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 life and 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 weakening in 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
bitterly unhappy 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 white house 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 her zeal 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 at home 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, if you’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 in a 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 of his 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
keep her 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 reincarnation of 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. “Concerning what 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, it would 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 the page, “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.