“Here I is, ma’am, I’s comin’, yes ’em,” was responded from an upper porch, and the two little darkies scuffled down the back stairs.
“Jist you two run down to de orchard whar I kin see you all de time, hear me? All de time, and look fur dat Dominiker hen’s nest. I hear her cacklin’ down dar, and don’t neither of you dar’ cum back till you find it. If you cum back ’fore I call you, I’ll pickle you well. Run!”
Two little guinea blue cotton skirts whisked through a gap in the rose hedge and emerged in the deep grass of the orchard, before Charlotte turned back into the kitchen, satisfied they were at a distance, and still under her observation. Levi Stucker meanwhile, having carefully tied his two weeks’ earnings in the corner of his red cotton handkerchief, and shared his last “chaw” of tobacco with William, swung his bundle from the end of his long whitewash pole and departed, with the shambling, shuffling gait of the typical Southern negro.
“I’m gwine upstairs, William, and I’ll ramshackle dat room till I find out what’s dar,” said the woman. She slowly mounted the stairs, down which the two culprits had so lately descended with flying feet, and turned into a small room on the servants’ gallery. She glanced around the bare apartment the two little negroes called their own. There was a battered trunk against the wall with a damaged cover and no fastening of any kind, a rickety chair and a bed. Charlotte tore the linsey dresses, homespun petticoats and check aprons from nails behind the door, shaking and critically examining each article. In the trunk she found remnants of rag dolls and broken toys and bits of quilt pieces that had been their playthings for time out of mind. There were no pockets to examine, no locks to pry open. “Dey don’t need no pockets to carry dere money in, and no locked up trunks fur dere jewelry,” Charlotte always said. It was her habit to go in and out their room freely, to see that it was kept in some kind of order and the bed regularly made up. The door of the room was always open, and no means afforded for securing it on the inside. Notwithstanding these precautions of Charlotte, who practically accepted the doctrine of infant depravity, there was a mystery concealed in that room that at intervals almost throttled the two little negroes, and, strange to say, with all the woman’s vigilance, had slumbered months within sound of her voice. She rapidly threw the clothes on the window sill, turned the trunk inside out and pushed its battered frame into the middle of the floor.
Nothing now remained to be searched but the plain unpainted bed. It was neatly made up, the coarse brown blankets securely tucked in all around. Charlotte whisked that off and dragged after it the cotton mattress which rested on a “sack bottom,” secured by interlacing cords to the bed frame. There was revealed the hidden secret! Crushed quite flat and sticking to the sacking, long under pressure of the cotton mattress and the tossing and tumbling children, what trick of dainty beauty lay before her? It was so crumpled and smothered, torn and ragged, soiled with fleeces of cotton lint that had sifted through the bed seams, and covered with dust and grime that but for glimpses of its original form and color here and there it would never have been recognized. Charlotte snatched it out and fled to the porch to see if Ma’y Ann and Marthy Ann were still down in the orchard. There they lay, prone in the soft grass, happy as only children, and black ones at that, can be. Four little ebony legs kicked up in the air, and the sound of merry shouts reached Charlotte’s ear.
“You’ll fly dem laigs to sum purpose yit, fur I lay I’ll git Marse Jim to giv you a breakdown dat’ll make dem laigs tired,” she said to herself. “You jist lay dar,” she muttered, as she descended the steps. “You needn’t waste your time (it’s a awful short one) lookin’ for aigs dat de ole Dominiker ain’t never laid yit.”
The deep window of the library was wide open, the sash thrown up and an easy lounging chair drawn to the veranda, on which reposed the towering form of the planter, lazily smoking a cigar, and looking off upon the broad, swift river at a passing steamboat, floating so high on its swelling waves that its deck was almost on a line with the top of the grass-covered levee. Its passengers, thronging the “guards” in the fragrance of a fine morning, seemed almost near enough to the spectator on shore to respond to a friendly nod of the head. The delicate lady of the mansion sat silently within, also watching the passing boat.
“I see some one waving a paper from the Belle Creole. I believe that’s Green. Yes, he has tied a handkerchief to his crutch, and is waving that.”