The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
eyes. You are looking for a way to degrade me in my own feelings, yet to
deceive me. Can you be a gentleman?"
She was serene as if she had said nothing, though she rose up, and stood
at one side of the fireplace, opposite him; between them was a print of
General Jackson riding over the British.
In that moment Allan McLane felt that the girl was cheap at her
grandmother's figure.
He had always conceived her a flexible, peculiar child; in a few minutes
she had grown years, and become a rare and nearly stately woman, not now
to be moulded, but to be tempted with large, worldly propositions.
"May I ask who this lover is that I am so much beneath, Hulda--I, who
have taught you the accomplishments you chastise me with? I found you
sand; I made you crystal."
He drew out a large pongee handkerchief, and really dropped some tears
into it. She continued, cool and unmoved:
"My love is Levin Dennis, from Princess Anne. I am not afraid to tell
it."
"Why?"
"Because I want his danger and mine to be fully known to him, and make
him a man."
The Colonel folded his pongee, and came again to Hulda's side.
"That dissipated boy! Oh, Hulda, where is your real pride? He has
abandoned his mother. He is a poor gypsy. No, I must save you from such
a mistake. It is my duty to do it."
"I thank you for teaching me, whatever made you do it. If I could awaken
in you some unselfishness towards me and my new love, sir, it would be
the greatest gratitude I could show you. You conceal so many hard, bad
things under your word 'conservative,' that the gentle feelings, like
forgiveness, have forsaken you, I fear."
"No," the Colonel said, stiffly, his shoulders becoming more military,
"insults to my honor I never forgive. People who do not resent, have no
conservative principle."
"I forgive, as I hope to be forgiven, Joe, Aunt Patty, Van Dorn, and
you. I hope pity and mercy and sweet, unselfish love, such as I think
mine is, may grow in all of you! Oh, Colonel,"--she turned to him
earnestly, and, raising her hands to impress him, he merely noted the
elegance of her wrists and brown arms--"the buying and selling of these
human beings makes everybody unfeeling. It is stealing their souls and
bodies, whether they be bought at the court-house or kidnapped on the
roads. My dream of joy is to have a husband who will work with his own
free hands, and till his little farm, and sail his vessel, without a
slave. Above that I expect and ask nothing from the dear God who has so
long been my protector in this den of crime."
"Warm or cold, hectoring or tender, you are splendid, Hulda," McLane
said, his face fairly refulgent. "Now let me show you a conservative
picture of your real deserts. I am a bachelor. I keep an elegant house
in Baltimore. My table is supplied with the best in the market; my
servants are my slaves, and never disobey me; my paintings are
celebrated; books I never run to--they are radical things--but I can buy
them; my carriage is the best Rahway turn-out, and my horses are
Diomeds. In Frederick County I have an estate, in sight of the
mountains. As a Christian act, I will take you away from this spot, to
which you seem but half kindred, and make you my wife."
"You ask me to marry you?"
"Conservatively; that is, continue to be my pupil, and obey me. I will
bring your mind out of its ignorance, your body out of rags, your
associations out of crime. I will provide for you, as you are obedient,
while I live and after I am dead. You shall travel with me, and see
bright cities--New Orleans, Charleston, Havana. If you remain here, you
will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it
conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to
become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every
kind."
"How are you to be repaid for this?"
"By your love."
"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."
"Pooh! that's beneath you."
"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."
"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the
refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"
The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he
bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his
hands.
"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro
dealer."
He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic
composure.
"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"
"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."
She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame.
He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult
to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have
been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty
Cannon shall see my gold."
CHAPTER XLI.
AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.
Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret,
a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited,
though she had not revealed them--her modesty having received a stab
that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by
the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter--Vesta
fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.
Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party
in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of
cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of
mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something
inconsequential and merry and heartless.
"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take
refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn
was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my
father's."
Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from
the slave-pen.
"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"
She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she
peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she
pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the
jail.
"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."
"Three men, one old woman, and some little things, makes the present
contents of Pangymonum," spoke up a rough, cheery voice, "an', by smoke!
it's jess enough."
"Is it the white man that talks?"
"He says he's white, but they think it's goin' to be easy hokey-pokey to
pass him off for a nigger."
Her eyes soon recognized the speaker as he said, "By smoke! miss, you're
not much like a Johnson. I reckon you're Huldy."
"Yes, and you, sir?"
"I was Jimmy Phoebus before I was a nigger."
The girl went rapidly up to him, and put her arms around him.
"Thank God!" she said, "you are not dead. Levin Dennis, my dear friend,
wept to think you were at the river bottom. But, quick, sir; I may be
caught here. Are you all true to each other?"
"Yes, the traitor's cut his wizzen. Speak out, Huldy!"
"I heard Patty Cannon mutter that she was going to set her black man
free to kidnap for her. Hark! I must fly."
Hulda descended the ladder in time to surprise Cy James coming up. He
bent his goose neck down as he leaned his hands upon his knees, and,
looking up into her face, ejaculated,
"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! And Pangymonum, too."
* * * * *
"Samson," said Jimmy Phoebus, as soon as Hulda disappeared, "git
ready to be a first-class liar; I want you to take up Patty Cannon's
offer."
"An' leave you yer alone, Jimmy? I can't do it."
"Don't be a fool, Samson. Ironed here, we can't help nobody. Make your
way to Seaford and Georgetown, and go round the Cypress Swamp to
Prencess Anne. Alarm the pungy captains; fur Johnson'll try to run us by
sail, I reckon, down the bay to Norfolk. I've got a file that
cymlin-headed feller give me, an' I reckon I'll git out of my irons
about the time you git to Judge Custis's. There! ole Patty's coming."
"Go, Samson," spoke the Delaware colored man. "I'm younger than you, and
I'll fight as heartily under Mr. Phoebus's orders."
Aunt Hominy's voice came in blank monologue out of the background:
"He tuk dat debbil's hat, chillen, an' measured us in wid little Vessy."
* * * * *
That evening there was a long, free conference between Samson and Patty
Cannon, in her kitchen, next to the bar, where Hulda heard laughing and
invitations to drink, and all the sounds of perfect equality, the
negro's piquant sayings and _bonhommie_ seeming to disarm and please the
designing woman, whose familiarity was at once her influence and her
weakness, and she lavished her sociable nature on blacks and whites.
Samson was so fearless and observing that he betrayed no interest in
escaping, and came slowly into the range of her temperament; but, as
Hulda peeped, towards midnight, into the kitchen, she saw old Samson
kindly patting juba, while Patty was executing a drunken dance.
As the latter dropped upon a pallet bed she had there, and fell into a
doze, the colored man quietly raised the latch and walked off the tavern
porch.
* * * * *
In the morning dawn horses and voices were heard by Hulda, and she
recognized Joe Johnson's steps in the house. He shook Patty Cannon, but
could not awaken her; then looked into Van Dorn's room, and found Hulda,
apparently sound asleep, and heard his name called by Allan McLane
across the hall:
"Joe! not so loud. Be conservative. Come in; I'm waiting for you. Is all
done and fetched?"
"The bloke with the steeple felt will never snickle," spoke the ruffian.
"Good, good, Joe! Vengeance is mine, and it's a conservative saying. My
dear sister is at peace."
"The two yaller pullets have slipped you; the abigail mizzled to the
funeral with your niece, and t'other dell must have smelt us, and hopped
the twig."
"Not tasteful language at all, Joe. I don't understand you. Where are
the two bright wenches, Virgie and Roxy?"
"Roxie's in Baltimore; Virgie's run away."
"Run? Where? Don't trifle with me, Joe Johnson! Conservative as I am, I
don't like it, sir. Where could she have run?"
"There's no way for her to slip us but by water or through the Cypress
Swamp, Colonel. She ain't safe this side of Cantwell's bridge. Word has
gone out, and every road is watched."
"But Van Dorn is beaten back; he hasn't made a single capture; the
niggers drove him out of Dover with firearms, and he is wounded
somewhere."
The tall kidnapper turned pale, and then consigned Van Dorn's shade to
eternal torment.
"Don't swear before me, sir!" McLane, also irritated, exclaimed. "It's
not conservative, and I won't permit it. How do I know Meshach Milburn
is dead? who did it?"
"Black Dave fired the barker, and saw him settled."
"Send him here!"
The negro came in, red-eyed, and hoarse with diseased lungs, and stood,
the wreck of a once gigantic and regular man.
"Gi' me a drink," he muttered; "I'm mos' dead wi' misery an cold."
"Tell this man what you did," Joe Johnson spoke; "you waited till you
saw the hat at the window, and fired, and fetched hat an' man to the
ground?"
Swallowing a thimbleful of McLane's brandy, the negro grunted "Blood!"
and looked tremblingly at his hands.
"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely;
"was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.
Black Dave looked, and shook his head.
"Not like that? Damnation!"
"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson;
"what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."