Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

“Speak to him, dear,” Mrs. Ware whispered brokenly. But there was no need. Slowly a puzzled expression crept into the vacuity, and that presently gave way to one of recognition, and then the hearts of the two women were stirred to their depths by the glad wonder that illumined his countenance. Never would Rhoda be able to forget that look, like the sudden happiness over-spreading the face of a child at unexpected sight of a loved one, which her presence had inspired—her presence, which had brought back his sense, trembling upon the verge of that unknown black gulf, into the world of light and reason.

“Rhoda!” he said feebly, and then, smiling, closed his eyes again.

“Stay here beside him,” Mrs. Ware whispered, “while I go and see if your father has returned. Oh, honey! I think it’s going to be all right!”

When she came back with Dr. Ware, half an hour later, she slipped quietly into the room a few steps ahead of her husband and found Rhoda telling her patient what had happened, while he listened, with her hand clasped in his. Her motherly heart gave a quick throb. “It has brought Rhoda to her senses too, at last!” was her quick inference. But a moment later doubts disturbed her certainty as she saw the unconcern with which the girl withdrew her hand and made way for her father.

Dr. Ware was well pleased with the young man’s condition. “You’ll have to stay in bed a few days, perhaps a week,” was his decision, “while your broken rib is knitting itself together again. You’ve got a pretty good case of nervous shock also, as the result of that blow on your head—and you can thank God, Mr. Delavan, that it’s nothing worse than shock. But a few days of quiet will make that all right too.”

There was no perturbation in the physician’s mind, at first, over the presence of Jefferson Delavan in his house, invested though the young man was with the romantic interest of his narrow escape from death. He felt sure of his daughter now and did not believe there was any danger of her marrying the southerner. She had thrown herself unreservedly into sympathy with the anti-slavery cause and she was working with him enthusiastically and efficiently in making of their house a “station” on the Underground Railroad.

“No,” he assured himself, “she won’t go back on her convictions now. She’s decided what’s right for her to do, and she’ll stick to it like a soldier.” He smiled with pride, but a moment later his thought supplemented, with softened feeling, “It will be hard on her, though!”

On the whole, feeling thus sure about Rhoda, he was rather glad to have the young man there, because of the pleasure it would give his wife to mother him and to recall the memories of her youth. In Dr. Ware’s feeling toward his wife there was a strong element of compassion. In serious middle age, considering the past with judicial mind, he doubted not a little if, in that wildly impelling time of youthful passion, it had been quite the fair thing for him to marry her and take her away from all her girlish associations. He knew well enough that she had loved him then and that she still loved him and that their life together had been as calmly happy as imperfect mortals have any right to expect the wedded state to be.

But he also felt quite sure that if he had not paid impetuous court to her in those vivid youthful days she would have loved and married some man of her own region and lived her life surrounded by the conditions and the people with whom she was most in sympathy. His conviction that she would have been happier in such estate inspired him with a very great tenderness toward her, and with a half-realized wish to make atonement, in such little ways as became possible, for what she had missed.

She had been loyal to him through all these years, and from the start had refused to go back to her old home for even a short visit, because the invitations from her family had never included him. That one stay at Fairmount, with Jeff Delavan’s mother, had been the only return to the old life which she had ever allowed herself. So now he was pleased when he foresaw how much comfort she would find in having “Adeline’s boy” under her roof and needing her ministrations.