HIGHLY RESOLVED.
Mollie Ainslie had made all her preparations to leave Red Wing.
She had investigated the grounds of the suit brought by Winburn
against Nimbus and others. Indeed, she found herself named among
the "others," as well as all those who had purchased from Nimbus
or were living on the tract by virtue of license from him. Captain
Pardee had soon informed her that the title of Nimbus was, in fact,
only a life-estate, which had fallen in by the death of the life
tenant, while Winburn claimed to have bought up the interests of
the reversioners. He intimated that it was possible that Winburn
had done this while acting as the agent of Colonel Desmit, but this
was probably not susceptible of proof, on account of the death of
Desmit. He only stated it as a conjecture at best.
At the same time, he informed her that the small tract about the
old ordinary, which had come to Nimbus by purchase, and which was
all that she occupied, was not included in the life-estate, but
was held in fee by Walter Greer. She had therefore instructed him
to defend for her upon Nimbus's title, more for the sake of asserting
his right than on account of the value of the premises. The suit
was for possession and damages for detention and injury of the
property, and an attachment had been taken out against Nimbus's
property, on the claim for damages, as a non-resident debtor. As
there seemed to be no good ground for defense on the part of those
who had purchased under Nimbus, the attorney advised that resistance
to the suit would be useless. Thus they lost at once the labor of
their whole life of freedom, and were compelled to begin again where
slavery had left them. This, taken in connection with the burning
of the church, the breaking up of the school, and the absence of
Eliab and Nimbus, had made the once happy and busy little village
most desolate and forlorn.
The days which Mollie Ainslie had passed in the old hostel since
she left Mulberry Hill had been days of sorrow. Tears and moans
and tales of anxious fear had been in her ears continually. All
over the county, the process of "redemption" was being carried on.
The very air was full of horrors. Men with bleeding backs, women
with scarred and mutilated forms, came to her to seek advice and
consolation. Night after night, devoted men, who did not dare to
sleep in their own homes, kept watch around her, in order that her
slumbers might be undisturbed. It seemed as if all law had been
forgotten, and only a secret Klan had power in the land. She did
not dare, brave as she was, to ride alone outside of the little
village. She did not really think she would be harmed, yet she
trembled when the night came, and every crackling twig sent her
heart into her mouth in fear lest the chivalric masqueraders should
come to fulfil their vague threats against herself. But her heart
bled for the people she had served, and whom she saw bowed down
under the burden of a terrible, haunting fear.
If she failed to make due allowance for that savageness of nature
which generations of slavery are sure to beget in the master, let us
not blame her. She was only a woman, and saw only what was before
her. She did not see how the past injected itself into the present, and
gave it tone and color. She reasoned only from what met her sight.
It is not strange that she felt bitterly toward those who had
committed such seemingly vandal acts. No wonder she spoke bitterly,
wrote hard things to her Northern friends, and denied the civilization
and Christianity of those who could harry, oppress, and destroy
the poor, the ignorant, and the weak. It is not surprising that
she sneered at the "Southern Gentleman," or that she wrote him down
in very black characters in the book and volume of her memory. She
was not a philosopher nor a politician, and she had never speculated
on the question as to how near of kin virtue and vice may be.
She had never considered how narrow a space it is that very often
divides the hero from the criminal, the patriot from the assassin,
the gentleman from the ruffian, the Christian saint from the
red-handed savage. Her heart was hot with wrath and her tongue
was tipped with bitterness.
For the first time she blushed at the thought of her native land.
That the great, free, unmatched Republic should permit these things,
should shut its eyes and turn its back upon its helpless allies in
their hour of peril, was a most astounding and benumbing fact to
her mind. What she had loved with all that tenacity of devotion
which every Northern heart has for the flag and the country, was
covered with ignominy by these late events. She blushed with shame
as she thought of the weak, vacillating nation which had given the
promise of freedom to the ears of four millions of weak but trustful
allies, and broken it to their hearts. She knew that the country
had appealed to them in its hour of mortal agony, and they had
answered with their blood. She knew that again it had appealed to
them for aid to write the golden words of Freedom in its Constitution,
words before unwritten, in order that they might not be continued
in slavery, and they had heard and answered by their votes; and then,
while the world still echoed with boastings of these achievements,
it had taken away the protecting hand and said to those whose hearts
were full of hate, "Stay not thine hand."
She thought, too, that the men who did these things--the midnight
masqueraders--were rebels still in their hearts. She called them
so in hers at least--enemies of the country, striving dishonorably
to subvert its laws. She did not keep in mind that to every Southern
man and woman, save those whom the national act brought forth to
civil life, the Nation is a thing remote and secondary. To them
the State is first, and always so far first as to make the country
a dim, distant cloud, to be watched with suspicion or aversion as
a something hostile to their State or section. The Northern mind
thinks of the Nation first. The love of country centers there.
His pride in his native State is as a part of the whole. As
a _Northerner_, he has no feeling at all. He never speaks
of his section except awkwardly, and when reference to it is made
absolutely necessary by circumstances. He may be from the East or
the West or the Middle, from Maine or Minnesota, but he is first
of all things an American. Mollie thought that the result of the
war--defeat and destruction--ought to have made the white people
of the South just such Americans. In fact it never occurred to her
simple heart but that they had always been such. In truth, she did
not conceive that they could have been otherwise. She had never
dreamed that there were any Americans with whom it was not the
first and ever-present thought that they _were_ Americans.
She might have known, if she had thought so far, that in that
mystically-bounded region known as "the South," the people were
first of all "Southerners;" next "Georgians," or "Virginians," or
whatever it might be; and last and lowest in the scale of political
being, "Americans." She might have known this had she but noted
how the word "Southern" leaps into prominence as soon as the old
"Mason and Dixon's line" is crossed. There are "Southern" hotels
and "Southern" railroads, "Southern" steamboats, "Southern"
stage-coaches, "Southern" express companies, "Southern" books,
"Southern" newspapers, "Southern" patent-medicines, "Southern"
churches, "Southern" manners, "Southern" gentlemen, "Southern"
ladies, "Southern" restaurants, "Southern" bar-rooms, "Southern"
whisky, "Southern" gambling-hells, "Southern" principles, "Southern"
_everything!_ Big or little, good or bad, everything that courts
popularity, patronage or applause, makes haste to brand itself as
distinctively and especially "Southern."
Then she might have remembered that in all the North--the great,
busy, bustling, over-confident, giantly Great-heart of the
continent--there is not to be found a single "Northern" hotel,
steamer, railway, stage-coach, bar-room, restaurant, school,
university, school-book, or any other "Northern" institution. The
word "Northern" is no master-key to patronage or approval. There is
no "Northern" clannishness, and no distinctive "Northern" sentiment
that prides itself on being such. The "Northern" man may be "Eastern"
or "Western." He may be "Knickerbocker," "Pennamite," "Buckeye,"
or "Hoosier;" but above all things, and first of all things in his
allegiance and his citizenship, he is an American. The "Southern"
man is proud of the Nation chiefly because it contains his section
and State; the "Northern" man is proud of his section and State
chiefly because it is a part of the Nation.
But Mollie Ainslie did not stop to think of these differences, or
of the bias which habit gives to the noblest mind; and so her heart
was full of wrath and much bitterness. She had forgiven coldness,
neglect, and aspersion of herself, but she could not forgive
brutality and violence toward the weak and helpless. She saw the
futility of hope of aid from the Nation that had deserted its allies.
She felt, on the other hand, the folly of expecting any change in a
people steeped in intolerance and gloating in the triumph of lawless
violence over obnoxious law. She thought she saw that there was but
little hope for that people for whom she had toiled so faithfully
to grow to the full stature of the free man in the region where
they had been slaves. She was short-sighted and impatient, but she
was earnest and intense. She had done much thinking in the sorrowful
days just past, and had made up her mind that whatsoever others
might do, she, Mollie Ainslie, would do her duty.
The path seemed plain to her. She had been, as it seemed to her,
mysteriously led, step by step, along the way of life, always with
blindfolded eyes and feet that sought not to go in the way they
were constrained to take. Her father and mother dead, her brother's
illness brought her to the South; there his wish detained her;
a seeming chance brought her to Red Wing; duties and cares had
multiplied with her capacity; the cup of love, after one sweet
draught, had been dashed from her lips; desolation and destruction
had come upon the scene of her labors, impoverishment and woe upon
those with whom she had been associated, and a hopeless fate upon
all the race to which they belonged in the land wherein they were
born.
She did not propose to change these things. She did not aspire to
set on foot any great movement or do any great deed, but she felt
that she was able to succor a few of the oppressed race. Those who
most needed help and best deserved it, among the denizens of Red
Wing, she determined to aid in going to a region where thought at
least was free. It seemed to her altogether providential that at
this time she had still, altogether untouched, the few thousands
which Oscar had given her of his army earnings, and also the little
homestead on the Massachusetts hills, toward which a little town
had been rapidly growing during the years of unwonted prosperity
succeeding the war, until now its value was greatly increased from
what it was but a few years before. She found she was quite an
heiress when she came to take an inventory of her estate, and made
up her mind that she would use this estate to carry out her new
idea. She did not yet know the how or the where, but she had got it
into her simple brain that somewhere and somehow this money might
be invested so as to afford a harbor of refuge for these poor
colored people, and still not leave herself unprovided for. She
had not arranged the method, but she had fully determined on the
undertaking.
This was the thought of Mollie Ainslie as she sat in her room at the
old ordinary, one afternoon, nearly two weeks after her departure
from the Le Moyne mansion. She had quite given up all thought of
seeing Hesden again. She did not rave or moan over her disappointment.
It had been a sharp and bitter experience when she waked out of
the one sweet dream of her life. She saw that it _was_ but a
dream, foolish and wild; but she had no idea of dying of a broken
heart. Indeed, she did not know that her heart _was_ broken.
She had loved a man whom she had fancied as brave and gentle as
she could desire her other self to be. She had neither proffered
her love to him nor concealed it. She was not ashamed that she
loved nor ashamed that he should know it, as she believed he did.
She thought he must have known it, even though she did not herself
realize it at the time. If he had been that ideal man whom she
loved, he would have come before, claimed her love, and declared
his own. That man could never have let her go alone into desolation
and danger without following at once to inquire after her. It
was not that she needed his protection, but she had desired--nay,
expected as a certainty--that he would come and proffer it. The
ideal of her love would have done so. If Hesden Le Moyne had come
then, she would have given her life into his keeping forever after,
without the reservation of a thought. That he did not come only
showed that he was not her ideal, not the one she had loved, but
only the dim likeness of that one. It was so much the worse for Mr.
Hesden Le Moyne, but none the worse for Mollie Ainslie. She still
loved her ideal, but knew now that it was only an ideal.
Thus she mused, although less explicitly, as the autumn afternoon
drew to its close. She watched the sun sinking to his rest, and
reflected that she would see him set but once more over the pines
that skirted Red Wing. There was but little more to be done--a
few things to pack up, a few sad farewells to be said, and then
she would turn her face towards the new life she had set her heart
upon.
There was a step upon the path. She heard her own name spoken and
heard the reply of the colored woman, who was sitting on the porch.
Her heart stopped beating as the footsteps approached her door. She
thought her face flushed burning red, but in reality it was of a
hard, pallid gray as she looked up and saw Hesden Le Moyne standing
in the doorway.