A faithful slave to old Miss Johnstone of Crown Street, Juma had been forced by his mistress's death into new service. He was a picture of ebonized urbanity, a good specimen of the vanished race of Gotham blacks, gentler in manners and clearer in speech than their Southern cousins. In his youth he had been sent to one Jean Toussaint of Elizabethtown to learn the art of hair-dressing. He could impart much knowledge of wigs to a wigless age, and talked in a grandiloquent fashion of Spencers, Albemarles, and Lavants. Many a beau peruke and macaroni toupee his lithe fingers curled and sprinkled with sweet flower-water. The voices of the fine people who were his visitors made constant music in his memory, and his tongue was ever ready with anecdotes of wizened beauties and uncrowned cavaliers.
Juma was faithful to the period of his greatest splendor. Deep in his heart he despised the home to which freedom and poverty had led him after the demise of his protectress. "Gold braid on company coat and silk stockings done ravel out in dese days. Knickerbockers talk quality, but dey ain't got quality mannahs—Missy Patsy is de only one of dem with tone."
He loved to listen to the girl as she tripped through the great rooms, humming softly some air from Lennet's "London Song-Book"—one of the relics of his "ole Miss." Patricia always sang on the days when her sisters were visiting their aunts on the bluff. Juma loved her, and during his five years' residence in the family had many times taken her youthful mind in train with quaint eighteenth-century maxims and fetiches.
"De wise miss drop her fan when she enters de ballroom," he would say. "Den she gets de men on der knees from de start."
"I wish I were invited to balls," Patricia sighed. "The Kings and Grahams give one or two every year, but father never notices them."
"Well, you jes' know how to behave," he chuckled. "Doan' yo' forget de tricks your Uncle Juma taught yo'."
When the two had met in the attic that April day, Juma's spirits were as ebullient as usual.
"How lovely she is, Juma! See, there is a blush on each cheek. Her pink brocade makes me think of a rose dancing in the wind."
Patricia stared into the canvas face before her and the lips seemed to curve themselves into the shadow of a smile. "I know you were the fairest one of us," she whispered, "the fairest and the best."
"Dat's the real quality way of holding the head," vouchsafed Juma. "I'se pow'ful 'clined to think she looks like yo', missy." And then they had laughed, shut away with maimed chairs, tired spinets, and other voiceless things, glad to have escaped from Knickerbocker frowns.