WEDDING RING
401
with it faced the man who seemed to be the friend of the man who was
now prostrate. He had a knife in his hand, but he seemed disinclined
to pursue the discussion."
Cass declined the assistance of Mr. Simms, pressed a hand–
kerchief over his wound, walked out of the building and toward his
ludgings, and collapsed on West Short Street. He was carried home.
The next day he was better. He learned that Mrs. Trice had left the
city, presumably for Washington. A couple of days later his wound
infected, and for some time he lay in delirium between life and death.
His recovery was slow, presumably retarded by what he termed in the
journal his "will toward darkness." But his constitution was stronger
than his will, and he recovered, to know himself as the "chief of sin–
ners and a plague-spot on the body of the human world." He would
have committed suicide except for the fear of damnation for that act,
for though "hopeless of Grace I yet clung to the hope of Grace." But
sometimes the very fact of damnation because of suicide seemed to be
the very reason for suicide: he had brought his friend to suicide and
the friend, by that act, was eternally damned; therefore he, Cass
Mastern, should, in justice, insure his own damnation by the same act.
"But the Lord preserved me from self-slaughter for ends which are
His and beyond my knowledge."
Mrs. Trice did not come back to Lexington.
He returned to Mississippi. For two years he operated his plan–
tation, read the Bible, prayed, and, strangely enough, prospered great–
ly, almost as though against his will. In the end he repaid Gilbert
his debt, and set free his slaves. He had some notion of operating the
plantation with the same force on a wage basis. "You fool," Gilbert
said to him, "be a private fool if you must, but in God's name don't
be a public one. Do you think you can work them and them free?
One day work, one day loaf. Do you think you can have a passell of
free niggers next door to a plantation with slaves?
If
you did have to
set them free, you don't have to spend the rest of your natural life
nursing them. Get them out of this country, and take up law or medi–
cine. Or preach the Gospel and at least make a living out of all
this
praying." Cass tried for more than a year to operate the plantation
with his free negroes, but was compelled to confess that the project
was a failure. "Get them out of the country," Gilbert said to him.
"And why don't you go with them. Why don't you go North?"
"I belong here," Cass replied.
"Well, why don't you preach Abolition right here?" Gilbert
demanded. "Do something, do anything, but stop making a fool of
yourself trying to raise cotton with free niggers."
