Last Pages. Oscar Mandel

last; “but—I believe the girl. Will not even tell her mother, eh? I believe her.” Then, standing up, he shook Young Nick’s hand. “I judge her to be a fine, honest and very smart young woman. Besides, the time has come for you to be married. I was much, much younger than you when my turn came to the altar. So fine a girl she was, so fine, so honest, and very smart. But so brief our bliss…. However, my boy, there will be a mountain of details. Presbyterian and Catholic. American and French. The Tourville family, unknown to us: who are they? Marriage contract. But of course the chief point is love, the Yes on both sides.”

      “She hasn’t yet said Yes,” Nicholas reminded his uncle, smiling.

      “A detail! You must attack again.”

      “I will.”

      And there, trifles aside, the conversation ended.

      Later that afternoon, Josh Mamack was shown in by Priscilla. It was going to be his business to drive his cart twice a day to the southern cove to look for the Enterprise anchored off-shore. No one would be suspicious, since Mamack the jack-of-all-trades was ever on the road looking for work or performing it. He would also discreetly transport a solid rowboat to the place.

      13

      NEXT MORNING Nicholas tried to call on Madeleine at the inn but was told that she was indisposed. He returned home slightly but only slightly alarmed. To some extent it may be said that the young woman was indeed unwell, but the trouble was purely spiritual, it came of reflections about her ungrateful enjoyment of the pampered life she led thanks to the mother she was betraying by her silence. Five hundred pounds! Still, Madeleine was not a brooder. A mission awaited her. When she rose to it that afternoon—a sunny afternoon, the mildest of winds giving a freshness to the land—her spirits were high again. This weighed against that, she was doing what was right and best.

      The lighthouse was clasped round its base by a long circular bench. One could thus sit in the sun or the shade as the day went by. The Colonel, however, was not to be seen when she arrived. She sat where she could watch the harbor alive with all the prosperous bustle that was going to be so cruelly diminished by the long war, and where she saw again the waters in which, so recently, a handsome young man had leaped to save—not a stranger, but a needed business agent of his.

      Deep in her thoughts, she was almost surprised by the very person she had been waiting for. The Colonel had arrived, book in hand. His face lit up, as one says, when he saw and greeted her. She invited him to sit beside her. Doing so, he quickly decided not to speak to her of what was, after all, not yet an engagement. She on her side intended to keep the conversation as light as possible before coming to the point. After replying to his inquiry about the well-being of her charming mother, she asked him, “What is your book, Colonel? Perhaps a treatise on whaling ships?”

      “No,” he replied with a smile; “guess again.”

      “The poems of some refined but ailing gentlewoman of Connecticut.”

      “Not quite.”

      “I give up. You must tell me.”

      “Well, I must be honest with you. It is a manifesto.”

      “Ah, that’s dangerous.”

      “More than you think. It came in the same bottom that brought you to Nantucket so recently.”

      “Come, tell me what it is.”

      “The author is one Thomas Jefferson.”

      “Read to me, Colonel. You have reason to believe that you are safe with me. Safe, safe, safe.”

      “I know it. I know everything. You understand me.”

      She nodded. He leafed through the little book. “Here’s some passable rhetoric,” he said, and he began to read, his voice becoming more and more powerful as he went on. “‘The common feelings of human nature must be surrendered up before his Majesty’s subjects here can be persuaded to believe that they hold their political existence at the will of a British Parliament. Shall these governments be dissolved, their property annihilated, and their people reduced to a state of nature, at the imperious breath of a body of men whom they never saw, in whom they never confided, and over whom they have no powers of punishment or removal, let their crimes against the American public be ever so great? Can any one reason be assigned why one hundred and sixty thousand electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the States of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength? Were this to be admitted, instead of being a free people, as we have hitherto supposed and mean to continue ourselves, we should suddenly be found the slaves not of one but of one hundred and sixty thousand tyrants.’”

      “I like that!” cried Madeleine. “Who is this flaming orator? Is he a friend of yours?”

      “I don’t know the man.”

      “Do you think he is in jail?”

      “No; for I’ve been told that he is presently a delegate in Philadelphia. But you see now, do you not”—and he looked intently at her—“why my nephew and I must go.”

      “I do, I do! What else does this delegate say?”

      “Many wicked things—oh, if I were George the Third, I should not sleep easy until I did see Mr. Jefferson in fetters.” Mayhew was leafing again. “For example: ‘By an act passed in the fifth year of the reign of his late Majesty, King George the Second, an American subject is forbidden to make a hat for himself of the fur which he has taken, perhaps, on his own soil—an instance of despotism to which no parallel can be produced in the most arbitrary ages of British history.’”

      But this time the Colonel failed to impress, for Madeleine burst out laughing. “Stop! Here I think your Mr. Henderson begins to foam at the mouth! What? Not to be allowed to make your own hat is a piece of brutality without parallel?”

      “I shouldn’t have read you this passage. It is followed by a weightier one on the manufacture of iron. Wait. Here is one you must hear.”

      “With pleasure. You read so beautifully!”

      “Thank you. Let me boast that I sing in our choir on Sundays. But here it is. ‘The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this, by prohibitions and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his Majesty’s negative, thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States and the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.’ Does this not touch you? ‘This infamous practice.’ Such words are quite beyond faction—we’ll say no more about the beaver hats.”

      These words had in fact moved Madeleine more than the Colonel suspected. She asked him, softly: “Had you the opportunity, would you not engage in the slave trade yourself, Colonel Mayhew? It is so very profitable.”

      The response was an indignant “I—in the slave trade? I would raise my tent in Muscovy or turn heathen before I’d handle a man like a bale of merchandise.”

      At this, with the utmost gravity, she asked: “But is there not pleasure in being waited on by glistening black slaves?”

      “Is this you speaking, Mademoiselle?” asked the Colonel, deeply grieved.

      But she placed a reassuring hand on his arm.

      “God forbid,” she said, and then she took a deep breath. “I was quoting your nephew.”

      Mayhew lowered his head, and one of his hands went to his brow. Perhaps her words had not come to him as an overwhelming surprise.

      “Can you not forgive what must have been a flip word or two?” he brought out, raising his head. “Nicholas has such splendid qualities.