These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not
only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and
share his peculiar, proprietary interest in the lovely Kentucky
countryside. He pointed out to her its beauties of wood and hill and
pasture like the owner of some vast estate exhibiting it to visitors,
with a frank and pardonable pride. It is a habit of mind not unusual to
the native of certain localities--notably Virginia and Maryland and
Kentucky; but in her wandering, unimportant old father it seemed to Joan
a little piteous, as if he had sunk his small identity into that of his
great State, content to make its history his history, its glory his.
"Here," he would say reverently, "is the spot where we made our final
victorious stand against the Indians. Sacred ground, my daughter!"
Or--"This is the place where our women went down to the spring for
water, risking their lives, bless their hearts! because the men could
not be spared from the defense of the stockade. You should thank God
that you are a Kentucky woman!" He sometimes forgot in his enthusiasm
that she had not been, so to speak, born to the purple--though that
fact, as he once explained to her, was merely an accident, due to a
certain miscalculation of dates.
Joan came to realize in this new intimacy with her father that his
futility was owing in large part to circumstances over which he had no
control: notably the times in which he lived. He had been born a little
too late or perhaps a little too early. There is no need for men of his
type in the piping times of peace; but had his prime chanced to occur
during some convulsed period of the world's history, it is conceivable
that Richard Darcy might have rendered a great account of himself. He
was a born leader of men, with unfortunately little opportunity to
exercise his talent. During the only war that came within his range of
vision (our late unpleasantness with Spain), he had chanced to be
involved with certain trusting friends in a financial situation so acute
that the affairs of the nation had been obliged to stand aside until he
extricated himself; by which time, to his lasting regret, the war was
over.
He had, of course, no right to his title. It had simply accrued to him
as titles often do accrue to men of his type, particularly in the South;
partly by inheritance, growing as he grew, beginning with a modest
lieutenancy in the State Guards, which had been his one and only taste
of the career for which he had been created. He never spoke of himself
as "Major"; but from the habit of years he had perhaps come to think of
himself so, accepting the unsought honor gracefully as he accepted
whatever else came his way, whether of good or evil.
It is a pity that he could not have fallen asleep, say, at twenty, in
his clean, brave youth; and awakened in the month of August 1914, ready
for the day's work....
The Darcys and Joan were running home after a long trip in the Bluegrass
one evening, slipping along without lights in the glow of an October
aftermath, when at the turn of an unfrequented lane they came suddenly
upon a crowd of people collected about a bridge. The chauffeur brought
the car to an abrupt stop. It was at once surrounded by several men with
handkerchiefs tied over the lower parts of their faces.
"What the devil--" cried Major Darcy.
"Highwaymen!" gasped Joan.
A man with a pistol in his hand said laconically, "No, we ain't
highwaymen, lady. We wasn't expectin' comp'ny, but sence you've come,
you'll hev to stay. Set right where you are and don't look. We'll be
through this job in a minute."
"Nonsense! Let us pass at once," said the Major indignantly. "Drive on
over the bridge, James!"
"Better not, James," drawled the laconic one. "We're usin' that bridge
ourselves just now."
The chauffeur hesitated, walling his eyes in fright. Joan, who was
seated beside him, reached for the ignition switch to start the engine,
but turned on instead the lighting-switch. The sudden glare of the
headlights revealed some twenty or thirty roughly dressed men of the
farmer class, and in their midst, bound hand and foot with rope, a
cowering negro.
"My God! It's a lynching," quavered Effie May.
The Major had by this time collected his startled wits.
With a sudden oath he jerked open the door and got out.
"What are you up to here, men? Don't touch me, sir!"--this to one who
had laid a hand on his sleeve.
There was a quality in her father's voice that sent a thrill through
Joan. She had never heard it before. The man removed his hand.
"We're just stringin' up a nigger for the best of reasons," he
explained. "'Tain't no business of yourn, stranger."
"I'll make it my business," said Richard Darcy sternly. "You're not
going to disgrace this State while _I_ am here!"
The effect was histrionic; and yet Joan realized that her father was not
blustering. He meant it.
There came a wail from beyond that made her shiver, the cry of a man in
mortal terror. "I ain't never done it, 'fore Gawd I ain't never tetched
that woman. Oh, Boss! O-o-oh, Boss!" It was like the cry of a damned
soul to God. "_Don'_ you let 'em git me!"
There was an agony of hope in the appeal, as of one who sees at hand
unexpected deliverance.
The Major responded to it, speaking in quiet reassurance as she had
sometimes heard him speak, years ago, when she had wakened out of some
nightmare in the little bed beside her parents'.
"All right, boy. They shan't get you,"
He strode through the crowd, putting men out of his way right and left.
In sheer surprise they let him pass till he reached the negro, who
cringed to him, catching at his hand.
Then a voice cried out, "Here, we're wastin' time. Muzzle the old boy!"
The Major turned and stared magnificently in the direction of his voice,
nettled by the term "old boy."
"Evidently," he remarked, "the gentleman does not know who I am!"
Joan was seized with an hysterical desire to laugh. At such a moment the
bombast of it was too much. Suppose they should inquire
minstrel-fashion, "Well, then, Mr. Johnsing, who _are_ you?"
But the crowd was not as used to her father as she was. They hesitated,
impressed by his hauteur, his fine clothes, the waiting limousine. They
stirred uneasily. A voice near her murmured, "Mebbe it's the Governor!"
Richard Darcy took instant advantage of the impression he had created,
and began to speak. It was not the first time she had heard him make a
speech, for he was frequently called upon to aid some friend in turning
the tide of political battle. The Major, indeed, had rather a reputation
for assisting his friends into office--It was typical of Joan that she
listened critically despite her thumping heart; that she watched what
she could see of the faces about her, picked out by the lights of the
car; that she missed no expression on the gray, working features of the
negro, darting wild glances about him like a newly caged wolf she had
seen once at the Zoo, frantically eying the people who stood to stare at
it.
Her father's voice poured out in a golden flood, running the gamut from
anger to gentle suasion. It was the voice of the natural orator, which
depends very little for its effect upon words. Once, passing a negro
church, Joan had heard just such a voice rising and falling within, and
though not a word of the sermon reached her, after a few moments she had
been almost ready to sway and moan with the congregation as it muttered,
"Yas, good Lawd!" "Be mussiful to us po' sinners" "Come, Jesus, come
down and take me home!"
Some such effect began to be visible on the Major's audience. There were
stirrings and murmurings that suggested applause. He rose to them. The
eloquence that lies so close under the skin of Southern-born
men--certainly of all Southern-born men of Irish stock--came to the
surface and flowered. He showed this handful of rough farmers what it
should mean to them to be natives of so great and glorious a
commonwealth ("'Commonwealth'--what a splendid word, my friends!");
wearing in her bosom all the riches of the earth, nourishing at that
bosom a race of supermen ("And superwomen, my friends! superwomen!");
carrying in her womb the greatness of the country's future.
"Statesmen we give to the world--law-makers, not lawbreakers! Soldiers
we give, not midnight marauders and assassins!" (If he borrowed freely
from a certain greater Kentucky orator who speaks only with his pen, the
Major was unaware of plagiarism.) "Show me the fools who say Kentuckians
are lawless? We make our laws as we need them, gentlemen--and we obey
them! Perhaps the greatest of our laws is this: 'Never kick a dog when
it is down.'" His voice sank to a warm and personal friendliness. "I ask
you, gentlemen--is there any dog more down than the negro? It is not his
fault that he is here where he is no longer wanted. It is not his fault
that he brought with him when he came the ways and the intelligence of
the jungle. It is ours, perhaps, that he has kept them. We shall never
tame the negro by proving ourselves savages!--My friends, you and I here
in Kentucky pride ourselves on breaking our horses and our dogs by means
of kindness. Shall we do less for our unfortunate black brother?"
A voice in the crowd remarked, "_You_ can claim kin with him ef you want
to, Jedge--_I_ ain't!"
A ripple of laughter greeted this sally, and Joan's tension relaxed. She
felt intuitively that a crowd which laughs does not kill.
While he spoke, her father had more than once caught her eye over the
heads of the others, urgently, meaningly. Now he nodded to her. Joan
suddenly caught the message he was trying to convey.
"He wants us to go to him. Quick, James! Start your engine. Quietly!"
In his nervousness, however, the chauffeur started the car with a jerk,
and many faces moved in their direction. The Major turned on the full
tide of his voice, and rose to his climax.
"My friends," he asked solemnly, "have you thought to take into your
hands the privilege of the Most High, who saith, 'Vengeance is mine'?
Perhaps you have called vengeance 'justice'? Even so there is a finer
thing than justice. There is mercy. And there is something we may give
even greater than mercy--something to which each of us poor souls has a
human right. I refer, gentlemen, to the benefit of the doubt.
"Some day every one of us here present--who knows how soon?--must stand
before the Judgment Seat, cowering as this wretch is cowering now. And
what we dare to ask then will be perhaps not justice, nor even
mercy--but simply the benefit of the doubt."
Tears came into Joan's eyes. It seemed to her that for a moment her
father had forgotten his purpose there, and was speaking not for another
but for himself....
His mind, however, had not left the business in hand. After a slight and
telling pause, he said in his ordinary conversational voice, "Now I am
going to take this negro with me, gentlemen, if you don't mind. I have
at hand a safe conveyance, as you see. I pledge you my word to deliver
him in person to the sheriff of this county."
He beckoned to Joan.
The spell was broken, and pandemonium reigned. "Look out--he's makin' a
get-away!"
"Aw, what's the use? Leave him go!"
"By God, it was _my sister_--"
"Let me at him"--
"The gen'leman's right, I tell you!"--
And penetrating all a laconic drawl, "Stranger, leggo that nigger, and
leggo quick."
Joan, on tiptoe, saw her father's head and beckoning hand above the
crowd.
"Go on, James!" she said tensely. "Never mind if you run them down--"
"Stop!" gasped Effie May. "Don't you see those pistols? They mean to
shoot!"
The terrified James did not know which to obey.
"Here, give me the wheel," ordered Joan. "Be quiet, Effie May!" Into her
mind came scornfully one of her father's sayings, "The canaille are
invariably timid."
Effie May suddenly screamed again. "They're going to _shoot_!"
And as if at a signal for which they had been waiting, two shots barked
out.
The Major, still finely erect, thrust the negro behind him, and at the
same moment Joan sprang out of the car to go to his defense; two
instinctive acts which proved them father and child, and also proved
indubitably the Darcy right to pride of race.
His steady voice reached her again as she struggled through the milling
crowd; "You poor fools, look to what your folly has already led you!
You've shot the wrong man. You've shot _me_!"
There was a second of appalled silence. Then a man muttered "Golly!" and
turned and fled. His panic was contagious. One after another, by twos
and threes, the lynchers melted hastily away. When Joan reached her
father he was seated on the ground, leaning for support against the
bridge railing, alone except for the shackled negro.
He still had command of the situation. "Take my penknife, Dollykins, and
set this boy free so that he can run," he ordered.
Joan cut the ropes, sick with relief. He was so calm that she thought he
must have been bluffing the crowd.
"Dad! Dad! You're not really hurt, then?"
He smiled up at her. "Not hurt, my child. Killed," he said, dramatic to
the last....
The negro did not run. In return for his defender's heroism, he
performed a small act of heroism himself--not so small either, perhaps,
considering that his life depended upon what use he made of the next few
hours.
"I'll tote him to de car, lady," he offered, pantingly; and delayed
further to give the paralyzed chauffeur instructions as to where to find
the nearest doctor.
Joan sat on the floor of the limousine with her father's head in her
lap, only half aware of his labored, fluttering breath, of the blood
upon her dress, of her step-mother's wild pleadings with him just to
look at her, just to say one word to his Effie May, who loved him--
She was strangely exalted. Her mind seemed to have slipped into a region
of consciousness where things were made suddenly clear to her, troubling
questions answered, doubts set forever aside.
"A gentleman," she kept repeating to herself. "A gentleman!"
It seemed to her in that moment a great thing to have been born a
gentleman, even if one became nothing more; to know that whatever the
fortunes of life, one would be able to meet them gallantly and unafraid,
because of a something within stronger than personal will or habit: the
sum of the wills and habits of many ancestors. She was sorry for the
_canaille_, the Effie Mays, who had no such inner power to rely upon....
As they carried him into a doctor's office, Richard Darcy's eyes opened.
They passed the face of his frantic wife unseeing, and came to rest upon
Joan in some anxiety.
"You all right, Dollykins? Must not allow--mere trifle like
this--upset--"
"Nothing shall upset me, Father," she said, smiling at him.
"Children so necessary--family traditions--"
She bent close to him. "My son is going to be proud to carry on the
family traditions, dear."
His face cleared. "Good girl!" There was a little bubbling breath. "I
promised Mary--"
But Joan never learned what promise it was that he had made, and
doubtless broken, to his Mary.