My Dear Boy: I cannot tell you how much good your bright letters have done us. It’s like opening the window and letting in the sunlight while fresh breezes blow through one’s soul.Margaret and I have had stirring times. I send you enclosed an order for the last dollar of money we have left. You must hoard it. Make it last until your father is safe at home. I dare not leave it here. Nothing is safe. Every piece of silver and everything that could be carried has been stolen since we returned.Uncle Aleck betrayed the place Jake had hidden our twenty precious bales of cotton. The war is long since over, but the “Treasury Agent” declared them confiscated, and then offered to relieve us of his order if we gave him five bales, each worth three hundred dollars in gold. I agreed, and within a weekanother thief came and declared the other fifteen bales confiscated. They steal it, and the Government never gets a cent. We dared not try to sell it in open market, as every bale exposed for sale is “confiscated” at once.No crop was planted this summer. The negroes are all drawing rations at the Freedman’s Bureau.We have turned our house into a hotel, and our table has become famous. Margaret is a treasure. She has learned to do everything. We tried to raise a crop on the farm when we came home, but the negroes stopped work. The Agent of the Bureau came to us and said he could send them back for a fee of $50. We paid it, and they worked a week. We found it easier to run a hotel. We hope to start the farm next year.Our new minister at the Presbyterian Church is young, handsome, and eloquent—Rev. Hugh McAlpin.Mr. Lenoir died last week—but his end was so beautiful, our tears were half joy. He talked incessantly of your father and how the country missed him. He seemed much better the day before the end came, and we took him for a little drive to Lovers’ Leap. It was there, sixteen years ago, he made love to Jeannie. When we propped him up on the rustic seat, and he looked out over the cliff and the river below, I have never seen a face so transfigured with peace and joy.“What a beautiful world it is, my dears!” he exclaimed, taking Jeannie and Marion both by the hand.They began to cry, and he said with a smile:“Come now—do you love me?”And they covered his hands with kisses.“Well, then you must promise me two things faithfully here, with Mrs. Cameron to witness!”“We promise,” they both said in a breath.“That when I fall asleep, not one thread of black shall ever cloud the sunlight of our little home, that you will never wear it, and that you will show your love for me by making my flowers grow richer, that you will keep my memory green by always being as beautiful as you are to-day, and make this old world a sweeter place to live in. I wish you, Jeannie, my mate, to keep on making the young people glad. Don’t let their joys be less even for a month because I have laid down to rest. Let them sing and dance——”“Oh, Papa!” cried Marion.“Certainly, my little serious beauty—I’ll not be far away,I’ll be near and breathe my songs into their hearts, and into yours—you both promise?”“Yes, yes!” they both cried.As we drove back through the woods, he smiled tenderly and said to me:“My neighbour, Doctor Cameron, pays taxes on these woods, but I own them! Their sighing boughs, stirred by the breezes, have played for me oratorios grander than all the scores of human genius. I’ll hear the Choir Invisible play them when I sleep.”He died that night suddenly. With his last breath he sighed:“Draw the curtains and let me see again the moonlit woods!”They are trying to carry out his wishes. I found they had nothing to eat, and that he had really died from insufficient nourishment—a polite expression meaning starvation. I’ve divided half our little store with them and send the rest to you. I think Marion more and more the incarnate soul of her father. I feel as if they are both my children.My little grandchick, Hugh, is the sweetest youngster alive. He was a wee thing when you left. Mrs. Lenoir kept him when they arrested your father. He is so much like your brother Hugh I feel as if he has come to life again. You should hear him say grace, so solemnly and tenderly, we can’t help crying. He made it up himself. This is what he says at every meal:“God, please give my grandpa something good to eat in jail, keep him well, don’t let the pains hurt him any more, and bring him home to me quick, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.”I never knew before how the people loved the doctor, nor how dependent they were on him for help and guidance. Men, both white and coloured, come here every day to ask about him. Some of them come from far up in the mountains.God alone knows how lonely our home and the world has seemed without him. They say that those who love and live the close sweet home life for years grow alike in soul and body, in tastes, ways, and habits. I find it so. People have told me that your father and I are more alike than brother and sister of the same blood. In spirit I’m sure it’s true. I know you love him and that you will leave nothing undone for his health and safety. Tell him that my only cure for loneliness in his absence is my fight to keep the wolf from the door, and save our home against his coming.Lovingly, yourMother.
My Dear Boy: I cannot tell you how much good your bright letters have done us. It’s like opening the window and letting in the sunlight while fresh breezes blow through one’s soul.
Margaret and I have had stirring times. I send you enclosed an order for the last dollar of money we have left. You must hoard it. Make it last until your father is safe at home. I dare not leave it here. Nothing is safe. Every piece of silver and everything that could be carried has been stolen since we returned.
Uncle Aleck betrayed the place Jake had hidden our twenty precious bales of cotton. The war is long since over, but the “Treasury Agent” declared them confiscated, and then offered to relieve us of his order if we gave him five bales, each worth three hundred dollars in gold. I agreed, and within a weekanother thief came and declared the other fifteen bales confiscated. They steal it, and the Government never gets a cent. We dared not try to sell it in open market, as every bale exposed for sale is “confiscated” at once.
No crop was planted this summer. The negroes are all drawing rations at the Freedman’s Bureau.
We have turned our house into a hotel, and our table has become famous. Margaret is a treasure. She has learned to do everything. We tried to raise a crop on the farm when we came home, but the negroes stopped work. The Agent of the Bureau came to us and said he could send them back for a fee of $50. We paid it, and they worked a week. We found it easier to run a hotel. We hope to start the farm next year.
Our new minister at the Presbyterian Church is young, handsome, and eloquent—Rev. Hugh McAlpin.
Mr. Lenoir died last week—but his end was so beautiful, our tears were half joy. He talked incessantly of your father and how the country missed him. He seemed much better the day before the end came, and we took him for a little drive to Lovers’ Leap. It was there, sixteen years ago, he made love to Jeannie. When we propped him up on the rustic seat, and he looked out over the cliff and the river below, I have never seen a face so transfigured with peace and joy.
“What a beautiful world it is, my dears!” he exclaimed, taking Jeannie and Marion both by the hand.
They began to cry, and he said with a smile:
“Come now—do you love me?”
And they covered his hands with kisses.
“Well, then you must promise me two things faithfully here, with Mrs. Cameron to witness!”
“We promise,” they both said in a breath.
“That when I fall asleep, not one thread of black shall ever cloud the sunlight of our little home, that you will never wear it, and that you will show your love for me by making my flowers grow richer, that you will keep my memory green by always being as beautiful as you are to-day, and make this old world a sweeter place to live in. I wish you, Jeannie, my mate, to keep on making the young people glad. Don’t let their joys be less even for a month because I have laid down to rest. Let them sing and dance——”
“Oh, Papa!” cried Marion.
“Certainly, my little serious beauty—I’ll not be far away,I’ll be near and breathe my songs into their hearts, and into yours—you both promise?”
“Yes, yes!” they both cried.
As we drove back through the woods, he smiled tenderly and said to me:
“My neighbour, Doctor Cameron, pays taxes on these woods, but I own them! Their sighing boughs, stirred by the breezes, have played for me oratorios grander than all the scores of human genius. I’ll hear the Choir Invisible play them when I sleep.”
He died that night suddenly. With his last breath he sighed:
“Draw the curtains and let me see again the moonlit woods!”
They are trying to carry out his wishes. I found they had nothing to eat, and that he had really died from insufficient nourishment—a polite expression meaning starvation. I’ve divided half our little store with them and send the rest to you. I think Marion more and more the incarnate soul of her father. I feel as if they are both my children.
My little grandchick, Hugh, is the sweetest youngster alive. He was a wee thing when you left. Mrs. Lenoir kept him when they arrested your father. He is so much like your brother Hugh I feel as if he has come to life again. You should hear him say grace, so solemnly and tenderly, we can’t help crying. He made it up himself. This is what he says at every meal:
“God, please give my grandpa something good to eat in jail, keep him well, don’t let the pains hurt him any more, and bring him home to me quick, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.”
I never knew before how the people loved the doctor, nor how dependent they were on him for help and guidance. Men, both white and coloured, come here every day to ask about him. Some of them come from far up in the mountains.
God alone knows how lonely our home and the world has seemed without him. They say that those who love and live the close sweet home life for years grow alike in soul and body, in tastes, ways, and habits. I find it so. People have told me that your father and I are more alike than brother and sister of the same blood. In spirit I’m sure it’s true. I know you love him and that you will leave nothing undone for his health and safety. Tell him that my only cure for loneliness in his absence is my fight to keep the wolf from the door, and save our home against his coming.
Lovingly, yourMother.
Lovingly, yourMother.
When the doctor had finished the reading, he looked out the window of the jail at the shining dome of the Capitol for a moment in silence.
“Do you know, my boy, that you have the heritage of royal blood? You are the child of a wonderful mother. I’m ashamed when I think of the helpless stupor under which I have given up, and then remember the deathless courage with which she has braved it all—the loss of her boys, her property, your troubles and mine. She has faced the world alone like a wounded lioness standing over her cubs. And now she turns her home into a hotel, and begins life in a strange new world without one doubt of her success. The South is yet rich even in its ruin.”
“Then you’ll fight and go back to her with me?”
“Yes, never fear.”
“Good! You see, we’re so poor now, pa, you’re lucky to be saving a board bill here. I’d ‘conspire’ myself and come in with you but for the fact it would hamper me a little in helping you.”
CHAPTER VAcross the Chasm
When Ben had fully recovered and his father’s case looked hopeful, Elsie turned to her study of music, and the Southern boy suddenly waked to the fact that the great mystery of life was upon him. He was in love at last—genuinely, deeply, without one reservation. He had from habit flirted in a harmless way with every girl he knew. He left home with little Marion Lenoir’s girlish kiss warm on his lips. He had made love to many a pretty girl in old Virginia as the red tide of war had ebbed and flowed around Stuart’s magic camps.
But now the great hour of the soul had struck. No sooner had he dropped the first tender words that might have their double meaning, feeling his way cautiously toward her, than she had placed a gulf of dignity between them, and attempted to cut every tie that bound her life to his.
It had been so sudden it took his breath away. Could he win her? The word “fail” had never been in his vocabulary. It had never run in the speech of his people.
Yes, he would win if it was the only thing he did in this world. And forthwith he set about it. Life took on new meaning and new glory. What mattered war orwounds, pain or poverty, jails and revolutions—it was the dawn of life!
He sent her a flower every day and pinned one just like it on his coat. And every night found him seated by her side. She greeted him cordially, but the gulf yawned between them. His courtesy and self-control struck her with surprise and admiration. In the face of her coldness he carried about him an air of smiling deference and gallantry.
She finally told him of her determination to go to New York to pursue her studies until Phil had finished the term of his enlistment in his regiment, which had been ordered on permanent duty in the West.
He laughed with his eyes at this announcement, blinking the lashes rapidly without moving his lips. It was a peculiar habit of his when deeply moved by a sudden thought. It had flashed over him like lightning that she was trying to get away from him. She would not do that unless she cared.
“When are you going?” he asked quietly.
“Day after to-morrow.”
“Then you will give me one afternoon for a sail on the river to say good-bye and thank you for what you have done for me and mine?”
She hesitated, laughed, and refused.
“To-morrow at four o’clock I’ll call for you,” he said firmly. “If there’s no wind, we can drift with the tide.”
“I will not have time to go.”
“Promptly at four,” he repeated as he left.
Ben spent hours that night weighing the question of how far he should dare to speak his love. It had been such an easy thing before. Now it seemed a question of life and death. Twice the magic words had been on his lips, and each time something in her manner chilled him into silence.
Was she cold and incapable of love? No; this manner of the North was on the surface. He knew that deep down within her nature lay banked and smouldering fires of passion for the one man whose breath could stir it into flame. He felt this all the keener now that the spell of her companionship and the sweet intimacy of her daily ministry to him had been broken. The memory of little movements of her petite figure, the glance of her warm amber eyes, and the touch of her hand—all had their tongues of revelation to his eager spirit.
He found her ready at four o’clock.
“You see I decided to go after all,” she said.
“Yes, I knew you would,” he answered.
She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop skirts.
He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared him.
They were seated in the little sailboat now, drifting out with the tide. It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding silencefill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a sacrilege.
Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.
She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple, scarlet, and gold.
The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.
Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks, and all the tints of autumn’s glory seemed to melt into the gold of her hair.
And those eyes he felt that God had never set in such a face before—rich amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.
“Are you dead again?” she asked demurely.
“Well, as the Irishman said in answer to his mate’s question when he fell off the house, ‘not dead—but spacheless.’”
He was quick to see the opening her question with its memories had made, and took advantage of it.
“Look here, Miss Elsie, you’re too honest, independent, and candid to play hide-and-seek with me. I wantto ask you a plain question. You’ve been trying to pick a quarrel of late. What have I done?”
“Nothing. It has simply come to me that our lives are far apart. The gulf between us is real and very deep. Your father was but yesterday a slaveholder——”
Ben grinned:
“Yes, your slave-trading grandfather sold them to us the day before.”
Elsie blushed and bristled for a fight.
“You won’t mind if I give you a few lessons in history, will you?” Ben asked softly.
“Not in the least. I didn’t know that Southerners studied history,” she answered, with a toss of her head.
“We made a specialty of the history of slavery, at least. I had a dear old teacher at home who fairly blazed with light on this subject. He is one of the best-read men in America. He happens to be in jail just now. But I haven’t forgotten—I know it by heart.”
“I am waiting for light,” she interrupted cynically.
“The South is no more to blame for negro slavery than the North. Our slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers. When a slaver arrived at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks that ‘A gracious and overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation——’”
She looked at him with angry incredulity and cried:
“Go on.”
“Twenty-three times the Legislature of Virginia passedacts against the importation of slaves, which the king vetoed on petition of the Massachusetts slave traders. Jefferson made these acts of the king one of the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a Massachusetts member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in the convention which framed the Constitution put into it a clause abolishing the slave trade, but the Massachusetts men succeeded in adding a clause extending the trade twenty years——”
He smiled and paused.
“Go on,” she said, with impatience.
“In Colonial days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston. The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In 1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America—one hundred and three in the South, and not one in Massachusetts. It was not until 1836 that Massachusetts led in Abolition—not until all her own slaves had been sold to us at a profit and the slave trade had been destroyed——”
She looked at Ben with anger for a moment and met his tantalizing look of good humour.
“Can you stand any more?”
“Certainly, I enjoy it.”
“I’m just breaking down the barriers—so to speak,” he said, with the laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.
“By all means go on,” she said soberly. “I thoughtat first you were trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest.”
“Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I’m at home in—I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day that your father meant to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a gentleman, gold or silver lace, buttons on the knees, or to walk in great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs, while the Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were everywhere in the South the heralds of man’s equality before the law.”
“But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of this generation.”
“Have I, too, sinned and come short?” he asked with mock gravity.
“Our ideals of life are far apart,” she firmly declared.
“What ails my ideal?”
“Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select what pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough—the insolence of a Southerner is beyond words!”
LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.
LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.
“You don’t say so!” cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. “Isn’t your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?”
“Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman.”
“Enlighten me further.”
“I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal—nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life—did you?”
“Come to think of it, I never did,” acknowledged Ben with comic gravity. “What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I’m studying law, you know.”
“I have a personality of my own. You and your kind assume the right to absorb all lesser lights.”
“Certainly, I’m a man.”
“I don’t care to be absorbed by a mere man.”
“Don’t wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?”
“I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows, expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest reach.”
She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben’s brown eyes, about which a smile was constantly playing.He looked away, and again the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself. He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold her.
His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, “If you get there before I do, tell ’em I’m comin’ too!”
As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly that had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to this man almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about him, this gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been immodest. She was in an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of her, and dreaded to meet his gaze.
And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling compound of dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his voice all doubt and questioning melted.
“Do you know,” he said earnestly, “that you are the funniest, most charming girl I ever met?”
“Thanks. I’ve heard your experience has been large for one of your age.”
Ben’s eyes danced.
“Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn’t know were there—to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of mind, with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and out of place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty.”
“I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more personal about you that I do not like.”
“What?”
“Your cavalier habits.”
“Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism.”
“You love to fish and hunt and frolic—you flirt with every girl you meet, and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and that I do not know you.”
Ben’s face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair suddenly became livid with the rush of blood.
“Perhaps I don’t mean that you shall know all yet,” he said slowly. “My ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet eludes. I confess that I’m close kin to an angel and a devil, and that I await a woman’s hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life.”
The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle appeal of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly nose, with its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that moment and very appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.
He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid look on her face caused him to sink back in silence.
They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all nature.They passed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its staff.
The girl’s eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then on the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the difference between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only his nearness was real. Again a strange joy held her.
He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A sea gull poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.
Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:
“I love you!”
A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.
“I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the thing that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and faults my land is yours—a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and everlasting song, old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and hospitable. Around its humblest cottage song birds live and mate and nest and never leave. The winged ones of your own cold fields have heard their call, and the sky to-night will echo with their chatter as they hurry southward. Elsie, my own, I too have called—come; I love you!”
She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes burning their passionate answer.
He bent and kissed her.
“Say it! Say it!” he whispered.
“I love you!” she sighed.
CHAPTER VIThe Gauge of Battle
The day of the first meeting of the National Congress after the war was one of intense excitement. The galleries of the House were packed. Elsie was there with Ben in a fever of secret anxiety lest the stirring drama should cloud her own life. She watched her father limp to his seat with every eye fixed on him.
The President had pursued with persistence the plan of Lincoln for the immediate restoration of the Union. Would Congress follow the lead of the President or challenge him to mortal combat?
Civil governments had been restored in all the Southern States, with men of the highest ability chosen as governors and lawmakers. Their legislatures had unanimously voted for the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery, and elected senators and representatives to Congress. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, had declared the new amendment a part of the organic law of the Nation by the vote of these States.
General Grant went to the South to report its condition and boldly declared:
“I am satisfied that the mass of thinking people of the South accept the situation in good faith. Slavery and secession they regard as settled forever by the highestknown tribunal, and consider this decision a fortunate one for the whole country.”
Would the Southerners be allowed to enter?
Amid breathless silence the clerk rose to call the roll of members-elect. Every ear was bent to hear the name of the first Southern man. Not one was called! The Master had spoken. His clerk knew how to play his part.
The next business of the House was to receive the message of the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.
The message came, but not from the White House. It came from the seat of the Great Commoner.
As the first thrill of excitement over the challenge to the President slowly subsided, Stoneman rose, planted his big club foot in the middle of the aisle, and delivered to Congress the word of its new master.
It was Ben’s first view of the man of all the world just now of most interest. From his position he could see his full face and figure.
He began speaking in a careless, desultory way. His tone was loud yet not declamatory, at first in a grumbling, grandfatherly, half-humorous, querulous accent that riveted every ear instantly. A sort of drollery of a contagious kind haunted it. Here and there a member tittered in expectation of a flash of wit.
His figure was taller than the average, slightly bent, with a dignity which suggested reserve power and contempt for his audience. One knew instinctively that back of the boldest word this man might say there was a bolder unspoken word he had chosen not to speak.
His limbs were long, and their movements slow, yetnervous as from some internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt within them.
The heaped-up curly profusion of his brown wig gave a weird impression to the spread of his mobile features. His eagle-beaked nose had three distinct lines and angles. His chin was broad and bold, and his brows beetling and projecting. His mouth was wide, marked, and grim; when opened, deep and cavernous; when closed, it seemed to snap so tightly that the lower lip protruded.
Of all his make-up, his eye was the most fascinating, and it held Ben spellbound. It could thrill to the deepest fibre of the soul that looked into it, yet it did not gleam. It could dominate, awe, and confound, yet it seemed to have no colour or fire. He could easily see it across the vast hall from the galleries, yet it was not large. Two bold, colourless dagger-points of light they seemed. As he grew excited, they darkened as if passing under a cloud.
A sudden sweep of his huge apelike arm in an angular gesture, and the drollery and carelessness of his voice were riven from it as by a bolt of lightning.
He was driving home his message now in brutal frankness. Yet in the height of his fiercest invective he never seemed to strengthen himself or call on his resources. In its climax he was careless, conscious of power, and contemptuous of results, as though as a gambler he had staked and lost all and in the moment of losing suddenly become the master of those who had beaten him.
His speech never once bent to persuade or convince. He meant to brain the opposition with a single blow, andhe did it. For he suddenly took the breath from his foes by shouting in their faces the hidden motive of which they were hoping to accuse him!
“Admit these Southern Representatives,” he cried, “and with the Democrats elected from the North, within one term they will have a majority in Congress and the Electoral College. The supremacy of our party’s life is at stake. The man who dares palter with such a measure is a rebel, a traitor to his party and his people.”
A cheer burst from his henchmen, and his foes sat in dazed stupor at his audacity. He moved the appointment of a “Committee on Reconstruction” to whom the entire government of the “conquered provinces of the South” should be committed, and to whom all credentials of their pretended representatives should be referred.
He sat down as the Speaker put his motion, declared it carried, and quickly announced the names of this Imperial Committee with the Hon. Austin Stoneman as its chairman.
He then permitted the message of the President of the United States to be read by his clerk.
“Well, upon my soul,” said Ben, taking a deep breath and looking at Elsie, “he’s the whole thing, isn’t he?”
The girl smiled with pride.
“Yes; he is a genius. He was born to command and yet never could resist the cry of a child or the plea of a woman. He hates, but he hates ideas and systems. He makes threats, yet when he meets the man who stands for all he hates he falls in love with his enemy.”
“Then there’s hope for me?”
“Yes, but I must be the judge of the time to speak.”
“Well, if he looks at me as he did once to-day, you may have to do the speaking also.”
“You will like him when you know him. He is one of the greatest men in America.”
“At least he’s the father of the greatest girl in the world, which is far more important.”
“I wonder if you know how important?” she asked seriously. “He is the apple of my eye. His bitter words, his cynicism and sarcasm, are all on the surface—masks that hide a great sensitive spirit. You can’t know with what brooding tenderness I have always loved and worshipped him. I will never marry against his wishes.”
“I hope he and I will always be good friends,” said Ben doubtfully.
“You must,” she replied, eagerly pressing his hand.
CHAPTER VIIA Woman Laughs
Each day the conflict waxed warmer between the President and the Commoner.
The first bill sent to the White House to Africanize the “conquered provinces” the President vetoed in a message of such logic, dignity, and power, the old leader found to his amazement it was impossible to rally the two-thirds majority to pass it over his head.
At first, all had gone as planned. Lynch and Howle brought to him a report on “Southern Atrocities,” secured through the councils of the secret oath-bound Union League, which had destroyed the impression of General Grant’s words and prepared his followers for blind submission to his Committee.
Yet the rally of a group of men in defence of the Constitution had given the President unexpected strength.
Stoneman saw that he must hold his hand on the throat of the South and fight another campaign. Howle and Lynch furnished the publication committee of the Union League the matter, and they printed four million five hundred thousand pamphlets on “Southern Atrocities.”
The Northern States were hostile to negro suffrage, the first step of his revolutionary programme, and not a dozen men in Congress had yet dared to favour it. Ohio, Michigan,New York, and Kansas had rejected it by overwhelming majorities. But he could appeal to their passions and prejudices against the “Barbarism” of the South. It would work like magic. When he had the South where he wanted it, he would turn and ram negro suffrage and negro equality down the throats of the reluctant North.
His energies were now bent to prevent any effective legislation in Congress until his strength should be omnipotent.
A cloud disturbed the sky for a moment in the Senate. John Sherman, of Ohio, began to loom on the horizon as a constructive statesman, and without consulting him was quietly forcing over Sumner’s classic oratory a Reconstruction Bill restoring the Southern States to the Union on the basis of Lincoln’s plan, with no provision for interference with the suffrage. It had gone to its last reading, and the final vote was pending.
The house was in session at 3a. m., waiting in feverish anxiety the outcome of this struggle in the Senate.
Old Stoneman was in his seat, fast asleep from the exhaustion of an unbroken session of forty hours. His meals he had sent to his desk from the Capitol restaurant. He was seventy-four years old and not in good health, yet his energy was tireless, his resources inexhaustible, and his audacity matchless.
Sunset Cox, the wag of the House, an opponent but personal friend of the old Commoner, passing his seat and seeing the great head sunk on his breast in sleep, laughed softly and said:
“Mr. Speaker!”
The presiding officer recognized the young Democrat with a nod of answering humour and responded:
“The gentleman from New York.”
“I move you, sir,” said Cox, “that, in view of the advanced age and eminent services of the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, the Sergeant-at-Arms be instructed to furnish him with enough poker chips to last till morning!”
The scattered members who were awake roared with laughter, the Speaker pounded furiously with his gavel, the sleepy little pages jumped up, rubbing their eyes, and ran here and there answering imaginary calls, and the whole House waked to its usual noise and confusion.
The old man raised his massive head and looked to the door leading toward the Senate just as Sumner rushed through. He had slept for a moment, but his keen intellect had taken up the fight at precisely the point at which he left it.
Sumner approached his desk rapidly, leaned over, and reported his defeat and Sherman’s triumph.
“For God’s sake throttle this measure in the House or we are ruined!” he exclaimed.
“Don’t be alarmed,” replied the cynic. “I’ll be here with stronger weapons than articulated wind.”
“You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker’s desk, and Sherman’s men are going to force its passage to-night.”
The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle of his outraged dignity, and inthirty minutes the bill was defeated, and the House adjourned.
As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:
“How did you do it?”
Stoneman’s huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:
“I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if they would join with me and defeat this bill, I’d give them a better one the next session. And I will—negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it whole!”
Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.
The Great Commoner laughed as he departed:
“He is yet too good for this world, but he’ll forget it before we’re done this fight.”
On the steps a beggar asked him for a night’s lodging, and he tossed him a gold eagle.
The North, which had rejected negro suffrage for itself with scorn, answered Stoneman’s fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.
So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the very existence of Stanton’s prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten, and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that AndrewJohnson was from Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under Stoneman’s assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance with Lincoln’s plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting favour of traitors and rebels.
Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial, impeachment, and removal from office.
Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the “conquered provinces” of the South to negro rule.
President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the constitutional rights of the States that it failed by one vote to find the two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.
The old Commoner’s eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when this vote was announced.
With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his own party who had faltered.
As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:
“If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I’d hang the man at the other end of the avenue from theporch of the White House! But I haven’t got them—cowards, dastards, dolts, and snivelling fools——”
His decision was instantly made. He would expel enough Democrats from the Senate and the House to place his two-thirds majority beyond question. The name of the President never passed his lips. He referred to him always, even in public debate, as “the man at the other end of the avenue,” or “the former Governor of Tennessee who once threatened rebels—the late lamented Andrew Johnson, of blessed memory.”
He ordered the expulsion of the new member of the House from Indiana, Daniel W. Voorhees, and the new Senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton. This would give him a majority of two thirds composed of men who would obey his word without a question.
Voorhees heard of the edict with indignant wrath. He had met Stoneman in the lobbies, where he was often the centre of admiring groups of friends. His wit and audacity, and, above all, his brutal frankness, had won the admiration of the “Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” He could not believe such a man would be a party to a palpable fraud. He appealed to him personally:
“Look here, Stoneman,” the young orator cried with wrath, “I appeal to your sense of honour and decency. My credentials have been accepted by your own committee, and my seat been awarded me. My majority is unquestioned. This is a high-handed outrage. You cannot permit this crime.”
The old man thrust his deformed foot out before him,struck it meditatively with his cane, and looking Voorhees straight in the eye, boldly said:
“There’s nothing the matter with your majority, young man. I’ve no doubt it’s all right. Unfortunately, you are a Democrat, and happen to be the odd man in the way of the two-thirds majority on which the supremacy of my party depends. You will have to go. Come back some other time.” And he did.
In the Senate there was a hitch. When the vote was taken on the expulsion of Stockton, to the amazement of the leader it was a tie.
He hobbled into the Senate Chamber, with the steel point of his cane ringing on the marble flags as though he were thrusting it through the vitals of the weakling who had sneaked and hedged and trimmed at the crucial moment.
He met Howle at the door.
“What’s the matter in there?” he asked.
“They’re trying to compromise.”
“Compromise—the Devil of American politics,” he muttered. “But how did the vote fail—it was all fixed before the roll-call?”
“Roman, of Maine, has trouble with his conscience! He is paired not to vote on this question with Stockton’s colleague, who is sick in Trenton. His ‘honour’ is involved, and he refuses to break his word.”
“I see,” said Stoneman, pulling his bristling brows down until his eyes were two beads of white gleaming through them. “Tell Wade to summon every member of the party in his room immediately and hold the Senate in session.”
When the group of Senators crowded into the Vice-president’s room the old man faced them leaning on his cane and delivered an address of five minutes they never forgot.
His speech had a nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger, his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot seemed to grip the floor as the claw of a beast.
“The life of a political party, gentlemen,” he growled in conclusion, “is maintained by a scheme of subterfuges in which the moral law cuts no figure. As your leader, I know but one law—success. The world is full of fools who must have toys with which to play. A belief in politics is the favourite delusion of shallow American minds. But you and I have no delusions. Your life depends on this vote. If any man thinks the abstraction called ‘honour’ is involved, let him choose between his honour and his life! I call no names. This issue must be settled now before the Senate adjourns. There can be no to-morrow. It is life or death. Let the roll be called again immediately.”
The grave Senators resumed their seats, and Wade, the acting Vice-president, again put the question to Stockton’s expulsion.
The member from New England sat pale and trembling, in his soul the anguish of the mortal combat between his Puritan conscience, the iron heritage of centuries, and the order of his captain.
When the Clerk of the Senate called his name, still the battle raged. He sat in silence, the whiteness of death about his lips, while the clerk at a signal from the Chair paused.
And then a scene the like of which was never known in American history! August Senators crowded around his desk, begging, shouting, imploring, and demanding that a fellow Senator break his solemn word of honour!
For a moment pandemonium reigned.
“Vote! Vote! Call his name again!” they shouted.
High above all rang the voice of Charles Sumner, leading the wild chorus, crying:
“Vote! Vote! Vote!”
The galleries hissed and cheered—the cheers at last drowning every hiss.
Stoneman pushed his way among the mob which surrounded the badgered Puritan as he attempted to retreat into the cloakroom.
“Will you vote?” he hissed, his eyes flashing poison.
“My conscience will not permit it,” he faltered.
“To hell with your conscience!” the old leader thundered. “Go back to your seat, ask the clerk to call your name, and vote, or by the living God I’ll read you out of the party to-night and brand you a snivelling coward, a copperhead, a renegade, and traitor!”
Trembling from head to foot, he staggered back to his seat, the cold sweat standing in beads on his forehead, and gasped:
“Call my name!”
The shrill voice of the clerk rang out in the stillness like the peal of a trumpet:
“Mr. Roman!”
And the deed was done.
A cheer burst from his colleagues, and the roll-call proceeded.
When Stockton’s name was reached he sprang to his feet, voted for himself, and made a second tie!
With blank faces they turned to the leader, who ordered Charles Sumner to move that the Senator from New Jersey be not allowed to answer his name on an issue involving his own seat.
It was carried. Again the roll was called, and Stockton expelled by a majority of one.
In the moment of ominous silence which followed, a yellow woman of sleek animal beauty leaned far over the gallery rail and laughed aloud.
The passage of each act of the Revolutionary programme over the veto of the President was now but a matter of form. The act to degrade his office by forcing him to keep a cabinet officer who daily insulted him, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Freedman’s Bureau Bill followed in rapid succession.
Stoneman’s crowning Reconstruction Act was passed, two years after the war had closed, shattering the Union again into fragments, blotting the names of ten greatSouthern States from its roll, and dividing their territory into five Military Districts under the control of belted satraps.
When this measure was vetoed by the President, it came accompanied by a message whose words will be forever etched in fire on the darkest page of the Nation’s life.
Amid hisses, curses, jeers, and cat-calls, the Clerk of the House read its burning words:
“The power thus given to the commanding officer over the people of each district is that of an absolute monarch. His mere will is to take the place of law. He may make a criminal code of his own; he can make it as bloody as any recorded in history, or he can reserve the privilege of acting on the impulse of his private passions in each case that arises.
“Here is a bill of attainer against nine millions of people at once. It is based upon an accusation so vague as to be scarcely intelligible, and found to be true upon no credible evidence. Not one of the nine millions was heard in his own defence. The representatives even of the doomed parties were excluded from all participation in the trial. The conviction is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever inflicted on large masses of men. It disfranchises them by hundreds of thousands and degrades them all—even those who are admitted to be guiltless—from the rank of freemen to the condition of slaves.
“Such power has not been wielded by any monarch in England for more than five hundred years, and in all that time no people who speak the English tongue have borne such servitude.”
When the last jeering cat-call which greeted this message of the Chief Magistrate had died away on the floor and in the galleries, old Stoneman rose, with a smile playing about his grim mouth, and introduced his bill to impeach the President of the United States and remove him from office.