"Bravo, Patty! you only tarnish into age, like an old bronze, that is harder by time and oxidizing. I was a gentleman, and yet you mastered me. How strange to see us together beleaguered here, myself by death, and you by the law! Why, we have defied them both! Let them come on! Do you believe in everlasting fire?—that every injury is a live coal to roast the soul? I know you do; and, if you do, how beautiful your rosy grate will be, tough charmer, with boys spoiled in the bud, and husbands in the blossom, with families of freemen torn apart, and children, born free as the flag of their country, sent to perpetual bondage and the whip. Poca barba, poca vergüenza![13] Who but a woman could have put it into William Bouser's head, when she had kidnapped him and thirty negroes more, and sold them all to Austin Woolfolk, in Baltimore, to rise at sea on Woolfolk's vessel, and massacre the officers, only to be hanged at last, and all to make Woolfolk a better customer!"[14]
"There are people all round the house, Van Dorn. I hear them on the stairs and in the rooms. Have mercy!"
"Devils, or men, Patty? Both are your courtiers, remember, and perhaps they crowd each other. What do we care? Que contento estoy! Perhaps I am indifferent because no blood is on my hands, vile slaver though I am! Joe Johnson and his low-browed brother you could teach to kill; me, nothing worse than to steal and fondle you. Patty, you believe in hell. I am a believer, too; for I believe in heaven."
"O Van Dorn; how you do talk!"
"Since you entrapped my son, young Levin Dennis—chito! quedito! do not start, fair fiend—to have his father make another Johnson of him, I have discovered, through the little girl, the beauteous damsel now, Hulda Van Dorn, the sin you meant to spot me with; and, listen, Patty! it was my son, rich with his mother's loyalty and love—dear guardian wife, that never shall learn of my ruin here, nor see me more!—it was my Levin, set free by me, who gave the news at Dover and beat us back."
He had partly risen as he spoke, and the exertion seemed to choke him. The woman sat in dreadful silence, watching his veins rise upon his pale and wilful face. He caught at his throat with his fingers, and for a time could speak no more.
"Patty," said he, at last, between his coughing spells, "I believe again, for I have seen my wife, true as an angel, beauteous as a child, in prayer for me. An honest man waits my death to love her better, and be the father of my son. Hala o hala! I have had the daughter of my murdered friend to kiss and bless me, and to love my son. My son has given me his confidence, unknowing whom I was, and shown to me a brave, pure heart. Yo soy amado! Their prayers may knock for me at the eternal door. But thou, the murderer of my youth, no heart will pray for. Believe in hell, and die; ha! hala! ho!"
He pointed his white finger at her in an ecstasy, with a mocking smile in his blue eyes, like fading stars at dawn, and then the rosy morning flowed all round his mouth, as the bullet, detached in his emotion, fell towards the lung, and wakened hemorrhage, and to the last of his strength he pointed at her, and then fell back, in crimson linen, smiling yet in death.
Terrified at the unwonted scene of a natural decease in that abode of violence, the mistress only sat, the image of paralysis, till her door slowly opened, and there entered, hand in hand, young Levin Dennis and Hulda Van Dorn.
"Levin," the young girl said, composed as one to whom reputable life and obsequies were familiar, "I have heard the dying sentences of this misled, strong, disappointed man. Let us kneel down, dear friend, and say a prayer. He was our father, Levin; not Van Dorn—that is my name, the daughter of his friend—but Captain Oden Dennis, of the Ida privateer."