The Cabin at Pharaoh's Ford [pp. 507-516]

THE CABIN AT PHARAOH'S FORD.
state a fervent truth in a very flat way;
albeit she usually dressed in a loose,
short frock of coarse cotton cloth, did
not possess a single piece of jewelry,
had never seen a corset, and went barefooted through half the summer. She
sometimes twined a water-lily in her
hair, or fastened a prairie-rose at her
throat; but I am sure this was only a
kind of involuntary manifestation of her
femininity, and not an expression of personal vanity. There is still something
of Eve in every one of the sex. Parson
Brewster was accustomed to assert that
the doctrine of innate depravity is fully
proved every day in the crimes and trickeries of men; and is not the story of the
fig-leaves reproduced more or less clearly in every feminine nature? But this
has nothing specially to do with Hannah,
whose shapely limbs and well-cut features were an integrant part of the ragged and tangled beauty of Pharaoh's
Ford, like the statuesque sycamores that
interlaced their boughs about the rivercrossing, and the larkspurs and columbines that struggled up from beneath the
stones and through the tufts of fragile
grass in the background of hills and gullies. She rarely left the cabin, and as
seldom talked with those who came
there. Sometimes the passers-by would
hear through the closed door a wild and
tremulous singing-usually a fragment
of some old hymn; and then such as
were acquainted with the truth of the
matter knew that poor Hannah was in
"one of her spells," as the parson expressed it. For the unfortunate girl was
subject to periodical aberrations of reason, during which she sung and cried
almost constantly, and frequently became so crazed that it was necessary to
chain her like a savage beast to her bed
until the fever lulled and the brain was
released from its consuming torture.
Then her beauty, totally eclipsed for
days and days by that great cloud of
pain, would shine out again and touch
her countenance with a fair lustre that
was fresh and strong, and yet seemed
just ready to fade away. All but the
eyes-alas! all but the eyes. They retained and wore always a pitiful suggestion of the terrible glare that burned
and flashed there in the periods of madness.
It was a very uncommon thing for any
other of womankind than this strange
girl to be seen about the cabin. The
nearest house was several miles away,
and the small sweet courtesies of teaparties and afternoon-calls did not obtain in the neighborhood of Pharaoh's
Ford to any marked extent. Possibly
they never do in localities where millinery is only a vision or a memory, and
corn-bread is a prosaic reality the year
round. Occasionally, the wan features
of a "mover's" wife would peer out from
the lifted cover of a passing wagon on
the way to some outlying settlement, or
journeying back to "the States;" and
there were a few instances of scared and
hurrying Negro women wandering in
after night to beg a few morsels of food
and be piloted across the river. One of
these came once in a raw storm of rain
and sleet, with a half-clad babe in her
arms; and Hannah remembered long
afterward that her father took the queer
little thing on his knee and bent his head
over it as in prayer, and that then the
woman went and laid with it overnight
in the manger at the mouth of "The Sepulchre." And that was all. The visitors there were men, as a rule, and the
coming of a woman was the exception.
Hannah observed, too, with that keenness of instinct peculiar to her sex, that
the conversations and discussions of
these men related entirely to matters in
which men alone seemed to be concerned, and that they rarely so much as mentioned the name of a woman. And yet
she knew by their friendly allusions to
one another's personal affairs, and by
their tender kindness to her at all times,
1874.]
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