"I know he is, Miss Charlotte," Martha answered with gentle bitterness, "and that makes it all the worse for him."
"It doesn't; it can't be worse for anybody to be born as beautiful and strong as that boy is," I answered her and felt somehow I had fallen head foremost into my mission. "I came down here to see you, Martha, and now that I have seen him—I—it's—it's a shame, all of it," I ended by faltering with a total lack of the eloquence that I felt.
"Yes, it's just that—a shame," Martha admitted to me with a great hopelessness in her black eyes. "And nothing can make it better."
"Something can be done!" I answered hotly. "You are young, Martha, and he's a baby. You can get out of it all and you can get him out and begin all over. I—I'll help you." And as I spoke I took her hand in mine. Mine was brown and hard from tennis and Martha's from toil, but they met and clung.
"I—I tried that, Miss Charlotte. I had to come back," answered Martha, and a bitter passion suddenly lit her pale face. "I'm too young to be let go—yet."
"What do you mean, Martha?" I asked, and suddenly I felt that some kind of chasm had yawned at my feet that I had never suspected to exist before.
"Don't ask me, Miss Charlotte," Martha answered as the passion died out of her face and voice and the sorrow fell over her like a shadow.
"Do you remember that afternoon at Mother Spurlock's when we were ten, and you climbed the tree and got the apples, while I picked them up for her to make apple turn-overs for us?" I asked her suddenly as I held on to her hand when she tried to draw it from me. "I cried for a week to go and see you, Martha, and it was all wrong that I wasn't allowed. My mother would have let me come if she had been alive, but Mammy was an ignorant negro and didn't understand."
"I cried for you, too," answered Martha, as the saddest smile I had ever seen came across the darkness of her face. "And when you was a young lady I crept up to the south window of the Poplars and saw you in your dress for the big coming-out party. You were like an angel from Heaven and I loved you. I wanted to be like you. All us girls did. They have always envied you and watched you, but I loved you. I did! I did, but—what chanct has a girl like me got against a man who's like—like you are? But I did love you; I did!"
"It doesn't seem right to—to either of us to have kept us apart," I faltered, as Martha suddenly slipped to the floor at my feet and put her head in her hands.