396
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I
was,"
she said, "until-until she looked at me like that."
"You know why you got that price for her?" Cass asked, and
without waiting for an answer, went on: "Because she's yellow and
comely and well-made. Oh, the drovers wouldn't take her down
chained in a coffle. They wouldn't wear her down. They'll take her
down the river soft. And you know why?"
"Yes, I know why," she said, "and what
is
it to you? Are you so
charmed by her?"
"That
is
unfair," Cass said.
"Oh, I see, Mr. Mastern," she said, "oh, I see, you are concerned
for the honor of a black coachman. It
is
very delicate sentiment, Mr.
Mastern. Why-" and she came to stand above him as he still sat on
the bench, "why did you not show some such delicate concern for the
honor of your friend? Who is now dead."
According to the journal, there was, at this moment, "a tempest
of
feeling" in his breast. He wrote: "Thus I heard put into words for
the first time the accusation which has ever, in all climes, been that
most calculated to make wince a man of proper nurture or natural
rectitude. What the hardened man can bear to hear from the still
small voice within, may yet be when spoken by any external tongue
an accusation dire enough to drain his very cheeks of blood. But it was
not only that accusation in itself, for
in
very truth I had supped
full of that horror and made it my long familiar. It was not merely the
betrayal of my friend. It was not merely the death of my friend, at
whose breast I had leveled the weapon. I could have managed some–
how to live with those facts. But I suddenly felt that the world outside
of me
was
shifting and the substance of things, and that the process
had only begun of a general disintegration of which I was the center.
At that moment of perturbation, when the cold sweat broke on my
brow, I did not frame any sentence distinctly to my mind. But I have
looked back and wrestled to know the truth. It was not the fact that
a slave woman was being sold away from the house where she had had
protection and kindness and away from the arms of her husband into
debauchery. I knew that such things had happened in fact, and I
was
no child, for after my arrival in Lexington and my acquaintance with
the looser sort of companions, the sportsmen and the followers of the
races, I had myself enjoyed such diversions. It was not only the fact
that the woman for whom I had sacrificed my friend's life and my
honor could, in her new suffering, turn on me with a cold rage and
the language of insult so that I did not recognize her. It was, instead,
the fact that
all
of these things- thd death of my friend, the betrayal
