And as the women filed past me, wringing their hands, I
scrutinized each face and figure--the sweet-faced portress, the
shrunken little creole ("A mulatto, she is," Hiram whispered--he had
taken his seat beside me--"and very powerful, they say, among 'em"),
and some fair young girls; two or three of these with blooming cheeks
bursting frankly through the stiff bordering of their caps. But I saw
not the face I sought.
"Them children! Ain't it awful?" muttered Hiram as a file of blue-coat
boys shambled past, with hair cut square across their foreheads and
bleached white with the sun. "Ain't got a grain of sense! Look at
'em!--all crowded clean out by the Shaker schools."
And surely they were a most unpromising little crowd. Waifs, snatched
probably from some New York whirlpool of iniquity, and wearing the
brute mark on their faces, which nothing in this school of their
transplanting tended to erase--a sodden little party, like stupid
young beasts of burden, uncouth and awkward.
As the girls came round again, and I had settled it in my mind that
there was certainly no Bessie in the room, I could watch them more
calmly. Eagerly as I sought her face, it was a relief, surely, that it
was not there. Pale to ghastliness, most of them, with high, sharpened
shoulders, and features set like those of a corpse, it was indeed
difficult to realize that these ascetic forms, these swaying devotees,
were women--women who might else have been wives and mothers.
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