"Yes; but cursed in Caleb," he replied.
"Our last wedding, as free people, was not equal to the first as slaves."
"That was because Caleb came in between."
"How many ex-slaves have considered the significance of these second weddings?"
"How many fathers and mothers have been cursed by only sons?"
Caleb entered the room as his father uttered these words, and struck him violently over the heart. The old man straightened up, gasped spasmodically, clutched at his breast wildly, and then fell heavily to the floor. Caleb, with a parting sneer, left the room, while Patsy ran to the aid of her husband. She turned him on his back, opened his shirt at the neck, but her efforts were of no avail. Benjamin was dead.
Patsy did not report Caleb for the murder of his father, but went on thinking her own theology and asking Rahab to explain.
"A thirty-dollar coffin? No, no, undertaker! A five-dollar robe? No, no, undertaker! Four carriages? No, no, undertaker! Think you the living have no rights? Cold, rigid dignity will suffice the dead, but the living must have money. He was my father, and I am his heir; therefore, speedy forgetfulness for the one and luxury for the other. Five hundred dollars are upon his life. As four hundred and fifty slip through my fingers I'll remember I owe him something for dying a pauper. Twenty dollars will keep Patsy chewing starch; and you, undertaker, may have the rest, and the thanks of science for your services. Why gaze upon the dead? Think you how you can make it twenty? At twenty? At twenty, you say? Cigars, cigars, ten dollars for cigars. You can't? Out! Out! Out! Offend not the living by pitying the dead."
Caleb thus addressed the undertaker while gazing upon the dead body of his father.
As the undertaker left the room Patsy hobbled in upon her crutches, sat close to the corpse and sobbed aloud.