"And well he may. Have you forgot Judith's and Ralph's attempt to 'realize' him when his master died?--to huddle him over to Buffalo and sell him into slavery again. Miss Judith thought she could do so much good with the money, and Ralph encouraged her, and undertook to arrange the transaction on the American side, when he would quietly have pocketed the money, I make no doubt. If you had not interfered and explained things to the poor boy he certainly would have fallen into their trap, and been disposed of for cash down. He is the only decent nigger I ever saw, and the only one who could have been so imposed on. Oh, yes! He would do anything for you or the child."
"Dinner will be on the table almost at once, George. Come in and get ready."
"Ah, yes! Dinner and something cool, after the long broiling day. By-and-by, when the candles are lit, and the moths and beetles come droning in from the darkness to singe their wings in the flame, we will have music and a little singing. Some of those dear old songs by the masters we used to revel in long ago. Haydn and the rest. Such as 'Gra-a-aceful partner.'"
"Quite so, your highness. That I may have to respond 'Spouse adorèd,' my most sovereign lord and master! Ha, ha, ha! What it is to be a lord of creation! Meanwhile, there is the bell. Hurry to your room."
CHAPTER IV.
["OUFF."]
The hour which saw Mary Selby thus lapping herself in her simple joys, was the same which witnessed the brewing of the storm destined to wreck and scatter them. A premonition must have been upon her spirits--that impalpable tremor and exhilaration preceding a catastrophe which whets the perceptions to intenser enjoyment before the destroying assault, like advancing fire which illumines, expands, and glorifies ere it leaps on its prey and turns it into smoke and ashes. It is certain at least that her spirits overstepped the limit of their tranquil wont. She turned over the piles of music with her husband in search of something to sing, but the measured graces of the older works were all too serious for her mood.
"Your masters are prosy, George," she cried; "I could not settle down to sing them to-night. Let us have that new duet from the 'Grand Duchesse.'"
"From Bach to Offenbach," he answered. "What a leap! You really are exuberant to-night. What next?"
Five or six miles away, on the lake-like broadening of the river which stretches upward from Lachine, a canoe was drifting under the lee of the wooded islands, and in it sat Ralph Herkimer. Remaining in town through the summer to watch the fluctuations of the gold-room--it was during the American war--he betook himself each afternoon to Lachine, to exchange the dust of streets for the breezy coolness of the water. He had been fishing, and Paul, an Indian from the Indian village of Caughnawaga near by, managed the canoe. His fishing had not prospered. It seemed indifferent to him, indeed, whether he got "bites" or not, but still from time to time he made a cast of the line, with his eyes brooding on the water where the slackened current drifted lazily by, with its rhythmic ripples flickering in the reddening light. The sun went down behind heavy banks of cloud, and the grey twilight stole silently up with that listening stillness which makes audible the murmur of the stream, a sound unnoticed in the garish hurry of noon when the world is vocal with a hundred noises, but heard at eve when other things with life have sunk to sleep.