The Squire could not be otherwise than indulgent to a youth of such tastes, who was his only son and heir. In boyhood’s days he had done the same himself. For this reason, his purse-strings, held tight against all others, were loosed to his hopeful son Blount, even to aiding him in his evil courses. He was less generous to his daughter Clara, a girl gifted with great beauty, as also endowed with many of those moral graces, so becoming to woman. True, it was she who had stood in the porch while Blue Dick was undergoing the punishment of the pump. And it is true, also, that she exhibited but slight sympathy with the sufferer. Still was there something to palliate this apparent hardness of heart: she was not fully aware of the terrible pain that was being inflicted; and it was her father’s fault not hers, that she was accustomed to witness such scenes weekly—almost daily. Under other tutelage Clara Blackadder might have grown up a young lady, good as she was graceful; and under other circumstances been happier than she was on the day she was seen to such disadvantage.
That, at this time, a cloud overshadowed her fate, was evident from that overshadowing her face; for, on looking upon it, no one could mistake its expression to be other than sadness.
The cause was simple, as it is not uncommon. The lover of her choice was not the choice of her father. A youth, poor in purse, but rich in almost every other quality to make man esteemed—of handsome person, and mind adorned with rare cultivation—a stranger in the land—in short, a young Irishman, who had strayed into Mississippi, nobody knew wherefore or when. Such was he who had won the friendship of Clara Blackadder, and the enmity both of her brother and father.
In heart accepted by her—though her lips dared not declare it—he was rejected by them in words scornful, almost insulting.
They were sufficient to drive him away from the State; for the girl, constrained by parental authority, had not spoken plain enough to retain him. And he went, as he had come, no one knew whither; and perhaps only Clara Blackadder cared.
As she stood in the porch, she was thinking more of him than the punishment that was being inflicted on Blue Dick; and not even on the day after, when her maid Sylvia was discovered dead under the trees, did the dread spectacle drive from her thoughts the remembrance of a man lodged there for life!
As the overseer had predicted, Squire Blackadder, on his return home, was angry at the chastisement that had been inflicted on Blue Dick, and horrified on hearing of the tragedy that succeeded it.
The sins of his own earlier life seemed rising in retribution against him!