The Entailed Hat Part 91

He rushed away and gave a low whistle at the window; Daw and Joe's brother, Ebenezer, a lower set and more sinister being, bounded up the stairs and loosened and drove before them the little band of captives.

"One word from you, white n.i.g.g.e.r, in all this journey to-day, scatters your brains in the woods!"

Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phoebus saw his nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.

"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed, and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau thrown in beside it.

"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take the poor old woman that's raised you along."

"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it to you."

He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little bar and moaned,

"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"

How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she shouted,

"Van Dorn! G.o.d bless you, Van Dorn! Is you alive again?"

The Captain was supported in the arms of another person, who took him, ghastly pale, into the little bar and laid him upon her pallet, muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The morning was well advanced, and the sun made the gaunt and steep old tavern rise like a mammoth from the level lands, and filled its upper front rooms with golden wine of light, as Patty Cannon sat in one of them by a window near the piazza, and talked to Van Dorn, whom she had tenderly washed and re-dressed, and placed him in her own comfortable rocking-chair of rushes, with his feet raised, as all unaffected Americans like, and blanketed, upon a second chair.

Her woes and his relief made Patty social, yet tender, and the instincts of her s.e.x had returned, to be petted and beloved.

"Oh, Captain," she said, fondly, "how clean and sweet you look, like my good man again. Don't be cross to me, Van Dorn! My heart is sad."

"_Chito_, Patty! _chito_! Fie! _you_ sad? I like to see you saucy and defiant. Let us not repent! So Joe has left you?"

"With cruel curses. My daughter hates me, he says, and means to be a lady where I can't disgrace her. Oh, honey! to raise a child and have it hate an' despise you goes hard, even if I have been bad. There's nothing left me now but you, Van Dorn; oh, do not die!"

He coughed carefully, as if coughing was a luxury to be very mildly exerted, and wiped a little blood from his tongue and lip.

"I'll try not to die till I comfort you some, _Marta delicioso_! The ball is at my windpipe, and, when the blood trickles in, it makes me cough, and I must beware of emotions, the surgeon says, lest it drop into my lung and break a blood-vessel by some very spasmodic cough. So do not be too beautiful or I might perish."

He stroked his long yellow mustache with the diamond-fingered hand, and drew his velvet smoking-cap tight upon his silken curls, but he was too pale to blush as formerly, though he lisped as much, like a modest boy.

"Captain," the woman said, pleased to crimson, "you are so much smarter than me I'm afeard of you. Am I beautiful a little yet? Do I please you?

I know you mock me."

"_O hala hala!_" sighed Van Dorn. "You are the star of my life. All that I am, you have made me. Patty, I wors.h.i.+p you. When you are gone, human nature will breathe and wonder. Do you remember when first we met?"

"A little, Captain. Tell it to me again. Praise me if you kin. I'm almost desolate."

Her lip trembled, and she glanced at the fields across the way, she had so long inhabited, where, as it seemed to her, more life than ever was visible to-day, though she did not look carefully.

"How many years it has been, Patty, we will not tell. I was coming home from Africa with an emigrant, a Briton, my capturer, indeed--that officer in the blockading squadron on that coast who seized my privateer, the _Ida_, with all her complement of Guinea slaves. His name was all I took from him--you got the rest--_Van Dorn_!"

She stole a startled look at him out of her listening eyes, as if this might be unpleasant talk, but he parried it with a compliment.

"_Chis! Dios!_ What a family of beauties you were! Betty, with her hoyden air, and Jane, with her wealth of charms, and Patty, with her bold, rich eyes and conquering will. We sailed into the Nantic.o.ke by mistake for the Manokin. My friend had pitied my misfortunes and liked my company, and, when he broke me up as a slaver--having already been broken as a privateer--had said: 'Dennis, that country you praise so well has infatuated me; I'll resign my commission and buy a little vessel, and settle in America with you for the sake of my dear little daughter, Hulda Van Dorn.' _Ayme!_ that poor little wild-flower: where did she spend the chill night yesterday, Patty, can you tell?"

He coughed again, very carefully, and his eye, the brighter for his fretted lungs, never left his hostess, as though he feared she might overlook some pleasing feature of his story. She trotted her foot and muttered:

"You made me jealous of her: I got to hate an' fear her, lovey."

"Voluptuous as two young widowers were after a long cruise, we tarried among you sirens, myself almost at the threshold of my home, where my wife believed me dead, yet waited longingly and waits this morn, dear Patty. _Dios da fe!_ My friend, enta.s.selled with bright Betty, sooner felt remorse at the spectacle of his little child so ill-caressed, and beckoned me away; but he had shown his gold, and could better be spared than reckless I. You know the cool, deep game, dear Pat. _Hala ha!_ I was made to buy the poison you sisters gave Van Dorn, and seem the accomplice in his death: never till this week has that murder given up a testimony--the portion of the dead man's coin your mother stole and hid, which Hulda inherited at last. _Verdad es verde!_ I became afraid to leave you: I am here at the death with you, my old enchantress."

A crack ran through the empty wooden house, which made her rise; Van Dorn, as he was called, enjoyed her uneasiness, like a pallid mask painted with a smile.

"Captain," she said, "how many people I see out yonder in the fields!

Maybe thar's to be a fox-chase."

"Sit, Patty! Let me drink, in my last days of life, the wine lees of your memory. You are so dear to me! Turn in the golden sun, that I may linger on that face which autumn's ashes fall upon, though through the dead leaves I see the russet colors smoulder yet! How daring was your girlhood: the poor blacksmith farmer, whose name you will transmit forever, fretted you with his sickness and his scruples, and, _he aqui!_ you stilled him with the same cup you mixed for Betty's husband. His daughter you gave to wife to his apprentice, a strong, stolid man, capable of heroism, Patty, for he died for you, his dear misleader, on the shameful scaffold, though all the crowd knew who his instigator was; but, like a man, he died and never told."

"Van Dorn, you hurt me," Patty broke out; "I cannot laugh to-day, and these tales depress me, honey. Where shall we go when you are well?"

"_La gente pone, y Dios dispone!_ Stay yet, and chat awhile. I would not, for the world, see you discouraged,--you, unfathomable angel! who, in this mangy corner of the globe, looked abroad over the land like Catherine, from her sterile throne, over the mighty steppes, and levied war upon the hopes of man. How you did trouble Uncle Sam, great Patty, robbing his mails for years between Baltimore and the Brandywine! Young Nichols still serves his term for that shrewd trick you taught him, of cutting the mail-bags open as he sat, with the corrupted drivers, on the crowded stage, stealthily throwing the valuable letters in the road, to be gathered by a following horseman.[10] _Es admirable!_ Young Perry Hutton, reared by you to kidnap, then to drive the mail and filch its letters--a Delaware boy, too--perished on the gallows for killing a mail-driver more scrupulous than himself, who detected him under his mask.[11] Young Moore--was he your connection, darling?--stopping the mail-stage at the Gunpowder Forge, fell under the driver's buckshot.[12]

And Hare--"

"Captain," called Patty, "I see men and boys all over the fields yonder, running and digging and dragging away the bresh. Is them ole buryins of mine suspected?"

"Pshaw! darling, 'tis your warm imagination, and Joe's unkindness. I would make you happy with the memory of your daring acts. _Que maravilla!_ In your little pets you stamped a life out, when another woman would only stamp her foot. There was that morning when your fire would not burn, and a little black child bawled with the cold and angered you; if its body is ever dug up where it was laid, the skull cracked with the billet of wood will tell the tale. You once suspected me of truantry from your charms--_Quedo, quedo!_ exacting dame--and the pale offspring of poor Hagar you threw upon the blazing backlog, and grimly watched it burn. The pursued children whose cries you could not still, that yet are stilled till h.e.l.l shall have a voice, not even you can number. Evangelists, O Patty, dipping their pens in blood of saints to write your crimes, would make the next age infidel, where you will seem impossible, and all of us mythology!"

"Be still!" the woman cried, rising and walking, in her rolling gait, to watch things without that stirred her mind more than her lover's recitation; "what good kin these tales do you, Captain? My G.o.d! the roads is full of people, and they are all looking yer. Is it at me, Van Dorn?"

He coughed painfully, still watching her, however, and answered:

"Only a quarter-race, I guess, dear Pat! What! are you _fearing_, at your time of life?"

"No," cried Patty Cannon, defiantly, taking something from her bosom; "here is the same dose I gave my husband, if the worst comes."

"Bravo, Patty! you only tarnish into age, like an old bronze, that is harder by time and oxidizing. I was a gentleman, and yet you mastered me. How strange to see us together beleaguered here, myself by death, and you by the law! Why, we have defied them both! Let them come on! Do you believe in everlasting fire?--that every injury is a live coal to roast the soul? I know you do; and, if you do, how beautiful your rosy grate will be, tough charmer, with boys spoiled in the bud, and husbands in the blossom, with families of freemen torn apart, and children, born free as the flag of their country, sent to perpetual bondage and the whip. _Poca barba, poca verguenza!_[13] Who but a woman could have put it into William Bouser's head, when she had kidnapped him and thirty negroes more, and sold them all to Austin Woolfolk, in Baltimore, to rise at sea on Woolfolk's vessel, and ma.s.sacre the officers, only to be hanged at last, and all to make Woolfolk a better customer!"[14]

"There are people all round the house, Van Dorn. I hear them on the stairs and in the rooms. Have mercy!"

"Devils, or men, Patty? Both are your courtiers, remember, and perhaps they crowd each other. What do we care? _Que contento estoy!_ Perhaps I am indifferent because no blood is on my hands, vile slaver though I am!

Joe Johnson and his low-browed brother you could teach to kill; me, nothing worse than to steal and fondle you. Patty, you believe in h.e.l.l.

I am a believer, too; for I believe in heaven."

"O Van Dorn; how you do talk!"

"Since you entrapped my son, young Levin Dennis--_chito! quedito!_ do not start, fair fiend--to have his father make another Johnson of him, I have discovered, through the little girl, the beauteous damsel now, Hulda Van Dorn, the sin you meant to spot me with; and, listen, Patty!

it was my son, rich with his mother's loyalty and love--dear guardian wife, that never shall learn of my ruin here, nor see me more!--it was my Levin, set free by me, who gave the news at Dover and beat us back."