Kitabı oku: «The Colonel's Dream», sayfa 18
Thirty-seven
Miss Laura came forward with outstretched hands and tear-stained eyes to greet him.
"Henry," she exclaimed, "I am shocked and sorry, I cannot tell you how much! Nor do I know what else to say, except that the best people do not—cannot—could not—approve of it!"
"The best people, Laura," he said with a weary smile, "are an abstraction. When any deviltry is on foot they are never there to prevent it—they vanish into thin air at its approach. When it is done, they excuse it; and they make no effort to punish it. So it is not too much to say that what they permit they justify, and they cannot shirk the responsibility. To mar the living—it is the history of life—but to make war upon the dead!—I am going away, Laura, never to return. My dream of usefulness is over. To-night I take away my dead and shake the dust of Clarendon from my feet forever. Will you come with me?"
"Henry," she said, and each word tore her heart, "I have been expecting this—since I heard. But I cannot go; my duty calls me here. My mother could not be happy anywhere else, nor would I fit into any other life. And here, too, I am useful—and may still be useful—and should be missed. I know your feelings, and would not try to keep you. But, oh, Henry, if all of those who love justice and practise humanity should go away, what would become of us?"
"I leave to-night," he returned, "and it is your right to go with me, or to come to me."
"No, Henry, nor am I sure that you would wish me to. It was for the old town's sake that you loved me. I was a part of your dream—a part of the old and happy past, upon which you hoped to build, as upon the foundations of the old mill, a broader and a fairer structure. Do you remember what you told me, that night—that happy night—that you loved me because in me you found the embodiment of an ideal? Well, Henry, that is why I did not wish to make our engagement known, for I knew, I felt, the difficulty of your task, and I foresaw that you might be disappointed, and I feared that if your ideal should be wrecked, you might find me a burden. I loved you, Henry—I seem to have always loved you, but I would not burden you."
"No, no, Laura—not so! not so!"
"And you wanted me for Phil's sake, whom we both loved; and now that your dream is over, and Phil is gone, I should only remind you of where you lost him, and of your disappointment, and of—this other thing, and I could not be sure that you loved me or wanted me."
"Surely you cannot doubt it, Laura?" His voice was firm, but to her sensitive spirit it did not carry conviction.
"You remembered me from my youth," she continued tremulously but bravely, "and it was the image in your memory that you loved. And now, when you go away, the old town will shrink and fade from your memory and your heart and you will have none but harsh thoughts of it; nor can I blame you greatly, for you have grown far away from us, and we shall need many years to overtake you. Nor do you need me, Henry—I am too old to learn new ways, and elsewhere than here I should be a hindrance to you rather than a help. But in the larger life to which you go, think of me now and then as one who loves you still, and who will try, in her poor way, with such patience as she has, to carry on the work which you have begun, and which you—Oh, Henry!"
He divined her thought, though her tear-filled eyes spoke sorrow rather than reproach.
"Yes," he said sadly, "which I have abandoned. Yes, Laura, abandoned, fully and forever."
The colonel was greatly moved, but his resolution remained unshaken.
"Laura," he said, taking both her hands in his, "I swear that I should be glad to have you with me. Come away! The place is not fit for you to live in!"
"No, Henry! it cannot be! I could not go! My duty holds me here! God would not forgive me if I abandoned it. Go your way; live your life. Marry some other woman, if you must, who will make you happy. But I shall keep, Henry—nothing can ever take away from me—the memory of one happy summer."
"No, no, Laura, it need not be so! I shall write you. You'll think better of it. But I go to-night—not one hour longer than I must, will I remain in this town. I must bid your mother and Graciella good-bye."
He went into the house. Mrs. Treadwell was excited and sorry, and would have spoken at length, but the colonel's farewells were brief.
"I cannot stop to say more than good-bye, dear Mrs. Treadwell. I have spent a few happy months in my old home, and now I am going away. Laura will tell you the rest."
Graciella was tearfully indignant.
"It was a shame!" she declared. "Peter was a good old nigger, and it wouldn't have done anybody any harm to leave him there. I'd rather be buried beside old Peter than near any of the poor white trash that dug him up—so there! I'm so sorry you're going away; but I hope, sometime," she added stoutly, "to see you in New York! Don't forget!"
"I'll send you my address," said the colonel.
Thirty-eight
It was a few weeks later. Old Ralph Dudley and Viney had been buried. Ben Dudley had ridden in from Mink Run, had hitched his horse in the back yard as usual, and was seated on the top step of the piazza beside Graciella. His elbows rested on his knees, and his chin upon his hand. Graciella had unconsciously imitated his drooping attitude. Both were enshrouded in the deepest gloom, and had been sunk, for several minutes, in a silence equally profound. Graciella was the first to speak.
"Well, then," she said with a deep sigh, "there is absolutely nothing left?"
"Not a thing," he groaned hopelessly, "except my horse and my clothes, and a few odds and ends which belong to me. Fetters will have the land—there's not enough to pay the mortgages against it, and I'm in debt for the funeral expenses."
"And what are you going to do?"
"Gracious knows—I wish I did! I came over to consult the family. I have no trade, no profession, no land and no money. I can get a job at braking on the railroad—or may be at clerking in a store. I'd have asked the colonel for something in the mill—but that chance is gone."
"Gone," echoed Graciella, gloomily. "I see my fate! I shall marry you, because I can't help loving you, and couldn't live without you; and I shall never get to New York, but be, all my life, a poor man's wife—a poor white man's wife."
"No, Graciella, we might be poor, but not poor-white! Our blood will still be of the best."
"It will be all the same. Blood without money may count for one generation, but it won't hold out for two."
They relapsed into a gloom so profound, so rayless, that they might almost be said to have reveled in it. It was lightened, or at least a diversion was created by Miss Laura's opening the garden gate and coming up the walk. Ben rose as she approached, and Graciella looked up.
"I have been to the post-office," said Miss Laura. "Here is a letter for you, Ben, addressed in my care. It has the New York postmark."
"Thank you, Miss Laura."
Eagerly Ben's hand tore the envelope and drew out the enclosure. Swiftly his eyes devoured the lines; they were typewritten and easy to follow.
"Glory!" he shouted, "glory hallelujah! Listen!"
He read the letter aloud, while Graciella leaned against his shoulder and feasted her eyes upon the words. The letter was from Colonel French:
"My dear Ben:
I was very much impressed with the model of a cotton gin and press which I saw you exhibit one day at Mrs. Treadwells'. You have a fine genius for mechanics, and the model embodies, I think, a clever idea, which is worth working up. If your uncle's death has left you free to dispose of your time, I should like to have you come on to New York with the model, and we will take steps to have the invention patented at once, and form a company for its manufacture. As an evidence of good faith, I enclose my draft for five hundred dollars, which can be properly accounted for in our future arrangements."
"O Ben!" gasped Graciella, in one long drawn out, ecstatic sigh.
"O Graciella!" exclaimed Ben, as he threw his arms around her and kissed her rapturously, regardless of Miss Laura's presence. "Now you can go to New York as soon as you like!"
Thirty-nine
Colonel French took his dead to the North, and buried both the little boy and the old servant in the same lot with his young wife, and in the shadow of the stately mausoleum which marked her resting-place. There, surrounded by the monuments of the rich and the great, in a beautiful cemetery, which overlooks a noble harbour where the ships of all nations move in endless procession, the body of the faithful servant rests beside that of the dear little child whom he unwittingly lured to his death and then died in the effort to save. And in all the great company of those who have laid their dead there in love or in honour, there is none to question old Peter's presence or the colonel's right to lay him there. Sometimes, at night, a ray of light from the uplifted torch of the Statue of Liberty, the gift of a free people to a free people, falls athwart the white stone which marks his resting place—fit prophecy and omen of the day when the sun of liberty shall shine alike upon all men.
When the colonel went away from Clarendon, he left his affairs in Caxton's hands, with instructions to settle them up as expeditiously as possible. The cotton mill project was dropped, and existing contracts closed on the best terms available. Fetters paid the old note—even he would not have escaped odium for so bare-faced a robbery—and Mrs. Treadwell's last days could be spent in comfort and Miss Laura saved from any fear for her future, and enabled to give more freely to the poor and needy. Barclay Fetters recovered the use of one eye, and embittered against the whole Negro race by his disfigurement, went into public life and devoted his talents and his education to their debasement. The colonel had relented sufficiently to contemplate making over to Miss Laura the old family residence in trust for use as a hospital, with a suitable fund for its maintenance, but it unfortunately caught fire and burned down—and he was hardly sorry. He sent Catherine, Bud Johnson's wife, a considerable sum of money, and she bought a gorgeous suit of mourning, and after a decent interval consoled herself with a new husband. And he sent word to the committee of coloured men to whom he had made a definite promise, that he would be ready to fulfil his obligation in regard to their school whenever they should have met the conditions.
One day, a year or two after leaving Clarendon, as the colonel, in company with Mrs. French, formerly a member of his firm, now his partner in a double sense—was riding upon a fast train between New York and Chicago, upon a trip to visit a western mine in which the reorganised French and Company, Limited, were interested, he noticed that the Pullman car porter, a tall and stalwart Negro, was watching him furtively from time to time. Upon one occasion, when the colonel was alone in the smoking-room, the porter addressed him.
"Excuse me, suh," he said, "I've been wondering ever since we left New York, if you wa'n't Colonel French?"
"Yes, I'm Mr. French—Colonel French, if you want it so."
"I 'lowed it must be you, suh, though you've changed the cut of your beard, and are looking a little older, suh. I don't suppose you remember me?"
"I've seen you somewhere," said the colonel—no longer the colonel, but like the porter, let us have it so. "Where was it?"
"I'm Henry Taylor, suh, that used to teach school at Clarendon. I reckon you remember me now."
"Yes," said the colonel sadly, "I remember you now, Taylor, to my sorrow. I didn't keep my word about Johnson, did I?"
"Oh, yes, suh," replied the porter, "I never doubted but what you'd keep your word. But you see, suh, they were too many for you. There ain't no one man can stop them folks down there when they once get started."
"And what are you doing here, Taylor?"
"Well, suh, the fact is that after you went away, it got out somehow that I had told on Bud Johnson. I don't know how they learned it, and of course I knew you didn't tell it; but somebody must have seen me going to your house, or else some of my enemies guessed it—and happened to guess right—and after that the coloured folks wouldn't send their children to me, and I lost my job, and wasn't able to get another anywhere in the State. The folks said I was an enemy of my race, and, what was more important to me, I found that my race was an enemy to me. So I got out, suh, and I came No'th, hoping to find somethin' better. This is the best job I've struck yet, but I'm hoping that sometime or other I'll find something worth while."
"And what became of the industrial school project?" asked the colonel. "I've stood ready to keep my promise, and more, but I never heard from you."
"Well, suh, after you went away the enthusiasm kind of died out, and some of the white folks throwed cold water on it, and it fell through, suh."
When the porter came along, before the train reached Chicago, the colonel offered Taylor a handsome tip.
"Thank you, suh," said the porter, "but I'd rather not take it. I'm a porter now, but I wa'n't always one, and hope I won't always be one. And during all the time I taught school in Clarendon, you was the only white man that ever treated me quite like a man—and our folks just like people—and if you won't think I'm presuming, I'd rather not take the money."
The colonel shook hands with him, and took his address. Shortly afterward he was able to find him something better than menial employment, where his education would give him an opportunity for advancement. Taylor is fully convinced that his people will never get very far along in the world without the good will of the white people, but he is still wondering how they will secure it. For he regards Colonel French as an extremely fortunate accident.
And so the colonel faltered, and, having put his hand to the plow, turned back. But was not his, after all, the only way? For no more now than when the Man of Sorrows looked out over the Mount of Olives, can men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. The seed which the colonel sowed seemed to fall by the wayside, it is true; but other eyes have seen with the same light, and while Fetters and his kind still dominate their section, other hands have taken up the fight which the colonel dropped. In manufactures the South has gone forward by leaps and bounds. The strong arm of the Government, guided by a wise and just executive, has been reached out to crush the poisonous growth of peonage, and men hitherto silent have raised their voices to commend. Here and there a brave judge has condemned the infamy of the chain-gang and convict lease systems. Good men, North and South, have banded themselves together to promote the cause of popular education. Slowly, like all great social changes, but visibly, to the eye of faith, is growing up a new body of thought, favourable to just laws and their orderly administration. In this changed attitude of mind lies the hope of the future, the hope of the Republic.
But Clarendon has had its chance, nor seems yet to have had another. Other towns, some not far from it, lying nearer the main lines of travel, have been swept into the current of modern life, but not yet Clarendon. There the grass grows thicker in the streets. The meditative cows still graze in the vacant lot between the post-office and the bank, where the public library was to stand. The old academy has grown more dilapidated than ever, and a large section of plaster has fallen from the wall, carrying with it the pencil drawing made in the colonel's schooldays; and if Miss Laura Treadwell sees that the graves of the old Frenches are not allowed to grow up in weeds and grass, the colonel knows nothing of it. The pigs and the loafers—leaner pigs and lazier loafers—still sleep in the shade, when the pound keeper and the constable are not active. The limpid water of the creek still murmurs down the slope and ripples over the stone foundation of what was to have been the new dam, while the birds have nested for some years in the vines that soon overgrew the unfinished walls of the colonel's cotton mill. White men go their way, and black men theirs, and these ways grow wider apart, and no one knows the outcome. But there are those who hope, and those who pray, that this condition will pass, that some day our whole land will be truly free, and the strong will cheerfully help to bear the burdens of the weak, and Justice, the seed, and Peace, the flower, of liberty, will prevail throughout all our borders.
