Mrs. Gentry waxed angry. “O, but she’ll be come up with!” This was the teacher’s favorite form of consolation. The Abolitionists would be come up with. Abe Lincoln would be come up with. General Scott would be come up with. Everybody who offended Mrs. Gentry would be come up with,—if not in this world, why then in some other.
An hour passed. She began to get seriously alarmed. She sent away the carriage. Hardly had it gone, when a second vehicle drew up before the door, and out of it stepped Mr. Ratcliff. She met him in the parlor, and, fearing to tell the truth, merely remarked, that Ellen was out making a few purchases.
“When will she be back?”
“Perhaps not till dinner-time.”
“Then I’ll call to-morrow at this hour.”
Mrs. Gentry passed the day in a state of wretched anxiety. She sent out messengers. She interested a policeman in the search. But no trace of the fugitive! Mrs. Gentry was in despair. If Ellen had not been a slave, her disappearance would have been comparatively a small matter. If it had been somebody’s free-born daughter who had absconded, it wouldn’t have been half so bad. But here was a slave! One whose flight would lay open to suspicion the teacher’s allegiance to the institution! Intolerable! Of course it was no concern of hers to what fate that slave was about to be consigned.
Ah! sister of the South,—(and I have known many, the charms of whose persons and manners I thought incomparable,)—a woman whose own virtue is not rooted in sand, cannot, if she thinks and reasons, fail to shudder at a system which sends other women, perhaps as innocent and pure as she herself, to be sold to brutal men at auctions. And yet, if any one had told Mrs. Gentry she was no better than a procuress, both she and the Rev. Dr. Palmer would have thought it an impious aspersion.
At the appointed hour Ratcliff appeared. Mrs. Gentry’s toilet that day was appropriate to the calamitous occasion. She was dressed in a black silk robe intensely flounced, and decorated around the bust with a profluvium of black lace that might have melted the heart of a Border-ruffian. She entered the parlor, tragically shaking out a pocket handkerchief with an edging of black.
“O Mr. Ratcliff! Mr. Ratcliff!” she exclaimed, rushing forward, then checking herself melodramatically, and seizing the back of a chair, as if for support.
“Well, madam, what’s the matter?”