Conscience,” the negro minister had solemnly said in his sermon that Sunday, “is sho’ going to keep a man good. It will make yo’ ‘fraid to lie, or steal, or bear false witness.”
Ben, the old negro who had outlived his generation and who was sheltered in his desolate old age by Col. Henry Jocelyn, had listened intently to the sermon. The word conscience had moved him strangely. There was something just and pure about it.
For a greater part of Monday Ben, with his gray head bowed and his huge hands hanging idly by his side, sat in his solitary cabin and mused over the message that had come to him. All his physical faculties had long since been impaired, but his mental faculties remained perfectly clear. And as he pondered the sermon, nearly every word that the preacher had said was crystal clear to him.
When at last, late in the afternoon he took his battered cedar bucket and went through the great airy pine woods toward Horry Spring, where he got his daily supply of drinking water, the scenes that he had known and loved so long took him on a new and more significant aspect. He felt that his attitude toward them, which in the past had been governed by a capricious will, should be governed only by conscience in the future. And for some reason the noble pines seemed to him far more noble this afternoon, the mellow winter sunlight far more benign and tender, and the saffron jasmine flowers far more heavenly and pure.
Buried in thought, he wandered beyond the spring, and had to retrace his steps. Blood-colored bay leaves lined the bottom of it; in the pool, the water was dark red, but when dipped up it was fresh and clear.
From the dewy retreats haunted by swamp thrushes and bullfinches, the little stream rippled on over its snowy pebbles into the dimness of the shadowy forest. On and on it flowed, through the hushed thicket of myrtle and through a dark swamp where cypress trees rose with their silken crests, until at last it poured into the Santee River, just below the home of Colonel Jocelyn.
Serene as was the flow of the little stream, its peaceful tide was not usually more tranquil than the life-tide in the heart of the genial and gentle old colonel. But on this day there was great trouble on the plantation. Nothing of so serious a nature had happened on the plantation since the blind mule Marie has died, five years before. The fact was that a fox had been taking heavy toll of the colonel’s game chickens. Five had been stolen before the loss had been discovered.
The chickens had been taken at night, of course, the ragged remains of one especially fine cock had been found in the broomgrass near the chicken yard. The intruder had had the boldness to devour his prey almost beneath the colonel’s bedroom windows.
The colonel’s fox-hunting days were over, and his once famous pack of hounds had diminished to a solitary creature, which, toothless and half-blind, dozed in the sun all day, and which did not have heart to howl at the full moon at night. So the colonel was at a loss to know how to put a stop to the depredations.
Many of his best chickens, with a high-bred dislike of being cooped up in the house for the night, slept out on the fences near the yard and in the low trees near by. Colonel Jocelyn half believed that any game that would go to roost meekly in a chicken house, when it had several thousand acres to roam over during the day, had a strain of common blood in it somewhere.
Fuming up and down under the big live-oaks, the old gentleman tried to devise some scheme for thwarting Master Reynard. As he paced up and down, Maj. Blythe Biddecomb, owner of the adjoining plantation, rode up.
“What’s the trouble, colonel?” he exclaimed, reigning in his mule Daphne with some show of flourish and effort, although the mule had been cropping the long succulent grass before the major ever ordered it to halt.
“It’s the worst luck, Blythe,” answered the colonel, glad indeed to have some sympathy and advice. “Five of my finest games are gone stolen.”
“Fox?” queried the major.
“Yes,” said the colonel, leaning wearily against the rotting stake-and –rider fence. “I reckon it must be a fox. I found some fresh tracks crossing the road down by the low gate, and my prize bronze-back cock I came across in the broomgrass over there half eaten. Maybe that old hound nosed him out before he finished his meal.”
“All gone in one night?” questioned Major Biddecomb, who liked to treat all subjects with legal precision.
“I don’t believe so,” returned the colonel. ”What would you do, Blythe?”
“Fox gun,” answered Major Biddecomb gravely, as if he were suggesting some unusual device. “It’s the only cure for your kind of chicken thief. I got a gray fox three years ago with one, although he had already cost me a couple of hen turkeys. S’pose you bring your old shotgun out, and I’ll rig her up for you.”
Colonel Jocelyn got the old double-barreled gun from the house, and he and the major set the fox trap. They were as eager as two boys. First they piled some brush lightly in two rows to make a rough pathway from the thickets nearby to the fence of the chicken yard. Then near the chicken house, they tied the gun on a low box with the muzzle pointing straight down the pathway.
The major, who was evidently familiar with the mechanism of fox traps, fastened one end of a long cord to the triggers, passed it round a smooth stake driven into the ground immediately behind the gun, and carried the other end some little distance down the pathway, where he passed it round two other stakes driven on opposite sides of the approach. The slightest touch on the cross cord would discharge the load from the gun.
When the work was done, Major Biddecomb rode off homeward. He felt that he had spent a most neighborly and profitable afternoon; but he failed utterly to inspire the unresponsive Daphne with any kindliness of his heart. She only rolled her angular head from side to side, whisked her dry tail, and ambled off at a slow gait.
On the other side of the plantation, Ben was thinking about conscience; he tried to fathom its mysteries, to realize its beauties, to understand its bleak austerities. The dogma of conscience hummed through his brain so insistently that he became a little tired of it. When he came home from Horry spring, he tried to forget all about it; but he could not. Again and again the questions of conscience assailed him.
As he stepped down from a shelving, sandy bank onto the main road, he slipped on a bare pine root and upset his precious bucket of water. He had to go back nearly a mile in order to refill it; he was alone and old, and the shadows of the December twilight were already darkening in the mighty pines.
When at last he reached his lonely cabin it was night, and his desolate home loomed solitary in the darkness. Sighing, Ben sat down on the hickory-block doorstep to rest; and not until then did it flash across to him that it was Monday night, and that he had not a bite to eat in the cabin. He always got his week’s allowance of food from Colonel Jocelyn’s commissary on Monday. The commissary would now be closed, and he had eaten nothing that day except two half-burned sweet potatoes early in the morning. He felt scarcely strong enough to go over to the plantation house. Yet he knew that Colonel Jocelyn and his daughters, the only friends that he had left in the world, would give him plenty to eat and a warm place to sleep if he would go over to the great house. He wondered vaguely why conscience, which he knew to be so great, did not give him aid and comfort now.
After a little while the darkness gathered so deep, the barred-owls hooted so weirdly, and the rasping bark of the foxes in the old burying ground sounded so near that the aged man struggled painfully to his feet and shuffled off down the black road toward the plantation house.
When he had passed the stables he saw the huge white bulk of the great house looming spectral and silent beneath the majestic live oaks. But, alas, there were no lights visible! He was too late; he had not been able to walk fast enough. More that ever he was alone now in the solitary night. But no, not alone. For as he stood there, a pathetic figure of weariness and bewilderment, he heard a great outcry in the darkness, and three proud game roosters, each trying to outdo the others, announced confidently and importantly that it was eleven o’clock. Ben knew well enough where they were. He also knew how to lift one noiselessly from its perch; for although he had never stolen a chicken, he had raised many of them. He was standing near the end of the path that led up to the chicken house. The roosters could hardly be more than 20 feet away. He even heard one of them clear its throat sedately as it settled down for another nap.
The old man took a step or two toward the sleeping chickens and then paused to listen. He heard one of his prizes stir on its roost; but there was now no other sound except the hooting of a swamp-sequestered owl far away. On his hands and knees Ben crept closer until he was almost within arm’s reach of his prey.
The cross cord of the Jocelyn-Biddecomb fox gun stretched a foot ahead of him, straight across his pathway. He was crouched so low that the full charge of buckshot would probably take its awful effect in his pitiful sunken breast.
But a foot away from the deadly hidden string he halted. A deep pain was in his heart; a keen and angry light seemed to flash a menace before his eyes. He sank back in the path, drew in a long breath, and looked up at the tremulous white stars. The words of the preacher rang in his ears: “Conscience is sho’ going to keep a man good. It will make yo’ ’fraid to lie, or steal, or bear false witness.”
So this must be the doing of conscience! Clear and swift as a thunderbolt out of the pure, silent heavens, conscience had struck him, had pierced his heart, had brought him face to face with the fact that he was being a thief―and thieving from the kindest, gentlest, most generous old gentleman on earth.
Ben rose stumbling to his feet and passed on up the road that led to his forlorn cabin on the other side of the plantation.
As he neared the cabin, he was startled to see a lantern swinging in the path and to hear voices laughing. As he emerged like a shapeless shadow into the brightness, he saw to his amazement that it was Colonel Jocelyn and his two daughters.
“Why, hello Ben!” the colonel called heartily. “Where have you been this time of night?”
“Oh Ben, guess where we’ve been!” cried out Lucy Jocelyn.
“We’ve been robbing your cabin, Ben!” cried Alice Jocelyn merrily.
Still laughing joyously, they left the bewildered old negro trembling in the darkness.
When he reached his cabin he found a cheerful fire burning on the wide hearth. On the chair, on the floor, and on the long wooden bench were great bundles done up in white paper. Ben could not understand it at all. He went from one package to another, and wonderingly opened each. In one was a huge, sugar-cured ham. In another was a box of ginger crackers and a peck of sweet potatoes. And in the last package could he believe his eyes! was a great game rooster, all ready to be cooked.
Then Ben went down on his knees and covered his face with his hands. And while he knelt there, he remembered that tonight was Christmas Eve.
The next morning Major Biddecomb rode over, and found the colonel by the gate.
“What luck, colonel?” he queried.
“Fine!” cried the colonel, vigorously wringing the major’s hand. “I heard the shot about midnight. Didn’t go out until this morning. ’Twas a gray, not a red.”
“I’m mighty glad you got him,” mused the major, stroking Daphne’s scrawny neck. “There’s no other way to stop a fox. He’s an animal that has no conscience.”
Note: “A Fox and a Conscience” originally appeared in Old Plantation Days, published in 1921.