Uncle Tom's Cabin
and went on smoking, like a hard-hearted wretch of a man as he was,
till a carriage drove up before the verandah, and Eva and Miss Ophelia
alighted.
Miss Ophelia marched straight to her own chamber, to put away her
bonnet and shawl, as was always her manner, before she spoke a word on
any subject; while Eva came, at St. Clare’s call, and was sitting on
his knee, giving him an account of the services they had heard.
They soon heard loud exclamations from Miss Ophelia’s room, which, like
the one in which they were sitting, opened on to the verandah and
violent reproof addressed to somebody.
“What new witchcraft has Tops been brewing?” asked St. Clare. “That
commotion is of her raising, I’ll be bound!”
And, in a moment after, Miss Ophelia, in high indignation, came
dragging the culprit along.
“Come out here, now!” she said. “I _will_ tell your master!”
“What’s the case now?” asked Augustine.
“The case is, that I cannot be plagued with this child, any longer!
It’s past all bearing; flesh and blood cannot endure it! Here, I locked
her up, and gave her a hymn to study; and what does she do, but spy out
where I put my key, and has gone to my bureau, and got a
bonnet-trimming, and cut it all to pieces to make dolls’ jackets! I
never saw anything like it, in my life!”
“I told you, Cousin,” said Marie, “that you’d find out that these
creatures can’t be brought up without severity. If I had _my_ way,
now,” she said, looking reproachfully at St. Clare, “I’d send that
child out, and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till
she couldn’t stand!”
“I don’t doubt it,” said St. Clare. “Tell me of the lovely rule of
woman! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn’t half kill a horse,
or a servant, either, if they had their own way with them!—let alone a
man.”
“There is no use in this shilly-shally way of yours, St. Clare!” said
Marie. “Cousin is a woman of sense, and she sees it now, as plain as I
do.”
Miss Ophelia had just the capability of indignation that belongs to the
thorough-paced housekeeper, and this had been pretty actively roused by
the artifice and wastefulness of the child; in fact, many of my lady
readers must own that they should have felt just so in her
circumstances; but Marie’s words went beyond her, and she felt less
heat.
“I wouldn’t have the child treated so, for the world,” she said; “but,
I am sure, Augustine, I don’t know what to do. I’ve taught and taught;
I’ve talked till I’m tired; I’ve whipped her; I’ve punished her in
every way I can think of, and she’s just what she was at first.”
“Come here, Tops, you monkey!” said St. Clare, calling the child up to
him.
Topsy came up; her round, hard eyes glittering and blinking with a
mixture of apprehensiveness and their usual odd drollery.
“What makes you behave so?” said St. Clare, who could not help being
amused with the child’s expression.
“Spects it’s my wicked heart,” said Topsy, demurely; “Miss Feely says
so.”
“Don’t you see how much Miss Ophelia has done for you? She says she has
done everything she can think of.”
“Lor, yes, Mas’r! old Missis used to say so, too. She whipped me a heap
harder, and used to pull my har, and knock my head agin the door; but
it didn’t do me no good! I spects, if they ’s to pull every spear o’
har out o’ my head, it wouldn’t do no good, neither,—I ’s so wicked!
Laws! I ’s nothin but a nigger, no ways!”
“Well, I shall have to give her up,” said Miss Ophelia; “I can’t have
that trouble any longer.”
“Well, I’d just like to ask one question,” said St. Clare.
“What is it?”
“Why, if your Gospel is not strong enough to save one heathen child,
that you can have at home here, all to yourself, what’s the use of
sending one or two poor missionaries off with it among thousands of
just such? I suppose this child is about a fair sample of what
thousands of your heathen are.”
Miss Ophelia did not make an immediate answer; and Eva, who had stood a
silent spectator of the scene thus far, made a silent sign to Topsy to
follow her. There was a little glass-room at the corner of the
verandah, which St. Clare used as a sort of reading-room; and Eva and
Topsy disappeared into this place.
“What’s Eva going about, now?” said St. Clare; “I mean to see.”
And, advancing on tiptoe, he lifted up a curtain that covered the
glass-door, and looked in. In a moment, laying his finger on his lips,
he made a silent gesture to Miss Ophelia to come and look. There sat
the two children on the floor, with their side faces towards them.
Topsy, with her usual air of careless drollery and unconcern; but,
opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in
her large eyes.
“What does make you so bad, Topsy? Why won’t you try and be good? Don’t
you love _anybody_, Topsy?”
“Donno nothing ’bout love; I loves candy and sich, that’s all,” said
Topsy.
“But you love your father and mother?”
“Never had none, ye know. I telled ye that, Miss Eva.”
“O, I know,” said Eva, sadly; “but hadn’t you any brother, or sister,
or aunt, or—”
“No, none on ’em,—never had nothing nor nobody.”
“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might—”
“Couldn’t never be nothin’ but a nigger, if I was ever so good,” said
Topsy. “If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.”
“But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy. Miss Ophelia would
love you, if you were good.”
Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of
expressing incredulity.
“Don’t you think so?” said Eva.
“No; she can’t bar me, ’cause I’m a nigger!—she’d ’s soon have a toad
touch her! There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do
nothin’! _I_ don’t care,” said Topsy, beginning to whistle.
“O, Topsy, poor child, _I_ love you!” said Eva, with a sudden burst of
feeling, and laying her little thin, white hand on Topsy’s shoulder; “I
love you, because you haven’t had any father, or mother, or
friends;—because you’ve been a poor, abused child! I love you, and I
want you to be good. I am very unwell, Topsy, and I think I shan’t live
a great while; and it really grieves me, to have you be so naughty. I
wish you would try to be good, for my sake;—it’s only a little while I
shall be with you.”
The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with
tears;—large, bright drops rolled heavily down, one by one, and fell on
the little white hand. Yes, in that moment, a ray of real belief, a ray
of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul! She
laid her head down between her knees, and wept and sobbed,—while the
beautiful child, bending over her, looked like the picture of some
bright angel stooping to reclaim a sinner.
“Poor Topsy!” said Eva, “don’t you know that Jesus loves all alike? He
is just as willing to love you, as me. He loves you just as I do,—only
more, because he is better. He will help you to be good; and you can go
to Heaven at last, and be an angel forever, just as much as if you were
white. Only think of it, Topsy!—_you_ can be one of those spirits
bright, Uncle Tom sings about.”
“O, dear Miss Eva, dear Miss Eva!” said the child; “I will try, I will
try; I never did care nothin’ about it before.”
St. Clare, at this instant, dropped the curtain. “It puts me in mind of
mother,” he said to Miss Ophelia. “It is true what she told me; if we
want to give sight to the blind, we must be willing to do as Christ
did,—call them to us, and _put our hands on them_.”
“I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes,” said Miss Ophelia, “and
it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me; but, I
don’t think she knew it.”
“Trust any child to find that out,” said St. Clare; “there’s no keeping
it from them. But I believe that all the trying in the world to benefit
a child, and all the substantial favors you can do them, will never
excite one emotion of gratitude, while that feeling of repugnance
remains in the heart;—it’s a queer kind of a fact,—but so it is.”
“I don’t know how I can help it,” said Miss Ophelia; “they _are_
disagreeable to me,—this child in particular,—how can I help feeling
so?”
“Eva does, it seems.”
“Well, she’s so loving! After all, though, she’s no more than
Christ-like,” said Miss Ophelia; “I wish I were like her. She might
teach me a lesson.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a little child had been used to instruct
an old disciple, if it _were_ so,” said St. Clare.
CHAPTER XXVI
Death
Weep not for those whom the veil of the tomb,
In life’s early morning, hath hid from our eyes.[1]
[1] “Weep Not for Those,” a poem by Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
Eva’s bed-room was a spacious apartment, which, like all the other
rooms in the house, opened on to the broad verandah. The room
communicated, on one side, with her father and mother’s apartment; on
the other, with that appropriated to Miss Ophelia. St. Clare had
gratified his own eye and taste, in furnishing this room in a style
that had a peculiar keeping with the character of her for whom it was
intended. The windows were hung with curtains of rose-colored and white
muslin, the floor was spread with a matting which had been ordered in
Paris, to a pattern of his own device, having round it a border of
rose-buds and leaves, and a centre-piece with full-flown roses. The
bedstead, chairs, and lounges, were of bamboo, wrought in peculiarly
graceful and fanciful patterns. Over the head of the bed was an
alabaster bracket, on which a beautiful sculptured angel stood, with
drooping wings, holding out a crown of myrtle-leaves. From this
depended, over the bed, light curtains of rose-colored gauze, striped
with silver, supplying that protection from mosquitos which is an
indispensable addition to all sleeping accommodation in that climate.
The graceful bamboo lounges were amply supplied with cushions of
rose-colored damask, while over them, depending from the hands of
sculptured figures, were gauze curtains similar to those of the bed. A
light, fanciful bamboo table stood in the middle of the room, where a
Parian vase, wrought in the shape of a white lily, with its buds,
stood, ever filled with flowers. On this table lay Eva’s books and
little trinkets, with an elegantly wrought alabaster writing-stand,
which her father had supplied to her when he saw her trying to improve
herself in writing. There was a fireplace in the room, and on the
marble mantle above stood a beautifully wrought statuette of Jesus
receiving little children, and on either side marble vases, for which
it was Tom’s pride and delight to offer bouquets every morning. Two or
three exquisite paintings of children, in various attitudes,
embellished the wall. In short, the eye could turn nowhere without
meeting images of childhood, of beauty, and of peace. Those little eyes
never opened, in the morning light, without falling on something which
suggested to the heart soothing and beautiful thoughts.
The deceitful strength which had buoyed Eva up for a little while was
fast passing away; seldom and more seldom her light footstep was heard
in the verandah, and oftener and oftener she was found reclined on a
little lounge by the open window, her large, deep eyes fixed on the
rising and falling waters of the lake.
It was towards the middle of the afternoon, as she was so
reclining,—her Bible half open, her little transparent fingers lying
listlessly between the leaves,—suddenly she heard her mother’s voice,
in sharp tones, in the verandah.
“What now, you baggage!—what new piece of mischief! You’ve been picking
the flowers, hey?” and Eva heard the sound of a smart slap.
“Law, Missis! they ’s for Miss Eva,” she heard a voice say, which she
knew belonged to Topsy.
“Miss Eva! A pretty excuse!—you suppose she wants _your_ flowers, you
good-for-nothing nigger! Get along off with you!”