“O mother! you worry about me too much, indeed you do. If I’m a little tired or out of sorts,—which I haven’t any right to be, not here,—or quiet, or anything, you think somebody’s been hurting me, or abusing me, or that everything’s gone wrong with me, when I do well enough all the time.”
“Now, Abram, you can’t deceive me,—not that way. My eyes is mother’s eyes, and they see plain enough, where you’re concerned, without spectacles. Who’s been putting on you to-day? Somebody. You don’t carry that down look in your face and your eyes for nothing, I found that out long ago, and you’ve got it on to-night.”
“O mother!”
“Don’t you ‘O mother’ me! I ain’t going to be put off in that way, Abram, an’ you needn’t think it. Has Mr. Surrey been saying anything hard to you?”
“No, indeed, mother; you needn’t ask that.”
“Nor none of the foremen?”
“None.”
“Has Snipe been round?”
“Hasn’t been near the office since Mr. Surrey dismissed him.”
“Met him anywhere?”
“Nein!” laughing, “I haven’t laid eyes on him.”
“Well, the men have been saying or doing something then.”
“N-no; why, what an inquisitor it is!”
“‘N-no.’ You don’t say that full and plain, Abram. Something has been going wrong with the men. Now what is it? Come, out with it.”
“Well, mother, if you will know, you will, I suppose; and, as you never get tired of the story, I’ll go over the whole tale.
“So long as I was Mr. Surrey’s office-boy, to make his fires, and sweep and dust, and keep things in order, the men were all good enough to me after their fashion; and if some of them growled because they thought he favored me, Mr. Given, or some one said, ’O, you know his mother was a servant of Mrs. Surrey for no end of years, and of course Mr. Surrey has a kind of interest in him’; and that put everything straight again.
“Well! you know how good Mr. Willie has been to me ever since we were little boys in the same house,—he in the parlor and I in the kitchen; the books he’s given me, and the chances he’s made me, and the way he’s put me in of learning and knowing. And he’s been twice as kind to me ever since I refused that offer of his.”
“Yes, I know, but tell me about it again.”
“Well, Mr. Surrey sent me up to the house one day, just while Mr. Willie was at home from college, and he stopped me and had a talk with me, and asked me in his pleasant way, not as if I were a ‘nigger,’ but just as he’d talk to one of his mates, ever so many questions about myself and my studies and my plans; and I told him what I wanted,—how hard you worked, and how I hoped to fit myself to go into some little business of my own, not a barber-shop, or any such thing, but something that’d support you and keep you like a lady after while, and that would help me and my people at the same time. For, of course,” I said, “every one of us that does anything more than the world expects us to do, or better, makes the world think so much the more and better of us all.”