The Flower of the Chapdelaines | Page 5

"'_Now, Maud,' said my
uncle_--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book
pose?"
"It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only
something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so."
"'_Now, Maud_,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the
evening's later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down
with the story. "And so you were grand'mère to our Royal Street
miracle. And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a
planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older.
Well, '_Now, Maud_,' for my absorption!"
It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement came. The four
chief characters were no sooner set in motion than Chester dropped the
pamphlet to his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact a year or
two old, which now all at once and for the first time arrested his
attention. He also had a manuscript! That lawyer uncle of his, saying as
he spared him a few duplicate volumes from his law library, "Burn that
if you don't want it," had tossed him a fat document indorsed:
"Memorandum of an Early Experience." Later the nephew had glanced
it over, but, like "Maud's" story, its first few lines had annoyed his

critical sense and he had never read it carefully. The amazing point was
that "_Now, Maud_" and this "_Memorandum_" most incredibly--with
a ridiculous nicety--fitted each other.
He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the beginning a third
time, read with a scrutiny of every line as though he studied a witness's
deposition. And this was what he read:

IV
THE CLOCK IN THE SKY
"Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the
confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't
forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as to be
too far away."
I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a
slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years,
and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was
broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and
yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the
general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof
that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me,
without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were not
trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle, smiling
round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our honest
opinion--of anything--in place of your own."
"Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just
heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your
own maid the blackest girl you ever saw."
"And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black."
"She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy
answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything
she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as
free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas."
"We draw the line at Mingo," said uncle.
"And who is Mingo?" I inquired.
"Mingo? he's her brother; a very low and trailing branch of the family
tree."
As we neared the house I was told more of the father and mother; their

sweet content, their piety, their diligence. "If we lived in town, where
there's better chance to pick up small earnings," remarked uncle, "those
two and Sidney would have bought their freedom by now, and Mingo's
too. Silas has got nearly enough to buy his own, as it is."
Silas, my aunt explained, was a carpenter. "He hands your uncle so
much a week; all he can make beyond that he's allowed to keep." The
carriage stopped at the door; half a dozen servants came, smiling, and I
knew Sidney and Hester at a glance, they were so finely different from
their fellows.
That night the daughter and I made acquaintance. She was eighteen, tall,
lithe and as straight as an arrow. She had not one of the physical traits
that so often make her race uncomely to our eyes; even her nose was
good; her very feet were well made, her hands were slim and shapely,
the fingers long and neatly jointed, and there was nothing inky in her
amazing blackness, her red blood so enriched it. Yet she was as really
African in her strong, eager mind as in her color, and