The Clansman
BOOK II
THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE CHASM
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 passion 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 petite 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 sail-boat 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 God 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 spacheless.' “
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 passed acts against
the importation of slaves, which the King vetoed on petition of the
Massachusetts slave-traders. Jefferson made these acts of the King one
of the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a
Massachusetts member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in
the convention which framed the Constitution put into it a clause
abolishing the slave-trade, but the Massachusetts 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
Massachusetts. It was not until 1836 that Massachusetts 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 tantalising
look of good-humour.
“Can you stand any more?”
“Certainly, I enjoy it.”
“I'm just breaking down the barriers—so to speak,” he said, with
the laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.
“By all means, go on,” she said, soberly. “I thought at first you
were trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest.”
“Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I'm at
home in—I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the
other day that your father meant to carry the civilization of
Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I
smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the
rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping- post, jail, and
gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by
pew-rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal
rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one
thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a
gentleman, gold or silver lace, buttons on the knees, or to walk in
great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs, while the Quakers,
Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were
everywhere in the South the heralds of man's equality before the law.
“But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of
this generation.”
“Have I too sinned and come short?” he asked, with mock gravity.
“Our ideals of life are far apart,” she firmly declared.
“What ails my ideal?”
“Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select
what pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough—the insolence of
a Southerner is beyond words!”
“You don't say so!” cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. “Isn't
your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?”
“Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman.”
“Enlighten me further.”
“I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is
after all a very inferior animal—nearer the brute creation, weaker in
infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting,
and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life—did
you?”
“Come to think of it, I never did,” acknowledged Ben with comic
gravity. “What else?”
“Isn't that enough?”
“It's nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is
irrelevant. I'm studying law, you know.”
“I have a personality of my own. You and your kind assume the right
to absorb all lesser lights.”
“Certainly; I'm a man.”
“I don't care to be absorbed by a mere man.”
“Don't wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?”
“I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a
home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook
and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another
grows, expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My
voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual
companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel
within to its highest reach.”
She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben's brown eyes,
about which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again
the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite
of herself. He laughed with boyish gaiety. It danced in his eyes, and
gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its
contagion infold her.
His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he
sang, “If you get there before I do, tell 'em I'm comin' too!”
As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly
that had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to
this man almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about
him, this gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been
immodest. She was in an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of
her, and dreaded to meet his gaze.
And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling
compound of dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his
voice all doubt and questioning melted.
“Do you know,” he said earnestly, “that you are the funniest, most
charming girl I ever met?”
“Thanks. I've heard your experience has been large for one of your
age.”
Ben's eyes danced.
“Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn't know were
there—to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of
mind, with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and
out of place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty.”
“I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more
personal about you that I do not like.”
“What?”
“Your cavalier habits.”
“Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are
all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy
loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism.”
“You love to fish and hunt and frolic—you flirt with every girl
you meet, and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and
that I do not know you.”
Ben's face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair
suddenly became livid with the rush of blood.
“Perhaps I don't mean that you shall know all yet,” he said, slowly.
“My ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet
eludes. I confess that I'm close kin to an angel and a devil, and that
I await a woman's hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life.”
The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle
appeal of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly
nose, with its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that
moment and very appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.
He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid
look on her face caused him to sink back in silence.
They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a
smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still
water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all
nature. They passed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the
banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its
staff.
The girl's eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then
on the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the
difference between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only
his nearness was real. Again a strange joy held her.
He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A
sea-gull poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.
Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:
“I love you!”
A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.
“I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the
thing that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and
faults my land is yours- a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and
everlasting song, old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and
hospitable. Around its humblest cottage song-birds live and mate and
nest and never leave. The winged ones of your own cold fields have
heard their call, and the sky to- night will echo with their chatter as
they hurry Southward. Elsie, my own, I too have called—come; I love
you!”
She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes
burning their passionate answer.
He bent and kissed her.
“Say it! Say it!” he whispered.
“I love you!” she sighed.