Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

He pressed her hand to his lips, bowed ceremoniously, and a moment later she was listening to the sound of his footsteps as he walked down the path to the gate.

CHAPTER XIX

After the discovery of the hiding place in the woodshed, Dr. Ware and his Underground co-workers thought it best for a little while to receive no runaways in his house. For it was closely watched, not only by the officers whose duty it was to enforce the Fugitive Slave law, but also by the slave hunters who made it a business to trail and capture northward-bound chattels for the sake of the rewards offered by their owners. In order to divert suspicion Walter and Lewis Kimball and several other young men who were in the habit of keeping a lookout for the fugitives contrived to secrete them elsewhere until surveillance upon the white house on the hilltop was relaxed.

In the meantime Dr. Ware made ready a new place of concealment. An end of the cellar extending beneath the room occupied by the two black servants was separated from the rest by a solid wall. A trap door was cut in the floor and a flight of stairs set in. Carpet concealed the door and over it was usually set a table, chairs, or other furniture. The cellar room was dark and had little ventilation, but Dr. Ware and Rhoda congratulated themselves that it would be perfectly safe.

“Why, father, it’s like a dungeon in a castle,” the girl exclaimed with a laughing face as she came up after making it ready with pallets and cots and a generous supply of old quilts and blankets. “While they are shut up in there they can rest and sleep, and so can we, without the least fear that they’ll be discovered!”

Dr. Ware cast an observant look at her alert and smiling countenance. Not since the adventure with the marshal had she seemed so like her usual self. Following those self-absorbed days, when she had seemed to be going about in a happy dream, had come a period of depression. His professional eye had noted that she did not eat as a healthy young creature should and his fatherly solicitude had made him quickly conscious of her lessened vivacity of spirit. The changes in her demeanor cost him a good deal of anxious thought—much more, indeed, than she supposed he ever bestowed upon her. He knew that Jefferson Delavan had been there again, but Rhoda told him nothing of what had passed between them. So he merely guessed that his daughter had struggled once more with her heart and had paid dearly for the victory.

He watched her anxiously, but shrank from speaking to her about her physical state because he felt sure of its emotional cause and could foresee the trend the conversation would take. For the leading-strings of habit were strong upon them both, and even stronger was the constraint of self-consciousness in a middle-aged man who all his life had cultivated the intellectual side of his nature at the expense of the emotional. Only toward the wife who had woven so strong a mesh about his heart in the days when the blood of young manhood was hot and winey and, in different scope and color, toward the child who so much resembled her, had he ever been able to express in words and actions the inner warmth and tenderness of his heart.

Of Rhoda he made a companion much more than he did of either his wife or Charlotte. When she settled down at home after the three years she had spent, in her latter teens, at Dr. Scott’s Female Institute, he had been much pleased to find that he could talk with her seriously upon most subjects that interested him. And since then they had grown into a deep and wide intellectual understanding and sympathy. But between them there was no emotional expression of their mutual feeling.

During this last year he had watched with pride her rapid development in character and intellect. Her Underground work had stimulated her sympathies and trained her in self-reliance and her increased interest in political affairs had broadened and developed her intellectually until, from an attractive girl of rather more than average endowment she had become a woman whose companionship her father enjoyed upon an equal footing. Blind babies, if the windows of sense perception are not opened into their minds, become imbecile. Perhaps—but everybody knows that argument by analogy is the most deceptive of all the paths by which human beings endeavor to find truth.

So, to go back to Rhoda and the new place of concealment in the cellar. Dr. Ware was much gratified to see her more lively demeanor that morning and began to hope that, with the renewal of their Underground operations and the constant call they would make upon both heart and head, she would soon forget the pain that had been benumbing her energies. She told him she was going to a meeting of the sewing circle that afternoon at which they were to consider the question of enlarging its sphere and turning it into an anti-slavery society. He thought it a good idea and encouraged her to do all she could toward that end.