"Upon my word, miss," cried our young gentleman, "you compel me to confess that I find myself in the society of one vastly more to my inclination than that of any houri of my acquaintance."
With such lively badinage, occasionally lapsing into more serious discourse, the dinner passed off with a great deal of pleasantness to our young gentleman, who had prepared himself for something prodigiously dull and heavy. After the repast, a pipe of tobacco in the summer-house and a walk in the garden so far completed his cheerful impressions that when he rode away towards Pig and Sow Point he found himself accompanied by the most lively, agreeable thoughts imaginable. Her wit, how subtle! Her person, how beautiful! He surprised himself smiling with a fatuous indulgence of his enjoyable fancies.
Nor did the young lady's thoughts, though doubtless of a more moderate sort, assume a less pleasing perspective. Our young gentleman was favored with a tall, erect figure, a high nose, and a fine, thin face expressive of excellent breeding. It seemed to her that his manners possessed an elegance and a grace that she had never before discovered beyond the leaves of Mr. Richardson's ingenious novels. Nor was she unaware of the admiration of herself that his countenance had expressed. Upon so slender a foundation she amused herself for above an hour, erecting such castles in the air that, had any one discovered her thought, she would have perished of mortification.
But though our young lady so yielded herself to the enjoyment of such silly dreams as might occur to any miss of a lively imagination and vivacious temperament, the reader is to understand that she has yet so much dignity and spirit as to cover these foolish and romantic fancies with a cloak of so delicate and so subtle a reserve that when the young gentleman called to pay his respects the next afternoon he quitted her presence ten times more infatuated with her charms than he had been the day before.
Nor can it be denied that our young lady knew perfectly well how to make the greatest use of such opportunities. She already possessed a great deal of experience in teasing the other sex with those delicious though innocent torments that cause the eyes of the victim to remain awake at night and the fancy to dream throughout the day.
Such presently became the condition of our young gentleman that at the end of the month he knew not whether his present life had continued for weeks or for years; in the charming infatuation that overpowered him he considered nothing of time, every other consideration being engulfed in his desire for the society of his charmer. Cards and dice lost for him their accustomed pleasure, and when a gay society would be at Belford's Palace it was with the utmost difficulty that he assumed so much patience as to take his part in those dissipations that there obtained. Relieved from them, he flew with redoubled ardor back to the gratification of his passion again.
In the mean time Captain Obadiah had become so accustomed to the presence of his guest that he made no pretence of any concealment of that iniquitous, dreadful avocation that lent to Pig and Sow Point so great a terror in those parts. Rather did the West Indian appear to court the open observation of his dependant.
One exquisite day in the last of October our young gentleman had spent the greater part of the afternoon in the society of the beautiful object of his regard. The leaves, though fallen from the trees in great abundance, appeared thereby only to have admitted of the passage of a riper radiance of golden sunlight through the thinning branches. This and the ardor of his passion had so transported our hero that when he had departed from her presence he seemed to walk as light as a feather, and knew not whether it was the warmth of the sunlight or the heat of his own impetuous transports that filled the universe with so extreme a brightness.
Overpowered with these absorbing and transcendent introspections, he approached his now odious home upon Pig and Sow Point by way of the old meeting-house. There of a sudden he came upon his patron, Captain Obadiah, superintending the burial of the last of three victims of his odious commerce, who had died that afternoon. Two had already been interred, and the third new-made grave was in the process of being filled. Two men, one a negro and the other a white, had nearly completed their labor, tramping down the crumbling earth as they shovelled it into the shallow excavation. Meanwhile Captain Obadiah stood near by, his red coat flaming in the slanting light, himself smoking a pipe of tobacco with all the ease and coolness imaginable. His hands, clasped behind his back, held his ivory-headed cane, and as our hero approached he turned an evil countenance upon him, and greeted him with a grin at once droll, mischievous, and malevolent in the extreme. "And how is our pretty charmer this afternoon?" quoth Captain Obadiah.
Conceive, if you please, of a man floating in the most ecstatic delight of heaven pulled suddenly thence down into the most filthy extremity of hell, and then you shall understand the motions of disgust and repugnance and loathing that overpowered our hero, who, awakening thus suddenly out of his dream of love, found himself in the presence of that grim and obscene spectacle of death—who, arousing from such absorbing and exquisite meditations, heard his ears greeted with so rude and vulgar an address.