Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered, willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.
Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of old Snow Hill in London.
Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian, which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court and jail might tell.
Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke. Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.
"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."
"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of town before any of the white people are up to see you."
At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her husband.
"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good Lord pay you back!"
"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard, because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."
"How came you free?" Virgie asked, wistfully.
"I saved a sick gentleman's life, and he bought me for it, and gave me my freedom. See, I have a pass that tells the color of my eyes and skin, my weight, and everything. With this I can go into Delaware and the free states. I wish you had one, Miss Virgie."
"Oh, Mrs. Hudson, I dearly wish I had. Let me read it. Why, I could almost pass for you, from this description."
"Indeed you could," the housewife said; "we are not of the same age, but white people don't read a pass very careful."
"How I would love anybody that could get me such a pass!"
"I have given my word of honor that I will never lend it. Much as I like to help my color to freedom, I cannot break my word. To-morrow I have to go into Delaware with my pass to nurse a lady."
"You attend the sick, Mrs. Hudson?"
"Yes, I have a kind of call that way, Miss Virgie. Ever since I was a girl I pulled herbs and tried them on myself, and studied 'tendin' on people, watchin' their minds, that is so much of sickness, and how to wrap and rub them. My husband oysters down in the inlets. Here is his wagon."
"The Lord remember you in need, dear Mrs. Hudson."
The old wagon, an open thing, to peddle oysters and fish, was driven across the town to the south, and soon was in the open country, going towards Virginia. A smell of salt bay seemed in the air; the hawks' nests in dead trees indicated the element that subsisted everything, and the trees in the fields were often lordly in size, though sand and small oak and pine woods were seldom out of sight. As they turned into a lane near a little roadside place of worship, a young white man rode by on horseback, and, seeing Virgie, reined in and shouted,
"Purty, purty, purty as peaches and cream! Ole Virginny blood is in them eyes, by the Ensign!"
The colored man muttered, "Go 'long, Mr. Wise!"
"By the Ensign now," continued the man, who was young, but of a cadaverous countenance, "if 'tis a Maryland huzzy, she is marvellous. What's the name, angel gal?"
"She's a Miss Spence. I'm a takin' her home yer," the mulatto man interposed, hastily, and went in the gate, while the horseman, with a shout like one intoxicated, gallopped towards the north.
"I'm sorry he seen you, sho'!" the conductor said; "that's Henry A. Wise, the big lawyer from Accomac. Maybe he'll inquire at Snow Hill, where he's goin' to court."
"What house is this, Mr. Hudson?" Virgie asked, seeing at the end of the short lane a thick-set house and porch, with small farm-buildings around it.
"That's ole Spring Hill, built by the first of the Milburns; by the one that made the will leavin' his hat and nothin' else to be son. It's got brick ends. I 'spect they had money when they come here, Virgie."
The quickened mettle of the girl noticed that he had ceased to call her "Miss."
"Now," said Hudson, "I'm goin' to leave you here with my sister till I see about gittin' a boat. If you is tracked to Snow Hill, it'll be found you come out this way, now. The inlets run up along the coast yer past the Delaware line. I'm a goin' to sail you past Snow Hill agin an' double on 'em. Yes, Miss Virgie, I'll git you away if it costs all I have got together."
An excited light seemed to be in his eyes.
Virgie was put in a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.
She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features, and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back, and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.
Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher, higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting flames.
Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her, till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the kidnapper had taken away.
"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if with red-hot eyeballs.
She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.
The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the skiff, covered with the man's large coat.
It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.
A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally seemed almost to meet, as the skiff, scraping the bottom, darted through a narrow strait.
Then the stars were shining over her, and the waters grew wide again, and, lying in a trance of flying lights and images, she thought she felt her lips kissed, and a voice say "Darling!"
Finally, she felt lifted up and carried, and, when she could realize the situation, she found herself lying on a pile of shingles at an old wharf, and the man, beside her, was weeping, as he watched the boat receding down a moonlit aisle of wave.
"My boy, my poor ole woman," she heard her conductor mutter, "I never can come back to you no mo'!"
"Why?" spoke Virgie, hardly realizing what she said.
"Because--because--you did it!" the man exclaimed, with ardent eyes, seen through his streaming tears.
"Oh, tell me where I am!" Virgie said. "Is it far to freedom now?"
She looked at the sky, all agitated with clouds and stars moving across each other, and it seemed the nearest world of all.
"Is my father there?" thought Virgie, "my dear white father? Can he see me here, sick and lonely, and hate me?"
"We're at de Shingle landing; yonder is St. Martin's," said the negro, cautiously; "there's two roads nigh whar we air, goin' to the North, dear Virgie; one is the stage-road, and t'other is the shingle-trail through the Cypress Swamp.
"Take the road that's the safest to Freedom," Virgie sighed.
In a few moments, walking over the ground, they came to a place where the cart-trail crossed a sandy road, and went beyond it, along the edge of a small stream. The man walked a few steps up the better road undecidedly, and suddenly drew Virgie back into the bushes, but not quick enough to be unobserved by two men coming on in an old, rattling wagon.
"My skin!" cried the man driving, a youngish man, of sharp, but not unkindly eyes, "thar's a sniptious gal. Come out yer and show yourself!"
Virgie felt the man's eyes resting on her, but not with the coarse ardor of his companion, who wore a wide slouched hat and red shirt, and was bandaged around the head and throat, yet from his ghastly pale face, like death, on which some blood seemed to be smeared, and to stain the bandage at his neck, lay a coarse leer, and he kissed his mouth at her, and uttered:
"O flexuosa! esquisita! It is dainty, Sorden!"
"Now ef we was a going t'other way, Van Dorn," the driver said, "we could give them a lift. Boy, what are you out fur? Where's your passes?"
"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."
"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same woman! where did you get this pass?"
"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."
His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,
"I love him as I never loved A male!"
"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon started south.
"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy Hudson for assisting a runaway!"
"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only road!"
He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the swampy branch.
"What have you done?" cried Virgie.
"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."
With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the reptile.
Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal dream.
The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each insist upon the last word to say:
"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't!" "You did, you did!"
Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born, had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night, till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan disputing for her soul.
As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!" groaned back.
"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"
She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"
The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.
He stared at her in wonder, but too wistfully. The cat-briers hung across the opening, and grapevines, like cables of sunken ships, fell many a fathom through the crystal waves of night; but the North Star seemed to find a way to peep through everything, and Virgie heard the words from Hudson, once, of--
"Jess over this branch a bit we is in Delaware!"
Then the crickets and tree-frogs, the bullfrogs and the whippoorwills, the owls and everything, seemed to drown his voice and halloo for hours, "We is in Delaware! we is, we is! we is in Del-a-a-ware!"
A little warming, kindly light at length began to blaze their trail along, as if some gentle predecessor, with a golden adze, had chipped the funereal trees and made them smile a welcome. Small fires were burning in the vegetable mould or surface brush, and the opacity of the forest yielded to the pretty flame which danced and almost sang in a household crackle, like a young girl in love humming tunes as she kindles a fire.
The mighty swamp now grew distinct, yet more inaccessible, as its inner edges seemed transparent in the line of fires, like curtains of lace against the midnight window-panes. The Virginia creeper, light as the flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers in bed.
Suddenly the man took Virgie up and carried her through a stream of running water, brown with the tannin matter of the swamp.
"We is in Delaware," he said, soon after, as they reached a camp of shingle sawyers, all deserted, and lighted by the fire, the golden chips strewn around, and the sawdust, like Indian meal, that suggested good, warm pone at Teackle Hall to Virgie.
She put her feet, soaked with swamp water, at a burning log to warm, and hardly saw a mocasson snake glide round the fire and stop, as if to dart at her, and glide away; for Virgie's mind was attributing this kindly fire to the presence of Freedom.
"Oh, I should like to lie here and go to sleep," she said, languidly; "I am so tired."
The man Hudson, wringing wet with the journey's difficulties, threw his arms around her and drew her to his damp yet fiery breast.
"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!"
The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her guide was drunken with passion.
She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a maniac's hands.
"I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuated ruffian sighed; "you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!"
A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her dying strength to preserve her modesty.
"Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!"
"My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it."
"Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever, though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done."
"Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states together and live for each other. Kiss me!"
He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen braids of her silky hair.
The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them.
"Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you."
As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke. The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed,
"It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!"
He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path.
They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning earth dodged and chased each other.
"Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must love me or we'll die together."
He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead of them.
Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn.
Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains were in her legs and feet, but she could walk.
"Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought.
A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked, burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water.
"Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to repent and be a better man."
He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and hideous to see.
