I fell asleep, I remember, on the night of my interview with Gregory—alias Englehart—to dream confusedly of Baron Trenck and his iron collar, and the Princess Amelia and her unmitigated grief, and it seemed to me that I was given to drink from a cup the poor prisoner had carved (as memoirs tell us he carved and sold many such), filled with a sort of bitter wine, by the man in the iron mask—so vividly did Fancy, mixing her ingredients, typify the anguish of my waking moments, and reproduce its anxieties, in dreams of night that could not be controlled.
When I awoke in the morning it was to lie quietly, and listen to the doleful voice of Sabra, for such had been Dinah's Congo name, uplifted in what site called a "speritual" as she cleaned the brass mountings of the grate and kindled its tardy fires. With very slight alteration and adjustment, this picturesque and dramatic Obi hymn is given in this place, just as I jotted it down in my diary, thus imprinting it on my memory from her own dolphin-like lips and bellows-like lungs. Her forefathers, she informed me with considerable pride, had been snake-worshipers, and she certainly inherited their tendency to treat the worst enemy of mankind with respectful adoration.
It served to divert my mind from its one fixed idea for a little time to arrange this singular hymn, which, together with those she had given voice to on the raft, proved her poetic powers. For Sabra assured me that this gift of sacred song had come to her one day when she was washing her master's linen, and that she had felt it run cold streaks down her back and through her brain, and that from that time she was uplifted to sing "sperituals" by spells and seasons. This, her longest and most successful inspiration, I now lay before the reader:
SABRA'S SPERITUAL.
We's on de road to Zion,
We's on de paf' to Zion,
But dar's a roarin' lion,
For Satan stops de way.
Oh! lef' us pass, ole Masta,
Oh! lef' us pass, strong Masta,
Oh! lef' us pass, rich Masta—
'T am near de break ob day!
We's on de road to Zion,
We's on de paf' to Zion,
But wid his red-hot iron
He bars de hebbenly gate
Oh! lef' us pass, ole Masta,
Oh! lef' us pass, kin' Masta,
Oh! lef' us pass, sweet Masta,
For we is mighty late!
Does you hear de rain a-fallin'?
Does you hear de prophets callin'?
Does you hear de cherubs squallin'
Wat's settin' on de gate?
Oh! lef' us pass, ole Masta,
Oh! step dis side, kin' Masta,
Unbar de do', dear Masta,
We dar' no longer wait!
Does you hear de win' a blowin'?
Does you hear de chickens crowin'?
Does you see da niggars hoein'?
It am de break ob day!
Oh! lef' us by, good Masta,
Oh! stan' aside, ole Masta,
Oh! light your lamp, sweet Sabiour,
For we done los' our way!
We'll gib you all our money.
We'll fotch you yams and honey,
We'll fill your pipe wid 'baccer,
An' twiss your tail wid hay!
We'll shod your hoofs wid copper,
We'll knob your horns wid silber,
We'll cook you rice and gopher,
Ef you will clar de way!
He's gwine away, my bredderin,
He's stepped aside, my sisterin,
He's clared de track, my chillun,
Now make do trumpets bray!
We tanks you kindly, Masta,
We gibs you tanks, ole Masta,
You is a buckra Masta,
Whateber white folks say!
CHAPTER XII.
During these last days of my captivity, Mrs. Clayton was truly a piteous sight to see—swathed in flannel and helpless as an infant, yet still perversely vigilant as she had been in her hours of health, and determined on the subject of opiates as before. I sometimes think she feared to place herself wholly in my hands, as she must have been under the influence of a powerful anodyne, and that, in spite of her professions of confidence, and even affection, she feared me as her foe. God knows that, had it been to save my own life, I would not have harmed one hair of her viperish head, as flat on top as if the stone of the Indian had been bound upon its crown from babyhood, yet full of brains to bursting around the base of the skull.
It was necessary for Dinah to be in constant attendance on my Argus, and even to feed her, so helpless were her hands, with the mucilages which now formed her principal diet, by the order of some celebrated physician, who wrote his prescriptions without seeing his patient, after the form of the ancients, sending them daily through the hands of Mrs. Raymond. Still those vigilant green eyes never faltered in their task, and lying where—with the door opened between our chambers (as she tyrannically required it to be most of the time) she could command a view of almost every act of my life—I found her scrutiny more unendurable than when she had at least feigned to be absorbed with her stocking-basket. Ernie's noise, too, disturbed her, and I was obliged to keep him constantly amused, for fear that her wrath might culminate in eternal banishment.
The days slid on—November had passed through that exquisite phase of existence (which almost redeems it from the reproach cast upon it through all time, of being par excellence the gloomy month of the year), the sweet and balmy influences of which had reached us, even through the walls of our prison-house, in the shape of smoky sunshine, and balmy, odorous, and lingering blossoms, and was now asserting its traditional character with much angry bluster of sleet, and storm, and cutting wind. It was Herod lamenting his Marianne slain by his own hand, and making others suffer the consequences of his regretted cruelty, his remorseful anguish. It was the fierce Viking making wild wail over his dead Oriana.
No more to come until another year had done its work of resurrection and decay, the lovely Indian Summer slumbered under her mound of withered flowers and heaps of gorgeous leaves, unheeding all, or unconscious of the grief of her stern bridegroom.