WHEN the old Commoner's private physician had gone and his mind had fully cleared, he would sit for hours in the sunshine of the vineclad porch, asking Elsie of the village, its life, and its people. He smiled good-naturedly at her eager sympathy for their sufferings as at the enthusiasm of a child who could not understand. He had come possessed by a great idea—events must submit to it. Her assurance that the poverty and losses of the people were far in excess of the worst they had known during the war was too absurd even to secure his attention.
He had refused to know any of the people, ignoring the existence of Elsie's callers. But he had fallen in love with Marion from the moment he had seen her. The cold eye of the old fox-hunter kindled with the fire of his forgotten youth at the sight of this beautiful girl, seated on the glistening back of the mare she had saved from death.
As she rode through the village, every boy lifted his hat as to passing royalty, and no one, old or young, could allow her to pass without a cry of admiration. Her exquisite figure had developed into the full tropic splendour of Southern girlhood.
She had rejected three proposals from ardent lovers, on one of whom her mother had quite set her heart. A great fear had grown in Mrs. Lenoir's mind lest she were in love with Ben Cameron. She slipped her arm around her one day and timidly asked her.
A faint flush tinged Marion's face up to the roots of her delicate blonde hair, and she answered, with a quick laugh:
"Mama, how silly you are! You know I've always been in love with Ben—since I can first remember. I know he is in love with Elsie Stoneman. I am too young, the world too beautiful, and life too sweet to grieve over my first baby love. I expect to dance with him at his wedding, then meet my fate and build my own nest."
Old Stoneman begged that she come every day to see him. He never tired praising her to Elsie. As she walked gracefully up to the house one afternoon, holding Hugh by the hand, he said to Elsie:
"Next to you, my dear, she is the most charming creature I ever saw. Her tenderness for everything that needs help touches the heart of an old lame man in a very soft spot."
"I've never seen any one who could resist her," Elsie answered. "Her gloves may be worn, her feet clad in old shoes, yet she is always neat, graceful, dainty, and serene. No wonder her mother worships her."
Sam Ross, her simple friend, had stopped at the gate, and looked over into the lawn as if afraid to come in.
When Marion saw Sam, she turned back to the gate to invite him in. The keeper of the poor, a vicious-looking negro, suddenly confronted him, and he shrank in terror close to the girl's side.
"What you doin' hare, sah?" the black keeper railed. "Ain't I done tole you 'bout runnin' away?"
"You let him alone," Marion cried.
The negro pushed her roughly from his side and knocked Sam down. The girl screamed for help, and old Stoneman hobbled down the steps, following Elsie.
When they reached the gate, Marion was bending over the prostrate form.
"Oh, my, my, I believe he's killed him!" she wailed.
"Run for the doctor, sonny, quick," Stoneman said to Hugh. The boy darted away and brought Dr. Cameron.
"How dare you strike that man, you devil?" thundered the old statesman.
"'Case I tole 'im ter stay home en do de wuk I put 'im at, en he all de time runnin' off here ter git sumfin' ter eat. I gwine frail de life outen 'im, ef he doan min' me."
"Well, you make tracks back to the Poor House. I'll attend to this man, and I'll have you arrested for this before night," said Stoneman, with a scowl.
The black keeper laughed as he left.
"Not 'less you'se er bigger man den Gubner Silas Lynch, you won't!"
When Dr. Cameron had restored Sam, and dressed the wound on his head where he had struck a stone in falling, Stoneman insisted that the boy be put to bed.
Turning to Dr. Cameron, he asked:
"Why should they put a brute like this in charge of the poor?"
"That's a large question, sir, at this time," said the doctor, politely, "and now that you have asked it, I have some things I've been longing for an opportunity to say to you."
"Be seated, sir," the old Commoner answered, "I shall be glad to hear them."
Elsie's heart leaped with joy over the possible outcome of this appeal, and she left the room with a smile for the doctor.
"First, allow me," said the Southerner, pleasantly, "to express my sorrow at your long illness, and my pleasure at seeing you so well. Your children have won the love of all our people and have had our deepest sympathy in your illness."
Stoneman muttered an inaudible reply, and the doctor went on:
"Your question brings up, at once, the problem of the misery and degradation into which our country has sunk under Negro rule"
Stoneman smiled coldly and interrupted:
"Of course, you understand my position in politics, Doctor Cameron—I am a Radical Republican."
"So much the better," was the response. "I have been longing for months to get your ear. Your word will be all the more powerful if raised in our behalf. The Negro is the master of our state, county, city, and town governments. Every school, college, hospital, asylum, and poorhouse is his prey. What you have seen is but a sample. Negro insolence grows beyond endurance. Their women are taught to insult their old mistresses and mock their poverty as they pass in their old, faded dresses. Yesterday a black driver struck a white child of six with his whip, and when the mother protested, she was arrested by a negro policeman, taken before a negro magistrate, and fined $10 for 'insulting a freedman.'"
Stoneman frowned: "Such things must be very exceptional."
"They are every-day occurrences and cease to excite comment. Lynch, the Lieutenant-Governor, who has bought a summer home here, is urging this campaign of insult with deliberate purpose"
The old man shook his head. "I can't think the Lieutenant-Governor guilty of such petty villainy."
"Our school commissioner," the doctor continued, "is a negro who can neither read nor write. The black grand jury last week discharged a negro for stealing cattle and indicted the owner for false imprisonment. No such rate of taxation was ever imposed on a civilised people. A tithe of it cost Great Britain her colonies. There are 5,000 homes in this county—2,900 of them are advertised for sale by the sheriff to meet his tax bills. This house will be sold next court day"
Stoneman looked up sharply. "Sold for taxes?"
"Yes; with the farm which has always been Mrs. Lenoir's support. In part her loss came from the cotton tax. Congress, in addition to the desolation of war, and the ruin of Black rule, has wrung from the cotton farmers of the South a tax of $67,000,000. Every dollar of this money bears the stain of the blood of starving people. They are ready to give up, or to spring some desperate scheme of resistance"
The old man lifted his massive head and his great jaws came together with a snap:
"Resistance to the authority of the National Government?"
"No; resistance to the travesty of government and the mockery of civilisation under which we are being throttled! The bayonet is now in the hands of a brutal Negro militia. The tyranny of military martinets was child's play to this. As I answered your call this morning, I was stopped and turned back in the street by the drill of a company of negroes under the command of a vicious scoundrel named Gus who was my former slave. He is the captain of this company. Eighty thousand armed Negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorise the state. Every white company has been disarmed and disbanded by our scalawag Governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of a volcano!"
Old Stoneman scowled, as the doctor rose and walked nervously to the window and back.
"An appeal from you to the conscience of the North might save us," he went on, eagerly. "Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the Negro was the slave of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of Ancient Civilisation, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!"
Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity with which the Southerner poured out his protest.
"For a Russian to rule a Pole," he went on, "a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian, is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realise its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them?"
"I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to authority," interrupted Stoneman.
"Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the slave of a slave"
"And yet, Doctor," said Stoneman, coolly, "manhood suffrage is the one eternal thing fixed in the nature of Democracy. It is inevitable."
"At the price of racial life? Never!" said the Southerner, with fiery emphasis. "This Republic is great, not by reason of the amount of dirt we possess, the size of our census roll, or our voting register—we are great because of the genius of the race of pioneer white freemen who settled this continent, dared the might of kings, and made a wilderness the home of Freedom. Our future depends on the purity of this racial stock. The grant of the ballot to these millions of semi-savages and the riot of debauchery which has followed are crimes against human progress."
"Yet may we not train him?" asked Stoneman.
"To a point, yes, and then sink to his level if you walk as his equal in physical contact with him. His race is not an infant; it is a degenerate—older than yours in time. At last we are face to face with the man whom slavery concealed with its rags. Suffrage is but the new paper cloak with which the Demagogue has sought to hide the issue. Can we assimilate the Negro? The very question is pollution. In Hayti no white man can own land. Black dukes and marquises drive over them and swear at them for getting under their wheels. Is civilisation a patent cloak with which law-tinkers can wrap an animal and make him a king?"
"But the negro must be protected by the ballot," protested the statesman. "The humblest man must have the opportunity to rise. The real issue is Democracy."
"The issue, sir, is Civilisation! Not whether a negro shall be protected, but whether Society is worth saving from barbarism."
"The statesman can educate," put in the Commoner.
The doctor cleared his throat with a quick little nervous cough he was in the habit of giving when deeply moved.
"Education, sir, is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the Continent of Africa—rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrow-head worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail! He lived as his fathers lived—stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, dance, and sport as the ape!
"And this creature, half-child, half-animal, the sport of impulse, whim and conceit, 'pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,' a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger—they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people"
The doctor sprang to his feet, his face livid, his eyes blazing with emotion. "Merciful God—it surpasses human belief!"
He sank exhausted in his chair, and, extending his hand in an eloquent gesture, continued:
"Surely, surely, sir, the people of the North are not mad? We can yet appeal to the conscience and the brain of our brethren of a common race?"
Stoneman was silent as if stunned. Deep down in his strange soul he was drunk with the joy of a triumphant vengeance he had carried locked in the depths of his being, yet the intensity of this man's suffering for a people's cause surprised and distressed him as all individual pain hurt him.
Dr. Cameron rose, stung by his silence, and the consciousness of the hostility with which Stoneman had wrapped himself.
"Pardon my apparent rudeness, Doctor," he said, at length, extending his hand. "The violence of your feeling stunned me for the moment. I'm obliged to you for speaking. I like a plain-spoken man. I am sorry to learn of the stupidity of the former military commandant in this town"
"My personal wrongs, sir," the doctor broke in, "are nothing!"
"I am sorry, too, about these individual cases of suffering. They are the necessary incidents of a great upheaval. But may it not all come out right in the end? After the Dark Ages, day broke at last. We have the printing press railroad and telegraph—a revolution in human affairs We may do in years what it took ages to do in the past May not the Black man speedily emerge? Who knows? An appeal to the North will be a waste of breath. This experiment is going to be made. It is written in the book of Fate. But I like you. Come to see me again."
Dr. Cameron left with a heavy heart. He had grown a great hope in this long-wished-for appeal to Stoneman. It had come to his ears that the old man, who had dwelt as one dead in their village, was a power.
It was ten o'clock before the doctor walked slowly back to the hotel. As he passed the armory of the black militia, they were still drilling under the command of Gus. The windows were open, through which came the steady tramp of heavy feet and the cry of "Hep! Hep! Hep!" from the Captain's thick cracked lips. The full-dress officer's uniform, with its gold epaulets, yellow stripes, and glistening sword, only accentuated the coarse bestiality of Gus. His huge jaws seemed to hide completely the gold braid on his collar.
The doctor watched, with a shudder, his black bloated face covered with perspiration and the huge hand gripping his sword.
They suddenly halted in double ranks and Gus yelled:
"Odah, arms!"
The butts of their rifles crashed to the floor with precision, and they were allowed to break ranks for a brief rest.
They sang "John Brown's Body," and as its echoes died away a big negro swung his rifle in a circle over his head, shouting:
"Here's your regulator for white trash! En dey's nine hundred ob 'em in dis county!"
"Yes, Lawd!" howled another.
"We got 'em down now en we keep 'em dar, chile!" bawled another.
The doctor passed on slowly to the hotel. The night was dark, the streets were without lights under their present rulers, and the stars were hidden with swift-flying clouds which threatened a storm. As he passed under the boughs of an oak in front of his house, a voice above him whispered:
"A message for you, sir."
Had the wings of a spirit suddenly brushed his cheek, he would not have been more startled.
"Who are you?" he asked, with a slight tremor.
"A Night Hawk of the Invisible Empire, with a message from the Grand Dragon of the Realm," was the low answer, as he thrust a note in the doctor's hand. "I will wait for your answer."
The doctor fumbled to his office on the corner of the lawn, struck a match, and read:
"A great Scotch-Irish leader of the South from Memphis is here to-night and wishes to see you. If you will meet General Forrest, I will bring him to the hotel in fifteen minutes. Burn this. Ben."
The doctor walked quickly back to the spot where he had heard the voice, and said:
"I'll see him with pleasure."
The invisible messenger wheeled his horse, and in a moment the echo of his muffled hoofs had died away in the distance.