Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
His attention thus directed, Captain Delano now noticed for the rst, that,
suspended by a slender silken cord, from Don Benito’s neck, hung a key. At once,
from the servant’s muttered syllables, divining the key’s purpose, he smiled, and
said:—”So, Don Benito—padlock and key—signicant symbols, truly.”
Biting his lip, Don Benito faltered.
Though the remark of Captain Delano, a man of such native simplicity as to be
incapable of satire or irony, had been dropped in playful allusion to the Spaniard’s
singularly evidenced lordship over the black; yet the hypochondriac seemed some
way to have taken it as a malicious reection upon his confessed inability thus far
to break down, at least, on a verbal summons, the entrenched will of the slave.
Deploring this supposed misconception, yet despairing of correcting it, Captain
Delano shifted the subject; but nding his companion more than ever withdrawn,
as if still sourly digesting the lees of the presumed aront above-mentioned, byand-by
Captain Delano likewise became less talkative, oppressed, against his own
will, by what seemed the secret vindictiveness of the morbidly sensitive Spaniard.
But the good sailor, himself of a quite contrary disposition, refrained, on his part,
alike from the appearance as from the feeling of resentment, and if silent, was only
so from contagion.
Presently the Spaniard, assisted by his servant somewhat discourteously
crossed over from his guest; a procedure which, sensibly enough, might have been
allowed to pass for idle caprice of ill-humor, had not master and man, lingering
round the corner of the elevated skylight, began whispering together in low voices.
This was unpleasing. And more; the moody air of the Spaniard, which at times
had not been without a sort of valetudinarian stateliness, now seemed anything
but dignied; while the menial familiarity of the servant lost its original charm of
simple-hearted attachment.
In his embarrassment, the visitor turned his face to the other side of the ship.
By so doing, his glance accidentally fell on a young Spanish sailor, a coil of rope
in his hand, just stepped from the deck to the rst round of the mizzen-rigging.
Perhaps the man would not have been particularly noticed, were it not that, during
his ascent to one of the yards, he, with a sort of covert intentness, kept his eye xed
on Captain Delano, from whom, presently, it passed, as if by a natural sequence, to
the two whisperers.
His own attention thus redirected to that quarter, Captain Delano gave a slight
start. From something in Don Benito’s manner just then, it seemed as if the visitor
had, at least partly, been the subject of the withdrawn consultation going on—a
conjecture as little agreeable to the guest as it was little attering to the host.
The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding in the Spanish captain
were unaccountable, except on one of two suppositions—innocent lunacy, or
wicked imposture.
But the rst idea, though it might naturally have occurred to an indierent
observer, and, in some respect, had not hitherto been wholly a stranger to Captain
Delano’s mind, yet, now that, in an incipient way, he began to regard the stranger’s
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