“I’d have loved to see one of those grand companies of ladies and gentlemen who used to visit here,” said Helen, after a little. “Such a weekend party as that must have been worth while.”
“And you don’t like darkeys!” cried Nettie, laughing merrily. “Why, in those times the place was alive with them. This piece of gravel before the house was haunted by every darkey from the quarters. The gravel was worked like a regular silver-mine. No gentleman mounted his horse before the door here without scattering a handful of silver to the darkeys. Even now, the men working for Aunt Rachel, sometimes find tarnished old silver pieces as they rake over the gravel.”
“Dear me! let’s go silver-mining, Ruthie,” cried Helen. “I need to have my purse replenished already.”
“And if you found any money here you would give it to that bright little girl who waited on us so nicely upstairs,” laughed Ruth.
“Of course. That’s what I want it for,” confessed Helen.
“Your mind is perfectly adjusted to a system of slavery, my dear,” Nettie said to Helen Cameron. “Here is my father’s picture of what slavery meant to the South. He says he was walking along a street in New Orleans years ago and saw an old gentleman grubbing in the mud of a gutter with his cane. The old gentleman finally turned up a half dollar which had been dropped there; and after picking it up and polishing it on his handkerchief to make sure it was good money, he tossed it to the nearest negro idling on the street corner.
“That was slavery. It was the whites who were enslaved to the blacks, after all. Both were bound by the system; but it was the negro who got the best of it, for every half dollar that the white man earned he had to pay for food to keep his slaves. Now,” added Nettie, smiling, “the law even lets the bad white man cheat the ignorant black out of the wages he earns, and the poor black may starve.”
“Dear me!” cried Helen, “we’re getting as sociological as one of Miss Brokaw’s lectures. Let’s not. Keep your information to yourself, please, Miss Parsons. Positively I refuse to learn anything about social conditions in the South while I am in the Land of Cotton. I’ll get my information from text-books and at a distance. This is too beautiful a landscape to have it spoiled by statistics and examples, or any other such trash!”
By and by, as the darkness came swiftly (so swiftly that it surprised the visitors from the North) a bird flew heavily out of the lowlands and pitched upon a dead limb near the house. At once the plaintive cry of “whip-poor-will!” resounded through the night, and Ruth and Helen began to count the number of times in succession the bird uttered its somber note without a break.
Usually the count numbered from forty-three to forty-seven—never an even number; but Nettie said she had heard one demand “the castigation of poor William” more than seventy times before stopping.