RHODA OF THE UNDERGROUND
[Illustration: “He listened with her hand clasped in his.”]
RHODA OF THE
UNDERGROUND
By
FLORENCE FINCH KELLY
Author of “With Hoops of Steel,” “The Delafield
Affair,” etc., etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
THE KINNEYS
New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1909
Copyright 1909
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909
THE MASON-HENRY PRESS
SYRACUSE AND NEW YORK
ILLUSTRATIONS
“He listened, with her hand clasped in his.” Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
“‘You won’t shoot him?’ she demanded, turning sharply around” 68
“Inside were a withered rose and a letter” 100
“‘Don’t Jeff, please don’t!’ she pleaded” 250
RHODA OF THE UNDERGROUND
CHAPTER I
The benediction of God was in the sunshine that lay still and bright
upon green fields and blooming gardens. The town, marshaled along the
river side, nestled quietly under the caressing warmth. Down by the
steamboat landing it stirred into sudden noisy activity as the up-river
boat drew in and made ready to discharge cargo and passengers. But
farther back, where the streets, lined with maple and butternut trees
and white-blossomed locusts, climbed the long sloping hill, the May
sunshine seemed to have kissed the earth into radiant peace. Here and
there, from some white-painted cottage set in a grassy, tree-shaded
yard, came the sound of a woman’s voice in speech or song, or the
shrilly sweet accents of children at play floated out from porch or
shady nook.
The lilac bushes in a yard at the top of the hill, hedging the walk
from front door to gate, lazily stirred their lavender foam and sent
forth waves of fragrance. The house, uncompromisingly white and square
and solid-looking, with green shutters at the windows, had a wide,
columned veranda across the southward front and down the eastern side.
Upon the balmy stillness in which it too was enveloped there came a
sound of dancing steps and girlish laughter, and a young woman ran
out of the front door, teasing with a leafy switch a gray kitten that
scampered at her side. Her spreading skirts, crinolined and beruffled,
tilted back and forth, and with a sudden twist she caught the kitten
within their cage. As it peeked out, with a half-frightened face, ready
to spring away, she caught it by the back of the neck and lifted it to
the bend of her arm.
“No, you didn’t, Prince of Walesy!” she laughed. “You’re not smart
enough yet to get away from me like that!” Leaning against the
veranda rail she gazed watchfully down the street while she pinched
the kitten’s ears until it squeaked and then stroked it into purring
content. The sunlight brought out reddish and golden gleams in her dark
brown hair.
“Walesy, why don’t they come!” she exclaimed with an impatient frown,
pulling the cat’s tail while it protested with growl and claw. “I
heard the steamboat a long time ago.” Her eyes sought the glimpses of
sparkling river between the trees and she descried a thin banner of
smoke moving up-stream. “Yes, there it goes! They’ll surely be here
soon! Now don’t make such a fuss about having your tail pulled. You’ll
just have to get used to it!”
She began to whistle softly, stopped, cast a backward glance at the
open door, made a little grimace and struck again into her tune,
louder than before. Up the street, under the drooping white masses of
locust bloom, came a two-seated carriage. “Mother! They’re coming!
They’re right here!” she called. Then with the kitten still in her arm
she scurried down the path between the walls of fragrant lilac, her
crinolined skirt giving glimpses of trimly slippered feet as it tilted
from side to side. Unlatching the gate she stepped upon its lower
cross-piece and swung back upon it as far as it would go. “Father!
Rhoda!” she called out joyously, and was herself welcomed with “Well,
Charlotte!” and a kiss by her father and a laughing embrace by her
sister. One of the tall, square gate-posts bore the sign, “Dr. Amos M.
Ware.”
“Now let’s take in the things!” cried Charlotte. “I’m just dying to
see what you’ve brought! Here, Jim,” to the negro who was holding the
horses, “come and carry in these bundles.”
Within the house there was eager cross-fire of question and answer,
punctuated by frequent exclamations of delight, as the two sisters and
their mother unwrapped the parcels and examined their contents.
“This is for mother,” said Rhoda, shaking out a light wool wrap.
“They’re wearing these little shawls so much this spring. Charlotte,
doesn’t she look nice in it!” Throwing her arms around her mother’s
shoulders Rhoda kissed her twice and then rushed back to the table
piled with packages. “And I’ve got the sweetest bonnet for you,
Charlotte!” she went on, opening a bandbox. “There! isn’t that lovely,
mother?” She tied the strings under Charlotte’s chin and all three
clustered about the mirror as the girl critically surveyed herself
therein.
The bonnet covered her head, in the fashion of the days “before the
war,” and the wreath of flowers inside its front made a dainty frame
that seemed to be trying to compel into demureness the saucy face with
its tip-tilted nose and mischievous brown eyes.
The two sisters, reflected side by side in the mirror, looked oddly
unlike. Charlotte’s deep tones of hair and eyes and rich coloring paled
in her elder sister into light brown and gray, and faint rose-bloom
upon her cheek. But Rhoda’s straight, thin-nostriled nose gave to her
countenance a certain dignity which the other’s lacked, while her
mouth, with its curved upper lip, just short enough to part easily
from its full red fellow, had a piquant sweetness more attractive than
her sister’s more regular features. Her eyes, large and gray, and
indeed all the upper part of her face, had a serious expression. At
the corners of her mouth there was just the suggestion of an upward
turn, like that in the Mona Lisa. It gave to the lower part of her face
an expression curiously contradictory of the grave upper part, as if
sense of the joyousness of life were always hovering there and ready at
any moment to break forth in laughter. When she did smile there was a
sudden irradiation of her whole countenance. The short upper lip lifted
above white teeth, the faint upward curve at the corners of her mouth
deepened and her eyes twinkled gaily. But no one ever accounted Rhoda
so handsome as her younger sister. Even those who admired her most
thought her forehead too high and her cheek bones too prominent for
beauty.
“And this muslin is for a dress for you, Charlotte,” Rhoda went on,
holding it up for their inspection. “Isn’t this vine a lovely pattern,
mother? We must make it with three wide flounces, from the foot to the
waist, and the skirt even wider than these we’re wearing now. And this
white silk is to make a drawn bonnet for you, mother. I saw several of
them in Cincinnati--they’re quite the latest thing. I have the pattern
and directions and I’m sure I can do it.”
There were only three of them, but as they moved about in their big,
balloon-like skirts, examining, comparing, discussing the purchases,
they seemed to pervade the whole large room with the essence of
femininity and to fill it with their bodily presence.
“What’s this?” said Charlotte, taking up a small package. “It feels
like a book.” And she began to undo its wrappings.
Rhoda looked, then half turned away. “It is a book--one father bought
for me. You won’t care about it.”
Charlotte glanced at her curiously and with increased interest went
on with the unwrapping. “Oh! ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin!’” she exclaimed
disdainfully as she tossed the book away. “What do you want to read
that for? Walesy, stop it!” And with a backward jump and a downward
swoop she extricated the kitten from beneath her hoopskirt, boxed its
ears and then cuddled it in her arm, whence in a moment more issued
sounds of distress and anger.
Her mother spoke reprovingly, in soft tones that betrayed southern
birth: “Charlotte, don’t hurt the little thing! Do try to remember that
you’re grown up!”
The girl rubbed the kitten against her face and cooed: “Well, it was
its own Charlotte’s precious Prince of Walesy kitty-cat and if it wants
to say that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is just a nasty old Black Republican
mess of lies it shall, so it shall! Shan’t you, Walesy?”
The kitten’s vehement response, slyly inspired, went unheeded as she
turned again to her sister, demanding, “What do you want to read it
for, Rhoda, when you know it’s just a lot of stuff with no truth in it?”
“I don’t know that, Charlotte. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time,
because it’s talked about so much. And while we were in Cincinnati
we went to Levi Coffin’s, and they told us so much about Mrs. Stowe,
and how she got some of the incidents for the story and talked such a
lot about--the darkies who--try to go to Canada that it made me very
anxious to read the book.”
“Who’s Levi Coffin?” asked Charlotte, regarding her sister closely and
noting a brief hesitation as Rhoda carefully folded the white silk
before she replied: “Oh, just a friend of father’s. They’re Quakers and
they wouldn’t interest you.”
Charlotte reached for the book and turned its leaves over carelessly.
“Humph! If they’re friends of Mrs. Stowe they’re probably just some
more nigger-stealers! You’ll soon be a black abolitionist yourself,
Rhoda, if you keep on. And then we won’t associate with her, will we,
Walesy! Didn’t you meet any nice people?”
Rhoda paid no heed to her sister’s aggressive tone. “Oh, yes! Mrs.
Benjamin Harrison--Carrie Scott, you know--she and I were such good
friends while I was at Dr. Scott’s Institute--happened to be visiting
in Cincinnati and she and I had a long talk. And I saw several other
girls whom I knew at Dr. Scott’s. And--oh, mother! You’ll be so
pleased!” Her color warmed and her face brightened as she went on. “It
was most romantic! We met Mr. Jefferson Delavan!”
“Oh, did you! Where? How did it happen? Tell me all about it!” Mrs.
Ware’s eager questions and delighted face showed how nearly the
information touched her heart. But Charlotte merely demanded, with
puzzled interest, “Who is he?”
“Don’t you remember, Charlotte?” Rhoda went on. “His mother was
Adeline Fairfax, mother’s dear friend when they were girls together in
Virginia. My middle name is after her, you know, and it’s her miniature
that mother has on her dressing table.”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Charlotte. “It was at her home that we visited,
wasn’t it, a long time ago, in Kentucky?”
“Yes--Fairmount, they call it. Such a beautiful place, just beyond
Lexington. Mother and you and I visited there for a month, twelve years
ago, wasn’t it, mother, when we first came here to Hillside. You were
only six years old then, so I suppose you don’t remember much about it.
But I remember it all very well and what a good time we had.”
“Poor, dear Adeline!” Mrs. Ware was wiping her eyes. “She and I did
enjoy that visit so much! And we never saw each other again, for she
died the next year. If she had lived you and her children would have
seen a great deal of each other. But do tell me about Jeff, Rhoda!
Where did you see him? And how did he know who you were? He was such a
fine boy--about twelve years old, wasn’t he?--when we were there. Just
two years older than you, Rhoda. Did you meet him in Cincinnati?”
“No. He was on the steamboat when we went down and the captain--it was
Captain Laidlaw, father’s friend, you know--introduced him to us, and
then he remembered who we were and we had great fun talking over the
good times we had at Fairmount.”
“Was his sister Emily with him? She was named for me, you know. Is
either of them married yet?”
“No, she wasn’t with him, and neither one of them is married. He told
me his father’s sister has lived with them ever since his mother died.
His father died too last year and now he manages the plantation.”
“Is he handsome?” queried Charlotte.
“N--no, not exactly handsome. But very fine-looking, and so courteous!”
“Then you saw more of him after you left the steamboat?”
“Yes. He called on us in Cincinnati, and we went out together several
times and then it happened that he finished his business there in time
to take the same steamboat back that we did.”
Charlotte regarded her sister with dancing eyes. “Is he coming up here
to visit--us?” she demanded. Rhoda reddened under her scrutiny. She did
not always find it easy to keep her composure under Charlotte’s habit
of making audacious deductions and voicing reckless intuitions. But she
had learned long before that to betray embarrassment was to invite more
questioning. She answered with apparent unconcern:
“Father asked him to come and told him how pleased mother would be to
see him, and he said that he expected to be up near the river before
long and he would cross over and call on us.”
“Dear boy! Indeed, I shall be glad to see him! Adeline’s son--how time
does fly!”
“Does he own slaves?” said Charlotte, her eyes still on her sister’s
face.
“Of course!” replied Mrs. Ware. “You evidently don’t remember the
place, Charlotte. It is a large tobacco plantation, and when we were
there Mr. Delavan had a great many slaves.”
Charlotte sprang to her feet and poised the kitten on her shoulder.
“Then you won’t like him, Rhoda--and I shall!” Whistling merrily, she
took some dancing steps toward the door.
“Charlotte!” called her mother reprovingly, “Do try to remember that
you’re not a child any more! I’ve told you so often it’s not ladylike
to whistle!”
Rhoda smiled at her fondly. “Don’t you know, sister, what happens to
whistling women and crowing hens?”
“Oh fudge! That’s all nonsense. I heard a better one the other day--
‘Girls that whistle and hens that crow
Catch the pleasures as they go.’
There’s some truth in that! I’m going to show father my new bonnet, and
he doesn’t care if I do whistle!”
Mrs. Ware gazed after her as she floated down the veranda and
disappeared around the corner of the house, tilting her skirts and
whistling.
“I did hope Charlotte wouldn’t be so trying after she became a young
lady!” she said in soft, plaintive tones.
“Never mind, mother. She doesn’t really mean to be trying. She does it
just the same as she pinches the kitten’s tail, to make it meaow. If
you don’t pay any attention to her she’ll quit much sooner.”
Mrs. Ware crossed the room to her daughter, pressed an arm around her
waist and kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you happened to meet Jeff
Delavan,” she murmured. “If he comes to see us, and I’m sure he will--”
she glanced at the warmer color that flushed Rhoda’s face, smiled, and
went on, “What did you buy for yourself, dear?”