Miles Wallingford / Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore"

by James Fenimore Cooper

"And knowing and seeing all this, cruel Lucy, why did you suffer years of cruel, cruel doubt to hang over me?"

"Was it a woman's part to speak, Miles? I endeavoured to act naturally,--believe I did act naturally,--and I left the rest to God. Blessed be his mercy, I am rewarded!"

I folded Lucy to my heart, and, passing a moment of sweet sympathy in the embrace, we both began to talk of other things, as if mutually conscious that our feelings were too high-wrought for the place in which we were. I inquired as to the condition of things at Clawbonny, and was gratified with the report. Everybody expected me. I had no tenantry to come forth to meet me,--nor were American tenants much addicted to such practices, even when they were to be found: though the miserable sophistry on the subject of landlord and tenant,--one of the most useful and humanizing relations of civilized life,--did not then exist among us, that I am sorry to find is now getting into vogue. In that day, it was not thought 'liberty' to violate the fair covenants of a lease; and attempts to cheat a landed proprietor out of his rights were called cheating, as they ought to be--and they were called nothing else.

In that day, a lease in perpetuity was thought a more advantageous bargain for the tenant, than a lease for a year, or a term of years; and men did not begin to reason as if one indulgence gave birth to a right, to demand more. In that day, paying rent in chickens, and wood, and work, was not fancied to be a remnant of feudality, but it was regarded as a favour conferred on him who had the privilege: and even now, nine countrymen in ten endeavour to pay their debts in everything they can, before they resort to the purse. In that day, the audacious sophism of calling land a monopoly, in a country that probably possesses more than a hundred acres for every living soul within its limits, was not broached: and, in that day, knots of men did not set themselves up as special representatives of the whole community, and interpret the laws in their own favour, as if they were the first principles of the entire republic. But my pen is running away with me, and I must return to Lucy. A crisis is at hand; and we are about to see the laws triumphant, or acts of aggression that will far outdo all that has hitherto rested on the American name, as connected with a want of faith in pecuniary transactions.

Should I ever continue these adventures, occasions may offer to draw certain pictures of the signs of the times; signs that have an ominous aspect as regards real liberty, by substituting the most fearful of all tyrannies, the spurious, in its place. God alone knows for what we are reserved; but one thing is certain--there must be a serious movement backward, or the nation is lost.

I had no tenantry to come out and meet me; but there were the blacks. It is true, the law was on the point of liberating these slaves, leaving a few of the younger to serve for a term of years, that should requite their owners for the care of their infancies and their educations; but this law could not effect an immediate change in the condition of the Clawbonnys. The old ones did not wish to quit me, and never did; while it took years to loosen the tie which bound the younger portion of them to me and mine. At this hour, near twenty of them are living round me, in cottages of mine; and the service of my kitchen is entirely conducted by them. Lucy prepared me for a reception by these children of Africa, even the outcasts having united with the rest to do honour to their young master. Honour is not the word; there was too much heart in the affair for so cold a term; the negro, whatever may be his faults, almost always possessing an affectionate heart.

At length, I remembered Marble, and, taking leave of Lucy, who would not let me accompany her home, I threw myself down the path, and found my mate cogitating in the carnage, at the foot of the hill.

"Well, Miles, you seem to value this land of yours, as a seaman does his ship," cried Moses, before I had time to apologize for having kept him so long waiting. "Howsomever, I can enter into the feelin', and a blessed one it is, to get a respondentia bond off of land that belonged to a feller's grandfather. Next thing to being a bloody hermit, I hold, is to belong to nobody in a crowded world; and I would not part with one kiss from little Kitty, or one wrinkle of my mother's, for all the desert islands in the ocean. Come, sit down now, my lad--why, you look as red as a rose-bud, and as if you had been running up and down hill the whole time you've been absent."

"It is sharp work to come down such a hill as this on a trot. Well, here I am at your side; what would you wish to know?"

"Why, lad, I've been thinkin', since you were away, of the duties of a bride's-maid,"--to his dying day, Moses always insisted he had acted in this capacity at my wedding;--"for the time draws near, and I wouldn't wish to discredit you, on such a festivity. In the first place, how am I to be dressed? I've got the posy you mentioned in your letter, stowed away safe in my trunk. Kitty made it for me last week, and a good-looking posy it was, the last time I saw it."