When Ben had fully recovered and his father"s case looked hopeful, Elsie turned to her study of music, and the Southern boy suddenly waked to the fact that the great mystery of life was upon him. He was in love at last--genuinely, deeply, without one reservation. He had from habit flirted in a harmless way with every girl he knew. He left home with little Marion Lenoir"s girlish kiss warm on his lips. He had made love to many a pretty girl in old Virginia as the red tide of war had ebbed and flowed around Stuart"s magic camps.
But now the great hour of the soul had struck. No sooner had he dropped the first tender words that might have their double meaning, feeling his way cautiously toward her, than she had placed a gulf of dignity between them, and attempted to cut every tie that bound her life to his.
It had been so sudden it took his breath away. Could he win her? The word "fail" had never been in his vocabulary. It had never run in the speech of his people.
Yes, he would win if it was the only thing he did in this world. And forthwith he set about it. Life took on new meaning and new glory. What mattered war or wounds, pain or poverty, jails and revolutions--it was the dawn of life!
He sent her a flower every day and pinned one just like it on his coat.
And every night found him seated by her side. She greeted him cordially, but the gulf yawned between them. His courtesy and self-control struck her with surprise and admiration. In the face of her coldness he carried about him an air of smiling deference and gallantry.
She finally told him of her determination to go to New York to pursue her studies until Phil had finished the term of his enlistment in his regiment, which had been ordered on permanent duty in the West.
He laughed with his eyes at this announcement, blinking the lashes rapidly without moving his lips. It was a peculiar habit of his when deeply moved by a sudden thought. It had flashed over him like lightning that she was trying to get away from him. She would not do that unless she cared.
"When are you going?" he asked quietly.
"Day after to-morrow."
"Then you will give me one afternoon for a sail on the river to say good-bye and thank you for what you have done for me and mine?"
She hesitated, laughed, and refused.
"To-morrow at four o"clock I"ll call for you," he said firmly. "If there"s no wind, we can drift with the tide."
"I will not have time to go."
"Promptly at four," he repeated as he left.
Ben spent hours that night weighing the question of how far he should dare to speak his love. It had been such an easy thing before. Now it seemed a question of life and death. Twice the magic words had been on his lips, and each time something in her manner chilled him into silence.
Was she cold and incapable of love? No; this manner of the North was on the surface. He knew that deep down within her nature lay banked and smouldering fires of pa.s.sion for the one man whose breath could stir it into flame. He felt this all the keener now that the spell of her companionship and the sweet intimacy of her daily ministry to him had been broken. The memory of little movements of her pet.i.te figure, the glance of her warm amber eyes, and the touch of her hand--all had their tongues of revelation to his eager spirit.
He found her ready at four o"clock.
"You see I decided to go after all," she said.
"Yes, I knew you would," he answered.
She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop skirts.
He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared him.
They were seated in the little sailboat now, drifting out with the tide.
It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding silence fill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a sacrilege.
Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.
She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple, scarlet, and gold.
The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.
Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks, and all the tints of autumn"s glory seemed to melt into the gold of her hair.
And those eyes he felt that G.o.d had never set in such a face before--rich amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.
"Are you dead again?" she asked demurely.
"Well, as the Irishman said in answer to his mate"s question when he fell off the house, "not dead--but s.p.a.cheless.""
He was quick to see the opening her question with its memories had made, and took advantage of it.
"Look here, Miss Elsie, you"re too honest, independent, and candid to play hide-and-seek with me. I want to ask you a plain question. You"ve been trying to pick a quarrel of late. What have I done?"
"Nothing. It has simply come to me that our lives are far apart. The gulf between us is real and very deep. Your father was but yesterday a slaveholder----"
Ben grinned:
"Yes, your slave-trading grandfather sold them to us the day before."
Elsie blushed and bristled for a fight.
"You won"t mind if I give you a few lessons in history, will you?" Ben asked softly.
"Not in the least. I didn"t know that Southerners studied history," she answered, with a toss of her head.
"We made a specialty of the history of slavery, at least. I had a dear old teacher at home who fairly blazed with light on this subject. He is one of the best-read men in America. He happens to be in jail just now. But I haven"t forgotten--I know it by heart."
"I am waiting for light," she interrupted cynically.
"The South is no more to blame for negro slavery than the North. Our slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers. When a slaver arrived at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks that "A gracious and overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation----""
She looked at him with angry incredulity and cried:
"Go on."
"Twenty-three times the Legislature of Virginia pa.s.sed acts against the importation of slaves, which the king vetoed on pet.i.tion of the Ma.s.sachusetts slave traders. Jefferson made these acts of the king one of the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a Ma.s.sachusetts member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in the convention which framed the Const.i.tution put into it a clause abolishing the slave trade, but the Ma.s.sachusetts men succeeded in adding a clause extending the trade twenty years----"
He smiled and paused.
"Go on," she said, with impatience.
"In Colonial days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston.
The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In 1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America--one hundred and three in the South, and not one in Ma.s.sachusetts. It was not until 1836 that Ma.s.sachusetts led in Abolition--not until all her own slaves had been sold to us at a profit and the slave trade had been destroyed----"
She looked at Ben with anger for a moment and met his tantalizing look of good humour.
"Can you stand any more?"