Deep
were the sounds of grief and mourning heard in that stately
dwelling when the stricken friends, whose office it had been to
nurse and soothe the weary sufferer, beheld her pale and
motionless in the sleep of death.
Who can imagine the feeling with which poor Clotelle received the
intelligence of her kind friend's death? The deep gashes of the
cruel whip had prostrated the lovely form of the quadroon, and she
lay upon her bed of straw in the dark cell. The speculator had
bought her, but had postponed her removal till she should recover.
Her benefactress was dead, and--
" Hope withering fled, and mercy sighed farewell."
"Is Jerome safe?" she would ask herself continually. If her lover
could have but known of the sufferings of that sweet flower,--
that polyanthus over which he had so often been in his dreams,--.
he would then have learned that she was worthy of his love.
It was more than a fortnight before the slave-trader could take his
prize to more comfortable quarters. Like Alcibiades, who defaced
the images of the gods and expected to be pardoned on the ground
of eccentricity, so men who abuse God's image hope to escape the
vengeance of his wrath under the plea that the law sanctions their
atrocious deeds.
CHAPTER XXII
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT AND WHAT FOLLOWED.
It was a beautiful Sunday in September, with a cloudless sky, and
the rays of the sun parching the already thirsty earth, that
Clotelle stood at an upper window in Slater's slave-pen in New
Orleans, gasping for a breath of fresh air.
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