The Clansman
BOOK III
THE REIGN OF TERROR
CHAPTER IX
AT LOVER'S LEAP
IN spite of the pitiful collapse of old Stoneman under his stroke of
paralysis, his children still saw the unconquered soul shining in his
colourless eyes. They had both been on the point of confessing their
love affairs to him and joining the inevitable struggle when he was
stricken. They knew only too well that he would not consent to a dual
alliance with the Camerons under the conditions of fierce hatreds and
violence into which the state had drifted. They were too high-minded to
consider a violation of his wishes while thus helpless, with his
strange eyes following them about in childlike eagerness. His weakness
was mightier than his iron will.
So, for eighteen months, while he slowly groped out of mental
twilight, each had waited—Elsie with a tender faith struggling with
despair, and Phil in a torture of uncertainty and fear.
In the meantime, the young Northerner had become as radical in his
sympathies with the Southern people as his father had ever been against
them. This power of assimilation has always been a mark of Southern
genius. The sight of the Black Hand on their throats now roused his
righteous indignation. The patience with which they endured was to him
amazing. The Southerner he had found to be the last man on earth to
become a revolutionist. All his traits were against it. His genius for
command, the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his
deathless love of home, his supreme constancy and sense of civic unity,
all combined to make him ultraconservative. He began now to see that it
was reverence for authority as expressed in the Constitution under
which slavery was established which made Secession inevitable.
Besides, the laziness and incapacity of the Negro had been more than
he could endure. With no ties of tradition or habits of life to bind
him, he simply refused to tolerate them. In this feeling Elsie had
grown early to sympathise. She discharged Aunt Cindy for feeding her
children from the kitchen, and brought a cook and house girl from the
North, while Phil would employ only white men in any capacity.
In the desolation of Negro rule, the Cameron farm had become
worthless. The taxes had more than absorbed the income, and the place
was only kept from execution by the indomitable energy of Mrs. Cameron,
who made the hotel pay enough to carry the interest on a mortgage which
was increasing from season to season.
The doctor's practice was with him a divine calling. He never sent
bills to his patients. They paid something if they had it. Now they had
nothing.
Ben's law practice was large for his age and experience, but his
clients had no money.
While the Camerons were growing, each day, poorer, Phil was becoming
rich. His genius, skill, and enterprise had been quick to see the
possibilities of the water- power. The old Eagle cotton mills had been
burned during the war. Phil organised the Eagle & Phoenix Company,
interested Northern capitalists, bought the falls, and erected two
great mills, the dim hum of whose spindles added a new note to the
river's music. Eager, swift, modest, his head full of ideas, his heart
full of faith, he had pressed forward to success.
As the old Commoner's mind began to clear, and his recovery was
sure, Phil determined to press his suit for Margaret's hand to an
issue.
Ben had dropped a hint of an interview of the Rev. Hugh McAlpin with
Dr. Cameron, which had thrown Phil into a cold sweat.
He hurried to the hotel to ask Margaret to drive with him that
afternoon. He would stop at Lover's Leap and settle the question.
He met the preacher, just emerging from the door, calm, handsome,
serious, and Margaret by his side. The dark-haired beauty seemed
strangely serene. What could it mean? His heart was in his throat. Was
he too late? Wreathed in smiles when the preacher had gone, the girl's
face was a riddle he could not solve.
To his joy, she consented to go.
As he left in his trim little buggy for the hotel, he stooped and
kissed Elsie, whispering:
“Make an offering on the altar of love for me, Sis!”
“You're too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!”
she replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the
dust.
As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs, over- looking
the river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendour to-day for
the Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the
pines, their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle
life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun
gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all
seemed incarnate in the calm lovely face and gracious figure beside
him.
They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech,
which was the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below
flowed the river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which
its current had thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite
formed a cave eighty feet in depth at the water's edge. From this
projecting wall, tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped
with her lover, fleeing from the wrath of a cruel father who had
separated them. The cave below was inaccessible from above, being
reached by a narrow footpath along the river's edge when entered a mile
down-stream.
The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous
beauty. For miles, the broad river rolled in calm shining glory
seaward, its banks fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn
and cotton spread in waving green toward the distant hills and blue
mountains of the west.
Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of
lovers from Piedmont.
They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower
she had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly.
The Southern sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened
fruit, doubly radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair.
The lustrous glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and
the graceful, careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured.
Her dress of airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave
Phil the impression of the eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the
tropics. He felt that if he dared to touch her she might lift her wings
and sail over the cliff into the sky and forget to light again at his
side.
“I am going to ask a very bold and impertinent question, Miss
Margaret,” Phil said with resolution. “May I?”
Margaret smiled incredulously.
“I'll risk your impertinence, and decide as to its boldness.”
“Tell me, please, what that preacher said to you today.”
Margaret looked away, unable to suppress the merriment that played
about her eyes and mouth.
“Will you never breathe it to a soul, if I do?”
“Never.”
“Honest Injun, here on the sacred altar of the princess?”
“On my honour.”
“Then I'll tell you,” she said, biting her lips to keep back a
laugh. “Mr. McAlpin is very handsome and eloquent. I have always
thought him the best preacher we have ever had in Piedmont—”
“Yes, I know,” Phil interrupted with a frown.
“He is very pious,” she went on evenly, “and seeks Divine guidance
in prayer in everything he does. He called this morning to see me, and
I was playing for him in the little music-room off the parlour, when he
suddenly closed the door and said:
“ 'Miss Margaret, I am going to take, this morning, the most
important step of my life—'
“Of course, I hadn't the remotest idea what he meant—
“ 'Will you join me in a word of prayer?' he asked, and knelt right
down. I was accustomed, of course, to kneel with him in family worship
at his pastoral calls, and so from habit I slipped to one knee by the
piano-stool, wondering what on earth he was about. When he prayed with
fervour for the Lord to bless the great love with which he hoped to
hallow my life—I giggled. It broke up the meeting. He rose and asked
me to marry him. I told him the Lord hadn't revealed it to me—”
Phil seized her hand and held it firmly. The smile died from the
girl's face, her hand trembled, and the rose- tint on her cheeks flamed
to scarlet.
“Margaret, my own, I love you,” he cried with joy. “You could have
told that story only to the one man whom you love—is it not true?”
“Yes. I've loved you always,” said the low sweet voice.
“Always?” asked Phil through a tear.
“Before I saw you, when they told me you were as Ben's twin brother,
my heart began to sing at the sound of your name—”
“Call it,” he whispered.
“Phil, my sweetheart!” she said with a laugh.
“How tender and homelike the music of your voice! The world has
never seen the match of your gracious Southern womanhood! Snow-bound in
the North, I dreamed, as a child, of this world of eternal sunshine.
And now every memory and dream I've found in you.”
“And you won't be disappointed in my simple ideal that finds its all
within a home?”
“No. I love the old-fashioned dream of the South. Maybe you have
enchanted me, but I love these green hills and mountains, these rivers
musical with cascade and fall, these solemn forests—but for the Black
Curse, the South would be to-day the garden of the world!”
“And you will help our people lift this curse?” softly asked the
girl, nestling closer to his side.
“Yes, dearest, thy people shall be mine! Had I a thousand wrongs to
cherish, I'd forgive them all for your sake. I'll help you build here a
new South on all that's good and noble in the old, until its dead
fields blossom again, its harbours bristle with ships, and the hum of a
thousand industries make music in every valley. I'd sing to you in
burning verse if I could, but it is not my way. I have been awkward and
slow in love, perhaps- but I'll be swift in your service. I dream to
make dead stones and wood live and breathe for you, of victories wrung
from Nature that are yours. My poems will be deeds, my flowers the
hard-earned wealth that has a soul, which I shall lay at your feet.”
“Who said my lover was dumb?” she sighed, with a twinkle in her
shining eyes. “You must introduce me to your father soon. He must like
me as my father does you, or our dream can never come true.”
A pain gripped Phil's heart, but he answered, bravely:
“I will. He can't help loving you.”
They stood on the rustic seat to carve their initials within a
circle, high on the old beechwood book of love.
“May I write it out in full—Margaret Cameron- Philip Stoneman?” he
asked.
“No—only the initials now—the full names when you've seen my
father and I've seen yours. Jeannie Campbell and Henry Lenoir were once
written thus in full, and many a lover has looked at that circle and
prayed for happiness like theirs. You can see there a new one cut over
the old, the bark has filled, and written on the fresh page is 'Marion
Lenoir' with the blank below for her lover's name.”
Phil looked at the freshly cut circle and laughed:
“I wonder if Marion or her mother did that?”
“Her mother, of course.”
“I wonder whose will be the lucky name some day within it?” said
Phil, musingly, as he finished his own.