The girl flushed with excitement.
"Who told you? What have you heard? Who said so?"
A dreamy look in the boy"s eyes deepened.
"n.o.body"s told me. I just know. It"s in the air. A wild duck knows when to go north. A bluebird knows when to move south. It"s in the air.
That"s the way I know--" his voice dropped. "Let"s go to Mt. Vernon and spend the day, Jennie--"
The girl looked up sharply. The low persuasive tones were unmistakable.
The faintest flush mantled her cheeks.
"No--I wouldn"t miss those speeches for anything. You promised to take me to the Senate gallery. Come on."
With a quick bound the boy scaled the next flight of steps and looked down at her laughing:
"All right, why don"t _you_ come on!"
With a frown she sprang up the stone stairs and he caught her step with a sudden military salute. They walked in silence for a few minutes.
"What"s the matter with you to-day, d.i.c.k Welford?"
"Why, Miss Jennie Barton?"
"I never saw you quite so foolish."
"Maybe it"s because I never saw you quite so pretty--"
The little figure stiffened with dignity.
"That will do now, sir--"
"Yessum!"
She threw him a look of quiet scorn as they picked their way through the piles of building material for the unfinished dome of the Capitol and mounted the steps.
Barely half past seven o"clock and the crowds were pouring into the Senate Chamber, its cloak rooms and galleries. Within thirty minutes after they had found seats opposite the diplomatic gallery every inch of s.p.a.ce in the great hall was jammed and packed.
Southern women and their escorts outnumbered the others five to one. The Southern wing of official Washington was out in force.
The tense electric atmosphere was oppressive.
The men and women whose eager anxious faces looked down on the circular rows of senatorial chairs and desks were painfully conscious that they were witnessing the final scene of a great historical era.
What the future might hold G.o.d alone could know. Their fathers had dreamed a beautiful dream--"_E Pluribus Unum_"--one out of many. The Union had yet to be realized as an historical fact. The discordant elements out of which our Const.i.tution had been strangely wrought had fought their way at last into two irreconcilable hostile sections, the very structure of whose civilization rested on antagonistic conceptions of life and government.
The Northern Senators were in their seats with grave faces long before the last straggling Southerner picked his way into the Chamber bowing and smiling and apologizing to the ladies on whose richly embroidered dresses he must step or give up the journey.
For weeks the pretense of polite formalities between parties had been unconsciously dropped. Men no longer bowed and smirked and pa.s.sed the time of day with shallow words.
With heads erect, they glanced at each other and pa.s.sed on. And if they spoke, it was with taunt, insult and challenge.
Jennie"s keen eyes rested on two vacant chairs on the floor of the Senate--every seat was crowded save these two.
She pressed d.i.c.k"s arm.
"See--the vacant seats of South Carolina!"
"They"re not vacant," the boy drawled.
"They are--look--"
"I see a white figure in each--"
"Nonsense!"
"We"re going to have war, I tell you! Death sits in those chairs to-day, Jennie--"
"Sh--don"t talk like that--"
The boy laughed.
"I"m not afraid, you know--just a sort of second sight--maybe it means I"ll be killed--"
South Carolina had felt no forebodings on the day her Convention had recalled those Senators. Kiett the eloquent leader of the Convention sprang to his feet, his face flaming with pa.s.sion that was half delirium as he shouted:
"This day is the culmination of long years of bitterness, of suffering and of struggle. We are performing a great deed, which holds in its magic not only the stirring present, it embraces the ages yet to come. I am content with what has been done to-day. I shall be content with it to-morrow. We have lowered the body of the old Union to its last resting place. We drop the flag over its grave."
When the vote was announced, without a single dissenting voice, the crowd rose to their feet with a shout of applause which shook the building to its foundations. It died away at last only to rise again with redoubled fury.
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida had followed in rapid succession, Louisiana"s Convention was to meet on the twenty-sixth, Texas on February first. On this the twenty-first day of January the Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their farewell addresses to the Old Union.
The girl"s eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress--every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice and Brussels.
The South was rich.
And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Washington because of his money. Her ruling cla.s.ses were without exception an aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.
The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.
The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for discussion had pa.s.sed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two vast sectional divisions on the issue.
Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown into a consuming pa.s.sion throughout the North and had resulted in the election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate--behind and underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental fact--the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and the fullness thereof were his.
And bigger than the fear of the confiscation of their property and the destruction of the Const.i.tution their fathers had created loomed before the Southern mind the Specter of a new democracy at the touch of whose fetid breath the soul of culture and refinement they believed must die.
In the vulgar ranks of this democracy must march sooner or later four million negroes but yesterday from the jungles of Africa.