AUGUSTUS CAESAR
Phil early found the home of the Camerons the most charming spot in town.
As he sat in the old-fashioned parlour beside Margaret, his brain seethed
with plans for building a hotel on a large scale on the other side of the
Square and restoring her home intact.
The Cameron homestead was a large brick building with an ample porch
looking out directly on the Court House Square, standing in the middle of
a lawn full of trees, flowers, shrubbery, and a wilderness of evergreen
boxwood planted fifty years before. It was located on the farm from which
it had always derived its support. The farm extended up into the village
itself, with the great barn easily seen from the street.
Phil was charmed with the doctor's genial personality. He often found the
father a decidedly easier person to get along with than his handsome
daughter. The Rev. Hugh McAlpin was a daily caller, and Margaret had a
tantalizing way of showing her deference to his opinions.
Phil hated this preacher from the moment he laid eyes on him. His
pugnacious piety he might have endured but for the fact that he was
good-looking and eloquent. When he rose in the pulpit in all his sacred
dignity, fixed his eyes on Margaret, and began in tenderly modulated voice
to tell about the love of God, Phil clinched his fist. He didn't care to
join the Presbyterian church, but he quietly made up his mind that, if it
came to the worst and she asked him, he would join anything. What made him
furious was the air of assurance with which the young divine carried
himself about Margaret, as if he had but to say the word and it would be
fixed as by a decree issued from before the foundations of the world.
He was pleased and surprised to find that his being a Yankee made no
difference in his standing or welcome. The people seemed unconscious of
the part his father played at Washington. Stoneman's Confiscation Bill had
not yet been discussed in Congress, and the promise of land to the negroes
was universally regarded as a hoax of the League to win their followers.
The old Commoner was not an orator. Hence his name was scarcely known in
the South. The Southern people could not conceive of a great leader except
one who expressed his power through the megaphone of oratory. They held
Charles Sumner chiefly responsible for Reconstruction.
The fact that Phil was a Yankee who had no axe to grind in the South
caused the people to appeal to him in a pathetic way that touched his
heart. He had not been in town two weeks before he was on good terms with
every youngster, had the entree to every home, and Ben had taken him,
protesting vehemently, to see every pretty girl there. He found that, in
spite of war and poverty, troubles present and troubles to come, the young
Southern woman was the divinity that claimed and received the chief
worship of man.
The tremendous earnestness with which these youngsters pursued the work of
courting, all of them so poor they scarcely had enough to eat, amazed and
alarmed him beyond measure. He found in several cases as many as four
making a dead set for one girl, as if heaven and earth depended on the
outcome, while the girl seemed to receive it all as a matter of
course--her just tribute.
Every instinct of his quiet reserved nature revolted at any such attempt
to rush his cause with Margaret, and yet it made the cold chills run down
his spine to see that Presbyterian preacher drive his buggy up to the
hotel, take her to ride, and stay three hours. He knew where they had
gone--to Lover's Leap and along the beautiful road which led to the North
Carolina line. He knew the way--Margaret had showed him. This road was the
Way of Romance. Every farmhouse, cabin, and shady nook along its beaten
track could tell its tale of lovers fleeing from the North to find
happiness in the haven of matrimony across the line in South Carolina.
Everything seemed to favour marriage in this climate. The state required
no license. A legal marriage could be celebrated, anywhere, at any time,
by a minister in the presence of two witnesses, with or without the
consent of parent or guardian. Marriage was the easiest thing in the
state--divorce the one thing impossible. Death alone could grant divorce.
He was now past all reason in love. He followed the movement of Margaret's
queenly figure with pathetic abandonment. Beneath her beautiful manners he
swore with a shiver that she was laughing at him. Now and then he caught a
funny expression about her eyes, as if she were consumed with a sly sense
of humour in her love affairs.
What he felt to be his manliest traits, his reserve, dignity, and moral
earnestness, she must think cold and slow beside the dash, fire, and
assurance of these Southerners. He could tell by the way she encouraged
the preacher before his eyes that she was criticizing and daring him to
let go for once. Instead of doing it, he sank back appalled at the
prospect and let the preacher carry her off again.
He sought solace in Dr. Cameron, who was utterly oblivious of his
daughter's love affairs.
Phil was constantly amazed at the variety of his knowledge, the
genuineness of his culture, his modesty, and the note of youth and cheer
with which he still pursued the study of medicine.
His company was refreshing for its own sake. The slender graceful figure,
ruddy face, with piercing, dark-brown eyes in startling contrast to his
snow-white hair and beard, had for Phil a perpetual charm. He never tired
listening to his talk, and noting the peculiar grace and dignity with
which he carried himself, unconscious of the commanding look of his
brilliant eyes.
"I hear that you have used hypnotism in your practice, Doctor," Phil said
to him one day, as he watched with fascination the changing play of his
mobile features.
"Oh, yes! used it for years. Southern doctors have always been pioneers in
the science of medicine. Dr. Crawford Long, of Georgia, you know, was the
first practitioner in America to apply anesthesia to surgery."
"But where did you run up against hypnotism? I thought this a new thing
under the sun?"
The doctor laughed.
"It's not a home industry, exactly. I became interested in it in Edinburgh
while a medical student, and pursued it with increased interest in
Paris."
"Did you study medicine abroad?" Phil asked in surprise.
"Yes; I was poor, but I managed to raise and to borrow enough to take
three years on the other side. I put all I had and all my credit in it.
I've never regretted the sacrifice. The more I saw of the great world, the
better I liked my own world. I've given these farmers and their families
the best God gave to me."
"Do you find much use for your powers of hypnosis?" Phil asked.
"Only in an experimental way. Naturally I am endowed with this
gift--especially over certain classes who are easily the subjects of
extreme fear. I owned a rascally slave named Gus whom I used to watch
stealing. Suddenly confronting him, I've thrown him into unconsciousness
with a steady gaze of the eye, until he would drop on his face, trembling
like a leaf, unable to speak until I allowed him."
"How do you account for such powers?"
"I don't account for them at all. They belong to the world of spiritual
phenomena of which we know so little and yet which touch our material
lives at a thousand points every day. How do we account for sleep and
dreams, or second sight, or the day dreams which we call visions?"
Phil was silent, and the doctor went on dreamily:
"The day my boy Richard was killed at Gettysburg, I saw him lying dead in
a field near a house. I saw some soldiers bury him in the corner of that
field, and then an old man go to the grave, dig up his body, cart it away
into the woods, and throw it into a ditch. I saw it before I heard of the
battle or knew that he was in it. He was reported killed, and his body has
never been found. It is the one unspeakable horror of the war to me. I'll
never get over it."
"How very strange!" exclaimed Phil.
"And yet the war was nothing, my boy, to the horrors I feel clutching the
throat of the South to-day. I'm glad you and your father are down here.
Your disinterested view of things may help us at Washington when we need
it most. The South seems to have no friend at court."
"Your younger men, I find, are hopeful, Doctor," said Phil.
"Yes, the young never see danger until it's time to die. I'm not a
pessimist, but I was happier in jail. Scores of my old friends have given
up in despair and died. Delicate and cultured women are living on cowpeas,
corn bread, and molasses--and of such quality they would not have fed it
to a slave. Children go to bed hungry. Droves of brutal negroes roam at
large, stealing, murdering, and threatening blacker crimes. We are under
the heel of petty military tyrants, few of whom ever smelled gunpowder in
a battle. At the approaching election, not a decent white man in this
country can take the infamous test oath. I am disfranchised because I gave
a cup of water to the lips of one of my dying boys on the battlefield. My
slaves are all voters. There will be a negro majority of more than one
hundred thousand in this state. Desperadoes are here teaching these
negroes insolence and crime in their secret societies. The future is a
nightmare."
[Illustration: HENRY WALTHALL AS BEN CAMERON.]
"You have my sympathy, sir," said Phil warmly, extending his hand. "These
Reconstruction Acts, conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity, can
bring only shame and disgrace until the last trace of them is wiped from
our laws. I hope it will not be necessary to do it in blood."
The doctor was deeply touched. He could not be mistaken in the genuineness
of any man's feeling. He never dreamed this earnest straightforward Yankee
youngster was in love with Margaret, and it would have made no difference
in the accuracy of his judgment.
"Your sentiments do you honour, sir," he said with grave courtesy. "And
you honour us and our town with your presence and friendship."
As Phil hurried home in a warm glow of sympathy for the people whose
hospitality had made him their friend and champion, he encountered a negro
trooper standing on the corner, watching the Cameron house with furtive
glance.
Instinctively he stopped, surveyed the man from head to foot and asked:
"What's the trouble?"
"None er yo' business," the negro answered, slouching across to the
opposite side of the street.
Phil watched him with disgust. He had the short, heavy-set neck of the
lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick they
curled both ways up and down with crooked blood marks across them. His
nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual dilation. The
sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites, were set wide
apart and gleamed apelike under his scant brows. His enormous cheekbones
and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears and almost hide them.
"That we should send such soldiers here to flaunt our uniform in the faces
of these people!" he exclaimed, with bitterness.
He met Ben hurrying home from a visit to Elsie. The two young soldiers
whose prejudices had melted in the white heat of battle had become fast
friends.
Phil laughed and winked:
"I'll meet you to-night around the family altar!"
When he reached home, Ben saw, slouching in front of the house, walking
back and forth and glancing furtively behind him, the negro trooper whom
his friend had passed.
He walked quickly in front of him, and blinking his eyes rapidly, said:
"Didn't I tell you, Gus, not to let me catch you hanging around this house
again?"
The negro drew himself up, pulling his blue uniform into position as his
body stretched out of its habitual slouch, and answered:
"My name ain't 'Gus.'"
Ben gave a quick little chuckle and leaned back against the palings, his
hand resting on one that was loose. He glanced at the negro carelessly and
said:
"Well, Augustus Caesar, I give your majesty thirty seconds to move off the
block."
Gus' first impulse was to run, but remembering himself he threw back his
shoulders and said:
"I reckon de streets free----"
"Yes, and so is kindling wood!"
Quick as a flash of lightning the paling suddenly left the fence and broke
three times in such bewildering rapidity on the negro's head he forgot
everything he ever knew or thought he knew save one thing--the way to run.
He didn't fly, but he made remarkable use of the facilities with which he
had been endowed.
Ben watched him disappear toward the camp.
He picked up the pieces of paling, pulled a strand of black wool from a
splinter, looked at it curiously and said:
"A sprig of his majesty's hair--I'll doubtless remember him without it!"