“He ought to be at peace at last.”
“He is not. Dr. Pathie says he is a case of Drapetomania.”
“I have heard that outlandish word used to express the tendency—diseased of course—that negroes have to run away from their masters.”
“Mr. Clitheroe is wild to get away from his proper master, namely, himself.”
“A desperate malady! At his age almost fatal.”
“So Pathie says. When a man of Mr. Clitheroe’s age is not at peace within, he goes into war with his circumstances. He cannot conquer them, so he runs away. He has always before him a shadow of a dream of what he might have been, and that ghost drives him and chases him, until it wears him out.”
“Yes; but it is not only the forlorn and disappointed that this pitiable disease attacks. Very rich and prosperous suffer, become drapetomaniacs, sell houses and build new, change neighborhoods, travel furiously, never able to escape from that inevitable companion of a reproaching self.”
“Mr. Clitheroe is chafing to be gone. I start a train for the States to-morrow,—the last chance to travel with escort this season,—a small topographical party going back. He has been for the last few days in a passion of impatience, almost scolding me and your party, his daughter, and circumstances, lest you should not arrive in time for him to go.”
“To go where? What does he intend?”
“He is full of great schemes. I do not know, of course, anything of him except what I have picked up from his communicativeness; but you would suppose him a duke from his talk. He speaks of his old manor-house,—I should know it by sight now,—and says he intends to repurchase it and be a great man again. He is constantly inviting me to share his new splendors. Really, his pictures of life in England will quite spoil me for another winter of cooling my heels in this dismal place, with a scalp on my head and a hundred Sioux looking at it hungrily.”