The Entailed Hat Part 89

"They says so, honey. Anyhow, he was hanged. We gals was beautiful. Says mother: 'It's a hard world, but don't let it beat you, gals! Marry ef you kin. Anyway, you must live, and you can't live off of women.' I married a Delaware man, and so I quit bein' Martha Hanley and became Patty Cannon."[7]

"And what a career you have led, Aunt Patty! Lived anywhere but in this old pocket between the bays, you would have had the reputation of Captain Kidd. Tell me now, conservatively, was not your own helpless childhood the cause of your mistakes, and does it never make you feel for other sparrow-birds like Hulda?"

The black-haired woman, with a certain evil-thinking, like one reflected upon harshly, finally clapped her bold black eyes on McLane's, and replied, chuckling:

"I don't know as it do, Cunnil. Before my mother pinted the way, I loved the men. I loved 'em to be bad. Mommy tuk us as we drifted. An' as fur Huldy yer, her mother throws her onto me; she's not like the Cannons an'

Johnsons; she's full of pride, and," with an oath, "let it be tuk out of her! Will you pay my price?"

He hesitated.

"It's not the price, Patty; it's the way. Isn't it cowardly?"

"Yes," said Patty, saucily, "it's kidnappin'. That's the trade yer. Pay down the money, Cunnil, an' this bare room will brighten to be your wedding chamber. Pah! are you a man!"

Her words aroused the visions self-love can reluctantly repulse, and which, entertained but an instant, grow irresistible.

The limber, maturing, rounding form of Hulda stepped on the footstool of his mind, touched his knee, and exhaled the aroma of her youth like a subtile musk, till he leaned back languidly, as if he smoked a pipe and on its bowl her bust was painted, and all her modesties dissolved into the intoxication. Brutality itself grew natural to this vision, as a fiercer joy and subst.i.tute for the deceit he could no longer practice.

The child had flown from her in the instant of his grasping it, like a pale b.u.t.terfly, but there remained where it had floated, a silken and nubile essence, fairy and humanity in one, clad in pure thoughts and sweet respect, the profanation of which would be as rare a game as Satan's struggle with the soul of Eve.

Her innocence and spirit, self-respect and awakened womanly consciousness, weakness and sensibility, mettle and beauty, presented themselves by turns; and the cold, woodeny room, the neglected tavern, the autumn night wind coming down the chimney and starting the fire, all seemed instinctive, like him, with mischief, as if Patty Cannon's soul flew astraddle of a broom and led a hundred witches.

McLane was fifty; his family was a stiff commercial one, that had generally kept demure, yet grasping, and practised the conservatism he also boasted of, but had departed from: he was the outlaw of the house, yet elevating its tenets into an aggressive s.h.i.+bboleth, the more so that he prospered by anti-progress.

He was a backer of domestic slave-dealers, and put his money into forms of gain men hesitated at; not only at the curbstone, for usury, but behind p.a.w.nbrokers and sporting men, in lottery companies and liquor-houses, and, it was said, in the open slave-trade, too, clippers for which occasionally stole out of the Chesapeake on affected trading errands to the East Indies, and came home with nothing but West India fruits.

He strove to maintain his credit by ostentatious abhorrence of novelties and heterodoxies, and of all liberal agitations, and had the sublime hardihood to carry his Bible into every sink of shame, as if it was the natural baggage of a gentleman, and expected with him; and he would rebuke "blasphemy" while bidding at the slave auction or sitting in a bar-room full of kidnappers, among many of whom he pa.s.sed for a religious standard.

No portion of that Bible gave him any delight or occupation, however, except the Old Testament, with its thoroughgoing codes of servitude, concubinage, and an-eye-for-an-eye. He knew the Jewish laws better than the Scribes and Pharisees in the time of Herod and John, and had persuaded himself that the mental endors.e.m.e.nt and, wherever possible, the practice of these, const.i.tuted a firm believer. Revenge, intolerance, formality, and self-sleekness had become so much his theory that he did not know himself whether he was capable of doing evil provided he wanted anything.

Not particularly courageous, he was so dest.i.tute of sensibility that he felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.

"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice, like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"

"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide from me yer by your fire, and my voice outside the door will keep her in yer till day."

McLane went to his portmanteau and unlocked it, and took out rolls of notes and a buckskin bag of gold.

The yellow l.u.s.tre seemed to flash in Patty Cannon's rich black eyes, like the moon overhead upon a well.

"How beautiful it do s.h.i.+ne, Cunnil!" she said. "Nothing is like it fur a friend. Youth an' beauty has to go together to be strong, but, by G.o.d!

gold kin go it alone."

He counted out two piles, one of notes and one of gold, using his gold spectacles upon his hawk nose to do so, and said:

"Patty, I've bought many a grandchild _with_ the old woman, but this is the first child I have bought _from_ the grandmother. Now fulfil your contract and earn your money!"

He put his spectacles in his pocket, stretched his gaitered slippers before the fire, looked at his watch and let the crystal seal drop on his sleek abdomen, and his vitreous, blue-green eyes filled with color like twin vases in a druggist's window. He was ready and anxious to subst.i.tute the ruffian for the tempter.

Patty Cannon, glancing at the money on the table, and bearing a lamp, started at once through the house, calling "Huldy! Huldy!"

Nothing responded to the name.

She searched from room to room, peering everywhere, and made the circuit twice, and, taking a lantern, went into the windy night and round the bounds of the old tavern.

The house was easily explored, having no cellar nor outbuildings, and the trap to the slave-pen was locked fast. The girl's shawl and hat were also gone.

"She's heard us, I reckon," the old woman muttered; "she's run away an'

ruined me. Joe's cruel to me; Van Dorn is gone; without gold I go to the poor-house. McLane is pitiless--"

She dwelt upon the sentence, and, with only an instant's hesitation, turned into the tavern again and b.u.t.toned the outer door.

Beneath her feather bed she reached her hand and drew out a large object, took a horn from the mantel and sprinkled it with something contained there, and then, in a bold, masculine walk, stamping hard went in the dark up the open stairs again, talking, as she advanced, loudly, complaisantly, or sternly, as if to some truant she was coaxing or forcing. Finally, at McLane's chamber, she knocked hard, crying:

"Open, Cunnil! Here's the bashful creatur! She daren't disobey no mo'.

Step out and kiss her, Cunnil!"

"Ha!" said McLane, throwing open his door, out of which the full light of fire and candles gleamed, "conservative, is she? Well, let her enter!"

As he made one step to penetrate the darkness with his dazzled eyes, Patty Cannon silently thrust against his heart a huge horse-pistol and pulled the trigger: a flash of fire from the sharp flint against the fresh powder in the pan lit up the hall an instant, and the heavy body of the guest fell backward before his chair, and over him leaned the woman a moment, still as death, with the heavy pistol clubbed, ready to strike if he should stir.

He did not move, but only bled at the large lips, ghastly and unprotesting, and the cold blue eyes looked as natural as life.

Patty Cannon took the chair and counted the money.

CHAPTER XLII.

BEAKS.

The wind was blowing in spells, like crowds moved during an argument, at one time mute as awe, again murmurous, and sometimes mutinous and fierce, when Hulda, having heard a few words only of her grandmother's overture, glided from the old tavern and pa.s.sed on into the night, terrified but not unthinking, till she reached some large pines that seemed to say over her head, high up towards heaven: "Where now, oh where, oh-h-h wh-h-here, in the co-o-o-old, co-o-o-old w-h-h-h-ilderness of the wh-h-h-orld?"

"Anywhere!" answered Hulda, not afraid of cold or nature, so intense had become her fear of men and women. "Still, where? I might go to Cannon's Ferry and tell my tale to those hard-hearted merchants, or to Seaford and beg a shelter somewhere there; but first I will try our old cottage home again."

She went so quietly up the field lane that dogs could not have heard her, and, as she approached the little house, saw lights in it, and soon heard voices and saw moving figures within.

Knowing every knot-hole and crack of the little dwelling, Hulda soon had a perfect view of the contents of the house by standing in the dark, a little distance from one of the low, small windows.

A table stood in the middle of the main room, on which was an old mouldered chest with the earth clinging to it, and beside the chest were bones and shreds of clothing on the riven lid of the chest.

"You swear that the evidence you give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you G.o.d!" exclaimed a small, chunky, Irish-looking person, presenting a book to be kissed by a scrawny, chinless, goose-necked lad, whom Hulda immediately recognized as Cyrus James.

"Shall I take him, Doctor Gibbons?" asked a fine-looking, easy-mannered man, of the magistrate.

"Yes, Mr. Clayton."

"Do you know the nature of an oath? What is it?"