Unmolested, as she had left it, Zulima stole back to her chamber. Weary, and yet with a heart more free than it had been for weeks, she flung off her damp garments, and lying down, slept sweetly for an hour. Zulima dreamed that she was sitting with her husband beneath the great magnolia-tree; her babe lay upon the turf laughing gleefully, and, with its little hands in the air, grasping after the summer insects as they flashed overhead. All at once a whirlwind rushed out, as it were, from the depths of the sky, overwhelming her with its violence. She strove to reach her child, but fell upon her face to the earth, shrieking wildly to her husband to save her and it. Then fell upon her one of those dark, fantastic clouds that make our dreams so fragmentary. She felt the magnolia upheave under her, and scatter down the fresh earth from its roots till she was half buried. Husband and child both were gone, leaving her prostrate and almost dead, to battle her way through the storm alone—alone! Zulima awoke with these words upon her lips.
It was but a dream. Louisa had entered the chamber and was examining the wet garments that her mistress had flung off, muttering suspiciously to herself as she saw the soiled slippers and other evidences of an early walk.
“What am de meaning ob all dis? What can de missus be about?” she muttered, casting down the raiment that had excited her distrust. The candle almost burned out, the drops of wax on the table, torn fragments of paper on the floor, were new objects of comment. The torn paper was all written upon, and had been gathered up in a grasp and wrenched asunder. The pieces were large, and might be easily combined. The negress could not read, but, with the quick cunning of her race, she saw that something unusual had happened, with which these fragments were connected, so gathering the papers in her apron, she bore them to her master, whose spy she was.
It was the noise that Louisa made going out which aroused Zulima from her wretched vision. The young creature started up, thanking God that it was but a dream. In moving about the room, she approached a window opening upon the garden just in time to see Ross follow her woman, Louisa, into the little slave-dwelling which we described in our last chapter.
Zulima lingered by the window. It was half an hour before Ross came forth again; he was followed by the slave woman, and stood conversing with her some time in one of the retired walks. Soon after, the young man who had been Ross’s companion from the city the previous day came up, and Louisa seemed to be dismissed. Still the two men conversed earnestly together, and, after a time, slowly retired into the slave-dwelling.
Since the previous day Zulima had grown suspicious, and she remarked all these movements with keen interest. Well she might, for that day and hour, in the low slave-dwelling, was written a letter destined to cast black trouble upon her whole life. There, two fiends, fashioned like men, sat down and concocted a foul slander against that innocent young woman which was to cling around her for years, and which her full strength might struggle against in vain. The very mail which carried out Zulima’s passionate and tender epistle to her husband, bore also a wicked slander framed by these two base men. The pleading words, the endearing expressions, that she had folded up fresh from her innermost soul, that he might know how truly she loved him, went jostling side by side with the fiendish assertion that she, Zulima Clark, had been unfaithful to his love.
And these two letters reached the husband in one package lying close to each other. He read the slander first.
Zulima waited, but no answer ever came to her letter. Week after week she lived upon that painful hope which hangs upon the morrow, and still hope mocked her. Then she grew desperate. One day, when Ross came back from the city empty-handed as usual, Zulima had left his house with the avowed intention of seeking her husband in the North.
“Let her go,” said the fiend, coolly folding the letter she had left behind. “The mail travels faster than she can; my pretty bird shall find all things prepared for her coming.”
Again Ross sat down and wrote to the husband of Zulima, telling him that she fled from his house at night to escape the vigilant watch which had been placed upon her actions. The letter reached its destination and performed its evil work.