“O, how I wish I had! If it hadn’t been for that storm—”
“It’s better to wake up too soon than too late,” she broke in. “As soon as I knew about that decision and all that the chief justice had said, and understood how delighted the South is over it, and how it has saddened and discouraged all of us up here at the North who hate slavery, then I saw once more that I couldn’t compromise with my conscience, not the least little bit.”
“But, Rhoda, you won’t have to, if I free my slaves. And I will!”
“I’ve thought that all out, and it wouldn’t help us any—though I’d be glad for the slaves. Don’t you see, Jeff, that if you should free them, still believing in slavery as you do, and still being devoted to the South and wanting with all your soul to further her interests, which you think are bound up in slavery—don’t you see that after a while you would begin to feel that for my sake you had done something wrong, had been false to your own ideals? And I would know it and it would make me unhappy. I don’t think, Jeff, that I’d want you to free your negroes, except as you might be convinced that it’s wrong to keep them enslaved.”
She stopped and looked up at him with her flashing smile. “I’ll run every one of them off to freedom that I can get a chance to, but—”
He smiled back at her indulgently, and then they both laughed a little, glad of the relief from the high tension which had held them.
“Rhoda, you are such a dear girl!” he murmured fondly. Her hands were imprisoned, one in each of his, but he did not attempt to lessen the distance between them. The earthly side of their love was fading out of their mutual consciousness, for the moment, as their thoughts mounted to the things of the spirit.
“It’s such a wide gulf between us, although we are so near,” she went on. “Your letters have shown me that. To the bottom of your heart you believe that all that the South is struggling for is right and good and is her just right and will be for the good of the world.”
He threw back his head and his eyes shone. “I do, Rhoda,” he exclaimed with emphasis. “I love the South, and her ideals are mine and her ambitions are mine! They are just and right and the more widely they are spread the better it will be for civilization and the whole world!”
She nodded. “Yes, I understand how you feel, though I didn’t at first. And I believe to the bottom of my heart that the enslavement of man by man”—her face was glowing now with the inner fires of conviction and her low voice thrilled with the intensity of her feeling—“is wrong and degrades both of them and is the cause of no end of horrible things. And I don’t believe that anything good can ever come out of it.”