The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

“The doing of it has been its own reward,” was the soft reply. “May I help you?”

“If I need it, yes. But I trust it will not be necessary. I still have a little store of gold Doctor Cameron was wise enough to hoard during the war. I brought half of it with me when I left home, and we buried the rest. I hope to find it on my return. And if we can save the twenty bales of cotton we have hidden we shall be relieved of want.”

“I’m ashamed of my country when I think of such ignoble methods as have been used against Doctor Cameron. My father is indignant, too.”

The last sentence Elsie spoke with eager girlish pride.

“I am very grateful to your father for his letter. I am sorry he has left the city before I could meet and thank him personally. You must tell him for me.”

At the jail the order of the President was not honoured for three hours, and Mrs. Cameron paced the street in angry impatience at first and then in dull despair.

“Do you think that man Stanton would dare defy the President?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” said Elsie, “but he is delaying as long as possible as an act of petty tyranny.”

At last the messenger arrived from the War Department permitting an order of the Chief Magistrate of the nation, the Commander-in-Chief of its Army and Navy, to be executed.

The grated door swung on its heavy hinges, and the wife and mother lay sobbing in the arms of the lover of her youth.

For two hours they poured into each other’s hearts the story of their sorrows and struggles during the six fateful months that had passed. When she would return from every theme back to his danger, he would laugh her fears to scorn.

“Nonsense, my dear, I’m as innocent as a babe. Mr. Davis was suffering from erysipelas, and I kept him in my house that night to relieve his pain. It will all blow over. I’m happy now that I have seen you. Ben will be up in a few days. You must return at once. You have no idea of the wild chaos at home. I left Jake in charge. I have implicit faith in him, but there’s no telling what may happen. I will not spend another moment in peace until you go.”

The proud old man spoke of his own danger with easy assurance. He was absolutely certain, since the day of Mrs. Surratt’s execution, that he would be railroaded to the gallows by the same methods. He had long looked on the end with indifference, and had ceased to desire to live except to see his loved ones again.

In vain she warned him of danger.

“My peril is nothing, my love,” he answered quietly. “At home, the horrors of a servile reign of terror have become a reality. These prison walls do not interest me. My heart is with our stricken people. You must go home. Our neighbour, Mr. Lenoir, is slowly dying. His wife will always be a child. Little Marion is older and more self-reliant. I feel as if they are our own children. There are so many who need us. They have always looked to me for guidance and help. You can do more for them than any one else. My calling is to heal others. You have always helped me. Do now as I ask you.”

At last she consented to leave for Piedmont on the following day, and he smiled.

“Kiss Ben and Margaret for me and tell them that I’ll be with them soon,” he said cheerily. He meant in the spirit, not the flesh. Not the faintest hope of life even flickered in his mind.

In the last farewell embrace a faint tremor of the soul, half sigh, half groan, escaped his lips, and he drew her again to his breast, whispering:

“Always my sweetheart, good, beautiful, brave, and true!”

CHAPTER III

The Joy of Living

Within two weeks after the departure of Mrs. Cameron and Margaret, the wounded soldier had left the hospital with Elsie’s hand resting on his arm and her keen eyes watching his faltering steps. She had promised Margaret to take her place until he was strong again. She was afraid to ask herself the meaning of the songs that were welling up from the depth of her own soul. She told herself again and again that she was fulfilling her ideal of unselfish human service.

Ben’s recovery was rapid, and he soon began to give evidence of his boundless joy in the mere fact of life.

He utterly refused to believe his father in danger.

“What, my dad a conspirator, an assassin!” he cried, with a laugh. “Why, he wouldn’t kill a flea without apologising to it. And as for plots and dark secrets, he never had a secret in his life and couldn’t keep one if he had it. My mother keeps all the family secrets. Crime couldn’t stick to him any more than dirty water to a duck’s back!”

“But we must secure his release on parole, that he may defend himself.”

“Of course. But we won’t cross any bridges till we come to them. I never saw things so bad they couldn’t be worse. Just think what I’ve been through. The war’s over. Don’t worry.”

He looked at her tenderly.

“Get that banjo and play ‘Get out of the Wilderness!’”

His spirit was contagious and his good humour resistless. Elsie spent the days of his convalescence in an unconscious glow of pleasure in his companionship. His handsome boyish face, his bearing, his whole personality, invited frankness and intimacy. It was a divine gift, this magnetism, the subtle meeting of quick intelligence, tact, and sympathy. His voice was tender and penetrating, with soft caresses in its tones. His vision of life was large and generous, with a splendid carelessness about little things that didn’t count. Each day Elsie saw new and striking traits of his character which drew her.

“What will we do if Stanton arrests you one of these fine days?” she asked him one day.

“Afraid they’ll nab me for something?” he exclaimed. “Well, that is a joke. Don’t you worry. The Yankees know who to fool with. I licked ’em too many times for them to bother me any more.”

“I was under the impression that you got licked,” Elsie observed.

“Don’t you believe it. We wore ourselves out whipping the other fellows.”

Elsie smiled, took up the banjo, and asked him to sing while she played.

She had no idea that he could sing, yet to her surprise he sang his camp songs boldly, tenderly, and with deep, expressive feeling.

As the girl listened, the memory of the horrible hours of suspense she had spent with his mother when his unconscious life hung on a thread came trooping back into her heart and a tear dimmed her eyes.

And he began to look at her with a new wonder and joy slowly growing in his soul.

CHAPTER IV

Hidden Treasure

Ben had spent a month of vain effort to secure his father’s release. He had succeeded in obtaining for him a removal to more comfortable quarters, books to read, and the privilege of a daily walk under guard and parole. The doctor’s genial temper, the wide range of his knowledge, the charm of his personality, and his heroism in suffering had captivated the surgeons who attended him and made friends of every jailer and guard.

Elsie was now using all her woman’s wit to secure a copy of the charges against him as formulated by the Judge Advocate General, who, in defiance of civil law, still claimed control of these cases.

To the boy’s sanguine temperament the whole proceeding had been a huge farce from the beginning, and at the last interview with his father he had literally laughed him into good humour.

“Look here, pa,” he cried. “I believe you’re trying to slip off and leave us in this mess. It’s not fair. It’s easy to die.”

“Who said I was going to die?”

“I heard you were trying to crawl out that way.”

“Well, it’s a mistake. I’m going to live just for the fun of disappointing my enemies and to keep you company. But you’d better get hold of a copy of these charges against me – if you don’t want me to escape.”

“It’s a funny world if a man can be condemned to death without any information on the subject.”

“My son, we are now in the hands of the revolutionists, army sutlers, contractors, and adventurers. The Nation will touch the lowest tide-mud of its degradation within the next few years. No man can predict the end.”

“Oh, go ’long!” said Ben. “You’ve got jail cobwebs in your eyes.”

“I’m depending on you.”

“I’ll pull you through if you don’t lie down on me and die to get out of trouble. You know you can die if you try hard enough.”

“I promise you, my boy,” he said with a laugh.

“Then I’ll let you read this letter from home,” Ben said, suddenly thrusting it before him.

The doctor’s hand trembled a little as he put on his glasses and read:

My Dear Boy: I cannot tell you how much good your bright letters have done us. It’s like opening the window and letting in the sunlight while fresh breezes blow through one’s soul.

Margaret and I have had stirring times. I send you enclosed an order for the last dollar of money we have left. You must hoard it. Make it last until your father is safe at home. I dare not leave it here. Nothing is safe. Every piece of silver and everything that could be carried has been stolen since we returned.

Uncle Aleck betrayed the place Jake had hidden our twenty precious bales of cotton. The war is long since over, but the “Treasury Agent” declared them confiscated, and then offered to relieve us of his order if we gave him five bales, each worth three hundred dollars in gold. I agreed, and within a week another thief came and declared the other fifteen bales confiscated. They steal it, and the Government never gets a cent. We dared not try to sell it in open market, as every bale exposed for sale is “confiscated” at once.

No crop was planted this summer. The negroes are all drawing rations at the Freedman’s Bureau.

We have turned our house into a hotel, and our table has become famous. Margaret is a treasure. She has learned to do everything. We tried to raise a crop on the farm when we came home, but the negroes stopped work. The Agent of the Bureau came to us and said he could send them back for a fee of $50. We paid it, and they worked a week. We found it easier to run a hotel. We hope to start the farm next year.

Our new minister at the Presbyterian Church is young, handsome, and eloquent – Rev. Hugh McAlpin.

Mr. Lenoir died last week – but his end was so beautiful, our tears were half joy. He talked incessantly of your father and how the country missed him. He seemed much better the day before the end came, and we took him for a little drive to Lovers’ Leap. It was there, sixteen years ago, he made love to Jeannie. When we propped him up on the rustic seat, and he looked out over the cliff and the river below, I have never seen a face so transfigured with peace and joy.

“What a beautiful world it is, my dears!” he exclaimed, taking Jeannie and Marion both by the hand.

They began to cry, and he said with a smile:

“Come now – do you love me?”

And they covered his hands with kisses.

“Well, then you must promise me two things faithfully here, with Mrs. Cameron to witness!”

“We promise,” they both said in a breath.

“That when I fall asleep, not one thread of black shall ever cloud the sunlight of our little home, that you will never wear it, and that you will show your love for me by making my flowers grow richer, that you will keep my memory green by always being as beautiful as you are to-day, and make this old world a sweeter place to live in. I wish you, Jeannie, my mate, to keep on making the young people glad. Don’t let their joys be less even for a month because I have laid down to rest. Let them sing and dance – ”

“Oh, Papa!” cried Marion.

“Certainly, my little serious beauty – I’ll not be far away, I’ll be near and breathe my songs into their hearts, and into yours – you both promise?”

“Yes, yes!” they both cried.

As we drove back through the woods, he smiled tenderly and said to me:

“My neighbour, Doctor Cameron, pays taxes on these woods, but I own them! Their sighing boughs, stirred by the breezes, have played for me oratorios grander than all the scores of human genius. I’ll hear the Choir Invisible play them when I sleep.”

He died that night suddenly. With his last breath he sighed:

“Draw the curtains and let me see again the moonlit woods!”

They are trying to carry out his wishes. I found they had nothing to eat, and that he had really died from insufficient nourishment – a polite expression meaning starvation. I’ve divided half our little store with them and send the rest to you. I think Marion more and more the incarnate soul of her father. I feel as if they are both my children.

My little grandchick, Hugh, is the sweetest youngster alive. He was a wee thing when you left. Mrs. Lenoir kept him when they arrested your father. He is so much like your brother Hugh I feel as if he has come to life again. You should hear him say grace, so solemnly and tenderly, we can’t help crying. He made it up himself. This is what he says at every meal:

“God, please give my grandpa something good to eat in jail, keep him well, don’t let the pains hurt him any more, and bring him home to me quick, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.”

I never knew before how the people loved the doctor, nor how dependent they were on him for help and guidance. Men, both white and coloured, come here every day to ask about him. Some of them come from far up in the mountains.

God alone knows how lonely our home and the world has seemed without him. They say that those who love and live the close sweet home life for years grow alike in soul and body, in tastes, ways, and habits. I find it so. People have told me that your father and I are more alike than brother and sister of the same blood. In spirit I’m sure it’s true. I know you love him and that you will leave nothing undone for his health and safety. Tell him that my only cure for loneliness in his absence is my fight to keep the wolf from the door, and save our home against his coming.

Lovingly, your Mother.

When the doctor had finished the reading, he looked out the window of the jail at the shining dome of the Capitol for a moment in silence.

“Do you know, my boy, that you have the heritage of royal blood? You are the child of a wonderful mother. I’m ashamed when I think of the helpless stupor under which I have given up, and then remember the deathless courage with which she has braved it all – the loss of her boys, her property, your troubles and mine. She has faced the world alone like a wounded lioness standing over her cubs. And now she turns her home into a hotel, and begins life in a strange new world without one doubt of her success. The South is yet rich even in its ruin.”

“Then you’ll fight and go back to her with me?”

“Yes, never fear.”

“Good! You see, we’re so poor now, pa, you’re lucky to be saving a board bill here. I’d ‘conspire’ myself and come in with you but for the fact it would hamper me a little in helping you.”

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 sailboat 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 tantalizing 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!”