"You are initiating the negroes into the League and teaching them the new catechism?"
"With remarkable success. Its secrecy and ritual appeal to them. Within six months we shall have the whole race under our control almost to a man."
"_Almost_ to a man?"
"We find some so attached to their former masters that reason is impossible with them. Even threats and the promise of forty acres of land have no influence."
The old man snorted with contempt.
"If anything could reconcile me to the Satanic Inst.i.tution it is the character of the wretches who submit to it and kiss the hand that strikes.
After all, a slave deserves to be a slave. The man who is mean enough to wear chains ought to wear them. You must teach, _teach_, TEACH these black hounds to know they are men, not brutes!"
The old man paused a moment, and his restless hands fumbled the cover.
"Your first task, as I told you in the beginning, is to teach every negro to stand erect in the presence of his former master and a.s.sert his manhood. Unless he does this, the South will bristle with bayonets in vain. The man who believes he is a dog, is one. The man who believes himself a king, may become one. Stop this snivelling and sneaking round the back doors. I can do nothing, G.o.d Almighty can do nothing, for a coward. Fix this as the first law of your own life. Lift up your head! The world is yours. Take it. Beat this into the skulls of your people, if you do it with an axe. Teach them the military drill at once. I"ll see that Washington sends the guns. The state, when under your control, can furnish the powder."
"It will surprise you to know the thoroughness with which this has been done already by the League," said Lynch. "The white master believed he could vote the negro as he worked him in the fields during the war. The League, with its blue flaming altar, under the shadows of night, has wrought a miracle. The negro is the enemy of his former master and will be for all time."
"For the present," said the old man meditatively, "not a word to a living soul as to my connection with this work. When the time is ripe, I"ll show my hand."
Elsie entered, protesting against her father"s talking longer, and showed Lynch to the door.
He paused on the moonlit porch and tried to engage her in familiar talk.
She cut him short, and he left reluctantly.
As he bowed his thick neck in pompous courtesy, she caught with a shiver the odour of pomade on his black half-kinked hair. He stopped on the lower step, looked back with smiling insolence, and gazed intently at her beauty. The girl shrank from the gleam of the jungle in his eyes and hurried within.
She found her father sunk in a stupor. Her cry brought the young surgeon hurrying into the room, and at the end of an hour he said to Elsie and Phil:
"He has had a stroke of paralysis. He may lie in mental darkness for months and then recover. His heart action is perfect. Patience, care, and love will save him. There is no cause for immediate alarm."
CHAPTER III
AUGUSTUS CaeSAR
Phil early found the home of the Camerons the most charming spot in town.
As he sat in the old-fashioned parlour beside Margaret, his brain seethed with plans for building a hotel on a large scale on the other side of the Square and restoring her home intact.
The Cameron homestead was a large brick building with an ample porch looking out directly on the Court House Square, standing in the middle of a lawn full of trees, flowers, shrubbery, and a wilderness of evergreen boxwood planted fifty years before. It was located on the farm from which it had always derived its support. The farm extended up into the village itself, with the great barn easily seen from the street.
Phil was charmed with the doctor"s genial personality. He often found the father a decidedly easier person to get along with than his handsome daughter. The Rev. Hugh McAlpin was a daily caller, and Margaret had a tantalizing way of showing her deference to his opinions.
Phil hated this preacher from the moment he laid eyes on him. His pugnacious piety he might have endured but for the fact that he was good-looking and eloquent. When he rose in the pulpit in all his sacred dignity, fixed his eyes on Margaret, and began in tenderly modulated voice to tell about the love of G.o.d, Phil clinched his fist. He didn"t care to join the Presbyterian church, but he quietly made up his mind that, if it came to the worst and she asked him, he would join anything. What made him furious was the air of a.s.surance with which the young divine carried himself about Margaret, as if he had but to say the word and it would be fixed as by a decree issued from before the foundations of the world.
He was pleased and surprised to find that his being a Yankee made no difference in his standing or welcome. The people seemed unconscious of the part his father played at Washington. Stoneman"s Confiscation Bill had not yet been discussed in Congress, and the promise of land to the negroes was universally regarded as a hoax of the League to win their followers.
The old Commoner was not an orator. Hence his name was scarcely known in the South. The Southern people could not conceive of a great leader except one who expressed his power through the megaphone of oratory. They held Charles Sumner chiefly responsible for Reconstruction.
The fact that Phil was a Yankee who had no axe to grind in the South caused the people to appeal to him in a pathetic way that touched his heart. He had not been in town two weeks before he was on good terms with every youngster, had the entree to every home, and Ben had taken him, protesting vehemently, to see every pretty girl there. He found that, in spite of war and poverty, troubles present and troubles to come, the young Southern woman was the divinity that claimed and received the chief worship of man.
The tremendous earnestness with which these youngsters pursued the work of courting, all of them so poor they scarcely had enough to eat, amazed and alarmed him beyond measure. He found in several cases as many as four making a dead set for one girl, as if heaven and earth depended on the outcome, while the girl seemed to receive it all as a matter of course--her just tribute.
Every instinct of his quiet reserved nature revolted at any such attempt to rush his cause with Margaret, and yet it made the cold chills run down his spine to see that Presbyterian preacher drive his buggy up to the hotel, take her to ride, and stay three hours. He knew where they had gone--to Lover"s Leap and along the beautiful road which led to the North Carolina line. He knew the way--Margaret had showed him. This road was the Way of Romance. Every farmhouse, cabin, and shady nook along its beaten track could tell its tale of lovers fleeing from the North to find happiness in the haven of matrimony across the line in South Carolina.
Everything seemed to favour marriage in this climate. The state required no license. A legal marriage could be celebrated, anywhere, at any time, by a minister in the presence of two witnesses, with or without the consent of parent or guardian. Marriage was the easiest thing in the state--divorce the one thing impossible. Death alone could grant divorce.
He was now past all reason in love. He followed the movement of Margaret"s queenly figure with pathetic abandonment. Beneath her beautiful manners he swore with a shiver that she was laughing at him. Now and then he caught a funny expression about her eyes, as if she were consumed with a sly sense of humour in her love affairs.
What he felt to be his manliest traits, his reserve, dignity, and moral earnestness, she must think cold and slow beside the dash, fire, and a.s.surance of these Southerners. He could tell by the way she encouraged the preacher before his eyes that she was criticizing and daring him to let go for once. Instead of doing it, he sank back appalled at the prospect and let the preacher carry her off again.
He sought solace in Dr. Cameron, who was utterly oblivious of his daughter"s love affairs.
Phil was constantly amazed at the variety of his knowledge, the genuineness of his culture, his modesty, and the note of youth and cheer with which he still pursued the study of medicine.
His company was refreshing for its own sake. The slender graceful figure, ruddy face, with piercing, dark-brown eyes in startling contrast to his snow-white hair and beard, had for Phil a perpetual charm. He never tired listening to his talk, and noting the peculiar grace and dignity with which he carried himself, unconscious of the commanding look of his brilliant eyes.
"I hear that you have used hypnotism in your practice, Doctor," Phil said to him one day, as he watched with fascination the changing play of his mobile features.
"Oh, yes! used it for years. Southern doctors have always been pioneers in the science of medicine. Dr. Crawford Long, of Georgia, you know, was the first pract.i.tioner in America to apply anesthesia to surgery."
"But where did you run up against hypnotism? I thought this a new thing under the sun?"
The doctor laughed.
"It"s not a home industry, exactly. I became interested in it in Edinburgh while a medical student, and pursued it with increased interest in Paris."
"Did you study medicine abroad?" Phil asked in surprise.
"Yes; I was poor, but I managed to raise and to borrow enough to take three years on the other side. I put all I had and all my credit in it.
I"ve never regretted the sacrifice. The more I saw of the great world, the better I liked my own world. I"ve given these farmers and their families the best G.o.d gave to me."
"Do you find much use for your powers of hypnosis?" Phil asked.
"Only in an experimental way. Naturally I am endowed with this gift--especially over certain cla.s.ses who are easily the subjects of extreme fear. I owned a rascally slave named Gus whom I used to watch stealing. Suddenly confronting him, I"ve thrown him into unconsciousness with a steady gaze of the eye, until he would drop on his face, trembling like a leaf, unable to speak until I allowed him."
"How do you account for such powers?"
"I don"t account for them at all. They belong to the world of spiritual phenomena of which we know so little and yet which touch our material lives at a thousand points every day. How do we account for sleep and dreams, or second sight, or the day dreams which we call visions?"
Phil was silent, and the doctor went on dreamily:
"The day my boy Richard was killed at Gettysburg, I saw him lying dead in a field near a house. I saw some soldiers bury him in the corner of that field, and then an old man go to the grave, dig up his body, cart it away into the woods, and throw it into a ditch. I saw it before I heard of the battle or knew that he was in it. He was reported killed, and his body has never been found. It is the one unspeakable horror of the war to me. I"ll never get over it."
"How very strange!" exclaimed Phil.
"And yet the war was nothing, my boy, to the horrors I feel clutching the throat of the South to-day. I"m glad you and your father are down here.