“Well, well,” he assented; “let’s have him up and see what he’s got to say for himself. Mike!” he shouted out the window; “bring up Colonel Brereton!”
Colonel Brereton had appeared in our village about a year before that Sunday. Why he came, whence he came, he never deigned to say. But he made no secret of the fact that he was an unreconstructed Southron. He had a little money when he arrived – enough to buy a tiny one-story house on the outskirts of the town. By vocation he was a lawyer, and, somehow or other, he managed to pick up enough to support him in his avocation, which, we soon found out, was that of village drunkard. In this capacity he was a glorious, picturesque and startling success. Saturated with cheap whiskey, he sat all day long in the bar-room or on the porch of the village groggery, discoursing to the neighborhood loafers of the days befo’ the wah, when he had a vast plantation in “Firginia” – “and five hundred niggehs, seh.”
So long as the Colonel’s excesses threatened only his own liver, no one interfered with him. But on the night before we called upon the Justice, the Colonel, having brooded long over his wrongs at the hands of the Yankees, and having made himself a reservoir of cocktails, decided to enter his protest against the whole system of free colored labor by cutting the liver out of every negro in the town; and he had slightly lacerated Winthrop’s mulatto coachman before a delegation of citizens fell upon him, and finding him unwilling to relinquish his plan, placed him for the night in the lock-up in Squire O’Brien’s cellar.
We waited for the Colonel. From under our feet suddenly arose a sound of scuffling and smothered imprecations. A minute later, Mike, the herculean son of the Justice, appeared in the doorway, bearing a very small man hugged to his breast as a baby hugs a doll.
“Let me down, seh!” shouted the Colonel. Mike set him down, and he marched proudly into the room, and seated himself with dignity and firmness on the extreme edge of a chair.
The Colonel was very small indeed for a man of so much dignity. He could not have been more than five foot one or two; he was slender – but his figure was shapely and supple. He was unquestionably a handsome man, with fine, thin features and an aquiline profile – like a miniature Henry Clay. His hair was snow-white – prematurely, no doubt – and at the first glance you thought he was clean shaven. Then you saw that there was scarcely a hair on his cheeks, and that only the finest imaginable line of snowy white moustaches curled down his upper lip. His skin was smooth as a baby’s and of the color of old ivory. His teeth, which he was just then exhibiting in a sardonic smile, were white, small, even. But if he was small, his carriage was large, and military. There was something military, too, about his attire. He wore a high collar, a long blue frock coat, and tight, light gray trousers with straps. That is, the coat had once been blue, the trousers once light gray, but they were now of many tints and tones, and, at that exact moment, they had here and there certain peculiar high lights of whitewash.
The Colonel did not wait to be arraigned. Sweeping his black, piercing eye over our little group, he arraigned us.
“Well, gentlemen,” with keen irony in his tone, “I reckon you think you’ve done a right smart thing, getting the Southern gentleman in a hole? A pro-dee-gious fine thing, I reckon, since it’s kept you away from chu’ch. Baptis’ church, I believe?” This was to poor Canfield, who was suspected of having been of that communion in his youth, and of being much ashamed of it after his marriage to an aristocratic Episcopalian. “Nice Sunday mo’ning to worry a Southern gentleman! Gentleman who’s owned a plantation that you could stick this hyeh picayune town into one co’neh of! Owned mo’ niggehs than you eveh saw. Robbed of his land and his niggehs by you Yankee gentlemen. Drinks a little wine to make him fo’get what he’s suffehed. Gets ovehtaken. Tries to avenge an insult to his honah. Put him in a felon’s cell and whitewash his gyarments. And now you come hyeh – you come hyeh – ” here his eye fell with deep disapproval upon Winthrop’s white flannels – “you come hyeh in youh underclothes, and you want to have him held fo’ Special Sessions.”
“You are mistaken, Colonel Brereton,” Winthrop interposed; “if we can have your promise – “
“I will promise you nothing, seh!” thundered the Colonel, who had a voice like a church-organ, whenever he chose to use it; “I will make no conventions with you! I will put no restrictions on my right to defend my honah. Put me in youh felon’s cell. I will rot in youh infehnal dungeons; but I will make no conventions with you. You can put me in striped breeches, but you cyan’t put my honah in striped breeches!”
“That settles it,” said the justice.
“And all,” continued the Colonel, oratorically, “and all this hyeh fuss and neglect of youh religious duties, fo’ one of the cheapest and most o’nery niggehs I eveh laid eyes on. Why, I wouldn’t have given one hundred dollahs fo’ that niggeh befo’ the wah. No, seh, I give you my wo’d, that niggeh ain’t wo’th ninety dollahs!”
“Mike!” said the Justice, significantly. The Colonel arose promptly, to insure a voluntary exit. He bowed low to Winthrop.
“Allow me to hope, seh,” he said, “that you won’t catch cold.” And with one lofty and comprehensive salute he marched haughtily back to his dungeon, followed by the towering Mike.
The Justice sighed. An elective judiciary has its trials, like the rest of us. It is hard to commit a voter of your own party for Special Sessions. However – “I’ll drive him over to Court in the morning,” said the little Justice.
I was sitting on my verandah that afternoon, reading. Hearing my name softly spoken, I looked up and saw the largest and oldest negress I had ever met. She was at least six feet tall, well-built but not fat, full black, with carefully dressed gray hair. I knew at once from her neat dress, her well-trained manner, the easy deference of the curtsey she dropped me, that she belonged to the class that used to be known as “house darkeys” – in contradistinction to the field hands.
“I understand, seh,” she said, in a gentle, low voice, “that you gentlemen have got Cunnle Bre’eton jailed?”
She had evidently been brought up among educated Southerners, for her grammar was good and her pronunciation correct, according to Southern standards. Only once or twice did she drop into negro talk.
I assented.
“How much will it be, seh, to get him out?” She produced a fat roll of twenty and fifty dollar bills. “I do fo’ Cunnle Bre’eton,” she explained: “I have always done fo’ him. I was his Mammy when he was a baby.”
I made her sit down – when she did there was modest deprecation in her attitude – and I tried to explain the situation to her.
“You may go surety for Colonel Brereton,” I said; “but he is certain to repeat the offense.”
“No, seh,” she replied, in her quiet, firm tone; “the Cunnle won’t make any trouble when I’m here to do fo’ him.”
“You were one of his slaves?”
“No, seh. Cunnle Bre’eton neveh had any slaves, seh. His father, Majah Bre’eton, he had slaves one time, I guess, but when the Cunnle was bo’n, he was playing kyards fo’ a living, and he had only me. When the Cunnle’s mother died, Majah Bre’eton he went to Mizzoura, and he put the baby in my ahms, and he said to me, ‘Sabrine,’ he sez, ‘you do fo’ him.’ And I’ve done fo’ him eveh since. Sometimes he gets away from me, and then he gets kind o’ wild. He was in Sandusky a year, and in Chillicothe six months, and he was in Tiffin once, and one time in a place in the state of Massachusetts – I disremembeh the name. This is the longest time he eveh got away from me. But I always find him, and then he’s all right.”
“But you have to deal with a violent man.”
“The Cunnle won’t be violent with me, seh.”
“But you’re getting old, Aunty – how old?”
“I kind o’ lost count since I was seventy-one, seh.