"You are astonished to see me here? as if I were a slave yet. Was it strange that I, a free woman, longed to leave the places which reminded me of the past, to see and learn something of the world? But, there was another and more important reason—had I not a child and a mother's heart longing to behold her offspring?"
"Zillah, tell me truly, is this thing real? is the girl we call Lina French your child?"
"Have I not said it," replied the woman, regarding him stealthily from under her half-closed lashes. "Why should I attempt to deceive you? it would gain me nothing."
"That is true; but how did it happen that you abandoned her?"
The woman lifted her face, with a sudden flush of the forehead—
"You sold me, made me another man's slave: me, me!" She paused, with a struggle, as if some suppressed passion choked her; but directly her self-possession returned; the flush died from her face, and she drooped into her former attitude, looking downward as before. "But that I always was—a slave, and the daughter of a slave. Your child, though unknown and unacknowledged, better that it died than lived my life over again, cursed with the proud Anglo-Saxon blood, debased by the African taint, that, if it exists but in the slightest degree, poisons all the rest."
"Zillah, you speak bitterly. Was it my fault that you were born a slave on the plantation of my friend; that your complexion was fair, and your beauty so remarkable, that few men could have detected the shadows on your forehead. Surely, you had no cause to complain of too much hardship as my servant?"
For an instant, the haughty lip of the woman writhed like a serpent in its venom, struggling to keep back the bitter words that burned upon them. Then her face settled into comparative calm again, and she said, in a tone of gentle reproach, "But you sold me!"
"I was compelled to it, Zillah. It was impossible to keep you on the plantation. James Harrington became your owner on the death of his mother, and you know how terribly he was prejudiced against you. It was the only command that he made; everything else he left to me; but here, here he was imperative. All that a kind and obliging master could do, I accomplished in spite of him. You had your own choice of masters, Zillah; that, at least, I secured to you."
"A choice of masters!" repeated the woman, turning pale with intense feeling. "What did I care about a choice of masters, when you sold me? Had you given me to the grave, it would have been Heaven to the years that followed. You sold me without warning—coldly sent an order to the agent, and I was taken away. Your own child was the slave of another man."