CHAPTER VI.
BRIGHTENING UP.—GRAND RESULT.
According to the intimation in the note received from Miss King dated Feb. 11th, she met me—not however as she expected on Tuesday—but, on Wednesday of next week in Syracuse: and at the house of a friend whose memory we hold in the highest reverence.
The interview, as the parents and relatives of Miss King understood it, was to be held to the intent that Miss King might then and there in person, and by "word" more effectually than she could possibly do by writing, absolve herself from all engagement, obligation or intention whatsoever to marry me—now, hereafter, or evermore. This was their construction of the matter, and it was in the light of this construction that they essayed to grant the request—the granting of which Miss King made the condition on which she proposed to yield up her sacred right.
That the King family—determined as they were, law or no law, justice or no justice, Christianity or no Christianity; in short, at all events and all hazards, to prevent our union—should have granted this interview to Miss King convicts them of as great imbecility and folly as was their persecution of their victim. But so it is, the innocent shall not only not be cut down, but they who practice unrighteousness shall themselves be overtaken.
But to the interview. I should be glad to describe my feelings on first meeting Miss King after she had passed through that fiery furnace of affliction. But I desist. The "engagement," I have already said, displayed a moral heroism which no one can comprehend who has not been in America, but the passage through was more than sublime.
She related to me the events of the two preceding weeks as she had known them to transpire in her own family, and as she had heard of them as transpiring in the village. I cannot write the details. It chills my blood to think of them. The various letters published in this narrative will suffice to give the reader some idea of things as they were; while the hundreds of things which cannot be written and which, because of their littleness are the more faithful exponents of meanness, must be left to the reader to imagine as best he can. I say as best he can, since no Englishman can imagine the thing precisely as it was.
She was reviled, upbraided, ridiculed, tormented; and by some, efforts were made to bribe her into the selling of her conscience. What the vilest and most vulgar prejudices could suggest were hurled at both our devoted heads. Letters were not permitted to be received or sent without their being first inspected by the parents. And finally she was imprisoned after the manner set forth in the letter of Mr. Porter. So rigid was the surveillance that her sister was also put under the same "regimen," because her sympathies were with the persecuted and not the persecutors.