There were half a dozen unoccupied rooms on the next floor, as she well knew, and up the stairs and into one of these she bounded, her cheeks still more aglow than they had been when she set out on her "reconnoissance," and her eyes still more wild and startled, while a strange tremor creeping at her heart told her that she had been witness to much more than could yet be shaped into words or embodied even in thought! Poor girl!—how her brain throbbed and how her heart beat like ten thousand little trip-hammers!—the usual and very proper penalty which we pay for an indiscretion!
CHAPTER VII.
Introduction of the Contraband, with some Reflections thereon—Three Months Before—Aunt Synchy and the Obi poisoning—A nice little arrangement of Egbert Crawford's.
Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether indispensable character. Not new to the world—sorrow for the world that it is not! Not new to the country—wo to the country that it has filled so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious narration—the contraband. The negro must come in, by all means and at all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed, apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more an object of mirth than of terror—and it certainly gave promise of profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and the black—the sharp profile and the broad lip—the springing instep and the protuberant heel—have been having a long tussle, with the probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-day the struggle is doubtful if not decided in favor of the black. "Here we go, up—up—uppy! Here we go, down—down—downy!" the children used to sing when playing see-saw with a broad plank on the fence; and they understood, what their elders sometimes forget—that the rebound of extreme height is descent. One more illustration, before this train of thought necessarily ceases.
Is it not recorded in all the books of relative history, that the Normans, under William the Conqueror, invaded and subjugated Saxon England and made virtual slaves of the unfortunate countrymen of Harold? Yet who were the conquered eventually? England was Saxon within fifty years of Hastings: England is Saxon to-day. The broad bosom of the Saxon mother, even when the sire of her child was a ravisher, gave out drops of strength that moulded it in spite of him, to be at last her avenger and his master! The Saxon pirate still sweeps the seas in his descendants: the Norman robber is only heard of at long intervals when he meets his opportunity at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever unloose the shackle!
Perhaps it is proper as well as inevitable that the negro should have changed his place and mounted astride of the national neck instead of being trodden under the national foot. Everything else in our surroundings has changed—why not he? We do not yet quite understand the fact—it may be; but the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood. The old deities of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution. The millionaire of two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky adventures in government transportations or army-contracts; and the jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut Street are busy resetting the diamonds of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that flashed last summer at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days; and on the "Dinorah" nights at the Academy[4] there have been new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as outre and unaccustomed in their appearance as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour there on his way to the inauguration.
[4] December 1862.
Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.
Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.