UC-NRLF 
 
 17Q 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY, 
 
 BY 
 
 W. D. IIOWKLLS 
 
 Al THuR OF 
 
 HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES" ANNIE KILBURN" ETOL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, KKANKLIN" SQUARE 
 1893 
 
Copyright, 1891, by WILLIAM DKAN HOWELLS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Electrotyped "by S. J. PARKHIU. * Co,, Boston. 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 I. 
 
 OLNEY got back to Boston about the middle of 
 July, and found himself in the social solitude which 
 the summer makes more noticeable in that city than in 
 any other. The business, the hard work of life, was 
 going on, galloping on, as it always does in America, 
 but the pleasure of life, which he used to be part of as 
 a younger man, was taking a rest, or if not a rest, then 
 certainly an outing at the sea-shore. He met no one 
 he knew, and In- roiitinurd his foreign travels in his 
 native place, after an absence so long that it made 
 everything once so familiar bewilderingly strange. 
 
 He had sailed ten days before from Liverpool, but 
 he felt as if he had been voyaging in a vicious circle 
 when he landed, and had arrived in Liverpool again. 
 In several humiliating little ways, Boston recalled the 
 most commonplace of English cities. It was not like 
 Liverpool in a certain civic grandiosity, a sort of lion- 
 and-unicorn spectacularity which he had observed 
 tin-re. The resemblance appeared to him in the 
 meanness and dulness of many of the streets in the 
 older part of the town where he was lodged, and in the 
 
2 AN ICVIPE RATIVE DUTY. 
 
 littleness of the houses. Then there was a curious 
 similarity in the figures and faces of the crowd. He 
 had been struck by the almost American look of the 
 poorer class in Liverpool, and in Boston he was struck 
 by its English look. He could half account for this by 
 the fact that the average face and figure one meets in 
 Boston in midsummer, is hardly American ; but the 
 other half of the puzzle remained. He could only 
 conjecture an approach from all directions to a common 
 type among those who work with their hands for a 
 living ; what he had seen in Liverpool and now saw 
 in Boston was not the English type or the American 
 type, but the proletarian type. He noticed it espe 
 cially in the women, and more especially in the young 
 girls, as he met them in the street after their day s 
 work was done, and on the first Sunday afternoon fol 
 lowing his arrival, as he saw them in the Common. 
 By far the greater part of those listening to the brass 
 band which was then beginning to vex the ghost of 
 our poor old Puritan Sabbath there, were given away 
 by their accent for those primary and secondary Irish 
 who abound with us. The old women were strong, 
 sturdy, old-world peasants, but the young girls were 
 thin and crooked, with pale, pasty complexions, and 
 an effect of physical delicacy from their hard work 
 and hard conditions, which might later be physical re 
 finement. They were conjecturably out of box facto 
 ries and clothier s shops ; they went about in threes or 
 fours, with their lank arms round one another s waists, 
 or lounged upon the dry grass ; and they seemed fond 
 
AN IMIM.KATIVK DUTY. 3 
 
 oi u aring red JTM-\>. which accented every fact of 
 their anatomy. Looking at them scientifically, Olney 
 thought that if they survived to be mothers they might 
 give us, with better conditions, a race as halt- and 
 handsome as the elder American race ; but the transi 
 tion from the Old World to tin- New, as represented 
 in them, was painful. Their voices were at once 
 COane and weak ; their walk was uncertain, now awk- 
 \\ard and now graceful, an undeveloped gait | he found 
 their bearing apt to be ai^n i\e, as if from a wMi to 
 ascertain the full limits of their social freedom, rather 
 than from ill-nature, or that bad-heartedness which 
 most rudeness comes from. 
 
 But, in fact, Olin-y met nowhere the deference from 
 beneath that his long sojourn in Europe had accus 
 tomed him to consider politeness. lie was used in all 
 public places with a kindness mixed with roughness, 
 which is probably the real republican manner; the 
 manner of Florence before the Medici ; the manner of 
 Venice when the Florentines were wounded by it 
 after the Medici corrupted them ; the manner of the 
 French when the Terror had done its work. Nobody 
 proved unamiable, though everybody seemed so at first ; 
 not even the waiters at his hotel, where he was served 
 bv adoptive eiti/ens who looked so much like brigands 
 that he could not help expecting to be carried off and 
 held somewhere for ransom when he first came into 
 the dining-room. They wore immense black mus 
 taches or huge whiskers, or else the American beard 
 cut slanting from the corners of the mouth. They 
 
4 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 had a kind of short sack of alpaca, which did not sup 
 port one s love of gentility like the conventional dress- 
 coat of the world-wide waiter, or cheer one s heart like 
 the white linen jacket and apron of the negro waiter. 
 But Olney found them, upon what might be called 
 personal acquaintance, neither uncivil nor unkind, 
 though they were awkward and rather stupid. They 
 could not hide their eagerness for fees, and they took 
 an interest in his well-being so openly mercenary, that 
 he could scarcely enjoy his meals. With two of those 
 four-winged whirligigs revolving on the table before 
 him to scare away the flies, and working him up to 
 such a vertigo that he thought he must swoon into his 
 soup, Olney was uncomfortably aware of the Irish 
 waiter standing so close behind his chair that his 
 stomach bulged against it, and he felt his breath com 
 ing and going on the bald spot on his crown. He 
 could not put out his hand to take up a bit of bread 
 without having a hairy paw thrust forward to antici 
 pate his want ; and he knew that his waiter considered 
 each service of the kind worth a good deal extra, and 
 expected to be remembered for it in our silver coin 
 age, whose unique ugliness struck Olney afresh. 
 
 He would not have been ready to say that one of 
 the negro waiters, whom he wished they had at his 
 hotel, would not have been just as greedy of money; 
 but he would have clothed his greed in such a smiling 
 courtesy and such a childish simple-heartedness that it 
 would have been graceful and winning. He would 
 have used tact in his ministrations ; he would not have 
 
AN MirKKAHYK IM TY. 5 
 
 cumbered him with >erviv, as from a wheelbarrow, 
 
 lnit \\niihl have given him :i toucli of help here, and a 
 little mor>el of attention there; IK- would liave kept 
 aloof as well as alert. That is, he would have had all 
 these charms if lit- were at hi> best, and In- would have 
 had >ome of them if he were at his worst. 
 
 In tact, the one aspect of our mixed humanity here 
 which struck Gluey as altogether agreeable in getting 
 home was tl. it of the race which vexes our social 
 question with its servile pa>t, and promises to keep it 
 uncomfortable with its civic future. lie had not for 
 gotten that, so far as society in the society sense is 
 concerned, we have- always frankly simplified the mat 
 ter, and no more consort with the negroes than we do 
 with the lower animals, so that one would be <ju;te as 
 likely to meet a cow or a horse in an American draw 
 ing-room as a person of color. But he had forgotten 
 how entirely the colored people keep to themselves in 
 all public places, and how, with the same civil rights 
 as ourselves, they have their own neighborhood-, their 
 own church* >. their own amusements, their own re- 
 BOrtS. They were ju>t as free to come to the mu>5<- 
 on the Common that Sunday afternoon as any of the 
 white people lie >aw there. They could have walked 
 up and down, they could have lounged upon the grass, 
 and no one would have molested them, though the 
 whites would have kept apart from them. But he 
 found very few of them there. It was not till he fol 
 lowed a group away from the Common through 
 Charles Street, where they have their principal church, 
 
6 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 into Cambridge Street, which is their chief promenade, 
 that he began to see many of them. In the humbler 
 side-hill streets, and in the alleys branching upward 
 from either thoroughfare, they have their homes, and 
 here he encountered them of all ages and sexes. It 
 seemed to him that they had increased since he was 
 last in Boston beyond the ratio of nature ; and the 
 hotel clerk afterward told him there had been that 
 summer an unusual influx of negroes from the South. 
 
 He would not have known the new arrivals by any 
 thing in their looks or bearing. Their environment 
 had made as little impression on the older inhabitants, 
 or the natives, as Time himself inakes upon persons of 
 their race, and Olney fancied that Boston did not 
 characterize their manner, as it does that of almost 
 every other sort of aliens. They all alike seemed 
 shining with good-nature and good-will, and the desire 
 of peace on earth. Their barbaric taste in color, 
 when it flamed out in a crimson necktie or a scarlet 
 jersey, or when it subdued itself to a sable that left no 
 gleam of white about them but a point or rim of shirt 
 collar, was invariably delightful to him; but he had 
 to own that their younger people were often dressed 
 with an innate feeling for style. Some of the young 
 fellows were very effective dandies of the type we 
 were then beginning to call dude, and were marked 
 by an ultra correctness, if there is any such thing ; 
 they had that air of being clothed through and 
 through, as to the immortal spirit as well as the per 
 ishable body, by their cloth gaiters, their light trousers, 
 
AN iMi>i:i: ^ i i\ r LI rv. 7 
 
 their neatly-buttoned cutaway coat-, their harmonious 
 >carK and their silk liats. They carried on flirtations 
 of the eye with the young colored "iris they met, or 
 when they were walking with them they paid them a 
 court which wa- far above the lieliavior of the common 
 young white fellows with the girls of their class in 
 refinement ami delieaey. The negroes, if they wished 
 to imitate the manners of our race, wished to imitate 
 the manners of the best among us; they wished to-be 
 like ladies and gentlemen. But the young white girls 
 and their fellows whom Olney saw during the evening 
 in possession of most of the benches in the Common 
 and the Public Garden, and between the lawns of 
 Commonwealth Avenue, apparently did not wi>h to be X 
 like ladies and gentlemen in their behavior. The fel 
 low in each case had his arm about the girl s waist, 
 and she had her head at times upon his shoulder; if 
 the branch of a tree overhead ca-t the smallest rag 
 or tatter of shadow upon them, she had her head 
 on his shoulder most of the time. Olney was rather 
 abashed when he passed close to one of these couples, 
 but they seemed to .-uffer no embarrassment. They 
 had apparently no concealments to make, nothing to 
 be ashamed of ; and they had really nothing to give 
 tlu-m a sense of guilt. They wen- -imply vulgar young 
 people, who were publicly abusing the freedom our 
 civilization gives their youth, without knowing anv 
 better, or meaning any worse. Olney knew this, but 
 he could not help remarking to the advantage, of the 
 .u-groe>, that among all these couples on the benches 
 
8 Atf IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 of the Common and the Garden and the Avenue, he 
 never found a colored couple. He thought that some 
 of the young colored girls, as he met them walking 
 with their decorous beaux, were very pretty in their 
 way. They had very thin, high, piping voices, that 
 had an effect both of gentleness and gentility. With 
 their brilliant complexions of lustrous black, or rich 
 cafe, au lait, or creamy white, they gave a vividness to 
 the public spectacle which it would not otherwise have 
 had, and the sight of these negroes in Boston some 
 how brought back to Olney s homesick heart a sense 
 of Italy, where he had never seen one of their race. 
 
II. 
 
 OLNEY was very homesick for Italy that Sunday 
 night. After two days in Boston, mostly spent in ex 
 ploring the once familial- plan-sin it. ami di-covering 
 the new and strange ones, he hardly knew which made 
 him feel more hopelessly alien. lie had been live 
 vears a wax . and he perceived that the effort to repa 
 triate himself must involve wounds as sore as those of 
 the lirst days of exile. The tissues then lacerated 
 must bleed again before his life could be reunited 
 with the stock from which it had been torn. lie felt 
 himself unable to bear the pain ; and he found no at 
 traction of novelty in the future before him. He knew 
 the Boston of his coming years too well to have any 
 illusions about it ; and he had known too many other 
 places to have kept the provincial superstitions or his 
 nonage and his earlier manhood concerning its primacy. 
 He believed he should succeed, but that it would be in 
 a minor cit Y, after a struggle with competitors who 
 would be just, and who might be generous, but uho 
 would be able, thoroughly equipped, and perfectly dis 
 ciplined. The light would be long, even if it were 
 victorious; its prizes would be hard to win, however 
 splendid. Neither the light nor the prizes seemed so 
 attractive now as they had .seemed at a distance, lie 
 
10 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 wished he had been content to stay in Florence, where 
 he could have had the field to himself, if the harvest 
 could never have been so rich. But he understood, 
 even while he called himself a fool for coming home, 
 that he could not have been content to stay without 
 first coming away. 
 
 When he went abroad to study, he had a good deal 
 of money, and the income from it was enough for him 
 to live handsomely on anywhere ; in Italy it was 
 enough to live superbly on. But the friend with 
 whom he left his affairs, had put all of Olney s eggs 
 into one basket. It was the Union Pacific basket 
 which he chose, because nearly every one in Boston 
 was choosing it at the same time, with the fatuous 
 faith of Bostonians in their stocks. Suddenly Olney s 
 income dropped from five or six thousand a year to 
 nothing at all a year ; and his pretty scheme of re 
 maining in Italy and growing up with the country in 
 a practice among the nervous Americans who came 
 increasingly abroad every year, had to be abandoned, 
 or at least it seemed so at the time. Now he wished 
 he had sold some of his depreciated stock, which every 
 body said would be worth as much as ever some day, 
 and taken the money to live on till he could begin 
 earning some. This was what Garofalo, his friend and 
 fellow-student in Vienna, and now Professor of the 
 Superior Studies at Florence, urged him to do ; and 
 the notion pleased him, but could not persuade him. It 
 was useless for Garofalo to argue that he would have 
 to get the means of living in Boston in some such 
 
AX niri.u \ TIN i. ix ii . 11 
 
 wav, if IK- went home to establish himself ; Olney be 
 lieved that he should be^in earning money in larger 
 sums if not sooner at home. Besides, he recurred to 
 that vamie ideal of duty which all virtuous Americans 
 have, and he felt that he ought, as an American, to 
 live in America. He had been quite willing to think 
 of living in Italy while he had the means, but as soon 
 a< he had no means, his dormant sense of patriotism 
 roused itself. He said that if he had to make a fight, 
 he would go where other people were making it, and 
 where it would not seem so unnatural as it would in 
 the secular repose of Florence, among those who Lad 
 all put off their armor at the close of the sixteenth 
 century. Garofalo alleged the intellectual activity 
 everywhere around him in science, literature, philos 
 ophy. Gluey could not say that it seemed to him a 
 life referred from Germany, France and England, 
 without root in Italian soil ; but he could answer that 
 all this might very well be without affording a lucrative 
 practice for a specialist in nervous diseases, who could 
 be most prosperous where nervous diseases most 
 abounded. 
 
 The question was joked away between them, and in 
 the end there never seemed to have been any very 
 serious question of Olney s staying in Florence. Now, 
 if there had not been really, he wished there really 
 had been. Everything discouraged him, somehow; 
 and no doubt his depression was partly a physical 
 mood. He had never expected to find people in town 
 at that time in the summer, or to begin practice at 
 
12 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 once ; he had only promised himself to look about and 
 be suitably settled to receive the nervous sufferers 
 when they began to get back in the fall. Yet the 
 sight of all those handsome houses on the Back Bay, 
 where nervous suffering, if it were to avail him, must 
 mainly abide, struck a chill to his spirit ; they seemed 
 to repel his intended ministrations with their barri 
 caded doorways and their close-shuttered windows. 
 His failure to find Dr. Wingate, with whom he had 
 advised about his studies, and with whom he had 
 hoped to talk ovc r his hopes, was peculiarly disheart 
 ening, though when he reasoned with himself he saw 
 that there was au imperative logic in Wingate s ab 
 sence ; a nervous specialist of his popularity must, of 
 course, have followed nervous suffering somewhere 
 out of town. Still it was a disappointment, and it 
 made the expense of Olney s sojourn seem yet more 
 ruinous. The hotel where he had gone for cheapness 
 was an old house keprt on the American plan ; but his 
 outgo of three dollars a day dismayed him when he 
 thought of the arrangiamento he could have made in 
 Florence for half the money. He determined to look 
 up a boarding-house in the morning ; and the thought 
 of this made him almost sick. 
 
 Olney was no longer so young as he had been ; we 
 none of us are as young as we once were ; but all of 
 us have not reached the great age of thirty, as he had, 
 after seeming sweetly destined to remain forever in 
 the twenties. He belonged to a family that became 
 bald early, and there was already a thin place in the 
 
\\ IMIM.KA Ti VK nrrv. 13 
 
 h.iir on liis crown, which lie discovered on.- day when 
 he WM looking al the hack of liis head in <he i:la--. 
 It was shortly after the Union Pacific first passed its 
 dividend, and it made him feel for the time decrepit. 
 Yet lie was by no means superannuated in other re 
 spects. His color was youthfully fresh ; his soft full 
 heard was of a rich --olden red ; what there was of his 
 hair and there was by no means little except, in that 
 one spot was of the >ame mellow color, which it 
 would keep till forty, without a touch of gray. His 
 liunre had not lost its youthful slinne^, and it looked 
 oven fashionable in its clothes of London cut; so that 
 any fellow-countryman who disliked his air of reserve 
 might easily have passed him by on the other side, 
 and avoided him for a confounded Englishman. 
 
 lie sat on the high-pillared portico of the hotel, 
 smoking for a half-hour after he returned from his 
 evening stroll, and then he went to his room, and be 
 gan to go to bed. He wa- very meditative about it, 
 and after he took off his coat, he sat on the edge of 
 the bed, pc-nsively holding one shoe in his hand, until 
 he could think to unlace the other. 
 
III. 
 
 THERE came a shattering knock at his door, such 
 as rouses you in the night when the porter mistakes 
 your number for that of the gentleman he was to call 
 at four. Olney shouted, " Come in ! " and sat waiting 
 the result, with his shoe still in his hand. The door 
 opened and one of those Irish faces showed itself. 
 
 " Are you a doctor, sor ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Ahl right." 
 
 The face was withdrawn, and the door was closing, 
 when Olney called out : " Why ? What of it ? Does 
 any one want me ? " 
 
 " I don t know, sor. There s a lady in Twenty- 
 wan that sah your name in the paper ; but she said not 
 to disturb ye if ye wahsn t a doctor." 
 
 " A lady ? " said Olney. He rapidly reasoned that 
 the lady, whoever she was, had found his name printed 
 in the Sunday papers among the arrivals at that 
 hotel, and that she must have some association with it. 
 " Is she ill ? Does she know me ? " 
 
 " I don t know, sor," said the man, with an air of 
 wishing to conceal nothing. " She don t be in bed, 
 annyway." 
 
 Olney reflected a moment, hesitating between a cer- 
 
AX JMI KKATIVK I>TTT. 15 
 
 tain vexation :it being inolrstnl with this ridiculous 
 menage and a vague curio-ity to find out who the 
 lady COBld be. Asa, man, he would ha\f wished to 
 know wlio any unknown woman could be ; as a man 
 of science, lie divined that this unknown woman \\as 
 probably one of those difficult invalids who have to he 
 coaxed into anything decisive, oven sending for a dor- 
 tor ; this tentative question of hers must represent 
 ever so much self-worry and a high degree of self-con 
 quest. 
 
 " Tell her, yes, I m a doctor." lie >aid to the man. 
 He added, for purposes of identification, " I)r. Kdward 
 Olney." He thought for an instant lie would send his 
 card; but he decided this would be silly. 
 
 " Ahl right, sor. Thank ye, sor," said the man. 
 
 He went a\\a\. and Olney jnit on the shoe he had 
 taken off, and got into his coat again. He expected 
 the man back at once, and he wished to be ready, but 
 the messenger did not come for ten or twelve minutes. 
 Then he brought Olney a note, superscribed in a 
 young-lady-like hand, and diiVu>ing when opened a 
 perfume which was instantly but indefinitely memorif- 
 erous. Where had he last met the young ladv who 
 used that perfume, so full of character, so redolent of 
 personality? The mystery was solved by the note, 
 and all the pleasure of the writer s presence returned 
 to him at the sicht of her name. 
 
 - 
 
 "DEAR SIR, My aunt. Mrs. Meredith, is so very 
 far from well, that she asks me to write for her, and 
 2 
 
16 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 beg you to come and see her. She hopes she is not 
 mistaken in thinking it is Dr. Olney whom she met at 
 Professor Garofalo s in Florence last winter ; but if it 
 is not, she trusts you will pardon the intrusion, other, 
 wise unwarrantable at such an hour. 
 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 RHODA ALDGATE." 
 
 " Where is the room ? " Olney demanded, putting 
 the note into his breast pocket, and taking up his hat. 
 He smiled to think how much less distinctive the dic 
 tion was than the perfume ; he fancied that Miss Aid- 
 gate had written down her aunt s words, which had a 
 formality alien to the nature of the young girl he re 
 membered so agreeably. As he followed along 
 through the apparently aimless corridors, up and down 
 short flights of steps that seemed to ascend at one 
 point only to descend at another, he recalled the par 
 ticulars of her beauty ; her slender height, her rich 
 complexion of olive, with a sort of under-stain of red, 
 and the inky blackness of her eyes and hair. Her 
 face was of almost classic perfection, and the hair, 
 crinkling away to either temple, grew low upon the 
 forehead, as the hair does in the Clytie head. In 
 profile the mouth was firmly accented, with a deep 
 cut outlining the full lower lip, and a fine jut forward 
 of the delicate chin ; and the regularity of the mask 
 was farther relieved from insipidity by the sharp wing- 
 like curve in the sides of the sensitive nostrils. Olney 
 recalled it as a mask, and he recalled his sense of her 
 
AN IMTI.KA i -IVI-: DTTV. 17 
 
 thi- family fa<v. with its somewhat tragic 
 beauty. (>\cr a personality that was at once gentle and 
 pay. The mask, he felt, was inherited, hut the char- 
 art <T seemed to be of Miss Aldgate s own invention, 
 and expressed itself in the sunny sparkle of her looks, 
 that ran over with a willingness to please and to be 
 pleax-d. and to consist in effect of a succession of 
 tla>liing, childlike smiles, showing between her red 
 lips teeth of the milkiest whiteness, small, even and 
 perfect. These looks, the evening he remembered 
 first meeting her and her aunt, were employed chiefly 
 upon a serious young clergyman, sojourning in Flor 
 ence after a journey to the Holy Land. But they 
 were not employed coquettishly so much as sympa 
 thetically, with a readiness for laughter that broke up 
 the inherited mask with a strange contradictory levity. 
 Olney was himself immersed in a long and serious 
 analysis of Romola with the aunt, who appeared to 
 have a conscience of prodigious magnifying force, cul 
 tivated to the last degree by a constant training upon 
 the ethical problems of fiction. She brought its power 
 ful lenses to bear upon the most intimate particles of 
 Tito s character ; his bad qualities seemed to give her 
 almost as much satisfaction as if they had been her 
 own. In knocking at Mrs. Meredith s door, he now 
 remembered how charmingly that pretty little head of 
 Miss Aldgate s, defined by the black hair with its lus 
 trous crinkle, was set upon her shoulders. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE young girl herself opened the door, and faced 
 him first with the tragic family mask. Then she put 
 out her hand to him with the personal gayety he had 
 recalled. Her laugh, so far as it bore upon the situ 
 ation, recognized rather the good joke of their finding 
 themselves all in an American hotel together than 
 expressed anxiety for her aunt s condition. It was so 
 glad and free, in fact, that Olney was surprised to find 
 Mrs. Meredith looking quite haggard on the sofa, from 
 which she reached him her hand without attempting 
 to rise. 
 
 " Isn t it the most fortunate thing in the world," 
 said Miss Aldgate, " that it should really be Dr. Olney ? 
 We couldn t believe it when we saw it in the paper ! " 
 she added ; and now Olney perceived that the laugh 
 which he might have thought indifferent, was a laugh 
 of happy relief, of trust that since it was he, all must 
 go well. 
 
 "Yes, it is indeed," said Mrs. Meredith; but she 
 had none of the gayety in putting the burden upon 
 Olney, under Providence, which flashed out in her 
 niece s smile ; she appeared to doubt whether Provi 
 dence and he could manage it, and to relinquish it 
 with misgiving. " There were so many chances against 
 
AN IMl l KATIVE DUTY. 19 
 
 it that it scarcely M-niu-.l possible." Sin- examined 
 Oluey s face, which had at once begun to hide tin- pro 
 fessional opinion li<- \\as forming, and seemed to find 
 comfort in its unsmiling strength. " And I hated 
 dreadfully to trouble you at such an hour." 
 
 "I believe there s no etiquette as to the time of a 
 doctor s visits," said Oluey, pulling a chair up to the 
 sofa, and looking down at her. " I hope, if things go 
 well after I m settled here, to be called up sometimes 
 in the middle of the night, though ten o clock isn t 
 bad for my second day in Boston." Miss Aldgate 
 laughed with instant appreciation of his pleasant rv. and 
 Mrs. Meredith wanlv smiled. "You must be even 
 more recent than I am, Mrs. Meredith. I m afraid 
 that if I had found your names in the register when I 
 signed mine, I should have ventured to call unprofes- 
 sionally. But then it would very likely have been 
 some other Mrs. Meredith." 
 
 Miss Aldgate laughed again, and Olney gave her a 
 look of the kindness a man feels for any one who sees 
 his joke. She dropped upon the chair at the head of 
 the sofa, and invited him with dancing eyes to say 
 some more of those things. But Mrs. Meredith took 
 the word. 
 
 We only got in this morning. That is, the 
 steamer arrived too late last night for us to come 
 ashore, and we drove to the hotel before breakfast. 
 You must be rather surprised to find us in such a 
 
 phiee." 
 
 " Not at all ; I m here myself," said Olney. 
 
20 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " Oh ! " Miss Aldgate laughed. 
 
 " I don t assume," he added, " that you came here 
 for cheapness, as I did. At the hotels on the 
 European plan, as they call it, they charge you as 
 much for a room as they do for room and board to 
 gether here." 
 
 " Everything is very expensive," sighed Mrs. Mere 
 dith. " We paid three dollars for our carriage from 
 the ship ; and I believe it s nothing to what it is in 
 New York. But it s a great while since I ve been in 
 Boston, and I told them to bring me here because I d 
 heard it was an old-fashioned, quiet place. I felt the 
 need of rest, but it seems very noisy. It was very 
 smooth all the way over ; but I was excited, and I 
 slept badly. The last two or three nights I ve scarcely 
 slept at all." 
 
 " Hmm ! " said the doctor, feeling himself launched 
 upon the case. 
 
 Miss Aldgate rose. 
 
 " My dear," said her aunt, " I wish you would look 
 up the prescription the ship s doctor gave me. I was 
 thinking of sending out to have it made up, but I 
 shouldn t wish to try it now unless Dr. Olney ap 
 proves." 
 
 Olney profited by Miss Aldgate s absence to feel 
 Mrs. Meredith s pulse and look at her tongue. He 
 asked her a few formal questions. He was a little 
 surprised to find her so much better than she looked. 
 
 " You seem a little upset, Mrs. Meredith," he said. 
 "You may be suffering from suppressed seasickness, 
 
AN IM1M.U V I I VI. IH TV. 21 
 
 but I don t think it s anything worse." He tried 
 to tivat the aifair lightly, and ho added : 1 doii t see 
 why you shouldn t be on good terms with sleep. You 
 know Tito slept very well, even with a bad con 
 science." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith would not smile with him at the 
 recurrence to their last conversation. She sighed, 
 and gave him a look of tragiral appeal. "I some 
 times think lie had an enviable character." 
 
 4k Or temperament," Olney suggested. " There 
 doesn t seem to have been much question of character. 
 But he was rertainly well constituted for getting on in 
 :i world where there was no moral law if he could 
 have found such a world." 
 
 " Then you do believe there is such a law in this 
 world ? " Mrs. Meredith demanded, with an intensity 
 that did not flatter Olney he had been light to good 
 purpose. 
 
 He could not help smiling at his failure. * I would 
 rather not say till you had got a night s rest." 
 
 " No, no," she persisted. " Do you believe that any 
 one can rightfully live a lie ? Do you believe that 
 Tito was ever really at rest when he thought of what 
 he was eoncealiug? " 
 
 " He seems to have been pretty comfortable, except 
 when Romola got at him with her moral nature." 
 
 "Ah, don t laugh! " said Mrs. Meredith. It isn t 
 a thing to laugh at." 
 
 Miss Aldgate came in. with a serap of paper flutter 
 ing from her slim hand, and showing her pretty teeth 
 
22 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 in a sinile so free of all ethical question that Olney 
 swiftly conjectured an anxiety of Mrs. Meredith con 
 cerning a nature so apparently free of all personal 
 responsibility as the young girl looked at that mo 
 ment. He was aware of innocently rejoicing in this 
 sense of her, which came from the goodness and sweet 
 ness which she looked as much as the irresponsibility. 
 It might be that Mrs. Meredith had lost sleep in 
 revolving the problems of Miss Aldgate s character, 
 and the chances of her being equal to the duties that 
 had left so little of Mrs. Meredith. If such an aunt 
 and such a niece were formed to wear upon each 
 other, as the ladies say, it was clear that the niece had 
 worn the most. With this thought evanescently in 
 mind, Olney took the prescription from her. 
 
 He read it over, but he did not perceive that the 
 sense of it had failed to reach his mind till Mrs. Mere 
 dith said, " If it is one of those old-fashioned narcotics 
 he called it a sleeping draught I would rather 
 not take it." 
 
 Though Olney had not been thinking of the pre 
 scription, he now pretended that he had. " It would 
 be rather a heroic dose for a first-cabin passenger," he 
 said, " though it might do for the steerage." He took 
 out his pocket-book and wrote a prescription himself. 
 " There ! I think that ought to get you a night s rest, 
 Mrs. Meredith." 
 
 " I suppose we can get it made up ? " she said, irres 
 olutely, lifting herself a little on one elbow. 
 
 "I ll take it out and have it done myself," said 
 
AN IMPERATIVE 1>1 TV. "2:\ 
 
 Oluey. "There s au apothecary s just under the 
 hotel." 
 
 H rose, but she said: " I can t let you be at that 
 
 trouble. We cuii send. Will you " 
 
 "I will ring. Aunt Caroline," said Miss Aldgate; 
 and she ran forward to press the electric button by the 
 door. 
 
 The bell was answered by the same man who came 
 to call the doctor to Mr>. Meredith. Miss Aldgate 
 took the prescription, and rapidly explained to him 
 what *he wanted. Wln-n she had iini>hrd. ho looked 
 up from the prescription at Olney with a puzzled 
 face. 
 
 Olney smiled and Miss Aldgate laughed. The man 
 had not understood at all. 
 
 "You know the apothecary s -hop under the 
 hotel ? " Olney began. 
 
 * Yes, I know that forst-rate, sor." 
 
 Well, take that paper down and give it to the 
 apoth< can. and wait till he makes up the medicine, 
 and then bring it back to us." 
 
 " This paper, sor ? " 
 
 - Xo; the medicine." 
 
 " And lave the paper wid um ? " 
 
 " Yes. The apothecary will give you the medicine 
 and keep the prescription. Do you understand ? " 
 
 - Yes, sor." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 " Is the pot ecary alter bavin the prescription now, 
 
24 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 Olney took the paper out of his hand aiid shook it 
 at him. " This paper this is the prescription. 
 Do you understand ? " 
 
 u Yes, sor." 
 
 "Take it to the apothecary " 
 
 " The man under the hotel, sor ? " 
 
 "Yes, the one under the hotel. This prescription 
 this paper give it to him ; and he will make up a 
 medicine, and give it to you in a bottle ; and then you 
 bring it here." 
 
 " The bottle, sor ? " 
 
 " Yes, the bottle with the medicine in it." 
 
 " Ahl right, sor ! I understand, sor ! " 
 
 The man hurried away down the corridor, and Miss 
 Aldgate shut the door and broke into a laugh at sight 
 of Olney s face, red and heated with the effort he had 
 been making. 
 
 Olney laughed too. " If the matter had been much 
 simpler, I never should have got it into his head at 
 all ! " 
 
 " They seem to have no imagination ! " said the girl. 
 
 -" Or too much," suggested Olney. " There is some 
 thing very puzzling to us Teutons in the Celtic tem 
 perament. We don t know where to have an Irishman. 
 We can predicate of a brother Teuton that this will 
 please him, and that will vex him, but we can t of an 
 Irishman. You treat him with the greatest rudeness 
 and he doesn t mind it ; then you propose to be par 
 ticularly kind and nice, and he takes fire with the 
 most bewildering offence." 
 
AN IMI KK V I !\ i: 1>1 I V. 2~> 
 
 "I know it," sail I Mi> AldiMte. "That was the 
 way with all our cooks in New York. Don t you 
 remember, aunty ? " 
 
 Mrs. Meredith made no answer, and 
 
 We can t call them Mupid." Olney went on. "I 
 think that as a gem-nil thing the Irish are quicker- 
 witted than we are. They re sympathetic and poetic 
 far beyond us. But they can t understand the sim 
 plest thing from us. Perhaps they set the high con 
 structive faculties of the imagination at work, when 
 they ought to u>e a little attention and mere common- 
 sense. At any rate they seem more foreign to our 
 intelligence, our way of thinking, than the Jews or 
 the negroes even." 
 
 "Oh, I m glad to hear you say that about the 
 negroes," said Miss Aldgate. "We wen; having a 
 dispute this afternoon," she explained, "about the 
 white waiters here and the colored waiters at the 
 Hotel Vendome. I was calling on some friends \\- 
 have there," and Miss Aldgate flushed a little as she 
 said this: "or rather, they came here to see us, and 
 then I drove back with them a moment ; and it made 
 me quite homesick to come away and leave those black 
 waiters. Don t you think they re charming? With 
 those soft voices and gentle manners? My aunt has 
 no patience with me ; she can t bear to have me look 
 at them; but I never see one of them without loving 
 tln-m. I suppose it s because they re about the first 
 thing I can remember. I was born in the South, you 
 know. Perhaps I got to having a sort of fellow- 
 
26 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 feeling with them from my old black nurse. You 
 know the Italians say you do." 
 
 She turned vividly toward Gluey, as if to refer the 
 scientific point to him, but he put it by with a laugh. 
 
 " I m afraid I feel about them as Miss Aldgate 
 does, Mrs. Meredith ; and I hadn t an old black 
 nurse, either. I ve been finding them delightful, 
 wherever I ve seen them, since I got back." Miss 
 Aldgate clapped her hands. " To be sure, I haven t 
 been here long enough to get tired of them." 
 
 " Oh, I should never tire of them ! " said the girl. 
 
 " But so far, certainly, they seem to me the most 
 agreeable, the most interesting feature of the social 
 spectacle." 
 
 " There, Aunt Caroline ! " 
 
 " I must confess," Olney went on, " that it s given 
 me a distinct pleasure whenever I ve met one of 
 them. They seem to be the only people left who 
 have any heart for life here ; they all look hopeful 
 and happy, even in the rejection from their fellow- 
 men, which strikes me as one of the most preposter 
 ous, the most monstrous things in the world, now I ve 
 got back to it here." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith lay with her hand shading her eyes 
 and half her face. She asked, without taking her 
 hand away, " Would you like to meet them on terms 
 of social equality intermarry with them ? " 
 
 " Oh, now, Aunt Caroline ! " Miss Aldgate broke in. 
 " Who s talking of anything like that ? " 
 
 " I certainly am not," said Olney, " as far as the 
 
AN IMPERATIVE. WTY. 27 
 
 intermarrying is concerned. But short of that I don t 
 iee why our shouldn t associate with them. There are 
 terms a good deal short of the affection we lavish on 
 dogs and horses that I fancy they might be very glad 
 of. "We might recognize them as fellow-beings in pub 
 lic, if we don t in private ; but we ignore, if we don t 
 repulse them at every point from our business as 
 well as our bosoms. Yes, it strikes one as very odd 
 on getting home very funny, very painful. You 
 would think we might meet on common ground before 
 our common God but we don t. They have their 
 own churches, and I suppose it would be as surprising 
 to find one of them at a white communion-table as ii 
 would to find one at a white dinner-party." 
 
 Gluey said this without the least feeling about the 
 matter, except a sense of its grotesqueness. He was 
 himself an agnostic, but he could be as censorious of 
 the Christians who denied Christ in the sacrament, as 
 if he had himself been a better sort. He added : 
 
 u Possibly the negroes w r ould be welcome in a Cath 
 olic church ; the Catholics seem to have kept the ideal 
 of Christian equality in their churches. If ever they 
 turn their attention to the negroes " 
 
 " Oh, I can t imagine a colored Catholic," said Miss 
 Aldgate. " There seems something unnatural in the 
 very idea." 
 
 * All the same, there are a good many of them." 
 
 "Jn Boston?" 
 
 " No, not in Boston, I fancy." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith had taken no farther part in the con- 
 
28 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 versation ; she lay rigidly quiet on her sofa, with her 
 hand shading her eyes. 
 
 There was a knock at the door, and Miss Aldgate 
 sprang to open it, with the effect of being glad to work 
 off her exuberant activity in that or any other way : 
 with Mrs. Meredith so passive, and Olney so acquies 
 cent, the discussion of the race problem was not half 
 enough for her. 
 
 The man was there, with the bottle from the apoth 
 ecary s, and he and Miss Aldgate had a beaming little 
 interview. He exulted in getting back with the medi 
 cine all right, and she gratefully accepted his high 
 sense of his offices, and repaid him his outlay, running 
 about the room, and opening several trunks and bags 
 to find her purse, and then added something for his 
 trouble. 
 
 " Dear me ! " she said, when she got rid of him, " I 
 wish they wouldn t make it quite so clear that they 
 expected to be * remembered. They ve kept my 
 memory on the qui vive every moment I ve been in 
 the hotel." 
 
 Olney smiled in sympathy as he took the bottle from 
 her. " I ve found it impossible to forget the least 
 thing they ve done for me, and I never boasted of my 
 memory." 
 
 She stood watching his examination of the label of 
 the bottle, and his test of its contents from a touch of 
 the inner tip of the cork on his tongue. " A spoon ? 
 I ve got one here in aunty s medicine chest. It would 
 have cost its weight in silver to get one from the din- 
 
\N IMITKATIVK DUTY. 29 
 
 ing-room. And there happens to be ice-water, if you 
 have to give it in water. Don t say water without 
 ice ! " 
 
 " Ice-water will do," said Olney. He began to 
 drop the medicine from the bottle into the spoon, 
 which he then poured into the glass of water she 
 brought him. "I believe," he said, stirring it, "that 
 if the negroes ever have their turn and if the mc k 
 are to inherit the earth they must come to it we 
 shall have a civilization of such sweetness and good 
 will as the world has never known yet. Perhaps we 
 shall have to wait their turn for any real Christian 
 civilization." 
 
 "You remember the black Madonna at Florence, 
 that used to be so popular? AVhat Madonna was it? 
 I suppose they will revere her, when they get to be all 
 Catholics. Were you in any of their churches to-day? 
 You were saying " Miss Aldgate put out her hand 
 for the glass. 
 
 No ; I never was in a colored church in my life," 
 said Olney. " I m critical, not constructive, in my 
 humanity. It s easier." 
 
 He went himself with the glass to Mrs. Meredith. 
 She seemed not to have been paying any attention to 
 his talk with her niece. She lifted herself up at his 
 approach, and took the glass from him. 
 
 "Shall I drink it all?" 
 
 "Yes you can take all of it." 
 
 She quaffed it at one nervous gulp, and Hung her 
 head heavily down again. "I don t believe it will 
 make me sleep," she said. 
 
30 AX IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 Olney smiled. " Well, fortunately, this kind doesn t 
 require the co-operation of the patient. It will make 
 you sleep, I think. You may try keeping awake, if 
 you like." 
 
 She opened her eyes with a flash. " Is it chloral ? " 
 
 " No, it isn t chloral." 
 
 " Tell me the truth ! " She laid a convulsive clutch 
 upon his wrist, as he sat fronting her and curiously 
 watching her. " I will not let you justify yourself by 
 that code of yours which lets the doctor cheat his pa 
 tient! If you have been giving me some form of 
 chloral " 
 
 "I haven t been giving you any form of chloral," 
 said Olney, beginning to smile. 
 
 " Then you are trying to hypnotize me ! " 
 
 Olney burst into a laugh. " You certainly need 
 sleep, Mrs. Meredith ! I ll look in during the fore 
 noon, about the time you ought to wake, and de- 
 hypnotize you." He moved toward the door; but 
 before he reached it he stopped and said, seriously : 
 " I don t know of any code that would allow me to 
 cheat you, against your will. I don t believe any doc 
 tor is justified in doing that. Unless he has some 
 sign, some petition for deception, from the patient, 
 you can depend upon it that he finds the truth the 
 best thing." 
 
 " It s the only thing at all times in life and 
 death ! " cried Mrs. Meredith, perfervidly. " If I were 
 dying, I should wish to know it ! " 
 
 "And I shouldn t wish to know it ! " said Miss Aid- 
 
AX mi KKATIYK 1H TV. 31 
 
 -ait-. I think there are cases when the truth would 
 be cruel positively wicked ! Don t you, Dr. Gluey ? " 
 Well," said Olney, preparing to escape through 
 the door which lie had set open, " I couldn t honestly 
 >ay that I think either of us is in immediate danger. 
 Good-night ! " 
 3 
 
V. 
 
 OLNEY did not go to see Mrs. Meredith until noon, 
 the next day. lie thought that if she were worse, or 
 no better, she would send for him, and that if she did 
 not send, he might very well delay seeing her. He 
 found her alone. Miss Aldgate, she said, had gone to 
 drive with their friends at the Vendome, and was to 
 lunch with them. Olney bore her absence as politely 
 as he could, and hoped Mrs, Meredith had slept. 
 
 " Yes, I slept," she said, with a kind of suppressed 
 sigh, " but I m not sure that I m very much the better 
 for it." 
 
 " I m sure you are," said Olney, with resolute cheer 
 fulness; and he began to go through with the usual 
 touching of the pulse, and looking at the tongue, and 
 the questions that accompany this business. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith broke abruptly away from it all. 
 " It s useless for us to go on ! I ve no doubt you can 
 drug me to sleep whenever you will. But if I m to 
 wake up, when I wake, to the trouble that s on my 
 mind, the sleep will do me no good." 
 
 She looked wistfully at him, as if she longed to have 
 him ask her what the matter was ; but Olney did not 
 feel authorized to do this. He had known, almost 
 from the first moment he met Mrs. Meredith, the night 
 
AN 1MPKRATIVE DUTY. 33 
 
 before, that she had something on her mind, or be 
 lieved so, and that if she could tell him of her trouble, 
 she would probably need no medieine ; but he had to 
 proceed, as the physician often must, upon the theory 
 that only her body was out of order, and try to quiet 
 her spirit through her nerves, when the true way was 
 from the other direction. It went through his mind 
 that it might be well for the nervous specialist here 
 after to combine the functions of the priest and the 
 leech, especially in the case of nervous ladies, and con 
 fess his patients before he began to prescribe for them. 
 But he could not help feeling glad that things had 
 not come to this millennial pass ; for he did not at all 
 wish to know what Mrs. Meredith had on her mind. 
 So much impression of her character had been left 
 from their different meetings in Florence that he had 
 already theorized her as one of those women, com 
 moner amongst us than any other people, perhaps, to 
 whom life, in spite of all experience, remains a sealed 
 book, and who are always trying to unlock its myste 
 ries with the keys furnished them by fiction. They 
 judge the world by the novels they have read, and 
 their acquaintance iii the flesh by characters in stories, 
 instead of judging these by the real people they have 
 met, and more or less lived with. Such women get a 
 tone of mind that is very tiresome to every one but 
 other women like them, and that is peculiarly repul 
 sive to such men as Olney, or if not repulsive, then 
 very ridiculous. In Mrs. Meredith s case he did not 
 so much accuse her of wishing to pose as a character 
 
34 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 with a problem to work out ; there was nothing histri 
 onic about the poor woman ; but he fancied her hope 
 lessly muddled as to her plain, every-day obligations, 
 by a morbid sympathy with the duty-ridden creatures 
 of the novelist s brain. He remembered from that 
 first talk of the winter before it had been a long 
 talk, an exhaustive talk, covering many cases of con 
 science in fiction besides that of Tito Malema that 
 she had shown herself incapable of sinking the sense 
 of obligation in the sense of responsibility, and that 
 she apparently conceived of what she called living up 
 to the truth as something that might be done singly ; 
 that right affected her as a body of positive color, 
 sharply distinguished from wrong, and not shading 
 into and out of it by gradations of tint, as we find it 
 doing in reality. Such a woman, he had vaguely re 
 flected, when he came to sum up his impressions, would 
 be capable of an atrocious cruelty in speaking or act 
 ing the truth, and would consider herself an exemplary 
 person for having done her duty at any cost of suffer 
 ing to herself and others. But she w r ould exaggerate 
 as well as idealize, and he tried to find comfort now in 
 thinking that what she had on her mind was very 
 likely a thing of bulk out of all proportion to its 
 weight. Very likely it was something with reference 
 to her niece ; some waywardness of affection or am 
 bition in the girl. She might be wanting to study 
 medicine, or law, or divinity ; perhaps she wanted to 
 go on the stage. More probably, it was a question of 
 whom she should marry, and Mrs. Meredith was 
 
AN IMl l.U A I I\ i: 1UTY. 35 
 
 wrestling with the problem of how far in this age of 
 intense individuali/ation a girl s inclinations might be 
 forced for her good, and how fur let go for her evil. 
 Such a problem would be quite enough to destroy Mrs. 
 Meredith s peace, if that was what she had on her 
 mind ; and ( Hnev could not help relating his conjec 
 ture to these people at the Vendome, whom Miss Aid- 
 gate had gone to drive with and lunch with to-day, 
 at ter having been to drive with them yesterday. Those 
 people in turn lie related to the young clergyman she 
 had spent the evening in talking with in Florence, 
 when he was himself only partially engaged in explor 
 ing her aunt s conscience , lie wondered whether Mr>. 
 Meredith favored or opposed the young clergyman, 
 and what was just the form of the trouble that was on 
 her mind, but still without the intention to inquire it 
 out. 
 
 Well, perhaps," he suggested, half jocosely, "the 
 trouble will disappear when you ve had sleep enough." 
 
 "You know very well/ she answered, "that it 
 u,,n t that what you say is simply impossible. 1 
 remember some things you said that night when \\ 
 talked so long together, and I know that you are in 
 clined to confound the moral and the physical, as all 
 doctors are." 
 
 Olney would have liked to say, t% I wish, my dear 
 lady, you wouldn t confound the >am- and insane in 
 the way you do." But he silently submitted, and let 
 her go on. 
 
 "That made me di.>like you ; but 1 can t say it made 
 
36 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 me distrust you. I think that if you had been an un 
 truthful person you would have concealed your point 
 of view from me." 
 
 Olney could not say he might not have thought it 
 worth while to do that. On the contrary, he had a 
 sort of compassion for the lofty superiority of a woman 
 who so obviously felt her dependence upon him, and 
 was arming herself in all her pride for her abasement 
 before him. He knew that she was longing to tell 
 him what was on her mind, and would probably not 
 end till she had done it. lie did not feel that he had 
 the right to prevent her doing that, and he smiled pas 
 sively in saying, " I couldn t advise you to trust me too 
 far." 
 
 u I must trust some one too far," she said, u and I 
 have literally no one but you." The tears came into 
 her eyes, and Olney, who knew very well how easily 
 the tears come into women s eyes, was broken up by 
 the sight. 
 
 " My dear Mrs. Meredith, I should be very glad to 
 be trusted even too far, if I could really be of use to 
 you." 
 
 "Oh, I don t know that you can," she said. After 
 a pause she added, abruptly, " Do you believe in 
 heredity ? " 
 
 Olney felt inclined to laugh. " Well, that s rather 
 a spacious question, Mrs. Meredith. What do you 
 mean by heredity ? " 
 
 " You know ! The persistence of ancestral traits ; 
 the transmission of character and tendency ; the 
 
AN IMl I.U.VTIVl. IMTY. 37 
 
 reappearance of -types after several generations ; 
 tin- " 
 
 She stopped, anil Olney knew that he had got at 
 the body of her anxiety, though she had not yet re 
 vealed its \vry features. He determined to deal with 
 the matter a- reassuringly as he could in the dark. He 
 smiled in answering, ; Heredity is a good deal like 
 the germ theory. There s a large amount of truth in 
 it, no doubt; but it s truth in a state of solution, and 
 nobody knows just how much of it there is. Perhaps 
 we shall never know. As for those cases of atavism 
 for I suppose that s what you mean " 
 
 "Yes, yes! Atavism? That is the word." 
 
 They re not so very common, and they re not so 
 very well ascertained. You find them mentioned in 
 the books, but vaguely, and on a kind of hearsay, with 
 out the names of persons and places ; it s a notion that 
 some writers rather like to toy with ; but when you 
 come to boil it down, as the newspapers say, there 
 isn t a great deal of absolute fact there. Take the re- 
 version to the inferior race type in the child of parents 
 of mixed blood sav a white with a mulatto or quad 
 roon " 
 
 " Yes ! " said Mrs. Meredith, with eagerness. 
 
 " Why, it s very effective as a bit of drama. But it 
 must be very rare very rare indeed. You hear of 
 instances in which the parent of mixed race could not 
 be known from a white person, and yet the child re 
 vert- to the iK-iM-o type in color and feature and char- 
 ueter. 1 should doubt it very much." 
 
88 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith cried out as if he had questioned holy 
 writ. " You should doubt it ! Why should you doubt 
 it, Dr. Olney ? " Yet he perceived that for some 
 reason she wished him to reaffirm his doubt. 
 
 " Because the chances are so enormously against it. 
 The natural tendency is all the other way, to the per 
 manent effacement of the inferior type. The child of 
 a white and an octoroon is a sixteenth blood ; and the 
 child of that child and a white is a thirty-second blood. 
 The chances of atavism, or reversion to the black great- 
 great-great-grandfather are so remote that they may be 
 said hardly to exist at all. They are outside of the 
 probabilities, and only on the verge of the possibilities. 
 But it s so thrilling to consider such a possibility that 
 people like to consider it. Fancy is as much commit 
 ted to it as prejudice is ; but it hasn t so much excuse, 
 for prejudice is mostly ignorant, and fancy mostly edu 
 cated, or half-educated." Olney folded one leg com 
 fortably across the other, and went on, with a musing 
 smile. " I ve been thinking about all this a good deal 
 within the past two days or since I got back to Bos 
 ton. I ve been more and more struck with the fact 
 that sooner or later our race must absorb the colored 
 race ; and I believe that it will obliterate not only its 
 color, but its qualities. The tame man, the civilized 
 man, is stronger than the wild man ; and I believe that 
 in those cases within any one race where there are 
 very strong ancestral proclivities on one side espe 
 cially toward evil, they will die out before the good 
 tendencies 011 the other side, for much the same 
 
AN iMi-i i; A i ivi: HTTY. 39 
 
 reason, iliat is, because vice is savage :ui<l virtue is 
 civilized." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith listened intently, but at last, u I wish 
 I could believe what you say," she sighed, heavily. 
 " lint I don t know that that would relieve me of the 
 duty before me," >he added, after a moment s thought. 
 " Dr. Olney, there is something that I need very inueli 
 to speak about something that must be done that 
 my health dejieiids upon I shall never get well un 
 less" 
 
 " If there is anything you wish to say concerning 
 your health, Mrs. Meredith," he answered, seriously, 
 it s of course my duty to hear it. 
 
 lie sat prepared to listen, but she apparently did not 
 know how to begin, and after several gasps she was 
 silent. Then, No, I can t tell you! " she broke out. 
 
 He rose. "Are you to be some time in Boston?" 
 he asked, to relieve the embarrassment of the situa 
 tion. 
 
 1 don t know. Y->. 1 >uppose a week or two." 
 
 I f I can be of use to you in any way, I shall be 
 glad to have you send for me." 
 
 lie turned to the door, but as he put his hand on 
 the knob she called out : " No ! Don t go ! Sit down! 
 I must speak ! You remember," she hurried on, be 
 fore he could resume his chair, "a voting gentleman 
 who talked with my niece that night at Professor 
 Garofalo s a Mr. Bloomingdale ? " 
 
 " The young minister : " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
40 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " I remember him very well, though I don t think ? 
 spoke with him." 
 
 Olney stared at Mrs Meredith, wondering what this 
 Rev. Mr. Bloomingdale had to do with the matter- 
 whatever the matter might be. 
 
 " It is his mother and sisters that my niece is lunch 
 ing with," she said, with an air of explaining. " lie 
 is expected on the next steamer, and then then I 
 must speak ! It can t go on, so. There must be a 
 clear and perfect understanding. Dr. Olney," she 
 continued, with a glance at his face, which he felt 
 growing more and more bewildered under the influence 
 of her words, " Mr. Bloomingdale is very much at 
 tached to my niece. He he has offered himself ; he 
 offered himself in Liverpool ; and I insisted that 
 Rlioda should not give him a decisive answer then 
 that she should take time to think it over. I wished 
 to gain time myself." 
 
 " Yes," said Olney, because she seemed to expect 
 him to say something. 
 
 "I wished to gain time and I wished to gain 
 strength, but I have lost botli ; and the affair has 
 grown more difficult and complicated. Mr. Blooming- 
 dale s family are very fond of Rhoda ; they are aware 
 of his attachment they were in Florence at the 
 time you were, and they came home without him a few 
 months ago, because lie wished to stay on in the hope 
 of winning her and they are showing her every at 
 tention ; and she does not see how her being with 
 them complicates everything. Of course they flatter 
 
AN IMl KUATIVE DUTY. 41 
 
 her, and she s very headstrong, like; all young girls, 
 and I m afraid >he s committing herself " 
 
 "Do they live at the Vendoinr : " Olney asked, 
 with a certain distaste for them, and he was conscious 
 of resenting their attentions to Miss Aldgate as push 
 ing and vulgar under the circumstances, though he had 
 no right to do so. 
 
 No. They are just waiting there for him. They 
 ire Ni-w York State people the western part. They 
 are very rich ; the mother is a widow, and they are 
 going to live in Ohio, where Mr. Bloomingdale. has a 
 call. They are kind, good people very kind : and 
 I feel that Rhoda is abusing their kindness by being 
 so much with them before she has positively accepted 
 him; and I can t let her do that until everything is 
 known. She refund him when he offered himself 
 first in Florence I ve always thought she had some 
 other fancy but at Liverpool, where he renewed his 
 offer just before we sailed, she was inclined to accept 
 him; I suppose her fanev had passed. As I sav, I 
 in-i-ted that she should take at h-a-t a we.-k to con 
 sider it, and that he should change his passage from 
 our steamer to the next. I had no idea of find ing 
 his family in Boston, but perhaps in the confusion he 
 forgot to tell us. They found our names in the pas- 
 sengt-r li>t, and they came to see us directly an. -r 
 lunch, yesterday. If the match is broken off now, 
 after " 
 
 Mrs. Meredith stopped in a sort of despair, which 
 Olney shared with her as far as concerned the blind 
 
42 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 alley in which he found himself. He had not the 
 least notion of the way out, and he could only wait 
 her motion. 
 
 " I don t see," she resumed, " how my niece can 
 help accepting him if she goes on at this rate with his 
 family, and I don t know how to stop her without 
 telling her the worst at once. I m afraid she has got 
 her heart set on him." Mrs. Meredith paused again, 
 and then went on. " I have shrunk from speaking 
 because I know that the poor young man s happiness, 
 as well as Rhoda s, is involved, and the peace and self- 
 respect of his family. There have been times when I 
 have almost felt that if there were no danger of t he 
 facts ever coming to light, I could make up my mind to 
 die, as I have lived, in a lie. But now I know I can 
 not ; it is my duty to speak out ; and the marriage 
 must not take place unless everything is known. It 
 will kill her. But it must be done ! Those ancestral 
 traits, those tendencies, may die out, but I can t let 
 any one take the risk of their recurrence unknowingly. 
 He must know who and what she is as fully as I do : 
 her origin, her " 
 
 Olney believed that he began to understand. There 
 was some stain upon that poor child s birth. She was 
 probably not related to Mrs. Meredith at all ; she was 
 a foundling ; or she was the daughter of some man or 
 woman whose vices or crimes might find her out with 
 their shame if not their propensity some day. What 
 ever sinister tendency she was heiress to, or whatever 
 ancestral infamy, it could only be matter of conjecture, 
 
AN IMri.KATIVK IM IV. 1 "> 
 
 not inquiry, with Olin-y: l>ut he imagined the worst 
 from hints tliat Mrs. Meredith had thrown out, and 
 attributed litTtoa family of criminals, such as has here 
 and tlicrc found its way into the iiguros of the stati>- 
 ticians. lie was not shocked; he was interested by 
 the fact ; and he did not find Miss Aldgatr at all less 
 charming and beautiful in the conclusion he jumped to 
 than he had found her before. lie said to himself 
 that if the case were his, as it was that young minis 
 ter s, there could be no question in it, except the ques 
 tion of her willingness to marry him. He said this 
 from the safe vantage of the disinterested witness, 
 and with the easy decision of one who need not act 
 upon his decision. 
 
VI. 
 
 IN liis instantaneous mental processes, Olney kept 
 his attention fixed upon Mrs. Meredith, and he was 
 aware of her gasping out : 
 
 " My nrece is of negro descent." 
 
 Olney recoiled from the words, in a turmoil of emo 
 tion for which there is no term but disgust. His dis 
 gust was profound and pervasive, and it did not fail, 
 first of all, to involve the poor child herself. He found 
 himself personally disliking the notion of her having 
 negro blood in her veins ; before he felt pity he felt 
 repulsion ; his own race instinct expressed itself in a 
 merciless rejection of her beauty, her innocence, her 
 helplessness because of her race. The impulse had to 
 have its course; and then he mastered it, with an 
 abiding compassion, and a sort of tender indigna 
 tion. He felt that it was atrocious for this old woman 
 to have allowed her hypochondriacal anxiety to dabble 
 with the mysteries of the young girl s future in that 
 way, and he resented having been trapped into consid 
 ering her detestable question. His feeling was unsci 
 entific ; but he could not at once detach himself from 
 the purely social relation which he had hitherto held 
 toward Miss Aldgate. The professional view which 
 he was invited to take seemed to have lost all dignity, 
 
AN IMI KRATIYK 1HTY. !"> 
 
 to be impertinent, cruel, squalid, ami to involve the 
 abdication of certain sentiments, conventions, which he 
 was unwilling to part with, at least in her case. 
 Sensibilities which ought not to have survived his 
 scientific training and ambition were wounded to re 
 bellion in him ; he perceived as never before that 
 then- was an inherent outrage in the submission of 
 such questions to one of the opposite sex ; there should 
 be women to deal with them. 
 
 " How negro descent ? " he asked, stupidly, from 
 the whirl of these thoughts. 
 
 " I will try to tell you," said Mrs. Meredith. " And 
 some things you said about that race those 
 w ret died beings, last night You were sincere in 
 what you said ? " she demanded of the kind of change 
 that came into his face. 
 
 "Sincere? Yes," said Olney, thinking how far 
 from any concrete significance he had supposed his 
 words to have for his listeners when he spoke them. 
 He added, " I do abhor the cruel stupidity that makes 
 any race treat another as outcast. But I never 
 dreamed " 
 
 Mrs. Meredith broke in upon him, saying : 
 
 " It is almost the only consolation I have in think 
 ing she is rightfully and lawfully my niece, to know 
 that in the course I must take now, I shall not be 
 seeming to make her an outcast. I honored my 
 brother for honoring her mother, and giving her his 
 name when there was no need of his doing it He did 
 not consult me, and I did not know it till afterward ; 
 
46 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 but I should have been the first to urge it, when it 
 came to a question of marriage or anything else. 
 For one of our family there could be no such question ; 
 there was none for him. 
 
 " He went South shortly after the war, as so many 
 Northern men did, intending to make his home there ; 
 his health was delicate, and his only hope of strength 
 and usefulness, if not of life, was in a milder climate. 
 He outlived the distrust that the Southerners had for 
 all Northern men in those days, and was establishing 
 himself in a very good practice at New Orleans 1 
 forgot to say he was a physician when he met 
 Rhoda s mother. I needn t go over the details ; she 
 was an octoroon, the daughter and the granddaughter 
 of women who had never hoped for marriage with the 
 white men who fell in love with them ; but she had 
 been educated by her father he was a Creole, and 
 she was educated in a Northern convent and I 
 have no doubt she was an accomplished and beautiful 
 girl. I never saw her. My brother met her in her 
 father s house, almost beside her father s death-bed ; 
 but even if he had met her in her mother s house, on 
 her mother s level, it would not have been possible 
 for him to do otherwise than as he did. He thought 
 at first of keeping the marriage secret, and of going on 
 as before, until he could afford to own it and take all 
 the consequences ; but he decided against this, and I 
 was always glad that he did. They were married, 
 after her father s death ; and then my brother s ruin 
 began. He lost his practice in the families where he 
 
AN IMTT.i; \ I I\ I IM TT. 47 
 
 had -ni a footing, among the well-to-do and respectable 
 I>e<>j>le whom IK- liad made his t riends ; and though he 
 would have been willing to go on among a poorer 
 da-s who could pay less, it was useless. lie had to 
 go away ; and for five or six years he drifted about 
 from one plan- to another, trying to gain a hold here 
 and there, and failing everywhere. Sooner or later 
 lii> Mory followed him. 
 
 "I don t Maine the Southern people; I m not sure 
 it would have been better in the North. If it had 
 been known who his wife was, she would not have 
 been received socially here any more than she w.t^ 
 there ; and I doubt if it would not have affected my 
 brother s professional standing in much the same way. 
 People don t like to think there is anything strange 
 about their doctor ; they must make a confidant, they 
 must make a familiar of him ; and if there is anything 
 peculiar, unusual My husband was a very good 
 man, one of the best men who ever lived, and he ap 
 proved of my brother s marriage in the abstract as 
 much as I did ; but even he never liked to think whom 
 he had married. He was always afraid it w r ould come 
 out among our friends, somehow, and it would be 
 known that his sister-in-law was 
 
 At last the poor young creature died, and my 
 brother came North with his little girl. "We hoped 
 that then he might begin again, and make a new start 
 in life. But it was too late. He was a mere wreck 
 physically, and he died too within the year. And 
 then it became a question what we should do with the 
 
48 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 child. As long as she was so merely a child, it was 
 comparatively simple. We had no children of our 
 own, and when my brother died in another part of the 
 State we were living in New York then, and he had 
 gone up into the Adirondack region in the hope of 
 getting better it was natural that we should take 
 the little one home. In a place like New York, noth 
 ing is known unless you make it known, and Rhoda 
 was brought up in our house, without any conjecture 
 or curiosity from people outside ; she was my brother s 
 orphan, and nobody knew or cared who my brother 
 was ; she had teachers and she had schools like any 
 other child, and she had the companionships and the 
 social advantages which our own station and money 
 could command. 
 
 " At first my husband and I thought of letting her 
 think herself our child ; but that would have involved 
 a deceit which we were unwilling to practise ; besides, 
 it was not necessary, and it would have been great 
 pain for her afterwards. We decided to tell her the 
 truth when the time came, and never anything but 
 the truth, at any time. We never deceived her, but 
 we let her deceive herself. When she came to the 
 age when children begin to ask about themselves, we 
 told her that her father had married in the South, and 
 that her mother, whom she did not remember, was of 
 French descent ; but we did not know of her family. 
 This was all true ; but still it was not the truth ; we 
 knew that well enough, but we promised ourselves that 
 when the time came we would tell her the truth. 
 
AN IM1T.KATIVK DUTY. 49 
 
 "She made up little romances about her mother, 
 which she- came to believe in as facts, with our suffer 
 ance. I should now call it our connivance." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith appealed to Olney with a glance, 
 and he said, in the first sympathy he had felt for her, 
 "It was a ditlicult position." 
 
 "She easily satisfied herself it s astonishing how 
 little curiosity children have about all the mystery of 
 their coming here and as she had instinctively in 
 ferred something strange or unusual about her 
 mother s family, she decided that she had married 
 against her grandfather s wishes. We left her that 
 illusion, too; it seemed so easy to leave things then! 
 It wa> when she ceased to be a child, and we realized 
 more and more how her life might any time involve 
 some other life, that the question became a constant 
 pressure upon us. Neither my husband or myself ever 
 justified the concealment we lived in concerning her. 
 We often talked of it, and how it must come to an end. 
 IJut we were very much attached to her, and we put 
 off thinking definitely about the duty before us as long 
 as we could. Sometimes it seemed to us that we 
 ought to tell the child just who and what she was, but 
 we IK -ver had the courage; she does not know to this 
 day. What do you think our duty to her really 
 was ? " 
 
 "Your duty?" Qlney echoed, vaguely. A little 
 while ago he would have answered instantly that they 
 had no duty but to keep her in ignorance as lon_ 
 she lived ; but now he could not honestly do this. 
 
50 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 The only thing that he could honestly do was to say, 
 " I don t know," and this was what he said. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith resumed : " My husband had gone 
 out of business, and there was nothing to keep us at 
 home. But we had nothing definitely in view when 
 we went abroad, or at least nothing explicitly in view. 
 We said that we were going abroad for Rhoda s edu 
 cation ; but I think that in my husband s heart, as 
 well as in mine, there was the hope that something 
 might happen to solve the difficulty ; we had no plan 
 for solving it. I thought, at any rate, if he did not, 
 that in Europe there would be less unhappiness in 
 store for her than here. I knew that in Europe, 
 especially on the Continent, there was little or none 
 of that race prejudice which we have, and I thought 
 I imagined I should find it easier to tell Rhoda 
 the truth, if I could tell her at the same time that it 
 made no difference to the man she was to marry." 
 
 Olney understood ; and he was rather restive under 
 Mrs. Meredith s apparent helplessness to leave any 
 thing to his imagination. 
 
 " I hoped it might be some Italian from the first 
 I liked the Italians the best. We lived a great deal 
 in Italy, at Rome and Naples, at Florence, at Venice, 
 even at Milan ; and everywhere we tried to avoid 
 Americans. We went into Italian society almost en 
 tirely. 
 
 " But it seemed a perfect fatality. Rhoda was 
 always homesick for America, and always eager to 
 meet Americans. She refused all the offers that were 
 
AN i.Mi i.KAi i\ i: 1-1 n. 51 
 
 made for her and they begun to come, even before 
 Bhe was fairly in >ociety ami declared that >he would 
 never marry any one but an American. She was al 
 ways proclaiming her patriotism, anl averting the 
 superiority of America over every other country in a 
 way that would ha\r made anybody but a very pretty 
 uirl offensive. Tin- perplexities simply grew upon us, 
 and in the mid.-t of them my hu-bund died, and then I 
 h id no one to advise with or confide in. When his 
 alVairs were settled up, it turned out that we were 
 much poorer than w- had believed. For a while I 
 thought that I should return home, and lihoda was 
 always eager to conn; back, but we staid on at Flor 
 ence,* living very quietly, and we had scarcely been 
 out at all for a year, when you lir-t met us at Profes 
 sor Garofalo s. It was there that >he met Mr. Bloom- 
 ingdale, and he was so attentive to her. I could 
 see at once that he was -ready taken with her, and he 
 followed up the acquaintance in a way that could not 
 leave me any doubt. It was certainly not her money 
 that attracted him. 
 
 "I liked him from the beginning: and his being a 
 minister gave me a kind of hope. I can hardly tell 
 why. But I thought that if it ever came to my hav- 
 in u t.) tell him about Khoda, he would be more, reason 
 able. He was so very amiable, very gentle, very 
 kind. Did you ever meet him afterward, any \\hei 
 
 M Xo," said Gluey, briefly. 
 
 "I am sorry; I hoped you had; I thought you 
 might have come to know him well enough to sug- 
 
52 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 gest I don t like his family, what I ve seen of 
 them, so well. If they know at all what is pending 
 between him and Rhoda, it doesn t seem very nice of 
 them to be pursuing her so." 
 
 " Mrs. Meredith sat so dreary in her silence that 
 Olney pitied her, and found a husky voice to say," 
 " Perhaps they don t know." 
 
 " Perhaps not," she assented, sadly. " But my only 
 hope now is in his being able to take it, when I tell 
 him, as I have hardly the hope that any other Ameri 
 can would. I must tell him, if she accepts him, or 
 decides to accept him, and the question is whether I 
 shall tell him before I tell her. If I tell him first, 
 fully and frankly, perhaps perhaps he may choose 
 to keep it from her and she need never know. What 
 what do you think ? " she entreated. 
 
 " Really," said Olney, " that s a matter I have no 
 sort of opinion about. I m very sorry, but you must 
 excuse me." 
 
 " But you feel that I must tell him ? " 
 
 u That s another question for you, Mrs. Meredith. 
 I can t answer it." 
 
 She threw herself back on the sofa. "I wish I 
 were dead ! I see no way out of it ; and whatever 
 happens, it will kill the child." 
 
 Olney sat silent for some time in a muse almost as 
 dreary as her own. After having despised her as a 
 morbid sentimentalist with a hypochondriacal con 
 science, he had come to respect her, as we respect any 
 fellow-creature on whom a heavy duty is laid, and 
 
AN IMTKUATIYK MTV. 53 
 
 who is struggling faithfully to stand up under the 
 burden. II- uud suddenly, "You mustn t tell him 
 first, Mrs. Meredith ! " 
 
 Why?" 
 
 r, cau-r because the secret is hers, to keep it 
 or to tell it. No one else h:is the right to know it 
 without her leave." 
 
 And if if she should choose to keep it from him 
 not tell him at all?" 
 
 " I couldn t blame her. It s no fault, no wrong of 
 hers. And who is to be harmed by its concealment? " 
 
 "But the chances the future the the " 
 
 Olney could not bear the recurrence to this phase 
 of the subject. He made a gesture of impatience. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith added, with hysterical haste: "It 
 might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in 
 her voice at times it s a Hack voice ! I can see it 
 in her looks ! I can feel it in her character so easy, 
 so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant! 
 She could not deny herself the amusement of going 
 with those people to-day, though I said all I could 
 against it. She cannot forecast consequences ; she s a 
 creature of the present hour; she s like them all! 
 I think that in some occult, dreadful way she feels 
 her ailinity with them, and that s the reason why she s 
 so attracted by them, so fond of them. It s her 
 race calling her ! I don t believe she would ever tell 
 him! 
 
 "I think you ought to leave it to her," said Olney. 
 
 "And let her live a lie! Oh, I know too well 
 what that is \ " 
 
54 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 "It s bad. But there may be worse things. It 
 seems as if there might be circumstances in which it 
 was one s right to live a lie, as you say ; for the 
 sake " 
 
 " Never ! " said Mrs. Meredith vehemently. " It 
 is better to die to kill than to lie. I know how 
 people say such things and act them, till life is all one 
 web of falsehood, from the rising to the going down of 
 the sun. But I will never consent to be a party to 
 any such deceit. I will tell Rhoda, and then she 
 shall tell me what she is going to do, and if she is not 
 going to tell him, /will do it. Yes! I will not be 
 responsible for the future, and I should be responsible 
 if he did not know. In such a case I could not spare 
 her. She is my own flesh and blood ; she is as dear 
 to me as my own child could be ; but if she were my 
 own child it would be all the same. I would rather 
 see her perish before my eyes than married to any man 
 who did not know the secret of her O-o-o-o-o ! " 
 Mrs. Meredith gave a loud, shuddering cry, as the 
 door was flung suddenly open, and Miss Aldgate 
 flashed radiantly into the room. 
 
 She kept the door-knob in her hand, while she de 
 manded, half frightened, half amused, " What in the 
 world is the matter ? Did I startle you ? Of course ! 
 But I just ran in a moment as we were driving by 
 we re going over to do our duty by Bunker Hill Mon 
 ument to see how you were getting on. I m so glad 
 you are here, Dr. Olney." She released the door 
 knob, and gave him her hand. "Now I can leave 
 
AN I.M1M.K A I 1 \ ! HI 11. . )." 
 
 Aunt Caroline without a qualm of conscience till after 
 lunch ; and I did have a qualm or two, poor aunty! " 
 
 She >toojied on one knee Inside the sofa, and kissed 
 her aunt, who seemed to Olney no better than a mur 
 deress in the embrace of her intended victim. In this 
 light and joyous presence, all that he had heard of the 
 girl s anomalous origin l>eeani - not only incredible, luit 
 atrocious. She was purely and merely a young lady, 
 like any other ; and he felt himself getting red with 
 >hame for having heard what he had been told against 
 his will. 
 
 He could not speak, and he marvelled that Mrs, 
 Meredith could command the words to sav, in quite an 
 every-day voice: "You silly child! You needn t 
 have stopped. I was getting on perfectly well." 
 
 " Of course you were ! And I suppose I have in 
 terrupted you in the full flow of symptoms ! I can 
 imagine what a perfectly delightful time you were 
 having with Dr. Olney ! I think I ll change these 
 gloves." She ran into the room that opened from 
 Mrs. Meredith s parlor, and left him unable to lift his 
 eyes from the floor in her brief absence. She came 
 back pulling on one long mousquetaire glove, while 
 the other dangled from her fingers, and began to 
 laugh. " There s one of those colored waiters down 
 there that even you couldn t have anything to say 
 against my falling in love with, Aunt Caroline. He s 
 about four feet high, and his feet are about eighteen 
 inches long, so that he looks just like a capital L. He 
 doesn t lift them when he walks, but he slips along on 
 
56 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. > 
 
 them over the floor like a funny little mouse ; I ve 
 decided to call him Creepy-Mousy ; it just exactly de 
 scribes him, he s so small and cunning. And he s so 
 sweet ! I should like to own him, and keep him as 
 long as he lived. Isn t it a shame that we can t buy 
 them, Dr. Olney, as we used to do ? There ! _I H put 
 on the other one in the carriage." 
 
 She swooped upon her aunt for another kiss, and 
 then flashed out of the room as she had flashed into it, 
 and left Mrs. Meredith and Oluey staring at each 
 other. 
 
 " Well ! " she said. " You see ! It is the race in 
 stinct ! It must assert itself sooner or later." 
 
 Olney became suddenly sardonic in the sort of des 
 peration he fell into. " I should say it was the other- 
 race instinct that was asserting itself sooner ; " and 
 when he had said this he felt somehow a hope, which 
 he tried to impart to Mrs. Meredith. 
 
 At the end of all their talk she said : " But that 
 doesn t relieve me of the duty I owe to her and to 
 him. I must tell her, at least, cost what it may. I 
 cannot live this lie any longer. If she chooses to do 
 so, perhaps " 
 
VII. 
 
 Miss ALDGATE came in late in the afternoon. She 
 came in softly, and then, finding her aunt awake, she 
 let herself fall into an easy-chair with the- air of utter 
 exhaustion that girls like to put on. after getting home 
 from a social pleasure, and sighed out a long "O-o-o-h, 
 dear I " 
 
 Her aunt let her sit silent and stare awhile at the 
 carpet just beyond the toe of her pretty boot before 
 she suggested. M Well?" 
 
 " Oh, nothing ! Only it got to be rather tiresome, 
 toward the last." 
 
 " Why did you stay so long? " 
 
 u I couldn t get away ; they wouldn t let me go. 
 They kept proposing this and that, and then they 
 wantt-d to arrange something for to-morrow. But I 
 wouldn t." 
 
 They are rather persistent," said Mrs. Meredith. 
 
 "Yes, they are persistent. But they are very kind 
 they are very good-natured. I wish I wish I 
 liked them better ! " 
 
 " Don t you like them ? " 
 
 "Oh, I like them, yes, in a kind of way. They rf 
 a very familyish sort of a family ; they re so muck 
 bound up in one another. Of course they can do a 
 
58 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 great many nice things : Miss Bloomingdale rs really 
 wonderful with her music; and Josie sketches very 
 nicely ; and Roberta sings beautifully, there s no 
 denying it ; but they don t talk very much, and they re 
 all so tall and handsome and blond ; and they sit 
 round with their hands arranged in their laps, and 
 keep waiting for me to say things ; and then their 
 mother starts them up and makes them do something. 
 The worst is she keeps dragging in Mr. Bloomingdale 
 all the time. There isn t anything that doesn t sug 
 gest him what he thinks, what he says, where he s 
 been and what he did there; just how far he s got on 
 his way home by this time ; how he s never seasick, 
 but he doesn t like rough weather. I began to dread 
 the introduction of a new subject : it was so sure to 
 bring round to him. Don t you think they re of rather 
 an old-fashioned taste ? " 
 
 "I never liked this family very much," said Mrs. 
 Meredith. " They seemed very estimable people, but 
 not " 
 
 " Our kind ? No, decidedly. Did Dr. Olney stay 
 long?" 
 
 " No. Why do you ask ? " Mrs. Meredith returned, 
 with a startled look. 
 
 " Oh, nothing. You seemed to be quite chummy 
 with him, and not to want me round a great deal when 
 I came in." Miss Aldgate had discovered the toe of 
 her boot just beyond her skirt, apparently with some 
 surprise, and she leaned forward to touch it with the 
 point of her parasol, as if to make sure of it. " Is he 
 
\\ M;IM i: VTIVK THTY. 59 
 
 comini: Mirain thi- evening? " she a>ked, leaning back 
 in ln-r chair, ami twi-ting her parasol by its handle. 
 
 Not unlr>s I send for him. 1 have his .-leeping 
 
 medicine." 
 
 Yes. And I know how to drop it. Did he think 
 it strange my being away from YOU so much when - ou 
 needed a doctor ? " 
 
 He knew 1 didn t need .-my doctor. Why do you 
 a-k Mich a question as that : " 
 
 1 don t know. I thought it might have struck 
 him. But I thought I had better try and see if I could 
 M used to them or not. They re pretty formal peo- 
 
 pl ( conventional. I mean in the way of dress and 
 
 that kind of thing. They re formal in their ideals, don t 
 you know. They would want to do just what they 
 thought other people were doing; they would be 
 dreadfully troubled if there was anything about them 
 that was not just like everybody else. Do you think 
 Mr. Bloomingdale would be so?" 
 
 I never liked his family very much." Mrs. Mere 
 dith repeated. AVhat little I saw of them." >he 
 added, as if conscientiously. 
 
 Oh. that doesn t count, Aunt Caroline ! " said the 
 girl, with a laugh. " You never liked the families of 
 any of the Americans that you thought t am-i.-d me. 
 But the question is not whether we like his family, but 
 whether he s like them." 
 
 "You can t separate him from his family, Rhoda. 
 You must remember that. Each of us is bound by a 
 thousand mysterious ties to our kindred, our ancestors ; 
 we can t get away from them - " 
 
60 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " Oh, what stuff, aunty ! " Miss Aldgate was still 
 greatly amused. " I should like to know how I m 
 bound to my mother s family, that I never saw one of ; 
 or to her father or grandfather ? " 
 
 " How ? " Mrs. Meredith gasped. 
 
 " Yes. Or how much they were bound to me, if 
 they never tried to find me out or make themselves 
 known by any sort of sign ? I m bound to you be 
 cause we ve always been together, and I was bound to 
 Uncle Meredith because he was good to me. But 
 there isn t anything mysterious about it. And Mr. 
 Bloomingdale is bound to his family in the same way. 
 He s fond of them because he s been nice to them and 
 they ve been nice to him. I wonder," she mused, 
 while Mrs. Meredith felt herself slowly recoil from 
 the point which she had been suddenly caught up to, 
 " whether I really care for him or not ? There were 
 very nice things about him ; and no, he was not tire 
 some and formal-minded like them. I wish I had 
 been a little in love with some one, and then I could 
 tell. But I ve never had anything but decided dislik- 
 ings, though I didn t dislike him decidedly. No, I 
 rather liked him. That is, I thought he was good. 
 Yes, I respected his goodness. It s about the only 
 thing in this world you can respect. But now, I re 
 member, he seemed very young, and all the younger 
 because he thought it was his duty as a minister to 
 seem old. Did you care very much for his sermon ? " 
 
 Rhoda came to the end of her thinking aloud with 
 a question that she had to repeat before her aunt asked 
 drearily in answer, " What sermon ? " 
 
AN IMIT.KA1 IVI. DUTY. 0)1 
 
 Wh\. \\ imlv heard linn oner! The one hv 
 in Florence. I didn t have a full sense of 
 his youth till I heard that. Isn t it strain:.- that there 
 arc ever young ministers? I suppose people think 
 they can make up in inspiration what they lack in ex 
 perience. But that day when I looked round at tlio-r 
 men and women, some of them gray-haired, and mo>t 
 of them middle-aged, and all of them knowing so mucli 
 more about life, and its trials and temptations, and 
 troubles and sorrows, than poor Mr. Bloomingdale 
 I oughtn t to call him poor and heard him going on 
 ahout the birds and the flowers, I womb-red how they 
 could bear it. Of course it was all right ; I know 
 that. But if the preaeher shouldn t happen to be in 
 spired, wouldn t it be awful? How old do yui >up- 
 pose Dr. Gluey Is?* 1 
 
 " I don t know." 
 
 " lie seems rather bald. Do you think he is 
 forty?" 
 
 "Dear me, no, child ! He isn t thirty yet, I dare 
 My. Some men are bald much earlier than other>. 
 lt > a matter of heredity." 
 
 Heredity ! Everything s heredity with yon. Aunt 
 Caroline!" the girl laughed. "I ll bet he s worn it 
 off by thinking too much m one partieular spot. You 
 know that they say now they can tell just what place 
 hi the brain a person thinks this or that ; and just 
 where the will-power comes from wh-n \ou wink your 
 eye, or wiggle your little linger. I wonder if Dr. 
 Gluey knows all those thin;:-? Have you tried him 
 on your favorite hTi-dity yt ? " 
 
62 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 "What do you mean, Rhoda ? " 
 
 " I know you have ! " the girl exulted. " Well, he 
 is the kind of man I should always want to have for 
 my doctor if I had to have one ; though I don t think 
 he s done you a great deal of good yet, Aunt Caroline : 
 you look wretched, and I shall feel like scolding Dr. 
 Olney when he comes again. But what I mean is, he 
 has such noble ideas : don t you think he has ? " 
 
 " Yes yes. About what ? " 
 
 " Why, about the negroes, you know." Mrs. Mer 
 edith winced at the word. " I never happened to 
 see it in that light before. I thought when we had 
 set them free, we had done everything. But I can 
 see now we haven t. We do perfectly banish them, 
 as far as we can ; and we don t associate with them 
 half as much as we do with the animals. I got to 
 talking with the Bloomingdales this afternoon, and I 
 had to take the negroes part. Don t you think that 
 was funny for a Southern girl ? " Mrs. Meredith 
 looked at her with a ghastly face, and moved her lips 
 in answer, without making any sound. " They said 
 that the negroes were an inferior race, and they never 
 could associate with the whites because they never could 
 be intellectually equal with them. I told them about 
 that black English lawyer from Sierra Leone that 
 talked so well at the table d hote in Venice better 
 than anybody else but they wouldn t give way. 
 They were very narrow-minded ; or the mother was ; 
 the rest didn t say anything ; only made exclama 
 tions. Mrs. Bloomiugdale said Dr. Olney must be a 
 
\\ IMTKKA i IN i IT n . f>., 
 
 very >tr:ui-- phy>ician, to ha\e tho-e idea-. 1 hope 
 .Mr. lUoominiMlale isn t like her. You would sav he 
 \\.is a good deal younger than Dr. Olncv, wouldn t 
 yon 
 
 Yes not so very. But why " 
 Rhoda broke out into a lau^li of humorous per 
 plexity. "Why. ii he were only a little older, or a 
 1 deal older, he could advi>e me whether to marrv 
 him or not ? n The laughter faded suddenly from her 
 -. and she fell hack dejectedly against her chair, 
 and remained looking at her aunt, as it trying to read 
 in her face the silent working of her thought. " Well?" 
 she demanded, finally. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith dropped her eye-. Why need you 
 marry any one?" 
 
 What a funny question ! " the girl an.-wered, with 
 the xj.arkle of a re-turning smil--. " S. a- to have 
 ximebody to take care of me in my old age!" The 
 youn^ like to speak of age so, with a mocking in 
 credulity; they feel that, however it may have fared 
 with all the race hitherto, they never can be old, and 
 they like to make a joke of the mere notion. "You ll 
 be getting old yourself some day. Aunt Caroline, and 
 then what shall I do? Don t you think that a woman 
 ought to get married 
 
 " Yes yes. Not always not necessarily. Cer 
 tainly not to have some one to take care of her." 
 
 "Of course not! That would be a very base 
 motive. I suppose I really meant, have somebody 
 for me to take care of. I think that is what keeps 
 
64 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 one from being lonesome more than anything else. I 
 do feel so alone sometimes. It seems to me there are 
 very few girls so perfectly isolated. Why, just think I 
 With the exception of you, I don t believe I ve got a 
 single relation in the world." Rhoda seemed inter 
 ested rather than distressed by the fact. " Now there 
 are the Bloomingdales," she went on ; " it seems as if 
 they had connections everywhere. That is something 
 like a family. If I married JVJr. Bloomingdale, I could 
 always have somebody to take care of as long as I 
 lived. To be sure, they would be Bloomingdales," 
 she added, dreamily. 
 
 " Rhoda ! " said her aunt, " I cannot let you speak 
 so. If you are in earnest about Mr. Bloomingdale " 
 
 " I am. But not about his family or not so much 
 so." 
 
 " You cannot take him without taking his family ; 
 that is always the first thing to be thought of in mar 
 riage, and young people think of it the last. The 
 family on each side counts almost as much as the 
 couple themselves in a marriage." 
 
 " Mine wouldn t," the girl interpolated. " There s 
 so very little of it ! " 
 
 If Mrs. Meredith was trying to bring the talk to 
 this point, she now seemed to find herself too suddenly 
 confronted with it, and she shrank back a little. "I 
 don t mean that family is the first thing." 
 
 " You just said it was, aunty ! " 
 
 " The first thing," Mrs. Meredith continued, ignor 
 ing the teasing little speech, " is to make sure of your 
 self, to he satisfied that you love him," 
 
AN IM1TK ATIVi: PITY. 65 
 
 "It s so mucli easier," the girl sighed in mock- 
 serion>ness. to lie satisfied that I don t love them" 
 
 Hut that won t do. Rlmda." said Mrs. Meredith, 
 "and I can t let you treat the matter in this trivial 
 spirit. It is a most important matter far more im 
 portant than you can realize." 
 
 "I can t realize anything about it that s the 
 trouble." 
 
 "Yon can realize whether you wish to accept him 
 or not." 
 
 " No ; that s just what I can t do." 
 
 " You ve had time enough." 
 
 I ve had nearly a week. But I want all the time 
 there is ; it wouldn t be any too much. I must see 
 him again after seeing so much of his family." 
 
 Rhoda ! " her aunt called sternly to her from the 
 sofa. 
 
 But Rhoda did not respond with any sort of intimi 
 dation. She was looking down into the street from 
 tin- window where she sat, and she suddenly bowed. 
 It was Dr. Olney," she explained. "He was just 
 coming into the hotel, and he looked up. I wonder 
 how he knew it was our window? He seems twice as 
 young with his hat on. I wish he d wear his hat in 
 the room. But of course he can t." 
 
 Kverything that had happened since Rhoda came in 
 made it more difficult for Mrs. Meredith to discharge 
 the duty that she thought she had nerved herself up 
 to. Sin- hail pn>mi<ed h-r><-lf that if Rhoda had de 
 cided to accept Mr. Bloomhigdale, she would speak, 
 
66 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 and tell her everything ; but she was not certain yet 
 that the girl had decided, though from the way in 
 which she played with the question, and her freedom 
 from all anxiety about it, she felt pretty sure that she 
 had. She wished, vaguely, perversely, weakly, that 
 she had not, for then the ordeal for them both could 
 be postponed indefinitely again. She sympathized 
 with the girl in her trials through the young minister s 
 family, who were so repugnant to her in their eager 
 ness for her, and she burned with a prophetic indigna 
 tion in imagining how such people would cast her off 
 when they knew what she really was. The young 
 man himself seemed kind and good, and if it were a 
 question of him alone, she believed she could trust 
 him ; but these others ! that mother, those sisters ! 
 She recoiled from the duty of humiliating the poor 
 girl before them, so helplessly, innocently, ignorantly 
 guilty of her own origin. The child s gayety and 
 lightness, her elfish whimsicality and thoughtless 
 superficiality, as well as those gleams and glimpses of 
 a deeper nature which a word or action gave from 
 time to time, smote the elder woman s heart with a 
 nameless pain and a tender compassion. By all her 
 circumstance Rhoda had a right to be the somewhat 
 spoiled and teasing pretty thing that she was ; and all 
 that sovereign young-ladyishness which sat so becom 
 ingly upon her was proper to the station a beautiful 
 young girl holds in a world where she has had only to 
 choose and to command. But Mrs. Meredith shud 
 dered to think with what contempt, open or masquerad- 
 
AN IMl KKA TI\ i: DUTY. 07 
 
 ing as pity, all this would be denied to her. Doubt 
 less she exaggerated ; the world slowly changes ; it 
 condones many things to those who are well placed in 
 it ; and it might not have fared so ill with the child as 
 the woman thought; but Mr>. Meredith had brooded 
 so long upon her destiny that she could see it only in 
 the gloomiest colors. She was darkling in its deepest 
 shadow when she heard Khoda saying, as if at the end 
 of some speech that she had not caught, " But he 
 doesn t seem to have any more family than I have." 
 
 -Who? "Mrs. Meredith asked. 
 
 Dr. Olney." 
 
 You don t know anything about his family." 
 
 Well, I don t know anything about my own," 
 Rhoda answered, lightly. She added, soberly, after a 
 moment: "Don t you think it s rather strange that 
 my mother s family never cared to look us up in any 
 way? Even it they were opposed to her marrying 
 papa, one would think they might have forgiven it by 
 this time. The family ties are so strong among the 
 French." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes, and niurmured, 
 " It may be different with the Creoles." 
 
 " No, I don t believe it is. I ve heard it s more so. 
 Did papa never see any of mamma s family but her 
 lather? It seems so strange that she should have 
 been as much alone as I am. I know I have you, 
 Aunt Caroline. Well, I don t know what to think 
 about Mr. Bloomingdale. I m always summing up 
 his virtues; he s very good, and he s good-looking, 
 
68 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 and he s good-natured. He s rich, though I don t let 
 that count. He parts his hair too much on one side, 
 but that doesn t matter, I could make him part it in 
 the middle, and it s a very pretty shade of brown. 
 His eyes are good, and his mouth wouldn t be weak if 
 he wore his beard full. I think he has very good 
 ideas, and I m sure he would be devoted all his days. 
 It isn t so easy to sum a person up, though, is it ? I 
 wish I knew whether I cared for him. I don t believe 
 I ve ever been in love with anybody yet. Of course, 
 I ve had my fancies. I do respect Mr. Bloomingdale, 
 and when I think how very anxious he was to have 
 me care for him, I don t know but I could if I really 
 tried. But ought one to have to try ? That s the ques 
 tion. Oughtn t the love to go of itself, without being 
 pushed or pulled ? I wish I knew ! Aunt Caroline, 
 do you believe in learning to love your husband 
 after marriage ? That s what happens in some of the 
 stories ; but it seems very ridiculous. 1 wish it was 
 my duty to marry him or not to ; then I could de 
 cide. I believe I m turning out quite a slave of duty. 
 I must have caught it from you, Aunt Caroline. 
 Now I can imagine myself sacrificing anything to duty. 
 If Mr. Bloomingdale were to step ashore from the 
 next steamer, and drive to the hotel without stopping 
 to take breath, and get himself shown up here, and 
 eay, I ve just dropped in, Miss Aldgate, to offer you 
 the opportunity of uniting your life with mine in a 
 high and holy purpose say working among the poor 
 on the east side in New York, or going down to edu- 
 
AN 1MPKHATIVK IU PT. H9 
 
 cate the black race in tin- South I believe I .should 
 seize the opportunity without a intinnur. IVrhaps he 
 mav. Do you think he will?" 
 
 Rhoda ended her monologue with a gay look at 
 her aunt, who wa silent at the end, as she had been 
 throughout, turniu" the trouble before them over and 
 
 O O 
 
 over iii IMT mind. As happens when we are pre 
 occupied with one thing, all other things seem to tend 
 toward it and bear upon it ; half a dozen mere acci 
 dents of the girl s spoken reverie touched the sore 
 place in Mrs. Meredith s soul and fretted it to an 
 anguish that she a>ked herself how she could bear. It 
 all accused and judged and condemned her, because 
 she had kept putting by the duty she had to discharge, 
 and making it contingent upon that decision of the 
 girl s which she was still far from ascertaining. In 
 her recoil from this duty she had believed that if it 
 nerd not be done at this time, it somehow need never 
 be done ; or she had tried to believe this. If Rhoda 
 rejected this young man, she might keep her safe for 
 ever from the fact which she felt must wreck the life 
 of the light-hearted, high-spirited girl. That was the 
 refuge which Mrs. Meredith had taken from the ta>k 
 which so strongly beset her; but when she had formu 
 lated the case to herself, the absurdity, tin- impo>^ibil- 
 ity of her position appeared to her. If Rhoda c.-uvd 
 nothing for Mr. Bloomingdale, the day would come 
 when she would care e\ rvthing for someone else; 
 and that day could not be postponed, nor the dtit\ >t 
 that day. It would be crueler to leave her unarmed 
 
70 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 against the truth until the moment when her heart 
 was set upon a love, and then strike her down with it. 
 Mrs. Meredith now saw this ; she saw that the doubt 
 in which she was resting was the very moment of 
 action for her ; and that the occasion was divinely 
 appointed for dealing more mercifully with the child 
 than any other that could have offered. She had 
 often imagined herself telling Rhoda what she had to 
 tell, and with the romantic coloring from the novels 
 she had read, she had painted herself in the heroic 
 discharge of her duty at the instant when the girl was 
 radiant in the possession of an accepted love, and had 
 helped her to renounce, to suffer, and to triumph. 
 She had always been very strong in these dramatized 
 encounters, and had borne herself with a stony power 
 throughout, against which the bruised and bleeding 
 girl had rested her broken spirit ; but now she cowered 
 before her. She longed to fall upon her knees at her 
 feet, and first implore her forgiveness for what she was 
 going to do, and not speak till she had been forgiven ; 
 but habit is strong, really stronger than emotion of 
 any sort, and so Mrs. Meredith remained lying on her 
 sofa, and merely put up her fan to shut out the sight 
 of the child, as she said, " And if it were your duty to 
 give up Mr. Bloomingdale, could you do it ? " 
 
 " Oh, instantly, Aunt Caroline ! " answered Rhoda, 
 with a gay burlesque of fortitude. " I would not 
 hesitate a single week. But why do you ask such an 
 awful question ? " 
 
 " Is it a very awful question ? " Mrs. Meredith pal 
 pitated. 
 
A\ IMPKRATIYI IH IV. 71 
 
 " Well, rather ! One may wish to give a person up, 
 but not as a drift/." 
 
 Mrs. Meredith understood this well enough, but it 
 was her perfect intelligence concerning the whole situ 
 ation that seemed to disable her. She made out to 
 say, "Then you have decided not to give him up 
 
 yet ? " 
 
 "I ve decided I ve decided let me think! 
 not to decide till I see him again! What do you 
 mean by if it were my duty to give him up r " 
 
 "It would be your duty," Mrs. Meredith faltered, 
 "to give him up. unless you were sure you loved 
 him." 
 
 "Oh, yes; certainly. That." 
 
 "You wouldn t wish him. after you ve seen so much 
 of his family, not to know everything about yours, if 
 you decided to accept him ? " 
 
 Why, you re all there is, Aunt Caroline ! You re 
 the end of the story. I should hope he understood 
 that. What else is there ? " 
 
 "Nothing nothing There is very little. But 
 we ought to tell Mr. Bloomingdale all we know of 
 your mother s family." 
 
 "Why, certainly. I expected to do that. There 
 was nothing disgraceful about them, I imagine, except 
 their behavior toward mamma." 
 
 "No" 
 
 " You speak as if there were. What are you keep 
 ing back, Aunt Caroline ?" Rhoda sat upright, and 
 faced her aunt with a sort of sudden fierceness which 
 
72 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 she sometimes showed when she was roused to self- 
 assertion. This was seldom, in the succession of her 
 amiable moods, but when it happened, Mrs. Meredith 
 saw in it the outbreak of the ancestral savagery, 
 and shuddered at it as a self-betrayal rather than a 
 self-assertion ; but perhaps self-assertion is this with 
 all of us. " What are you hinting at ? If there was 
 anything dishonorable " 
 
 Mrs. Meredith found herself launched at last. She 
 could not go back now ; she could not stop. She had 
 only the choice, in going on, of telling the truth, or 
 setting sail to shipwreck under some new lie. For 
 this, both will and invention failed her ; she was too 
 weak mentally, if she was not too strong morally, for 
 this. She went on, with a kind of mechanical force. 
 
 " If there were something dishonorable that was not 
 their fault, that was their wrong, their sorrow, their 
 burden what should you think of your father s 
 marrying your mother, with a full knowledge of it ? " 
 
 " I should think he did nobly and bravely to marry 
 her. But that s nothing. What was the disgrace? 
 What had they done, that they had to suffer inno 
 cently ? You needn t be afraid of telling me every 
 thing. I don t care what Mr. Bloomingdale or any 
 one thinks ; I shall be proud of them for it ; I shall 
 be glad ! " Mrs. Meredith saw with terror that the 
 girl s fancy had kindled with some romantic conjec 
 ture. " Who was my grandfather ? " 
 
 " I know very little about him, Rhoda," said Mrs. 
 Meredith, seeking to rest in this neutral truth. "Your 
 
AX nilT.KA I I Vi: I l IV. 7- ! 
 
 father never told me much, except that In- was :i Cre 
 ole, and and rich ; and and respect. <!. as th<-e 
 things went there, among his people " 
 
 Was In- >o;ne old slaver, like those in Mr. Oihlr s 
 book ? I shouldn t cure for that ! But that would 
 have been his fault, and it wouldn t have been any 
 great di>grace; and yon said And my grand 
 mother who was she ? " 
 
 She was not his wife." 
 
 " Oh ! " said the girl, with a quick breath, as if she 
 had been struck over the heart. That was how the 
 dishonor She stopped, with an absent stare fixed 
 upon her aunt, who waited in silence for her to realize 
 this e\ il which was still so far sho"t of the worst. 
 Where -h.- sat she could not see the blush of shame 
 that gradually stained the girl s face to her throat and 
 forehead. ^ Who was she ? " 
 
 Mrs. Meredith tried to think how the words would 
 sound as she said them, and simultaneously she said 
 them, "She was his slave." 
 
 The girl was silent and motionless. AVith her head 
 defined against the open window, her face showed 
 quite black toward h-r aunt, as if the fact of her 
 mother s race had remanded her to its primordial 
 hue in touching her consciousness. Mrs. Meredith 
 had risen, and sat with on.- hand grasping tin- wrap 
 that still covered her f-.-t. as if ready to ca>t it loose 
 and tly her victim s presrner. if it becann- intolerable. 
 But she found her>-lf too weak to stand up. and -lie 
 waited, throbbing and quaking, for Rhoda to speak. 
 
74 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 The girl gave a little, low, faltering laugh, an. inarticu 
 late note of such pathetic fear and pitiful entreaty that 
 it went through the woman s heart. " Aunt Caroline, 
 are you crazy ? " 
 
 " Crazy ? " The word gave her an instant of strange 
 respite. Was she really mad, and had she long dreamed 
 this thing in the cloudy deliriums of a sick brain ? The 
 fact of her hopeless sanity repossessed her from this 
 tricksy conjecture. If I were only crazy ! " 
 
 " And you mean to say to tell me that that 
 -lam black?" 
 
 " Oh, no, poor child ! You are as white as I am 
 as any one. No one would ever think " 
 
 " But I have that blood in me ? It is the same 
 thing ! " An awful silence followed again, and then 
 the girl said: "And you let me grow up thinking I 
 was white, like other girls, when you knew You 
 let me pass myself off on myself and every one else, 
 for what I wasn t ! Oh, Aunt Caroline, w r hat are you 
 telling me this ghastly thing for ? It isn t true ! You 
 couldn t have let me live on all these years thinking I 
 was a white person, when You would have told 
 me from the very beginning, as soon as I could begin 
 to understand anything. You wouldn t have told me 
 all those things about my mother s family, and their 
 being great people, and disowning her, and all that ! 
 If this is true you wouldn t have let me believe that, 
 you and Uncle Meredith ? " 
 
 " We let you believe it, but you made it up your 
 self ; we never told you anything." 
 
AN" mri.KATIVl. IH t Y. 75 
 
 " l>ut yu couldn t have thought that was being 
 honest, and so you couldn t have done it you 
 couldn t. And so it isn t any of it true that you ve 
 just told me. But why did you tell me such a thing? 
 I don t believe you have told me it. Why, I must be 
 dreaming. It s as if as if you were to come to 
 a perfectly well prr.-nn. and tell them that they were 
 going to die in half an hour. Don t you see ? How 
 ran you tell me such a thing? Don t you understand 
 that it tears my whole life up, and flings it out on the 
 ground? But you know it isn t tun-. Oh, my, I think 
 my head will burst! AVliy don t you speak to me, and 
 tell me why you said >m-h a thing? Is it because you 
 don t want me to marry Mr. Bloomingdale ? Well, I 
 won t marry him. Now will you say it ? " 
 
 u Rhoda ! " her aunt began, "whether you married 
 Mr. Bloomingdale or not, the time had come 
 
 " No ! The time had gone. It had come as soon 
 as I could speak or understand the first word. Then 
 would have been the time for you to tell me such a 
 thing if it were true, so that I might have grown up 
 knowing it, and trying to bear it. But it isn t true, 
 and you re just saying it for some other reason. Wluit 
 has happened to you, Aunt Caroline ? I am going to 
 send for Dr. Olney ; you re not well. It s something 
 in that medicine of his, I know it is. Let me look at 
 you ! " She ran suddenly toward Mrs. Meredith, who 
 recoiled, crouching back into the corner of her sofa. 
 The girl broke into a hysterical laugh. " Do you 
 think I will hurt you ? Oh, Aunt Caroline, take it 
 
76 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 back, take it back! See, I ll get on my knees to 
 you ! " She threw herself down before the sofa where 
 Mrs. Meredith crouched. " Oh, you couldn t have 
 been so wicked as to live such a lie as that ! " 
 
 " It was a lie, the basest, the vilest," said Mrs. Mer 
 edith, with a sort of hopeless gasp. " But I never saw 
 the time when I must tell you the truth and so I 
 couldn t." 
 
 " Oh, no, no ! Don t take yourself from me ! " 
 The girl dropped her head on the woman s knee, and 
 broke into a wild sobbing. " I don t know what you re 
 doing this for. It can t be true it can t be real. 
 Shall I never wake from it, and have you back ? You 
 were all I had in the world, and now, if you were not 
 what I thought you, so true and good, I haven t even 
 you any more. Oh, oh, oh ! " 
 
 " Oh, it was all wrong," said Mrs. Meredith, in a 
 tearless misery, a dry pang of the heart for which her 
 words were no relief. " There hasn t been a day or 
 an hour when I haven t felt it ; and I have always 
 prayed for light to see my duty, and strength to do it. 
 God knows that if I could bear this for you, how 
 gladly I would do it. I have borne it all these years, 
 and the guilt of the concealment besides ; that is 
 something, though it is nothing to what you. are suf 
 fering. I know that I know that! " 
 
 The girl sobbed on and on, and the woman repeated 
 the same things over and over, a babble of words in 
 which there was no comfort, no help, but which suf 
 ficed to tide them both over from the past which had 
 
AN I MI IK \T1VK IHTY. 77 
 
 dropped into chaos In-hind them to a new present in 
 which they must try to g-iin a footing once more. 
 
 The girl suddenly ceased to bemoan herself, and 
 lifted her head, to look into her aunt s face. "And 
 my mother," she said, ignoring the piteous sympathy 
 she saw, " was she my father s slave, too ? " 
 
 "She was your father s wife. Slavery was past 
 then, and lie was too good a man for anything else, 
 though he knew his marriage would ruin him, as it 
 did." 
 
 " At least there is some one I can honor, then ; I 
 can honor him" said the girl, with an unpitying hard 
 ness m her tone. She rose to her feet, and turned 
 toward the door of her own room. 
 
 "Is there is there anything else that I can tell 
 that you wish to know? " her aunt entreated. " Oh, 
 child ! If you could only understand " 
 
 " I do understand," said the girl. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith, in her millionfold prefigurations of 
 this moment, had often suffered from the necessity of 
 insinuating to the ignorance of girlhood all the sad de 
 tails of the social tragedy of which she was the victim. 
 But she perceived that this at least was to be spared 
 her, that the girl had somehow in-tantly reali/.rd tin- 
 whole affair in these aspects. In middle life we often 
 forget, amidst the accumulations of experience. 1m w 
 early the main bases of it were laid in our consciou 
 ness. We suppose, when we are experienced, that 
 knowledge comes solely from experience; but knowl 
 edge, or if not knowledge, then truth, comes largely 
 
78 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 from perceptiou, from instinct, from divination, from 
 the intelligence of our mere potentialities. A man can 
 be anything along the vast range from angel to devil ; 
 without living either the good thing or the bad thing 
 in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can perceive it. 
 His intelligence may want accuracy, though after-ex 
 perience often startling! y verifies it ; but it does not 
 want truth. The materials of knowledge accumulate 
 from innumerable unremembered sources. All at 
 once, some vital interest precipitates the latent elec 
 tricity of the cloudy mass in a flash that illumines the 
 world with a shadowless brilliancy and shows every 
 thing in its very form and meaning. Then the wit 
 ness perceives that somehow from the beginning of 
 conscious being he had understood all this before, and 
 every influence and circumstance had tended to the 
 significance revealed. 
 
 The proud, pure girl who had been told that her 
 mother was slave-born and sin-born, had lived as care 
 fully sheltered from the guilt and shame that are in 
 the world as tender love and pitying fear could keep 
 her ; but so much of the sad fact of evil had somehow 
 reached her that she stood in a sudden glare of the 
 reality. She understood, and she felt all scathed 
 within by the intelligence, by whatever the cruelest 
 foe could have told her with the most unsparing ful 
 ness, whatever the fondest friend could have wished 
 her not to know. The swiftness of these mental 
 processes no words can suggest ; we can portray life, 
 not living. 
 
AN IMPI i; A i i\ i. itrrv. 79 
 
 I am going to i\\\ room, now," she said to her 
 aunt, "and whatever happens, don t follow me, don t 
 c all me. If you are dying, don t speak to me. I have 
 a riiiht to hi- alone." 
 
 She crossed to the door of her chamber opening 
 from the little parlor, and closed it behind her, and 
 ht r aunt fell back again on her sofa. She was too 
 weak to follow her if she had wished, and she was too 
 wi>e to wi.-h it. She lay there revolving the whole 
 misery in her mind, turning it over and over ten thou- 
 >and times. She said to herself that it was worse, far 
 worse, than she had ever pictured it; but in fact it 
 \\as better, for her. She pretended otherwise, but for 
 her there was the relief in the situation of a lie owned, 
 a truth spoken, and with whatever heart-wrung drops 
 she told the throes of the anguish beyond that door, 
 for herself she was glad. It was monstrous to be 
 glad, she knew that ; but she knew that she was glad. 
 
 After awhile she began to be afraid of the absolute 
 silence that continued in Rhoda s room, and then she 
 did what men would say a man would not have done ; 
 she crept to the door and peeped and listened. She 
 could not hear anything, but she saw Rhoda sitting by 
 the table writing. She went back to her sofa, and lay 
 there more patiently now ; but as the time passed she 
 began to be hungry ; with shame that did not suffer 
 her to ring and ask for anything to eat, she began to 
 feel the weak and self-pitiful craving of an invalid for 
 food. 
 
 The time passed till the travelling-clock on the 
 
80 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 mantel showed her that it was half-past seven. Then 
 Rhoda s door was flung open, and the girl stood before 
 her with her hat on, and dressed to go out. She had 
 a letter in her hand, and she said, with a mechanical 
 hardness, " I have written to him, and I am going out 
 with the letter. When I come back 
 
 " You can send your letter out," pleaded her aunt ; 
 she knew what the girl had written too well to ask. 
 " It s almost dark ; it s too late for you to be out on 
 the streets alone." 
 
 " Oh, what could happen to me ? " demanded Rhoda, 
 scornfully. " Or if some one insulted a colored girl, 
 what of it ? When I come back I will pack for you, 
 and in the morning we will start for New Orleans, and 
 try to find out my mother s family." 
 
 Her aunt said nothing to this, but she set herself 
 earnestly to plead with the girl not to go out. " It 
 will be dark, Rhoda, and you don t know the streets. 
 Indeed you mustn t go out. You haven t had any 
 dinner For my sake 
 
 " For your sake ! " said Rhoda. She went on, as if 
 that were answer enough, " I have written to him that 
 all is over between us it was, even before this : I 
 could never have married him and that when he 
 arrives we shall be gone, and he must never try to see 
 me again. I ve told you all that you could ask, Aunt 
 Caroline, and now there is one thing I want you to 
 answer me. Is there any one else who knows this ? " 
 
 " No, indeed, child ! " answered Mrs. Meredith in 
 stantly, and she thought for the instant that she was 
 
AV IM1M KATIVK DUTY. 81 
 
 telling the truth. " Xot another living soul. No one 
 ever knew but your uncle " 
 
 " Be careful, Aunt Caroline," said the girl, coming 
 up to her sofa, and looking gloomily down upon her. 
 " You had better always tell me the truth, now. Have 
 you told no one else ? " 
 
 " No one." 
 
 "Not Dr. Olney?" 
 
 It was too late, now that Mrs. Meredith perceived 
 her error. She could not draw back from it, and say 
 that she had forgotten ; Rhoda would never believe 
 that. She could only say, " Xo, not Dr. Olney." 
 
 " Tell me the truth, if you expect ever to see me 
 again, in this world or the next. Is it the truth? 
 Swear it ! " 
 
 " It is the truth," said the poor woman, feeling this 
 new and astonishing lie triply riveted upon her soul ; 
 and she sank down upon the pillow from which she 
 had partly lifted herself, and lay there as if crushed 
 under the burden, suddenly rolled back upon her. 
 
 " Then I forgive you," said the girl, stooping down 
 to kiss her. 
 
 The woman pushed her feebly away. " Oh, I don t 
 want your forgiveness, now," she whimpered, and she 
 began to cry. 
 
 Rhoda made no answer, but turned and went out of 
 the room. 
 
 Mrs. Meredith lay exhausted. She was no longer 
 hungry, but she was weak for want of food. After a 
 while she slid from the sofa, and then on her hands 
 
82 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 and knees she crept to the table where the bottle that 
 held Dr. Olney s sleeping medicine stood. She drank 
 it all off. She felt the need of escaping from herself ; 
 she did not believe it would kill her ; but she must 
 escape at any risk. So men die who mean to take 
 their lives ; but it is not certain that death even is an 
 escape from ourselves. 
 
VIII. 
 
 IN the street where Rhoda found herself the gas 
 win already palely burning in the shops, and the 
 moony glare of an electric globe was invading the flush 
 of the sunset, whose after-glow still filled the summer 
 air in the western perspective. She did not know 
 where she was going, but she went that way, down the 
 slope of the slightly curving thoroughfare. She had 
 the letter which she meant to post in her hand, but 
 she passed the boxes on the lamp-posts without putting 
 it in. She no longer knew what else she meant to do, 
 in any sort, or what she desired; but out of the tur 
 moil of horror, which she whirled round and round in, 
 some purpose that seemed at first exterior to herself 
 began to evolve. The street was one where she would 
 hardly have met ladies of the sort she had always sup 
 posed herself of ; gentility fled it long ago, and the 
 houses that had once been middle-class houses had 
 fallen in the social scale to the grade of mechanics 
 lodgings, and the shops, which had never been fashion 
 able, were adapted strictly to the needs of a neighbor 
 hood of poor and humble people. They were largely 
 provision stores, full of fruit, especially watermelons ; 
 there were some groceries, and some pharmacies of 
 that professional neatness which pharmacies are of 
 
84 A1S T IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 everywhere. The roadway was at this hour pretty 
 well deserted by the express wagons and butcher 
 carts that bang through it in the earlier day ; and the 
 horse-cars coming and going on its incline and its final 
 westward level, were in the unrestricted enjoyment of 
 the company s monopoly of the best part of its space. 
 
 At the first corner Rhoda had to find her way 
 through groups of intense-faced suburbans who were 
 waiting for their respective cars, and who heaped 
 themselves on board as these arrived, and hurried to 
 find places, more from force of habit than from neces 
 sity, for the pressure of the evening travel was al 
 ready over. When she had passed these groups she 
 began to meet the proper life of the street the 
 women who had come out to cheapen the next day s 
 provisions at the markets, the men, in the brief leisure 
 that their day s work had left them before bedtime, 
 lounging at the lattice doors of the drinking-shops, or 
 standing listlessly about on the curb-stones smoking. 
 Numbers of young fellows, of the sort whose leisure is 
 day-long, exchanged the comfort of a mutual support 
 with the house walls, and stared at her as she hurried 
 by ; and then she began to encounter in greater and 
 greater number the colored people who descended to 
 this popular promenade from the up-hill streets open 
 ing upon it. They politely made way for her, and at 
 the first meeting that new agony of interest in them 
 possessed her. 
 
 This was intensified by the deference they paid her 
 as a young white lady, and the instant sense that she 
 
AN Miri.KATlX K 1>1 TV. 85 
 
 had no right to it in that quality. She could have 
 l.orne hrtti-r to have th-iii rude ami even in>olcnt ; 
 there \va> Mnm-thinu in the way they turned their 
 black eyes in their lar^v di>ks of while upon her, like 
 dogs, with a mute animal appeal in them, that seemed 
 to claim her one of tin in. and to creep nearer and 
 nearer and pos-css her in that late-found solidarity of 
 race. She never knew before how hideous they were, 
 with their flat wide-nostriled noses, their out-rolled 
 thick lips, their mobile, bulging eyes set near together, 
 their retreating chins and forehead-, and their smooth, 
 shining skin; they seemed burlesques of humanity, 
 worse than apes, because they were more like. But 
 the men were not half so bad as the women, from the 
 shrill-piped young girls, with their grotesque attempts 
 at i a>hion, to the old grandmothers, wrinkled or obese, 
 who came down the sloping sidewalks in their bare 
 head-, out of the courts and alleys where they lived, 
 to get the evening air. Impish black children swarmed 
 on these uphill sidewalks, an.d played their g;inn-<, 
 with shrill cries racing back and forth, catching and 
 escaping one another. 
 
 These colored folk were of all tints and types, from 
 the comedy of the pure black to the closest tragical 
 approach to white. She saw one girl, walking with a 
 cloud of sable companions, who was as white as her 
 self, and >ht- \\onder.-dif >he \\vnj of the same dilution 
 of negro blood ; she was laughing and chattering with 
 the rest, and seemed to feel no diii erencr, but to be 
 pleased and Haltered with the court paid her by the 
 inky dandy who sauntered beside her. 
 
86 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " She has always known it ; she has never felt it !" 
 she thought bitterly. " It is nothing ; it is natural to 
 her ; I might have been like her." 
 
 She began to calculate how many generations would 
 carry her back, or that girl back, in hue, to the black 
 est of those loathsome old women. She knew what 
 an octoroon was, and she thought, " I am like her, 
 and my mother was darker, and my grandmother 
 darker, and my great-grander like a mulatto, and then 
 it was a horrible old negress, a savage stolen from 
 Africa, where she had been a cannibal." 
 
 A vision of palm-tree roofs and grass huts, as she 
 had seen them in pictures, with skulls grinning from 
 the eaves, floated before her eyes ; then a desert with 
 a long coffle of captives passing by, and one black, 
 naked woman, fallen out from weakness, kneeling, 
 with manacled hands, and her head pulled back, and 
 the Arab slaver s knife at her throat. She walked 
 in a nightmare of these sights ; all the horror of the 
 wrong by which she "came to be, poured itself round 
 and over her. 
 
 She emerged from it at moments with a refusal to 
 accept the loss of her former self, like that of the 
 mutilated man who looks where his arm was, and can 
 not believe it gone. Like him, she had the full sense 
 of what was lost, the unbroken consciousness of what 
 was lopped away. At these moments all her pride re 
 asserted itself ; she wished to punish her aunt for 
 what she had made her suffer, to make her pay pang 
 for pang. Then the tide of reality overwhelmed her 
 
AN IMl ERATIVK DUTY. 87 
 
 again, and she grovelled in self-loathing ami despair. 
 Froiu that she rose in a fren/y of longing to rid her 
 self of this shame that was not hers ; to tear out the 
 stain ; to spill it with the last drop of her blood upon 
 the ground. By flamy impulses she thrilled towards 
 the mastery of her misery through its open acknowl 
 edgment. She seemed to see herself and hear her 
 self stopping some of these revolting creatures, the 
 dreadfulest of them, and saying, " I am black, too. 
 Take me home with you, and let me live with you, 
 and be like you every way." She thought, " Perhaps 
 I have relations among them. Yes, it must be. I 
 will send to the hotel for my things, and I will live 
 here in some dirty little back court, and try to find 
 them out." 
 
 The emotions, densely pressing upon each other, 
 the dramatizations that took place as simultaneously 
 and insuccessively as the events of a dream, gave her 
 a new measure of time ; she compassed the experience 
 of years in the seconds these sensations outnumbered. 
 
 All the while she seemed to be walking swiftly, fly 
 ing forward ; but the ground was uneven : it rose be 
 fore her, and then suddenly fell. She felt her heart 
 beat in the middle of her throat. Her head felt light, 
 like the blowball of a dandelion. She wished to laugh. 
 There seemed two selves of her, one that lived before 
 that awful knowledge, and one that had lived as long 
 since, and again a third that knew and pitied them 
 both. She wondered at the same time if this were 
 what people meant by saying one s brain was turned; 
 
88 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 arid she recalled the longing with which her aunt said, 
 " If I were only crazy ! " But she knew that her own 
 exaltation was not madness, and she did not wish for 
 escape that way. " There must be some other," she 
 said to herself ; "if I can find the courage for it, 1 
 can find the way. It s like a ghost: if I keep going 
 towards it, it won t hurt me ; I mustn t be afraid of it. 
 Now, let me see ! What ought I to do ? Yes, that is 
 the key : Duty." Then her thought flew passionately 
 off. " If she had done her duty all this might have 
 been helped. But it was her cowardice that made her 
 murder me. Yes, she has killed me ! " 
 
 The tears gushed into her eyes, and all the bitter 
 ness of her trial returned upon her, with a pressure of 
 lead on her brain. 
 
 In the double consciousness of trouble she was as 
 fully aware of everything about her as she was of the 
 world of misery within her ; and she knew that this 
 had so far shown itself without that some of the pas 
 sers were noticing her. She stopped, fearful of their 
 notice, at the corner of the street she had come to, 
 and turned about to confront an old colored woman, 
 yellow like saffron, with the mild, sad face we often 
 see in mulattoes of that type, and something peculiarly 
 pitiful in the straight underlip of her appealing mouth, 
 and the cast of her gentle eyes. The expression might 
 have been merely physical, or it might have been an 
 hereditary look, and no part of her own personality, 
 but Rhoda felt safe in it. 
 
 " What street is this ? " she asked, thinking sud- 
 
AN IMI KKATIVE DUTY. 89 
 
 denly, " She is the color of my grandmother ; that is 
 the way she looked ; " but though she thought this she 
 did not realize it, and she kept an imperious attitude 
 towards the old woman. 
 
 Charles Street, lady." 
 
 " Oh, yes ; Charles. Where are all the people 
 going? " 
 
 " The colored folks, lady ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " "Well, lady, they s a kyind of an evenin meetin at 
 ouah choach to-night. Some of em s goin there, I 
 reckon ; some of em s just out fo a walk." 
 
 " Will you let me go with you ? " Rhoda asked. 
 
 Why, certainly, lady," said the old woman. She 
 glanced up at Rhoda s face as the girl turned to ac 
 company her. " But Tm a-goin* to choach." 
 
 " Yes, yes. That s what I mean. I want to go to 
 your church with you. Are you from the South 
 Louisiana? She would be the color," she thought. 
 " It might be my mother s own mother." 
 
 " No, lady : from Voginny. I was bawn a slave ; 
 and I lived there till after the wa . Then I come 
 Nawth." 
 
 " Oh," said Rhoda, disappointedly, for she had 
 nerved herself to find this old woman her grand 
 mother. 
 
 They walked on lii silence for a while ; then the old 
 woman said, " I thought you wasn t very well, when I 
 noticed you at the cawnah." 
 
 I am well," Rhoda answered, feeling the tears 
 
90 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 start to her eyes again at the note of motherly kind 
 ness in the old woman s voice. u But I am in trouble ; 
 I am in trouble." 
 
 " Then you re gwine to the right place, lady," said 
 the old woman, and she repeated solemnly these words 
 of hope and promise which so many fainting hearts 
 have stayed themselves upon : " ( Come unto me, all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest 
 unto your souls. Them s the words, lady ; the Lawd s 
 own words. Glory be to God ; glory be to God ! " 
 she added in a whisper. 
 
 " Yes, yes," said Rhoda, impatiently. " They are 
 good words. But they are not for me. He can t 
 make my burden light; He can t give me rest. If it 
 were sin, He could ; but it isn t sin ; it s something 
 worse than sin ; more hopeless. If I were only a sin 
 ner, the vilest, the wickedest, how glad I should be ! " 
 Her heart uttered itself to this simple nature as freely 
 as a child to its mother. 
 
 " Why, sholy, lady," said the old woman, with a 
 little shrinking from her as if she had blasphemed, 
 " sholy you s a sinnah ? " 
 
 " No, I am not ! " said the girl, with nervous sharp 
 ness. " If I were a sinner, my sins could be forgiven 
 me, and I could go free of my burden. But nothing 
 can ever lift it from me." 
 
 " The Lawd can do anything, the Bible says. He 
 kin make the /lead come to life. He done it oncet, 
 too." 
 
 The girl turned abruptly on her. " Can He change 
 your skin ? Can He make black white ? " 
 
AN IMI l.KA TIVi: IH TV. 91 
 
 The old woman seemed dauim -d ; she faltered. " 1 
 don t know as he ever tried, lady ; the Bible don t 
 tell." She added, more hopefully, " But I reckon He 
 could do it if lie wanted to." 
 
 Then why doesn t lie do it?" demanded the girl. 
 " What does He leave you black for, when He could 
 make you white ? " 
 
 f l reckon He don t think it s worth while, if He 
 can make me willing to be black so easy. Somebody s 
 got to be black, and it might as well be me," said the 
 old woman, with a meek sigh. 
 
 ** Xo, no one need be black ! " said Rhoda, with a 
 vehemence that this submissive sigh awakened in her. 
 " If He cared for us, no one would be ! " 
 
 " Sh ! " said the old woman, gently. 
 
 They had reached the church porch, and Rhoda 
 found herself in the tide of black worshippers who 
 were drifting in. The faces of some were supernat- 
 urally solemn, and these rolled their large-whited eyes 
 rebukingly on the young girls showing all their teeth 
 in the smiles that gashed them from ear to ear, and 
 carrying on subdued flirtations with the polite young 
 fellows escorting them. It was no doubt the best col 
 ored society, and it was bearing itself with propriety 
 and self-respect in the court of the temple. If their 
 natural gayety and lightness of heart moved their 
 youth to the betrayal of their pleasure in each other in 
 the presence of their Maker, He was perhaps propi 
 tiated by the gloom of their elders. 
 
 " Tain t a regular evenin meetin ," Rhoda s com- 
 
92 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 panion explained to her. It s a kind o lecture." She 
 exchanged some stately courtesies of greeting with the 
 old men and women as they pushed into the church ; 
 they called her sister, and they looked with at least 
 as little surprise and offence at the beautiful young 
 white lady with her as white Christians would have 
 shown a colored girl come to worship with them. 
 " De preacher s one o the Southern students ; I 
 ain t hud him speak; but I reckon the Lawd s sent 
 him, anyway." 
 
 Rhoda had no motive in being where she was except 
 to confront herself as fully and closely with the trouble 
 in her soul as she could. She thought, so far as 
 such willing may be called thinking, that she could 
 strengthen herself for what she had henceforth to bear, 
 if she could concentrate and intensify the fact to her 
 outward perception ; she wished densely to surround 
 herself with the blackness from which she had sprung, 
 and to reconcile herself to it, by realizing and owning 
 it with every sense. 
 
 She did not know what the speaker was talking 
 about at first, but phrases and words now and then 
 caught in her consciousness. He was entirely black, 
 and he was dressed in black from head to foot, so that 
 he stood behind the pulpit light like a thick, soft 
 shadow cast upon the wall by an electric. His abso 
 lute sable was relieved only by the white points of his 
 shirt-collar, and the glare of his spectacles, which, when 
 the light struck them, heightened the goblin effect of 
 his presence. He had no discernible features, and 
 
AX IMI KKA I 1\ K DUTY. 93 
 
 when he turned his profile in addressing those who sat 
 :it tin- >ide-. it was only a wavering hlur against the 
 wall. Hi- void* \vas rich and tender, \vith those ca- 
 ivv-ing notes in it \vhieh are the peculiar gift of his 
 
 race. 
 
 The lecture opened with prayer and >inging, and 
 the lecturer took part in the singing; then he began 
 to speak, and Khoda s mind to wander, with her 
 eyes, to the congregation. The prevailing blackness 
 gave back the light here and there in the glint of a 
 bald head, or from a patch of white wool, or the cast 
 (.1 a i<>l!iim eye. Inside of the bonnets of the elder 
 women, and under the gay hats of the young girls, it 
 was mostly lost in a charaeterle.-s dark ; but nearer by, 
 Khoda distinguished faces, sad, repulsive visages of a 
 frog-like ugliness added to the repulsive black in all 
 its .-.hade>, from the unalloyed brilliancy ot the pure 
 negro type to the pallid yellow of the quadroon, and 
 these mixed bloods were more odious to ber than the 
 others, because she felt herself more akin to them ; but 
 they were all abhorrent. Some of the elder people 
 made fervent responses to thoughts and sentiments 
 in the lecture as if it had been a sermon. u That 
 is so ! " they said. " Bless the Lord, that s the 
 truth!" and "Glory to God!" One old woman, 
 who sat in the same line of pews witli Khoda, 
 opened her mouth like a eatlUh. to emit the>e pious 
 ejaculations. 
 
 The lii-lit wa- warm, and as tin- church filled, the 
 musky exhalations of their bodies thickened tlie air. 
 
94 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 and made the girl faint ; it seemed to her that she 
 began to taste the odor ; and these poor people, whom 
 their Creator has made so hideous by the standards of 
 all his other creatures, roused a cruel loathing in her, 
 which expressed itself in a frantic refusal of their 
 claim upon her. In her heart she cast them off with 
 vindictive hate. " Yes," she thought, " I should have 
 whipped them, too. They are animals ; they are only 
 fit to be slaves." But when she shut her eyes, and 
 heard their wild, soft voices, her other senses were 
 holden, and she was rapt by the music from her 
 frenzy of abhorrence. In one of these suspenses, 
 while she sat listening to the sound of the lecturer s 
 voice, which now and then struck a plangent note, 
 like some rich, melancholy bell, a meaning began to 
 steal out of it to her whirling thoughts. 
 
 "Yes, my friends," it went on saying, "you got to 
 commence doing a person good if you expect to love 
 them as Jesus loved us when he died for us. And 
 oh, if our white brethren could only understand 
 and they re gettin to understand it that if they 
 would help us a little more, they needn t hate us 
 so much, what a great thing," the lecturer lamely 
 concluded " what a great thing it would be all 
 round ! " 
 
 " Amen ! Love s the thing," said the voice of the 
 old woman with the catfish mouth ; and Rhoda, who 
 did not see her, did not shudder. Her response in 
 spired the lecturer to go on. " I believe it s the one 
 way out of all the trouble in this world. You can t 
 
\\ IM1T.KATIVK 1)1 TV. 95 
 
 fight y"".r W:l y out, and you can t steal your \vay out, 
 and you can t lie your way out. But you can love 
 your way out. And how can you love your way out? 
 Hy helpin* somebody else ! Yes, that s it. Somebody 
 that needs your help. And now if there s any one 
 here that s in trouble, and wants to get out of trouble, 
 all he s got to do is to help somebody else out. Re 
 member that when the collection is taken up durin 
 the singin of the hymn. Our college needs help, and 
 every person that helps our college helps himself. 
 Let us pray ! " 
 
 The application was apt enough, and Rhoda did not 
 feel anything grotesque in it. She put into the plate 
 which the old woman passed to her from the collector 
 all the money she had in her purse, notes and silver, 
 and two or three gold pieces that had remained over 
 to her from her European travel. Her companion saw 
 tli in, and interrupted herself in her singing to say, 
 "The Lawd 11 bless it to you; He ll help them that 
 helps them that can t help themselv >." 
 
 * Yes, that is the clew," the girl said to herself. 
 " That is the way out ; the only way. I can endure 
 tlieni if I can love them, and I shall love them if I try 
 to help them. This money will help them." 
 
 But she did not venture to look around at the 
 objects of her beneficence ; she was afraid that the 
 sight of their faces would harden her heart against 
 them in spite of her giving, and she kept her eyes shut, 
 listening to their pathetic voices. She stood forgetful 
 after the lecturer had pronounced the benediction > 
 7 
 
96 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 he was a divinity student, and he could not forego 
 it and her companion had to touch her arm. Then 
 she started with a shiver, as if from a hypnotic 
 trance. 
 
 Once out on the street she was afraid, and begged 
 the old woman to go back to her hotel with her. 
 
 " Why, sholy, lady," she consented. 
 
 But Rhoda did not hear. Her mind had begun 
 suddenly to fasten itself upon a single thought, a sole 
 purpose, and " Yes," she pondered, " that is the first 
 thing of all ; to forgive her ; to tell her that I forgive 
 her, and that I understand and pity her. But how 
 how shall I begin ? I shall have to do her some good 
 to begin with, and how can I do that when I hate her 
 so ? I do hate her ; I do hate her ! It is her 
 fault ! " 
 
 As she hurried along, almost running, and heedless 
 of the old woman at her side, trying to keep up with 
 her, it seemed to her that if her aunt had told her long 
 ago, when a child, what she was, she would somehow 
 not have been it now. 
 
 It was not with love, not with pardon, but with 
 frantic hate and accusal in her heart, that she burst 
 into the room, and rushed to Mrs. Meredith s sofa, 
 where she lay still. 
 
 " Aunt Caroline, wake up ! Can you sleep when 
 you see me going perfectly crazy? It is no time for 
 sleeping ! Wake ! " 
 
 The moony pallor of an electric light suspended 
 over the street shone in through the naked window 
 
AN IMPF.RATIVK DITV. 97 
 
 and fell upon Mrs. Meredith s face. It was white, 
 and as the girl started back her foot struck the empty 
 bottle from which the woman had drained the sleeping 
 medicine, and let lie where she had let it fall upon 
 the floor, llhoda caught it up, and flew with it to 
 the light. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE thing that had been lurking in a dark corner 
 of Olney s mind, intangible if not wholly invisible, 
 came out sensible to touch and sight when he parted 
 with Mrs. Meredith. At first it masqueraded a little 
 longer as resentment of that hapless creature s fate, a 
 creature so pretty, so proud, and by all the rights of 
 her youth and sex heiress of a prosperous and un 
 clouded future, the best love and the tenderest care 
 that any man could give her. Then it began to de 
 clare itself a fear lest the man whose avowal had given 
 him the right to know everything concerning her, 
 might prove superior to it, and nobly renounce his 
 privilege, and gladly take her for what she had always 
 seemed, for what, except in so remote degree, she 
 really was. Then Olney knew that he was himself in 
 love with her, and that he was judging a rival s possi 
 bilities by his own, and dreading them. He had an 
 impulse to go back to Mrs. Meredith and say that he 
 was ready to take all those risks and chances which 
 she had counted so great, and laugh them to scorn in 
 the gladness of his heart if he could only hope that 
 Rhoda would ever love him. A few years before he 
 would have obeyed his impulse, and even now he 
 dramatized an obedience to it, and exacted from Mrs. 
 
AX I.M1M I;A 1 IVK DUTY. 99 
 
 Meredith a promise that >lir would not speak to Miss 
 Aldgate until he had found time to put his fortune to 
 the touch, and it he won, would never speak to her. 
 But at thirty he hud his hesitations, his misgivings, 
 not indeed as to "the wish, but as to the way. For 
 one thing, lie was too late, if Mrs. Meredith s con 
 jectures were right ; and for another, he felt it dis 
 honorable to do what he longed in his heart to do, and 
 steal from this man, whom he began to hate, the love 
 upon which his courageous wooing had given him the 
 right to count. Such a thing would be not theft only 
 in the possible but not probable case she did not euro 
 for his rival, and he had no means of knowing the 
 fact as to that. It might be defended if not justified 
 on the ground that he wished to keep her forever in 
 ignorance of what it was Mrs. Meredith s clear duty 
 otherwise to tell her; Olney comforted liiinself with 
 the theory that a woman who had d -laved in her duty 
 so long would doubtless put it oH" till the last moment, 
 and that until this Mr. Bloomingdale actually appeared, 
 and there was no loop-hole left her, she would not 
 cease attempting to escape from her duty. 
 
 He postponed any duty which he himself had in the 
 matter through the love he now owned ; he made it 
 contingent upon hers ; but all the same, he determined 
 to forego no right it gave him. Again he had a mind 
 to go back to Mrs. Meredith, and ask her to do noth 
 ing until Bloomingdale came, and then, before she 
 spoke, to authorize him to approach the man as her 
 family physician and deal tentatively, hypothetically, 
 
100 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 with the matter, and interpret his probable decision 
 from his actual behavior. 
 
 This course, which appeared the only course open 
 to him, commended itself more and more to Olney as 
 he thought of it ; here was something practicable, 
 here was something that was perhaps even obligatory 
 upon him; he tried to believe it was obligatory. But 
 it occurred to him only after long turmoil of thinking 
 and feeling in other directions, and it was half-past 
 seven o clock before he returned from a walk he took 
 as a final means of clearing his mind, and went to 
 Mrs. Meredith s room to propose it to her. He 
 knocked several times without response, and then 
 went to the office to see if she had gone out and left 
 her key with the clerk ; he was now in a hurry to 
 speak to her. 
 
 The clerk felt in the pigeon-hole of Mrs. Meredith s 
 number. " Her key isn t here, but that s no sign she 
 hasn t gone out. Ladies seldom leave their keys 
 when they go out ; we re only too glad if they leave 
 em when they go away for good. I thought she was 
 sick." 
 
 " She would be able to drive out." 
 Olney mastered his impatience as well as he could, 
 and went in to his dinner. After dinner he knocked 
 again at Mrs. Meredith s door, and confirmed himself 
 in the belief that she had gone out. After that it 
 was not so easy to wait for her to come back. He 
 wished to remain of the mind he had been about 
 speaking to her of Rhoda, and to avow himself her 
 
AN IMl KKATIVi-: ! : V. } \ 
 
 lover at nil risk-. l>ut more and more he began to feel 
 that lie W&a too late, that he was quixotic, that he was 
 ridiculous. He felt himself wavering from his purpose, 
 and he held to it all the more tenaciously for that 
 reason. If he was willing to hazard all upon the 
 chance of being in time, that gave him the right to 
 ask that the girl might be spared ; but when he 
 thought she and Mrs. Meredith were probably spend 
 ing the evening together with the Bloomingdales, his 
 courage failed. It was but too imaginable that Miss 
 Aldgate had made up her mind to accept that man, 
 and that her aunt would tell her all that he longed to 
 save her from knowing before he could prevent it. 
 
 When at la-t lie went a third time to her door, he 
 ventured to turn the knob, and the door opened to his 
 inward pressure. It let in with him a glare of gas 
 from the lamp in the entry, and by this light he saw 
 Rhoda standing beside her aunt s sofa with the empty 
 bottle in her hand. She had her hat on, and at the 
 face she turned him across her shoulder, a shiver of 
 prescience passed over him. It was the tragic mask, 
 the inherited woe, unlit by a gleam of the bright in 
 which had sometimes seemed Heaven s direct gift to 
 the girl on whom that burden of ancestral sin and sor 
 row had descend**!. 
 
 "What is the matter?" he murmured. 
 
 Rhoda gave him the empt\ bottle. " She s drunk 
 it all. She s dead." 
 
 "Oh, no," he almost laughed. "It would be too 
 soon." He dropped on his knees beside the insensi- 
 
I Jl! .iN IMP KRATIVK DUTY. 
 
 ble body, and satisfied himself by pulse and breath 
 that the life had not yet left it. But to keep it there 
 was now the business, and Gluey began his losing 
 fight with a sort of pluriscience in which it seemed to 
 him that he was multiplied into three selves : one ap 
 plying all the antidotes and using all the professional 
 skill with instant coolness ; another guarding the 
 probable suicide from the conjecture of the hotel 
 servants and keeping the whole affair as silent as pos 
 sible ; another devotedly vigilant of the poor girl who 
 was so deeply concerned in the small chances of success 
 perceptible to Olney, and who, whether he succeeded 
 or not, was destined to so sad an orphanage. When 
 he thought of the chance that fate was invisibly offer 
 ing her, he almost wished he might fail, but he fought 
 his battle through with relentless scientific conscience. 
 At the end it was his part to say, " It s over ; she s 
 dead." 
 
 " I knew she was," Rhoda answered apathetically. 
 "I expected it." 
 
 " Where were you ? " he asked, with the sort of sad 
 futility with which, when all is done, the spirit con 
 tinues its endeavor. " Was she alone ? " 
 
 " Yes. I had gone out," Rhoda said. 
 
 " What time was that ? " Olney wondered that he 
 had not asked this before ; perhaps he had made some 
 mistake through not having verified the moment. 
 
 " It was about half-past seven," answered the girl. 
 
 " You went out at half-past seven I And when did 
 you return ? " 
 
AX IMPERATIVE DUTY. li;! 
 
 " We had a quarrel. I didn t come back till nearly 
 ten when you came in." 
 
 The poignancy of Olney s interest remained, but it 
 took another direction. " You were out all the even 
 ing alone ? Excuse my asking," he made haste to 
 add, " But I don t understand " 
 
 I wasn t alone," said Rhoda. " I met an old col 
 ored woman on the street, and she went with me to 
 the colored church. She came home with me." The 
 girl said this quietly, as if there were nothing at all 
 strange in it. 
 
 Her calm left Olney in the question which he was 
 always pressing home to himself; whether her aunt 
 had told her that thing. It was on his tongue to ask 
 her whv she went to the colored church, and what her 
 quarrel with her aunt was about. He asked her in 
 stead, " Did you think, when you left her, that Mrs. 
 Meredith seemed different at all that ? " 
 
 " I didn t notice," said Rhoda. " No. She seemed 
 as she often did. But I know she thought she hadn t 
 taken enough of the medicine. She wanted to sleep 
 more." 
 
 Rhoda sat by the window of the little parlor where 
 she had sat when the dead woman had told her that 
 dreadful thing, and she remembered how she had 
 glanced out of it and seen Olney in the street. The 
 gas was now at full blaze in the room, but she glanced 
 through the window again, and saw that the day wa- 
 beginning to come outside. She turned from the chill 
 of its pale light, and looked at Olney. Through the 
 
104 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 irresistible association of ideas, she looked for his 
 baldness with the lack-lustre eyes she lifted to his 
 face. 
 
 " Is there anything you wish me anything I can 
 do ? " he asked, after a silence, in which he got back 
 to the level of practical affairs, though still stupefied 
 from what Rhoda had said. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " I mean, notify your friends your family tele 
 graph - 
 
 " I have no friends no relatives. We were alone ; 
 all our family are dead." 
 
 " But Mr. Meredith s family there is surely some 
 one that you can call upon at this time." 
 
 A strong compassion swelled in Olney s heart ; he 
 yearned to take her in his arms and be all the world 
 to one who had no one in all the world. 
 
 She remained as if dazed, and then she said, with a 
 perplexed look : " I was trying to think who there 
 was. Mr. Meredith s people lived in St. Louis ; I re 
 member some of them when I was little. Perhaps my 
 aunt would have their address." 
 
 She went into the adjoining chamber where the 
 dead woman lay, in the atmosphere of useless drugs 
 and effectless antidotes, and Oln-ey thought, "It s the 
 mechanical operation of custom ; she s going to ask 
 her," but Rhoda came back with an address-book in 
 her hand, as if she had gone directly to Mrs. Mere 
 dith s writing case for it with no such error of cere 
 bration. 
 
AN IMPERATIVE hi TV. 105 
 
 "Hen- it is," >he said. 
 
 " Very well. I ll telegraph them at once. But in 
 the mean time, what will you do, Miss Aldgate ? You 
 can t stav here in the hotel she can t. How can I be 
 of use to you?" Olney felt all the disinterestedness 
 in the world in asking, but in what lie a>ke<l m-xt he 
 had a distinct consciousness of self-interest, or at lea>t 
 of selfish curiosity. " Shall I let your friends at the 
 Vendome " 
 
 " Oh, no, no, no ! " she broke out. " Not on any 
 account ! I couldn t bear to see them. Don t think 
 of such a thing ! No, indeed, I can t let you ! " 
 
 The self-seeker is never fully rewarded, and Olney 
 was left with a doubt whether this reluctance meant 
 abhorrence of the Blooiningdales, or unwillingness to 
 receive kindness from them which might involve some 
 loss of her perfect independence to the spirited girl ; 
 she would not choose or be chosen for any reason but 
 one. He could not make out from her manner as yet 
 whether her aunt had spoken what was on her mind to 
 speak or not; it seemed such a cruel invasion of her 
 rights even to conjecture, that he tried to put the 
 question out of his thoughts. 
 
 He began again while he was sensible of an unequal 
 struggle with the question, which intruded itself in the 
 swift whirl of his anxieties, as to what could immedi 
 ately be done for her. 
 
 " Is there anything else you would suggest? " 
 
 " No," said the girl, in the div:un\ quiet she seemed 
 helpless to emerge from. I suppose it wouldn t do, 
 
106 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 even if we could find her. I was thinking of the old 
 woman I saw to-night," she explained. " I would like 
 to go and stay with her if I could." 
 
 " Is it some one you know ? " 
 
 "No, I don t know her. I just met her on the 
 street, and we went to the colored people s church 
 together. I went out after dinner and left my aunt 
 alone. That was when she drank it." 
 
 She added the vague sentences together with a 
 child s heedlessness as to their reaching her listener s 
 intelligence, and she did not persist in her whimsical 
 suggestion. 
 
 Olney left it too. " You must let me get you an 
 other room," he said; "You can t stay here any 
 longer," and he made her take her hat and come with 
 him to the hotel parlor. He went to arrange the 
 business with the clerk, and to tell him of Mrs. Mere 
 dith s death ; then he had to go about other duties 
 connected with the case, which he rather welcomed as 
 a distraction ; to notify the fact and cause of Mrs. 
 Meredith s death to the authorities, and to give the 
 funeral preparations in charge. But when this was 
 all done, and he could no longer play off the aggregate 
 of these minor cares against his great one, he began to 
 be harassed again about Miss Aldgate. 
 
IT was so mucn easier to dispose of the friendless 
 dead than the friendless living, Olney thought, with 
 a sardonic perception of one of the bitterest truths 
 in the world ; and he was not consoled by the reflec 
 tion that it is often the man readiest to do all for a 
 woman who can do nothing for her. At the same time 
 he hurried along imagining a scene in which Rhoda 
 owned her love for him, and for his sake and her own, 
 consented to throw convention to the winds, and to 
 unite her fate with his in a marriage truly solemnized 
 by the presence of death. He was aroused from this 
 preposterous melodrama by a voice that said, with 
 liking and astonishment, " Why, Dr. Olney ! " and he 
 found himself confronted with Mrs. Atherton, whom 
 he had known as Miss Clara Kingsbury. In another 
 moment she had flooded him with inquiry and explana 
 tion, from which he emerged with the dim conscious 
 ness that he had told her how he happened not to be 
 in Florence, and had heard how she happened to be in 
 Boston. Her presence in the city at such an untimely 
 season was to be accounted for by the eccentric spirit 
 in which she carried on her visiting for the Associated 
 Charities ; she visited her families in the summer, 
 while most people looked after their families only in 
 
108 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 the winter. She excused herself by saying that Bev 
 erly was so near, and sometimes it gave her a chance 
 for a little bohemian lunch with Mr. Atherton. 
 
 Olney laid his trouble before her. IIo knew from 
 of old that if he could not count upon her tact, he 
 could count upon her imagination, and he was quite 
 prepared for the sympathy with which she rushed to 
 his succor, a sympathy that in spite of the circum 
 stances could not be called less than jubilant. 
 
 " Why, the poor, forlorn, little helpless creature! 
 she exulted. " I ll go to the hotel at once with you, 
 doctor ; and she must come down to Beverly with me, 
 and stay till her friends come on for her." 
 
 The question whether he was not bound in honor to 
 tell Mrs. Atherton just what Miss Aldgate was, crazily 
 visited him, and became a kind of longing before he 
 could rid himself of it ; he dismissed it only upon the 
 terms of a self-promise to entertain it some other time ; 
 and he availed himself of her good offices almost as 
 joyfully as she proposed them. He had to submit to 
 the romantic supposition which he was aware Mrs. 
 Atherton was keeping out of her words and looks, and 
 he joined her in the conspicuous pretence she made 
 throughout the affair that he was acting from the most 
 disinterested, the most scientific motives. 
 
 It was not so hard as he had fancied it might be to 
 get Miss Aldgate s consent to Mrs. Athertou s hospi 
 tality. It was the only possible thing for her, and she 
 acquiesced simply, like one accustomed to favors; 
 she expressed a sense of the kindness done her, with 
 
AX IMIM.K \TIVK Df TY. 109 
 
 a delicate self-respect which Olney hardly knew how 
 to account for upon the theory that Mrs. Meredith had 
 spoken to her. Apparently she appreciated all the 
 necessities of the case, and she did not troublesomely 
 interpose any of the reluctances of grief which he had 
 expected. If he could have wished any difference in 
 her it would have been for rather less composure ; hut 
 then this might have been the apathy following the 
 great shock she had received. He willingly accepted 
 Mrs. Atherton s theory, hurriedly whispered at part 
 ing, that she did not realize what had happened yet ; 
 Mrs. Atherton seemed to prize her the more for it. 
 
 He came back from seeing them off on the train to 
 the hotel, where he found a telegram from Mrs. Mere 
 dith s connections in St. Louis. They were very 
 sorry ; they were unable to come on ; they would 
 write. Olney felt a grateful lift of the heart in think 
 ing of Miss Aldgate in Mrs. Atherton s affectionate 
 keeping, as he crumpled the despatch in his hand and 
 tossed it on his dismal white-marble hearth. He be 
 lieved that he read between its words a revelation of 
 the fact that the dead woman s husband had not kept 
 Rhoda s secret from his family, and that these unable 
 friends, whatever they wrote, were riot likely to urge 
 any claim to comfort the girl. 
 
 It was Mrs. Bloomingdale who came to do this with 
 several of her large and passive daughters, about as 
 long after the evening papers came out as would take 
 her to drive over from the Vendome. Olney had been 
 able to persuade the reporters who got hold of the case 
 
110 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 that there was nothing to work up in it, and the para 
 graph that Mrs. Bloomingdale saw was discreet enough ; 
 it attributed Mrs. Meredith s death to an overdose of 
 the soporific prescribed for her, and it connected 
 Olney s name with the matter as the physician who 
 happened to be stopping in the hotel with the unfor 
 tunate lady. 
 
 " I came the instant I read it," Mrs. Bloomingdale 
 explained, " for I couldn t believe the evidence of my 
 senses," and she added such a circumstantial statement 
 of her mental struggle with the fact projected into her 
 consciousness as could leave no doubt that the fact 
 itself was far less important than the effect produced 
 upon her. 
 
 As Olney listened he lost entirely a lurking discom 
 fort he had felt at Miss Aldgate s refusal to let those 
 people have anything to do with her or for her in her 
 calamity. Whatever the son might be, the mother 
 was a vulgarly selfish woman, posing before him as a 
 generous benefactress, who was also a martyr. u I 
 asked for you, doctor," she went on, at the end of her 
 personal history in connection with the affair, " be 
 cause I preferred not to intrude upon that poor young 
 creature without learning just how I ought to approach 
 her. As I said to my daughter Roberta, in coming 
 along " she put the tallest and serenest of the big, 
 still blondes in evidence with a wave of her hand 
 " I would be ruled entirely by what you said of the* 
 newspaper report." 
 
 Qlney said of it dryly that it was quite correct. 
 
JLN IMPERATIVE DUTY. Ill 
 
 " Oil, I am so relieved, doctor ! " said Mrs. Bloom- 
 ingdale. " I didn t know, don t you know I thought 
 perhaps that there were facts details which you pre 
 ferred to keep from the public ; that there were pecu 
 liar circumstances aberration, don t you know ; and 
 that kind of thing. But I m so glad there wasn t! " 
 
 Oluey felt a malicious desire to disturb this crowing 
 complacency which he believed was the cover of mean 
 anxieties and suspicions. He asked, " Do you mean 
 suicide?" 
 
 " Well, no ; not that exactly. But " She stopped, 
 and he merely said : 
 
 " There was no evidence of suicidal intent." 
 
 " Oh ! " said Mrs. Bloomingdale, but, as he intended, 
 not so crowingly this time. "And then you think 
 I can ask for Miss Aldgate ? " 
 
 " Miss Aldgate is not here " Olney began. 
 
 " Not here ! " 
 
 " She is with Mrs. Athertou, at Beverly. She 
 couldn t remain here, you know." 
 
 " And may I ask do I understand Why didn t 
 Miss Aldgate let us know ? " 
 
 Olney rejoiced to be able to say, " I suggested that, 
 but she preferred not to disturb you." 
 
 "And why did she prefer that?" said Mrs. Bloom 
 ingdale, with rising crest. 
 
 " I m sorry, I don t know. It was by accident that 
 I met Mrs. Atherton on the street ; she is a well- 
 known lady here, and she at once took Miss Aldgate 
 home with her." 
 8 
 
112 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 At the bottom of his heart Olney did not feel alto 
 gether easy at what he knew of Miss Aldgate s rela 
 tions to the Bloomingdale family. He would have 
 liked to blind himself to facts that proved her weak 
 or at least light-mindedly fond of any present pleasure 
 at the cost of any future complication, but he was not 
 quite able to do so, much as he wished to inculpate 
 the Bloomingdales. He was silent, and attempted no 
 farther explanation or defence of Rhoda s refusal to 
 see them. 
 
 "I presume, Dr. Olney," Mrs. Bloomingdale went 
 on, " that you know nothing of the circumstances of 
 our acquaintance with Miss Aldgate ; and I can t ex 
 pect you to sympathize with my my surprise that 
 she should have turned from us at such a time. But 
 I must say that I am very greatly surprised. Or not 
 surprised, exactly. Pained." 
 
 " I am very sorry," Olney said agaiu. " I have no 
 right to intervene in any matter so far beyond my 
 functions as Mrs. Meredith s physician, but I venture 
 to suggest that the blow which has fallen on Miss Aid- 
 gate is enough to account for what seems strange to 
 you in " 
 
 " Of course. Certainly. I make allowance for that, * 
 said Mrs. Bloomingdale ; and Olney was aware of re 
 ceiving this proof of her amiability, her liberality, with 
 regret ; he would have so willingly had it otherwise, 
 in justification of Miss Aldgate. "And I know that 
 the past year has been one of great anxiety both to 
 Mrs. Meredith and Miss Aldgate. You knew they 
 had lost their money ? " 
 
AN IMPERATIVE I lTY. 113 
 
 "No," >aid Olney, with a joyful throb of the heart, 
 " I didn t." 
 
 I have understood so. Miss Aldgate will be left 
 A\ ithout anything in a manner. But that would have 
 made no difference to us. We should have been only 
 too glad to prove to her that it made no difference. 
 But if she prefers not to see us We expect my son 
 by Wednesday s steamer in New York." She added 
 this suddenly and with apparent irrelevance, but Olney 
 perceived that she wished to test his knowledge of the 
 whole case, and she had instantly learned from his face 
 that he knew much more than he would own. But he 
 made no verbal concession to her curiosity. " I think 
 you met my son in Florence ? " she said. 
 
 44 1 saw him at Professor Garofalo s one night." 
 
 " He was there a great deal. It was there he met 
 Mrs. Meredith." Olney said nothing, and Mrs. 
 Bloomingdale rose, and as with the same motion her 
 large daughters rose. " May I ask, Dr. Olney, that 
 you will give Miss Aldgate our love, and say to her 
 that if there is anything we can do, we shall be so 
 I suppose you have had to communicate with Mrs. 
 Meredith s or Mr. Meredith s rather family ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "They will be at the funeral, of course ; and if " 
 
 "They are not coming," said Olney. " They have 
 telegraphed that they are unable to come." 
 
 " Oh, "said Mrs. Bloomingdale; and after a little 
 pause she said, " Good-afternoon," and led her girls 
 out. 
 
114 AN IMPERATIVE: DUTY. 
 
 Olney felt that he had parted with an enemy, and 
 that though he had in one sort tried to keep a con 
 scientious neutrality, he had discharged himself of an 
 offensive office in a hostile manner, ,hat he had made 
 her his enemy if not Miss Aldgate s enemy. She sus 
 pected him, he knew that, of having somehow come 
 between her and Miss Aldgate of his own will as well 
 as Rhoda s. In view of this fact he had to ask him 
 self to be very explicit as to his feelings, his hopes, 
 his intentions ; and after a season of close question, 
 the response was very clear. He could not doubt 
 what he wished to do ; the only doubt he had was as 
 to how and where and whether he could do it. 
 
XI. 
 
 THE day of the funeral Blooiningdftle arrived. None 
 of his family had come to the last rites, though Olney 
 had made it a point both of conscience and of honor to 
 let them know when and where the ceremony would 
 take place, lie felt that their absence was an expres 
 sion of resentment, but that it was a provisional re 
 sentment merely. There was a terrible provisionally 
 about the whole business, beginning with the provi 
 sional deposition of the dead in the receiving-vault at 
 Mount Auburn, till it could be decided \\ln-re the long- 
 tormented clay was finally to rest. Every decision 
 concerning the affair seemed postponed, but he did not 
 know till when; death had apparently decided noth 
 ing ; he did not see how life should. 
 
 Bloomingdale came to see him in the evening, after 
 dinner. His steamer had been late in getting up to 
 her dock, and he had missed the first train on to Bos 
 ton. He explained the ta< t briefly to Olney, and he- 
 said he had come directly to see him. lie recalled 
 their former meeting in Florence, but said, with some 
 how an effect of disappointment, that In- had taken an 
 older man whom he had seen at Professor Garofalo s 
 for Dr. ()ln-y. On his part, Olney could have owned 
 to an e(|ual disappointment, lie remembered perfectly 
 
116 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 that Mr. Bloomingdale was a slight, dark man ; but 
 the composite Bloomingdale type, from the successive 
 impressions of his mother s and sisters style, was so 
 deeply stamped in his consciousness that he was sur 
 prised to find the young minister himself neither large 
 nor blond. His mind wandered from him to the 
 father whom he had never seen, but who had left 
 so distinct a record of himself in his son, and not in 
 his daughters, as fathers are supposed usually to do. 
 Then Olney s thoughts turned to that whole vexed 
 question of heredity, and he lost himself deeply in 
 conjecture of Rhoda s ancestry, while Bloomingdale 
 was feeling his way forward to inquire about her 
 through explanation and interest concerning Mrs. 
 Meredith, and a fit sympathy, a most intelligent and 
 delicate appreciation of the situation in all its details. 
 Before the fact formulated itself in his mind, Olney 
 was aware of feeling that this man was as different 
 from his family in the most essential and characteristic 
 qualities as he was different from them in tempera 
 ment and complexion. 
 
 " And now about Miss Aldgate, Dr. Olney," he said, 
 with a kind of authority, which Olney instinctively, how 
 ever unwillingly, admitted. " I shall have to tell you 
 why I am so very anxious to know how she is how 
 she bears this blow. I am afraid my mother betrayed 
 to you the hurt which she felt, that Miss Aldgate 
 should not have turned to her in her trouble ; but I 
 can understand how impossible it was she should. 
 Without reflecting upon my mother at all for her 
 
AN IMI KUATIVK IHTY. 117 
 
 feeling for I can see how she would feel as she does 
 I must say I don t share it. While Miss Aldgate 
 was still uncertain about about myself it was 
 simply impossible that she should receive any sort of 
 favor or kindness from my family even in such an ex 
 igency as this. I, would have been indelicate; it 
 must have been infinitely easier for her to accept the 
 good offices of a total stranger, as she has done. Dr. 
 Gluey, I have to ask your good offices and I have 
 first to make you a confidence, as my reason for asking 
 them. I m sure you will understand me ! " 
 
 In the fervor of his feeling the young man s voice 
 trembled, and Olney felt himself moved with a curious 
 involuntary kindness for him the sort of admiring 
 pity which men have been said to feel toward a brave 
 foeman they mean to fight to the death. " I had a 
 very great hope and I think I had grounds for my 
 hope that Miss Aldgate would have consented to be 
 my wife when she met me, if this terrible visitation 
 if all had gone well." The words sent a cold thrill 
 through Olney s heart, and the mere suggestion that 
 Rhoda could be anybody s wife but his own steeled it 
 against this pretender to her love. " I offered myself 
 to her in Liverpool before she sailed, and she was to 
 have given me her answer here when we met. Now, 
 I don t know what to do. I don t know anything. 
 The whole world seems tumbled back into chaos. I 
 can t urge anything upon her at such a time. I m not 
 even sure that I can decently ask to see her. And 
 yet if I don t, what may not she think ? Can t you 
 
118 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 help me in this matter ? You were Mrs. Meredith s 
 physician, and you stand in a sort of relation to Miss 
 Aldgate that would authorize you to let her know that 
 I am here, and very anxious to know what her wish 
 her will is as to our meeting. It might not be 
 professional, exactly, but I came to you with the 
 hope that it might be possible. Does it seem asking 
 too much? I should be very sorry " 
 
 Olney saw that the man s sensitiveness was taking 
 fire, and in spite of his resentment of a request which 
 set aside all his own secret hopes and intentions as 
 non-existent, he could not forbear a concession to his 
 unwitting rival s generous feeling. " Not at all," he 
 said ; " but I doubt my authority to intervene in any 
 way. I have no right " 
 
 Only the right I ve suggested," the young man 
 urged. " I wouldn t have you assume anything for 
 my sake. But I know that the circumstances are 
 more than ordinarily distressing, and that Mrs. Mere 
 dith s death came in a way that might make Miss 
 Aldgate afraid that that there might be some 
 shadow of change in me on account of them. At such 
 times we have misgivings about everybody ; but I wish 
 it to be understood that no circumstance could influ 
 ence my feeling toward her." 
 
 " I don t know whether I understand you exactly," 
 said Olney, with a growing dread of the man s gen 
 erosity. 
 
 " Why, I suppose, from what I am able to learn, 
 that poor Mrs. Meredith committed suicide." 
 
AN IMPKUAT1VK DUTY. 119 
 
 " Not at all," Olney promptly returned. - There is 
 no evidence of that. There s every indication that she 
 simply took an overdose of the medicine I prescribed. 
 It wouldn t have killed her of itself, but her forces 
 were otherwise weakened." 
 
 I m glad, for her sake, to hear it," said Blooming- 
 dale, "but it would have made no difference with me 
 if it had been different. If she had taken her life in 
 a fit of insanity, as I inferred, it would only have made 
 me more constant in the feeling. There is no con 
 ceivable disadvantage which would not have endeared 
 
 o 
 
 Miss Aldgate more to me. I could almost wish for 
 the direst misfortune, the deepest disgrace," he went 
 on, while the tears sprang to his eyes, " to befall her, 
 if only that I might show her that it counted nothing 
 against her, that it counted everything for lu-r ! " 
 
 Olney s heart sank within him, and he felt guilty 
 before this unselfish frankness, which, if a little boy 
 ish, was still so noble. He knew very well that if 
 such a lover could be told everything, it would not 
 matter the least to him ; that the girl might be as 
 black as ebony, and his passion would paint her di 
 vinely fairer than the lily. Olney knew this from his 
 own thoughts as well as from the other s words ; he 
 was himself like the spirit he conceived : 
 
 " Du gleichst dem Geist dem du begreifst." 
 
 But he was aware of an instant purpose not to let his 
 rival be brought to the test; and he was aware at the 
 same time of a duty he had to let him somehow have 
 
120 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 his chance. " After all," he reflected, " what reason 
 have I to suppose that she ever cared a moment for 
 me, or ever could care ? Very likely she likes this 
 fellow ; he is lovable ; he is a fine fellow, though I 
 hate him so ; and what right have I to stand between 
 them ? He must have his chance." When he came 
 to this point, he said aloud, coldly, " I don t under 
 stand what you expect me to do." 
 
 " Nothing ! Only this : to let me go and see the 
 lady with whom Miss Aldgate is staying, and learn 
 from her whether and when Miss Aldgate will see me. 
 That s all I can reasonably ask. I ought to ask as 
 much if I meant to give her up and it s all that I 
 ask meaning never to give her up. Yes, that s all I 
 can ask ! " he repeated, desperately. 
 
 " That will be a very simple matter," said Olney. 
 " Miss Aldgate is with Mrs. Atherton, at Beverly. I 
 can give you her address, and my card to her." 
 
 " Yes, yes ! Thank you thank you ever so much. 
 But but if 1 present myself without explanation, 
 what will this lady think ? " 
 
 " She ll give your name to Miss Aldgate, and that 
 will be explanation enough," said Olney, finding some 
 thing a little superfine in this hesitation, and refusing 
 to himself to be the bearer of any sort of confidences 
 to Mrs. Atherton, who would be only too likely to 
 take a romantic interest in the devoted young minister. 
 Oluey meant to give him an even chance, but nothing 
 more. 
 
 "True ! " said Bloomingdale, nervously gnawing his 
 
AN IMI KIIATIN K Dl TV. 121 
 
 lip. "True!" He drew a long breath, and added, 
 " Of course, I can t go now till morning." 
 
 Olnoy said nothing as to this. lie was writing on 
 his card Mrs. Atherton s address and the introduction 
 for Bloomingdale which he combined with it. lie had 
 resolved to go down himself that night. Bloomingdale 
 clung fervently to his hand in parting. 
 
 " I can never thank you enough ! " he palpitated. 
 
 " You have very little to thank me for," said Olney. 
 
XII. 
 
 IF Mrs. Atherton thought it strange of Dr. Olney to 
 drive up to her sea-side door at half-past nine, out of 
 a white fog that her hospitable hall lamp could pierce 
 only a few paces down the roadway, she dissembled 
 her surprise so well that he felt he was doing the most 
 natural thing, not to say the most conventional thing, 
 in the world. She was notoriously a woman of no 
 tact, but of so much heart that where it was a question 
 at once of friendship and of romance, as the question 
 of Dr. Olney and of Miss Aldgate was with her, she 
 exercised a sort of inspiration in dealing with it. She 
 put herself so wholly at the service of their imagined 
 exigency that she now made Olney feel his welcome 
 most keenly : a welcome which expressed that she 
 would have been equally glad and equally ready to 
 receive him in her sweet-matted, warm-rugged, hearth- 
 fire-lit little drawing-room, if he had suddenly ap 
 peared at half-past two in the morning. The Japanese 
 portiere had not ceased tinkling behind him when she 
 appeared through it, with outstretched hand. She 
 promptly refused his excuses. " I really believe I was 
 somehow expecting you to-night ; and I m ashamed 
 that Mr. Atherton isn t up to bear witness to my pre 
 sentiment. But he s had rather a tiresome day, in 
 
AX IMIM KA IIVI. DUTY. 123 
 
 town, and he s gone to bed early. I m glad to say 
 that Miss Aldgate has gone to her room, too. She s 
 feeling the reaction from the tension she s been in, and 
 I hope it will be a complete letting down for her. 
 Have you heard anything more from those strange 
 people ? Very odd they shouldn t any of them have 
 come on ! " 
 
 Mrs. Atherton meant the St. Louis connections of 
 Mrs. Meredith, and Oluey said, with an embarrassed 
 frown, " No, they haven t made any sign yet." 
 
 " The strange thing about a tragedy of this kind is," 
 Mrs. Atherton remarked, " that you never can realize 
 that it s ended. You always think there s going to be 
 something more of it. I suppose I was thinking that 
 you had heard something disagreeable from those peo 
 ple, though I don t know what they could say or do to 
 heighten the tragedy." 
 
 " I don t either," Gluey answered. " But some 
 thing else has happened, Mrs. Atherton. You were 
 quite right in your foreboding that the end was not 
 yet." He paused with a gloomier air than he knew, 
 for Bloomingdale fl appearance was to him by far the 
 most tragical phase of the affair. Then he went on 
 thoughtfully : " I hardly know how to approach the 
 matter without seeming to meddle in it more than I 
 mean to do. I wish absolutely to put myself outside 
 of it. But there s a kind of necessity that I should 
 tell you about it." As he said this the kind of neces 
 sity that he had thought there was instantly vanished, 
 and left him feeling rather blank. There was no 
 
124 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 necessity at all that he should tell Mrs. Atnerton what 
 relation Bloomingclale bore, and wished to bear, toward 
 Miss Aldgate. All that he had to do, if he had to do 
 anything, was to tell her that he had given him his 
 card to her, and that she might expect him in the 
 morning, and so leave her to her conjectures. If he 
 went beyond this, he must go very far beyond it, and 
 not make any confidence for Bloomingdale without 
 making a much ampler confidence for himself. "The 
 fact is, I wish to submit a little case of conscience to 
 you." 
 
 Mrs. Atherton was delighted ; and if she had been 
 drowsy before, this would have aroused her to the 
 most vigilant alertness. She knew that the case of 
 conscience must somehow have something to do with 
 Miss Aldgate ; she believed that it was nothing but a 
 love affair in disguise, and a love affair, with a strong 
 infusion of moral question in it, promised a pleasure 
 to Mrs. Atherton s sympathetic nature which nothing 
 else could give. " Yes ? " she said. 
 
 " Mrs. Atherton," Olney resumed, " how far do you 
 think a man is justified in pursuing an advantage 
 which another has put in his hands unknowingly 
 say that another, who did not know that I was his 
 enemy, had put in my hands ? " 
 
 " Not very far, Dr. Olney," she answered, promptly. 
 " In fact, not at all. That is, you might justify such 
 a man, if the case were some one else s. But you 
 couldn t justify him if the case were yours." 
 
 " I was afraid you would say so ; I knew you would 
 
AN IMl l.KATIVK DUTY. 125 
 
 say so. Well, the case is mine," said Gluey, "and it s 
 this. I ve run down here to-night to tell yon that I ve 
 given my card to a gentleman who will call here in 
 the morning." 
 
 Olney paused, and Mrs. Atherton said, "I m sure I 
 shall be glad to see any friend of yours, Dr. Olney." 
 
 " He isn t my friend," Olney returned, gloomily. 
 
 " Then, any enemy," Mrs. Atherton suggested. 
 
 Olney put the little ph-asantry by. "The day !- 
 fore Mrs. Meredith died, she told me something that I 
 need not speak of except as it relates to this Mr. 
 Bloomingdale." 
 
 4 - It s Mr. Bloomiugdale who s coming, then ? " 
 
 " Yes. Do you know anything about him ? " 
 
 " Oh, no ! Only it s a very floral kind of name." 
 
 " I wish I could be light about the kind of person 
 he is. But I can t. He s a very formidable kind of 
 person : very sensible, very frank, very generous." 
 
 Mrs. Atherton shook her head with a subtle intelli 
 gence. " Those might be very disheartening traits 
 in another." 
 
 " They are. They complicate the business for me. 
 This Mr. Bloomingdale has offered himself to Miss 
 Aldgate." Mrs. Atherton s attentive gaze expressed 
 no surprise ; probably she had divined this from the 
 beginning. " He was to have had his answer when 
 he met her in Boston," Olney said, with an effect of 
 finding the words a bad taste in his mouth. " That 
 was the arrangement in Liverpool. But, of course, 
 now " 
 
126 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 He stopped, and Mrs. Atherton took the word, with 
 a lofty courage : 
 
 "Of course now he has all the greater right to it." 
 
 " Yes," said Olney, though he did not see why. 
 
 " I shall be glad to see Mr. Bloomingdale when he 
 comes," Mrs. Atherton went on ; " and though it s an 
 embarrassing moment, I must manage to prepare Miss 
 Aldgate for his coming. She will certainly have her 
 mind made up by this time." 
 
 There was something definitive in Mrs. Atherton s 
 tone that made Olney feel as if he had transacted his 
 business, and he rose. He had felt that he ought to 
 tell Mrs. Atherton of his own hopes or purposes in 
 regard to Miss Aldgate ; but now that he had given 
 Bloomiugdale away, this did not seem necessary. In 
 fact, by a sudden light that flashed upon it, he per 
 ceived that it would be allowing his rival a fairer 
 chance if he let him have it without competition. 
 Afterwards when he got out of the house he thought 
 he was a fool to do this ; but he could not go back 
 and make his confession without appearing a greater 
 fool ; and he kept on to the station, and waited there 
 till the last train for town came lagging along, and 
 then he put himself beyond temptation, at least for 
 the night. 
 
 He spent what was left of it in imaginary interviews, 
 now with Mrs. Atherton, now with Bloomingdale, 
 now with Rhoda, and now with all of them in various 
 combinations, and constructed futures varying in char 
 acter from the gayest happiness to the gloom of the 
 
AN IMPERATIVK DUTY. 127 
 
 darkest tragedy, lit by the one high star of self-renun 
 ciation. Olnoy got almost as much satisfaction out of 
 the renunciation as out of the fruition of his hopes. It 
 i> apt to be so in these hypothetical cases; perhaps it 
 is often so in experience. 
 
 He waited heroically about all the next day to hear 
 from Mrs. Atherton. Something in the pressure of 
 her hand at parting had assured him that she under 
 stood everything, and that she was his friend ; that 
 they were people of honor, who were bound to do this 
 thing at any cost to him, but that a just Providence 
 would probably not let it cost him much, or at least 
 not everything. 
 
 When her letter came at last, hurried forward by a 
 special delivery stamp that spoke volumes in itself, it 
 brought intelligence which at first made Olney feel 
 that he must somehow have been guilty of an unfair 
 ness towards Bloommgdale, that he had tacitly if not 
 explicitly prejudiced his case. There was a little 
 magnanimous moment in which he could not rejoice 
 that Miss Aldgate had absolutely refused to see Mr. 
 Bloommgdale ; that she had shown both surprise and 
 indignation at his coming ; and that no entreaty or ar 
 gument of Mrs. Atherton s had prevailed with her to 
 show him the slightest mercy, or to send him any 
 message but that of abrupt refusal, which- Mrs. Ather- 
 ton softened to him as best she could. She wrote 
 now that she was sure there must be some misunder 
 standing, but that in Miss Aldgate s state of nervous 
 exaltation, it was perfectly useless to urge anything in 
 9 
 
128 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 excuse of him, and she had to resign herself to the 
 girl s decision. She coincided with Olney in his idea 
 of Bloomingdale s character. She owned to a little 
 fancy for him, and to a great deal of compassion. He 
 had borne the severe treatment he received very man 
 fully, and at the same time gently. He seemed to 
 accept it as final, and he did not rebel against it by 
 the slightest murmur. Olney perceived that Mrs. 
 Atherton had been recognized as his rival s confidante 
 far enough to be authorized to pour balm into his 
 wounds, and that she probably had not spared the 
 balm. 
 
XIII. 
 
 OLNEY expected, without being able to say why ex 
 actly, a second visit from the man who was now only 
 his former rival. Perhaps it was because he believed 
 he knew why Miss Aldgate had refused to see him 
 that he rather thought the young man would come to 
 ask him. But he did not come, and in the mean time 
 Olney began to perceive that it would have been pre 
 posterous for him to have come. Till he learned by 
 inquiry of the clerk at the Vendome that Bloomingdale 
 had left there witli his mother and sisters, he did not 
 feel that the minister was out of the story, and that it 
 remained for him alone to read it to the end. He took 
 it for granted that Rhoda treated the man who had 
 certainly a claim upon her kindness in that brusque, 
 not to say brutal manner, out of mere hysterical 
 weakness. She had made up her mind to refuse him, 
 and as she felt she might not have strength to endure 
 the sight of the pain she must inflict, she had deter 
 mined not to witness it. Whether she had loved him 
 too well to afflict him with her secret, or not well 
 enough to trust him with it, was what remained a 
 question with Olney. and he turned from one point of 
 it to the other with the wish to an>\ver it in a sense 
 different from both. What he wished to believe was 
 
130 AX IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 that she did not love the poor young fellow at all, but 
 this seemed to be too good to be true, and he could 
 not believe it with the constancy of his desire. Never 
 theless he had a fitful hold upon it, and it was this 
 faith, wavering and elusive as it was, that encouraged 
 him to think Miss Aldgate would not refuse to see 
 him, and that he might at any rate go down at once 
 to Mrs. Atherton s, and ask about her if not for her. 
 
 When he had reasoned to this conclusion, which he 
 reached with electrical rapidity as soon as he knew 
 that Bloomingdale was gone, he acted upon it. Mrs. 
 Atherton received him with a cheerfulness that ig 
 nored, at least in Miss Aldgate s presence, the fact 
 that lay hidden in their thoughts if not in hers. Olney 
 was not obliged to ask about her or for her ; she came 
 down with Mrs. Atherton, as if it were entirely natu 
 ral she should do so ; and the pathetic confidingness 
 of her reception of him as an old friend, brightened 
 almost into the gayety that was her first and principal 
 charm for him. If it had appeared at once this gayety 
 would have troubled him ; he would have doubted it 
 for that levity of nature, of race, for which Mrs. Mere 
 dith had seen it; but it came out slowly like sunshine 
 through mist, and flattered him with the hope that he 
 had evoked it upon her tragic mask. At the same 
 time he was puzzled, if not shocked, that she seemed 
 forgetful of the woman, so recently gone forever, who 
 had been in all effects a mother to her, and who had 
 sacrificed and borne more than most mothers for her 
 sake. He was himself too inexperienced, as yet, tc 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 131 
 
 know that we grieve 1 or the dead only by fits, by im 
 pulses ; that the boul from time to time flings off with . 
 all its force, the crushing burden, which then sinks 
 slowly back and bows it in sorrow to the earth again ; 
 that if ever grief is constant, it is madness, it is death. 
 Mrs. Atherton could have told him of moments 
 when the girl was prostrated by her bereavement, and 
 realized to their whole meaning the desolation and de 
 spair which it had left her to. But she could not have 
 told him of the stony weight of uuforgiveness at the 
 child s heart ; of her uiiivaxMiing resentment of the 
 dead woman s revelation, as if she had created the 
 fact that she had felt so sorely bound to impart. The 
 tragic circumstances of her death had not won her 
 pardon for this: the girl felt through all that her aunt 
 had somehow made it so ; and for her, ignorant of it all 
 her life till that avowal, she had indeed made it so. 
 Whether a wiser and kinder conscience might not have 
 found it possible to keep the secret, in which there 
 was no guilt or responsibility for the girl, and trust 
 the Judge of all the earth for the end, is a question 
 which the casuist of Mrs. Meredith s school could not 
 deal with. Duty with her could mean but one thing, 
 and she had done her duty. Certainly she was not to 
 be condemned for it ; but neither was the affection 
 which she had so sorely wounded to blame if it had 
 conceived for her memory the bitter dtop of hate 
 which poisoned all Rhoda s thoughts of her. What 
 the girl had constantly said to herself from the first 
 was what she still said : that having kept this secret 
 
132 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 from her all her life, it was too late for her aunt to 
 speak when she did speak at last. Another not in 
 volved in the consequences of her act might not have 
 taken this view of it ; but this was the view taken of 
 it by the girl who felt herself its victim, and who help 
 lessly resented it, in spite of all that had happened 
 since. 
 
 Whether she was in any degree excusable, or 
 whether she was wholly in the wrong in this feeling, 
 must remain for each to decide, and to each must be 
 left the question of how far the Puritan civilization has 
 carried the cult of the personal conscience into mere 
 dutiolatry. The daughter of an elder faith would 
 have simplified the affair, and perhaps shirked the re 
 sponsibility proper to her, by going first with her secret 
 to her confessor, and then being ruled by him. Mrs. 
 Meredith had indeed made a confessor of her physi 
 cian, after the frequent manner of our shrill-nerved 
 women, but even if Olney could have felt that he had 
 the right to counsel her on the moral side, it is doubt 
 ful if she could have found the strength to submit to 
 him. 
 
 Olney s interest in her was mainly confined to the 
 episodes of the last few days, and vivid as these had 
 been, it could not hold him long in censure of Miss 
 Aldgate s behavior ; he began to yield to the charm 
 of her presence, and in a little while hazily to wond,er 
 what his reserves about her were. She was in the 
 black that seems to grow upon women in the time of 
 mourning, and it singularly became her. It is the 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. ]: , .} 
 
 color for the South, and for Southern beauty; like 
 the inky shadow cast by the effulgence of tropical 
 skies, it is the counterpart of the glister and flash of 
 hair and eyes which no other hue could set off so 
 well. The girl s splendor dazzled him from the sable 
 cloud of her attire, and in Mrs. Atherton s blond 
 presence, which also had its sumptuousness she was 
 large and handsome, and had as yet lost no grace of 
 her girlhood he felt the tamencss of the Northern 
 type. It was the elder world, the beauty of antiquity, 
 which appealed to him in the lustre and sparkle of 
 this girl ; and the remote taint of her servile and sav 
 age origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses 
 to let itself be put in words : it was like the grace of a 
 limp, the occult, indefinable lovableness of a deformity, 
 but transcending these by its allurement in infinite 
 degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep into 
 the mysterious places of being where the spirit and the 
 animal meet and part in us. When Olney followed 
 some turn of her head, some movement of her person, 
 a wave of the profoundest passion surged up in his 
 heart, and he knew that he loved her with all his life, 
 which he could make his death if it were a question of 
 that. The mood was of his emotional nature alone ; 
 it sought and csmld have won no justification from his 
 moral sense, which indeed it simply submerged and 
 blotted out for the time. 
 
 There was no reason why lie should not stay now as 
 long as he liked, or why he should not come auain a- 
 often as Mrs. Atherton could find pretexts for asking 
 
134 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 him. Between them they treated the matter very 
 frankly. He took her advice upon the taste and upon 
 the wisdom of urging his suit at so strange a time ; 
 and she decided that in the anomalous situation to 
 which Miss Aldgate was left, her absolute friendless- 
 ness and helplessness, there were more reasons for his 
 wooing than against it. They took Mrs. Atherton s 
 husband into their confidence, and availed themselves 
 of the daylight of a legal mind upon their problem. 
 He greatly assisted to clear up the coarser difficulties 
 by communicating as Miss Aldgate s lawyer with her 
 aunt s connections in St. Louis. Mrs. Meredith had 
 left to her niece the remnant of the property she had 
 inherited from her husband ; and his family willingly, 
 almost eagerly, accepted the conditions of the will. 
 They waived any right to question it in any sort, and 
 they made no inquiries about Miss Aldgate, or her 
 purposes or wishes. 
 
 Olney agreed with the Athertons that their be 
 havior was very singular, but he kept his own con 
 jectures as to the grounds of it. They were, in fact, 
 hardly conjectures any more ; they were convictions- 
 He felt sure that they knew the secret which Mrs. 
 Meredith believed her husband had kept from all 
 the world ; but this did not concern him so deeply as 
 the belief that had constantly grown upon him since 
 their first meeting in Mrs. Atherton s presence, that 
 Rhoda knew it too. He had no reasons for his belief; 
 it was quite without palpable proofs ; it was mere in 
 tuition ; and yet he was more and more sure of the 
 fact. 
 
AX IMl EKATIVE DUTY. 135 
 
 His assurance of it strengthened with his belief that 
 the girl loved him, and had perhaps had her fancy for 
 him from the moment they saw each other in Florence. 
 The evidences that a woman gives of her love before 
 it is asked are always easily resolvable into something 
 else ; and in both these things Olney s beliefs were of 
 the same quality, and they were of the same measure. 
 But the one conviction began to taint and poison the 
 other. The man s sweetest and fondest hope became 
 a pang to nim, because it involved the fear that the 
 girl might have decided to accept his love and yet 
 keep her secret. In any case he desired her love ; as 
 before himself he did not blame her for withholding 
 her secret till she found what seemed to her the best 
 time for imparting it ; but for her own sake he could 
 have wished that she would heroically choose the 
 worst. This tacit demand upon her was made from 
 his knowledge of how safe it would be for her to tell 
 him everything, and it left out of the account the fact 
 that till he asked her to be his wife he had no claim 
 upon her, that he could have no terms from her till he 
 owned himself won. Love is a war in which there 
 can be no preliminaries for grace ; the surrender must 
 be unconditional, before these can even be mentioned. 
 
 There were times, of course, when Gluey could not 
 believe that the girl knew what at "other times she 
 seemed to withhold from him ; but at all times the 
 conjecture had to be kept to himself. If she knew, 
 she practised a perfect art in concealing her knowl 
 edge which made him fear for the future ; and if she 
 
136 AX IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 did not know, then she showed an indifference to her 
 aunt s memory which seemed not less than unnatural. 
 He conceived the truth concerning her when he said 
 to himself that Rhoda must hold Mrs. Meredith re 
 sponsible for the fact if she had imparted it ; and that 
 time alone could clear away her confusion of mind 
 and enable her to be just to the means which she 
 confounded with the cause of her suffering. But he 
 could not have followed her into those fastnesses of 
 the more intensely personalized feminine conscious 
 ness where the girl relentlessly punished her aunt in 
 thought, not for doing her duty, but for doing it too 
 late, when she could remain through life only the un 
 reconciled victim of her origin, instead of revealing it 
 early enough to enable her to accept it and annul it by 
 conforming herself to it. 
 
 As this was what Rhoda had never ceased to believe 
 would have been possible, her heart remained sore 
 with resentment in the midst of the love which she 
 could not help letting Olney divine. Circumstance 
 had drawn their lives into a sudden intimacy which 
 neither would or could withdraw from; they drifted 
 on toward the only possible conclusion together. For 
 the most part the sense of their love preoccupied them. 
 She turned from her desperate retrospect and blindly 
 strove to keep herself in the present, and to shun the 
 future as she tried to escape the past ; he made sure 
 of nothing to build on except the fact that at least she 
 did not know that Mrs. Meredith had confided her 
 secret to him. With this certain, he could take all 
 
AV IMPF.RAT1VE Dl TY. l.>7 
 
 rhancvs. He could trust time to soften her heart. 
 toward the dead, and he* could forgive the concealment 
 Inward himself which she used. 
 
 One thing that he could not understand was her 
 apparent willingness to remain just where and as she 
 was indefinitely ; he did not realize that it was ap 
 parent only, and as a man he did not account for her 
 patience if it were patience as an effect of the 
 abeyance in which the whole training of women 
 teaches them to keep themselves. The moral of their 
 education from the moment they can be instructed in 
 anything is passivity, and to take any positive course 
 must be a negation almost of their being ; it must cost 
 an effort unimaginable to a man. 
 
 The summer weeks faded away into September, 
 when one morning Olney came to see Rhoda, and 
 found her sitting on a bench to the seaward of a group 
 of birches. The trees had already dropped a few 
 yellow leaves on the lawn, which looked like flowers 
 strewn in the still vividly green grass. It was one of 
 those pale mornings when a silvery mist blots the edge 
 of the sea and lets the sails melt into it. She was 
 looking wistfully out at them, across Mrs. Atherton s 
 wall, which struggled so conscientiously to look wild 
 and unkempt, with its nasturtiums clambering over it ; 
 but she did not affect to be startled when Olney s 
 steps made themselves heard on the gravel-walk com 
 ing toward her. 
 
 She flushed with the same joy that thrilled in his 
 heart, and waited for him to come near enough to 
 
138 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 take her hand before she asked, " Oh, didn t you see 
 Mrs. Atherton ? " 
 
 " She sent me word that you were here, as if that 
 were what I wanted," he answered, smiling over the 
 hand he held. 
 
 " Well, I can tell you myself, then," she said, sitting 
 down again. 
 
 "Yes ; or not, as you like," he returned. 
 
 "No, it is isn t whether I like or not. I am going 
 away." 
 
 "Yes," he said quietly. " Where ? " 
 
 " To to New Orleans. To look up my mother s 
 family." She lifted her eyes anxiously to his face, 
 and then helplessly let her glance fall. " I have been 
 talking it over with Mrs. Atherton, and she thinks 
 too that I ought to try to find them." 
 
 Olney s heart gave a leap. He knew that she was 
 hovering on the verge of a confession, which she 
 longed to make for his sake, and that he ought not to 
 suffer her till he had made his own confession. He 
 had the joy of realizing her truth, and he rested 
 nervelessly in that a moment, before he could say 
 lightly, " I don t see why you should do that." 
 
 "Don t you think think that it s my duty?" 
 she pleaded. 
 
 " Not in the least ! From the experience I ve had 
 with the St. Louis branch of your family I don t think 
 it s your duty to look any of them up. Why do you 
 think it is your duty ? Have they tried to find you ? " 
 
 "They are very poor and humble people the 
 humblest," she faltered piteously. " They " 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 139 
 
 Her breath went in silence, and lie cried, Rhoda ! 
 Don t go away ! Stay ! Stay with me. Or, if you 
 must go somewhere, go back with me to Florence, 
 where the happiness of my life began when I first 
 knew you were in the world. I love you ! I ask you 
 to be my wife ! " 
 
 She let her hand seem to sink deeper in his hold, 
 which had somehow not released it yet; she almost 
 pushed it in for an instant, and then she pulled it 
 away violently. " Never ! " She sprang to her feet 
 and gasped hoarsely out, " I am a negress ! " 
 
 Something in her tragedy affected Olney comically ; 
 perhaps the belief that she had often rehearsed these 
 words as answer to his demand. He smiled. " Well, 
 not a very black one. Besides, what of it, if I love 
 you?" 
 
 " What of it ? " she echoed. " But don t you know ? 
 You mustn t! " 
 
 The simpleness of the words made him laugh out 
 right ; these she had not rehearsed. She had drama 
 tized his instant renunciation of her when he knew 
 the fatal truth. 
 
 " Why not? I love you, whether I must or not! " 
 
 As tragedy the whole affair had fallen to ruin. It 
 could be reconstructed, if at all, only upon an octave 
 much below the operatic pitch. It must be treated in 
 no lurid twilight gloom, but in plain, simple, matter- 
 of-fact noonday. 
 
 " I can t let you," she began, in a vain effort to 
 catch up some fragments of her meditated melodrama 
 
140 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 about her. u You don t understand. My grand 
 mother was a slave." 
 
 " The more shame to the man that called himself 
 her master!" said Olney. "But I do know I 
 understand everything I know everything ! " He 
 had not meant to say this. He had always imagined 
 keeping his knowledge from her till they were married, 
 and then in some favored moment confessing that her 
 aunt had told him, and making her forgive her for 
 having told him. But now, in his eagerness to spare 
 her the story which he saw she had it on her conscience 
 to tell him in full, the truth had escaped him. 
 
 " You know it ! " she exclaimed, with a fierce recoil. 
 " How do you know it ? " 
 
 "Your aunt told me," he answered, hardily. He 
 must now make the best of the worst. 
 
 " Then she was false to me with her last breath ! 
 Oh, I will never forgive her I " 
 
 " Oh, yes you will, my dear," said Olney, with the 
 quiet which he felt to be his only hope with her. 
 " She had to tell me, to advise with me, before she 
 told you. I wish she had never told you, but if she 
 had not told me, she would have defrauded me of the 
 sweetest thing in life." 
 
 " The privilege of stooping to such a creature as I ? " 
 she demanded, bitterly. 
 
 He took her hand and kissed it, and kept it in his. 
 "No : the right of saying that you are all the dearer 
 to me for being just what you are, and that I m prouder 
 of you for it. And now, don t say that you will not 
 
AN IMI KKATIVK DITV. 141 
 
 forgive that poor soul, who suffered years for every 
 hour that you have suffered from that cause. She felt 
 herself sacredly bound to tell you." 
 
 " It was too late then," said the girl, with starting 
 tears. " She killed me. I can t forgive her." 
 
 " Well, what can that matter to her? She can for 
 give you; and that s the great thing." 
 
 What do you mean ? " she asked, weakly trying 
 to get her hand away. 
 
 " How came she to tell you that she hadn t told 
 me?" 
 
 ** I I made her," faltered the girl. " I asked her 
 if she had. I was frantic." 
 
 "Yes. You had no right to do that. Of course 
 she had to deny it, and you made her take a new lie 
 on her conscience when she had just escaped from one 
 that she had carried for you all your life." Olney 
 gave her back her hand. " Whatever you do with 
 me, for your own sake put away all thoughts of hard 
 ness towards that poor woman." 
 
 There was a long silence. Then the girl broke into 
 sudden tears. " I do ; I will ! I see it now ! It was 
 cruel, cruel! But I couldn t see it then; I coul ln t 
 see anything but myself ; the world was filled with me 
 blotted out with me! Ah, can she ever forgive 
 me ? If I could only have one word with her, to say 
 that there never was any real hardness in me toward 
 her, and I didn t know what I was doing ! Do you 
 think I made her kill herself? Tell me if you do ! 
 I can bear it I deserve to bear it ! 
 
142 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " She never meant to kill herself," said Olney, sin 
 cerely. " I feel sure of that. But she s gone, and 
 you are here ; the question s of you, not of her ; and 
 I only asked you to be just to yourself. Idid nt mean 
 to tell you now that I knew your secret from her, but 
 I m not sorry I told you, if it s helped you to substitute 
 a regret for a resentment." 
 
 " It s done that for all my life long." 
 
 " Ah, I didn t mean it to go so far as that ! " said 
 Olney, smiling. 
 
 " No matter ! It s what I must bear. It s a just 
 punishment." She rose suddenly, and put out her 
 hand to him. " Good-by." 
 
 " What for ? " he asked. " I m not going." 
 
 " But / am. I m going away to find my mother s 
 people, if I can to help them and acknowledge them. 
 I tried to talk with Mrs. Atherton about it, the other 
 day, but I couldn t rightly, for I couldn t let her 
 understand fully. But it s true and be serious about 
 it, and don t laugh at me ! Oughtn t I to go down 
 there and help them ; try to educate them, and elevate 
 them ; give my life to them ? Isn t it base and 
 cowardly to desert them, and live happily apart from 
 them, when " 
 
 " When you might live so miserably with them ? " 
 Olney asked. " Ah, that s the kind of question that I 
 suspect your poor aunt used to torment herself with ! 
 But if you wish me to be really serious with you about 
 it, I will say, Yes, you would have some such duty 
 toward them, perhaps, if you had voluntarily chosen 
 
AX IMPERATIVK DUTY. 143 
 
 your part with .hem if you had ever consented to be 
 of their kind. Then it would be base and cowardly to 
 desert them ; it would be a treason of the vilest sort. 
 But you never did that, or anything like it, and there 
 is no more specific obligation upon you to give your 
 life to their elevation than there is upon me. Besides, 
 I doubt if that sort of specific devotion would do much 
 good. The way to elevate them is to elevate us, to 
 begin with. It will be an easy matter to deal with 
 those simple-hearted fofks after we ve got into the 
 right way ourselves. No, if you must giv your life 
 to the improvement of any particular race, give it to 
 mine. Begin with me. You won t find me unreason 
 able. All that I shall ask of you are the fifteen-six 
 teenths or so of you that belong to my race by hered 
 ity ; and I will cheerfully consent to your giving our 
 colored connections their one-sixteenth." 
 
 Olney broke off, and laughed at his joke, and she 
 joined him helplessly. " Oh ! don t laugh at me ! " 
 
 " Laugh at you ? I feel a great deal more like cry 
 ing. If you go down there to elevate the blacks, 
 what is to become of me ? I don t really object to 
 your going, but I want to go with you." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " she entreated, piteously. 
 
 " What I said just now. I love you, and I ask you. 
 to be my wife." 
 
 " I said I couldn t. You know why." 
 
 " But you didn t mean it, or you d have given me 
 some reason. * 
 
 " Some reason ? " 
 
 10 
 
144 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " Yes. What you said was only an excuse. I can t 
 accept it. Rhoda," he added, seriously, " I m afraid 
 you don t understand ! Can t you understand that 
 what you told me what I knew already didn t 
 make the slightest difference to me, and couldn t to 
 any man who was any sort of a man ! Or yes, it does 
 make a difference ! But such a kind of difference that 
 if I could have you other than you are by wishing it, 
 I wouldn t for my own .selfish sake at least, I 
 wouldn t wish it for the world. Can t you understand 
 that?" 
 
 " No, I can t understand that. It seems to me that 
 it must make you loathe me. Oh ! " she shuddered. 
 " You don t know how hideous they are a whole 
 churchful, as I saw them that night. And I m like 
 them ! " 
 
 Olney s heart ached for her, but he could not help 
 his laugh. " Well, you don t look it. Oh, you poor 
 child ! Why do you torment yourself ? * 
 
 " I can t help it. It s burnt into me. It s branded 
 me one of them. I am one. No, I can t escape. And 
 the best way is to go and live among them and own it. 
 Then perhaps I can learn to bear it, and not hate them 
 so. But I do hate them. I do, I do ! I can t help it, 
 and I don t blame you for hating me ! " 
 
 "I don t happen to hate even you," said Olney, 
 going back to his lightness. "My trouble s another 
 kind. Perhaps I should hate you, and hate them, if 
 I d come of a race of slave-holders, as you have. But 
 my people never injured those poor creatures, and so 
 
AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 145 
 
 I don t hate them, or their infinitesimal part in 
 you." 
 
 He found himself, whenever it came to the worst 
 with her in this crisis, taking a tone of levity which 
 was so little of his own volition that it seemed rather 
 to take him. He was physician enough to flatter his 
 patient for her good, and instinctively he treated 
 Rhoda as if she were his patient. It did flatter her 
 to have that side of her ancestry dwelt upon, and to 
 be treated as the daughter of slave-holders ; she who 
 would not reconcile herself to her servile origin, lis- 
 
 55 
 
 teued with a kind of fascination to his tender mockery, 
 in which she felt herself swayed by the deep under 
 current of his faithful love. 
 
 " Come, come ! " he went on, and at his touch she 
 dropped weakly back into her seat again, and let him 
 take her hand and hold it. " I know how this fact 
 has seized upon you and blotted everything else out 
 of the world. But life s made up of a great deal else ; 
 and you are but one little part injured to many parts, 
 injurer. You belong incomparably more to the op 
 pressors than to the oppressed, and what I m afraid of 
 is that you ll keep me in hopeless slavery as long as I 
 live. Who would ever imagine that you were as black 
 as you say ? Who would think " 
 
 " Ah, you ve confessed it You would be ashamed 
 of me, if people knew ! That is it ! " 
 
 " If you ll answer me as I wish, I ll go up with you 
 to the house and tell Mrs. Atherton. I ve rather a 
 fancy for seeing how she would take it. But. I can t 
 
146 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 unless you ll let me share in the disgrace with you. 
 Will you ? " 
 
 " Never ! It shall never be known ! For your 
 sake ! /can bear it ; but you shall not. Promise me 
 that you ll never tell a living soul ! " She caught him 
 nervously by the arm, and clung to him. It was her 
 sign of surrender. 
 
 He accepted it, arid said : " Very well, I promise it. 
 But only on one condition : that you believe I m not 
 afraid to tell it. Otherwise my self-respect will oblige 
 me to go round shouting it to everybody. Do you 
 promise ? " 
 
 " Yes, I promise ; and now she yielded to the gay 
 ety of his mood, and a succession of flashing smiles lit 
 up her face, in which her doom was transmuted to the 
 happiest fortune. She kept smiling, with her hands 
 linked through his arm and her form drawn close to 
 him ; while their talk flowed fantastically away from 
 all her awful questions. Their love performed the 
 effect of common-sense for them, and in its purple 
 light they saw the every-day duties of life plain before 
 them. They spoke frankly of the incidents of the 
 past few days, and he told her now of his interview 
 with the Bloomingdale family, and how he felt that he 
 had hardened Mrs. Bloomingdale s heart against her 
 by his unsympathetic behavior in denying them an 
 interview with Rhoda herself. 
 
 This made her laugh, but she said, with a shudder : 
 " I couldn t have borne to look at them. From the 
 first moment after my aunt told me, I felt that I must 
 
AN I.MIM- .K \ 1 IVE IM TY. 147 
 
 prevent their ever seeing me a<rain. I wrote to him. 
 and I carried the letter out with me to post it, and 
 make sure it went ; and then* somehow I forgot to 
 post it." 
 
 " Ah," said Gluey, " I suppose that s the reason 
 why he came to see me, and to ask where he could 
 find you." 
 
 " Yes," answered Rhoda, placidly. 
 " There is only one thing in the whole affair that 
 really troubles me," said Olney, u and that s the very 
 short shrift you gave that poor fellow." 
 
 " "Why, when I had written to him I would not see 
 him again, I supposed he was persisting, and it was 
 only the other day that I found the letter, which I d 
 forgotten to post. It was in the pocket of the dress 
 I wore that night to the church." 
 
 "And you don t think his persisting his caring 
 so much for you gave him the right to see you ? " 
 " Not the least." 
 
 " Ah, a man never understands a woman s position 
 on that question." 
 
 " Why, of course, if I had cared for him " 
 "I don t know but I ve a little case of conscience 
 here myself. I had awful qualms when that poor 
 fellow was talking with me. I perceived that he was 
 as magnanimous as I was on the subject of heredity, 
 and that, I thought, ought to count in, his favor. Will 
 you let it?" 
 " No." 
 44 Why not?" 
 
148 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 " Because I don t care for him." 
 
 " How simple it is ! "Well, he s off my conscience, 
 at any rate." 
 
 She began to grieve a little. " But if you are 
 sorry " 
 
 "Sorry?" 
 
 "If you think you will ever regret if you re not 
 sure that you ll never be troubled by by that, 
 then we had better " 
 
 " My dear child," said Olney, " I m going to leave 
 all the trouble of that to you. I assure you that from 
 this on I shall never think of it. I am going to pro 
 vide for your future, and let you look after your past/ 
 
 She dropped her head with a sob upon his shoulder, 
 and as he gathered her In his arms he felt as If he had 
 literally rescued her from her own thoughts of her 
 self. 
 
 He was young and strong, and he believed that he 
 would always be able to make her trust him against 
 them, because now in the fulness of their happiness he 
 prevailed. 
 
 There are few men who, when the struggle of life 
 is mainly over, do not wonder at the risks they took 
 in the days of their youth and strength ; and it could 
 not be pretended that Olney found more than the com 
 mon share of happiness in the lot he chose ; but then 
 it could be said honestly enough that he did not con 
 sider either life or love valuable for the happiness 
 they could yield. They were enough in themselves* 
 He was not a seeker after happiness, and when he 
 
AN 1MPKKATIVK IM PT. 149 
 
 saw that even hi> l<>v- failed at times to make life 
 happy, for \\\* \\iiV, IM- pitied her, and he did not 
 Maine her. He knew that in her hours of despond 
 ency there was that war between her temperament 
 and her character which is the fruitful cause of misery 
 in the world, when- all >train> are now so crossed and 
 intertangled that there is no definite and unbroken 
 direction any more ill any of us. In her, the confu 
 sion was only a little greater than in most others, and 
 if Olney ever had any regret it was that the sunny- 
 natured antetypes of her mother s race had not en 
 dowed her with more of the heaven-born cheerfulness 
 with which it meets contumely and injustice. His 
 struggle was with that hypochondria of the soul into 
 which the Puritanism of her father s race had sick 
 ened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its 
 crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aim 
 less act of self-sacrifice. The silence in which they 
 lived concerning her origin weighed upon her some 
 times with the sense of a guilty deceit, and it was her 
 remorse for this that he had to reason her out of. 
 The question whether it ought not to be told to each 
 of their acquaintance who became a friend had always 
 to be solved anew, especially if the acquaintance was 
 an American ; but as yet their secret remains their 
 own. They are settled at Rome, after a brief experi 
 ment of a narrower field of practice at Florence ; and 
 the most fanciful of Olney s compatriot patients does 
 not dream that his wife ought to suffer shame from 
 her. She is thought to look so very Italian that you 
 
150 AN IMPERATIVE DUTY 
 
 would really take her for an Italian, and he represents 
 to her that it would not be the ancestral color, avhich 
 is much the same in other races, but the ancestral 
 condition which their American friends would despise 
 if they knew of it ; that this is a quality of the despite 
 in which hard work is held all the world over, and has 
 always followed the children of the man who earns 
 his bread with his hands, especially if he earns other- 
 people s bread too. 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 
 
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