The darkies brought in their vines and clusters, and laid them on the table or draped them with primitive art about the room, until it became a sort of bower, verdant and perfumed with their offerings; and Jessie sat there like an unaffected little queen, distributing tokens to this and that adherent. She knew their humble demands were not prompted by greed, but that they simply loved the old custom of receiving something from their mistress, and could not give it up even though times were so greatly changed.
Lance had now fully entered into the spirit of the scene, and the fancy struck him that it was a repetition of the old story of savages on the New World shores worshipping the first white person who came among them.
What if these negroes had been the aborigines, and his Jessie—or Miss Jessie, rather—had been that Gertrude Wylde whom tradition told of, receiving their homage? The idle query of imagination, thus propounded, brought up to him with renewed force the vision, still unexplained, which had crossed his path on the sea-shore.
CHAPTER VI.
A NEW LESSON IN BOTANY.
In the cool of the afternoon the Floyds and their guest took a drive, rattling gayly on, in the old carry-all, which was the colonel's chariot of state, over many miles of light-earthed road screened for the most part by groves of pine.
The old gentleman discoursed to Lance a good deal about the country and the people, and gave vent to his natural regret that the class once dominant had yielded more and more to a hard, pushing set, who were no doubt doing much to increase the general welfare, but lacked the graces and the repose of the whilom aristocracy. The young Northerner's own conviction was that the old aristocracy had succumbed to a relentless law of nature, for which he entertained the admiration that he believed all natural laws were entitled to; but he could not help regretting somewhat the fate that had overcome his friends and their kind; and it was borne in upon him strongly that so fine a flower of heredity as Jessie appeared to be—however defective the structure of the species to which she belonged—ought not to be involved in this decadence.
You will observe that I am giving you his thoughts in the formal and strictly rational phraseology which it pleased him to adopt. Plainly speaking, he was very much in love with Jessie, and did not care a rap about natural laws or anything else, if they conflicted with her happiness or his chances of winning her.
Meanwhile, as they passed Elbow Crook Swamp, which the road skirted for a considerable distance, he reverted, with every appearance of absorbed interest, to his scheme for reclaiming that tract and converting it into a source of wealth and the means of building up a prosperous, highly intelligent community. The swamp covered a territory of many hundreds of acres. It was rank with cypress, evergreen, oak, and laurel, from which parasitic gray mosses depended in endless garlands, locked in the embrace of luxuriant vines, that hung or crept down to the edge of that slow brown stream, the angular turnings of which gave the place its name. The rich, alluvial soil in which all this greenery rooted held a promise of unlimited fertility; but the only profit which men derived from the splendid waste was found in the cane-brakes, that yielded succulent fodder for hogs or cattle. Lance imagined in this wild expanse a possibility of great results, which might play in well with his humanitarian schemes. He had brooded over the matter ever since first seeing the spot; but the commercial and educational interest attaching thereto was not the only one that kept him thinking about it. Its mysteriousness, its lone solemnity; the frowning masses of dense and forbidding trees; its impenetrability in parts; the danger and savageness of its hidden depths—all these had wrought upon and excited him, until it became impossible for him to get the swamp out of his mind, and he felt that it was somehow connected with his destiny.