"Tell me, ye silent stars, that seem to slumber "neath the auroral coverlet of day, tell me, down what laurelled pathways among ye walk our dead, the heroes whose blood was our benison, bequeathing to us the heritage of this flower-strewn land; they who have pa.s.sed to that bourne whence no traveller returns? Answer me: Are not _theirs_ the loftiest names inscribed on your marble catalogues of the nations?" He let his voice out startlingly and shouted: "CREEPS there a creature of the earth with spirit so sordid as to doubt it, to doubt _who_ heads those gilded rolls! If there be, then _I_ say to him, "Beware!" For the names I see written above me to-day on the immemorial canopy of heaven begin with that of the spotless knight, the unsceptred and uncrowned king, the G.o.dlike and immaculate"--(here he turned suddenly, ran to the front of the stage, and, with outstretched fist shaking violently over our heads, thundered at the full power of his lungs): "GEORGE WASHINGTON!"
He did the same for Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and four or five governors and senators of the State; and at every name the crowd went wild, worked up to it by Hector in the same way. But what surprised me was his daring to conclude his list with a votive offering laid at the feet of Pa.s.sley Trimmer. Trimmer was the congressional representative of that district and one of the meanest men and smartest politicians in the world. He was always creeping out of tight places and money-scandals by the skin of his teeth; and yet, by building up the finest personal machine in the State, he stuck to his seat in Congress term after term, in spite of the fact that most of the intelligent and honest men in his district despised him. It was a proof of the power Hector held over his audience that, by his tribute to Trimmer, he was able to evoke the noisiest enthusiasm of the afternoon.
Nevertheless, what really tickled me most was the boy"s peroration. It gave me a pretty clear insight into his "innard workings." He led up to it in his favourite way: stepping backward a pace or two and sinking his voice to a kind of Edwin Booth quiet; gradually growing a little louder; then suddenly turning on the thunder and running forward.
"You ask _me_ for our credentials?" he roared. (n.o.body had, this time.) "In the Lexicon of the Peoples, you ask _me_ for my country"s credentials? The credentials of our pastures, our population and our pride! You ask me for my country"s credentials? I reply: "The credentials of our youth and our enthusiasm! Of red corpuscles! Of red blood! The credentials of the virility and of the magnificent manhood of the Columbian Continent!" You ask for my country"s credentials and I answer: "The credentials of Glory! By right of the eternal and Almighty G.o.d!""
Of course there was a great deal more, but that"s enough to show how he had polished it.
I walked back to Mary"s with Joe Lane, while Hector followed, making a kind of Royal Progress through the crowds, with his mother and Miss Rainey.
"You see it now, yourself, don"t you?" Joe said to me.
"You mean about his doing well?"
"What else? He"s just shown what he can do with people. The day will come when you"ll have to take him at his own valuation."
I couldn"t help laughing. "Well, Joe," I said, "that sounds as if _you_, at least, already took Hector at his own valuation."
"In some things," he answered, "I think I do. Don"t you take him for an a.s.s, sir. Sometimes I believe he"s guided by a really superior intelligence--"
"Must be a sub-consciousness, then, Joe!"
"Exactly," he said seriously. "He doesn"t make a single mistake. He"s trained his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn"t go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn"t pompous, but he"s acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that"s made Greenville call him "Mister Ransom" instead of "Hec." You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he"s got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted he could have made good."
"What did he want to run Pa.s.sley Trimmer into his Pantheon for, to-day?" I asked.
Joe"s honest face looked a little dark at this. "It"s only another proof of the shrewdness that directs him, though it was, maybe, a little bit sickening. He talks gold and stars and eternal G.o.ds, about sweetness and light and pure politics and reform, but he wants Pa.s.sley Trimmer"s machine to take him up. Pa.s.sley Trimmer and his brother, Link, are a good-sized curse to this district, I expect you know, but Hector"s courting them. Link is the dirtiest we"ve ever had here, and he holds all the rottenest in this county solid for Pa.s.sley. He"s overbearing; ugly, too; shot a n.i.g.g.e.r in the hip a year ago, and crippled him for life on account of a little back-talk, and got off scot-free. I had a row with him in a saloon last week; I was tight, I suppose, though there"s always been bad blood between us, anyway, drunk or sober, and I didn"t know much what happened, except that I refused to drink in his company and he cursed me out and I blacked an eye for him before they separated us. Well, sir, next day, here was Hector demanding that I go and apologize to Link. I said I"d as soon apologize to a rattlesnake, and Hector upbraided me in his rhetoric, but with a whole lot of real feeling, too. He was even pathetic about it: put it on the ground that I owed it to morality, by which he meant Hector. I was known to be his most intimate friend; I had done him an irrecoverable injury with the Trimmers, who would extend their retaliation and let _him_ have a share of it, as my friend. He ended by declaring that he should withhold the light of his countenance from me until I had repaired the wrong done to his cause, and had apologized to Link!"
"Did you do it?"
The good fellow answered with his little chuckle: "Of course! Don"t you see that he gets everybody to do what he wants? It"s almost sheer will, and he"s a true cloud-compeller."
I wanted to understand something else, and I didn"t know how much Mary could tell me; that is, I was sure that she would think that Miss Rainey was in love with Hector. Mary wouldn"t be able to see how any girl could help it.
"Joe," I said, "does Hector seem much taken with this Miss Rainey?"
We had come to the gate, and Lane stopped to relight a cigar before he answered. He kept the match at the stub until it burned out, half hiding his face from me with his hands, shielding the flame from a breeze that wasn"t blowing.
"Yes," he said finally, "as much as he could be with anybody--at least he wants her to be taken with him."
"Do you think she is?"
He swung the gate open, and stood to let me pa.s.s in first. "She could be of great help to him. We"ve all got to help Hector."
I was going on: "You believe she will--"
"Did you ever hear," he interrupted, "of Jane Welsh Carlyle?"
I thought about that answer of Joe"s most of the evening, and it struck me he was right. It was one of those things you couldn"t possibly explain to save your life, but you knew it: everybody had _got_ to help Hector. Everybody had to get behind him and push. Hector took it for granted in a way that pa.s.sed the love of woman!
And yet, as we sat at Mary"s supper-table, that evening, I don"t know that I ever felt less real liking for any of my kin than I felt for Hector, though, perhaps, that was because he seemed to keep rubbing it in on me in indirect ways that I had done him an injury by not helping him with the National Committee, and that I ought to know it, after his triumph of the afternoon. I could see that Mary agreed with him, though in her gentle way.
Young Lane and Miss Rainey stayed for supper, too, and were very quiet. Miss Rainey struck me as a quiet girl generally, and Joe never talked, anyway, when in Hector"s company. For that matter, n.o.body else did; there was mighty little chance. The truth is, Hector had an impediment of speech: he couldn"t listen.
Of course he talked only about himself. That followed, because it was all there was in him. Not that it always _seemed_ to be about himself. For instance, I remember one of his ways of rubbing it into me, that evening. He had been delivering himself of some opinions on the nature of Genius, fragments (like his "credentials"--I had a sneaking idea) of some undeveloped oration or other. "Look at Napoleon!" he bade us, while Mary was cutting the pie. "Could Barras with all his jealous and malevolent opposition, could Barras with all his craft, all his machinations, with all the machinery of the State, could Barras oppose the upward flight of that mighty spirit? No!
Barras, who should have been the faithful friend, the helper, the disciple and believer, Barras, I say, set himself to destroy the youth whose genius he denied, and Barras was himself destroyed! He fell, for he had dared to oppose the path of one of the eternal stars!"
That was a sample, and I don"t exaggerate it. I couldn"t exaggerate Hector; it"s beyond me; he always exaggerated himself beyond anybody else"s power to do it. But I loved to hear Joe Lane"s chuckle and I got one out of him when I offered him a cigar as we went out on the porch.
"Take one," I said. "It"s one of Barras"s best."
"Better get in line," was all he added to the chuckle.
A good many visitors dropped in, during the evening, Greenville"s greatest come to congratulate Hector on the speech. Everybody in the county was talking about him that night, they said. Hector received these people in his old-fashioned-statesman manner, though I noticed that already he shook hands like a candidate. He would grasp the caller"s hand quickly and decidedly, instead of letting the other do the gripping. And I could see that all those who came in, even hard-headed men twice his age, treated him deferentially, with the air of intimate respect that he somehow managed to exact from people.
Perhaps I don"t do him justice: he was a "mighty myster"us" boy!
I sat and smoked, lounging in one of Mary"s comfortable porch-chairs. I managed without trouble to be in the background and I couldn"t help putting in most of my time studying Joe Lane and Miss Rainey. Those two were sitting, on the side-steps of the porch, a little apart from the rest of us--and a little apart from each other, too. Lord knows how you get such strong impressions, but I was very soon perfectly sure that these two young people were in love with each other and that they both knew it, but that they had given each other up. I was sure, too, that they were both under Hector"s spell, and preposterous as it may seem, that they were under his _will_, and that Hector"s plans included Miss Rainey for himself.
It was a mighty pretty evening; full of flower-smells and breezes from the woods, which began just across the village street. Joe sat in a sort of doubled-up fashion he had, his thin hands clasped like a strap round his knees. She sat straight and trim, both of them looking out toward where the twilight was fading. As the darkness came on I could barely make them out, a couple of quiet shadows, seemingly as far away from the group about the lamp-lit doorway where Hector sat, as if they were alone on big Jupiter who was setting up to be the whole thing, far out yonder in the lonely sky.
By and by, the moon oozed round from behind the house and leaked through the trees and I could see them plainer, two silhouettes against the foliage of some bright lilac-bushes. Joe hadn"t budged, but the back of Miss Rainey"s head wasn"t toward me as it had been before; it was her profile. She was leaning back a little, against a post, and looking at Joe--just looking at him. Neither of them spoke a word the whole time, and somehow I felt they didn"t need to, and that what they had to say to each other had never been spoken and never would be. It was mighty pretty--and sad, too.
I felt so sorry for them, but it made me more or less impatient with Hector, and with Joe--especially with Joe, I think. It seemed to me he needn"t have taken his temperament so hopelessly. But what"s the use of judging? When a man has a temperament like that, people who haven"t can"t tell what he"s got to contend with.
That Fourth of July speech gave Hector his chance. His district managers and the Trimmer faction saw they could use him; and they sent him round stumping the district. Two campaigns later the State Committee was using him, and parts of his speeches were being printed in all the party papers over the State. Locally, I suppose you might say, he had become a famous man; at least he acted like one--not that there was any essential change in him. His style had undergone a large improvement, however; his language was less mixed-up, and he seemed clear-headed enough on "questions of the day," showing himself to be well-informed and of a fine judgment.
In these things I thought I saw the hand of Laura Rainey. The teacher was helping him. The seriousness of his face had increased, he had always entirely lacked humour; yet the spell he managed to cast over his audiences was greater. He never once failed to "get them going,"
as they say. At twenty-nine he was no longer called "a rising young orator"; no, he was usually introduced as the "Hon. Hector J. Ransom, the Silver-tongued Lochinvar of the West."
Things hadn"t changed much at Greenville. Mary had always been so proud of Hector that she hadn"t inflated any more on account of his wider successes. She couldn"t, because she hadn"t any room left for it.
Joe Lane still went on his periodical sprees quite regularly, about one week every three months, and he was the least offensive tippler I ever knew. He came up to the city during one of his lapses, and called at my office. He was dressed with unusual care (he was always a good deal of a dandy), and he did not stagger nor slush his syllables; indeed, the only way I could have told what was the matter with him, at first, was by the solemn preoccupation of his expression. A little black pickaninny followed him, grinning and carrying a big bundle, covered with a new lace window-curtain.
"I am but a bearer of votive flowers," Joe said, bowing. Then turning to the little darky, he waved his hand loftily. "Unveil the offering!"
The pickaninny did so, removing the lace curtain to reveal a shiny new coal-bucket in which was a lump of ice, whereon reposed a pair of white kid gloves and a large wreath of artificial daisies.
"With love," said Joe. "From Hector." And he stalked majestically out.
There was a card on the wreath, which Joe had inscribed: "To announce the betrothal. No regrets."
Sure enough, the next morning I had a letter from Mary, telling me that Hector and Miss Rainey were engaged, that they had been so without announcing it, for several years, and she feared the engagement must last much longer before they could be married. So did I, for all of Hector"s glittering had brought him very little money. While he had some law practice, of course it was small, in Greenville, and what he had he neglected. Nor was he a good lawyer. I knew him to be heavily in debt to Lane, whose father had died lately, leaving Joe fairly well off; and I knew also that this debt sat very lightly on Hector. I judged so, because in the matter of the advances I had made for his education, I never heard him refer to them. Probably he forgot all about it, having so many more important things to think of.
Mary was right: it was a very long engagement. It had lasted seven years in all, when Pa.s.sley Trimmer declared himself a candidate for the nomination for Governor and gave Hector the great chance he had been waiting for. Hector "came out" for Trimmer, and came out strong.