SHE’S coming next month, Charlie,” said Mrs. Durham, looking up from a letter.
“Who is it now. Auntie, another divinity with which you are going to overwhelm me?” asked Gaston smiling as he laid his book down and leaned back in his chair.
“Some one I’ve been telling you about for the last month.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, you wretch! You don’t think about anything except your books. I’ve been dinning that girl’s praises into your ears for fully five weeks, and you look at me in that innocent way and ask which one?”
“Honestly, Aunt Margaret, you’re always telling me about some beautiful girl, I get them mixed. And then when I see them, they don’t come up to the advance notices you’ve sent out. To tell you the truth, you are such a beautiful woman, and I’ve got so used to your standard, the girls can’t measure up to it.”
“You flatterer. A woman of forty-two a standard of beauty! Well, it’s sweet to hear you say it, you handsome young rascal.”
“It’s the honest truth. You are one of the women who never show the addition of a year. You have spoiled my eyesight for ordinary girls.”
“Hush, sir, you don’t dare to talk to any girl like you talk to me. They all say you’re afraid of them.”
“Well, I am, in a sense. I’ve been disappointed so many times.”
“Oh! you ’ll find her yet and when you do!”—
“What do you think will happen?”
“I’m certain you will be the biggest fool in the state.”
“That will make it nice for the girl, won’t it?”
“Yes, and I shall enjoy your antics. You who have dissected love with your brutal German philosophy, and found every girl’s faults with such ease,—it will be fun to watch you flounder in the meshes at last.”
“Auntie, seriously, it will be the happiest day of my life. For four years my dreams have been growing more and more impossible. Who is this one?”
“She is the most beautiful girl I know, and the brightest and the best, and if she gets hold of you she will clip your wings and bring you down to earth. I ’ll watch you with interest,” said Mrs. Durham looking over the letter again and laughing.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Just a little joke she gets off in this letter.”
“But who is she? You haven’t told me.”
“I did tell you—she’s General Worth’s daughter, Miss Sallie. She writes she is coming up to spend a month at the Springs, with her friend Helen Lowell, of Boston, and wants me to corral all the young men in the community and have them fed and in fine condition for work when they arrive.”
“She evidently intends to have a good time.”
“Yes, and she will.”
“Fortunately my law practice is not rushing me at this season. My total receipts for June last year were two dollars and twenty-five cents. It will hardly go over two-fifty this year.”
“I’ve told her you’re a rising young lawyer.”
“I have plenty of room to rise, Auntie. If you will just keep on letting me board with you, I hope to work my practice up to ten dollars a month in the course of time.”
“Don’t you want to hear something about Miss Sallie?”
“Of course, I was just going to ask you if she’s as homely as that last one you tried to get off on me.”
“I’ve told you she’s a beauty. She made a sensation at her finishing school in Baltimore. It’s funny that she was there the last year you were at the Johns Hopkins University. She’s the belle of Independence, rich, petted, and the only child of old General Worth, who thinks the sun rises and sets in her pretty blue eyes.”
“So she has blue eyes?”
“Yes, blue eyes and black hair.”
“What a funny combination! I never saw a girl with blue eyes and black hair.”
“It’s often seen in the far South. I expect you to be drowned in those blue eyes. They are big, round and child-like, and look out of their black lashes as though surprised at their dark setting. This contrast accents their dreamy beauty, and her eyes seem to swim in a dim blue mist like the point where the sea and sky meet on the horizon far out on the ocean. She is bright, witty, romantic and full of coquetry. She is determined to live her girl’s life to its full limit. She is fond of society and dances divinely.”
“That’s bad. I never even cut the pigeon’s wing in my life—and I’m too old to learn.”
“She has a full queenly figure, small hands and feet, delicate wrists, a dimple in one cheek only, and a mass of brown-black hair that curls when it’s going to rain.”
“That’s fine, we wouldn’t need a barometer on life’s voyage, would we?”
“No, but you will be looking for a pilot and a harbour before you’ve known her a month. Her upper lip is a little fuller and projects slightly over the lower, and they are both beautifully fluted and curved like the petals of a flower, which makes the most tantalising mouth a standing challenge for a kiss.”
“Oh! Auntie, you’re joking! You never saw such a girl. You’re breaking into my heart, stealing glances at my ideal.”
“All right, sir, wait and see for yourself. She has pretty shell-like ears, her laughter is full, contagious, and like music. She plays divinely on the piano, can’t sing a note, but dresses to kill. You might as well wind up your affairs, and get ready for the first serious work of your life. You will have your hands full after you see her.”
“But did I understand you to say she’s rich?”
“Yes, they say her father is worth half a million.”
“Do you think she could be interested in the poor in this county?”
“Yes, she doesn’t seem to know she’s an heiress. Her father, the General, is a deacon in the Baptist church at Independence, and hates dudes and fops with all his old-fashioned soul. His idea of a man is one of character, and the capacity of achievement, not merely a possessor of money. Still, I imagine he is going to give any man trouble who tries to take his daughter away from him.”
“I’m afraid that money lets me out of the race.”
“Nothing of the sort, when you see her you will never allow a little thing like that to worry you.”
“It’s not her dollars that will worry me. It’s the fact that she’s got them and I haven’t. But, anyhow, Auntie, from your description you can book me for one night at least.”
“I’m going to book you for her lackey, her slave, devoted to her every whim while she’s here. One night—the idea!”
“Auntie, you’re too generous to others. I’ve no notion all this rigmarole about your Miss Sallie Worth is true. But I ’ll do anything to please you.”
“Very well, I ’ll see whom you are trying to please later.”
“I must go,” said Gaston, hastily rising. “I have an engagement to discuss the coming political campaign with the Hon. Allan McLeod, the present Republican boss of the state.”
“I didn’t know you hobnobbed with the enemy.”
“I don’t. But as far as I can understand him, he purposes to take me up on an exceeding high mountain and offer me the world and the fulness thereof. We all like to be tempted whether we fall or not. The Doctor hates McLeod. I think he holds some grudge against him. What do you think of him, Auntie? He swears by you. I used to dislike him as a boy, but he seems a pretty decent sort of fellow now, and I can’t help liking just a little anybody who loves you. I confess he has a fascination for me.”
“Why do you ask my opinion of him?” slowly asked Mrs. Durham.
“Because I’m not quite sure of his honesty. He talks fairly, but there’s something about him that casts a doubt over his fairest words. He says he has the most important proposition of my life to place before me to-day, and I’m at a loss how to meet him—whether as a well-meaning friend or a scheming scoundrel. He’s a puzzle to me.”
“Well Charlie, I don’t mind telling you that he is a puzzle to me. I’ve always been strangely attracted to him, even when he was a big red-headed brute of a boy. The Doctor always disliked him and I thought, misjudged him. He has always paid me the supremest deference, and of late years the most subtle flattery. No woman, who feels her life a failure, as I do mine, can be indifferent to such a compliment from a man of trained mind and masterful character. This is a sore subject between the Doctor and myself. And when I see him shaking hands a little too lingeringly with admiring sisters after his services, I repay him with a chat with my devoted McLeod. Don’t ask me. I like him, and I don’t like him. I admire him and at the same time I suspect and half fear him.”
“Strange we feel so much alike about him. But your heart has always been very close to mine, since you slipped your arm around me that night my mother died. I know about what he will say, and I know about what I ’ll do.” He stooped and kissed his fostermother tenderly.
“Charlie, I’m in earnest about my pretty girl that’s coming. Don’t forget it.”
“Bah! You’ve fooled me before.”
McLEOD was waiting with some impatience in his room at the hotel.
“Walk in Gaston, you’re a little late. However, better late than never.” McLeod plunged directly into the purpose of his visit.
“Gaston you’re a man of brains, and oratorical genius. I heard your speech in the last Democratic convention in Raleigh, and I don’t say it to flatter you, that was the greatest speech made in any assembly in this state since the war.”
“Thanks!” said Gaston with a wave of his arm.
“I mean it. You know too much to be in sympathy with the old moss-backs who are now running this state. For fourteen years, the South has marched to the polls and struck blindly at the Republican party, and three times it struck to kill. The Southern people have nothing in common with these Northern Democrats who make your platforms and nominate your candidate. You don’t ask anything about the platform or the man. You would vote for the devil if the Democrats nominated him, and ask no questions; and what infuriates me is you vote to enforce platforms that mean economic ruin to the South.”
“Man shall not live by bread alone, McLeod.”
“Sure, but he can’t live on dead men’s bones. You vote in solid mass on the Negro question, which you settled by the power of Anglo-Saxon insolence when you destroyed the Reconstruction governments at a blow. Why should you keep on voting against every interest of the South, merely because you hate the name Republican?”
“Why? Simply because so long as the Negro is here with a ballot in his hands he is a menace to civilisation. The Republican party placed him here. The name Republican will stink in the South for a century, not because they beat us in war, but because two years after the war, in profound peace, they inaugurated a second war on the unarmed people of the South, butchering the starving, the wounded, the women and children. God in heaven, will I ever forget that day they murdered my mother! Their attempt to establish with the bayonet an African barbarism on the ruins of Southern society was a conspiracy against human progress. It was the blackest crime of the nineteenth century.”
“You are talking in a dead language. We are living in a new world.”
“But principles are eternal.”
“Principles? I’m not talking about principles. I’m talking about practical politics. The people down here haven’t voted on a principle in years. They’ve been voting on old Simon Legree. He left the state nearly a quarter of a century ago.”
“Yes, McLeod, but his soul has gone marching on. The Republican party fought the South because such men as Legree lived in it, and abused the negroes, and the moment they won, turn and make Legree and his breed their pets. Simon Legree is more than a mere man who stole five millions of dollars, alienated the races, and covered the South with the desolation of anarchy. He is an idea. He represents everything that the soul of the South loathes, and that the Republican party has tried to ram down our throats, Negro supremacy in politics, and Negro equality in society.”
“You are talking about the dead past, Gaston. I’m surprised at a man of your brain living under such a delusion. How can there be Negro supremacy when they are in a minority?”
“Supremacy under a party system is always held by a minority. The dominant faction of a party rules the party, and the successful party rules the state. If the Negro only numbered one-fifth the population and they all belonged to one party, they could dictate the policy of that party.”
“You know that a few white brains really rule that black mob.”
“Yes, but the black mob defines the limits within which you live and have your being.”
“Gaston, the time has come to shake off this nightmare, and face the issues of our day and generation. We are going to win in this campaign, but I want you. I like you. You are the kind of man we need now to take the field and lead in this campaign.”
“How are you going to win?”
“We are going to form a contract with the Farmer’s Alliance and break the backbone of the Bourbon Democracy of the South. The farmers have now a compact body of 50,000 voters, thoroughly organised, and combined with the negro vote we can hold this state until Gabriel blows his trumpet.”
“That’s a pretty scheme. Our farmers are crazy now with all sorts of fool ideas,” said Gaston thoughtfully.
“Exactly, my boy, and we’ve got them by the nose.”
“If you can carry through that programme, you’ve got us in a hole.”
“In a hole? I should say we’ve got you in the bottomless pit with the lid bolted down. You ’ll not even rise at the day of judgment. It won’t be necessary!” laughed McLeod, and as he laughed changed his tone in the midst of his laughter.
“And what is the great proposition you have to make to me?” asked Gaston.
“Join with us in this new coalition, and stump the state for us. Your fortune will be made, win or lose. I ’ll see that the National Republican Committee pays you a thousand dollars a week for your speeches, at least five a week, two hundred dollars apiece. If we lose, you will make ten thousand dollars in the canvass, and stand in line for a good office under the National Administration. If we win, I ’ll put you in the Governor’s Palace for four years. There’s a tide in the affairs of men, you know. It’s at the flood at this moment for you.”
Gaston was silent a moment and looked thoughtfully out of the window. The offer was a tremendous temptation. A group of old fogies had dominated the Democratic party for ten years, and had kept the younger men down with their war cries and old soldier candidates, until he had been more than once disgusted. He felt as sure of McLeod’s success as if he already saw it. It was precisely the movement he had warned the old pudding-head set against in the preceding campaign in which they had deliberately alienated the Farmer’s Alliance. They had pooh poohed his warning and blundered on to their ruin.
It was the dream of his life to have money enough to buy back his mother’s old home, beautify it, and live there in comfort with a great library of books he would gather. The possibility of a career at the state Capital and then at Washington for so young a man was one of dazzling splendour to his youthful mind. For the moment it seemed almost impossible to say no.
McLeod saw his hesitation and already smiled with the certainty of triumph. A cloud overspread his face when Gaston at length said, “I ’ll give you my answer to-morrow.”
“All right, you’re a gentleman. I can trust you. Our conversation is of course only between you and me.”
“Certainly, I understand that.”
All that day and night he was alone fighting out the battle in his soul. It was an easy solution of life that opened before him. The attainment of his proudest ambitions lay within his grasp almost without a struggle. Such a campaign, with his name on the lips of surging thousands around those speaker’s stands, was an idea that fascinated him with a serpent charm.
All that he had to do was to give up his prejudices on the Negro question. His own party stood for no principle except the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon. On the issue of the party platforms, he was in accord with the modern Republican utterances at almost every issue, and so were his associates in the Southern Democracy. The Negro was the point. What was the use now of persisting in the stupid reiteration of the old slogan of white supremacy? The Negro had the ballot. He was still the ward of the nation, and likely to be for all time, so far as he could see. The Negro was the one pet superstition of the millions who lived where no negro dwelt. His person and his ballot were held more peculiarly sacred and inviolate in the South than that of any white man elsewhere.
The possibility of a reunion in friendly understanding and sympathy between the masses of the North and the masses of the South seemed remote and impossible in his day and generation.
He asked himself the question, could such a revolution toward universal suffrage ever go backward, no matter how base the motive which gave it birth? Why not give up impracticable dreams, accept things as they are, and succeed?
He did not confer with the Rev. John Durham on this question, because he knew what his answer would be without asking. A thousand times he had said to him, with the emphasis he could give to words, “My boy, the future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto! We are now deciding which it shall be. The future of the world depends on the future of this Republic. This Republic can have no future if racial lines are broken, and its proud citizenship sinks to the level of a mongrel breed of Mulattoes. The South must tight this battle to a finish. Two thousand years look down upon the struggle, and Two thousand years of the future bend low to catch the message of life or death!”
He could see now his drawn face with its deep lines and his eyes flashing with passion as he said this. These words haunted Gaston now with strange power as he walked along the silent streets.
He walked down past his old home, stopped and leaned on the gate, and looked at it long and lovingly. What a flood of tender and sorrowful memories swept his soul! He lived over again the days of despair when his mother was an invalid. He recalled their awful poverty, and then the last terrible day with that mob of negroes trampling over the lawn and overrunning the house. He saw the white face of his mother whose memory he loved as he loved life. And now he recalled a sentence from her dying lips. He had all but lost its meaning.
“You will grow to be a brave strong man. You will fight this battle out, and win back our home, and bring your own bride here in the far away days of sunshine and success I see for you.”
You will fight this battle out—he had almost lost that sentence in his hunger for that which followed. It came to his soul now ringing like a trumpet call to honour and duty.
He turned on his heel and walked rapidly home. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning.
“We will fight it out on the old lines,” he said to McLeod next day.
“You will find me a pretty good fighter.”
“Unto death, let it be,” answered Gaston firmly setting his lips.
“I admire your pluck, but I’m sorry for your judgment. You know you’re beaten before you begin.”
“Defeat that’s seen has lost its bitterness before it comes.”
“Then get ready the flowers for the funeral. I hoped you would have better sense. You are one of the men now I ’ll have to crush first, thoroughly, and for all time. I’m not afraid of the old fools. I ’ll be fair enough to tell you this,” said McLeod.
“Not since Legree’s day has the Republican party had so dangerous a man at its head,” said Gaston thoughtfully to himself as McLeod strode away across the square. “He has ten times the brains of his older master, and none of his superstitions. He will give me a hard fight.”
HAMBRIGHT had changed but little in the eighteen years of peace that had followed the terrors of Legree’s régime. The population had doubled, though but few houses had been built. The town had not grown from the development of industry, but for a very simple reason—the country people had moved into the town, seeking refuge from a new terror that was growing of late more and more a menace to a country home, the roving criminal negro.
The birth of a girl baby was sure to make a father restless, and when the baby looked up into his face one day with the soft light of a maiden, he gave up his farm and moved to town.
The most important development of these eighteen years was the complete alienation of the white and black races as compared with the old familiar trust of domestic life.
When Legree finished his work as the master artificer of the Reconstruction Policy, he had dug a gulf between the races as deep as hell. It had never been bridged. The deed was done and it had crystallised into the solid rock that lies at the basis of society. It was done at a formative period, and it could no more be undone now than you could roll the universe back in its course.
The younger generation of white men only knew the Negro as an enemy of his people in politics and society.
He never came in contact with him except in menial service, in which the service rendered was becoming more and more trifling, and his habits more insolent. He had his separate schools, churches, preachers and teachers, and his political leaders were the beneficiaries of Legree’s legacies.
With the Anglo-Saxon race guarding the door of marriage with fire and sword, the effort was being made to build a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. No such thing had ever been done in the history of the human race, even under the development of the monarchial and aristocratic forms of society. How could it be done under the formulas of Democracy with Equality as the fundamental basis of law? And yet this was the programme of the age.
Gaston was feeling blue from the reaction which followed his temptation by McLeod. His duty was clear the night before as he walked firmly homeward, recalling the tragedy of the past. Now in the cold light of day, the past seemed far away and unreal. The present was near, pressing, vital. He laid down a book he was trying to read, locked his office and strolled down town to see Tom Camp.
This old soldier had come to be a sort of oracle to him. His affection for the son of his Colonel was deep and abiding, and his extravagant flattery of his talents and future were so evidently sincere they always acted as a tonic. And he needed a tonic to-day.
Tom was seated in a chair in his yard under a big cedar, working on a basket, and a little golden-haired girl was playing at his feet. It was his old home he had lost in Legree’s day, but had got back through the help of General Worth, who came up one day and paid back Tom’s gift of lightwood in gleaming yellow metal. His long hair and full beard were white now, and his eyes had a soft deep look that told of sorrows borne in patience and faith beyond the ken of the younger man. It was this look on Tom’s face that held Gaston like a magnet when he was in trouble.
“Tom, I’m blue and heartsick. I’ve come down to have you cheer me up a little.”
“You’ve got the blues? Well that is a joke!” cried Tom. “You, young and handsome, the best educated man in the county, the finest orator in the state, life all before you, and God fillin’ the world to-day with sunshine and spring flowers, and all for you! You blue! That is a joke.” And Tom’s voice rang in hearty laughter.
“Come here, Flora, and kiss me, you won’t laugh at me, will you?”
The child climbed up into his lap, slipped her little arms around his neck and hugged and kissed him.
“Now, once more, dearie, long and close and hard—oh! That’s worth a pound of candy!” Again she squeezed his neck and kissed him, looking into his face with a smile.
“I love you, Charlie,” she said with quaint seriousness.
“Do you, dear? Well, that makes me glad. If I can win the love of as pretty a little girl as you I’m not a failure, am I?” And he smoothed her curls.
“Ain’t she sweet?” cried Tom with pride as he laid aside his basket and looked at her with moistened eyes.
“Tom, she’s the sweetest child I ever saw.”
“Yes, she’s God’s last and best gift to me, to show me He still loved me. Talk about trouble. Man, you’re a baby. You ain’t cut your teeth yet. Wait till you’ve seen some things I’ve seen. Wait till you’ve seen the light of the world go out, and staggerin’ in the dark met the devil face to face, and looked him in the eye, and smelled the pit. And then feel him knock you down in it, and the red waves roll over you and smother you. I’ve been there.”
Tom paused and looked at Gaston. “You weren’t here when I come to the end of the world, the time when that baby was born, and Annie died with the little red bundle sleepin’ on her breast. The oldest girl was murdered by Legree’s nigger soldiers. Then Annie give me that little gal. Lord, I was the happiest old fool that ever lived that day! And then when I looked into Annie’s dead face, I went down, down, down! But I looked up from the bottom of the pit and I saw the light of them blue eyes and I heard her callin’ me to take her. How I watched her and nursed her, a mother and a father to her, day and night, through the long years, and how them little fingers of hers got hold of my heart! Now, I bless the Lord for all His goodness and mercy to me. She will make it all right. She’s going to be a lady and such a beauty! She’s goin’ to school now, and me and the General’s goin’ to take her ter college bye and bye, and she’s goin’ to marry some big handsome fellow like you, and her crippled grey haired daddy ’ll live in her house in his old age. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.”
“Tom, you make me ashamed.”
“You ought to be, man, a youngster like you to talk about gettin’ the blues. What’s all your education for?”
“Sometimes I think that only men like you have ever been educated.”
“G’long with your foolishness, boy. I ain’t never had a show in this world. The nigger’s been on my back since I first toddled into the world, and I reckon he ’ll ride me into the grave. They are my only rivals now making them baskets and they always undersell me.”
Gaston started as Tom uttered the last sentence.
“With you, boy, it’s all plain sailin’. You’re the best looking chap in the county. I was a dandy when I was young. It does me good to look at you if you don’t care nothin’ about fine clothes. Then you’re as sharp as a razor. There ain’t a man in No’th Caliny that can stand up agin you on the stump. I’ve heard ’em all. You ’ll be the Governor of this state.”
That was always the climax of Tom’s prophetic flattery. He could think of no grander end of a human life than to crown it in the Governor’s Palace of North Carolina. He belonged to the old days when it was a bigger thing to be the Governor of a great state than to hold any office short of the Presidency,—when men resigned seats in the United States Senate to run for Governor, and when the national government was so puny a thing that the bankers of Europe refused to loan money on United States bonds unless countersigned by the State of Virginia. And that was not so long ago. The bankers sent that answer to Buchanan’s Secretary of the Treasury.
“Tom, you’ve lifted me out of the dumps. I owe you a doctor’s fee,” cried Gaston with enthusiasm as he placed Flora back on the grass and started to his office.
“All I charge you is to come again. The old man’s proud of his young friend. You make me feel like I’m somebody in the old world after all. And some day when you’re great and rich and famous and the world’s full of your name, I ’ll tell folks I know you like my own boy, and I ’ll brag about how many times you used to come to see me.”
“Hush, Tom, you make me feel silly,” said Gaston as he warmly pressed the old fellow’s hand. He went back toward his office with lighter step and more buoyant heart. His mind was as clear as the noonday sun that was now flooding the green fresh world with its splendour. He would stand by his own people. He would sink or swim with them. If poverty and failure were the result, let it be so. If success came, all the better. There were things more to be desired than gold.
GASTON called at the post-office to get his mail.
One relief the Cleveland administration had brought Hambright—a decent citizen in charge of the post-office. Dave Haley had given place to a Democrat and was now scheming and working with McLeod for the “salvation” of it the state, which of course meant for the old slave trader the restoration of his office under a Republican administration. If the South had held no other reason for hating the Republican party, the character of the men appointed to Federal office was enough to send every honest man hurrying into the opposite party without asking any questions as to its principles.
Sam Love, the new postmaster was a jovial, honest, lazy, good-natured Democrat whose ideal of a luxurious life was attained in his office. He handed Gaston his mail with a giggle.
“What’s the matter with you, Sam?”
“Nuthin’ ‘tall. I just thought I’d tell you that I like her handwriting,” he laughed.
“How dare you study the handwriting on my letters, sir!”
“What’s the use of being postmaster? There ain’t no big money in it. I just take pride in the office,” said Sam genially. “That’s a new one, ain’t it?”
Gaston looked at the letter incredulously. It was a new one,—a big square envelope with a seal on the back of it, addressed to him in the most delicate feminine hand, and postmarked “Independence.”
“Great Scott, this is interesting,” he cried, breaking the seal.
When the postmaster saw he was going to open it right there in the office, he stepped around in front and looking over his shoulder said, “What is it, Charlie?”
“It’s an invitation from the Ladies’ Memorial Association to deliver the Memorial day oration at Independence the 10th of May. That’s great. No money in it, but scores of pretty girls, big speech, congratulations, the lion of the hour! Don’t you wish you were really a man of brains, Sam?”
“No, no, I’m married. It would be a waste now.”
“Sam, I ’ll be there. Got the biggest speech of my life all cocked and primed, full of pathos and eloquence,—been working on it at odd times for four years. They ’ll think it a sudden inspiration.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“The Message of the New South to the Glorious Old.”
“That sounds bully, that ought to fetch ’em.”
“It will, my boy, and when Dave Haley gets this postoffice away from you in the dark days coming, I ’ll publish that speech in a pamphlet, and you can peddle it at a quarter and make a good living for your children.”
“Don’t talk like that, Gaston, that isn’t funny at all. You don’t think the Radicals have got any chance?”
“Chance! Between you and me they ’ll win.”
Sam went back to the desk without another word, a great fear suddenly darkening the future. McLeod had gotten off the same joke on him the day before. It sounded ominous coming from both sides like that. He took up his party paper, “The Old Timer’s Gazette” and read over again the sure prophecies of victory and felt better.
Gaston accepted the invitation with feverish haste. He had it all ready to put in the office for the return mail to Independence. But he was ashamed to appear in such a hurry, so he held the letter over until the next day. He proudly showed the invitation to Mrs. Durham.
“What do you think of that, Auntie?”
“Immense. You will meet Miss Sallie sure. That letter is in her handwriting. She’s the Secretary of the Association and signed the Committee’s names.”
“You don’t say that’s the great and only one’s handwriting!”
“Couldn’t be mistaken. It has a delicate distinction about it. I’d know it anywhere.”
“It is beautiful,” acknowledged Gaston looking thoughtfully at the letter.
“I wish you had a new suit, Charlie.”
“I wouldn’t mind it myself, if I had the money. But clothes don’t interest me much, just so I’m fairly decent.”
“I ’ll loan you the money, if you will promise me to devote yourself faithfully to Sallie.”
“Never. I ’ll not sell my interest in all those acres of pretty girls just for one I never saw and a suit of clothes. No thanks. I’m going down there with a premonition I may find Her of whom I’ve dreamed. They say that town is full of beauties.”
“You’re so conceited. That’s all the more reason you should look your best.”
“I don’t care so much about looks. I’m going to do my best, whatever I look.”
“Oh, you know you’re good looking and you don’t care,” said his foster mother with pride.
On the 10th of May Independence was in gala robes. The long rows of beautiful houses, with dark blue grass lawns on which giant oaks spread their cool arms, were gay with bunting, and with flowers, flowers everywhere! Every urchin on the street and every man, woman and child wore or carried flowers.
The reception committee met Gaston at the depot on the arrival of the excursion train that ran from Ham-bright. He was placed in an open carriage beside a handsome chattering society woman, and drawn by two prancing horses, was escorted to the hotel, where he was introduced to the distinguished old soldiers of the Confederacy.
At ten o’clock the procession was formed. What a sight! It stretched from the hotel down the shaded pavements a mile toward the cemetery, two long rows of beautiful girls holding great bouquets of flowers. This long double line of beauty and sweetness opened, and escorted gravely by the oldest General of the Confederacy present, he walked through this mile of smiling girls and flowers. Behind him tramped the veterans, some with one arm, some with wooden legs.
When they passed through, the double line closed, and two and two the hundreds of girls carried their flowers in solemn procession. Here was the throbbing soul of the South, keeping fresh the love of her heroic dead.
They spread out over the great cemetery like a host of ministering angels. There was a bugle call. They bent low a moment, and flowers were smiling over every grave from the greatest to the lowliest.
And then to a stone altar marked “To the Unknown Dead,” they came and heaped up roses. Then a group of sad-faced women dressed in black, with quaint little bonnets wreathing their brows like nuns, went silently over to the National Cemetery across the way and each taking a basket, walked past the long lines of the dead their boys had fought and dropped a single rose on every soldier’s grave. They were women whose boys were buried in strange lands in lonely unmarked trenches. They were doing now what they hoped some woman’s hand would do for their lost heroes.
The crowd silently gathered around the speakers’ stand and took their seats in the benches placed beneath the trees.
Gaston had never seen this ceremony so lavishly and beautifully performed before. He was overwhelmed with emotion. His father’s straight soldierly figure rose before him in imagination, and with him all the silent hosts that now bivouacked with the dead. His soul was melted with the infinite pathos and pity of it all.
He had intended to say some sharp epigrammatic things that would cut the chronic moss-backs that cling to the platforms on such occasions. But somehow when he began they were melted out of his speech. He spoke with a tenderness and reverence that stilled the crowd in a moment like low music.
His tribute to the dead was a poem of rhythmic and exalted thoughts. The occasion was to him an inspiration and the people hung breathless on his words. His voice was never strained but was penetrated and thrilled with thought packed until it burst into the flame of speech. He felt with conscious power his mastery of his audience. He was surprised at his own mood of extraordinary tenderness as he felt his being softened by that oldest religion of the ages, the worship of the dead—as old as sorrow and as everlasting as death! He was for the moment clay in the hands of some mightier spirit above him.
He had spoken perhaps fifteen minutes when suddenly, straight in front of him, he looked into the face of the One Woman of all his dreams!
There she sat as still as death, her beautiful face tense with breathless interest, her fluted red lips parted as if half in wonder, half in joy, over some strange revelation, and her great blue eyes swimming in a mist of tears. He smiled a look of recognition into her soul and she answered with a smile that seemed to say “I’ve known you always. Why haven’t you seen me sooner?” He recognised her instantly from Mrs. Durham’s description and his heart gave a cry of joy. From that moment every word that he uttered was spoken to her. Sometimes as he would look straight through her eyes into her soul, she would flush red to the roots of her brown-black hair, but she never lowered her gaze. He closed his speech in a round of applause that was renewed again and again.
His old classmate, Bob St. Clare, rushed forward to greet him.
“Old fellow, you’ve covered yourself with glory. By George, that was great! Come, here’s a hundred girls want to meet you.”
He was introduced to a host of beauties who showered him with extravagant compliments which he accepted without affectation. He knew he had outdone himself that day, and he knew why. The One Woman he had been searching the world for was there, and inspired him beyond all he had ever dared before.
He was disappointed in not seeing her among the crowd who were shaking his hand. He looked anxiously over the heads of those near by to see if she had gone. He saw her standing talking to two stylishly dressed young men.
When the crowd had melted away from the rostrum, she walked straight toward him extending her hand with a gracious smile.
He knew he must look like a fool, but to save him he could not help it, he was simply bubbling over with delight as he grasped her hand, and before she could say a word he said, “You are Miss Sallie Worth, the Secretary of the Association. My foster mother has described you so accurately I should know you among a thousand.”
“Yes, I have been looking forward with pleasure to our trip to the Springs when I knew we should meet you. I am delighted to see you a month earlier.” She said this with a simple earnestness that gave it a deeper meaning than a mere commonplace.
“Do you know that you nearly knocked me off my feet when I first saw you in the crowd?”
“Why? How?” she asked.
“You startled me.”
“I hope not unpleasantly,” she said, looking up at him with her blue eyes twinkling.
“Oh! Heavens no! You are such a perfect image of the girl she described that I was so astonished I came near shouting at the top of my voice, ‘There she is!’ And that would have astonished the audience, wouldn’t it?”
“It would indeed,” she replied blushing just a little.
“But I’m forgetting my mission, Mr. Gaston. Papa sent me to apologise for his absence to-day. He was called out of the city on some mill business. He told me to bring you home to dine with him. I’m the Secretary, you know and exercise authority in these matters, so I’ve fixed that programme. You have no choice. The carriage is waiting.”