Without blemish; to-day's problem

Front matter

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Preface

To suggest measures for the solution of a problem that is taxing the brains of the wise men of the land is to incur the charge of presumption and risk the penalty of arrogance.

To pronounce upon the seeming apathy of the people who were imperatively called upon to solve that problem, while themselves still staggering from the blow that had left them stunned, bewildered, powerless, is to cast one more dart into an already lacerated breast.

To maintain that this problem of the negro’s future can be solved alone by the people who know him and to whom he is bound by ties more enduring than the chains of slavery ; to maintain that his mental and moral emancipation must be wrought out on the spot where he is destined to make his home for all time to come, is simply to espouse the cause of truth and justice.

As a leaven of suggestion hidden away in many measures of meal this story is offered by the

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CONTENTS,

Chapter i. a relic, . . . . .

Chapter ii. mrs. stanhope invests in orphans. Chapter hi. a neighbor, ....

Chapter iv. mrs. g. waring Trowbridge,

Chapter V. mr. g. waring Trowbridge, .

Chapter vi. hardlines, . . . . .

Chapter vii. old dora, ....

Chapter viii. rosetta, . . . . .

Chapter ix. a returned wanderer.

Chapter x. miss denton renews an acquaintance. Chapter xi. the blow descends.

Chapter xii. discordant notes,

Chapter xiii. eustis’s analysis.

Chapter xiv. miss denton gives a dinner. Chapter xv. seed by the wayside, .

Chapter xvi. the prodigal at home.

Chapter xvii. storm shaken, . . . .

Chapter xviii. old dora’s curse, .

Chapter xix. comforted, . . . .

CHAPTER XX. THE GULF FIXED,

Chapter xxi. acceptance, . . . .

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Chapter xxii. olga’s box, .... 265

Chapter xxiii. dr. maddox, .... 279 Chapter xxiv. aunt judy little, . . 290

Chapter xxv. stolen joy, . . . .301

Chapter xxvi. to-morrow and to-morrow, . 313

Chapter xxvii. co-workers, .... 332 Chapter xxviii. in bridal array, . . 344

Chapter xxix. the letter delivered, . . 356

Chapter xxx. proven beyond a doubt, . . 367

Chapter 1. A Relic

I N ante-bellum times nature, good-taste and affluence went hand-in-hand in the perfecting of the suburban homes about the quiet little town of Natchez, Mississippi, and amid the subsequent wreck of matter, the upheaval of a system, and the abolition of all that gave their owners social supremacy, they still abide among the things beautiful, with an added touch of pathos that takes on the form of silent guest-chambers, crumbling terraces and weed-choked rose gardens.

With one of the loveliest of these pathetic wrecks we have especially to do, as there, all alone, at the close of the war lived a woman, who, by reason of her stately dignity and almost apathetic repose of manner, fitted admirably well into the somber setting' of her home, where, facing west-ward, only the setting sun ever shone upon its faded facade ; where the shadows

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lay long and black on the checkered marble slab in front of the carriage block ; where the singing of the mocking birds in the solemn cedars sounded frivolously impertinent ; where the craunching of wheels upon the graveled drive aroused instant attention, and the coming of a visitor was an event ; where last year’s fallen leaves choked up the rusty tin-gutters that begirt the ornamental coping of the old roof ; where thoughts of death and decay came readily and dwelt securely.

Owing to a certain rigid erectness of carriage ; a certain very stately poise of the head — suggestive, not remotely, of royalty — together with ^various involuntary assertions of superiority, this lonely house-holder was known, locally, as “ Old Lady Stanhope,” although, at the bottom of the few letters she found occasion to write, the name of Margaret J. Stanhope appeared in bold strong characters, that seemed to give emphatic denial to the aptness of the prefix “ old.”

People judge so superficially, that when, at the close of the four years’ struggle which had deprived her of a husband, two sons and a brother, leaving her, for all earthly tie, a boy of fifteen years of age, her hair was found to have whitened, her step grown slow to the degree of heavy listlessness, and the whole .woman shrunken from the proportions of a brilliant leader of society, to those of a melancholy repellent recluse, they made haste to say : “ Mrs. Stanhope is growing

A RELIC.

II old fast ; ” and so prematurely were the honors of old age thrust upon her, that before she had seen her fiftieth birth-day she had come to be spoken of as “ the old lady at the Hall " and to be regarded as the legitimate possessor of all the rights and privileges accruing to the oldest inhabitant.

On the other hand, either ignorant of, or utterly indifferent to the pitying comments of her old associates, Mrs. Stanhope passed her days in a species of somnambulism that may have been neither wise nor healthful, but was none the less natural under the circumstances. Apart from the personality and prospects of the boy about whom clung every chord of her heart not unstrung and broken, the future was void and objectless, and the present empty and joyless. But the past ! Ah ! the past was so real ! Her past was her present! It teemed with bitter sweetness! To dwell in it, dream of it, cleave unto it, seemed the only thing possible to do.

Not wishing to envelop the boy who was the last representative of his line, in the gloomy isolation which was the only condition of life endurable to herself in those bereaved days, she had sent him off to college promptly upon the close of the war. Not to the North, for that would have savored too much of acquiescence in a result which had been sealed with the blood of her nearest and dearest. But to Germany, where instruction was thorough and living cheap, she had sent

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him in pursuance of advice given her by the only person who ever dared talk to her in an advisory manner, Reverend Walter Bissell, incumbent of the only Episcopal pulpit in the little town.

She had grown strong through the discipline of pain, but a certain hardness had come with the strength. It was without the shedding of a tear, that she had held her boy’s bright young face between her hands, while the carriage that was to bear him away from her waited before the door, and said, photographing his features with hungry eyes : “ Of course, dear, I shall miss you torturingly at first. I shall miss my boy’s ringing laugh ; I shall miss the clatter of his horse’s feet upon the wooden bridge in the hollow, that told me he was near at home : I shall miss his cap on the rack in the hall — ”

Why not shut up the old house and go along too,” Eustis had said, in an off-hand attempt to do away with the shadowy portions of a scheme that filled his own boyish soul with unalloyed satisfaction. But she had silenced him imperiously: “Hush, child, you do not know what you . are asking. I could not breathe away from this spot. Moreover, your ability to finish your course over there, depends upon my faithful supervision of your interests here. I will have to manage the plantation with rigid economy to keep the old home-stead for you, and pay your expenses. So don’t carry away with you any exaggerated notions of your

A RELIC.

own wealth. I don’t want to stint you in any necessary expenses however.”

Then she had sent him away from her with the understanding that they could not hope to see each other for five years, for her plans for him included one year of travel at the close of four years of study.

It never occurred to Mrs. Stanhope that five years of foreign life and study were perhaps not the best possible training for a young planter, who, in the natural course of events, would be at the head of an estate peopled by a newly emancipated and benighted race; encumbered by debts, incurred by his predecessors under a reckless order of things that was embodied in the necessity, “ of buying more land for a surplus of slaves, and buying more slaves for a surplus of land,” and demanding practical abilities of more than ordinary degree. All of the Stanhopes had been college-bred men, and until she was financially disabled, Eustis should go through the same educational course that his brothers had.

So she took up the added burde*n of his absence with a heavy heart, but resolute determination never to let Eustis know what she suffered, there, all alone in the big grand house, over every door of which seemed written in lurid letters. In Memoriam.

. The Stanhope place was accounted one of the very handsomest estates in the whole country side. Approached through a park where the live-oak, silvery cotton-wood and glossy magnolias, furnished forth rich variations in green, the house itself stood in square and massive proportions on the crown of its terraced grounds, each alternate terrace brightly outlined by white or pink azaleas, which, in that congenial soil, grow to the dimensions of small trees.

But when the azaleas bloomed now, the mistress’s heart beat yet more heavily, and her step fell yet more slowly, for the boys that had fallen such useless sacrifices to the lost cause, used to fight their mimic wars of York and Lancaster, when the terraces bloomed white and red with the azaleas, and now that the boys were gone, why should the azaleas bloom only to revive the memory of joys she had tasted in those peace-girt days of motherhood ?

Down yonder in the hollow, where the clear waters of the creek rippled over its bed of many colored pebbles, stood the bowling alley, under the spreading arms of a giant pecan. A useless sort of a structure now, where the dust lay thick upon the balls in the sloping trough and the pins lay huddled confusedly, just where they had fallen last. Her practical business adviser, a Mr. Trowbridge, Eustis’s godfather and legal guardian, advised its leveling and reconstruction into a negro cabin, but though her head might approve, her heart would not consent to such desecration. Some of the pleasantest hours of the happy care-free life she had led in those secure days, before Sumter’s rude awaken-

A RELIC.

ing, had been spent down at the old alley, lazily swinging in the hammock in the little gallery, with attention evenly divided between the rumbling of the balls over the wooden alley in a hotly contested game between her husband and brother, the book in her hand, and Eustis, wading yonder, bare-foot, in the limpid waters of the creek !

The friendly contestants had fought their last battle, and slept side by side in far off graves ! The bowling alley was silenced forever. Eustis had out-grown the boyish delights of bare-foot wading in the creek ! Weeds clambered close about the decaying steps and peered insolently through the broken sash of every window! The hammock swung in unsightly tatters from its rusty rings I The old alley was fast dropping into hopeless decay ! Only the creek glided by unchanged and uncaring ; softly singing the requiem of dead days and buried joys, as it rippled over its bed of many colored pebbles: In Memoriam ! In Memoriam I

Within doors it was no better. Not a book! not a chair! not a picture! but spoke to her in mournful tones of the dead past that would not die and never would be past. It would have been better if she would have consented to some innovations, but to her in-turned vision innovation was forgetfulness, and her all of religion was, not to forget.

The desk that had been located by the bay-window i6 in the library, so that the “judge ” should get the full benefit of the honeysuckle-laden air, was too sacred to be tampered with. It was a point of pride with her to keep the contents of that desk precisely as he had left it!

The things he had approved of in life must retain the stamp of that approval now that he was gone. The boys’ hunting pouches and guns swung just where they had left them, when they mounted to ride away from her forever, looking so bright and handsome in their new gray uniforms that it was hard yet to realize that they lay side by side in nameless graves : exactly where — she did not even yet know! In those by-gone days one of the brightest spots in the house had been the little studio, in the top of the house, devoted to the aesthetic slovenliness of her artist brother, whose last unfinished water sketch still stood upon the easel, surrounded by all the belongings of the artist, undisturbed and sacred !

Small wonder, that the relic of all this home brightness walked now as one whose burden was almost too heavy to be borne. And thus she had lived ever since the dread certainty that none of them would ever come back to her. Like a cave-dweller she persistently turned from the sunshine and groped in the darkness. Physically, she was well enough looked after by two of her old slaves, whose tender hearts made the leaving of the lonely woman an impossibility. The only modern n thing about this grand old home was a very small and very shabby young colored girl, who, when she opened the front door to the rare visitors that found their way to the house behind the azaleas, had an incurable trick of regarding them suspiciously with a pair of excessively wide open eyes, then with picturesque tatters flapping wildly about her small bare ^lack feet she would speed through the grand hall shrilly announcing “ white folks,” to whomsoever it might concern, in tones of mingled terror and surprise. But then Dumps was simply an anachronism done in ebony.

One day Mrs. Stanhope’s man of business had occasion to submit for her examination a very important legal document. She read the paper in silence, and folding it up with that mechanical precision that was part of every thing she did, she handed it back to him with only one, and that a totally irrelevant comment. She quoted from the document :

“Margaret, relict of John E. Stanhope! How queer to think of one’s self as nothing but a relic.”

(The day chanced to be one of Mrs. Stanhope’s anniversaries: she had been telling her beads on the rosary of her woes.)

“ But the import of the paper, Mrs. Stanhope ? ”

“ Oh ! that is all right I suppose,” she said in tones of utter indifference.

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Then the lawyer had gone away and told the doctor that “if something was not done for old lady Stanhope r8

she would fall into settled melancholia. Her mind was already losing its grasp of the realities of life, as evidenced by her torpid indifference to a transaction involving several thousand dollars.” And the doctor after paying her an unsolicited visit and getting politely snubbed for his pains, told the minister that, if something was not done for old lady Stanhope, Eustis Stanhope would return from college only to put his mother into an insane asylum.” So the Rev. Dr. Bissell threw himself into the breach and daringly told Mrs. Stanhope that ‘ she was doing her son Eustis a great and irreparable injury.”

“What can you possibly mean? ” asked the woman of many sorrows, fixing a startled look on the minister’s uncompromising face.

“I mean that you are rendering yourself such a very undesirable sort of companion for a boy with any life or wit in him, that he must needs come home supernaturally gifted in point of filial reverence, or be the veriest muff in existence, not to fly from your depressing presence to any relief that offers.”

Mrs. Stanhope hurled reproaches at her accuser until her quiver was empty, then, with sudden apologetic meekness, asked : —

“What would you have me do, doctor? ”

“Po! why you must arouse yourself! You must shake off this lethargy! You’ve very little more animation in you than the woman in the mourning

A RELIC.

brooches where the woman and the tomb-stone and the weeping willow are all manufactured out of the same material."

The Reverend Walter Bissell never did things by halves. When he scolded, he scolded ; when he petted, he petted, and he never left one in doubt as to which he was doing, either. He was scolding now vigorously.

Mrs. Stanhope passed her long thin hand dreamily across her forehead, as she asked, yet more meekly : —

How ! Why, you must get out of this. You must make a change. You’ve refused yourself to your neighbors until they’ve all dropped you! You must travel, if to no other end than to discover that the boundary fence of Stanhope Hall is not the boundary line of the universe, nor, when the sun sinks behind that big old oak by your window, is the entire world left in darkness. Why, you’re in a worse plight than Robinson Crusoe. He couldn’t get away from himself, and you won’t.’’

“Where must I go ? ’’ she asked, groping toward the light, too much alarmed at the idea of doing Edstis any wrong to retain the slightest personal preference for a destination, or even to feel any indignation at this unsolicited interest in her affairs.

“Go! Why, anywhere! everywhere!" says the doctor of souls, with liberal vagueness.

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“ I can’t go everywhere, doctor ! ” his victim sighed reproachfully.

“Well, then, go North ! ”

“ North ! ”

The suggestion was as if some one should suddenly fling wide open to the blazing sunlight the windows of a room long closed and given over to shadowy darkness and creeping things. The garish sunlight blinded and dazzled her ! The suggestion stunned her ! Go to the North, where every thing was bright and fresh and crisp and sparkling with energy and prosperity ! Drag her wounds and her sores to the gate of Dives ! Risk the pitying solicitude of the well-meaning, and the cold endurance of the unforgiving ! Place her loss in stinging juxtaposition with their gain ! Why, it would be like passing from a grave to a carousal ! It was a remedy she shrank from applying, even though “ for Eustis’s sake,” was beginning to peal through her brain in a monotonous chime-like fashion ! Could she extend the hand of amity to these Northern conquerors without treason to her dear martyrs?

“North, doctor? ” She repeated the words with a whole volume of reproach in her voice.

“Yes! Why not? You have friends there. All the judge’s relatives live there. I think your hifsband was a Cleveland man originally ? ”

There was a brisk breeziness about the doctor’s arguments that seemed to follow the sunlight into that i

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darkened chamber of Mrs. Stanhope’s soul with winnowing effect.

“Yes,” she acknowledged hesitantly, “but — ”

The minister divined her hidden thought.

“ Mrs. Stanhope,” he said with grave assertion, “ the war is over ! Every body but a few sore-heads and unreasonable women surrendered when Robert E. Lee laid down his sword.”

Thus driven from her last stronghold, Mrs. Stanhope consented to “think about it.”

And so, about two weeks later, the astonishing piece of news, that old Mrs. Stanhope had actually left home, percolated through the neighborhood.

As it was not the season of the year when she, as nominal head of the plantation over in the Louisiana bottoms, from which she derived her revenues, would be going to New Orleans for an annual settlement with her commission merchants, this sudden hegira, involving, as it did, the reappearance of the great Saratoga trunks that used to make regular summer trips from the Hall to some fashionable watering place, and the promotion of Aunt Betty from the poultry-yard to the dignity of an extempore lady’s maid, must mean something! ^Must mean a great deal, in fact.

To conceive of old lady Stanhope as alive, but permanently located anywhere but in the house where the azaleas bloomed, and the dropping pecans marked the coming of the fall, required too great a stretch of the i

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imagination to be indulged in by the most frivolousminded of the neighbors, who had long since been excluded from the confidence of the lonely woman. That she would come back to them in the flesh, no one doubted. But that she had gone away at all, every one marveled.

When, with a plaintive moan, Mrs. Stanhope heard the great wooden gate of the park swing creaking back on its hinges, shutting her out from her seclusion, she scored one more sacrifice for Eustis’s sake.

Chapter II

MRS. STANHOPE INVESTS IN ORPHANS.

I F one can imagine the sensations a snail would experience upon being suddenly dispossessed of its shell, and placed, exposed and writhing, in the middle of a modern model bee-hive, with the imperative necessity staring it in the face for adapting its ways to those of the swarming inmates of that hive, one can imagine how Mrs. Stanhope felt when she found herself actually domesticated, for the time being, in the city home of her prosperous Northern connections.

For awhile, the desire to crawl, snail-wise, into some obscure corner of the hive, was her only well defined sensation. It hurt her, all this activity and stir and bustle and industry, and, however satisfactory the outcome might be in a rich store of wax and honey, she believed she preferred her own sleepy existence. But as the bees in that particular cell of the great national hive were imbued with the tenderest pity for this sore stricken snail, she was not permitted to indulge in her favorite pastime of brooding over the inevitable, even to the point of calling divine justice into question. Fortunately for her, her sojourn was made among a masterful lot, who, believing that their own brisk, breezy ways, were the best sort of ways, combated her gloom and reticence at every turn with forceful determination. She had come prepared to find herself the object of much solicitude and volumes of good advice, which she had made up her mind beforehand to accept as part of the regimen necessary to insure her against the threatened calamity of proving a “ nuisance to Eustis.”

When she had quite made up her mind that Rev. Dr. Bissell was altogether in the right and herself altogether in the wrong, she had selected this cousin of the judge’s as the one among all his relatives with whom it would be least hard for her to come in contact under her much altered circumstances. She remembered this cousin as a soft-eyed, soft-voiced Christian lady, who went about doing good for the love of God and her fellow-man, and, with whom it was quite possible to differ fundamentally without feeling one’s temper rise irrepressibly.

She could hardly have selected a place where she could have been lifted more completely and suddenly out of the old groove than in this home of the judge’s cousin.

“Cousin,” she said, toward the close of the second week of her visit, “I envy you Northern women the fullness of your lives. You never seem to have a superfluous moment ! Never an unappropriated second !

MRS. STANHOPE INVESTS IN ORPHANS. - 25

Do you ever misspend an hour? I can hardly imagine you taking time to grieve for the taking off of your nearest and dearest ! ”

** Perhaps it is best so ! ” Mrs. Dana answered, with the slow distinctness of a person habituated to weighing her thoughts before committing them to the medium of irrecoverable words. “ Perhaps it is best so. I doubt if it is ever well to waste time in brooding over the incurable. I think the fuller one’s life is of the proper sort of activities, the happier, don't you ? ”

“ Undoubtedly it is better to wear out than to rust out. But, if there is nothing to fill one’s life with, what then ? ”

I can not conceive of such a condition of affairs.”

[The judge’s cousin was the queen bee of the hive. A combination of gentleness, shrewdness, meekness and activity. The possessor of a soft, quiet voice, a pair of mild blue eyes, wavy white hair, upon which the weight of many a well spent year pressed lightly. Her voice was full of mild astonishment at the idea of any human being complaining of having nothing to fill the hours with.]

“ Nevertheless, it exists in my own case,” said Mrs. Stanhope, with somewhat haughty assertion. The sparse population of the neighborhood of Stanhope Hall, even inclusive of the town, renders the taking care of our few paupers and orphans a task easily performed by a certain class of persons who are always

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only too glad to take such duties on themselves. Of course I subscribe, but there’s nothing else for me to do in that directipn. My neighbors are all persons in my own sphere of life. Planters’ families, more or less broken up by the war, poor, by contrast with their former circumstances, but of course not objects of charity, nor even of friendly interference.”

“ Who is thy neighbor ? ” Mrs. Dana asked with sweet solemnity.

The two women were sitting alone at the luncheon table. The other members of the family were always too busy to join in this informal meal. Mrs. Dana carefully sweetened a second cup of tea and extended it to her guest, unconscious that she had let fall a drop of gall into her cousin’s cup.

Mrs. Stanhope flushed a little before answering. She had come prepared to take issue on various points, and had felt thankful that, heretofore, none of a very alarming complexion had cropped out above the level of well-conducted social intercourse.

“ In a social sense,” she answered a trifle nervously, “ no one who would furnish scope for the most intrusive philanthropy. In a Christian sense, I suppose it would take in every body of a high or low degree, darkeys included.”

“ I should think you would find a practically inexhaustible field there'' Mrs. Dana’s emphasis was significant.

MRS. STANHOPE INVESTS IN ORPHANS.

“ With my negroes ? ”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Dana’s hobby was national education. She was preparing now to mount and ride decorously.

Mrs. Stanhope had received a violent shock, and her face showed the traces of the conflict within.

The sound of wheels circling the house was a welcome diversion to both. Mrs. Dana suddenly dismounted from her pet hobby (mentally resolved to remount it at an early date in the future) and retreated to safe neutral ground.

“ I ordered the carriage for half past two, Margaret,” she said. “ This is the annual reception at our Protestant Orphan Asylum. I rather think you will enjoy an hour or so there. The building alone is well worth your inspection. We are rather proud of our children too.”

The invitation was given and accepted with marked alacrity. Both felt that they had stepped backward from the brink of an abyss not one second too promptly. Mrs. Dana was regarded as a sort of patron saint at the asylum in whose behalf she spent much of her time, a great deal of her money, and an inexhaustible stock of the liveliest interest.

An hour of exhaustive and exhausting examination of the various wards and departments inclined Mrs. Stanhope very favorably to her cousin’s proposition that they should take seats in the little school-room

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and watch the kindergarten exercises in the school. The sight of that small army of well cared for little waifs, so ignorant of and so indifferent to the superior blessedness of individual homes, had something very pathetic in it. Something that touched a long silent chord in Mrs. Stanhope’s heart and made it vibrant. Something that lifted her out of her selfish absorption and impelled her to say with an air of sudden but fixed resolve :

Amelia ! I tell you what I can do. I can take one of your orphans home and forward her interests in life. That will give me some one to care for while Eustis is away. I will be good to her.” This last in answer to a grave uncertainty in Mrs. Dana’s eyes.

“ We are always willing to put our little ones into good hands. The expense of taking care of so large a number is by no means light. I know you would be good to the child ; I am only afraid, too good.”

“ In what way ? ”

‘‘You would forget the future in indulgence of the present.”

“ Try me,” said Mrs. Stanhope coaxingly. “ My heart is quite set on retrieving my character for uselessndss.”