"Hold your infernal tongue! I'm telling this story. When we got her home, of course the reaction set in. She had been as brave as a lion all the time before, but now she couldn't hold up her head. She just lay on the bed up-stairs, with her great black eyes staring out of her white face, and by George, sir, I thought she was certain to kick the bucket. The only thing that roused her was when old Scaife Beverly, Jack's uncle, died without a will, and Jack got every cent the old curmudgeon left. Jack had hung around here ever since Mrs. Corbin came, but she wouldn't see him, and so months and months went on. At last one evening when she was well enough to sit up—it was more than a year after the trial—she was sitting in the chamber there by the dining-room, looking devilish pretty in a white wrapper, when—"
"I seen Marse Jack comin', and I run round de house an' tole him fur Gord A'mighty's sake ter run in missis's chamber, kase I was feerd Miss Ferginny Corbin had done had a fit er sumpin. Co'se she didn't have no fit; I jes' say it ter git him in d'yar, an' he jump through de winder openin' on de po'ch, and when he see her he say, kinder solemn, 'Ferginny!' I never will forgit de way he say 'Ferginny.' 'Twas jes' same as if he'd tole her, 'I loves you better'n anything in de whole wide worl'.' An' Miss Ferginny she fall back in her cheer, an' she begin ter cry, and say, 'Don't! don't! I'm too wicked to live!' when Marse Jack he just tooken her in he arms an' kiss her. I got so intrusted wid dem conjurements I jes' stan' like I done tooken root and look in de winder twell arf' while Marse Jack seen me, an' he pick up ole marse's boot-jack layin' on de flo' an' shy it at me. I dodge, an' it broke missis's lookin'-glass an' her big red berangium in de flower-pot. He gin me a dollar naix day, an' missis she quile wid him 'bout breakin' her lookin'-glass." Then the colonel took his turn.
"They wanted to go away from the county, but I told them they'd better stay where they were known. It could be lived down sooner here than anywhere else. Upon my soul they were the most devoted married couple I ever saw. But the Thorntons were short-lived people, and Jack died at forty. That killed Virginia. She never held up her head afterward. I don't think she lived six months. The madam said it was better she should die than live. They had no children. And a lot of damned, thrifty, industrious Yankees bought Northend, and they've got a confounded steam-plow that frightens all my horses, and they raise hay all over the place, and they've built an infernal ice-house on top of the ground instead of under it, and they work the whole place with twenty hands instead of sixty, as Jack Thornton did, and make more money than all the rest of the county put together, and I want a julep—d'ye hear, you yellow rascal?"
THE VALBELLA BROTHERS.
It isn't necessary for me to tell how I drifted into the burnt-cork profession, but I tell you, after my preliminary experience of life without burnt cork, I was glad enough when I could march up to the manager's office and get my fifteen dollars a week for amusing my masters, the public. And I was always in such a hurry to get my money—we were paid Saturday night, after the performance—that I didn't wait to wash the burnt cork off before dropping in for the three five-dollar notes which I was certain to get; for old Sam Stacker, God bless him! was full of cranks, and always had a particular way of paying us.
Now I can't say I was a brilliant performer. I never reached the dignity of interlocutor, to say nothing of the envied height of Bones or the end man. I just stood a good way back, and pretended to play on the 'cello—I couldn't play a note, and was nothing but a dummy, but I could sing pretty well. I remember how when I came to the front I used to bring the house down with "The Nightingale." I was great on sentimental songs. Sam Stacker used to say I was a good all-round man. I was quick at figures—Sam wasn't—and I helped him out in his accounts. Then I could talk to the theatre managers and write them letters. I had had some education and bringing up in my pre-Sam Stacker days, and so somehow I stayed on with the company, and saw it expand from a small variety show into a first-class minstrel performance, and old Sam always said it never would have come to that if it hadn't been for me. Of course my salary was raised after a while, and I got to putting some of it away for a rainy day.
Well, as I said, except as a singer, I wasn't good for much at first, but after a while I got to singing first-rate. I took a few lessons now and then, and I learned to sing falsetto. I was boyish looking, although I was twenty-five years old, and I used to come out dressed in a low-necked pink silk gown, with my hair all curled up, and a bunch of puffs on the top of my head and a fan in my hand, and sing Il Bacio and the Magnetic Waltz, as well as plenty of women concert singers, so the people said. Those curls, though, on the top of my head, used to bother me dreadfully. It took Sam and me a good quarter of an hour to get them in place, and Sam invariably swore like a pirate during the operation. All the time I was singing I was thinking about my back hair.
For a long time a notion had been in my head to bring out something original in the show. All minstrel shows are alike, and I couldn't for the life of me hit on anything that Sam Stacker didn't say, "Oh, I seen that down in Tennessee in '58," or "That there thing was introduced in New Orleens along about '61," or something discouraging of the kind. At last I did hit upon something. It's old enough now, but it was new then.