A SLAVE'S GRATITUDE!
And now I have to tell, as briefly as may be, of how the Honourable Roderick St. Amande--as he said he was, and as we all came to believe he was in very truth--who had come as a bought slave and bond-servant to our house, became ere long almost one of us, mixing on the same footing with us and, indeed, living almost the life of a member of my father's family. To listen to his discourse was, indeed, to be forced to believe in him, for while he had ceased to insist upon the truth of his position, as though 'twas no longer necessary, every word he uttered showed that he must have held that position at home and had, at least, mixed amongst those with whom he claimed to be on an equality. He spoke of other lords and ladies with such easy freedom as no impostor could have assumed who had only known them by sight or hearsay; he described London and Dublin, and the Courts of both, in a manner which other Virginians, who were in the habit of paying frequent visits home, acknowledged was perfectly just and accurate, and, above all, his easy assumption of familiarity, if not superiority, to those whom he designated as "colonials" and "emigrants," impressed everyone. To my father, whose bread he ate in easy servitude, he behaved with a not disrespectful freedom; Gregory he treated as a sort of provincial acquaintance; and to Mary Mills and myself he assumed an easy degree of intercourse which was at once amusing and galling. And that he was a bought slave who might be starved or flogged, and possibly killed if his master were cruelly disposed, he seemed to have entirely forgotten.
Yet--bitter as is the confession, knowing now how this wretch repaid at last that which was done for him--all of us came to regard him as an intimate, and, if the truth must be told, to take some amusement in his society. To my father he could tell many interesting stories, young as he was, of men moving in the gay world at home, of whom the former had heard, or with whose forerunners he had been acquainted. To Gregory he described the hunting of the fox in England and Ireland; racing which he had seen at Newmarket and on Hampstead Heath and Southsea Common, new guns that were invented for the chase, and the improved breeds of harriers that were trained in Wiltshire. To Mary and myself--shame on us that we loved to hear such things!--he would tell of the ladies of the Court and their love affairs and intriguings; of the women of the theatres and their great appetites and revellings, and of the balls and ridottos and "hops," as he termed them, which took place. Of books, though he had been at school at Harrow, he seemed to know nothing, though he had little scraps of Latin which he would lug into his conversation as suitable to the subject. Yet to us, to Mary who had never been allowed to go to a theatre in England, or to me who dwelt in a land where such a thing had never at this time been heard of, and where an exhibition of a polar bear, or a lion, or a camel in a barn was a marvel that drew crowds from miles around, his talk was agreeable.
Unfortunately, however, there was that about him which led us two women--though I was scarce a woman then--to keep him at his distance. Being made free of the rum and the sangaree as well as, sometimes, the imported brandy, and being often with the young gentlemen of other plantations, whom he soon came to know, he was frequently inebriated, and, when in this state, was not fit to be encountered. My white bondmaid, Christian Lamb (who as a girl of fourteen had been sentenced to death in London for stealing a bottle of sweetmeats, but was afterwards cast for transportation) was one of the objects of his passion until her brother, a convict, threatened to have revenge if he did not desist. Of this brother so strange a thing was related that I must here repeat it. Going to bid farewell to his sister, Christian, in the transport at Woolwich, near London, he begged the captain to take him, too, as a foremast man, but this the other refused, bidding him brutally to wait but a little while and he would doubtless come soon "in the proper way," namely, as a convict himself. Enraged, he went ashore and picked a gentleman's pocket of a handkerchief, when, sure enough, he came out in the next transport to Virginia, and, enquiring for his sister, had the extreme good fortune to attract my father's notice and to be bought by him.
To Mary and to me Mr. St. Amande ever used the language of his class, as, I suppose, in England, and would exclaim:
"How beautiful you both are. You, Miss Mills, are dark as the Queen of Night, as the fellow saith in the play, while you Miss Bampfyld are like unto the lilies of the field. 'Tis well I have not to stay here long or my heart would be irremediably gone--split in twain, one half labelled 'Mary,' t'other 'Joice.' Nay, I know not that I do not love you both now."
"Best keep your love, sir," Mary would reply, "for those who wish it, as doubtless there are many. 'Tis said you admire many of the bond-women below; why not offer your love to them as well as your pretty speeches?"
Whereon he would flush up and reply, "Madam, my love is for my equals. You forget I am a peer in the future."
"And a slave in the present," she would retort, as it seemed to me then, cruelly. "Therefore are the bond-women your equals."
His drunkenness angered my father so, that, sometimes, he would order him out of the great saloon, where he would unconcernedly sprawl about, soiling our imported Smyrna and Segodia carpets, disarranging our old English furniture we prized so much, and rumpling the silk and satin covers on the couches. Then, when ordered forth, he would often disappear for a day or so, to be heard of next as being at a cock-fight at some neighbouring hamlet; or in a drinking bout with our clergyman, a most depraved divine who was only kept in his position till a more decorous person could be obtained; or herding down with the bond-servants and negroes till driven away by the overseers.