Jacob moved on, tramping down the grass, and casting his long, uncouth shadow before her, in the moonlight. She followed him in silence, casting back mournful glances at the old homestead.
Jacob paused to let down a heavy set of bars that divided the meadow from the trout stream. He jerked them fiercely from their sockets in the tall chestnut posts, dropping them down on each other with a noise that rang strangely through the stillness. Ada Leicester passed through the opening, and moved slowly toward the tavern. She reached the door, but turned again to her attendant.
"Jacob," she said, very sorrowfully, "I am all alone now, in the wide world; you will not leave me?"
"Ada Wilcox, I have not deserved that question," said Jacob, pushing open the door.
She shrunk through timidly, perhaps expecting her servant to follow; but he closed the door and rushed away, leaping the pile of bars with a bound, and plunging back into the meadow.
"Leave her!" he said, dashing the tall herds-grass aside with his hand; "Leave her, as if I warn't her slave—her dog—her jackall, and had been ever since I was a shaver, so small that this very grass would have closed over my head; and yet she don't know why—thinks it's the wages, may be. It never enters her head that I've got a soul to love and hate with. What did I follow her and that man to foreign parts for, but to stand ready when her time of trouble came? What did I give up my freeborn American birthright for, and put that gold lace, and darn'd etarnal cockade over my hat, like an English white nigger, only because I couldn't stand by her in any other way? What is it that makes me humble as a rabbit, sometimes, and then, again, snarling around like a dog? She don't see it; she believes me when I tell her that it was a hankering to see foreign parts, that sent me over sea; and that I, a freeborn American citizen, have a nat'ral fancy to gold bands and cockades, as if the thing wasn't jist impossible! True enough, she don't want me to wear them now; but if she did, it's my solemn belief that I should do it, jist here, in sight of the old homestead.
"The old homestead," he continued, standing still in the grass, and looking toward the old home, till the bitter mood passed from his heart, and his eyes filled with tears. "Oh, if I was only his bound boy again, and she a little girl, and the old folks up yonder. I would be a nigger—a hound—anything, if she could only stand here, as she did then—as innocent and sweet a critter as ever drew breath. But he did it—that villain! Oh, if he could be extarminated from the face of the earth! It wan't her fault—I defy the face of man to say that. It was the original sin in her own heart."
Poor Jacob! All his massive strength was exhausted now. He even ceased to mutter over the sad, sad memories that crowded on him. But all that night he wandered about the old homestead—now lost beneath its pear trees—now casting his uncouth shadow across the barn-yard, where half a dozen slumbering cows lifted their heads and gazed earnestly after him, as if waiting for the intruder to be gone. There was not a nook or corner of the old place that he did not visit that night, and the morning found him cold, sad and pale, waiting for his mistress at the tavern door.
Just after daylight, the one-horse chaise crossed the ferry again. The old boatmen would gladly have conversed a little with its inmates, but Jacob only answered them in monosyllables, and they could not see the lady's face, so closely was it shrouded with the folds of her travelling veil.