The Clansman
BOOK III
THE REIGN OF TERROR
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 tantalising 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 God, 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 assurance 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 farm-house, 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 assurance of these Southerners. He could tell by the way she
encouraged the preacher before his eyes that she was criticising 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 practitioner 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 God 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 classes 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. Your disinterested view of things may help us at
Washington when we need it most. The South seems to have no friend at
Court.”
“Your younger men, I find, are hopeful, Doctor,” said Phil.
“Yes, the young never see danger until it's time to die. I'm not a
pessimist, but I was happier in jail. Scores of my old friends have
given up in despair and died. Delicate and cultured women are living on
cowpeas, corn bread and molasses—and of such quality they would not
have fed it to a slave. Children go to bed hungry. Droves of brutal
negroes roam at large, stealing, murdering, and threatening blacker
crimes. We are under the heel of petty military tyrants, few of whom
ever smelled gunpowder in a battle. At the approaching election, not a
decent white man in this county can take the infamous test-oath. I am
disfranchised because I gave a cup of water to the lips of one of my
dying boys on the battle- field. My slaves are all voters. There will
be a negro majority of more than one hundred thousand in this state.
Desperadoes are here teaching these negroes insolence and crime in
their secret societies. The future is a nightmare.”
“You have my sympathy, sir,” said Phil, warmly extending his hand.
“These Reconstruction Acts, conceived in sin and brought forth in
iniquity, can bring only shame and disgrace until the last trace of
them is wiped from our laws. I hope it will not be necessary to do it
in blood.”
The doctor was deeply touched. He could not be mistaken in the
genuineness of any man's feeling. He never dreamed this earnest
straightforward Yankee youngster was in love with Margaret, and it
would have made no difference in the accuracy of his judgment.
“Your sentiments do you honour, sir,” he said, with grave courtesy.
“And you honour us and our town with your presence and friendship.”
As Phil hurried home in a warm glow of sympathy for the people whose
hospitality had made him their friend and champion, he encountered a
negro trooper standing on the corner, watching the Cameron house with
furtive glance.
Instinctively he stopped, surveyed the man from head to foot and
asked:
“What's the trouble?”
“None er yo' business,”the negro answered, slouching across to the
opposite side of the street.
Phil watched him with disgust. He had the short, heavy-set neck of
the lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick
they curled both ways up and down with crooked blood-marks across them.
His nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual
dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites,
were set wide apart and gleamed ape-like under his scant brows. His
enormous cheekbones and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears and
almost hide them.
“That we should send such soldiers here to flaunt our uniform in the
faces of these people!” he exclaimed, with bitterness.
He met Ben hurrying home from a visit to Elsie. The two young
soldiers whose prejudices had melted in the white-heat of battle had
become fast friends.
Phil laughed and winked:
“I'll meet you to-night around the family altar!”
When he reached home, Ben saw, slouching in front of the house,
walking back and forth and glancing furtively behind him, the negro
trooper whom his friend had passed.
He walked quickly in front of him, and, blinking his eyes rapidly,
said:
“Didn't I tell you, Gus, not to let me catch you hanging around this
house again?”
The negro drew himself up, pulling his blue uniform into position as
his body stretched out of its habitual slouch, and answered:
“My name ain't 'Gus.' “
Ben gave a quick little chuckle and leaned back against the palings,
his hand resting on one that was loose. He glanced at the negro
carelessly and said:
“Well, Augustus Caesar, I give your majesty thirty seconds to move
off the block.”
Gus' first impulse was to run, but remembering himself he threw back
his shoulders and said:
“I reckon de streets is free-”
“Yes, and so is kindling-wood!”
Quick as a flash of lightning the paling suddenly left the fence and
broke three times in such bewildering rapidity on the negro's head he
forgot everything he ever knew or thought he knew save one thing—the
way to run. He didn't fly, but he made remarkable use of the facilities
with which he had been endowed.
Ben watched him disappear toward the camp.
He picked up the pieces of paling, pulled a strand of black wool
from a splinter, looked at it curiously and said:
“A sprig of his majesty's hair—I'll doubtless remember him without
it!”