Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

He seemed scarcely to hear what she said, and touched her cheek with a caressing palm as he exclaimed, “Rhoda, my sweet, your face is like a guardian angel’s!”

Before Jefferson Delavan reached Fairmount again the Thing had happened that made the North gasp with wonder and set the South beside itself with fear and rage. The amazing audacity of John Brown’s attack upon Harper’s Ferry and the rankling distrust between the two sections make reasonable, to impartial eyes of a later day, the alarming significance which the southern people, especially those in the border states, saw in Brown’s foredoomed enterprise. The slaveholders of Kentucky were aroused to almost as extreme a pitch of angry apprehension and defiance as were the people of Virginia.

Rhoda Ware had not to wait even three weeks for the expected letter from Jefferson Delavan.

“You were right,” he wrote. “You saw the obstacles that lie between us more clearly than I did—or, perhaps, you had more information than I of the treacherous lengths to which the North would dare to go in the desire to overthrow the ordinary rights of a state and to undermine the power of the government under which both sections have solemnly sworn to live. This attempt to incite the slaves to insurrection and the butchery of their masters proves to all of us that neither property nor life is safe in the South. At any moment another plot may break forth, no man can tell where, and be more successful than this one was. The South needs now, more than she ever did before, every one of her sons whom she can trust. I cannot desert her in her hour of peril. From the bottom of my heart I thank you, Rhoda, that you made it possible for me to remain, without dishonor, in the position where every instinct of duty and honor and loyalty demands that I stay. It was like you to know that, much as I love you, love would have to yield to honor if it came to a test between the two, and it has made me love you all the more, if that were possible, to know that your love is so rich and noble and generous.

“God knows what the future may hold for us two. For the first time since our love began I can see no hope for us. The feeling between the North and the South grows intolerable and the bonds between them cannot last much longer. As long as the South and her interests are in danger, my conscience, my sense of duty, my loyalty, all my ideals and aspirations, bid me stay here. And here I know you will not come.

“But whatever happens, dear, I shall always thank God that I have had the privilege of knowing and loving you, while the knowledge that you, such a peerless woman as you, have loved me will be as long as I live the most precious treasure of my heart. I have many dear memories of our love, but the dearest of them all is of that last day we had together, that splendid ride, when you were so adorable, and of all the sweet pictures of you that I cherish the sweetest of all is of your face as you leaned toward me in the wood and said, ‘It is for your sake, dear Jeff.’

“Only God knows whether or not we shall ever see each other again. But I shall always love you, and as long as we both live I shall treasure in my heart the belief that you still love me. Good-by, dear heart.”

“At last, it is all over,” Rhoda said to herself when she had read the letter. “He sees, at last, as I did so long ago, that there is no hope for us. No—he sees none, now, but I can a little. John Brown has brought the war ten years nearer, father says, and any time it may come. And the war will end slavery. But it’s best not to hope too much.”

She took out the box of his letters and read them all over again, touching them tenderly and kissing the withered rose. “I’d better burn them all now,” she told herself, “and try not to think so much about it after this.”

With such pain in her heart as might have been in Abraham’s when he led Isaac to the altar, she carried her little love treasure to the fire. But even as she held it poised over the flames her resolution failed her. It was too much a part of herself and she could not do it. The little box was put away again in its hiding place and in the months that followed, whenever the ache in her breast would not be hushed in any other way, she solaced her love and longing by reading the letters over and over again, until she almost knew them, word for word.