But soon after he came to Belle Fanchon, and after he had met and loved Genieve, Col. Seybert’s treatment became so unendurable that Victor begged of his mother to go away with him, tellin’ her he could now earn a good livin’ for her; and he had dreams, hardly formulated to himself then, of the future of his mother’s race. They lay in his heart as seeds lie in the dark ground, waitin’ for the time to spring up—they were germinatin’, waitin’ for the dawn to waken them to rich luxuriance.
But his mother felt that she could not leave her kind mistress in her lonely troubles, and she entreated him prayerfully that he would not leave her, “and she could not go away and leave Miss Alice with that tyrant and murderer”—for so she called Col. Seybert in her wrath.
And his mistress’s anguished entreaties that he would not leave her, for she felt that she had but a little time to live, her health was failin’ all the time—
“And the blessed lamb would die without us anyway,” his mother would say to Victor—
And all these arguments added to his loyal desire to befriend this gentle mistress who had educated him and done for him all she could have done for son or brother—all these arguments caused him to stay on.
But after comin’ to Seybert Court, Victor had given Col. Seybert another opportunity to empty the vials of his wrath upon him.
Victor had a bosom friend, a young man in about the same circumstances that he wuz—only this friend, Felix Ward, had lived with a kind master and mistress durin’ his childhood and early youth.
His father and mother wuz both dead; his father bein’ killed in the war, and his mother soon followin’ him.
He wuz an intelligent negro, with no white blood in his veins, so far as he knew. Felix, for so he had been named when he looked like a tiny black doll, by his young mistress, to whom the world looked so happy and prosperous that everything assumed a roseate hue to her.
Her faithful servant, his mother, brought the little image in ebony to her room to show it to her, jest after she had read the letter from the man she loved askin’ her to be his wife.