RHODA OF THE UNDERGROUND

“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

RHODA OF THE UNDERGROUND

[2]

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[4] 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[5] 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[6] 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[7] 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.

[8]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[9] 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?[10] 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[11] 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[12] 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—

[13]

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?”

CHAPTER II

“Father! Can these things be true? Oh, how terrible it is! Do such things really happen now, in this country?”

Rhoda Ware rushed into her father’s office, her cheeks wet with recent tears, her voice vibrating on the verge of sobs. Dr. Ware looked up from the medical work he was reading in some surprise. For it was unusual for her to give way, at least in his presence, to so much agitation. His professional eye took quick note of her excited nerves. In the same glance he saw that she held a book tightly grasped in her trembling hands and read its title. But he did not betray in either words or manner the fact that he had noticed it or the satisfaction that it gave him.

“Sit down, Rhoda, and calm yourself,” he said quietly. “What is it you want to know about? Something you’ve been reading?”

“Yes. It’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Father, isn’t it exaggerated? Can it be true?”

Appeal sounded in her tones, the longing of a sensitive nature to be assured that what it has suffered in imagination no human being has been called upon to suffer in the thousandfold of reality. He noted her hurried breathing, with the[15] catch of a half-sob in it now and then, and as he looked into her appealing eyes the man and the father in him drew back from saying what he wished to say lest he add to her hurt and the physician counseled not to increase her excitement. But the believer in a cause urged him to strike while the iron was hot. And it was the believer that won, after a mere moment of hesitation.

“You heard what they said at Levi Coffin’s, about many of the incidents of the book being based on fact. But what you have read there is only a drop in the bucket!”

As he leaned toward her across his desk and she, seated at the other side, bent her face toward him, even a casual observer might have seen their relationship. For her countenance was a copy of his, a young, soft, feminine copy, but yet formed clearly upon the same plan, even in the details of feature and coloring. His eyes, large and gray like hers, were calm and cool and judicial in expression, even when, as now, they were alight with earnestness. His shaven upper lip, also, was short, but it pressed upon the lower in a firm line, while all his countenance expressed a sort of austerity that seemed to bespeak a mind informed with intense moral conviction rather than hardness or coldness of nature. But looking at the two faces thus, one could see in hers the kindling fires of an emotionalism which would be forever foreign to him, an incipient power of emotional[16] exaltation which would never be within his possibilities. But if there was less of warmth in his eyes and of spirituality in his brow, poise and cool judgment were written there, and far-sightedness,

their inevitable offspring. Of the intellectual, judicial type Dr. Ware’s countenance showed him to be, and however much or little of such qualities his daughter had inherited from him, along with her remarkable physical resemblance, from elsewhere had come the emotional forces which now were trembling in the sensitive curves of her mouth and glowing in her tear-wet eyes.

“There’s nothing in that book that couldn’t be duplicated right now in the South, every day in the week,” Dr. Ware was saying in low, even tones that nevertheless held such intensity of conviction that she felt her nerves thrilling with it. “And even then, Rhoda, it’s only a beginning! There are such horrors perpetrated under slavery as a young girl like you can’t begin to realize!”

She shuddered, and he watched her silently as she pressed her lips together and deliberately held her breath for a moment in the effort to master her emotion.

“I don’t think I’ve ever quite realized anything about it before,” she said in calmer voice, “although I’ve always believed, ever since I’ve known anything about it, that it is wrong. But I’ve never felt, all through me”—and she shivered[17] again—“just how wrong it is, until this book has made it seem all real and alive.”

She hesitated, leaning her arms upon the desk, and a puzzled expression crossed her face. “But, father,” she presently went on, “why doesn’t mother feel as you do about it? Her father owned slaves, and until she married you she had always lived on the plantation with slaves all around her. And she still thinks that slavery is right and that the negroes are happier and better off in it than they would be if they were free. She’s so kind and gentle, how can she feel as she does if this book is true?”

“Your mother and I, Rhoda, have never discussed the question. Her father was a kindly man and treated his slaves well, and so the only conditions that she knew anything about were of slavery at its best. She had such a happy girlhood on her father’s plantation, where the slaves were all eager to do anything for her, that her memories of it are very pleasant. I’ve never wanted to disturb them, because it wouldn’t do any good and it might spoil the pleasure she takes in thinking about those days; and so I’ve never talked about it with her, although she knows, of course, what I think.”