“You promise!” and he turned on her with a fury from which she shrank. “The promise of a woman who allowed a loyal friend to suffer disgrace for her fault!––the promise of one who has abused the affection and hospitality of the women you assure protection for! A spy! A traitor! You, the woman I worshipped! God! What cursed fancy led you to risk life, love, honor, everything worth having, for a fanatical fight against one of two political factions?”
He dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. As he did so a handkerchief in his pocket caught in the fastening of his cuff, as he let his hand fall the ’kerchief was dragged from the pocket, and with it the little oval frame over which he had been jealous for an hour, and concerning which he had not yet had an explanation.
It rolled towards her, and with a sudden movement she caught it, and the next instant the dark, girlish face lay uncovered in her hand.
She uttered a low cry, and then something of strength seemed to come to her as she looked at it. Her eyes dilated, and she drew a long breath, as she turned and faced him again with both hands clasped over her bosom, and the open picture pressed there. All the tears and pleading were gone from her face and voice, as she answered:
“Because to that political question there is a background, shadowed, shameful, awful! Through the shadows of it one can hear the clang of chains; can see the dumb misery of fettered women packed in the holds of your slave ships, carried in chains to the land of your free! From the day the first slave was burned at the stake on Manhattan Island by your Christian forefathers, until now, when they are meeting your men in battle, fighting you to the death, there is an unwritten record that is full of horror, generations of dumb servitude! Did you think they would keep silence forever?”
He arose from the chair, staring at her in amazement; those arguments were so foreign to all he had known of the dainty woman, patrician, apparently, to her finger tips. How had she ever been led to sympathize with those rabid, mistaken theories of the North?
“You have been misled by extravagant lies!” he said, sternly; “abuses such as you denounce no longer exist; if they ever did it was when the temper of the times was rude––half savage if you will––when men were rough and harsh with each other, therefore, with their belongings.”
“Therefore, with their belongings!” she repeated, bitterly, “and in your own age all that is changed?”
“Certainly.”