"Oh, yes; but it is not the prejudice there that worries me. It is the prejudice here. It is the barrier my color brings between me and the only being whose regard I crave!"
The girl's cheeks grew rosier than ever, but she affected not to understand, and once more reverted to the errand that had brought her thither.
"You promised me the documents with which my poor father has been tortured," she said, reproachfully; "let us not talk of other things until you have given them to me."
The negro drew from a pocket of his coat a fair-sized package tied with a ribbon.
"They are all there," he said. "Every scrap, every particle of proof, everything that could bring the breath of suspicion upon your father's honesty. All there, in that little envelope."
She reached for it, but instead of giving it to her, Hannibal caught her hand, and before she dreamed what he intended, pressed a kiss upon it. The next moment the girl, with a look of outraged womanhood, was rubbing the spot with her handkerchief, as if he had covered it with poison.
"You brute!" she exclaimed. "You—you—"
She could not find the word she wanted; nothing in the language she spoke seemed detestable enough to fill the measure of her wrong.
"You see!" he answered, bitterly. "Because I am black I cannot touch the hand of a woman that is white. You have claimed to be without the hatred of the African so ingrained among Americans; you have talked about the Almighty making of one blood all the nations of the earth; and yet you are like the rest! A viper's bite could not have aroused deeper disgust in you than my lips. And all because the sun shone more vertically on my ancestors than it did on yours!"
Daisy was divided between her horror of the act he had committed and her anxiety to do something to free her father from his danger. She suppressed the hateful epithets that rose to her tongue and once more entreated the negro to give her the packet he held in his possession.