When Judge Straight's visitors had departed, he took up the papers
which had been laid loosely on the table as they were taken out of
Tryon's breast-pocket, and commenced their perusal. There was a note
for five hundred dollars, many years overdue, but not yet outlawed by
lapse of time; a contract covering the transaction out of which the
note had grown; and several letters and copies of letters modifying the
terms of the contract. The judge had glanced over most of the papers,
and was getting well into the merits of the case, when he unfolded a
letter which read as follows:--
MY DEAREST GEORGE,--I am going away for about a week, to visit the
bedside of an old friend, who is very ill, and may not live. Do not be
alarmed about me, for I shall very likely be back by the time you are.
Yours lovingly,
ROWENA WARWICK.
The judge was unable to connect this letter with the transaction which
formed the subject of his examination. Age had dimmed his perceptions
somewhat, and it was not until he had finished the letter, and read it
over again, and noted the signature at the bottom a second time, that
he perceived that the writing was in a woman's hand, that the ink was
comparatively fresh, and that the letter was dated only a couple of
days before. While he still held the sheet in his hand, it dawned upon
him slowly that he held also one of the links in a chain of possible
tragedy which he himself, he became uncomfortably aware, had had a hand
in forging.
"It is the Walden woman's daughter, as sure as fate! Her name is Rena.
Her brother goes by the name of Warwick. She has come to visit her
sick mother. My young client, Green's relation, is her lover--is
engaged to marry her--is in town, and is likely to meet her!"
The judge was so absorbed in the situation thus suggested that he laid
the papers down and pondered for a moment the curious problem involved.
He was quite aware that two races had not dwelt together, side by side,
for nearly three hundred years, without mingling their blood in greater
or less degree; he was old enough, and had seen curious things enough,
to know that in this mingling the current had not always flowed in one
direction. Certain old decisions with which he was familiar; old
scandals that had crept along obscure channels; old facts that had come
to the knowledge of an old practitioner, who held in the hollow of his
hand the honor of more than one family, made him know that there was
dark blood among the white people--not a great deal, and that very much
diluted, and, so long as it was sedulously concealed or vigorously
denied, or lost in the mists of tradition, or ascribed to a foreign or
an aboriginal strain, having no perceptible effect upon the racial type.
Such people were, for the most part, merely on the ragged edge of the
white world, seldom rising above the level of overseers, or
slave-catchers, or sheriff's officers, who could usually be relied upon
to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal
of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate
blacks that fell into their hands. One curse of negro slavery was, and
one part of its baleful heritage is, that it poisoned the fountains of
human sympathy. Under a system where men might sell their own children
without social reprobation or loss of prestige, it was not surprising
that some of them should hate their distant cousins. There were not in
Patesville half a dozen persons capable of thinking Judge Straight's
thoughts upon the question before him, and perhaps not another who
would have adopted the course he now pursued toward this anomalous
family in the house behind the cedars.
"Well, here we are again, as the clown in the circus remarks," murmured
the judge. "Ten years ago, in a moment of sentimental weakness and of
quixotic loyalty to the memory of an old friend,--who, by the way, had
not cared enough for his own children to take them away from the South,
as he might have done, or to provide for them handsomely, as he perhaps
meant to do,--I violated the traditions of my class and stepped from
the beaten path to help the misbegotten son of my old friend out of the
slough of despond, in which he had learned, in some strange way, that
he was floundering. Ten years later, the ghost of my good deed returns
to haunt me, and makes me doubt whether I have wrought more evil than
good. I wonder," he mused, "if he will find her out?"
The judge was a man of imagination; he had read many books and had
personally outlived some prejudices. He let his mind run on the
various phases of the situation.
"If he found her out, would he by any possibility marry her?"
"It is not likely," he answered himself. "If he made the discovery
here, the facts would probably leak out in the town. It is something
that a man might do in secret, but only a hero or a fool would do
openly."
The judge sighed as he contemplated another possibility. He had lived
for seventy years under the old regime. The young man was a
gentleman--so had been the girl's father. Conditions were changed, but
human nature was the same. Would the young man's love turn to disgust
and repulsion, or would it merely sink from the level of worship to
that of desire? Would the girl, denied marriage, accept anything less?
Her mother had,--but conditions were changed. Yes, conditions were
changed, so far as the girl was concerned; there was a possible future
for her under the new order of things; but white people had not changed
their opinion of the negroes, except for the worse. The general belief
was that they were just as inferior as before, and had, moreover, been
spoiled by a disgusting assumption of equality, driven into their thick
skulls by Yankee malignity bent upon humiliating a proud though
vanquished foe.
If the judge had had sons and daughters of his own, he might not have
done what he now proceeded to do. But the old man's attitude toward
society was chiefly that of an observer, and the narrow stream of
sentiment left in his heart chose to flow toward the weaker party in
this unequal conflict,--a young woman fighting for love and opportunity
against the ranked forces of society, against immemorial tradition,
against pride of family and of race.
"It may be the unwisest thing I ever did," he said to himself, turning
to his desk and taking up a quill pen, "and may result in more harm
than good; but I was always from childhood in sympathy with the under
dog. There is certainly as much reason in my helping the girl as the
boy, for being a woman, she is less able to help herself."