“Stay a moment,” said Alfred, laying his hand on his shoulder; “you are not aware that you will never come back to this place again. Is there nothing here, nothing of your own, that you wish to take with you? No clothes, no tools, or utensils?”
Cassius looked about him with an expression of intense disgust.
“Be prudent, Cassius. Your clothes and your tools will not be the less useful to you in Liberia because they belonged to you as a slave.”
Cassius slowly returned and took up a few articles, but presently seemed much disposed to throw them into the fire.
“Well, well,” said Alfred, “leave them where they are, and if your master does not allow you the value of them, I will. Now take one more look at the dwelling where you have lived so long, and then let us be gone.”
Cassius had, however, no sentimental regrets to bestow on the abode of his captivity. He refused the last look, and strode away as an escaped malefactor from the gibbet, without any wish to look back. The first words he spoke were uttered as he passed old Robert’s hut.
“Little Hester will cry when she comes home and finds that I am gone. Can you do nothing for poor little Hester, Mr. Alfred?”
This was exactly what Alfred was turning over in his mind.
When Cassius had told down his ransom with Alfred’s assistance, when the necessary forms of business were gone through, and the variety of coins which the pouch contained were fairly transferred to Mitchelson, Alfred said,
“Now that our affair of justice is concluded, I am going to bring forward a matter of pure favour.” Mr. Mitchelson, who liked granting favours better than doing justice, looked very gracious. Alfred explained, that by Cassius’s departure, Hester would lose her only friend. He begged that she might be taken from under the charge of Robert and Sukey, and placed with some one who would treat her kindly, and that Mr. Mitchelson would himself inquire after the friendless little girl from time to time.[time.]