For his master wuz not a good man. He wuz hard, haughty, implacable. He wuz attached to Victor much as a manufacturer would be to an extra good piece of machinery by which his gains wuz enhanced.
Victor wuz an exceptionally good servant; he watched over his employer’s interests, he wuz honest amongst a retinue of dishonest ones. He saved his employer’s money when many of his feller-servants seemed to love to throw it away. His keen intelligence and native loyalty and honesty found many ways of advancin’ his master’s interests, and he helped him in so many ways that Col. Seybert had come to consider his services invaluable to him.
Still, and perhaps he thought it wuz the best way to make Victor feel his place and not consider himself of more consequence than he wuz—and it wuzn’t in the nater of Col. Seybert to be anything but mean, mean as pusley, and meaner—
Anyway, he treated Victor with extreme insolence, and cruelty, and brutality. Mebby he thought that if he didn’t “hold the lines tight,” as he called it, Victor might make disagreeable demands upon his purse, or his time, or in some way seek for a just recognition of his services.
Col. Seybert, too, drank heavily, which might perhaps be some excuse for his brutality, but made it no easier for Victor to endure.
At such times Col. Seybert wuz wont to address Victor as “his noble brother,” and order his “noble brother” to take off his boots, or put them on, or carry him upstairs, or perform still more menial services for him, he swearin’ at him roundly all the time, and mixin’ his oaths with whatever vile and contemptible epithets he could think of—and he could think of a good many.
And perhaps it did not make it easier for Victor to obey him that he told the truth in his drunken babble. Victor wuz his brother, and they two wuz the only descendants of the gallant old Gen. Seybert, the handsomest, the wittiest, the bravest and the most courtly man of his day.
He went down to the grave the owner of many hundred slaves, the husband of a fair young bride, and the father of two children, one the only son of his pretty Northern bride, the other the son of his mother’s maid.
And what made matters still more complicated and hard to understand, to this unowned, despised son had descended all the bright wit and philosophical mind, and suave, gentle, courteous manners of this fine gentleman Gen. Seybert; and to the son and legal heir of all his wealth, not a bit of his father’s sense, bright mind, and good manners.
One of his maternal great-uncles had been a rich, new-made man of low tastes and swaggerin’, aggressive manners. It wuz a sad thing that these inherited traits and tastes should just bound over one gentlemanly generation and swoop down upon the downy, lace-festooned cradle of this only son and heir—but they did.