"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"
"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor." The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."
As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in the night.
In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out, its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond, lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's foreclosure.
A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the ponds and night-damps?
The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.
Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.
"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart is bursting: what can I say?"
"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night," the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."
"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my freedom, or die on the road to it."