“Why should I? They’ve done their worst. They have robbed me of all. I’ve only rags and ashes left.”
“Things might still be worse, Madam.”
“I can’t see it. There is nothing but suffering and ruin before us. These ignorant negroes are now being taught by people who hate or misunderstand us. They can only be a scourge to society. I am heart-sick when I try to think of the future!”
There was a mist about her eyes that betrayed the deep emotion with which she uttered the last sentence.
She was a queenly woman of the brunette type with full face of striking beauty surmounted by a mass of rich chestnut hair. The loss of her slaves and estate in the war had burned its message of bitterness into her soul. She had the ways of that imperious aristocracy of the South that only slavery could nourish. She was still uncompromising upon every issue that touched the life of the past.
She believed in slavery as the only possible career for a negro in America. The war had left her cynical on the future of the new “Mulatto” nation as she called it, born in its agony. Her only child had died during the war, and this great sorrow had not softened but rather hardened her nature.
Her husband’s career as a preacher was now a double cross to her because it meant the doom of eternal poverty. In spite of her love for her husband and her determination with all her opposite tastes to do her duty as his wife, she could not get used to poverty. She hated it in her soul with quiet intensity.
The General was thinking of all this as he tried to frame a cheerful answer. Somehow he could not think of anything worth while to say to her. So he changed the subject.
“Mrs. Durham, I’ve called to ask your interest in your Sunday School in a boy who is a sort of ward of mine, young Allan McLeod.”
“That handsome red-headed fellow that looks like a tiger, I’ve seen playing in the streets?”