CHAPTER XV

LITTLE ARCADY VIEWS A PARADE

And so began the time of Miss Caroline among us,—­one effect the more of Fate’s mad trickery.  It was my privilege to be more intimately aware of her concerns than was the town at large.  And even to me in those days she carried off the difficulties of her lot with a manner so plausible that it clenched my admiration if it did not win my belief.  I knew that she daily bore a burden of ruin and faced a future of perilous uncertainty.  I knew that she must have journeyed into our strange land with a real terror, nerved to that course only by a resolve to be no longer a burden upon her impoverished kinsman.  Surely it had been like dying a death for her to leave the land of her own people, devastated though it was and vacant of those who had made the world easy for her.

And I was not a little puzzled by the tie that bound her to her one remaining stay.  Both she and Clem, I saw, considered her coming to him to be a thing so natural that it should excite no wonder, a thing familiar in the thought and as little to be puzzled about as their own breathing.  I saw that her perplexities lay not at all in this black fellow’s unthinking adherence to his life of service, but rather in the circumstance of her spirit-grieving exile and in the necessary doubts of her chattel’s competence for the feat he had undertaken.

I despaired very soon of ever comprehending the intricate strands of their relationship.  When I understood, as I was not long in doing, that each was in certain ways genuinely afraid of the other, I knew that the problem must always be far beyond my own little powers.

As to Little Arcady at large, some aspects of this complication were simpler than they appeared to me; others were more obscure.  Of the tragedy of Miss Caroline’s mere coming to us they could suspect nothing, save it might be the humiliation her old-fashioned furniture must put upon her in a prosperous town where so much of the furniture was elegant to the point of extravagance.

In the much-discussed matter of mistress and slave, the town agreed simply that Clem was stupid and had been deluded by Miss Caroline into believing that a certain proclamation had stopped short of her personal property.  It was believed that she had terrorized him by threatening to put bloodhounds on his trail if he ever tried to run off—­for the town knew its “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as well as it knew “Gaskell’s Compendium.”  It was thought that if Clem proved to be disobedient or rebellious, his mistress would try to hire “Big Joe” Kestril or some equally strong person to whip him with a “black-snake.”  Also it was said that she had sold his wife away from him, and might try to sell Clem himself if ever she got “hard up,” though it was felt that she would be wise not to go too far in that matter.

For the rest, Little Arcady rather rejoiced in the novelty of Miss Caroline’s establishment.  There was a flavor of much-needed romance in this survival at our very doors of an ante-bellum unrighteousness.  The town cherished a hope that Clem would try to run off some time, or that Miss Caroline would have his back cut to ribbons, or try to sell or mortgage him or something, thus creating entertainment of an agreeable and exciting character.