The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times

"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!" The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her guide was drunken with passion. She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a maniac's hands. "I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuated ruffian sighed; "you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!" A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her dying strength to preserve her modesty. "Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!" "My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it." "Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever, though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done." "Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states together and live for each other. Kiss me!" He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen braids of her silky hair. The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them. "Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you." As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke. The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed, "It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!" He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path. They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning earth dodged and chased each other. "Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must love me or we'll die together." He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead of them. * * * * * Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn. Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains were in her legs and feet, but she could walk. "Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought. A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked, burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water. "Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to repent and be a better man." He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and hideous to see. "Merciful Lord!" exclaimed Virgie; "what ails you, pore man?" "The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you must lead me now; I am gone blind." CHAPTER XXXIX. VIRGIE'S FLIGHT (_continued_). "Can you walk, Hudson?" asked Virgie, when her horror would permit. "Yes, child, I can walk, I reckon; but both my eyes is burned out. Oh, my pore old wife: she could nurse me so well. I have lost her." The girl comforted the sightless man, and led him on, indifferent to danger. He waded the deep places, where the water soothed his wounds and filled his blistered sockets with cool mud. "Blessed is the pure in heart," he murmured, as they reached some sandy ground and sank down. "You, Virgie, can see God; I never can." The great Cypress Swamp of Delaware--counterpart of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia--the northern border of which they had now reached, had probably been once a great inlet or shallow bay in the encroaching sand-bar of the peninsula, and was filled with oysters and fish, which in time were imprisoned and became the manure of a cypress forest that soon started up when springs of water flowed under the sand and moistened the seed; and for ages these forests had been growing, and had been prostrated, and had dropped their leaves and branches in the great inlet's bed, until a deep ligneous mass of combustible stuff raised higher and higher the level of the swamp, and, dried with ages more of time than dried the mummies of the Pharaohs, it often opened tunnels to burrowing fire, which at some point of its course belched forth and lighted the hollow trees, and raged for weeks. Such a fire they had come through. Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a little cart and ox. "Are you a colored boy?" Virgie asked. "No," answered the boy, proudly. "I'm Indian-river Indian; reckon I'm a _little_ nigger." "Take this poor man in and I will pay you. Where are you going?" "To Dagsborough landing, for salt." "Leave me at Dagsborough, at the old Clayton house," spoke up the blind man; "it's empty. I can die thar or git a doctor." Before the people were up they entered a little hamlet, on that stage road from which they had made the night's detour, and saw a few small houses and a little shingle-boarded church near by among the woods, and one large house of a deserted appearance was at the town's extremity. The man said, "This is John M. Clayton's birthplace: my wife used to work yer." "Virgie!" exclaimed a familiar voice. The girl turned, her ears still ringing with the echoes of the swamp, and saw a face she knew, and ran to the breast beneath it, crying, "Samson Hat! Oh, friend, love me like my mother. I am very ill." "Pore, darlin' child," Samson said; "no love will I ever bodder you wid agin but a father's. Why air you so fur from home?" "I'm sold, Samson: I'm trying to get free. The kidnappers is after me. Oh, save me!" "I've jist got away from 'em, Virgie. The ole woman, Patty Cannon, set me free. I promised her I would kidnap somebody younger dan ole Samson. Bless de Lord! I come dis way!" He led her into the oak-trees of the old church grove, where English worship had been celebrated just a hundred years; and she gave him money to buy medicine and get a doctor for the blind man, and to purchase her a shawl at the store. Then Virgie sank into a fevered sleep under the old oak-trees, and, when she knew more, was gliding in a boat that Samson was sailing down a broad piece of water, and her head was in his lap. "You air pure as an angel yit, my little creatur," Samson said; "and now I'm a-takin' you down the Indian River into Rehoboth Bay; and arter dark I'll git you up the beach to Cape Hinlopen, and maybe I kin buy you a passage on some of dem stone boats dat's buildin' de new breakwater dar, and dat goes back to de Norf." "Oh, Samson, if I could love any man it would be you," Virgie said; "but I cannot love any now except my dear white father. Who is he?" "De Lord, I reckon, has got yo' pedigree, Virgie." "Am I dying, Samson?" asked the girl, wistfully, with her brilliant eyes full of fever. "Oh, friend, let me die so good that Miss Vesty and my father can come and kiss me!" "Tell me about Princess Anne an' my dear old Marster Meshach Milburn, dat I'se leff so long, Virgie!" the old pugilist said, wiping his eyes of tears. She began to try to remember, but faces and events ran into each other, and she felt aware that her mind was wandering, but could not bring it back; and so the boat, sailing in sight of the ocean and the stately ships there, grounded after noon almost within sound of the surf. Sheltered in a piece of woods for some hours, Virgie found herself, at dark, carried in old Samson's arms up a beach of the sea where the sand was yielding and seldom firm, except at the very edge of the surf, which rolled ominously and at times became a roar, and often swept to the low, sedgy bank. Lightning played across the black sea, lifting it up, as it seemed, and showing vessels making either out or in, and finally thunder burst upon the gathering confusion, and Samson said: "Dar's a gun in dat thunder!" The next flash of lightning showed a vessel close to the shore, coming rapidly in on the southeaster, and her gun was fired again, and feeble hailing was heard; but the storm now broke all at once, and a wave threw Samson to the ground and nearly carried Virgie back with it to the boiling sea; but the faithful old man fought for her, and she ran at his side, uttering no complaint, till once, as they stopped to get breath, and the heavenly fire drew into sight every foot, as it seemed, of that vast ocean, cannonading it also with majestic artillery, the girl sighed, "Freedom is beautiful!" "Oh, Virgie," Samson answered, covering her with his own coat, "if I could buy you free, pore chile, I'd a-mos' go into slavery to save you from dis night." "I can die in there," Virgie said, pointing to the waves; "they must not catch me." A wail came out of the storm, so close before that it hushed them both, and the lightning lifted upon their eyes a stranding vessel, so close, it seemed, that they could touch it, and she was full of people, hallooing, but not in any intelligible tongue. As the black night fell upon this magic-lantern sketch they heard a crash of wave and wood, and falling spars and awful shrieks, and, when the next vivid flash of lightning came, nothing was visible but floating substance, and spluttering cries came out of the bosom of the sea, and a black man, flung, as if out of a cannon, upon a wave that drenched these wanderers, struck the ground at their feet, and looked into Samson's eyes as the convulsion of death seized his chest and feet. Before they could speak to each other, the beach was full of similar corpses, a moment before alive as themselves, and every one was naked and black. "It's a slave-ship, foundered yer," cried Samson. He caught at a yawl-boat driving past him, in the many things that drifted around their feet, and Virgie saw painted upon its bow the word "_Ida_." "Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again, and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and shipwrecked." * * * * * When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like little twigs in amber. Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side, peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in life. "Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father. Father, do love me before I die!" She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till she, too, lost her knowledge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old man at her side to say, "Samson, why cannot these angels sing?" The old man looked up and faintly smiled: "Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and swans. Dey can't sing like angels." "Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"