The Bondwoman Part 60

All of pleading was in her eyes and voice; her hands were clasped in the intensity of her anxiety. But he only shook his head as he looked down in the beautiful, beseeching face.

"For your sake I shall remain," he said, coldly.

"Kenneth!"

"Your anxiety that I leave shows that the plots you confessed are not the only ones you are aware of," he said, controlling his voice with an effort, and speaking quietly. "You are my wife; for the plots of the future I must take the responsibility, prevent them if I can; shield you if I cannot."

"No, no!" and she clasped his arm, pleadingly; "believe me, Kenneth, there will be no more plots, not after today--"

"Ah!" and he drew back from her touch; "not after today! then there _is_ some further use you have for my house as a rendezvous? Do you suppose I will go at once and leave my mother and sister to the danger of your intrigues?"

"No! there shall be no danger for any one if you will only go," she promised, wildly; "Kenneth, it is you I want to save; it is the last thing I shall ever ask of you. Go, go! no more harm shall come to your people, I promise you, I--"

"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 a.s.sure protection for! A spy! A traitor!

_You_, the woman I worshipped! G.o.d! 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."

"Certainly!" she agreed. "Slaves are no longer burned for insubordination, because masters have grown too wise to burn money!

But they have some laws they use now instead of the torch and the whip of those old crude days. From their book of laws they read the commandment: _'Go you out then, and of the heathen about you, buy bondmen and bondmaids that they be servants of your household;'_ and again it is commanded: _'Servants be obedient unto your masters!'_ The torch is no longer needed when those fettered souls are taught G.o.d has decreed their servitude. G.o.d has cursed them before they were born, and under that curse they must bend forever!"

"You doubt even the religion of my people?" he demanded.

"Yes!"

"You doubt the divinity of those laws?"

"Yes!"

"Judithe!"

"Yes!" she repeated, a certain dauntless courage in her voice and bearing. She was no longer the girl he had loved and married; she was a strange, wild, beautiful creature, whose tones he seemed to hear for the first time. "A thousand times--yes! I doubt any law and every law shackling liberty of thought and freedom of people! And the poison of that accursed system has crept into your own blood until, even to me, you pretend, and deny the infamy that exists today, and of which you are aware!"

"Infamy! How dare you use that word?" and his eyes flamed with anger at the accusation, but she raised her hand, and spoke more quietly.

"You remember the story you heard here today--the story of your guest and guardian, who sold the white child of his own brother? and the day when that was done is not so long past! It is so close that the child is now only a girl of twenty-three, the girl who was educated by her father's brother that she might prove a more desirable addition to your bondslaves!"

"G.o.d in heaven!" he muttered, as he drew back and stared at her. "Your knowledge of those things, of the girl's age, which _I_ did not know!

Where have you gained it all? When you heard so much you must know I was not aware of the purchase of the girl, but that does not matter now. Answer my questions! Your words, your manner; what do they mean?

What has inspired this fury in you? Answer--I command you!"

_"'Servants, be obedient unto your masters!'"_ she quoted, with a strange smile. "My words oppress you, possibly, because so many women are speaking through my lips, the women who for generations have thought and suffered and been doomed to silence, to bear the children of men they hated; to have the most sacred thing of life, mother-love, desecrated, according to the temper of their masters; to dread bringing into the world even the children of love, lest, whether white or black, they prove cattle for the slave market!"

"Judithe!"

He caught her hand as though to force silence on her by the strength of his own horror and protest. She closed her eyes for an instant as he touched her, and then drew away to leave a greater s.p.a.ce between them, as she said:

"All those women are back of me! I have never lived one hour out of the shadow of their presence. Their cause is my cause, and when I forget them, may G.o.d forget me!"

"_Your_ cause!--my wife!" he half whispered, as he dropped her hand, and the blue eyes swept her over with a glance of horror. "Who are you that their cause should be yours?"

"Until this morning I was Madame La Marquise de Caron," she said, making a half mocking inclination of her head; "in the bill of sale you read today I was named Rhoda Larue, the slave girl who--"

"No!" He caught her fiercely by the shoulder, and his face had a murderous look as he bent above her, "don't dare to say it! You are mad with the desire to hurt me because I resent your sympathy with the North! But, dear, your madness has made you something more terrible than you realize! Judithe, for G.o.d's sake, never say that word again!"

"For G.o.d's sake, that is, for truth's sake, I am telling you the thing that is!"

He half staggered to the table, and stood there looking at her; her gaze met his own, and all the tragedy of love and death was in that regard.

"_You_!" he said, as though it was impossible to believe the thing he heard. "You--of all women! G.o.d!--it is too horrible! What right have you to tell me now? I was happy each moment I thought you loved me; even my anger against you was all jealousy! I was willing to forgive even the spy work, shield you, trust you, _love_ you--but--now--"

He paused with his hand over his eyes as though to shut out the sight of her, she was so beautiful as she stood there--so appealing. The dark eyes were wells of sadness as she looked at him. She stood as one waiting judgment and hoping for no mercy.

"You have punished me for a thing that was not my fault," he continued. "I destroyed it--the accursed paper, and--"

"And by destroying it you gave me back to the Loring estate," she said, quietly. All the pa.s.sion had burned itself out; she spoke wearily and without emotion. "That is, I have become again, the property of my half sister, my father's daughter! Are the brutal possibilities of your social inst.i.tution so very far in the past?"

He could only stare at her; the horror of it was all too sickening, and that man who was dying in the other room had caused it all; he had moved them as puppets in the game of life, a malignant Fate, who had made all this possible.

"Now, will you go?" she asked, pleadingly. "You may trust me now; I have told you all."

But he did not seem to hear her; only that one horrible thought of what she was to him beat against his brain and dwarfed every other consideration.

"And you--married me, knowing this?"

"I married you because I knew it," she said, despairingly. "I thought you and Matthew Loring equally guilty--equally deserving of punishment. I fought against my own feelings--my own love for you--"

"Love!"

"Love--love always! I loved you in Paris, when I thought hate was all you deserved from me. I waited three years. I told myself it had been only a girlish fancy--not love! I pledged myself to work for the union of these states and against the cause championed by Kenneth McVeigh and Matthew Loring; for days and nights, weeks and months, I have worked for my mother's people and against the two men whose names were always linked together in my remembrance. The thought became a monomania with me. Well, you know how it is ended! Every plan against you became hateful to me from the moment I heard your voice again. But the plans had to go on though they were built on my heart. As for the marriage, I meant to write you after I had left the country, and tell you who you had given your name to. Then"--and all of despair was in her voice--"then I learned the truth too late. I heard your words when that paper was given to you here, and I loved you. I realized that I had never ceased to love you; that I never should!"

"The woman who is my--wife!" he muttered. "Oh, G.o.d!--"