"Mr. Jekyl, that humbug don't go down with me! I'm no more of the race of Ham than you are! I'm Colonel Gordon's oldest son—as white as my brother, who you say owns me! Look at my eyes, and my hair, and say if any of the rules about Ham pertain to me!"
"Well," said Mr. Jekyl, "my boy, you mustn't get excited. Everything must go, you know, by general rules. We must take that course which secures the greatest general amount of good on the whole; and all such rules will work hard in particular cases. Slavery is a great missionary enterprise for civilizing and christianizing the degraded African."
"Wait till you see Tom Gordon's management on this plantation," said Harry, "and you'll see what sort of a christianizing institution it is! Mr. Jekyl, you know better! You throw such talk as that in the face of your northern visitors, and you know all the while that Sodom and Gomorrah don't equal some of these plantations, where nobody isn't anybody's husband or wife in particular! You know all these things, and you dare talk to me about a missionary institution! What sort of missionary institutions are the great trading-marts, where they sell men and women? What are the means of grace they use there? And the dogs and the negro-hunters!—those are for the greatest good, too! If your soul were in our souls' stead, you'd see things differently."
Mr. Jekyl was astonished, and said so. But he found a difficulty in presenting his favorite view of the case, under the circumstances; and we believe those ministers of the Gospel, and elders, who entertain similar doctrines, would gain some new views by the effort to present them to a live man in Harry's circumstances. Mr. Jekyl never had a more realizing sense of the difference between the abstract and concrete.
Harry was now thoroughly roused. He had inherited the violent and fiery passions of his father. His usual appearance of studied calmness, and his habits of deferential address, were superinduced; they resembled the thin crust which coats over a flood of boiling lava, and which a burst of the seething mass beneath can shiver in a moment. He was now wholly desperate and reckless. He saw himself already delivered, bound hand and foot, into the hands of a master from whom he could expect neither mercy nor justice. He was like one who had hung suspended over an abyss, by grasping a wild rose; the frail and beautiful thing was broken, and he felt himself going, with only despair beneath him. He rose and stood the other side of the table, his hands trembling with excitement.
"Mr. Jekyl," he said, "it is all over with me! Twenty years of faithful service have gone for nothing. Myself and wife, and unborn child, are the slaves of a vile wretch! Hush, now! I will have my say for once! I've borne, and borne, and borne, and it shall come out! You men who call yourselves religious, and stand up for such tyranny,—you serpents, you generation of vipers,—how can you escape the damnation of hell? You keep the clothes of them who stone Stephen! You encourage theft, and robbery, and adultery, and you know it! You are worse than the villains themselves, who don't pretend to justify what they do. Now, go, tell Tom Gordon—go! I shall fight it out to the last! I've nothing to hope, and nothing to lose. Let him look out! They made sport of Samson,—they put out his eyes,—but he pulled down the temple over their heads, after all. Look out!"
There is something awful in an outburst of violent passion. The veins in Harry's forehead were swollen, his lips were livid, his eyes glittered like lightning; and Mr. Jekyl cowered before him.
"There will come a day," said Harry, "when all this shall be visited upon you! The measure you have filled to us shall be filled to you double—mark my words!"
Harry spoke so loudly, in his vehemence, that Clayton overheard him, and came behind him silently into the room. He was pained, shocked, and astonished; and, obeying the first instinct, he came forward and laid his hand entreatingly on Harry's shoulder.
"My good fellow, you don't know what you are saying," he said.