________________________________________________
_ "And slight, withal, may be the things that bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside forever; it may be a sound,
A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,--
Striking the electric chain wherewith we're darkly bound."
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CAN. 4.
The sitting-room of Legree's establishment was a large, long
room, with a wide, ample fireplace. It had once been hung with
a showy and expensive paper, which now hung mouldering, torn
and discolored, from the damp walls. The place had that peculiar
sickening, unwholesome smell, compounded of mingled damp, dirt and
decay, which one often notices in close old houses. The wall-paper
was defaced, in spots, by slops of beer and wine; or garnished with
chalk memorandums, and long sums footed up, as if somebody had been
practising arithmetic there. In the fireplace stood a brazier full
of burning charcoal; for, though the weather was not cold, the
evenings always seemed damp and chilly in that great room; and
Legree, moreover, wanted a place to light his cigars, and heat his
water for punch. The ruddy glare of the charcoal displayed the
confused and unpromising aspect of the room,--saddles, bridles,
several sorts of harness, riding-whips, overcoats, and various
articles of clothing, scattered up and down the room in confused
variety; and the dogs, of whom we have before spoken, had encamped
themselves among them, to suit their own taste and convenience.
Legree was just mixing himself a tumbler of punch, pouring his
hot water from a cracked and broken-nosed pitcher, grumbling,
as he did so,
"Plague on that Sambo, to kick up this yer row between me and
the new hands! The fellow won't be fit to work for a week,
now,--right in the press of the season!"
"Yes, just like you," said a voice, behind his chair. It was
the woman Cassy, who had stolen upon his soliloquy.
"Hah! you she-devil! you've come back, have you?"
"Yes, I have," she said, coolly; "come to have my own way, too!"
"You lie, you jade! I'll be up to my word. Either behave
yourself, or stay down to the quarters, and fare and work with
the rest."
"I'd rather, ten thousand times," said the woman, "live in
the dirtiest hole at the quarters, than be under your hoof!"
"But you _are_ under my hoof, for all that," said he, turning
upon her, with a savage grin; "that's one comfort. So, sit
down here on my knee, my dear, and hear to reason," said he,
laying hold on her wrist.
"Simon Legree, take care!" said the woman, with a sharp flash
of her eye, a glance so wild and insane in its light as to
be almost appalling. "You're afraid of me, Simon," she said,
deliberately; "and you've reason to be! But be careful, for I've
got the devil in me!"
The last words she whispered in a hissing tone, close to
his ear.
"Get out! I believe, to my soul, you have!" said Legree,
pushing her from him, and looking uncomfortably at her.
"After all, Cassy," he 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. _
Read next: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XXXVI - Emmeline and Cassy
Read previous: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XXXIV - The Quadroon's Story
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