The evil day has arrived; the ruin, foreseen, has fallen.
The mortgage deed, so long held in menace over the head of Archibald Armstrong—suspended, as it were, by a thread, like the sword of Damocles—is to be put into execution. Darke has demanded immediate payment of the debt, coupled with threat of foreclosure.
The demand is a month old, the threat has been carried out, and the foreclosure effected. The thread having been cut, the keen blade of adversity has come down, severing the tie which attached Colonel Armstrong to his property, as it to him. Yesterday, he was owner, reputedly, of one of the finest plantations along the line of the Mississippi river, an hundred able-bodied negroes hoeing cotton in his fields, with fifty more picking it from the pod, and “ginning” the staple clear of seed; to-day, he is but their owner in seeming, Ephraim Darke being this in reality. And in another day the apparent ownership will end: for Darke has given his debtor notice to yield up houses, lands, slaves, plantation-stock—in short, everything he possesses.
In vain has Armstrong striven against this adverse fate; in vain made endeavours to avert it. When men are falling, false friends grow falser; even true ones becoming cold. Sinister chance also against him; a time of panic—a crisis in the money-market—as it always is on such occasions, when interest runs high, and second mortgages are sneered at by those who grant loans.
As no one—neither friend nor financial speculator—comes to Armstrong’s rescue, he has no alternative but submit.
Too proud, to make appeal to his inexorable creditor—indeed deeming it idle—he vouchsafes no answer to the notice of foreclosure, beyond saying: “Let it be done.”
At a later period he gives ear to a proposal, coming from the mortgagee: to put a valuation upon the property, and save the expenses of a public sale, by disposing of it privately to Darke himself.
To this he consents; less with a view to the convenience of the last, than because his sensitive nature recoils from the vulgarism of the first. Tell me a more trying test to the delicate sensibilities of a gentleman, or his equanimity, than to see his gate piers pasted over with the black and white show bills of the auctioneer; a strip of stair carpet dangling down from one of his bedroom windows, and a crowd of hungry harpies clustered around his door-stoop; some entering with eyes that express keen concupiscence; others coming out with countenances more beatified, bearing away his Penates—jeering and swearing over them—insulting the Household Gods he has so long held in adoration. Ugh! A hideous, horrid sight—a spectacle of Pandemonium!
With a vision of such domestic iconoclasm flitting before his mind—not a dream, but a reality, that will surely arise by letting his estate go to the hammer—Colonel Armstrong accepts Darke’s offer to deliver everything over in a lump, and for a lamp sum. The conditions have been some time settled; and Armstrong now knows the worst. Some half-score slaves he reserves; the better terms secured to his creditor by private bargain enabling him to obtain this concession.
Several days have elapsed since the settlement came to a conclusion—the interval spent in preparation for the change. A grand one, too; which contemplates, not alone leaving the old home, but the State in which it stands. The fallen man shrinks from further association with those who have witnessed his fall. Not but that he will leave behind many friends, faithful and true. Still to begin life again in their midst—to be seen humbly struggling at the bottom of the ladder on whose top he once proudly reposed—that would indeed be unendurable.