"En Miss Lindy sent me off befo' de year was up, Marster. My boy Jubal was born de mont' atter she done tu'n me out." She hesitated a minute, and then added, with a kind of savage coquetry, "I 'uz a moughty likely gal, Marster. You ain't done furgit dat, is you?"
Her words touched Cyrus like the flick of a whip on a sore, and he drew back quickly while his thin lips grew tight.
"You'd better take that basket into the house," he said sharply.
In the negress's face an expression of surprise wavered for a second and then disappeared. Her features resumed their usual passive and humble look—a look which said, if Cyrus could have read human nature as easily as he read finance, "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding. Am I not what you have made me? Have I not been what you wanted? And yet you despise me for being the thing you made."
"I didn't mean nuttin', Marster. I didn't mean nuttin'," she protested aloud.
"Then get into the house," retorted Cyrus harshly, "and don't stand gaping there. Any more of your insolence and I'll never let you set foot in this yard again."
"'Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin'! Gawd a' moughty, I didn't mean nuttin'! I jes lowed as you mought be willin' ter gun me fo' dollars a mont' fur de washin'. My boy Jubal——"
"I'll not give you a red cent more. If you don't want it, you can leave it. Get out of here!"
All the primitive antagonism of race—that instinct older than civilization—was in the voice with which he ordered her out of his sight. "It was downright blackmail. The fool was trying to blackmail me," he thought. "If I'd yielded an inch I'd have been at her mercy. It's a pretty pass things have come to when men have to protect themselves from negro women." The more he reflected on her impudence, the stronger grew his conviction that he had acted remarkably well. "Nipped it in the root. If I hadn't——" he thought.
And behind him in the doorway the washerwoman continued to regard him, over the lowered clothes basket, with her humble and deprecating look, which said, like the look of a beaten animal: "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding because you are stronger than I."