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 vine-clad 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. 285
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:
“Mamma, 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 286 negro, suddenly confronted him, and he shrank in terror close to the girl’s side.
“What you doin’ here, 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 somfin’ ter eat. I gwine frail de life outen ’im, ef he doan min’ me.”
“Well, you make tracks back to the Poorhouse. 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 dan 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: 287
“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 288 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 everyday 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 civilized 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 289 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 civilization 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, terrorize the State. Every white company has been disarmed and disbanded by our scallawag 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 290 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 Civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to ru............