All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [108]
“Yes,” she replied, “I got a good price. I made him pay every penny she was worth. And then do you know what I did with the money, do you?”
“No.”
“When I came off the boat at Louisville, there was an old man, a nigger, sitting on the landing stage, and he was blind and picking on a guitar and singing ‘Old Dan Tucker.’ I took the money out of my bag and walked to him and laid it in his old hat.”
“If you were going to give the money away–if you felt the money was defiled–why didn’t you free her?” Cass asked.
“She’d stay right here, she wouldn’t go away, she would stay right here and look at me. Oh, no, she wouldn’t go away, for she’s the wife of a man the Motley’s have, their coachman. Oh, she’d stay right here and look at me and tell, tell what she knows, and I’ll not abide it!”
Then Cass said, “If you had spoken to me I would have bought the man from Mr. Motley and set him free, too.”
“He wouldn’t have sold,” she said, “the Motleys won’t sell a servant.”
“Even to be freed?” Cass continued, but she cut in, “I tell you I won’t have you interfering with my affairs, do you understand that? And she rose from his side and stood in the middle of the summerhouse, and he saw the glimmer of her face in the shadow and heard her agitated breathing. “I thought you were fond of her,” Cass said.
“I was,” she said, “until–until she looked at me like that.”
“You know why you got that price for her?” Cass asked, and without waiting for an answer, went on, “Because she’s yellow and comely and well-made. Oh, the drovers wouldn’t take her down chained in a coffle. They wouldn’t wear her down. They’ll take her down the river soft. And you know why?”
“Yes, I know why,” she said, “and what is it to you? Are you so charmed by her?”
“That is unfair,” Cass said.
“Oh, I see, Mr. Mastern,” she said, “oh, I see, you are concerned for the honor of a black coachman. It is a very delicate sentiment, Mr. Mastern. Why–” and she came to stand above him as he still sat on the bench–“why did you not show some such delicate concern for the honor of your friend? Who is now dead.”
According to the journal, there was, at this moment, “a tempest of feeling” in his breast. He wrote: “Thus I heard put into words for the first time the accusation which has ever in all climes been that most calculated to make wince a man of proper nurture or natural rectitude. What the hardened man can bear to hear from the still small voice within, may yet be when spoken by any external tongue an accusation dire enough to drain his very cheeks of blood. But it was not only that accusation in itself, for in very truth I had supped full of that horror and made it my long familiar. It was not merely the betrayal of my friend. It was not merely the death of my friend, at whose breast I had leveled the weapon. I could have managed somewhat to live with those facts. But I suddenly felt that the world outside of me was shifting and the substance of things, and that the process had only begun of a general disintegration of which I was the center. At that moment of perturbation, when the cold sweat broke on my brow, I did not frame any sentence distinctly to my mind. But I have looked back and wrestled to know the truth. It was not the fact that a slave woman was being sold away from the house where she had had protection and kindness and away from the arms of her husband into debauchery. I knew that such things had happened in fact, and I was no child for after my arrival in Lexington and my acquaintance with the looser sort of companions, the sportsmen and the followers of the races, I had myself enjoyed such diversions. It was not only the fact that the woman for whom I had sacrificed my friend’s life and my honor could, in her own suffering, turn on me with a cold rage and the language of insult so that I did not recognize her. It was, instead, the fact that all of these things–the death of my friend, the betrayal of Phebe, the suffering and rage and great change of the woman I had loved–all had come from my single act of sin and perfidy, as the boughs from the bole and the leaves from the bough. Or to figure the matter differently, it was as though the vibration set up in the whole fabric of the world by my act had spread infinitely and with ever increasing power and no man could know the end. I did not put it into words in such fashion, but I stood there shaken by a tempest of feeling.