CHAPTER XIV
Almost as much heartened by the result of the presidential election as if it had been a victory, Dr. Ware and his friends and political co-workers in Hillside lost no time in renewing and extending the work of the campaign.
“If we have polled such a tremendous vote as this,” they said, “when the party in many northern states was no more than a year old, what can we not do in the next four years?”
The Rocky Mountain Club, through which they had carried on the Frémont propaganda, was reorganized and every member went zealously to work again to win converts to their faith and add to their membership. Joshua Giddings, ardent apostle of the anti-slavery cause, journeyed down from his home in the Western Reserve during a recess of Congress and made for them a stirring speech. To another meeting came Governor Chase with words of hope and encouragement and practical advice. And on one memorable night Henry Ward Beecher roused an overflowing hall to a pitch of enthusiastic resolution hardly equaled even during the campaign.
Rhoda attended the meetings with her father and shared his zeal in the work the club was doing.She and Mrs. Hardaker, Horace’s mother, and Marcia Kimball organized an “Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle” which met at the houses of the members and made clothing for such of the refugees as reached the Hillside station ragged and shivering.
Mrs. Ware knew only in a general way of her daughter’s interest and work in connection with this society, and of Rhoda’s connection with the Underground she knew nothing at all. Deeply grieved, but not yet despairing, over the girl’s refusal to marry the son of her old friend, she set herself to combat, in gentle, unobtrusive ways, what she believed to be the harmful influence exerted by her husband over their first-born.
She talked much with Rhoda about the delightfulness of plantation life and she dwelt long and lovingly upon Jeff Delavan’s passionate devotion and upon his ambition and capacities which, she was sure, would result in a career of national renown. Rhoda hearkened with interest, saying but little in opposition, for her heart had begun to ache for her mother almost as much as it did for herself and she shrank from bringing the hurt look into those gentle eyes any oftener than she found necessary. But sometimes, when evasion was no longer possible, she would say, with caresses, and humble manner:
“Dear mother, you don’t know how much all you tell me makes me long for that kind of lifeand surroundings. I think the wish for them must have been born in me. But, mother, dear mother, I couldn’t endure them if they meant being a part of slavery. Perhaps I should feel different about it if I had been born there, as you were, and had grown up in it.”
Dr. Ware knew of the efforts his wife was making to win Rhoda’s consent and, perceiving that her arguments and presentations made a strong appeal to their daughter’s temperament, set himself to counteract any effect they might have by appeals to her conscience. But he openly urged no argument against the marriage, and in all his talk with her he took it for granted that the question was settled for good.
Once he told her the story of Fanny Kemble, then at the zenith of her fame,—of how, for love’s sake, she had married a slaveholder, although herself convinced of the wrongfulness of slavery, and of how life on the plantation, in close contact with the system, had filled her with such loathing that she had not long been able to endure it.
“I am very glad, Rhoda,” he added, “that you were able to appreciate, before it was too late, just what it would mean to marry into the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ You have saved yourself a great deal of unhappiness.”
But especially did Dr. Ware have confidence in anti-slavery work as a preventive of possible weakeningin his daughter’s determination. To that end he encouraged her in her sewing-circle activities, enlisted her help in the sending out of pamphlets, newspapers and other literature which was a part of the work of the Rocky Mountain Club, and entrusted largely to her care the refugee slaves who sought the shelter of their house.
Husband and wife said not a word to each other of their opposing desires. Silence upon the question of Rhoda and Delavan was a part of their lifelong habit of ignoring the question of slavery in their mutual relations. But each felt so much at stake in their silent struggle that gradually it forced them apart, and as the winter months wore on there grew up between them the first alienation of their married life.
Rhoda was soon sensible of the growing coldness between her father and mother and guessed its cause. Her heart ached over the unhappiness she had so unintentionally brought about and she spent much thought and many secret tears upon the endeavor to find some way out of the intolerable situation. Sometimes, in her misery over having brought such disaster into her home, she felt that, if it would only heal the breach, she could even sacrifice her scruples against becoming a part of the system of slavery.
“But it wouldn’t do any good,” was the conclusion to which she had always to come. “For if I were to marry Jeff it would make father bitterlyunhappy and he would blame mother for having influenced me to give way. And as long as I don’t marry him mother will keep on feeling that it is father’s fault and being angry with him because of it.”
The hiding place for runaway slaves was completed during the stay of Mrs. Ware and Charlotte in Cincinnati, in October. It was a little, narrow room, or cell, long enough for a man to stretch himself at length on the floor and high enough for him to sit upright on a bench. On three sides and across the top, cords of wood for the winter fires were stacked in orderly array. But on the third side, containing the entrance, where there was only a little space between the room and the back wall of the shed, the wood was piled irregularly. From any but a very searching eye these apparently haphazard sticks would conceal the tiny, boarded structure, while in a moment they could be thrown aside and passage in or out made easy. Within, a pile of straw and some old quilts and carriage rugs made a bed comfortable enough, save on the worst of winter nights, for those who had seldom known a better.
If a wayfarer gave the four signal knocks on a night too bitterly cold for him to be housed in the woodpile shelter Rhoda, into whose charge her father had given most of the work of conducting their “station,” risked discovery by making some arrangement for him within the house. Once,when the traveler was a man alone, she bedded him for the rest of the night on the lounge in the office, until early morning, when Jim hurried him to the woodshed. Another time, when the suppliants were a husband and wife and little child, a bed was improvised for them in Jim and Lizzie’s room.
But, zealously absorbed though she was in this work and convinced that it was righteous and would have a good result, Rhoda was never free from twinges of conscience because it was being carried on without her mother’s knowledge. “It is her home and it isn’t fair for her not to know about it,” she thought, time after time, as the winter went by. “Of course, she wouldn’t like it and it would make her most unhappy to know about it, and it is very dear in father to want to save her the pain of knowing. I know it’s right for us to do it—we must— Oh, dear! It’s just another of these dreadful knots of right and wrong all mixed up that the North and South have tangled themselves into! And slavery is at the bottom of it all,—and slavery is the thing we must get rid of—tear it all out—no matter—no matter who is hurt!”
The winter months, with their likelihood of cold and storms, greatly lessened the Underground traffic. But even so, rarely a week went by without the coming of at least one dark-faced runaway from the South, trusting to find, at “the whitehouse on the top of the hill with a lantern at the gate,” shelter, food, and help for the next stage of his journey.
For Rhoda it was a busy winter and its weeks sped by rapidly until the warming sun brought promise that the spring was already on her way. Then there came a night of cold and blustering wind with dashes of rain. It was near daylight when Rhoda was roused from sound sleep by Lizzie, who was bending over her bed and softly calling her name. A fugitive was downstairs, tired out and wet to the skin.
The runaway was a young mulatto, scarcely more than a lad, who had absconded from his owner, a horse dealer in a Kentucky town, because he had learned that he was about to be sold to a trader who was collecting a party of negroes for the owner of a Louisiana cotton plantation. He was already planning to earn enough money in Canada to buy “free papers” for his mother, who was owned by a merchant in the same town. But he was oppressed by the fear that she might be sold “down south” before he would be able to rescue her. From her box of clothing, kept on hand for such emergencies, Rhoda gave him new, dry garments, he was fed and warmed, and then taken to the woodshed shelter where, since he was so wearied, he was left to rest and sleep through all the next day.
Notwithstanding her many activities and herzeal for the anti-slavery cause, Jeff Delavan was never absent long from Rhoda’s mind, nor did she even try to banish him from her thoughts. Every now and then came a long letter from him which she read and re-read and pondered over, and finally answered at equal length. These letters she frankly read, with now and then a reservation, to her mother, who, as the months went by, began to hope that finally she and Jeff together would overcome the girl’s resolution. Rhoda entered into the social gaieties of the town much less that winter than had formerly been her custom. Her days were so fully occupied and the nights were so likely to bring responsibility that she was reluctant to leave her post. Moreover, since she had become so much absorbed in anti-slavery work, social pleasures had for her less attraction. Charlotte gibed at her frequently on this account.
“You’re no better than an old maid already, Rhoda,” she complained that same morning when the mulatto boy was sleeping in the woodshed. They were working together, dusting and tidying the big, bright living-room. Charlotte had been to a party the night before with Billy Saunders and his sister Susie, who was her particular friend. But it had taken much coaxing of her mother, with a final appeal to her father’s indulgence, to win a reluctant consent for her to go without the watchful care of her elder sister.
“Really, I think it’s unkind of you to stay athome so much when you know mother doesn’t like me to go without you.”
“But she let you go last night.”
“Yes, because father asked her to. But she didn’t want to do it.” Charlotte paused in her work and regarded her sister with brown eyes sparkling. “Say, Rhoda,” she giggled, “do you suppose father would have sided with me if he’d known about—Horace, last fall?”
Rhoda laughed, then drew her face into admonishing seriousness. “Aren’t you ever going to be ashamed of yourself about that, Charlotte? You ought to be!”
“Indeed I’m not! And I’ll do it again some day, if you don’t quit being such an old maid and sticking at home so much!”
“I guess Horace would know better another time.”
“Well, he’s not the only one!” Charlotte tossed her head and her saucy countenance twinkled with mischief. Rhoda noted her expression and wondered what it might portend, but said nothing. “If you’re not going to marry Jeff Delavan,” she went on, “it’s time somebody else did! The idea of letting such a fine young man, with a beautiful old estate like Fairmount, pine away in single misery!”
“Jeff is free to marry any one he likes, who’ll have him.”
“Who’ll have him! The idea! Rhoda, I never heard of such a simpleton as you are! Well, ifyou’re determined to be an old maid, after such a chance as that, you don’t deserve a bit of sympathy, no matter what happens.”
Charlotte pursed her lips to the tune of “Comin’ thro’ the Rye” and started toward the door. “Jeff was exceedingly nice to me on the boat going down to Cincinnati,” she threw back with a bright glance over her shoulder.
“Jeff is a gentleman and is always very courteous and attentive to ladies.”
“Oh, is he?” was Charlotte’s response with a significant intonation. “Well, I’m awfully tired of all the young men in Hillside and—Horace isn’t the only one, Rhoda!” she ended in her most teasing accents as she danced away, waving her duster.
In spite of all her efforts to drive it away, a dull ache settled in Rhoda’s breast as she thought over Charlotte’s words. She felt sure that behind them lay some intention of more moment than were that young lady’s ordinary vagaries. As she had so often done before, she told herself sharply that she had no right to stand in Charlotte’s way, that if she did not intend to marry Jefferson Delavan she ought not to try to hold his love. And her heart answered back triumphantly that Jeff knew very well he could not hope to make her his wife and that if he nevertheless chose to remain faithful to her she could not be blamed.
As she straightened the piano cover and set the chairs against the wall Rhoda’s lips curved ina proud little smile at the thought that his love for her was strong enough, her attraction for him potent enough, to hold his heart thus steadily against her constant refusal of his wish. For herself, she knew that she would never marry any one else. But it was different, she told herself, with a man. Naturally, she reflected, no one could expect him to remain true very long to a girl who told him “no” over and over again, and it would be no more than any man would be likely to do if he consoled himself with some other girl’s love. It would be much harder to bear, she confessed to herself, if that girl should be her own sister than if she were some far-away being who would take Jeff entirely out of her life and leave him and their unfortunate love a mere memory.
The thought of such an ending of their romance, wherein she would be compelled to see her sister in the place which by right of love ought to be her own, made more insistent the ache in her heart and presently drove her upstairs to lock her door and take from her bureau the box tied with white ribbon. A number of letters lay in it now, beneath the faded rose. She took them out, caressingly, turning each one over in her hands, noting its date, glancing with soft eyes at its closely written pages. Then she began to read them as carefully as if she had not already pored over them a dozen times. For the most part they were arguments in defense of the institution of slavery and the interests ofhis section. But these were interspersed with items of personal interest, little accounts of what he and his sister were doing, comments upon the duties and the pleasures of their life, and now and then an audacious mention, which would make Rhoda at first frown and then smile tenderly, of some holiday they would make or something they would do when she should be installed as mistress at Fairmount. But evidently her lover was hoping to win her by appeals to her intelligence, by trying to convince her that the ideals which he and his section cherished were righteous and desirable.
“I do not yet understand,” she read in the latest letter, still unanswered, “how any one possessing a nature as noble and upright as I know yours to be can yet engage in that work in which you told me you glory so much. (I refer to the assisting of runaway slaves). I do not see how you can reconcile the deliberate breaking of the laws of your country and the taking of other people’s property with the dictates of a scrupulous conscience. But I am well assured that you would not engage in this course if you did not believe it to be thoroughly honorable and right. And therefore I merely accept the fact and marvel at it.”
“The negro is on a moral and intellectual plane so much lower than the white man,” met her eyes in another letter, “that it is evident he was designed by an all-wise God to be the white man’s servitor, just as are the other domestic animals.The Almighty meant the white man to use him for his own benefit in order that he might the more easily mount to higher spheres of cultivation and achievement. Between the races there is a natural relation, ordained by God himself when he created the black so much inferior to the white, and we are but carrying out His decrees when we embody that natural, heaven-declared superiority and inferiority into the legal relation of master and slave.”
Presently her attention was attracted by farther development of the same theme in a more recent missive: “The idea that it is possible for the negro to profit by civilization, to advance or develop, is a monstrous delusion, held only by a few people at the North who know nothing about his real character. To attempt to force him into channels of life and into efforts for which he is by nature unfitted, as they are bent on doing, would be to turn the natural order of things topsy-turvy and bring destruction upon the whole nation. For a free Negrodom in the midst of our republic would swamp it in savagery.”
Over the concluding page of the last letter she pored thoughtfully, stopping now and then to consider again the ideas it contained. For she could not deny to herself the seductive appeal of the aims it set forth, whatever she thought of the arguments upon which they were based. Interested though she was in these lines, she yet remembered to keepher hand over the bottom of the page. She knew what was there, but she knew too that if she hid it from eyes that would be drawn in that direction it would leap at her, when suddenly disclosed, with a fresh thrill of happiness.
“In this beautiful Southland,” she read, “we are working out what will prove to be the crowning glory of civilization. Here man, free to reach his highest possible development, enjoying political liberty, delivered by the divine institution of slavery from the hampering, benumbing effects of labor, surrounded by comfort, beauty, affluence, can produce the finest fruits of human effort. Here a refined and beautiful social order is being established, learning encouraged, chivalrous feeling and living made possible, womanhood reverenced, all intellectual achievement honored and sought after, and here letters and art will flourish as they have not flourished anywhere on the face of the earth since the Christian era began. Here will it be possible, and here only in all the world, for a modern Greece to grow into the fulness of beautiful flower. Here poets and artists and orators and statesmen and men of science and women, whose beauty and grace and talent will make them social queens as powerful as were the ladies of the French salons, will be appreciated and honored and find it possible to reach their finest, fairest development. Here in the new world, in our own native land, will be made possible a reincarnationof all that ‘glory that was Greece, and grandeur that was Rome,’ as our own lamented southern poet has so beautifully sung.”
Thus far she read, and then, lifting her eyes from the page, looked steadily away for a moment. A soft and tender light shone in their gray depths as, smiling gently, she dropped them again upon the page and removed her concealing hand.
“Is it not a glorious prospect, and is it not worth while, my own dear heart, to have some share in bringing about so grand a consummation? What better can I do in the world than to help my beloved South to maintain and extend her social order in which the negro, a mere animal, does the work for which he is fitted and to which he was appointed by the Creator, and the white man, created by God in His own image, is left unhampered to develop his own God-given talents and so produce such splendid results? But I am lonely, my dear one, and I long always for the presence and the companionship of the mate God made for me. Rhoda, darling, do not be cruel any longer! Tell me I can come and claim her! Always, your friend and lover, Jefferson Delavan.”
For a little while Rhoda sat gazing at those closing lines, and then, with a sigh, she prepared to write her answer. She made several beginnings that did not suit her and tossed the pages to one side. “Dear Friend Jeff,” she finally wrote. “Concerningwhat you say about my doing things that are contrary to law, I must tell you that when men make laws that outrage every sense of right and justice in my own heart then I think that to disobey them is the only right and honorable course. The law of God is higher than the law of man. The law of God commands us to help the needy, to succor the oppressed, to aid the wayfarer, to deal justly by all men. That is what I have been doing and what I shall continue to do, although I break a whole houseful of man’s unjust and wicked laws.”
She worked on through his letter, seriously answering an argument here, gaily deriding a point there, now displaying a hint of tenderness in some inquiry concerning his welfare, and again replying with vivacious but evasive sallies to personal remarks in which the lover seemed to overbalance the friend, until at last she came to the closing page. Then she laid down her pen and read it over again, realizing fully the enthusiasm, ambition and youthful energy which stirred and fed his devotion to this ideal of his section, and feeling also to the depths of her soul how completely it parted them. Her lips were trembling and her eyes dim with tears as she took up her pen again.
“I will not deny,” she wrote, “that the picture you draw of a South in which men and women would make the highest and finest kind of civilization, is very attractive to me. Or, rather, itwould be if your beautiful social order were not rooted in the hideous slime of slavery. I cannot believe that it would endure, or that it would be anything but a curse to the world as long as beneath it were the groans, the chains, the unpaid toil and misery of so many thousands of other men and women unfortunate enough to have been born with black skins. It will never be possible for you to claim me as long as you are a part of such a system. But I hope you will always remember me as your truest friend, Rhoda Adeline Ware.”
She always signed her name thus in her letters to him, although she never used her middle name elsewhere, because it was a token of their mothers’ friendship and so it seemed to her to belong specially to their intercourse and to give to it a shy little fragrance of exclusion, of separateness from everything else.
But when she had finished she pushed it all aside and dropped her face on her arm and her whole body trembled with a long, deep sob. Her heart was answering the call of his, which she had heard and refused to heed, through every line of his letters. They were so far apart, their faces were set toward such hostile ideals! And yet across that deep gulf their spirits clamored and their bodies yearned for presence, for companionship, each for its mate. Through a blur of tears she took up her pen and groped for a fresh sheet of paper.
“Oh, Jeff, Jeff,” her pen was flying across thepage, “how will it be possible to endure this separation longer? Surely it is wrong for people who love as we do to tear themselves apart like this. I cannot endure it, and yet I cannot consent. Come then, and carry me away in spite of myself.” Ah, it was a relief to give way to her feelings, to write the things she longed to say, even though she did not intend that he should ever read them. The pain in her face, the drawn look of mental suffering, began to fade out of it. “Tie my feet and my arms, if you must, so that I cannot run from you. Stop my lips with kisses, so that I cannot say I will not go. Take me in your arms and carry me away, anywhere, but do not let me deny our love any longer.”
It was the cry of the primitive woman, whose sane instinct for the strong mate lives on through all the thousand and one denials and perversions of civilization. From the days when courtship was seizure, and first choice belonged to the strongest, has the wish to be won in spite of herself lived on in the heart of woman. It has been buried deep and ever deeper beneath the accruing refinements of humanity, and forced to find dwarfed expression in the subterfuges with which the civilized woman evades and refuses her wooer, that finally she may make pretense of her unwilling capture. But now, from beneath the depths of a million years, it rose suddenly to the surface of a strong woman’s heart and overpowered all her strength.
Her hand was shaking and her bosom heaving as she put the sheet to one side. There was a knock at the door and Charlotte’s voice called out: “Rhoda! Please let me have some of your paper. I’ve used mine all up.”
Opening her door a mere crack she handed out paper and envelopes, for she had no wish to give her sister’s inquiring mind a chance to speculate upon the reason for her agitated countenance. But it was only a moment more, with a little resolute drawing in of her breath and a pressure of her lips, and a minute or two before the mirror, until her composure was restored. Then she heard her mother in the hall: “Come, Rhoda! Come, Charlotte! Dinner’s ready!”
“Yes, mother, in just a minute,” she called back. Jeff’s letters were quickly laid away in their box. Then she gathered up the sheets of her own letter and hurriedly folded them into the envelope, which she addressed and sealed. For after dinner she was going to a meeting of the anti-slavery sewing circle. The discarded sheets she twisted together and tossed into the fire.