This being settled, Alice’s next inquiry was for her cat, and her brown eyes opened wide with wonder when told of the six young kittens which had a home in Ben Burt’s grocery, and one of which was called for her.
“It ought to be blind,” said the little girl, and, with a quivering chin, Ben answered:
“That’s it, though I shouldn’t have told you for fear of hurtin’ your feelin’s. The little cat is blind, and when Sandy—that’s a boy who lives there—said how he would kill it for me, it struck to my stomick to once, for that little critter lies even nigher to my heart than the handsomest, sleekest one, which I call ‘Marian Grey,’ and ’tis grey, too, with mottled spots all over its back, while Alice is white as milk!”
The cat story being satisfactorily concluded, Ben went out to renew his acquaintance with the negroes, who vied with each other in paying him marked attention. Though they did not quite understand it, they knew that he was in some way connected with the return of their young mistress, and neither Dinah nor Hetty made the least objection when, before night, they saw the two black babies which had usurped the rights of Dud and Victory, seated upon his lap and “riding to Boston to buy penny cakes,” at a rate which bade fair to throw them to the top of the ceiling at least, if not to land them somewhere in the vicinity of the bay state capital.
The next morning, Frederic, Marian and Alice started for Ohio, leaving Ben in charge at Redstone Hall.
“He’d tend to the niggers,” he said, and he bade the “Square,” as he persisted in calling Frederic, “not to worry at all about things to hum.”
The family had scarcely been gone an hour when Dinah came in quest of Ben, whom she found in the parlor drumming Yankee Doodle upon the piano with one hand and whistling by way of accompaniment.
“Thar was the queerest actin’ man in the dinin’ room,” she said, “and he done ax for marster, and when I tole him he had gone to the ’Hio with his wife, he laughed so hateful, and say how’t she isn’t his wife, that I come for you, ’case thar’s a look in his eye I don’t like.”
“Catch him tellin’ me Marian ain’t a lawful wife,” said Ben, starting from the stool and hurrying to the dining room, where very much intoxicated, Rudolph McVicar was sitting.
He had landed not long before at New Orleans, and coming up the river as far as Louisville had stopped in that city, where he accidentally heard a young man speak of Frederic’s wedding party, which had taken place the previous night.