The Clansman (1905)/Book 2/Chapter 5
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.
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