While Mrs. Blake knelt for a few moments in silent prayer, Mary and Betty sat restlessly trying to peep over the hats and sunbonnets in front of them to catch sight of their dear Mr. Fairhead, who was in the splint-bottom chair behind the pulpit, waiting for his congregation to assemble.

  When the scuffling tramp of heavy shoes on the bare floor had ceased, Mr. Fairhead rose and said: “Let us pray.” He closed his eyes and began his invocation. In the untempered light which poured through the bare windows he looked a very young man indeed, with rosy cheeks and yellow hair. He had been sent out into the backwoods to teach the country school and to “fill the pulpit,” though he had not yet been ordained. During the long summer vacations he lived in Winchester and read divinity with old Doctor Sellers, coming out to Back Creek on horseback every Saturday to conduct the Sunday service.

  After the prayer he gave out the hymn, read it aloud slowly and distinctly, since many of his congregation could not read. When he closed his hymnbook, the congregation rose. Old Andrew Shand, a Scotchman with wiry red hair and chin whiskers, officially led the singing. He struck his tuning-fork on the back of a bench and began: “There is a Land of Pure Delight,” at a weary, drawling pace. But the Colbert negroes, and the miller himself, immediately broke away from Shand and carried the tune along. Mr. Fairhead joined in, looking up at the gallery. For him the singing was the living worship of the Sunday services; the negroes in the loft sang those bright promises and dark warnings with such fervent conviction. Fat Lizzie and her daughter, Bluebell, could be heard above them all. Bluebell had a pretty soprano voice, but Lizzie sang high and low with equal ease. The congregation downstairs knew what a “limb” she was, but no one, except Andy Shand, ever complained because she took a high hand with the hymns. The old people who couldn’t read could “hear the words” when Lizzie sang. Neither could Lizzie read, but she knew the hymns by heart. Mr. Fairhead often wondered how it was that she sounded the letter “r” clearly when she sang, though she didn’t when she talked.

  Could we but stand where Moses stood

  And view the landscape o’er

  Not Jordan’s stream nor death’s cold flood

  Would fright us from that shore.

  When Lizzie rolled out the last verse and sat down, the young preacher looked up at the gallery, not with a smile, exactly, but with appreciation. He often felt like thanking her.

  As for Andy Shand, he hated Lizzie and all the Colbert negroes. His animosity extended to the Colberts themselves; even about Mrs. Blake he was “none so sure.”

  After the congregation was dismissed, Mr. Fairhead and the miller walked down the road together, deep in conversation. Mrs. Blake and her girls followed behind. She knew her father enjoyed the company of an educated man like Fairhead; that was why she had asked the preacher to dinner. Their talk, as she listened to it, was plain farmer talk, to be sure; about the early season, and the prospects for wheat and hay. Presently the miller began to ask about the country school and Mr. Fairhead’s pupils. There were bright boys among them, the young man insisted, some who rode over to school from as far as Peughtown. There were even boys from the mountain who would do fairly well if they had half a chance. There was Casper Flight — Here Colbert held up his hand.

  “Never say Flight to me, Mr. Fairhead. I’ve ground that man’s miserable bit of corn and buckwheat ten years for nothing, and on top of that he hangs around the mill and steals honest men’s grist. My Sampson has caught him time and again crawling down from the storeroom at night with a bag in his hand.”

  “I know all about him, Mr. Colbert. But if you could see how that corn and buckwheat was raised, you wouldn’t grudge grinding it for nothing. They’ve got no horse, and this boy Casper breaks up the ground in their corn patch and buckwheat field himself. He pulls the plough, and his mother follows at the plough handles and holds the share in the earth. Last spring I got Mr. Giffen up on the ridge to lend Casper a horse, to put in his buckwheat. His father came home unexpectedly, knocked the boy down, took the horse out of the plough, and rode up to Capon River to go fishing.”

  “I’m glad you told me, sir. If there’s any good can come out of the Flights, God knows I’d like to help it along. I could give this boy work around the place in busy times, but you know none of those mountain boys will work along with coloured hands.”

  “Yes, I know.” Mr. Fairhead sighed. “It’s the one thing they’ve got to feel important about — that they’re white. It’s pitiful.”

  Whenever Colbert had a talk with David Fairhead, he wished he could see more of him. He had several times asked the young man to supper at the Mill House, but he observed that Fairhead was not at ease in Sapphira’s company. He was shy and on his guard, and Sapphira had seemed possessed to puzzle him with light ironies. Since he was from Pennsylvania, she considered him an inferior. Yet her manner with inferiors (with the cobbler, the butcher, the weaver, the storekeeper) was irreproachable. When the old broom-pedlar or the wandering tinsmith happened along, they were always given a place at the dinner table, and she knew just how to talk to them. But with Fairhead she took on a mocking condescension, as if she were all the while ridiculing his simplicity. Therefore, Henry figured it out, she did not really regard him as an inferior, but as an equal — of the wrong kind. Fairhead boarded with Mrs. Bywaters, at the post office, and Sapphira knew that he was “Northern” at heart. She laughed and told Henry she could “smell it on him.”

  Oh, yes, she admitted, he was not an ignoramus, like the country schoolteachers who had been there before him. She was glad Mary and Betty had a teacher who did not chew tobacco in the schoolroom or speak like the mountain people. He had doubtless been raised a gentleman — of the Pennsylvania kind. But he was a mealy-mouth, say what you would; and if she made him uncomfortable, it was because he hadn’t the wit to come back at her. “How can I talk to a man who blushes every time I poke fun at him, or at anybody else? You’d better give it up, Henry.” So the schoolmaster was not invited to the Mill House again.

  BOOK III. OLD JEZEBEL

  I

  ON THE FIRST day after her return from town Mrs. Colbert summoned Till and told her she meant to go out to see Aunt Jezebel this morning. “I will have a look around the yard first. Send Nancy in to dress me, and tell Tap to have the boys here in about an hour.”

  The “boys” were young negroes whom Tap called in from the barn or the fields to help him carry the Mistress. On each side of her chair were two iron rings; into these the boys thrust dressed hickory saplings and bore Mrs. Colbert about the place. Tap was one of the mill-hands, but he loved to wait on ladies. He was a handsome boy, and he knew the Mistress thought so. He used to make his assistants clean up on these occasions. “Take off dat sweaty ole rag an’ put on a clean shirt fo’ de Missus.”

  This morning the sunshine was so bright that the Mistress carried a tiny parasol with a jointed handle. Her bearers took her along the brick walks bordered by clipped boxwood hedges, — which were dark as yew except for the yellow-green tips of new growth. Mrs. Colbert visited all the flower-beds. The lilac arbour was now in bud, the yellow roses would soon be opening. The Mistress sent Tap for her shears and cut off sprays from the mock-orange bushes, which were filling the air with fragrance. With these in her lap she moved on, until she was carried into old Jezebel’s cabin and her chair put down beside the bed.

  “You know who it is, don’t you, Aunt Jezebel?”

  “Co’se I does, Miss Sapphy! Ain’t I knowed you since de day you was bawn?” The old woman turned on her side to see her mistress better.

  She had wasted since Sapphira saw her last. As she lay curled up in bed, she looked very like a lean old grey monkey. (She had been a tall, strapping woman.) Her grizzled wool was twisted up in bits of rag. She was toothless, and her black skin had taken on a greyish cast. Jezebel thought she was about ninety-five. She knew she was eighteen when she was captured and sold to a British slaver, but she was not sure how many years passed before she learned English and began to keep account of time.

  Mrs. Colbert put the sprays of syringa down on the pillow, close to the old woman’s face. “The mock-oranges are out, I thought you’d like to smell them. There’s not a man on the place can tend the shrubs like you did.”

  “Thank ‘ee, mam. I hepped you set out most all de shrubs on dis place, didn’ I? Wasn’t nothin’ when we first come here but dat ole white lilack tree.”

  “Those were good times, Auntie. I’ve been house-bound for a long while now, like you.”

  “Oh, Missy, cain’t dem doctors in Winchester do nothin’ fur you? What’s dey good fur, anyways?” She broke off with a wheeze.

  “There now, you mustn’t talk, it catches your breath. We must take what comes to us and be resigned.”

  “Yes’m, I’se resigned,” the old woman whispered.

  Mrs. Colbert went on soothingly: “When I sit out on the porch on a day like this, and look around, I often think how we used to get up early and rake over the new flower-beds and transplant before it got hot. And you used to run down to the creek and break off alder branches, and we’d stick them all around the plants we’d set out, to keep the sun off. I expect you remember those things, too.”

  The old negress looked up at her and nodded.

  “Now I’m going to read you a Psalm that will hearten us both.” Mrs. Colbert took from her reticule her glasses-case and a Prayer Book, but she opened neither as she repeated: “The Lord is my shepherd.”

  Jezebel watched her intently, her eyes shining bright under eyelids thin as paper.

  When the Mistress finished the Psalm, she called for Nancy, who was waiting in the cabin kitchen in case she might be needed.

  “Are the boys outside?”

  Then she turned again to the bed. “Have you quilts enough, Jezebel? Do they keep you warm?”

  “Yes, Missy, the niggahs is mighty good to me. Dey keeps a flatiron to my feet, an’ a bag a hot salt undah my knees. Lizzie, she sends Bluebell down to set wid me a lot. Dat he’ps to pass de time. Her an’ Bluebell comes and sings to me, too.”

  “But Till tells me you don’t eat anything. You must eat to keep ‘up your strength.”

  “Don’t want nothin’, Missy.”

  “Can’t you think of anything that would taste good to you? Now think a minute, and tell me. Isn’t there something?”

  The old woman gave a sly chuckle; one paper eyelid winked, and her eyes gave out a flash of grim humour. “No’m, I cain’t think of nothin’ I could relish, lessen maybe it was a li’l pickaninny’s hand.”

  Nancy, crouching in a corner, broke out with a startled cry and ran to the foot of the bed. “Oh, she’s a-wanderin’ agin! She wanders turrible now. Don’t stay, Missy! She’s out of her haid!”

  Mrs. Colbert raised her eyes and gave the girl a cold, steady look. “No need for you to be speaking up. I know your granny through and through. She is no more out of her head than I am.” She turned back again to the bed, took up Jezebel’s cold grey claw, and patted it. “Good-bye till another time, Auntie. Now you must turn over and have a nap.”

  She beckoned to the four hands standing outside, and they came with their hickory poles and carried her away.

  II

  JEZEBEL WAS THE only one of the Colbert negroes who had come from Africa. All the others were, as they proudly said, Virginians; born and raised on the Dodderidge place or on the estates of their Loudoun County neighbours. But Jezebel was brought over from Guinea, that gold coast of the slave-traders, in the seventeen-eighties — about twenty years before the importation of slaves became illegal. She was sold to her first master on the deck of a British slaver in the port of Baltimore.

  Her native village in Africa lay well inland, some four days’ journey from the sea. It was raided and destroyed by a coast tribe which early in the history of the traffic had become slave-hunters for the slavers. That night of fire and slaughter, when she saw her father brained and her four brothers cut down as they fought, old Jezebel now remembered but dimly. It was all over in a few hours; of the village nothing was left but smoking ashes and mutilated bodies. By morning she and her fellow captives were in leg chains and on their march to the sea.

  When they reached the coast they were kept in the stockade only long enough to be stripped, shaved all over the body, and drenched with sea water. An English vessel, the Albert Horn, lay at anchor out in the gulf, with nearly a full cargo of negroes stowed on board. The wind was good, and the skipper was waiting impatiently for the booty of this last raid.

  Jezebel and the other captives were rowed out in small boats and put on board in leg chains; they came from a fierce cannibal people, and had not been broken in by weeks of discipline in the stockade.

  When the Albert Horn was under sail, and the blue lines of the inland mountains began to grow dim, the fetters were taken off the female captives. They were not likely to make trouble.

  The Albert Horn, built for the slave trade, had two decks. The negroes were stowed between the upper and lower decks, on a platform as long and as wide as the vessel; but there was only three feet ten inches between the shelf on which they lay and the upper deck which roofed them over. The slaves made the long voyage of from two to three months in a sitting or recumbent position, on a plank floor, with very little space, if any, between their bare bodies. The males were stowed forward of the main hatch, the women aft. All were kept naked throughout the voyage, and their heads and bodies were shaved every fortnight. As there was no drainage of any sort, the slaves’ quarters, and the creatures in them, got very foul overnight. Every morning the “‘tween decks” and its inmates were cleaned off with streams of sea water from the hose. The Captain of the Albert Horn was not a brutal man, and his vessel was a model slaver. Except in rough weather, the males, ironed two and two, were allowed out on the lower deck for a few hours while their platform was being scrubbed and fumigated. At the same time, the women were turned out on the lower after deck without chains.

  On the first night after the Albert Horn got under way, the sailors gave Jezebel the name she had borne ever since. When the two hands detailed to watch the after ‘tween decks had seen that all the females were lying in the spaces assigned to them, they put out their lanterns and went on deck to take the air. A little later the second mate, hearing shrieks and screams from the women’s quarters, ran down from his cabin to find the guards flogging a girl they had dragged out from a heap of rolling, howling blacks.

  “It’s this here Jezebel made all the row, sir,” one of the men panted.

  The mate made a dash and drove at her throat to throttle her, but she was too quick for him. She snapped like a mastiff and bit through the ball of his thumb.

  Next morning the mate felt an ominous throbbing in his hand. He reported the fracas to the Captain, saying he didn’t see anything for it but to throw the female gorilla overboard. She could never be tamed.

  The skipper feared his mate might be in for a bad infection; but he had a third interest in the cargo, and he wasn’t anxious to throw any of it overboard. He thought he would like to see a girl who could stand up against two men and the cat.

  “Clean her off and put a bridle on her, and bring her up,” he told the mate. Himself, he never went near the slave deck; he couldn’t stand the smell.

  Jezebel was brought up in heavy irons for his inspection. Her naked back was seamed with welts and bloody cuts, but she carried herself with proud indifference, and there was no plea for mercy in her eyes. The skipper told the seamen in charge to loosen the noose round her neck. As he walked up and down, smoking his pipe, he looked her well over. He judged this girl was worth any three of the women, — as much as the best of the men. Anatomically she was remarkable, for an African negress: tall, straight, muscular, long in the legs. The skipper had a kind of respect for a well-shaped creature; horse, cow, or woman. And he respected anybody who could take a flogging like that without buckling.

  He gave orders that Jezebel was not to go back between decks. She was to be kept on the upper deck in all weathers, fastened with a light chain to the deck rail. She was to be given a sailor’s jacket to cover her wounds, and at night she was to be provided with a tarpaulin.

  After she was thus isolated, the girl gave no more trouble, — though she always laughed aloud when the second mate passed with his arm in a sling. The voyage was long and rough. Jezebel was knocked about and drenched by heavy seas, and was sometimes seasick, but she made no complaint. When the seamen hosed out the scupper, she took off her jacket and invited the stream of salt water over her body. Except for a few long scars on her back and thighs, there was nothing now to show what had happened the first night she came on board.

  When the Albert Horn at last reached Baltimore, her skipper kept her out at anchor until buyers from Maryland and Virginia could be notified and arrive. Jezebel, he noticed, regarded the water line of the city with lively curiosity, quite different from the hopeless indifference on the faces of her fellow captives.

  “She’ll make the best sale of the lot,” he told the mate.

  In the first boat-load of purchasers who came out to inspect the skipper’s cargo, there was a Dutch dairy farmer. He brought with him the country doctor of his neighbourhood. The dairyman and his friend, the doctor, were in no hurry. They looked over a great number of negroes. To Jezebel they gave a searching physical examination, talking together in the low Dutch vernacular, and asking no questions of the skipper. The dairyman called attention to the whip scars on her body, and beckoned the second mate.