Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Fiction
There was less lightning now, and the thunder sounded in long booming
peals, instead of short, sharp cannon cracks. The rain, too, had
ceased; but the wind blew furiously, and the sea ran in tremendous
waves. Regulus stirred, groaned, and struggled into a sitting posture.
"Lie down again!" ordered Darkeih. "We ’s all on de way to Heaben, but
if nigger shake de boat, we ’ll get dere befo’ de Lawd ready for us.
Lie down!" Regulus, muttering to himself, looked stupidly about him,
then dropped his head back into her lap. In three minutes he was
snoring. Darkeih’s whimpering died away, and her turbaned head sank
lower and lower, until it rested upon that of Regulus, and she, too,
slept.
Landless sat very still, holding his burden lightly and tenderly, and
staring into the darkness. Against the steep slope of the sea, a
picture framed itself, melted away, and was followed by others in long
procession. He saw a ruinous, ivy-grown hall, and an old, grave, formal
garden, where, between long box hedges broken by fantastic yews, there
walked a boy, book in hand. A man with a stately figure and a stern,
careworn face met the boy, and they leaned upon a broken dial, and the
father reasoned with the son of Right and Truth and Liberty, and
something touched upon the Tyrannicides of old. The yew trees drooped
their sombre boughs about the figures, and they were gone, and in their
place roared and swelled the Chesapeake.... The sound of the storm
became the sound of a battle-cry. He saw a clanging fight where sword
clashed upon armor, and artillery belched fire and thunder, and horse
and man went down in the melée, and were trampled under foot amidst
shrieks and oaths and stern prayers. The boy who had leaned upon the
dial fought coolly, desperately, drunk with the joy of battle, stung to
fierce effort by his father’s eyes. The great banner, blazoned with the
Cross of Saint George, streamed in crimson and azure between the battle
and the lonely watcher in the storm-tossed boat, and the vision was
gone.... The spires of a great city, where men walked with long faces
and church bells made the only music, rose through the gloom, and he saw
a dingy chamber in a dingy stack of buildings, and within it, bending
over great tomes of law, a man, impoverished and orphaned, but young,
strong, and full of hope,—a man well spoken of and allowed to be on the
road to high preferment. The chamber wavered into darkness; but the
city spires flashed light, and the slow ringing changed to mad peals
from joy bells. Some one had been restored—to drop balm upon the
bleeding heart of a nation, to bring light to them that sit in
darkness,—so said the joy bells.... He saw a loathsome prison, and the
man who had sat in the dingy chamber lying therein under accusation of a
crime which he had not committed. He saw him pining there, week after
week, month after month, untried, forgotten, at the mercy of an enemy to
his house whose day had come with the Restored One....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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