nsideration. John Mayrant worked in the
custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in
general--which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general
opinion at all--but the boy's particular Kings Port, his severe old
aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the
men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this
condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some
pledge to one's own sacred honor, were at stake--but here was no such
thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the
salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had
seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with
the world before him, and no one to support--stop! Hortense Rieppe!
There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he
was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to
perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he
liked "taking orders from a negro," fling away his worldly goods some
few days before he was to pronounce his bridegroom's vow. So here, at
Mrs. Trevise's dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a
vision of the unhappy boy's plight; he was sticking to a task which he
loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as
he saw it, was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his
kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything
except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from
aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises
and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of
fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a
strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white
superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second,
perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement
was broken. Well, if that were the case--But was it likely to be the
case? Juno's agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the
house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quantities
of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations,
she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for
which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John
Mayrant wasn't in bed f