"
Parson Fair grasped his daughter's arm again. "No man whom you have
promised to wed should reply to such distrust as this," he said.
"Dorothy, I command you to go down-stairs and be married to this
man."
Then Dorothy broke away from him with a wild shriek. "No, I will not
marry this man with his cousin's blood on his soul! I will not,
father; you shall not make me! I will not! Night and day I shall see
that knife in his hand. I will not marry him, because he tried to
kill his cousin Lot. I will not, I will not!" The black woman pushed
between them with a savage murmur of love and wrath, and caught her
mistress in her arms, and crooned over her, like a wild thing over
her young.
"There is no use in prolonging this, sir," Burr said to Parson Fair.
The elder man looked at him with a strange mixture of helpless
dignity and sympathy and wrath. "You know that I have no share in
this," he said, and he glanced almost piteously from Burr to his
mother. "I could never have believed that my daughter--"
"We will say no more about it, sir," responded Burr. "I hold neither
you nor your daughter in any blame." Then he offered his arm to his
mother, and the three went out and down-stairs, and the black woman
clapped to the chamber door with a great jar upon her mistress, whose
calm of obstinacy had broken into wailing hysterics which betokened
no less stanchness.
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