Gracious heavens! Was I right in my surmises? Under all his harlequin grimaces and foolery, this negro, to my quickened penetration, seemed to be crowding back, smothering, disguising, some intense emotion. His laugh was so extravagantly African, that it struck me as imitative in its exaggeration. I had heard a laugh much like it from the late Jim Crow Rice on the stage. Was the negro playing a part?
He approached Estelle, cut the thongs that bound her to the post, threw her shawl over her shoulders, and then, falling on one knee, put both hands on his heart, and rolled up his eyes much after the manner of Bombastes Furioso making love to Distaffina. The Ratcliffites were in ecstasies at the burlesque. Then, rising to his feet, the negro affectedly drew nearer to Estelle, and, putting up his hand, whispered, first in one of her ears, then in the other. I could see a change, sudden, but instantly checked, in her whole manner. Her lips moved. She must have murmured something in reply.
“Look here, Peek, you rascal,” cried Ratcliff, “we must have the benefit of your soft words. What have you been saying to her?”
“I’ze been tellin’ her,” said the negro, with tragic gesticulation, pointing to himself and then at me, “to look fust on dis yere pikter, den on dat. Wheugh!”
Still affecting the buffoon, he came up to me, presenting his person so that his face was visible only to myself. There was a divine pity in his eyes, and in the whole expression of his face the guaranty of a high and holy resolve. “She will trust me,” he whispered. “Do you the same.”
To the spectators he appeared to be mocking me with grimace. To me he seemed an angel of deliverance.
“Now, Peek, to business!” said Ratcliff. “You swear, do you, to make this woman your wife in fact as well as in name; do you understand me, Peek?”
“Yes, massa, I understan’.”
“You swear to guard her well, and never to let that white scoundrel yonder come near or touch her?”
“Yes, massa, I swar ter all dat, an’ ebber so much more. He’ll kotch what he can’t carry if he goes fur to come nare my wife.”