“I will tell you, Ma’am; but mind, this makes no difference; the boy is mine.  I’ll give the Lord a chance to take him fust; if He don’t, I shall.”

“Oh, no! remember, he is your brother.”

An unwise speech; I felt it as it passed my lips, for a black frown gathered on Robert’s face, and his strong hands closed with an ugly sort of grip.  But he did not touch the poor soul gasping there behind him, and seemed content to let the slow suffocation of that stifling room end his frail life.

“I’m not like to forget that, Ma’am, when I’ve been thinkin’ of it all this week.  I knew him when they fetched him in, an’ would ‘a’ done it long ’fore this, but I wanted to ask where Lucy was; he knows,—­he told to-night—­an’ now he’s done for.”

“Who is Lucy?” I asked hurriedly, intent on keeping his mind busy with any thought but murder.

With one of the swift transitions of a mixed temperament like this, at my question Robert’s deep eyes filled, the clenched hands were spread before his face, and all I heard were the broken words,—­

“My wife,—­he took her”—­

In that instant every thought of fear was swallowed up in burning indignation for the wrong, and a perfect passion of pity for the desperate man so tempted to avenge an injury for which there seemed no redress but this.  He was no longer slave or contraband, no drop of black blood marred him in my sight, but an infinite compassion yearned to save, to help, to comfort him.  Words seemed so powerless I offered none, only put my hand on his poor head, wounded, homeless, bowed down with grief for which I had no cure, and softly smoothed the long neglected hair, pitifully wondering the while where was the wife who must have loved this tender-hearted man so well.

The captain moaned again, and faintly whispered, “Air!” but I never stirred.  God forgive me! just then I hated him as only a woman thinking of a sister woman’s wrong could hate.  Robert looked up; his eyes were dry again, his mouth grim.  I saw that, said, “Tell me more,” and he did,—­for sympathy is a gift the poorest may give, the proudest stoop to receive.

“Yer see, Ma’am, his father,—­I might say ours, if I warn’t ashamed of both of ’em,—­his father died two years ago, an’ left us all to Marster Ned,—­that’s him here, eighteen then.  He always hated me, I looked so like old Marster:  he don’t,—­only the light skin an’ hair.  Old Marster was kind to all of us, me ‘specially, an’ bought Lucy off the next plantation down there in South Car’lina, when he found I liked her.  I married her, all I could, Ma’am; it warn’t much, but we was true to one another till Marster Ned come home a year after an’ made hell fur both of us.  He sent my old mother to be used up in his rice-swamp in Georgy; he found me with my pretty Lucy, an’ though young Miss cried, an’ I prayed to him on my knees, an’ Lucy run away, he wouldn’t have no mercy; he brought her back, an’—­took her, Ma’am.”