WENDELL PHILLIPS WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22WENDELL PHILLIPSWHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22
Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in the government of the Republic without having given reasonable guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war," he was inpoint of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.
It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the rebellion ceased they wereipso factorestored; that, therefore, the rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to their former rights and privileges—that is, to the recognition of their self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress. Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.
But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain States had through their regular political organs declared themselves independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union. That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity, the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full participation in the national government so long as that restoration was reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public creditor, into serious jeopardy.
SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VETOSENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULLWHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VETO
It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln. This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr. Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of encouraging loyal movementsin those States and of weakening the Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive and inflexible," but might be changed according to different circumstances.
Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment, that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those freedmen to the mercies of that master class!
No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope that more or less harmonious coöperation, or at least a peaceablemodus vivendi, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed, if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.
The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those lately in rebellion, were excluded—thus throwing out a dark hint that before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made himbelieve that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.
On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response, could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition." Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,—a tailor who "always made a close fit,"—and broadly insinuated that there were men in high places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more, thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.
I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington, remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation in behalf of the country.
In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm, described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General J. D. Cox of Ohio—one of the noblest men I have ever known,—called upon him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance of mutual approach.
On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed, were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of every race and color should have the same right in every State and Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr. Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself, by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another reason,a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not. He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.
Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever. Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President, aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.
The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of the means to be used to that end.
This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been his original design or not,—probably not,—would by his political course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived—that alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help them to victory.
THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS
The carrier's cart—for my means afforded no more lordly style of travel—set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.
"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last, lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."
He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life, and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,—for he had followed both walks in his day,—and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brigHyperionsome years before.
"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him. "The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."
"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was: 'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!' 'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"
"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes more than two or three years."
"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head. "Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye think, sir?"
I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by assuring him that I hadcontrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."
"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and looked up to by everybody."
I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my grandfather seem?"
Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He—he don't always answer the helm, Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look. "Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so long—nigh eighty year, ain't it?"
"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be alone."
"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately—about a month ago, I b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself, and so he—er—well——" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The cap'n—Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say, short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and so the cap'n he ups and ships these here—and—and, in fac', Mr. Nick, one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.
"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a pretty strong term of disapproval.
"There, now, Ithoughtyou'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to, transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere, Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,—where the captain was reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable,—the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied pronunciation.
Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years' absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired, and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. And to him therewas doubtless something unwholesome and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.
The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind, coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which, set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.
"'YOU DIDN'T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?'""'YOU DIDN'T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?'"
The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds. The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry, clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me to the ground, when——
"Don't touch those apples, young man!" said somebody sharply.
I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of laughter, shrill and sweet.
"Here I am. What bats men are!" it said.
I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and good winter keepers—that is, I think they are——" she added a little tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"
I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:
"I did it myself with a red-hot poker," she said proudly.
I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well done," I managed to get out at last.
"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming. They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.
"Ah? You are Miss Mary Smith?"
"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and sudden flush. "Yes,Smith. That's—that's a very good name,Ithink." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she half expected me to question it.
"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly—for, in fact, I had scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"
She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was evidently her unspoken thought.
"And how long has my—ahem!—has Captain Pendarves been employing you, may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as for the other changes.
"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on, for it's late."
"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."
Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step, putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes. "Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the heart. "Sir, I—I—meant no harm!"
"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."
"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I havedone no wrong. You will find everything just as you left it."
"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been here?"
"Four weeks—next Wednesday," she answered nervously.
"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of things here. For—not to boggle about it—I am in some uneasiness, Miss Smith. These people—this man and woman who I hear have settled themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late—who are they? what are they?"
As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me, so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.
"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand—I thought you knew. I—I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is within, and the other—the man—with him."
Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness, there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is, a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,—he who founded this house,—in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration. Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations; but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.
The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered, with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed only a not too well pleased surprise.
"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!" and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows. With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me, the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.
"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!" He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.
Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.
There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere—a globe of crystal, perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The fat man's eyes, or so much of them as onemight see, were fixed upon this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:
"What do you see?"
"THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY""THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"
The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.
"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick, searching look about the room. "Doubloons—pieces-of-eight—Spanish pillar-dollars—doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be made up of, eh? But where—try to see that—where?"
Another interval of silent gazing, and theoracle uttered some further statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.
"Doubloons—piles of gold—I know!" he said. "And a ship. But whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"
"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.
I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost, sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as a mummy's.
"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept, and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and Space!"
And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it savagely.
"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room until the very window-panes vibrated.
She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting facing each other in silence.
The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had, in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his shield.
"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you the gift of the seeing eye?"
"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business here?"
"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many names are mine——"
"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant yourlastalias."
He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many names have been mine through the uncounted eons—many names. In this flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."
It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name; that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking townspeople. I do not remember—indeed, I took no pains to note—what else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house; I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye, in the town jail and later in the stocks."
He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were, for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stuporand straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.
"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!
"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod of correction.
Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr. Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility: "It's so bad for him."