SCENES IN THE LIFE OF A PLANTER'S DAUGHTER. FACT = 25 PER CENT; FICTION = 75 PER CENT. NAMES IMAGINARY. DUBLIN: GEORGE HERBERT, 117 GRAFTON STREET. 1865. SCENES IN THE LIFE OF A PLANTER'S DAUGHTER. ----- THE scene opens in Florida; nature was glowing under an almost tropical sun, which made the varnished magnolia leaves shine with painful and metallic lustre. Intense heat and deadly miasma filled the air, and drove many a lordly planter to seek rest in his midday siesta. Among those so resting was Colonel Marshall. Old military habits had made him case-hardened to the effects of climate, and he had ridden from his house, Drayton Hall, to visit a distant sugar-field. But as he skirted an intervening branch of the lagoon - where, contrary to their custom, the very alligators seemed afraid to face the sun - it seemed as if a wind, moister but not lesss deadly than the Sirocco, fanned horse and rider with the floating elements of death, and seemed to repel him from the margin of the lagoon. He accordingly, with a muttered oath, turned the head of his English hunter homeward, and half walking, half cantering, reached the entrance of his shrubbery. Here he gave the reins to his attendant, and sought the shade of a bower covered with passion flowers, and hidden in a grove of orange trees. But even here the odours of orange and jessamine seemed to blend with the miasma of the lagoon, and the soldier beat a retreat to the stronghold of his hammock. He was just dozing off, when Sambo peered in through the curtains of the verandah, and said, "Massa, Yankee man want to know can he paint him now?" Colonel M. roused himself, and remembered that Carton, a Yankee photographer, had been sent down by an enterprising house in New York, expressly to get his photograph, but had not yet succeeded in doing so. One day the Colonel was at a lynx hunt; the next day the game was a runaway negro; and so time passed on. Carton was in despair, and telegraphed to his employers for advice. The answer was, "Don't come home without it;" for the firm wanted his portrait to complete a series of eminent public men in the States, and left no stone unturned to effect their object. Meanwhile Carton, though sadly worried by Colonel M.'s caprices, fared well as far as the outward or rather the inward man was concerned, for Colonel M. kept open house, and Carton was well lodged and sumptuously fed. He was some time, however, dropping into his proper niche in the household. Col. M. of course looked down on him as an inferior being, unworthy of the lowest place below the salt at the family table. On the other hand, though in his heart of hearts there was a sense in which he ranked Carton below his niggers - below Pompey, and perhaps even Sambo - yet M. was too jealously sensible of the ethnological status of the lowest white over the highest black, to allow Carton to mingle socially with the negroes at their meals. As another reason, he feared that Carton, a Bostonian, might be one of those tempters, only less dangerous than demons, because capable of being tarred, feathered, and otherwise exorcised, who preached the heresy of abolitionism. From the horns of this dilemma, the tutor, Mr. Jarvis, released Carton. The tutor had, of course, his place at the family circle, but latterly he had defended his native country, England, from the attacks of Colonel M. rather too warmly for the Colonel's patience. The latter had also fancied that Mr. Jarvis was presuming to think of Edith, Colonel M.'s eldest daughter, with less of the cold feeling of reverence expected by Colonel M. than the latter thought proper. Jarvis, feeling thus like a fish out of water, had clubbed meals with Carton, and many a conversation passed between them, involving heresies against the State and the institution of slavery, which would have led to their instant expulsion from Drayton Hall, if known by Colonel M. To return to the photographer: M., with a sigh, caused half by heat and half by the unwelcome presence of the Yankee, agreed to sit for his photograph, or at least loll a little more erectly. While Carton is taking it, let us verbally photograph the Colonel. Imagine a man more than six feet high, but so well proportioned, so well balanced in bodily dimensions, as not to seem strikingly tall. Imagine a muscular framework of the toughest nature, on which ease and luxury were gradually building a super-structure of fat. Add an cagle eye, dulled, by want of warlike stimulus, and fading into dove-like quietness, but still full of latent fire. To these elements of physique add a Stuart-like mould of head, and a skin swarthy as a Nubian's, though smooth as velvet - and you will begin to realise Colonel M. And now, having described the father, a few words will do for Edith. Then, as we are not writing a novel, but only a few scenes in a life, we will kill off our secondary characters, saying only a few words of Jubal and his relations to Edith. Edith was as like her father as a woman could be: the same commanding figure, the same piercing glance, the same fiery temper, were hers; and, like her father, she was a good lover, and a still better hater. She had many suitors among the neighbouring planters' sons, but she would have none of them; their vanity, their indolence, their selfishness, all disgusted her, and she saw that it was the heiress of Drayton Hall, and not Edith, that they loved. There was one faithful heart, or one, at least, which she thought faithful, which beat for her alone, although it beat under a black skin, which in its turn was often beaten by the overseer of the cotton field. Jubal, who had loved her almost from infancy, but with the hopeless love with which a man might love an angel - Jubal, who had twice proved his love by saving her life at the risk of his own, once from fire, and once from the jaws of an alligator - Jubal had at length found courage and opportunity to speak what his eyes had long said to her, and to ask what hers had long since granted. The love of the South is not the slow passion of the North, which halts at every step, steps slowly, and thinks much of settlements and pin-money. To see - to love - to be loved - to ask - to gain - to marry; - all follow each other in as many hours as the tedious days of a cold Northern engagement. And Edith had resolved that she would not spurn from her the faithful heart of Jubal, weighted though it might be with the ancient curse of Ham. She had made her choice: rather than become the wife of some sensual planter's son - slave to him, though mistress of a thousand slaves - she would marry the negro slave Jubal. But, even here, the plotting mind of woman came to her aid, and a grand scheme of emancipation on a small scale was planned. She would free Jubal - but how? If she asked her father to do so, he would suspect something, and perhaps send Jubal to his other plantation, many hundred miles away. So she got a neighbouring planter, whom she knew she could trust, to go to her father with the story that he wanted an overseer, and that Jubal would be the very man. Colonel M. consented, and sold Jubal for nine hundred dollars; then the neighbouring planter left him with Colonel M. for the present, and meanwhile secretly procured his papers of manumission. So Edith's scheme was doubly successful, for she freed Jubal, and at the same time kept him always within call and sight. Colonel M. now almost retires from the story, and may die either of yellow fever or the bite of a tarantula, as the mercy of our readers may determine; but a few words on Jubal are necessary. Perhaps he might best be described by negatives. He was not white, neither was he a full-blooded African. His head was covered profusely by something which no stretch of the wildest imagination could call hair; and yet it was wool, which was more human and less sheep-like than that of many a genuine African whom I have seen. The shape of the head was a compromise: if Jubal had studied comparative anatomy and phrenology, he must have felt grateful for his share of American blood, which had made his skull so many removes farther from the gorilla's, than if he could have shown an unbroken descent from the King of Dahomey. His voice, I must confess, even in his hey-day of youthful beauty, was a little cracked, a cracked tenor of great beauty and power, but cracked beyond redemption. It was twice cracked; indeed, once in early boyhood, by aping the cries of fisherwomen, and cracked for ever in later days by the stentorian utterances with which he edified the camp meetings of the negroes. To say that he was good-natured, would be only to repeat that he was a negro. Indeed, I never saw him in a passion, still he seldom laughed, smile he might, and, when he did, Liston seemed to lurk in every feature; and terrible, indeed, must have been the load of care on that man's mind, who could see Jubal's lips twisting into the various curves of a smile, without feeling that Jubal had the combined fun of an Irish car-stand at his command. Again, I can't say that Jubal was strictly honest according to the decalogue, at least he loved his perquisites, and would have been the last man to return conscience-money to the Chancellor of the Exchequer - in other words, he was a negro. But he had redeeming traits, he was charitable at times, partly from selfishness; to see a beggar hungry made him feel hungry by sympathy, and to see him thirsty made Jubal feel as if he had eaten red herrings. But his real redeeming point, the moral light of which made his inky frame shine like ebony, was his attachment to Colonel Marshall's family; and it was this which first won Edith's heart. If any strangers had been in the fire on that fatal night, it is very doubtful whether Jubal would have saved them. Very doubtful, and very certain that he would not, if he were in the crisis of a delicious dinner, when all the good things enjoyed, one by one, were still fresh in his grateful thoughts, and yet the pine apple was to come, so that the pleasures of memory and hope were added to the more carnal joys of wild-fowl. But to see the fire, and to feel something in his heart whisper "Edith," to rush up the smoking staircase, bleeding, fainting, all but dead, and yet sternly keeping his strength, till, with one furious butt of his head, he dashed open her door, and bore her safely to the lawn; all this was done without a moment's pause or delay. And this for clanship - for love to Edith, as a Marshall, and not personal love. True it is he might have run a little more slowly if the Colonel had been locked up, and not Edith. He might have looked at his singed wool before he battered in the door; but still he would have made the attempt. He prided in the family of his master, and thought it the richest, the greatest, the most slave-driving in the world. And it is fair to say, that he had not merely fought with his love for Edith, but had tried to make her help him to do so. But the battle between love and reason is soon over in the fiery south, and Edith and Jubal were engaged, and were planning flight under a large lightning-blasted cypress tree, near the cotton field. Edith sat long in silence; at length, warned by the brightening shadows, she rose to go. "But, before we part," said she, "Jubal, keep this token." So saying, she drew from her pocket an exquisitely chased dagger of Damascus steel. On the hilt was an emerald of the purest water, worth a thousand slaves. On the end of the sheath gleamed a twin gem of priceless value. "Jubal," she said, "you see this dagger; a Russian prince tore it from the dying grasp of a Turkish pasha at Kars, and gave it to me. Keep you the dagger, I keep the sheath. Swear to me that, while you have life and the dagger, you will never let me be torn from you. Swear to me that, on the very altar-steps, should they compel me to marry a planter's son, you will plunge it in my bosom to avert the doom." "I swear," said Jubal; and, as he did so, he took out of his pocket some herrings, and began to eat, for love had whetted, rather than dulled, his appetite. Edith looked on lovingly as he eat - lovingly on him, not on the herrings; but the sun was fast sinking; and, with a faint sigh and pressure of the hand, she mounted her horse, and rode rapidly home. Jubal followed her, with his eyes, in silence, for his mouth and heart were too full for speech; and, stretching himself at full length, mused on their coming flight to New Orleans. END OF SCENE I. SCENE II. NEW ORLEANS. IN one of the poorest houses of the poorest streets in New Orleans, a room was furnished with everything that the most luxurious taste could require, and the table groaned with every delicacy. Edith and Jubal, now no longer mistress and slave, but wife and husband, sat at dinner. Edith, full of gratified love and affection for Jubal, now and then picked out some choice morsel of pine apple and watched it disappear in his sable mouth, and talked of the time when the slave should be fully emancipated, and when they might return to their native home. For much had happened since our last scene. Colonel M. had slowly relented; nay, more, had acknowledged their union, supplied ample funds, and invited them to return. But though the calf might be killed for the returning prodigal, and she might fall, with sylph-like lightness, into her father's open arms, still there was no social restoration in store for her. She might again be mistress of Drayton Hall, but the neighbouring planters could never forgive her marrying a negro, and making a chattel her husband. And if she returned, she could never join the merry dance or moonlight walk again in the orange groves, and with the daughters of Florida. Jubal and Edith sat in deep thought - Jubal sometimes rising, from old habit, to stand behind her chair, and scarcely realizing that his happiness was not a dream. At last Edith said, "Jubal, let us go somewhere where this curse of slavery is done away with, and the negro is received as an equal." "Come, then," said Jubal, "to Hayti, where the negro is master." "No," said Edith, "not to that country of ferocious savages, where you are likely to be stabbed and certain to be robbed." "Well, then," said Jubal, "come away to N - a; there the negro is respected, and may be president. Come to a country lovely as Adam's early home, and peopled with a mild and gentle race." "The very thing," said Edith. "See, here; a vessel starting for G - n next week. Run down to the office - you can put that last pine apple in your pocket - and secure berths." This being settled, they talked of their future plans, and of a village which Edith had heard of called Pueblo, where much good might be done with a little money, and where Edith intended to build a church, and Jubal to officiate on Sunday, and on week days to turn many honest pennies in more secular ways. END OF SCENE II. SCENE III. PUEBLO. COME with me, in thought, still further South, and leave the land of the palmetto for the land of the palm, and for a village in Spanish America. It is Sunday; but Sunday among the Spaniards. No file of rosy schoolboys, prayer-book in hand, and master in front, is marching to church. No train of vehicles, no perfect Brougham or imperfect car is on the road. Indeed, there is no road - none, at least, of man's making - nothing but the grassy carpet covering the sand where men-of-war once anchored, and which still shows in grassy outline the marks of tidal waves. Horses there are, indeed, galloping wildly to escape the mosquitoes, but whose they are, or why they exist, no Spaniard knows or cares. There was a tradition of a cart, and is a dream of an omnibus, but as yet the horses live in Arab independence. How the villagers of Pueblo are spending the day we need not enquire; how many Spaniards are cock-fighting; how many negroes are asleep, and how many Americans posting their ledgers. But, strange to say, there was a church, and well filled, too - Creole ladies, in crinolines twenty feet all round; a sprinkling of Topseys; here and there an American, and many a sallow Jamaican; also a few Europeans, with the bloom of the North still lingering on their cheeks. So much for the congregation. The church was a lofty, wooden, palm-thatched building, with no glass, but plenty of openings for air. The preacher was a layman, coloured and woolly-headed, but otherwise a man who had few superiors in physique. He was far above the average height, his features regular, though not spiritual, his eyes soft and brown. He was cast in the mould of a Hercules, with the proportions of an Apollo. He had dazzling teeth, and, to crown all, a soft, musical voice, such as one seldom hears in Europe, out of an opera house. He was reading a sermon such as our grandfathers may have dozed over, with little of Paul and much of Cicero. The congregation was mixed. There had been an attempt to keep the right hand for gentlemen and the left for ladies, but it would not do. So two ladies might be seen waving fans in concert for their own benefit and that of the negro urchin who, half smothered in crinoline, sank between them under the combined effects of heat and sermon. Underneath the preacher was a negro, the true parson of Pueblo. Nothing could be blacker than his coat, nor anything whiter than his necktie. But his skin was a peculiar shade - not the glossy, black skin of the youthful negro, but dry, and with a faint, whitish shade. Something about him reminded me irresistibly of a jackdaw. Spectacles on nose, and book in hand, an ordinary observer might have thought him absorbed in the sermon; but I knew better - I saw his eye wander through an open side-door, whence he could see the parlour of his own house. Suddenly, while the sermon was in full flow, he started, and laying down his book, exclaimed, with a small expletive, "She is moving!" and rushed through the side-door to his own house. I followed, looked in, and stood stupified with horror. Who was that bound in an arm-chair, vainly trying to reach a glass of water? Could it be Edith? Edith, whom I had known in her beauty - Edith, the mistress of a thousand slaves - the flower of Florida? Or was I mistaken? No. Those unfathomable eyes could have been only hers, for nature does not repeat herself. And then I looked more keenly at the negro, the parson of Pueblo, and I slowly seemed to see the devoted slave of the cotton plantation of long ago. But while Edith is bound, she longs in spirit to burst her bands, and, crossing the street, to join the service of the church, built with her money and on her land, but the cruel rope prevents her. And she longs in the flesh for the water standing outside her reach. And now came reproaches like a torrent. Bound as she is, she looks at him with scorn; she tells him that she saved him from the cotton field, and that she bought him; and he quails before her, as if he feared that he was yet her slave. All this passed like lightning. I insisted on his loosing her. He took it all very coolly - handed her the water, and said that she was insane, and would be doing mischief if set free. At last he cut the rope. She seemed in doubt what to do. She vowed vengeance against Jubal. She would bring him before the Alcalde, and she would make him disgorge her fortune. She would go back among her brothers, and die among the haughty planters of Florida. He stood meekly removing knives and razors, and I burned with indignation at her wrongs, and felt that some great tragedy was coming. In the kitchen Jubal had, securely hidden as he thought, a paper of cheese and sardines, which he had kept for a private feast. Thither she went, stepping like a Juno, and gleaming as Lady Macbeth might have gleamed on her timid husband. Jubal was going out when he caught her eye, and whispered to me, "My God, the pistol!" - for there was a loaded pistol on the same shelf as the cheese and sardines. It was too late to stop her, and we stood petrified! Was it to be suicide or murder? For, once she saw the pistol, some victim must fall. On she went, but quicker, as her eye caught the shelf, and brightened with anticipated triumph. She snatched something from it, and flung it out into the well. We rushed forward. The deed was done. The sardines had escaped, but the cheese was gone for ever; and, with a haughty glance at Jubal, and "Now your dinner is spoiled," she sank back into the arm-chair; and I vowed I would never assist again at a tragedy in Central America. W. E. H. Printed by Porteous and Gibbs, 18 Wicklow Street, Dublin.