“I can’t help thinking, Charles,” said Vance, “that your zeal has the purer origin. Mine sprang from a personal experience of wrong; yours, from an abstract conception of what is just; from those inner motives that point to righteousness and God.”
“I almost wish sometimes,” replied Kenrick, “that I had the spur of a great personal grievance to give body to my wrath. And yet Slavery, when it lays its foul hand on the least of these little ones ought to be felt by me also, and by all men! But now—now—I shall not lack the sting of a personal incentive. Your griefs, cousin, fall on my own heart, and shall not find the soil altogether barren. This Ratcliff,—I know him well. He has been more than once at our house. A perfect type of the sort of beast born of slavery,—moulded as in a matrix by slavery,—kept alive by slavery! Take away slavery, and he would perish of inanition. He would be, like the plesiosaur, a fossil monster, representative of an extinct genus.”
“Cousin,” said Vance, “all you lack is to join the serpent with the dove. Be content to bide your time. Here in Louisiana lies your work. We must make the whole western bank of the Mississippi free soil. Texas can be taken care of in due time. But with a belt of freedom surrounding the Cotton States, the doom of slavery is fixed. Give me to see that day, and I shall be ready to say, ‘Now, Lord, dismiss thy servant!’”
“I had intended to go North, and join the army of freedom,” said Kenrick; “but what you say gives me pause.”
“We must not be seen together much,” resumed Vance. “And now good night, or rather, good morning, for there’s a glimmer in the east, premonitory of day. Ah, cousin, when I hear the braggarts around us, gassing about Confederate courage and Yankee cowardice, I can’t help recalling an old couplet I used to spout, when an actor, from a play by Southern,—
‘There is no courage but in innocence,
No constancy but in an honest cause!’”
CHAPTER XXVI.
CLARA MAKES AN IMPORTANT PURCHASE.
“Allow slavery to be ever so humane. Grant that the man who owns me is ever so kind. The wrong of him who presumes to talk of owning me is too unmeasured to be softened by kindness.”
Laura Tremaine had just come in from a drive with her invalid mother, and stood in the drawing-room looking out on a company of soldiers. There was a knock at the door. A servant brought in a card. It said, “Will Laura see Darling?” The arrival, concurring so directly with Laura’s wishes, caused a pleasurable shock. “Show her in,” she said; and the next moment the maidens were locked in each other’s embrace.