Peter Siner"s thoughts lifted him with the tremendous buoyancy of inspiration. He swung out of his chair and began tramping his dark room.
The skin of his scalp tickled as if a ghost had risen before him. The nerves in his thighs and back vibrated. He felt light, and tingled with energy.
Unaware of what he was doing, he set about lighting the gasolene-lamp.
He worked with nervous quickness, as if he were in a great hurry.
Presently a brilliant light flooded the room. It turned the gray illumination of the windows to blackness.
Joy enveloped Peter. His own future developed under his eyes with the same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his country. He saw himself remedying those ills. He would go about showing white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for justice and fairness. It was not a question of social equality; it was a question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life. He would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro, inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the black man might develop. He would show black men that to hate the whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.
It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one could resist logic so fundamental.
Peter"s heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work.
All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he knew not what. It had driven him with endless travail out of n.i.g.g.e.rtown, through school and college, and back to n.i.g.g.e.rtown,--this untiring Hound of Heaven. But at last he had reached his work. He, Peter Siner, a mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come as an evangel of liberty to both white and black. The brown man"s eyes grew moist from Joy. His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.
As he paced his room there came into the glory of Peter"s thoughts the memory of the Arkwright boy as he sat in the cedar glade brooding on the fallen needles Peter recalled the hobbledehoy"s disjointed words as he wrestled with the moral and physical problems of adolescence. Peter recalled his impulse to sit down by young Sam Arkwright, and, as best he might, give him some clue to the critical and feverish period through which he was pa.s.sing.
He had not done so, but Peter remembered the instance down to the very desperation in the face of the brooding youngster. And it seemed to Peter that this rejected impulse had been a sign that he was destined to be an evangel to the whites as well as to the blacks.
The joy of Peter"s mission bore him aloft on vast wings. His room seemed to fall away from him, and he was moving about his country, releasing the two races from their bonds of suspicion and cruelty.
Slowly the old manor formed about Peter again, and he perceived that a tapping on the door had summoned him back. He walked to the door with his heart full of kindness for old Rose. She was bringing him his supper. He felt as if he could take the old woman in his arms, and out of the mere hugeness of his love sweeten her bitter life. The mulatto opened the door as eagerly as if he were admitting some long-desired friend; but when the shutter swung back, the old crone and her salver were not there. All he could discern in the darkness were the white pillars marking the night into panels. There was no light in the outer kitchen. The whole manor was silent.
As he stood listening, the knocking was repeated, this time more faintly. He fixed the sound at the window. He closed the door, walked across the brilliant room, and opened the shutters.
For several moments he saw nothing more than the tall quadrangle of blackness which the window framed; then a star or two pierced it; then something moved. He saw a woman"s figure standing close to the cas.e.m.e.nt, and out of the darkness Cissie Dildine"s voice asked in its careful English:
"Peter, may I come in?"
CHAPTER XIV
For a full thirty seconds Peter Siner stared at the girl at the window before, even with her prompting, he thought of the amenity of asking her to come inside. As a further delayed courtesy, he drew the Heppelwhite chair toward her.
Cissie"s face looked bloodless in the blanched light of the gasolene- lamp. She forced a faint, doubtful smile.
"You don"t seem very glad to see me, Peter."
"I am," he a.s.sured her, mechanically, but he really felt nothing but astonishment and dismay. They filled his voice. He was afraid some one would see Cissie in his room. His thoughts went flitting about the premises, calculating the positions of the various trees and shrubs in relation to the windows, trying to determine whether, and just where, in his brilliantly lighted chamber the girl could be seen from the street.
The octoroon made no further comment on his confusion. Her eyes wandered from him over the stately furniture and up to the stuccoed ceiling.
"They told me you lived in a wonderful room," she remarked absently.
"Yes, it"s very nice," agreed Peter in the same tone, wondering what might be the object of her hazardous visit. A flicker of suspicion suggested that she was trying to compromise him out of revenge for his renouncement of her, but the next instant he rejected this.
The girl accepted the chair Peter offered and continued to look about.
"I hope you don"t mind my staring, Peter," she said.
"I stared when I first came here to stay," a.s.sisted Peter, who was getting a little more like himself, even if a little uneasier at the consequences of this visit.
"Is that a highboy?" She nodded nervously at the piece of furniture.
"I"ve seen pictures of them."
"Uh huh. Revolutionary, I believe. The night wind is a little raw." He moved across the room and closed the jalousies, and thus cut off the night wind and also the west view from the street. He glanced at the heavy curtains parted over his front windows, with a keen desire to swing them together. Some fragment of his mind continued the surface conversation with Cissie.
"Is it post-Revolutionary or pre-Revolutionary?" she asked with a preoccupied air.
"Post, I believe. No, pre. I always meant to examine closely."
"To have such things would almost teach one history," Cissie said.
"Yeah; very nice." Peter had decided that the girl was in direct line with the left front window and an opening between the trees to the street.
The girl"s eyes followed his.
"Are those curtains velour, Peter?"
"I--I believe so," agreed the man, unhappily.
"I--I wonder how they look spread."
Peter seized on this flimsy excuse with a wave of relief and thankfulness to Cissie. He had to restrain himself as he strode across the room and swung together the two halves of the somber curtains in order to preserve an appearance of an exhibit. His fingers were so nervous that he bungled a moment at the heavy cords, but finally the two draperies swung together, loosing a little cloud of dust. He drew together a small aperture where the hangings stood apart, and then turned away in sincere relief.
Cissie"s own interest in historic furniture and textiles came to an abrupt conclusion. She gave a deep sigh and settled back into her chair.
She sat looking at Peter seriously, almost distressfully, as he came toward her.
With the closing of the curtains and the establishment of a real privacy Peter became aware once again of the sweetness and charm Cissie always held for him. He still wondered what had brought her, but he was no longer uneasy.
"Perhaps I"d better build a fire," he suggested, quite willing now to make her visit seem not unusual.
"Oh, no,"--she spoke with polite haste,--"I"m just going to stay a minute. I don"t know what you"ll think of me." She looked intently at him.
"I think it lovely of you to come." He was disgusted with the triteness of this remark, but he could think of nothing else.
"I don"t know," demurred the octoroon, with her faint doubtful smile.
"Persons don"t welcome beggars very cordially."
"If all beggars were so charming--" Apparently he couldn"t escape ba.n.a.lities.
But Cissie interrupted whatever speech he meant to make, with a return of her almost painful seriousness.
"I really came to ask you to help me, Peter."