"Beautifully read, Hulda! I never go to such places as theatres, but you might be, I should say, an actress. Don't think of it, however! Very unconservative profession! I take great pride in you, my lovely girl; suppose I take you home with me!"

He walked to her stool, and laid his warm hand on her neck, standing behind her; she did not move nor change color.

"Something has happened to me, Colonel McLane," Hulda spoke, clear as a bell out of a prison, "to make even Johnson's Cross Roads good and happy. Can you guess what it is?"

She bent her head back, and looked up fearlessly at him, as if he were the negro now.

"Not religious ecstasy?" he said. "Not camp-meeting or revival conversion, I hope. That's vile."

"No, Colonel. It is knowing a pure young man, whose love for me is natural and unselfish."

"Great G.o.d!" spoke McLane, removing his hand. "Not some kidnapper?"

"No," Hulda said, "no slave-dealer of any kind. They cannot make him so.

He is perfectly conservative, Colonel, as to that vileness. I believe he is a gentleman, too."

"You must have great experience in that article," he sneered, looking angry at her.

"I have seen you and my lover; you have the best clothes, and profess more. He has a nature that your opportunities would bring real refinement from. He respects me, wretched as I am; I read it in his eyes. You are looking for a way to degrade me in my own feelings, yet to deceive me. Can you be a gentleman?"

She was serene as if she had said nothing, though she rose up, and stood at one side of the fireplace, opposite him; between them was a print of General Jackson riding over the British.

In that moment Allan McLane felt that the girl was cheap at her grandmother's figure.

He had always conceived her a flexible, peculiar child; in a few minutes she had grown years, and become a rare and nearly stately woman, not now to be moulded, but to be tempted with large, worldly propositions.

"May I ask who this lover is that I am so much beneath, Hulda--I, who have taught you the accomplishments you chastise me with? I found you sand; I made you crystal."

He drew out a large pongee handkerchief, and really dropped some tears into it. She continued, cool and unmoved:

"My love is Levin Dennis, from Princess Anne. I am not afraid to tell it."

"Why?"

"Because I want his danger and mine to be fully known to him, and make him a man."

The Colonel folded his pongee, and came again to Hulda's side.

"That dissipated boy! Oh, Hulda, where is your real pride? He has abandoned his mother. He is a poor gypsy. No, I must save you from such a mistake. It is my duty to do it."

"I thank you for teaching me, whatever made you do it. If I could awaken in you some unselfishness towards me and my new love, sir, it would be the greatest grat.i.tude I could show you. You conceal so many hard, bad things under your word 'conservative,' that the gentle feelings, like forgiveness, have forsaken you, I fear."

"No," the Colonel said, stiffly, his shoulders becoming more military, "insults to my honor I never forgive. People who do not resent, have no conservative principle."

"I forgive, as I hope to be forgiven, Joe, Aunt Patty, Van Dorn, and you. I hope pity and mercy and sweet, unselfish love, such as I think mine is, may grow in all of you! Oh, Colonel,"--she turned to him earnestly, and, raising her hands to impress him, he merely noted the elegance of her wrists and brown arms--"the buying and selling of these human beings makes everybody unfeeling. It is stealing their souls and bodies, whether they be bought at the court-house or kidnapped on the roads. My dream of joy is to have a husband who will work with his own free hands, and till his little farm, and sail his vessel, without a slave. Above that I expect and ask nothing from the dear G.o.d who has so long been my protector in this den of crime."

"Warm or cold, hectoring or tender, you are splendid, Hulda," McLane said, his face fairly refulgent. "Now let me show you a conservative picture of your real deserts. I am a bachelor. I keep an elegant house in Baltimore. My table is supplied with the best in the market; my servants are my slaves, and never disobey me; my paintings are celebrated; books I never run to--they are radical things--but I can buy them; my carriage is the best Rahway turn-out, and my horses are Diomeds. In Frederick County I have an estate, in sight of the mountains. As a Christian act, I will take you away from this spot, to which you seem but half kindred, and make you my wife."

"You ask me to marry you?"

"Conservatively; that is, continue to be my pupil, and obey me. I will bring your mind out of its ignorance, your body out of rags, your a.s.sociations out of crime. I will provide for you, as you are obedient, while I live and after I am dead. You shall travel with me, and see bright cities--New Orleans, Charleston, Havana. If you remain here, you will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every kind."

"How are you to be repaid for this?"

"By your love."

"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."

"Pooh! that's beneath you."

"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."

"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"

The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his hands.

"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro dealer."

He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic composure.

"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"

"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."

She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame.

He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty Cannon shall see my gold."

CHAPTER XLI.

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.

Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited, though she had not revealed them--her modesty having received a stab that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter--Vesta fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly pa.s.sion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from the slave-pen.

"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"

She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the jail.

"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."