III
His conscience, stirring again, projected the image of Hester, with her pinched glistening countenance, on his conjecturing. He resolutely addressed himself to the judgment of Rosemary Roselle's second paper, his lighter thoughts drowned in the ascending dark tide of his temperament It was called Our Waitress, and an instant antagonism for the entire South and its people swept over him.
He saw that the essay's subject was a negro, a slave; and all his impassioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence of the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride in the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under the domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have been, from the obdurate and resplendent granite masses of the highland where they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim Meikeljohn's political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling fanaticism. Even now when, following South Carolina, six other states had seceded, he did not believe that war would ensue; he believed that slavery would be abolished at a lesser price; but he was a supporter of drastic means for its suppression. His Christianity, if it held a book in one hand, grasped a sword in the other, a sword with a bright and unsparing blade for the wrong-doer.
He consciously centered this antagonism on Rosemary Roselle; he visualized her as a thoughtless and capricious female, idling in vain luxury, cutting with a hard voice at helpless and enslaved human beings. He condemned his former looseness of being, his playing with insidious and destructive forces. A phrase, “Babylonish women,” crept into his mind from some old yellow page. He read:
“Indy is a large light mulatto, very neat and very slow. She has not much Sense, but a great deal of Sensibility. Helping her proves Fatal. The more that is done for her the less well does she work.... Indy is very unfortunate: going out with a present of money she lost every penny. Of course she was incapable of work until the sum was replaced.”
Elim paused with an impatient snort at this exhibition of shiftlessness. If the negroes were not soon freed they would be ruined beyond redemption. He read the remainder of the paper rigid and unapproving. It gave, he considered, such an excellent picture of Southern iniquities that he marked it B plus, the highest rating his responsibility had allowed Rosemary Roselle. Now he was certain that her very name held a dangerous potentiality—it came too easily to the tongue; it had a wanton sound like a silk skirt.
The warm glow faded from the room; without, the tenuous and bare upper branches of the maples wavered in the oncoming dusk. The river had disappeared. Elim was acutely conscious of the approaching hour of supper; and in preparation to go out to it he donned again the nankeen waistcoat and solemn garment that had served his father so long and so well.