eliza; “yet, I can’t bear to have him turn
away from me. But come,—where’s my cloak? Here,—how is it men put on
cloaks, George?”

“You must wear it so,” said her husband, throwing it over his
shoulders.

“So, then,” said Eliza, imitating the motion,—“and I must stamp, and
take long steps, and try to look saucy.”

“Don’t exert yourself,” said George. “There is, now and then, a modest
young man; and I think it would be easier for you to act that
character.”

“And these gloves! mercy upon us!” said Eliza; “why, my hands are lost
in them.”

“I advise you to keep them on pretty strictly,” said George. “Your
slender paw might bring us all out. Now, Mrs. Smyth, you are to go
under our charge, and be our aunty,—you mind.”

“I’ve heard,” said Mrs. Smyth, “that there have been men down, warning
all the packet captains against a man and woman, with a little boy.”

“They have!” said George. “Well, if we see any such people, we can tell
them.”

A hack now drove to the door, and the friendly family who had received
the fugitives crowded around them with farewell greetings.

The disguises the party had assumed were in accordance with the hints
of Tom Loker. Mrs. Smyth, a respectable woman from the settlement in
Canada, whither they were fleeing, being fortunately about crossing the
lake to return thither, had consented to appear as the aunt of little
Harry; and, in order to attach him to her, he had been allowed to
remain, the two last days, under her sole charge; and an extra amount
of petting, jointed to an indefinite amount of seed-cakes and candy,
had cemented a very close attachment on the part of the young
gentleman.

The hack drove to the wharf. The two young men, as they appeared,
walked up the plank into the boat, Eliza gallantly giving her arm to
Mrs. Smyth, and George attending to their baggage.

George was standing at the captain’s office, settling for his party,
when he overheard two men talking by his side.

“I’ve watched every one that came on board,” said one, “and I know
they’re not on this boat.”

The voice was that of the clerk of the boat. The speaker whom he
addressed was our sometime friend Marks, who, with that valuable
perseverance which characterized him, had come on to Sandusky, seeking
whom he might devour.

“You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” said Marks. “The
man is a very light mulatto; he has a brand in one of his hands.”

The hand with which George was taking the tickets and change trembled a
little; but he turned coolly around, fixed an unconcerned glance on the
face of the speaker, and walked leisurely toward another part of the
boat, where Eliza stood waiting for him.

Mrs. Smyth, with little Harry, sought the seclusion of the ladies’
cabin, where the dark beauty of the supposed little girl drew many
flattering comments from the passengers.

George had the satisfaction, as the bell rang out its farewell peal, to
see Marks walk down the plank to the shore; and drew a long sigh of
relief, when the boat had put a returnless distance between them.

It was a superb day. The blue waves of Lake Erie danced, rippling and
sparkling, in the sun-light. A fresh breeze blew from the shore, and
the lordly boat ploughed her way right gallantly onward.

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart! Who thought, as
George walked calmly up and down the deck of the steamer, with his shy
companion at his side, of all that was burning in his bosom? The mighty
good that seemed approaching seemed too good, too fair, even to be a
reality; and he felt a jealous dread, every moment of the day, that
something would rise to snatch it from him.

But the boat swept on. Hours fleeted, and, at last, clear and full rose
the blessed English shores; shores charmed by a mighty spell,—with one
touch to dissolve every incantation of slavery, no matter in what
language pronounced, or by what national power confirmed.

[Illustration: THE FUGITIVES ARE SAVE IN A FREE LAND.]

George and his wife stood arm in arm, as the boat neared the small town
of Amherstberg, in Canada. His breath grew thick and short; a mist
gathered before his eyes; he silently pressed the little hand that lay
trembling on his arm. The bell rang; the boat stopped. Scarcely seeing
what he did, he looked out his baggage, and gathered his little party.
The little company were landed on the shore. They stood still till the
boat had cleared; and then, with tears and embracings, the husband and
wife, with their wondering child in their arms, knelt down and lifted
up their hearts to God!

“’T was something like the burst from death to life;
    From the grave’s cerements to the robes of heaven;
From sin’s dominion, and from passion’s strife,
    To the pure freedom of a soul forgiven;
    Where all the bonds of death and hell are riven,
And mortal puts on immortality,
When Mercy’s hand hath turned the golden key,
And Mercy’s voice hath said, _Rejoice, thy soul is free.”_

The little party were soon guided, by Mrs. Smyth, to the hospitable
abode of a good missionary, whom Christian charity has placed here as a
shepherd to the outcast and wandering, who are constantly finding an
asylum on this shore.

Who can speak the blessedness of that first day of freedom? Is not the
_sense_ of liberty a higher and a finer one than any of the five? To
move, speak and breathe,—go out and come in unwatched, and free from
danger! Who can speak the blessings of that rest which comes down on
the free man’s pillow, under laws which insure to him the rights that
God has given to man? How fair and precious to that mother was that
sleeping child’s face, endeared by the memory of a thousand dangers!
How impossible was it to sleep, in the exuberant possession of such
blessedness! And yet, these two had not one acre of ground,—not a roof
that they could call their own,—they had spent their all, to the last
dollar. They had nothing more than the birds of the air, or the flowers
of the field,—yet they could not sleep for joy. “O, ye who take freedom
from man, with what words shall ye answer it to God?”

CHAPTER XXXVIII
The Victory

“Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory.”[1]

 [1] I Cor. 15:57.

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how
far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror,
finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic.
There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry
through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory
and rest.

But to live,—to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing
servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling
gradually smothered,—this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow,
daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after
hour,—this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or
woman.

When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and heard his threats,
and thought in his very soul that his hour was come, his heart swelled
bravely in him, and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear
anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just a step beyond;
but, when he was gone, and the present excitement passed off, came back
the pain of his bruised and weary limbs,—came back the sense of his
utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and the day passed wearily
enough.

Long before his wounds were healed, Legree insisted that he should be
put to the regular field-work; and then came day after day of pain and
weariness, aggravated by every kind of injustice and indignity that the
ill-will of a mean and malicious mind could devise. Whoever, in _our_
circumstances, has made trial of pain, even with all the alleviations
which, for us, usually attend it, must know the irritation that comes
with it. Tom no longer wondered at the habitual surliness of his
associates; nay, he found the placid, sunny temper, which had been the
habitude of his life, broken in on, and sorely strained, by the inroads
of the same thing. He had flattered himself on leisure to read his
Bible; but there was no such thing as leisure there. In the height of
the season, Legree did not hesitate to press all his hands through,
Sundays and week-days alike. Why shouldn’t he?—he made more cotton by
it, and gained his wager; and if it wore out a few more hands, he could
buy better ones. At first, Tom used to read a verse or two of his
Bible, by the flicker of the fire, after he had returned from his daily
toil; but, after the cruel treatment he received, he used to come home
so exhausted, that his head swam and his eyes failed when he tried to
read; and he was fain to stretch himself down, with the others, in
utter exhaustion.

Is it strange that the religious peace and trust, which had upborne him
hitherto, should give way to tossings of soul and despondent darkness?
The gloomiest problem of this mysterious life was constantly before his
eyes,—souls crushed and ruined, evil triumphant, and God silent. It was
weeks and months that Tom wrestled, in his own soul, in darkness and
sorrow. He thought of Miss Ophelia’s letter to his Kentucky friends,
and would pray earnestly that God would send him deliverance. And then
he would watch, day after day, in the vague hope of seeing somebody
sent to redeem him; and, when nobody came, he would crush back to his
soul bitter thoughts,—that it was vain to serve God, that God had
forgotten him. He sometimes saw Cassy; and sometimes, when summoned to
the house, caught a glimpse of the dejected form of Emmeline, but held
very little communion with either; in fact, there was no time for him
to commune with anybody.

One evening, he was sitting, in utter dejection and prostration, by a
few decaying brands, where his coarse supper was baking. He put a few
bits of brushwood on the fire, and strove to raise the light, and then
drew his worn Bible from his pocket. There were all the marked
passages, which had thrilled his soul so often,—words of patriarchs and
seers, poets and sages, who from early time had spoken courage to
man,—voices from the great cloud of witnesses who ever surround us in
the race of life. Had the word lost its power, or could the failing eye
and weary sense no longer answer to the touch of that mighty
inspiration? Heavily sighing, he put it in his pocket. A coarse laugh
roused him; he looked up,—Legree was standing opposite to him.

“Well, old boy,” he said, “you find your religion don’t work, it seems!
I thought I should get that through your wool, at last!”

The cruel taunt was more than hunger and cold and nakedness. Tom was
silent.

“You were a fool,” said Legree; “for I meant to do well by you, when I
bought you. You might have been better off than Sambo, or Quimbo
either, and had easy times; and, instead of getting cut up and
thrashed, every day or two, ye might have had liberty to lord it round,
and cut up the other niggers; and ye might have had, now and then, a
good warming of whiskey punch. Come, Tom, don’t you think you’d better
be reasonable?—heave that ar old pack of trash in the fire, and join my
church!”

“The Lord forbid!” said Tom, fervently.

“You see the Lord an’t going to help you; if he had been, he wouldn’t
have let _me_ get you! This yer religion is all a mess of lying
trumpery, Tom. I know all about it. Ye’d better hold to me; I’m
somebody, and can do something!”

“No, Mas’r,” said Tom; “I’ll hold on. The Lord may help me, or not
help; but I’ll hold to him, and believe him to the last!”

“The more fool you!” said Legree, spitting scornfully at him, and
spurning him with his foot. “Never mind; I’ll chase you down, yet, and
bring you under,—you’ll see!” and Legree turned away.

When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which
endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of
every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the
heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. So
was it now with Tom. The atheistic taunts of his cruel master sunk his
before dejected soul to the lowest ebb; and, though the hand of faith
still held to the eternal rock, it was a numb, despairing grasp. Tom
sat, like one stunned, at the fire. Suddenly everything around him
seemed to fade, and a vision rose before him of one crowned with
thorns, buffeted and bleeding. Tom gazed, in awe and wonder, at the
majestic patience of the face; the deep, pathetic eyes thrilled him to
his inmost heart; his soul woke, as, with floods of emotion, he
stretched out his hands and fell upon his knees,—when, gradually, the
vision changed: the sharp thorns became rays of glory; and, in splendor
inconceivable, he saw that same face bending compassionately towards
him, and a voice said, “He that overcometh shall sit down with me on my
throne, even as I also overcome, and am set down with my Father on his
throne.”

How long Tom lay there, he knew not. When he came to himself, the fire
was gone out, his clothes were wet with the chill and drenching dews;
but the dread soul-crisis was past, and, in the joy that filled him, he
no longer felt hunger, cold, degradation, disappointment, wretchedness.
From his deepest soul, he that hour loosed and parted from every hope
in life that now is, and offered his own will an unquestioning
sacrifice to the Infinite. Tom looked up to the silent, ever-living
stars,—types of the angelic hosts who ever look down on man; and the
solitude of the night rung with the triumphant words of a hymn, which
he had sung often in happier days, but never with such feeling as now:

“The earth shall be dissolved like snow,
    The sun shall cease to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
    Shall be forever mine.

“And when this mortal life shall fail,
    And flesh and sense shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil
    A life of joy and peace.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
    Bright shining like the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
    Than when we first begun.”

Those who have been familiar with the religious histories of the slave
population know that relations like what we have narrated are very
common among them. We have heard some from their own lips, of a very
touching and affecting character. The psychologist tells us of a state,
in which the affections and images of the mind become so dominant and
overpowering, that they press into their service the outward imagining.
Who shall measure what an all-pervading Spirit may do with these
capabilities of our mortality, or the ways in which He may encourage
the desponding souls of the desolate? If the poor forgotten slave
believes that Jesus hath appeared and spoken to him, who shall
contradict him? Did He not say that his mission, in all ages, was to
bind up the broken-hearted, and set at liberty them that are bruised?

When the dim gray of dawn woke the slumberers to go forth to the field,
there was among those tattered and shivering wretches one who walked
with an exultant tread; for firmer than the ground he trod on was his
strong faith in Almighty, eternal love. Ah, Legree, try all your forces
now! Utmost agony, woe, degradation, want, and loss of all things,
shall only hasten on the process by which he shall be made a king and a
priest unto God!

From this time, an inviolable sphere of peace encompassed the lowly
heart of the oppressed one,—an ever-present Saviour hallowed it as a
temple. Past now the bleeding of earthly regrets; past its fluctuations
of hope, and fear, and desire; the human will, bent, and bleeding, and
struggling long, was now entirely merged in the Divine. So short now
seemed the remaining voyage of life,—so near, so vivid, seemed eternal
blessedness,—that life’s uttermost woes fell from him unharming.

All noticed the change in his appearance. Cheerfulness and alertness
seemed to return to him, and a quietness which no insult or injury
could ruffle seemed to possess him.

“What the devil’s got into Tom?” Legree said to Sambo. “A while ago he
was all down in the mouth, and now he’s peart as a cricket.”

“Dunno, Mas’r; gwine to run off, mebbe.”

“Like to see him try that,” said Legree, with a savage grin, “wouldn’t
we, Sambo?”

“Guess we would! Haw! haw! ho!” said the sooty gnome, laughing
obsequiously. “Lord, de fun! To see him stickin’ in de mud,—chasin’ and
tarin’ through de bushes, dogs a holdin’ on to him! Lord, I laughed fit
to split, dat ar time we cotched Molly. I thought they’d a had her all
stripped up afore I could get ’em off. She car’s de marks o’ dat ar
spree yet.”

“I reckon she will, to her grave,” said Legree. “But now, Sambo, you
look sharp. If the nigger’s got anything of this sort going, trip him
up.”

“Mas’r, let me lone for dat,” said Sambo, “I’ll tree de coon. Ho, ho,
ho!”

This was spoken as Legree was getting on his horse, to go to the
neighboring town. That night, as he was returning, he thought he would
turn his horse and ride round the quarters, and see if all was safe.

It was a superb moonlight night, and the shadows of the graceful China
trees lay minutely pencilled on the turf below, and there was that
transparent stillness in the air which it seems almost unholy to
disturb. Legree was a little distance from the quarters, when he heard
the voice of some one singing. It was not a usual sound there, and he
paused to listen. A musical tenor voice sang,

“When I can read my title clear
    To mansions in the skies,
I’ll bid farewell to every fear,
    And wipe my weeping eyes

“Should earth against my soul engage,
    And hellish darts be hurled,
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage,
    And face a frowning world.

“Let cares like a wild deluge come,
    And storms of sorrow fall,
May I but safely reach my home,
    My God, my Heaven, my All.”[2]

 [2] “On My Journey Home,” hymn by Isaac Watts, found in many of the
 southern country songbooks of the ante bellum period.

“So ho!” said Legree to himself, “he thinks so, does he? How I hate
these cursed Methodist hymns! Here, you nigger,” said he, coming
suddenly out upon Tom, and raising his riding-whip, “how dare you be
gettin’ up this yer row, when you ought to be in bed? Shut yer old
black gash, and get along in with you!”

“Yes, Mas’r,” said Tom, with ready cheerfulness, as he rose to go in.

Legree was provoked beyond measure by Tom’s evident happiness; and
riding up to him, belabored him over his head and shoulders.

“There, you dog,” he said, “see if you’ll feel so comfortable, after
that!”

But the blows fell now only on the outer man, and not, as before, on
the heart. Tom stood perfectly submissive; and yet Legree could not
hide from himself that his power over his bond thrall was somehow gone.
And, as Tom disappeared in his cabin, and he wheeled his horse suddenly
round, there passed through his mind one of those vivid flashes that
often send the lightning of conscience across the dark and wicked soul.
He understood full well that it was GOD who was standing between him
and his victim, and he blasphemed him. That submissive and silent man,
whom taunts, nor threats, nor stripes, nor cruelties, could disturb,
roused a voice within him, such as of old his Master roused in the
demoniac soul, saying, “What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of
Nazareth?—art thou come to torment us before the time?”

Tom’s whole soul overflowed with compassion and sympathy for the poor
wretches by whom he was surrounded. To him it seemed as if his
life-sorrows were now over, and as if, out of that strange treasury of
peace and joy, with which he had been endowed from above, he longed to
pour out something for the relief of their woes. It is true,
opportunities were scanty; but, on the way to the fields, and back
again, and during the hours of labor, chances fell in his way of
extending a helping-hand to the weary, the disheartened and
discouraged. The poor, worn-down, brutalized creatures, at first, could
scarce comprehend this; but, when it was continued week after week, and
month after month, it began to awaken long-silent chords in their
benumbed hearts. Gradually and imperceptibly the strange, silent,
patient man, who was ready to bear every one’s burden, and sought help
from none,—who stood aside for all, and came last, and took least, yet
was foremost to share his little all with any who needed,—the man who,
in cold nights, would give up his tattered blanket to add to the
comfort of some woman who shivered with sickness, and who filled the
baskets of the weaker ones in the field, at the terrible risk of coming
short in his own measure,—and who, though pursued with unrelenting
cruelty by their common tyrant, never joined in uttering a word of
reviling or cursing,—this man, at last, began to have a strange power
over them; and, when the more pressing season was past, and they were
allowed again their Sundays for their own use, many would gather
together to hear from him of Jesus. They would gladly have met to hear,
and pray, and sing, in some place, together; but Legree would not
permit it, and more than once broke up such attempts, with oaths and
brutal execrations,—so that the blessed news had to circulate from
individual to individual. Yet who can speak the simple joy with which
some of those poor outcasts, to whom life was a joyless journey to a
dark unknown, heard of a compassionate Redeemer and a heavenly home? It
is the statement of missionaries, that, of all races of the earth, none
have received the Gospel with such eager docility as the African. The
principle of reliance and unquestioning faith, which is its foundation,
is more a native element in this race than any other; and it has often
been found among them, that a stray seed of truth, borne on some breeze
of accident into hearts the most ignorant, has sprung up into fruit,
whose abundance has shamed that of higher and more skilful culture.

The poor mulatto woman, whose simple faith had been well-nigh crushed
and overwhelmed, by the avalanche of cruelty and wrong which had fallen
upon her, felt her soul raised up by the hymns and passages of Holy
Writ, which this lowly missionary breathed into her ear in intervals,
as they were going to and returning from work; and even the half-crazed
and wandering mind of Cassy was soothed and calmed by his simple and
unobtrusive influences.

Stung to madness and despair by the crushing agonies of a life, Cassy
had often resolved in her soul an hour of retribution, when her hand
should avenge on her oppressor all the injustice and cruelty to which
she had been witness, or which _she_ had in her own person suffered.

One night, after all in Tom’s cabin were sunk in sleep, he was suddenly
aroused by seeing her face at the hole between the logs, that served
for a window. She made a silent gesture for him to come out.

Tom came out the door. It was between one and two o’clock at
night,—broad, calm, still moonlight. Tom remarked, as the light of the
moon fell upon Cassy’s large, black eyes, that there was a wild and
peculiar glare in them, unlike their wonted fixed despair.

“Come here, Father Tom,” she said, laying her small hand on his wrist,
and drawing him forward with a force as if the hand were of steel;
“come here,—I’ve news for you.”

“What, Misse Cassy?” said Tom, anxiously.

“Tom, wouldn’t you like your liberty?”

“I shall have it, Misse, in God’s time,” said Tom. “Ay, but you may
have it tonight,” said Cassy, with a flash of sudden energy. “Come on.”

Tom hesitated.

“Come!” said she, in a whisper, fixing her black eyes on him. “Come
along! He’s asleep—sound. I put enough into his brandy to keep him so.
I wish I’d had more,—I shouldn’t have wanted you. But come, the back
door is unlocked; there’s an axe there, I put it there,—his room door
is open; I’ll show you the way. I’d a done it myself, only my arms are
so weak. Come along!”

“Not for ten thousand worlds, Misse!” said Tom, firmly, stopping and
holding her back, as she was pressing forward.

“But think of all these poor creatures,” said Cassy. “We might set them
all free, and go somewhere in the swamps, and find an island, and live
by ourselves; I’ve heard of its being done. Any life is better than
this.”

“No!” said Tom, firmly. “No! good never comes of wickedness. I’d sooner
chop my right hand off!”

“Then _I_ shall do it,” said Cassy, turning.

“O, Misse Cassy!” said Tom, throwing himself before her, “for the dear
Lord’s sake that died for ye, don’t sell your precious soul to the
devil, that way! Nothing but evil will come of it. The Lord hasn’t
called us to wrath. We must suffer, and wait his time.”

“Wait!” said Cassy. “Haven’t I waited?—waited till my head is dizzy and
my heart sick? What has he made me suffer? What has he made hundreds of
poor creatures suffer? Isn’t he wringing the life-blood out of you? I’m
called on; they call me! His time’s come, and I’ll have his heart’s
blood!”

“No, no, no!” said Tom, holding her small hands, which were clenched
with spasmodic violence. “No, ye poor, lost soul, that ye mustn’t do.
The dear, blessed Lord never shed no blood but his own, and that he
poured out for us when we was enemies. Lord, help us to follow his
steps, and love our enemies.”

“Love!” said Cassy, with a fierce glare; “love _such_ enemies! It isn’t
in flesh and blood.”

“No, Misse, it isn’t,” said Tom, looking up; “but _He_ gives it to us,
and that’s the victory. When we can love and pray over all and through
all, the battle’s past, and the victory’s come,—glory be to God!” And,
with streaming eyes and choking voice, the black man looked up to
heaven.

And this, oh Africa! latest called of nations,—called to the crown of
thorns, the scourge, the bloody sweat, the cross of agony,—this is to
be _thy_ victory; by this shalt thou reign with Christ when his kingdom
shall come on earth.

The deep fervor of Tom’s feelings, the softness of his voice, his
tears, fell like dew on the wild, unsettled spirit of the poor woman. A
softness gathered over the lurid fires of her eye; she looked down, and
Tom could feel the relaxing muscles of her hands, as she said,

“Didn’t I tell you that evil spirits followed me? O! Father Tom, I
can’t pray,—I wish I could. I never have prayed since my children were
sold! What you say must be right, I know it must; but when I try to
pray, I can only hate and curse. I can’t pray!”

“Poor soul!” said Tom, compassionately. “Satan desires to have ye, and
sift ye as wheat. I pray the Lord for ye. O! Misse Cassy, turn to the
dear Lord Jesus. He came to bind up the broken-hearted, and comfort all
that mourn.”

Cassy stood silent, while large, heavy tears dropped from her downcast
eyes.

“Misse Cassy,” said Tom, in a hesitating tone, after surveying her in
silence, “if ye only could get away from here,—if the thing was
possible,—I’d ’vise ye and Emmeline to do it; that is, if ye could go
without blood-guiltiness,—not otherwise.”

“Would you try it with us, Father Tom?”

“No,” said Tom; “time was when I would; but the Lord’s given me a work
among these yer poor souls, and I’ll stay with ’em and bear my cross
with ’em till the end. It’s different with you; it’s a snare to
you,—it’s more’n you can stand,—and you’d better go, if you can.”

“I know no way but through the grave,” said Cassy. “There’s no beast or
bird but can find a home some where; even the snakes and the alligators
have their places to lie down and be quiet; but there’s no place for
us. Down in the darkest swamps, their dogs will hunt us out, and find
us. Everybody and everything is against us; even the very beasts side
against us,—and where shall we go?”

Tom stood silent; at length he said,

“Him that saved Daniel in the den of lions,—that saved the children in
the fiery furnace,—Him that walked on the sea, and bade the winds be
still,—He’s alive yet; and I’ve faith to believe he can deliver you.
Try it, and I’ll pray, with all my might, for you.”

By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and
trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new
light, as a discovered diamond?

Cassy had often revolved, for hours, all possible or probable schemes
of escape, and dismissed them all, as hopeless and impracticable; but
at this moment there flashed through her mind a plan, so simple and
feasible in all its details, as to awaken an instant hope.

“Father Tom, I’ll try it!” she said, suddenly.

“Amen!” said Tom; “the Lord help ye!”

CHAPTER XXXIX
The Stratagem

“The way of the wicked is as darkness; he knoweth not at what he
stumbleth.”[1]

 [1] Prov. 4:19.

The garret of the house that Legree occupied, like most other garrets,
was a great, desolate space, dusty, hung with cobwebs, and littered
with cast-off lumber. The opulent family that had inhabited the house
in the days of its splendor had imported a great deal of splendid
furniture, some of which they had taken away with them, while some
remained standing desolate in mouldering, unoccupied rooms, or stored
away in this place. One or two immense packing-boxes, in which this
furniture was brought, stood against the sides of the garret. There was
a small window there, which let in, through its dingy, dusty panes, a
scanty, uncertain light on the tall, high-backed chairs and dusty
tables, that had once seen better days. Altogether, it was a weird and
ghostly place; but, ghostly as it was, it wanted not in legends among
the superstitious negroes, to increase its terrors. Some few years
before, a negro woman, who had incurred Legree’s displeasure, was
confined there for several weeks. What passed there, we do not say; the
negroes used to whisper darkly to each other; but it was known that the
body of the unfortunate creature was one day taken down from there, and
buried; and, after that, it was said that oaths and cursings, and the
sound of violent blows, used to ring through that old garret, and
mingled with wailings and groans of despair. Once, when Legree chanced
to overhear something of this kind, he flew into a violent passion, and
swore that the next one that told stories about that garret should have
an opportunity of knowing what was there, for he would chain them up
there for a week. This hint was enough to repress talking, though, of
course, it did not disturb the credit of the story in the least.

Gradually, the staircase that led to the garret, and even the
passage-way to the staircase, were avoided by every one in the house,
from every one fearing to speak of it, and the legend was gradually
falling into desuetude. It had suddenly occurred to Cassy to make use
of the superstitious excitability, which was so great in Legree, for
the purpose of her liberation, and that of her fellow-sufferer.

The sleeping-room of Cassy was directly under the garret. One day,
without consulting Legree, she suddenly took it upon her, with some
considerable ostentation, to change all the furniture and appurtenances