Bricks Without Straw Part 48

"When?"

"When you are willing to acknowledge yourself proud of me because of the work in which I have been engaged! Hesden Le Moyne,"

she continued, rising, and standing before him, "you are a brave man and a proud one. You are so brave that you would not hesitate to acknowledge your regard for me, despite the fact that I am a 'n.i.g.g.e.r-teacher.' It is a n.o.ble act, and I honor you for it. But I am as proud as you, and have good reason to be, as you will know some day; and I say to you that I would not prize any man's esteem which coupled itself with an apology for the work in which I have been engaged. I count that work my highest honor, and am more jealous of its renown than of even my own good name. When you can say to me, 'I am as proud of your work as of my own honor--so proud that I wish it to be known of all men, and that all men should know that I approve,' then you may come to me. Till then, farewell!"

She held out her hand. He pressed it an instant, took his hat from the table, and went out into the night, dazed and blinded by the brightness he had left behind.

CHAPTER LI.

HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE?

Two days afterward, Mollie Ainslie took the train for the North, accompanied by Lugena and her children. At the same time went Captain Pardee, under instructions from Hesden Le Moyne to verify the will, discover who the testator really was, and then ascertain whether he had any living heirs.

To Mollie Ainslie the departure was a sad farewell to a life which she had entered upon so full of abounding hope and charity, so full of love for G.o.d and man, that she could not believe that all her bright hopes had withered and only ashes remained. The way was dark. The path was hedged up. The South was "redeemed."

The poor, ignorant white man had been unable to perceive that liberty for the slave meant elevation to him also. The poor, ignorant colored man had shown himself, as might well have been antic.i.p.ated, unable to cope with intelligence, wealth, and the subtle power of the best trained political intellects of the nation; and it was not strange. They were all alone, and their allies were either as poor and weak as themselves, or were handicapped with the brand of Northern birth. These were their allies--not from choice, but from necessity. Few, indeed, were there of the highest and the best of those who had fought the nation in war as they had fought against the tide of liberty before the war began--who would accept the terms on which the nation gave re-established and greatly-increased power to the States of the South.

So there were ignorance and poverty and a hated race upon one side, and, upon the other, intelligence, wealth, and pride. The former _outnumbered_ the latter; but the latter, as compared with the former, were a Grecian phalanx matched against a scattered horde of Scythian bowmen. The Nation gave the jewel of liberty into the hands of the former, armed them with the weapons of self-government, and said: "Ye are many; protect what ye have received." Then it took away its hand, turned away its eyes, closed its ears to every cry of protest or of agony, and said: "We will not aid you nor protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you will we demand the works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your hands." Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: "_There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks._"

But, alas! they were weak and inept. The weapon they had received was two-edged. Sometimes they cut themselves; again they caught it by the blade, and those with whom they fought seized the hilt and made terrible slaughter. Then, too, they were not always wise--which was a sore fault, but not their own. Nor were they always brave, or true--which was another grievous fault; but was it to be believed that one hour of liberty would efface the scars of generations of slavery? Ah! well might they cry unto the Nation, as did Israel unto Pharaoh: "Theree is no straw given unto thy servants, and they say to us, 'Make brick': and behold thy servants are beaten; but the fault is in thine own people." They had simply demonstrated that in the years of Grace of the nineteenth century liberty could not be maintained nor prosperity achieved by ignorance and poverty, any more than in the days of Moses adobe bricks could be made without straw. The Nation gave the power of the South into the hands of ignorance and poverty and inexperience, and then demanded of them the fruit of intelligence, the strength of riches, and the skill of experience. It put before a keen-eyed and unscrupulous minority--a minority proud, aggressive, turbulent, arrogant, and scornful of all things save their own will and pleasure--the temptation to enhance their power by seizing that held by the trembling hands of simple-minded and unskilled guardians. What wonder that it was ravished from their care?

Mollie Ainslie thought of these things with some bitterness. She did not doubt the outcome. Her faith in truth and liberty, and her proud confidence in the ultimate destiny of the grand Nation whose past she had wors.h.i.+ped from childhood, were too strong to permit that. She believed that some time in the future light would come out of the darkness; but between then and the present was a great gulf, whose depth of horror no man knew, in which the people to serve whom she had given herself must sink and suffer--she could not tell how long. For them there was no hope.

She did not, indeed, look for a continuance of the horrors which then prevailed. She knew that when the incentive was removed the acts would cease. There would be peace, because there would no longer be any need for violence. But she was sure there would be no real freedom, no equality of right, no certainty of justice.

She did not care who ruled, but she knew that this people--she felt almost like calling them her people--needed the incentive of liberty, the inspiriting rivalry of open and fair compet.i.tion, to enable them to rise. Ay, to prevent them from sinking lower and lower. She greatly feared that the words of a journal which gloried in all that had been done toward abbreviating and annulling the powers, rights, and opportunities of the recent slaves might yet become verities if these people were deprived of such incentives.

She remembered how deeply-rooted in the Southern mind was the idea that slavery was a social necessity. She did not believe, as so many had insisted, that it was founded merely in greed. She believed that it was with sincere conviction that a leading journal had declared: "The evils of free society are insufferable. Free society must fail and give way to a _cla.s.s society_--a social system old as the world, universal as man."

She knew that the leader of a would-be nation had declared: "A thousand must die as slaves or paupers in order that one gentleman may live. Yet they are cheap to any nation, even at that price."

So she feared that the victors in the _post-bellum_ strife which was raging around her would succeed, for a time at least, in establis.h.i.+ng this ideal "cla.s.s society." While the Nation slumbered in indifference, she feared that these men, still full of the spirit of slavery, in the very name of law and order, under the pretense of decency and justice, would re-bind those whose feet had just begun to tread the path of liberty with shackles only less onerous than those which had been dashed from their limbs by red-handed war. As she thought of these things she read the following words from the pen of one who had carefully watched the process of "redemption," and had noted its results and tendency--not bitterly and angrily, as she had done, but coolly and approvingly:

"We would like to engrave a prophecy on stone, to be read of generations in the future. The Negro, in these [the Southern] States, will be slave again or cease to be. His sole refuge from extinction will be in slavery to the white man." [Footnote: Out of the numerous declarations of this conviction which have been made by the Southern press every year since the war, I have selected one from the _Meridian (Miss.) Mercury_ of July 31st, 1880. I have done this simply to show that the sentiment is not yet dead.]

She remembered to have heard a great man say, on a memorable occasion, that "the forms of law have always been the graves of buried liberties." She feared that, under the "forms" of _subverted_ laws, the liberties of a helpless people would indeed be buried.

She had little care for the Nation. It was of those she had served and whose future she regarded with such engrossing interest that she thought. She did not dream of remedying the evil. That was beyond her power. She only thought she might save some from its scath. To that she devoted herself.

The day before, she had visited the cemetery where her brother's ashes reposed. She had long ago put a neat monument over his grave, and had herself supplemented the national appropriation for its care. It was a beautiful inclosure, walled with stone, verdant with soft turf, and ornamented with rare shrubbery. Across it ran a little stream, with green banks sloping either way. A single great elm drooped over its bubbling waters. A pleasant drive ran with easy grade and graceful curves down one low hill and up another.

The iron gate opened upon a dusty highway. Beside it stood the keeper's neat brick lodge. In front, and a little to the right, lay a sleepy Southern town half hidden in embowering trees. Across the little ravine within the cemetery, upon the level plateau, were the graves, marked, in some cases, by little square white monuments of polished marble, on which was but the single word, "Unknown." A few bore the names of those who slept below. But on one side there were five long mounds, stretching away, side by side, as wide as the graves were long, and as long as four score graves. Smoothly rounded from end to end, without a break or a sign, they seemed a fit emblem of silence. Where they began, a granite pillar rose high, decked with symbols of glory interspersed with emblems of mourning.

Cannon, battered and grim, the worn-out dogs of war, gaped with silent jaws up at the silent sky. No name was carved on base or capital, nor on the marble s.h.i.+eld upon the shaft. Only, "Sacred to the memory of the unknown heroes who died--."

How quick the memory fills out the rest! There had been a military prison of the Confederacy just over the hill yonder, where the corn now grew so rank and thick. Twelve thousand men died there and were thrown into those long trenches where are now heaped-up mounds that look like giants' graves--not buried one by one, with coffin, shroud, and funeral rite, but one upon another heaped and piled, until the yawning pit would hold no more. No name was kept, no grave was marked, but in each trench was heaped one undistinguishable ma.s.s of dead humanity!

Mollie Ainslie, when she had bidden farewell to her brother's grave, looked on these piled-up trenches, scanned the silent shaft, and going into the keeper's office just at hand, read for herself the mournful record:

Known 94 Unknown 12,032 ------ Total 12,126 Died in Prison 11,700

As she wandered back to the town, she gleaned from what she had seen a lesson of charity for the people toward whom her heart had been full of hardness.

"It was thus," she said to herself, "that they treated brave foemen of their own race and people, who died, not on the battle-field, but of lingering disease in crowded prison pens, in the midst of pleasant homes and within hearing of the Sabbath chimes. None cared enough to give to each a grave, put up a simple board to mark the spot where love might come and weep--nay, not enough even to make entry of the name of the dead some heart must mourn. And if they did this to their dead foemen and kinsmen, their equals, why should we wonder that they manifest equal barbarity toward the living freedman--their recent slave, now suddenly exalted. _It is the lesson and the fruitage of slavery!"_

And so she made excuse both for the barbarity of war and the savagery which followed it by tracing both to their origin. She did not believe that human nature changed in an hour, but that centuries past bore fruit in centuries to come. She thought that the former master must be healed by the slow medicament of time before he could be able to recognize in all men the sanct.i.ty of manhood; as well as that the freedman must be taught to know and to defend his rights.

When she left the cemetery, she mounted Midnight for a farewell ride. The next morning, before he arose, Hesden Le Moyne heard the neigh of his old war-horse, and, springing from his bed, he ran out and found him hitched at his gate. A note was tied with a blue ribbon to his jetty forelock. He removed it, and read:

"I return your n.o.ble horse with many thanks for the long loan. May I hope that he will be known henceforth only as Midnight?

"MOLLIE."

He thought he recognized the ribbon as one which he had often seen encircling the neck of the writer, and foolishly treasured it upon his heart as a keepsake.

The train bore away the teacher, and with her the wife and children who fled, not knowing their father's fate, and the lawyer who sought an owner for an estate whose heir was too honorable to hold it wrongfully.

CHAPTER LII.

REDEEMED OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE.

Three months pa.s.sed peacefully away in Horsford. In the "redeemed"

county its "natural rulers" bore sway once more. The crops which Nimbus had cultivated were harvested by a Receiver of the Court.

The families that dwelt at Red Wing awaited in sullen silence the outcome of the suits which had been inst.i.tuted. Of Nimbus and Eliab not a word had been heard. Some thought they had been killed; others that they had fled. The family of Berry Lawson had disappeared from the new home which he had made near "Bre'er Rufe Patterson's," in Hanson County. Some said that they had gone South; others that they had gone East. "Bre'er Rufe" declared that he did not know where they had gone. All he knew was that he was "ober dar ob a Sat.u.r.day night, an' dar dey was, Sally an' de chillen; an' den he went dar agin ob a Monday mornin' arly, an' dar dey wasn't, nary one ob'

em."

The excitement with regard to the will, and her fear that Hesden was infected with the horrible virus of "Radicalism," had most alarmingly prostrated the invalid of Mulberry Hill. For a long time it was feared that her life of sufferirig was near its end. Hesden did not leave home at all, except once or twice to attend to some business as the trustee for the fugitive Jackson. Cousin Hetty had become a regular inmate of the house. All the invalid's affection for her dead daughter-in-law seemed to have been transferred to Hetty Lomax. No one could serve her so well. Even Hesden's attentions were less grateful. She spoke freely of the time when she should see Hetty in her sister's place, the mistress of Mulberry Hill.

She had given up all fear of the property being claimed by others, since she had heard how small were the chances of discovering an heir whose claims were not barred; and though she had consented to forego her legal rights, she trusted that a way would be found to satisfy any who might be discovered. At any rate, she was sure that her promise would not bind her successor, and, with the usual stubbornness of the chronic invalid, she determined that the estate should not pa.s.s out of the family. In any event, she did not expect to live until the finding of an heir, should there chance to be one.

One of the good citizens of the county began to show himself in public for the first time since the raid on Red Wing. An ugly scar stretched from his forehead down along his nose and across his lips and chin. At the least excitement it became red and angry, and gave him at all times a ghastly and malevolent appearance. He was a great hero with the best citizens; was _feted_, admired, and praised; and was at once made a deputy sheriff under the new _regime_. Another most worthy citizen, the superintendent of a Sabbath-school, and altogether one of the most estimable citizens of the county, had been so seriously affected with a malignant brain-fever since that b.l.o.o.d.y night that he had not yet left his bed.

The colored men, most of whom from a foolish apprehension had slept in the woods until the election, now began to perceive that the nights were wholesome, and remained in their cabins. They seemed sullen and discontented, and sometimes whispered among themselves of ill-usage and unfair treatment; but they were not noisy and clamorous, as they had been before the work of "redemption."

It was especially noted that they were much more respectful and complaisant to their superiors than they had been at any time since the Surrender. The old time "Ma.r.s.e" was now almost universally used, and few "n.i.g.g.e.rs" presumed to speak to a white man in the country districts without removing their hats. In the towns the improvement was not so perceptible. The "sa.s.sy" ones seemed to take courage from their numbers, and there they were still sometimes "boisterous"

and "obstreperous." On the whole, however, the result seemed eminently satisfactory, with a prospect of growing better every day. Labor was more manageable, and there were much fewer appeals to the law by lazy, impudent, and dissatisfied laborers. The master's word was rarely disputed upon the day of settlement, and there was every prospect of reviving hope and continued prosperity on the part of men who worked their plantations by proxy, and who had been previously very greatly annoyed and discouraged by the persistent clamor of their "hands" for payment.

There had been some ill-natured criticism of the course of Hesden Le Moyne. It was said that he had made some very imprudent remarks, both in regard to the treatment of Jordan Jackson and the affair at Red Wing. There were some, indeed, who openly declared that he had upheld and encouraged the n.i.g.g.e.rs at Red Wing in their insolent and outrageous course, and had used language unworthy of a "Southern gentleman" concerning those patriotic men who had felt called upon, for the protection of their homes and property, to administer the somewhat severe lesson which had no doubt nipped disorder in the bud, saved them from the war of races which had imminently impended, and brought "redemption" to the county. Several of Hesden's personal friends called upon him and remonstrated with him upon his course.

Many thought he should be "visited," and "Radicalism in the county stamped out" at once, root and branch. He received warning from the Klan to the effect that he was considered a dangerous character, and must change his tone and take heed to his footsteps. As, however, his inclination to the dangerous doctrines was generally attributed in a great measure to his unfortunate infatuation for the little "n.i.g.g.e.r-teacher," it was hoped that her absence would effect a cure. Especially was this opinion entertained when it became known that his mother was bitterly opposed to his course, and was fully determined to root the seeds of "Radicalism" from his mind. His attachment for her was well known, and it was generally believed that she might be trusted to turn him from the error of his ways, particularly as she was the owner of Red Wing, and had freely declared her intention not to leave him a foot of it unless he abandoned his absurd and vicious notions. Hesden himself, though he went abroad but little, saw that his friends had grown cool and that his enemies had greatly multiplied.

This was the situation of affairs in the good County of Horsford when, one bright morning in December--the morning of "that day whereon our Saviour's birth is celebrate"--Hesden Le Moyne rode to the depot nearest to his home, purchased two tickets to a Northern city, and, when the morning train came in, a.s.sisted his "boy"

Charles to lift from a covered wagon which stood near by, the weak and pallid form of the long-lost "n.i.g.g.e.r preacher," Eliab Hill, and place him upon the train. It was noticed by the loungers about the depot that Hesden carried but half concealed a navy revolver which seemed to have seen service. There was some excitement in the little crowd over the reappearance of Eliab Hill, but he was not interfered with. In fact, the cars moved off so quickly after he was first seen that there was no time to recover from the surprise produced by the unexpected apparition. It was not until the smoke of the engine had disappeared in the distance that the wrath of the bystanders clothed itself in words.

Then the air reeked with expletives. What ought to have been done was discussed with great freedom. An excited crowd gathered around Charles as he was preparing to return home, and plied him with questions. His ignorance was phenomenal, but the look of stupefied wonder with which he regarded his questioners confirmed his words.

It was not until he had proceeded a mile on his homeward way, with Midnight in leading behind the tail-board, that, having satisfied himself that there was no one within hearing, by peeping from beneath the canvas covering of the wagon, both before and behind, he tied the reins to one of the bows which upheld the cover, abandoned the mule to his own guidance, and throwing himself upon the mattress on which Eliab had lain, gave vent to roars of laughter.

"Yah, yah, yah!" he cried, as the tears rolled down his black face.

"It du take Ma.r.s.e Hesden to wax dem fellers! Dar he war, jest ez cool an' keerless ez yer please, a'standin' roun' an' waitin' fer de train an' payin' no 'tention at all ter me an' de wagon by de platform, dar. Swar, but I war skeered nigh 'bout ter death, till I got dar an' seed him so quiet and keerless; an' Bre'er 'Liab, he war jest a-prayin' all de time--but dat's no wonder. Den, when de train whistle, Ma.r.s.e Hesden turn quick an' sharp an' I seed him gib dat ole pistol a jerk roun' in front, an' he come back an' sed, jest ez cool an' quiet, 'Now, Charles!' I declar' it stiddied me up jes ter hear him, an' den up comes Bre'er 'Liab in my arms. Ma.r.s.e Hesden helps a bit an' goes fru de crowd wid his mouf shet like a steel trap. We takes him on de cars. All aboard! _Whoo-oop--puff, puff!_ Off she goes! an' dat crowd stan's dar a-cussin' all curration an' demselves to boot! Yah, yah, yah! 'Rah for Ma.r.s.e Hesden!"