The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields — Background and Themes

I. The Man in the Field

II. The Owner of Blake Hall

III. Showing That a Little Culture Entails Great Care

IV. Of Human Nature in the Raw State

V. The Wreck of the Blakes

VI. Carraway Plays Courtier

VII. In Which a Stand Is Made

VIII. Treats of a Passion That Is Not Love

IX. Cynthia X. Sentimental and Otherwise

BOOK II. The Temptation

I. The Romance That Might Have Been

II. The Romance That Was

III. Fletcher's Move and Christopher's Counterstroke

IV. A Gallant Deed That Leads to Evil

V. The Glimpse of a Bride

VI. Shows Fletcher in a New Light

VII. In Which Hero and Villain Appear as One

VIII. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

IX. As the Twig Is Bent

X. Powers of Darkness

BOOK III. The Revenge

I. In Which Tobacco Is Hero

II. Between Christopher and Will

III. Mrs. Blake Speaks Her Mind on Several Matters

IV. In Which Christopher Hesitates

V. The Happiness of Tucker

VI. The Wages of Folly

VII. The Toss of a Coin

VIII. In Which Christopher Triumphs

BOOK IV. The Awakening

II. Maria Returns to the Hall

III. The Day Afterward

IV. The Meeting in the Night

V. Maria Stands on Christopher's Ground

VI. The Growing Light

VII. In which Carraway Speaks the Truth to Maria

VIII. Between Maria and Christopher

IX. Christopher Faces Himself

X. By the Poplar Spring

BOOK V. The Ancient Law

I. Christopher Seeks an Escape

II. The Measure of Maria

IV. In Which Mrs. Blake's Eyes are Opened

V. Christopher Plants by Moonlight

VI. Treats of the Tragedy Which Wears a Comic Mask

VII. Will Faces Desperation and Stands at Bay

VIII. How Christopher Comes into His Revenge

IX. The Fulfilling of the Law

CHRISTOPHER BLAKE, a tobacco-grower

MRS. BLAKE, his mother

TUCKER CORBIN, an old soldier

CYNTHIA and LILA BLAKE; sisters of Christopher

BILL FLETCHER, a wealthy farmer

MARIA FLETCHER, his granddaughter

WILL FLETCHER, his grandson

"MISS SAIDIE," sister of Fletcher

JACOB WEATHERBY, a tobacco-grower

JIM WEATHERBY, his son

SOL PETERKIN, another tobacco-grower

MOLLY PETERKIN, daughter of Sol

Tom SPADE, a country storekeeper

CHAPTER I. The Man in the Field

When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine.

"So this is my way, is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a shining puddle--"five miles as the crow flies, and through a bog?"

For a moment he hung suspended above the encrusted axle, peering with blinking pale-gray eyes over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. In his appearance there was the hint of a scholarly intention unfulfilled, and his dress, despite its general carelessness, bespoke a different standard of taste from that of the isolated dwellers in the surrounding fields. A casual observer might have classified him as one of the Virginian landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow of the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen into a provincial prominence.

His humour met with a slow response from the driver, who sat playfully flicking at a horsefly on the flank of a tall, raw-boned sorrel. "Wall, thar's been a sight of rain lately," he observed, with goodnatured acquiescence, "but I don't reckon the mud's more'n waist deep, an' if you do happen to git clean down, thar's Sol Peterkin along to pull you out. Whar're you hidin', Sol? Why, bless my boots, if he ain't gone fast asleep!"

At this a lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the long seat.

"I'd wake up if I was you," she remarked in the voice her sex assumes when virtue lapses into severity.

Starting from his doze, the little man straightened his wiry, sunburned neck and mechanically raised his hand to wipe away a thin stream of tobacco juice which trickled from his half-open mouth.

"Hi!we ain't got here a'ready!" he exclaimed, as he spat energetically into the mud. "I d'clar if it don't beat all--one minute we're thar an' the next we're here. It's a movin' world we live in, ain't that so, mum?" Then, as the severe matron still stared unbendingly before her, he descended between the wheels, and stood nervously scraping his feet in the long grass by the roadside.