"Our leading man?"
"Certainly, your leading man. Whose lead did you follow, when you joined in worrying Charles Shaler out of your community of gentlemen?"
Westlake shrank. He was conscious that he had been going down hill ever since Shaler left the neighborhood. The hold that Rasey took of him then the crafty old man has never let go.
When Westlake's plantation came into his possession by the death of his father, he undertook to carry it on himself, and has been supposed to do so ever since. It was carried on well from the time that Senator was old enough to take charge; but with his disappearance disappeared all the credit and all the comfort his good management had secured to his master. Westlake needed some one to lean on, and Rasey was ready to take advantage of this necessity. His ascendancy was not established all at once. It is only during the last year that it has been perfected. In the beginning, he gave just a touch of advice and withdrew; showed himself again at discreet intervals, gradually shortened; but, all the time, was casting about his victim the singly almost impalpable threads of his deadly thraldom, until they had formed a coil which forbade even an effort after freedom. Westlake had put no overseer between himself and his people; but he had, without well knowing how it came about, set a very hard one over both. He found the indulgences on his plantation diminished, the tasks more rigidly enforced, the holidays fewer. The punishments, which were before sometimes capriciously severe, but more often threatened and remitted, he was now expected to carry out with the inflexibility of fate. He has found himself reduced to plotting with his servants against himself,—to aiding them in breaking or evading his own laws; reduced—worst humiliation of all—to ordering, under the sharp eye and sharp voice of his officious neighbor, the infliction of chastisement for neglect which he himself had authorized or connived at.
All came of that unhappy Christmas I have told you of. If Westlake could only have been silent, the simple plot devised by Senator would have worked perfectly. All the neighborhood would have respected a secret that was its own. But Westlake could not be silent; he was too uneasy. It was not long before the culprit's escape and his master's part in it were more than surmised. In view of the effect of such a transaction on the servile imagination, Westlake's weakness was ignored by common consent; but it was not the less incumbent upon him to reinstate himself in opinion on the first opportunity. The opportunity was offered by the storm then brewing against Shaler.
Westlake's sufferings are, happily for him, intermittent. Rasey is away from the neighborhood one month out of every three, looking after the estates of yet more unlucky vassals,—his through debt, and not from simple weakness. During these intervals, Westlake takes his ease with his people, as thoughtless as they of consequences no more within his ability to avert than theirs. He has lately had an unusual respite. Rasey has been confined to the house by an illness,—the first of his life.
I do not know how far Dr. Borrow is aware of Westlake's humiliations; and Westlake, I think, does not know. When he was able to speak again, he sheltered himself under a question.
"Do you know Rasey?"
"He is owner of the plantation which lies south of yours and Shaler's, larger than both together."