“Not the least doubt about it,” said Collingwood. “But when masters are the right sort—fellows like me, for instance—they are not a bad thing for some women to have—women like you, for instance.”
Chapter IV
What the buried archives are to the archæologist, the trunkful of old letters is to the novelist. But before those light-giving documents are brought forth, a little family history should be detailed as preface.
In the year 1872 the Civil War had been more generally forgotten in the North than in the South. In the State of Massachusetts, however, a goodly circle of antislavery agitators still kept up the fight in favor of the black man. The Fourteenth Amendment had not then been made, nor those celebrated discussions which fixed its interpretation and application; but the reconstruction of the Southern States still left plenty of ground for bitter speech and feeling.
Prominent among that circle and among the old Boston families of that day was the widow of a man who had literally given his life to the antislavery cause, for he had died during the War of overwork upon an antislavery journal. His widow belonged to a family that for two hundred years or more had been prominent in state and national affairs. When her husband died and left her and a half-grown daughter almost penniless among a wealthy kindred, she found little or no difficulty in getting along; for their pride in the editorial victim was great, and she had been always a family favorite.
But if the mother was everywhere sought, her daughter Charlotte found a less ready welcome. A tall, superb beauty, singularly cold at times and reserved, at others fiercely vehement, she was as utterly unlike the descendant of a staid New England family as can be imagined. It is regrettable that she found little favor in the family eyes; and in the year 1872 she came to an out and out rupture with all her kindred by eloping with Mountjoy Ponsonby, a Marylander, a Roman Catholic, and an irreconcilable son of slave-holding parents.
Mrs. K—— took to her bed and died of chagrin. Four years later the unhappy girl followed her mother to the grave, leaving behind her a baby daughter six months old.
Of that marriage so soon ended, the best and the worst that can be said is that it was unhappy. The two undisciplined natures who had defied tradition, family sentiment, religious training, and political inheritance for the sake of each other, had not the patience to work out their common happiness when the infatuation which had drawn them together died, as all such sudden and violent emotions must.
When Mrs. Ponsonby turned her back on life and on an impoverished Southern home where her New England thrift had struggled ceaselessly with the indolence and sluggish ways of a slave-holding household, it was after almost all possible recrimination had been exhausted over religion, politics, family inheritance, and ideals of life. Her husband, having buried her with due ceremony and observance in the Maryland family vaults, betook himself to travel, leaving the child to be cared for by a distant female relative. When little Charlotte was four, the relative died, and, as an ultimate act of defiance to his wife’s kindred, Ponsonby placed his daughter in a Roman Catholic convent.