“You see, Emily,” said Harrington, sadly, breaking the pause, “that your promise to Roux cannot be fulfilled. It is now our painful problem how to destroy his new hope, without giving him the anguish of an explanation. We are in a very difficult position.”
“Oh, if I had only known of this!” cried Emily, in bitter distress. “As long as Roux expected nothing, he had only his ordinary pain. But I have lifted the poor man to this height only to dash him into a pit of despair.”
“Hush, dear Emily,” said Muriel, tenderly. “Do not reproach yourself. You could not have imagined that an effort had been made to buy Roux’s brother. So don’t feel badly about it. We will devise some means of escape out of this dilemma. What I am most afraid of is, that Lafitte may, after all, find out Harrington, and get on the track of Roux.”
“In which case,” said Harrington, tranquilly, “it would be a good idea to take him to Southac street and show him Roux’s house.”
“Harrington!” exclaimed Emily, almost shrilly.
“Yes indeed it would,” said Harrington, quietly. “But before I showed him the house, I would say two words to Elkanah Brown. I’ll engage that he would hurry back to the pirate civilization that spawned him, resolved never to set foot in Boston again. The negroes here would sound a roar in his ears that he would remember to his dying day.”
“Good Heavens, Harrington,” cried Emily, “they would kill him!”
Harrington’s face was calm, but his blue eyes gleamed, and his broad nostrils lifted with passionate emotion.
“And if I were an American patriot, pure and simple,” he replied, “I would answer that it would be no matter if they did, and that Bunker Hill is near enough to keep tyrannicide in countenance. You remember what one of our leading Whigs said in convention many years ago—in the time, when to be a Whig was not to be a Webster Whig, with a fine speech for kidnapping. ‘Why, sir,’ foamed a slaveholder, ‘if your doctrines obtain, our slaves would cut our throats for us.’ ‘And in God’s name,’ said our Whig friend, tossing the words over his shoulder—‘in God’s name, why shouldn’t they!’”