“And perhaps you noticed, honey, that when I discovered who he was I was quite ready to set him safely on his way?” Miss Imogene asked with a gentle smile.
“You said it was because of an old friendship,” Dorothea replied, wondering what was coming.
“It was more than a friendship,” Miss Imogene admitted, looking off into the distance as if she pictured again the well-remembered scene from out of the past. “To think that he might have been my son, if—if I had not been so foolish a maid. I would not listen to my heart. Shall I tell you about it, dear?”
“Please do,” Dorothea murmured.
“It may serve as a warning to you, child,” Miss Imogene continued in her sweet gentle voice. “That boy’s father and I—well, he was madly in love with me and I with him. His name was Laurence, too; ‘Larry,’ I called him, and he came from up North, from Albany in New York State. I met him while he was visiting in Charleston, and, my dear, I say it without vanity, I was something of a toast in those days. Yes, I had many lovers and all would bend to my slightest whims. All but Larry—who was a man. He would not bend, and so—so I sent him off, but I never forgot him nor did any other come to take his place in my heart. Perhaps it was because he would not bend. It isn’t the man you can twist around your finger, honey, that you remember the longest.”
“What did you want of him that he wouldn’t do?” Dorothea asked after a pause.
“Nothing very much, it seemed to me at the time,” Miss Imogene replied, “but now I know that I asked him to sacrifice a principle, and that he would not do, even for me whom he loved. I know he did love me then—you remember that I said he was from the North.”
“But there wasn’t any war then,” Dorothea interrupted.
“No, there wasn’t; but Larry was an Abolitionist even in those days,” Miss Imogene explained. “To tease him I said that I should give my husband one of my negro boys for a body-servant. I thought what a fine joke it would be to make him a slave owner, little knowing that my whole happiness was at stake. And, honey, he refused my gift! So we parted—and to-day his son is fighting for the very Cause over which we quarreled twenty years ago. And I—I have lost over twenty years of happiness. All the slaves in the world were not worth it, and I knew it at the time; but I had a foolish pride and thought that no one should refuse me what I wanted. I have missed the best in life for a silly whim and when I see others about me who are running the same risk, I long to take them in my arms and whisper my story in their ears. I do not mean you, dear,” Miss Imogene ended, with a little laugh.
Dorothea knew to whom Miss Imogene referred, but she kept that knowledge to herself. Thereafter, however, she understood better why April’s affairs were of such vital interest to her cousin.