"Go now, Samson, to oblige Miss Vesty," Virgie said, "and I'll try to love you a little, black and bad as you are."
"I'se afraid of Delawaw state," Samson repeated, laughing slowly. "Joe Johnson, dat I put dat head on, will git me whar he lives if I go dar, mebbe."
"No," Phœbus put in, "I'll be a lookin' after him on the banks of the Nanticoke, Samson, while you keep right in the high-road from Laurel to Georgetown, and on to Dover. Joe Johnson's been whipped at the post, and banished from Delaware for life, and dussn't go thar no more."
"If you go, Samson," little Roxy put in, having reappeared, "Virgie'll feel complimented. Anything that obliges Miss Vesty counts with Virgie."
"If you are a free man," Virgie herself exclaimed, her slight, nervous, willowy figure expanding, "are you afraid to go into a freer state than Maryland? If I was free I would want to go to the freest state of all. Behave like a free man, Samson Hat, or what is freedom worth to you?"
"It's wuth so much, pretty gal, dat I don't want to be a-losin' of it, mind, I tell you, 'sept to my wife when she'll hab me."
Samson watched the quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's after a hard winter—the more active that a little meagre—her head small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong passion, for her mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when they listened to him.
"A slave, Miss Vesty says"—Virgie spoke with almost fierceness—"is not one that's owned, half as much as one that sells himself—to hard drink, or to selfishness, or to fear. You're not a free man, Samson, if you're afraid, and are like these low slave negroes who dare nothing if they can only get a little low pleasure. All that can make a black man white, in my eyes, is a white man's enterprise."
Vesta felt, as she often had done, the capable soul of her servant, and did not resent her spirit as unbecoming a slave, but rather felt responsive chords in her own nature, as if, indeed, Virgie was the more imperious of the two. Coming now into full womanhood, her race elements finding their composition, her character unrestrained by any one in Teackle Hall, Virgie was her young mistress's shield-bearer, like David to the princely Jonathan.
"Why, Virgie," Samson answered, with humility, "I never meant not to go, lady gal, after marster's wife asked me, I only wanted you to beg me hard, an' mebbe I'd git a kiss befo' I started."