The Entailed Hat Part 85

Without an instant's consideration of this ambitious proposition, Mrs.

Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar, into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry her yet."

With this reflection Mr. James hid himself for the remainder of the afternoon in some secluded part of the Hotel Johnson.

Mrs. Cannon, however, had instantly resumed her monologue on business.

"They all think to give the old woman the go-by: a sick man's no good, and there's that wife of Van Dorn's hopin' to git him yit. By G.o.d! she sha'n't have him in his shroud. No; I'll recruit from young material.

Ruin 'em when they's boys, and, while you kin pet 'em, they'll do your work! I have one n.i.g.g.e.r in the garret Joe wants to burn: he's my n.i.g.g.e.r, and I'll let him loose to bring me more n.i.g.g.e.rs. Money is what I need to put on a bold front: Huldy must fetch it!"

With this resolution Patty Cannon mounted the stairs to a room on the second floor, and, without knocking, pushed her way in.

A man of a voluptuous form and face, like one overfed, yet on the best, and with stiff, military shoulders, and of colors warm in tint, yet cold in expression, blue eyes, and rich, wine-lined cheeks and lips, that still seemed hard and self-indulged, spoke up at once:

"Always knock, Patty! it's more conservative. My way in life is to reach my point, but respect all the forms. What do you want?"

"When do you leave for Baltimore, Cunnil McLane?"

"As soon as Joe returns with my dear sister's property: to-morrow, I hope."

"You can take Huldy Bruington if you pay my price for her: two thousand dollars down. If you won't give it, she shall be married to some young kidnapper, who will fetch twice that pile for her in n.i.g.g.e.rs. They'll all fight their weight in black wildcats to git her."

"Very, very abrupt proposition, Patty; not conservative at all. What's the matter with you, dame, to-day. Van Dorn not lucky, heigh?"

He gave her a vitreous smile and watched her over his round paunch, on which a crystal watch-seal hung, like a more human eye than his own. Her color began to rise.

"I'm mad," said Patty Cannon; "don't worry me; don't Jew me! Do you mind? Yes, Van Dorn has been whipped--by n.i.g.g.e.rs, too. Will you pay my price or not?"

"Tut, tut, good woman! What can I want with a white girl. It wouldn't look conservative at all in Baltimore."

Patty Cannon stamped her foot.

"Don't rouse me with any of your hypocritical cant, Cunnil McLane! What have you been teachin' that child to read an' write fur--out of your Bible, too? What do you bring her presents fur, and hang around us when we know you despise us all, except fur the black folks we can sell you cheap? Haven't I been sold to men like you time and again before I was a woman, and don't I know the sneaking pains that old men take to look benevolent when youth an' beauty is fur sale; and how they pet it to keep it pure fur their own selfish enjoyment? G.o.d knows I do!"

"Patty, you shock me!" the rubicund gentleman observed. "I have always found you conservative before. Now, go and send sweet Hulda here, and, for Heaven's sake, Patty, don't reveal this bargain to her."

"Is it a bargain, Cunnil?"

"It is, if she can be made willing to it."

"That she shall, or make her bed in the forest, where good looks are not safe around yer."

Hulda was found at a window, looking out upon her former home, and at a ploughman who had nearly completed the furrows in a large field, sparing only some low places piled with brush, over one of which some buzzards circled, lofty, yet intent as anglers watching their tackle. Hard as that home had been to Hulda, she regretted leaving it for this men's tavern, where her grandmother's saucy temperament found so many incentives to bravado, and her caution, that had to be exercised in Delaware, was quite unnecessary on the Maryland side of the line.

At the little hip-roofed white cottage Hulda had felt a sense of privacy pleasing to her growing life, and her ability to read often charmed Patty Cannon to a stillness that was like the hyena's sleep, and even made her acquiescent and cordial.

But where she met men alone, unmodified by modest women's example, the bold tendency of Patty was to out-do men, and lead them on to audacities they would have feared to follow in but for her courage and policy; for she could coax either young or coa.r.s.e natures, as well as she could drive.

These feats of strength and cunning, statecraft and desperation, reminded Hulda of a book she had read about the Norman knights in England kidnapping and robbing the poor Saxons; and one description of King William the Conqueror suggested to Hulda that he was perhaps a Patty Cannon in his times, as his body and legs were short and powerful, like hers, and he could bend a bow riding on horseback that no other knight could bend on foot with the legs planted firmly. He could not read nor write, and was superst.i.tious, yet cruel as the grave. All this was true of Patty Cannon, whose feat of standing in a bushel measure and putting three hundred pounds of grain on her shoulder has been related.

She often wrestled and bound, without a.s.sistance, strong black men fighting for their liberties. She could ride horseback, sitting like men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel.

Hulda was dressed in her best clothes, her hair was tied in wide braids, her fine features and large, tender, yet seeking, gray eyes, never had been turned on Patty Cannon so directly.

Her grandmother abandoned in a moment an attempt to be complaisant, and sternly ordered her to attend to Colonel McLane's chamber.

"I can support you no longer, huzzy," said the dark-eyed woman, her cheeks full of blood. "Make haste to find some easy life or Joe shall get you a husband. We are ruined. You must make money, do you hear!"

"Here is money, grandma!" said Hulda, producing some of the shillings of 1815.

At the first glance of these Patty Cannon turned pale, but, in an instant, the hot blood rushed to her face again, and she swore a dreadful oath and chased Hulda, with uplifted hands, into the chamber of Allan McLane.

"Ah, Hulda, inflaming your poor grandmother again!" said that carefully clad and game-fed gentleman. "Now, now, lovely girl, it's not conservative. Honor thy father and mother, and grandmother, of course; didn't I teach you that?"

"What is it to be conservative?" Hulda asked, sitting before the fire, while the Colonel ran over her straight feet and tall, willowy figure, and stopped, a little chilled by her clear, dewy eyes.

"Conservative? why, it's never to rush on anything; to oppose rushing; to--to be a bulwark against innovations. To prefer something you have tried, and know."

"Like you?" asked Hulda.

"Yes, your benefactor, instead of having some impulsive pa.s.sion. Of course, you never loved in this place?"

"It is the only place I know. To be conservative, as you call it, I must take my life and opportunity as I find them, like something I have tried and know."

"Ah, Hulda! I see you have a radical, perverse something in you, to twist my meaning so close. You do not belong to this vile spot, except by consanguinity. It would be perfectly conservative for you to look to a better settlement."

"You have hinted that before," Hulda said, serene in his presence as a young woman used to proposals. "I do want to change this life, but I cannot do it and be conservative. I must fasten upon a free impulse, a natural chance of some kind. G.o.d has kept my heart pure in this dreadful place, where I was born. Why are you here, if you are conservative? It is not a gentleman's resort."

He grew a little angry at this thrust, but she continued to look at him quietly, unaware that she was impertinent.

"I often have business, Hulda, with Joe and Patty; negroes are very high, and we must buy them where they are to be had. But a deepening religious interest in you often attracts me here."

"Why religious as well as conservative, sir?"

"I have been afraid that the sights you see here, after the good instructions I have given you, might make you an infidel."

"What is an infidel?"

"One who, being unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man.

Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position on a Great First Cause."

Here McLane drew out his gold spectacles, and turned the leaves of his Bible over, and pointed Hulda a place to read, beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no G.o.d." At his command she read it, with faith, yet observation, her mind being fully alert to the warning Van Dorn had left her, that in his absence her great trial was to be.

McLane was wearing a gray English suit, with full round paunch, sleek all over the body, his hair a little gray, his gold gla.s.ses dangling in his hand, patent varnished slippers and silk stockings, and a silk scarf and cameo pin in it, and a cameo of his deceased sister upon his finger-ring, marking his attire; his eyes, of a pop kind, much too far forward, and blue as old china, and yet an animal, not a spiritual blue--the tint of washing-blue, not of distance; a hare-lip somewhere in his talk, though the fulness of his very red lips hardly allowed place for it; and his nose and brows stern and military, as if he had been a pudding stamped with the die of a Roman emperor or General Jackson.

He watched her reading with censorship, yet desire, patronage, and oiliness together.

Glancing up when she had read far enough, Hulda thought he was looking at her as if she was some rarer kind of negress.