He mounted his horse and rode away into the fading sunset as they watched him through dimmed eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
Lee had promised Edmund Ruffin his answer early in the week. Ruffin had just ridden up the hill and dismounted.
Mrs. Marshall, the Colonel's sister, on a visit from Baltimore, fled at his approach.
"Excuse me, Mary," she cried to Mrs. Lee. "I just can't stand these ranting fire-eating politicians. They make me ill. I'll go to my room."
She hurried up the stairway and left the frail mistress of the house to meet her formidable guest.
Ruffin was the product of the fierce Abolition Crusade. Hot-tempered, impulsive, intemperate in his emotions and their expression, he was the perfect counterpart of the men who were working night and day in the North to create a condition of mob feeling out of which a civil conflict might grow. Uncle Tom's Cabin had set him on fire with new hatreds. His vocabulary of profanity had been enlarged by the addition of every name in the novel. He had been compelled to invent new expressions to fit these characters. He damned them individually and collectively. He cursed each trait of each character, good and bad. He cursed the good points with equal unction and equal emphasis. In fact the good traits in Mrs. Stowe's people seemed to carry him to greater heights of wrath and profanity than the bad ones. He dissected each part of each character's anatomy, damned each part, put the parts together and damned the collection. And then he damned the whole story, characters, plot and scenes to the lowest pit and cursed the devil for not building a lower one to which he might consign it. And in a final burst of passion he always ended by damning himself for his utter inability to express anything which he really felt.
With all his ugly language, which he reserved for conversation with men, he was the soul of consideration for a woman. Mrs. Lee had no fear of any rude expression from his lips. She didn't like him because she felt in his personality the touch of mob insanity which the Slavery question had kindled. She dreaded this appeal to blind instinct and belief. With a woman's intuition she felt the tragic possibility of such leadership North and South.
She saw his leonine head and shaggy hair silhouetted against the red glow of the west with a shiver at its symbolism, but met him with the cordial greeting which every Southern woman gave instinctively to the friend of her husband.
"Come in, Mr. Ruffin," she welcomed.