Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

A shout came through the woods from the road: “Delavan! Are you there? Have you found him?”

Jefferson Delavan searched for an instant in his breast pocket as he called back: “No,—I’m coming—wait for me—I’ll be there in a minute!”

He took out an old envelope and hurriedly wrote a few lines on the back. “There,” he said as he handed it to Rhoda, “is proof of my love. I’ll send you the legal papers to-night.”

He lifted his hat, bowed, and sprang down the path. A moment later she heard him saying, rather loudly, to the men at the fence, “No, we’ve missed him somewhere. A lady is in there gathering flowers and if he had gone this way she would have seen him. Come, let’s hurry back.”

She listened to the sound of their horses’ hoofs clattering up the hill and as it died away in the distance she swayed against the tree beside her and dropped her head into her hands.

CHAPTER VII

Through all the afternoon Rhoda stayed in her room, thinking over her adventure of the morning and considering whether it would be to her mother or her father that she would tell the whole story. Of one thing she felt sure—that she could not marry Jefferson Delavan, that she could not be the wife of a man who believed in slavery and held slaves. To that decision had she come swiftly, after her doubts and longings and vacillations of the last week, while she listened to the departing hoofbeats of the marshal’s party, going away without the fugitive. To both, of course, she would make known this determination, and to her father she would tell the incident about the negro. But she wanted to pour forth the whole affair to some one who would understand and sympathize and be tender with her because of the ache in her heart.

Her mother would be sorely disappointed by her final decision and shocked and grieved, if told of it, by what she had done that morning and would be able to see in the whole affair and in the conclusion to which she had come nothing but wrong-headedness and fanaticism. Rhoda knew that she could depend upon her loving heart and motherly tenderness and longed for her caressing arms and her soothing voice. But she knew also that Mrs. Ware could never understand why, if she loved Jefferson Delavan, she would not marry him, and she winced at the thought of what a blow to her mother her refusal would be. Her father would know just how she felt about it; he would understand and appreciate the convictions that had impelled her and he would be deeply pleased. She knew just the light of satisfaction that would flash into his eye. But he would not sympathize or be tender with her unhappiness. A touch of bitterness tinged her feeling as she thought how different it would be were Charlotte to go to him with a breaking heart.

Ever since her childhood had Rhoda stood thus wistfully between her parents. Between her father and herself there was always intellectual understanding. Their minds worked alike and they saw things in the same way, just as in facial and bodily appearance there was much resemblance between them. But it seemed to Rhoda that this very physical and mental likeness had caused him to hold her at a distance. Even as a little girl he had never welcomed her affectionate advances as he had Charlotte’s. She, on the other hand, had always been drawn to him more than to her mother, and she could still remember many a time when, a little thing in pantalettes and short dresses, she had slipped away with a trembling lip and hidden herself to fight back the tears which would come because he had taken Charlotte up in his arms and kissed her and had ignored Charlotte’s elder sister. As she grew older they had become good friends and she knew that he liked to make a companion of her and that he talked with her much more freely than with Charlotte. But between them there was never any expression of sentiment.

And now her aching heart was longing for understanding, sympathy, tenderness, love, all from one source, without having to make revelation of itself. What she really wanted, although she was not well enough versed in self-analysis to know it, was something that would take the place of the love she was casting aside,—or, more accurately, that love itself. She came near enough to such knowledge to say to herself, in the midst of her unhappiness, “Jeff would understand and—and be sorry, if I could only tell him all about it!” And then she smiled, seeing the absurdity of the idea. But notwithstanding her little flash of amusement at herself she felt vaguely, in the background of her woe-filled consciousness, that only the supreme love between man and woman can carry that full measure of comprehension, sympathy, tolerance and affection for which human nature forever yearns.