Uncle Tom's Cabin
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?”