They were up at the little meadow-side cottage of Mrs. Vennard, Ray's maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest, owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established. Here, when bodings of trouble began to darken her sunny fields, she had, in early spring, withdrawn again, leaving her maiden aunt to attend to the affairs of the homestead, or to find more luxurious residence in watering-places or cities, as she chose. For Vivia liked the placid life and freedom of the cottage, and here, too, she had oftenest met those dear friends to whom one winter her father, long since dead, had taken her, and half of all that was pleasant in her life had inwoven itself with the simple surroundings of the place. Here, in that fatal spring when the first tocsin alarmed the land, Ray, now scarcely any longer a boy, yet with a boy's singleness of mind, though possessing neither patience nor power for subtilties of difficult reason and truth, thinking of no lonely portion, but of the one great fact of country, had been fired with spontaneous fervor, and had ever since been like some restive steed champing the bit and quivering to start. As for Vivia, she was a Maryland woman. Too burningly indignant, the blood bubbled in her heart for words sometimes, and she would be glad of Beltran's weapons with which to confront Kay when he returned from Boston, whither, the day before, without a word's explanation, he had betaken himself. So she turned again to the open letter, and scanned its weightiest paragraphs.
"There is a strange reversal of right and wrong, when the American Peace Society declares itself for war. There is, then, a greater evil than war, even than civil war, with its red, fratricidal hands?—Slavery. But, could that be destroyed, it would be the first great evil ever overcome by force of arms. They fight tangibly with an intangible foe; tangible issues rise between them; the black, intangible phantom hovers safe behind. But even should they visibly succeed, is there not left the very root of the matter to put forth fresh growth,—that moral condition in which the thing lived at all? An evil that has its source in the heart must be eradicated by slow medicinal cure of the blood. To fight against the stars in their courses, one must have brands of starry temper. No sudden shocks of battle will sweep Slavery from the sphere. Can one conquer the universe by proclamation? 'Lyra will rise to-morrow,' said some one, after Cæsar reformed the calendar. 'Doubtless,' replied Cicero, 'there is an edict for it.' But, believe me, there can be no broad, stupendous evil, unless it be a part of God's plan; and in His own time, without other help from us than the performance of our duty, it will slough off its slime and rise into some fair superstructure. Our efforts dash like spray against the rock,—the spray is broken, the rock remains. To annihilate evil with evil,—that is an error in itself against which every man is justified in taking up his sword.
"So far, I have allowed the sin. Yet, sin or not, in this country the estate of the slave is unalterable. Segregately, the institution is their protection. For though there is no record of the contact of superior and inferior races on a basis of equality, where the inferior did not absorb the superior, yet, if every slave were set free to-day, imbruted through generations, it could not be on a basis of equality that we should meet, and they would be as inevitably sunk and lost as the detritus that a river washes into the sea. If the black stay here, it must be as a menial. In his own latitudes, where, after the third generation, the white man ceases to exist, he is the stronger; there the black man is king: let him betake himself to his realm. Abolition is impracticable, colonization feasible; on either is gunpowder wasted: one cannot explode a lie by the blast.
"But saying the worst of our incubus that can be said, could all its possible accumulation of wrong and woe exceed that of four years of such a war as this? Think a moment of what this land was, what a great beacon and celestial city across the waves to the fugitives from tyranny; think of our powerful pride in eastern seas, in western ports, when each ship's armament carried with it the broadside of so many sovereign States, when each citizen felt his own hand nerved with a people's strength, when no young man woke in the morning without the perpetual aurora of high hopes before him, when peace and plenty were all about us,—and then think of misery at every hearth, of civilization thrust back a century, of the prestige of freedom lost among the nations, of the way paved for despots. And how needlessly!
"They taunted us, us the source of all their wealth, with the pauper's deserting the poor-house; we put it to proof; when, lo! with a hue and cry, the blood-hounds are upon us, the very dogs of war. So needless a war! For has it not been a fundamental principle that every people has a right to govern itself? We chose to exercise that right. Was it worth the while to refuse it? Exhausted, drained, dispeopled, they may chain a vassal province to their throne; but, woe be to them, upon that conquering day, their glory has departed from them! The first Revolution was but the prologue to this: that was sealed in blood; in this might have been demonstrated the progress made under eighty years of freedom, by a peaceful separation. It is the Flight of the Tartar Tribe anew, and the whole barbarous Northern nation pours its hordes after, hangs on the flank, harasses, impedes, slaughters,—but we reach the shadow of the Great Wall at last. If we had not the right to leave the league, how had we the right to enter? If we had not the right to leave, they also had not the right to withhold us. Yet, when we entered, resigning much, receiving much, retaining more, we were each a unit, a power, a commonwealth, a nation, or, as we chose to term it, a State,—as much a state as any of the great states of Europe, as Britain, as France, as Spain, and jealously ever since have we individually regarded any infringement on our integrity. That, and not the mere tangle of race that in time must unravel itself, is the question of the age. Long ago it was said that our people, holding it by transmission, never having struggled for it, would some day cease rightly to value the one chief bulwark of liberty. Nothing is more true. They of the North will lose it, we of the South shall gain it; for, battling on a grander scale than our ancestors, the South is to-day taking out the great habeas corpus of States!"
No matter whether all this was sophistry or truth. Beltran had said it,—that was enough; so strongly did she feel his personality in what he wrote, that the soul was exultant, jubilant, defiant, within her. Other words there were in the letter, such words as are written to but one; the blood swept up to Vivia's lips as she recalled them, and her heart sprang and bounded like one of those balls kept in perpetual play by the leaping, bubbling column of a fountain. She was in one of those dangerous states of excitement after which the ancients awaited disaster. That last picture of the mirror dazzled her vision again; she saw the sunshine, smelt the perfume, heard the bird-song. How a year had changed the scene! The house was a barrack; now down in her Maryland peach-orchards the black muzzles of Federal cannon yawned, and under the flickering shadows and sunshine the grimy gunners, knee-deep in grass and dew, brushed away the startled clover-blooms, as they touched fire to the breach. Beltran was a Rebel. Vivia was a Rebel, too! She ran down-stairs into her little parlor overflowing with flowers. As she walked to and fro, the silent keys of her pianoforte met her eye. Excellent conductors. Half standing, half sitting, she awoke its voices, and, to a rolling, silvery thunder of accompaniment, commenced singing,—
"The lads of Kilmarnock had swords and had spears
And lang-bladed daggers to kill cavaliers,
But they shrunk to the wall and the causey left free
At one toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee!
So fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Saddle my horses and call up my men,
Open your west-port and let me gae free,
For it's up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!"
Some one in the distance, echoing the last line with an emphasis, caught her ear in the pause. It was Ray. He had already returned, then. She snatched the letter and sped into the kitchen, where she was sure to find him.
Mrs. Vennard rocked in her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy