Trade Wind Read Free Page B

whose husband was a well-known Senator, and when, while there, they had received a pressing invitation to visit relatives in South Carolina, Barclay—who could on occasions be every bit as obstinate as his daughter—had flatly refused to move a step further, so that in the end Hero had gone without him.
    “I guess you get it from your Mama’s side of the family,” sighed Barclay resignedly; “all the Craynes have been great ones for moving around. You look a lot like your Ma, and maybe if she’d lived she’d have come to be a gadabout too. She wasn’t as big as you…You know, you ought to have been a boy, Hero. Mother Nature sure changed her mind about you at the last minute, and that’s a fact!”
    He had sighed again as he said it, and Hero had wondered for the first time if her father regretted her sex and would have preferred a boy, and if that might not have been in his mind when he had named her ‘Hero’ instead of calling her Harriet after her mother? He had certainly never made any attempt to bring her up as a ‘womanly woman’, but in defiance of the Craynes and his sister Lucy had permitted her to learn to shoot and ride, to read before she could write and write before she could sew. The remainder of her education, however, had been left to Miss Penbury, and he had done nothing to correct some of the opinions that his daughter acquired at second-hand from her governess and her Aunt Lucy; or from sundry works of fiction obtained from the shelves of the ‘Ladies’ Lending Library’.
    It had been a popular novel by Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, read in 1852 at the impressionable age of fourteen, that had convinced Hero that the world was a hotbed of injustice, cruelty and squalor, and that something should be done about it at once. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had succeeded in making yet another convert to the cause of Anti-Slavery, and Miss Penbury, in the process of continuing the good work, had escorted her young charge to a lecture on the “Evils of the Slave Trade’, given by a local parson who had quoted the words of Lord Palmerston:
    “If all the crimes which the human race has committed from creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they would not exceed, the amount of guilt that has been incurred by mankind in connection with the diabolical Slave Trade.”
    But whatever she might think of slave trading, that visit to South Carolina had served to modify Hero’s view on slave owners, for the Langly family’s slaves had been as healthy, happy and as well-cared-for a community as anyone could wish to see, and neither Gaylord Langly nor his overseer even remotely resembled Simon Legree. Clarissa Hollis Langly, having been born and raised in Massachusetts, disapproved in principle of slavery, but confessed herself unable to see any way out of it:
    “It is as though we were caught in a trap,” she explained to Hero. “Our entire economy is bound up with slavery, and if we were to free the negroes we should not only ruin ourselves but them as well, since without slave labour the South could not last a day. We would all go bankrupt, and then who would feed the negroes? or clothe them or give them work? Not the Northern Abolitionists, for all their pious talk! I can see no way out: though it is at times a sad weight on my conscience.”
    Mrs Langly applied salve to her conscience by taking a fervent interest in foreign missions, in the belief that if there was nothing that could be done towards freeing the enslaved negroes of America, at least there was much that could be done towards improving the lot of coloured races overseas. She lent her young cousin a number of pamphlets that vividly described the horrors of life in Africa and Asia, with the result that Hero’s sympathies had been widened to include ‘Our Poor Heathen Sisters’ whose status in harems and zenanas appeared to be quite as bad as that of any slave.
    Brooding upon