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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
was more alert, who, with one hand sustaining his master, with the other applied
the cordial. Don Benito restored, the black withdrew his support, slipping aside
a little, but dutifully remaining within call of a whisper. Such discretion was here
evinced as quite wiped away, in the visitor’s eyes, any blemish of impropriety which
might have attached to the attendant, from the indecorous conferences before
mentioned; showing, too, that if the servant were to blame, it might be more the
master’s fault than his own, since, when left to himself, he could conduct thus well.
His glance called away from the spectacle of disorder to the more pleasing one
before him, Captain Delano could not avoid again congratulating his host upon
possessing such a servant, who, though perhaps a little too forward now and then,
must upon the whole be invaluable to one in the invalid’s situation.
“Tell me, Don Benito,” he added, with a smile—”I should like to have your man
here, myself—what will you take for him? Would fty doubloons be any object?”
“Master wouldn’t part with Babo for a thousand doubloons,” murmured the
black, overhearing the oer, and taking it in earnest, and, with the strange vanity
of a faithful slave, appreciated by his master, scorning to hear so paltry a valuation
put upon him by a stranger. But Don Benito, apparently hardly yet completely
restored, and again interrupted by his cough, made but some broken reply.
Soon his physical distress became so great, aecting his mind, too, apparently,
that, as if to screen the sad spectacle, the servant gently conducted his master
below.
Left to himself, the American, to while away the time till his boat should arrive,
would have pleasantly accosted some one of the few Spanish seamen he saw;
but recalling something that Don Benito had said touching their ill conduct, he
refrained; as a shipmaster indisposed to countenance cowardice or unfaithfulness
in seamen.
While, with these thoughts, standing with eye directed forward towards that
handful of sailors, suddenly he thought that one or two of them returned the
glance and with a sort of meaning. He rubbed his eyes, and looked again; but
again seemed to see the same thing. Under a new form, but more obscure than any
previous one, the old suspicions recurred, but, in the absence of Don Benito, with
less of panic than before. Despite the bad account given of the sailors, Captain
Delano resolved forthwith to accost one of them. Descending the poop, he made
his way through the blacks, his movement drawing a queer cry from the oakumpickers,
prompted by whom, the negroes, twitching each other aside, divided
before him; but, as if curious to see what was the object of this deliberate visit to
their Ghetto, closing in behind, in tolerable order, followed the white stranger up.
His progress thus proclaimed as by mounted kings-at-arms, and escorted as by
a Care guard of honor, Captain Delano, assuming a good-humored, o-handed
air, continued to advance; now and then saying a blithe word to the negroes, and
his eye curiously surveying the white faces, here and there sparsely mixed in with
the blacks, like stray white pawns venturously involved in the ranks of the chessmen
opposed.
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