“You are Miss De Vere, I’m sure,” he said, “and you are very kind. I shall not tax your hospitality long. I hope to go on to-night. Don’t stay here, Miss De Vere; you must be uncomfortable. It’s hotter here than in Massachusetts.”
“You are from New England, then?” Maude asked, and Tom replied:
“From Boston,—yes,—your people hate us most of all I believe,” and Tom tried to smile, while Maude answered him,
“It makes no difference to me whether you are from Maine or Oregon. You are sick and have come to us for succor. I’ll do what I can to help you.”
With the last words she was gone, her tall, lithe figure bending gracefully under the low doorway, and the rustle of her fresh, clean garments leaving a pleasant sound in Tom Carleton’s ears.
“A sick Yankee down in Hetty’s cabin,—a Boston one at that, with his Wendell Phillips notions, and you want me to let him be brought up to this house, the house of a Southern gentleman, who, if he hates one of the dogs worse than another, hates the Massachusetts kind, whose women have nothing to do but to write Abolition books about our niggers. No, indeed; he shall not come an inch, and by the Harry I’ll send for the authorities and have him bundled off to jail before night, with his camp fever, and his Boston airs. Needn’t talk. See if I don’t do it, and I’ll have Hetty strung up and whipped for harboring the villain. Treason under my very nose, and a Yankee, too! Go away,—go away, I tell you. I won’t hear you. I hate ’em all for the cussedness there is in ’em.”
This was Squire Tunbridge’s reply to Maude De Vere, who had told him of Tom Carleton, and asked permission to have him moved up to the house. Nothing daunted, Maude went close up to him, and her beautiful eyes looked straight into his as she said:
“Think if it was Arthur sick among his enemies. They were kind to him, he says, and remember Nettie, too. Had she lived she would have married a Northern man. You liked Robert, and Nettie loved him. For her sake let this man be brought to the house. He will die there, where it is so close.”
“Serve him right for coming down here to fight us; wish they were all dead. How are you going to get the rascal up that confounded hill? Can he walk?”