Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/365

 slave women of her color are in general mighty squeamish and particular — quite as much so as the white women — as to any connection with men of a darker hue than themselves."

Painful to me as these suggestions were, I could not but admit their high degree of probability. To what might net twenty years of servitude have reduced the wife of my heart! To what humiliations, dishonors, miserable degradations, corrupting connections might she not have been subjected, tempting as she was by her innocence, beauty, and gentleness, and exposed — without the least shield of law, religion, or public opinion — to the unbridled appetite, I do not say of any lecherous debauchee, but of any polygamous patriarch, amorous youth, or luxurious respectability who might have the fancy or the means to purchase her!

It made my heart grow sick and my brain spin to think of it.

"And then the boy," continued my tormenter. "If you had him as I saw him, — a bright little fellow, just able to speak, full of life and joy, and unable to understand what made his mother cry so, — you might hope to make something of him. He was a child such as nobody need be ashamed of. But what do you suppose he is by this time, with-the benefit of a slave education? If, my dear sir, you intended to act the father by him, or the friend by her, you should not have left them all this time in slavery."

I hastened to explain, in general terms, that my leaving them as they were was, at the time of my separation from them, a thing entirely beyond my control — it was not in my power to do otherwise; but that, so soon as I became possessed of the means, I had made every effort to discover and to purchase them; that I had traced them to Augusta, where all clew to them had been lost; but that the clew which he had so unexpectedly and accidentally put into my hands had recalled all the past, and, as I was unmarried, childless, and with nothing else in particular to