Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

At her window that night, Rhoda pondered long upon these words. “I suppose Mrs. Benedict is right,” she said to herself finally. “It was only my pride—and my love, that made me think I could atone for even this one bit of his wrongdoing. He will have to suffer for it, for all of it, himself, before he can see that it is wrong. And we shall all have to suffer, North and South alike, for this awful sin of slavery, for the North is to blame almost as much as the South.

“‘Sweat and suffer stripes’! Bloody sweat, father thinks it will be,—he is so sure that it will end in war. Will it come in our time? Oh, surely, things cannot go on like this much longer! So much anger on both sides, so much indignation in the North, so many threats in the South—and all getting worse and worse every year—Oh, if war is to be the end, we must be getting nearly there! War!”

She shivered and pressed her hands against her face. As the grisly specter of blood and smoke passed vaguely before her mind’s eye her anxious thoughts hovered with instant anxiety over the dear image of him who she knew would be among the first to challenge the issue. Then with a little cry she sprang to her feet.

“Shall I never remember I must not think of him like that!” she asked herself with bitterness. “My sister’s husband! O, God, help me to forget!” She paced about the room with frowning brows and lips pressed hard together, telling herself, as she had already done a hundred times, that she must learn to forget, as it had been so easy for him to do. And there she touched upon her deepest wound, that his love had not been as fine and as true as she had thought it.

“How could he love another—so different—and wish to marry her, after all that has passed between us? I could not—how could he?” was the question that would come back, again and again. She tried to subdue it by telling herself that since he could, since his love and faith were not equal to hers, he was not worthy of her love and deserved only forgetfulness complete, eternal. But her heart cried out fiercely against this edict of her brain and clung to its need of believing in him.

“He is fine and noble in many, many ways,” at last she said to herself, “in nearly all ways the finest and the noblest man I’ve ever known, and if his love fell short of all I thought it was, I must try to forgive him that, as I forgive him his blindness about the wickedness of slavery, which kept us apart, and, I suppose—deep down in my heart—I suppose—I’ll always love him. But I’ll try, oh, I’ll try from this minute, always to think of him as Charlotte’s husband. He mustn’t be Jeff to me any more—just Charlotte’s husband! Charlotte’s husband!”

During her days in jail she spent much time embroidering dainty things for Charlotte’s trousseau, and into these she found herself able to stitch, along with the tears that would fall now and then, prayers and hopes for Charlotte’s happiness and earnest desires, since the marriage must be, that she would make her husband happy. But on this latter question she found herself haunted by a doubt that would yield to no arguments based on the sequence of love and happiness.

Charlotte and Mrs. Ware returned home immediately after Rhoda’s arrest and it was some time, after her sister’s first brief announcement of her engagement, before she heard again from either of them. And afterward their letters were filled mainly with accounts of their plans and preparations for Charlotte’s trousseau and wedding. In her replies she could not bring herself to write Jeff’s name and so referred to him only as “Charlotte’s lover,” or “Charlotte’s intended.” She noticed too that her mother spoke of him only in the same way while her sister wrote of him as “he,” in capital letters.

“They are afraid of hurting my feelings by mentioning his name,” I suppose, Rhoda said to herself. “I must get used to it, but—I’m glad they don’t.”

Charlotte’s letters were brief and infrequent and each one contained, in addition to talk about her bridal plans, advice in plenty on the propriety of Rhoda’s giving up her “nigger thieving” and her black abolition acquaintance, now that the family was identified with southern interests.