Shall I confess it? Such was the influence of education, of inherited prejudice, and of social proscription, that when she told me she was a slave, I shuddered as a high-caste Brahmin might when he finds that the man he has taken by the hand is a Pariah. Estelle was too keen of penetration not to detect it; and she drew her robe away from my touch, and moved her chair back a little.
My ancestors, with the exception of my father, had been slaveholders ever since 1625. I had lived all my life in a community where slavery was held a righteous and a necessary institution. I had never allowed myself to question its policy or its justice. Skepticism as to a God or a future state was venial, nay, rather fashionable; but woe to the youth who should play the Pyrrhonist in the matter of slavery!
Yet it was not fear, it was not self-interest, that made me acquiesce; it was simply a failure to exercise my proper powers of thought. I took the word of others,—of interested parties, of social charlatans, of sordid, self-stultified fanatics,—that the system was the best possible one that could be conceived of, both for blacks and whites. From the false social atmosphere in which I had grown up I had derived the accretions that went to build up and solidify my moral being.
And so if St. Paul or Fenelon, Shakespeare or Newton, had come to me with ebonized faces, I should have refused them the privileges of an equal. To such folly are we shaped by what we passively receive from society! To such outrages on justice and common sense are we reconciled simply by the inertness of our brains, not to speak of the hollowness of our hearts!
Estelle paused, and almost despaired, when she saw the effect upon me of her confession. But I pressed her to a conclusion of her story, and then asked, “Who has any claim upon you, in the event of Madame Dufour’s dying intestate?”
“Nearly all her property,” replied Estelle, “is mortgaged to her nephew, Carberry Ratcliff, and he is her only heir.”
“Give me some account of him.”
“He is a South Carolinian by birth. Some years ago he married a Creole lady, by whom he got a fine cotton-plantation on the Red River, stocked with several hundred slaves. He has a house and garden in Lafayette, but lives most of the time on his plantation at Loraine.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Yes; the first time only ten days ago, and he has been here four times since to call on Madame Dufour, though he rarely used to visit her oftener than twice a year.”