I hated him as only a woman thinking
of a sister woman's wrong could hate. Robert looked up; his eyes were
dry again, his mouth grim. I saw that, said, "Tell me more," and he
did,--for sympathy is a gift the poorest may give, the proudest stoop to
receive.

"Yer see, Ma'am, his father,--I might say ours, if I warn't ashamed of
both of 'em,--his father died two years ago, an' left us all to Marster
Ned,--that's him here, eighteen then. He always hated me, I looked so
like old Marster: he don't,--only the light skin an' hair. Old Marster
was kind to all of us, me 'specially, an' bought Lucy off the next
plantation down there in South Car'lina, when he found I liked her. I
married her, all I could, Ma'am; it warn't much, but we was true to one
another till Marster Ned come home a year after an' made hell fur both
of us. He sent my old mother to be used up in his rice-swamp in Georgy;
he found me with my pretty Lucy, an' though young Miss cried, an' I
prayed to him on my knees, an' Lucy run away, he wouldn't have no mercy;
he brought her back, an'--took her, Ma'am."

"Oh! what did you do?" I cried, hot with helpless pain and passion.

How the man's outraged heart sent the blood flaming up into his face and
deepened the tones of his impetuous voice, as he stretched his arm
across the bed, saying, with a terribly expressive gesture,--

"I half murdered him, an' to-night I'll finish."

"Yes, yes,--but go on now; what came next?"

He gave me a look that showed no white man could have felt a deeper
degradation in remembering and confining these last acts of brotherly
oppression.

"They whipped me till I couldn't stand, an' then they sold me further
South. Yer thought I was a white man once;--look here!"

With a sudden wrench he tore the shirt from neck to waist, and on his
strong brown shoulders showed me furrows deeply ploughed, wounds which,
though healed, were ghastlier to me than any in that house. I could not
speak to him, and, with the pathetic dignity a great grief lends the
humblest sufferer, he ended his brief tragedy by simply saying,--

"That's all, Ma'am. I've never seen her since, an' now I never shall in
this world,--maybe not in t' other."

"But, Robert, why think her dead? The captain was wandering when he said
those sad things; perhaps he will retract them when he is sane. Don't
despair; don't give up yet."

"No, Ma'am, I guess he's right; she was too proud to bear that long.
It's like her to kill