The weed had been
cut down, but its roots remained, deeply imbedded in the soil, to spring
up and trouble a new generation. Upon her weak shoulders was placed the
burden of her father's weakness, her father's folly. It was left to her
to acknowledge or not this shameful marriage and her sister's rights in
their father's estate.
Balancing one consideration against another, she had almost decided
that she might ignore this tie. To herself, Olivia Merkell,--Olivia
Carteret,--the stigma of base birth would have meant social ostracism,
social ruin, the averted face, the finger of pity or of scorn. All the
traditional weight of public disapproval would have fallen upon her as
the unhappy fruit of an unblessed union. To this other woman it could
have had no such significance,--it had been the lot of her race. To
them, twenty-five years before, sexual sin had never been imputed as
more than a fault. She had lost nothing by her supposed illegitimacy;
she would gain nothing by the acknowledgment of her mother's marriage.
On the other hand, what would be the effect of this revelation upon Mrs.
Carteret herself? To have it known that her father had married a negress
would only be less dreadful than to have it appear that he had committed
some terrible crime. It was a crime now, by the laws of every Southern
State, for white and colored persons to intermarry. She shuddered before
the possibility that at some time in the future some person, none too
well informed, might learn that her father had married a colored woman,
and might assume that she, Olivia Carteret, or her child, had sprung
from this shocking _mesalliance_,--a fate to which she would willingly
have preferred death.
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