Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/421

 alone in so hazardous an enterprise — left our lodgings to seek her out, Mr Gilmore, having fortified his courage with wine, turned the key of the door, and entered her solitary chamber. She had heard his footstep on the stair, and had prepared to meet him, retreating into a corner behind a small table, which, with a chair and an old mattress on the floor, formed the entire furniture of her prison. As he came directly towards her, she bade him stand off, at the same time drawing and holding up a small stiletto, which Montgomery, in a playful mood, had hung around her neck by a gold chain, just as she was leaving New York, telling her that as she was to make the passage alone to New Orleans, she must have some weapon with which to defend herself; and, as it happened, she had worn it when she went by appointment to call on Mr Gilmore.

He laughed at the sight of the tiny dagger; but stopped, drew the only chair towards him, sat down upon it, and began to read her a lecture, one half law and the other half divinity, on the folly and wickedness of resistance to legal authority, and the necessity of submission to the divine ordinances. Thomas Littlebody, Esq., the distinguished Boston lawyer, or even the reverend Dr Dewey himself, could not have done it better.

He told her that resistance and opposition were as useless as they would be sinful and criminal; that it was in vain to hope assistance or relief from any quarter; that Cassy, no better off than herself, had been sold into slavery the day before; and that Montgomery, having arrived that very evening from New York, was by this time in the hands of Mr Agrippa Curtis, who, having punished him sufficiently for his insolence, intended to hire him out to work on a plantation up the Red River. She never need expect to see him more.

At these cruel words, the falsehood of which she had no means of knowing, poor Eliza turned deadly pale, alarmed more for her lover than herself, and the