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The Redemptioner
by
Having got his pipe a-going, he strolled back into the wide passage and scanned the horizon once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless task by holding up her apron of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls, pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying: “Now, Mr. Browne, why don’t you praise my cotton? Did you ever see better carding than that?”
The young planter took a roll of the cotton in his hands, holding it gingerly, and essaying absentmindedly to yield to his wife’s mood. Just at that moment Sanford Browne the younger, a boy about eight years of age, came round the corner of the house and stood in front of his father, with his feet wide apart, feeling among the miscellanies in the bottom of his pocket for a periwinkle shell.
“How would you like to have him spirited away by a crimp, Judy?” demanded the husband, replacing the cotton and pointing to the lad.
“I should just die, dear,” said Judy Browne in a low voice.
“That’s what happened to my mother, I suppose,” said Browne. “I hope she died; it would be too bad to think that she had to live all these twenty-two years imagining all sorts of things about her lost little boy. I remember her, Judy, the day I saw her last. I went out of a side street into Fleet Street, and then I grew curious and went on out through Temple Bar into the road they call the Strand. I did not know how far I had gone from the city until I heard the great bell of St. Martin’s in the Fields chiming at five o’clock. I turned toward the city again, but stopped along the way to look at the noblemen’s houses. Somehow, at last I got into Lincoln’s Inn Fields and could not tell which way to go. Just then a sea captain came up to me, and, pretending to know me, told me he would fetch me to my father. I went with him, and he got me into a boat and so down to his ship below the bridge. The ship was already taking aboard a lot of kids and freewillers out of the cook houses, where some of them had been shut up for weeks. I cried and begged for my father, but the captain only kicked and cuffed me. It was a long and wretched voyage, as I have told you often. I was brought here and sold to work with negroes and convicts. I don’t so much mind the beatings I got, or the hard living, but to think of all my mother has suffered, and that I shall never see her or my father again! If I ever lay eyes on that Captain Lewis, he will go to the devil before he has time to say any prayers.”
“I’d like to shoot him,” said the boy, in sympathy with his father’s mood. “I’ll kill him when I get big enough, pappy.” And he went off to seek the bow and arrow given him by an Indian who lingered in the region once occupied by his tribe.
“Never mind,” said the wife, stroking her husband’s arm, “you are getting rich now, and your hard times are over.”
“Yes, but everybody will always remember that I was a bought redemptioner, and your folks will hardly ever forgive you for marrying me.”
“Oh, yes, they will some day. If you keep on as lucky as you are, I shall live in a bigger house than any of them, and drive to church behind six horses. That’ll make a great difference. If the Nancy Jane fetches me a London bonnet and a wide, wide petticoat such as the Princess Augusta wears, so that I can brush against the pews on both sides with my silk frock when I go down the aisle, my folks will already begin to think that Sanford Browne is somebody,” and she made little motions of vanity as she fancied her entrance into Duck Creek parish church on the Sunday after the arrival of the tobacco ship, arrayed in imitation of the Princess of Wales, the news of whose recent widowhood had not yet reached Judy Browne.