“It must be that little rogue of a Charlotte!” he presently exclaimed. “She has sharp eyes in her head, that’s plain enough, always, and she has seen how it is with her sister and thought she might help things along by giving me a hint. Bless her heart! She’s a dear little thing, if she does like to flirt, and after Rhoda and I are married we’ll bring her down to Fairmount and give her the best time she’s had in all her life and perhaps marry her to Lloyd Corey or Frank Morehead.”
While this was not the outcome of her anonymous message which Charlotte hoped to bring about when she penned it, she would perhaps have been as willing to accept it, had her thoughts ranged so far ahead, as the one she planned to compass. Nor would she have been taken aback had she known, while she fluttered about on the tiptoe of expectancy for whatever might happen, with what ardor Jefferson Delavan’s thoughts were turning toward Rhoda on his northward ride.
If her missive induced him to come again to their house what did it matter whether he thought its words referred to Rhoda or to some one else? Since Rhoda was determined she would not marry him, he would soon find out his mistake and would be quite willing to look for consolation elsewhere. Had he not shown her every attention on the trip to Cincinnati? And when had she failed to set a man’s heart aflame, if she had really wanted to witness the conflagration? Let her once more have the opportunity—and she smiled at the brown eyes reflected back from her mirror, confident that they had lost none of their power.
He would be able to reach the Ohio river by the morrow’s night, Delavan thought, and the next morning he would cross over and hasten up the hill to claim the sweet promise that beckoned to him from that glimpse of Rhoda’s secret heart. As he mused over her words, and the wonder of it that she should at last have called him, it occurred to him that perhaps she had not meant to put that sheet into her letter. Perhaps she had merely written down that revelation of her feelings as ease to her own aching heart. But he laughed joyously.
“She’s let me know how it is with her, whether she meant to send it or not, and I’ll do just as she begs me to, this time!”
And so he urged his horse onward, his glowing heart beating high in his breast, sure of the happiness waiting for him at the end of his journey, and counting off the lessening hours that lay between him and the banks of the river. But that night there came a violent rainstorm that carried away bridges and left swollen streams rushing through overflowed valleys. It delayed him two days, so that it was not until the sixth day after Rhoda penned her letter that he reached Hillside.
And in the meantime the Supreme Court had announced its decision in the Dred Scott case, delighting the South, staggering the North, and fanning to still higher and hotter flame the fires of contention over the ever-burning question of slavery. Jefferson Delavan heard the news as he fumed over his delay, storm-bound in the hotel of a country town. He and half a dozen other slave owners from the town and near-by plantations, who dropped into the hotel during the evening, rejoiced over the victory as they sat around a bowl of punch.
“This will put an end to the whole controversy and give the country peace at last,” said Delavan.
“It knocks the feet from under the Republican party,” declared another. “They’ll be capable of no more mischief now!”
“Yes, gentlemen,” exclaimed a third, “it surely ties the hands of the northern fanatics. They can no longer stop our growth!”