In Old Plantation Days
The Easter Wedding
The brief, sharp winter had passed and Easter was approaching. As Easter Monday was a great day for marrying, Aunt Sukey’s patience was entirely worn out with her master’s hesi, tancy, for which she could see no reason. She had long ago given her consent, and young Liza had said “yes” to Ben too many days past to talk about, and the old woman could not see why the white man, the one least concerned, should either object or hesitate. She had lorded it in the family for so long that it now seemed very hard suddenly to be denied anything.
“I tell you, Mas’ Lancaster,” she said, “dem two chillum been gallantin’ wid each othah too long to pa’t dem now. Cose I knows you gwine say Ben and ‘Lize des niggahs, but la’ Mas’ you’d be s’prised w’en hit come to lovin’, dem two des de same ez white folks in dere feelin’s.”
It was perhaps this point in the old woman’s argument that overcame Robert Lancaster’s objections. He surrendered and gave his consent to the marriage of Sukey’s Lize and his boy Ben on the Monday following Easter. Great were the rejoicings that attended the announcement of the affair, and because Sukey herself was a great person on the plantation and Ben his master’s valet, the wedding was to be no small one.
As the days passed the preparations were hastened. The mistress herself went into town and purchased such a dress as only Sukey’s daughter could have thought of wearing, even though both Easter and her wedding day came at the same time. The young mistress, she who had married early but was widowed and sad now, had brought out a once used orange wreath and a veil as filmy as a fairy spider’s web, and both the white mother and daughter took as deep an interest in the affair as did the two black women. While Sukey and Liza spun and wove they laughed, chatted and sewed, and they could not understand why Robert Lancaster kept so close to his library and looked on at all the preparations with no gladness in his eyes and no mirth on his tongue. He was closeted often with strange men from town, but they thought very little of that. He was a popular man, and it was not to be wondered at that he should be visited by people who did not know him.
It may have been that Robert Lancaster was an arch dissembler or only that he was less transparent than his brother, the good and child-like rector, who cared for the souk of the whole country, and for the bodies of one-half its population and took no thought for the morrow. It was on his face that they first saw the cloud that hung over them alL Robert himself was slow to confess it, and when his wife went to him and taxed him withholding something from her, some trouble on his mind that he was bearing alone, he confessed all, and she took up the burden of it with him. For some time past things had gone badly with him. He had been careless of his crops and over-indulgent with his servants. A man drawn apart from the mere commercial pursuits of life to the quieter