AT LOVER'S LEAP
In spite of the pitiful collapse of old Stoneman under his stroke of
paralysis, his children still saw the unconquered soul shining in his
colourless eyes. They had both been on the point of confessing their love
affairs to him and joining in the inevitable struggle when he was
stricken. They knew only too well that he would not consent to a dual
alliance with the Camerons under the conditions of fierce hatreds and
violence into which the State had drifted. They were too high-minded to
consider a violation of his wishes while thus helpless, with his strange
eyes following them about in childlike eagerness. His weakness was
mightier than his iron will.
So, for eighteen months, while he slowly groped out of mental twilight,
each had waited--Elsie with a tender faith struggling with despair, and
Phil in a torture of uncertainty and fear.
In the meantime, the young Northerner had become as radical in his
sympathies with the Southern people as his father had ever been against
them. This power of assimilation has always been a mark of Southern
genius. The sight of the Black Hand on their throats now roused his
righteous indignation. The patience with which they endured was to him
amazing. The Southerner he had found to be the last man on earth to become
a revolutionist. All his traits were against it. His genius for command,
the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his deathless love of
home, his supreme constancy and sense of civic unity, all combined to make
him ultraconservative. He began now to see that it was reverence for
authority as expressed in the Constitution under which slavery was
established which made Secession inevitable.
Besides, the laziness and incapacity of the negro had been more than he
could endure. With no ties of tradition or habits of life to bind him, he
simply refused to tolerate them. In this feeling Elsie had grown early to
sympathize. She discharged Aunt Cindy for feeding her children from the
kitchen, and brought a cook and house girl from the North, while Phil
would employ only white men in any capacity.
In the desolation of negro rule the Cameron farm had become worthless. The
taxes had more than absorbed the income, and the place was only kept from
execution by the indomitable energy of Mrs. Cameron, who made the hotel
pay enough to carry the interest on a mortgage which was increasing from
season to season.
The doctor's practice was with him a divine calling. He never sent bills
to his patients. They paid something if they had it. Now they had
nothing.
Ben's law practice was large for his age and experience, but his clients
had no money.
While the Camerons were growing each day poorer, Phil was becoming rich.
His genius, skill, and enterprise had been quick to see the possibilities
of the waterpower. The old Eagle cotton mills had been burned during the
war. Phil organized the Eagle & Phoenix Company, interested Northern
capitalists, bought the falls, and erected two great mills, the dim hum of
whose spindles added a new note to the river's music. Eager, swift,
modest, his head full of ideas, his heart full of faith, he had pressed
forward to success.
As the old Commoner's mind began to clear, and his recovery was sure, Phil
determined to press his suit for Margaret's hand to an issue.
Ben had dropped a hint of an interview of the Rev. Hugh McAlpin with Dr.
Cameron, which had thrown Phil into a cold sweat.
He hurried to the hotel to ask Margaret to drive with him that afternoon.
He would stop at Lover's Leap and settle the question.
He met the preacher, just emerging from the door, calm, handsome, serious,
and Margaret by his side. The dark-haired beauty seemed strangely serene.
What could it mean? His heart was in his throat. Was he too late? Wreathed
in smiles when the preacher had gone, the girl's face was a riddle he
could not solve.
To his joy, she consented to go.
As he left in his trim little buggy for the hotel, he stooped and kissed
Elsie, whispering:
"Make an offering on the altar of love for me, Sis!"
"You're too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!" she
replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the dust.
As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs overlooking the
river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendours to-day for the
Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the pines,
their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle
life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun
gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all seemed
incarnate in the calm, lovely face and gracious figure beside him.
They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech, which was
the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below flowed the
river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which its current had
thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite formed a cave
eighty feet in depth at the water's edge. From this projecting wall,
tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped with her lover, fleeing
from the wrath of a cruel father who had separated them. The cave below
was inaccessible from above, being reached by a narrow footpath along the
river's edge when entered a mile downstream.
The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous beauty. For
miles the broad river rolled in calm, shining glory seaward, its banks
fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn and cotton spread in
waving green toward the distant hills and blue mountains of the west.
Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of
lovers from Piedmont.
They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower she
had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly. The Southern
sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened fruit, doubly
radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair. The lustrous
glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and the graceful,
careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured. Her dress of
airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave Phil the impression
of eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the tropics. He felt that if he
dared to touch her she might lift her wings and sail over the cliff into
the sky and forget to light again at his side.
"I am going to ask a very bold and impertinent question, Miss Margaret,"
Phil said with resolution. "May I?"
Margaret smiled incredulously.
"I'll risk your impertinence, and decide as to its boldness."
"Tell me, please, what that preacher said to you to-day."
Margaret looked away, unable to suppress the merriment that played about
her eyes and mouth.
"Will you never breathe it to a soul if I do?"
"Never."
"Honest Injun, here on the sacred altar of the princess?"
"On my honour."
"Then I'll tell you," she said, biting her lips to keep back a laugh. "Mr.
McAlpin is very handsome and eloquent. I have always thought him the best
preacher we have ever had in Piedmont----"
"Yes, I know," Phil interrupted with a frown. "He is very pious," she went
on evenly, "and seeks Divine guidance in prayer in everything he does. He
called this morning to see me, and I was playing for him in the little
music-room off the parlour, when he suddenly closed the door and said:
"'Miss Margaret, I am going to take, this morning, the most important step
of my life----'
"Of course I hadn't the remotest idea what he meant----
"'Will you join me in a word of prayer?' he asked, and knelt right down. I
was accustomed, of course, to kneel with him in family worship at his
pastoral calls, and so from habit I slipped to one knee by the piano
stool, wondering what on earth he was about. When he prayed with fervour
for the Lord to bless the great love with which he hoped to hallow my
life--I giggled. It broke up the meeting. He rose and asked me to marry
him. I told him the Lord hadn't revealed it to me----"
Phil seized her hand and held it firmly. The smile died from the girl's
face, her hand trembled, and the rose tint on her cheeks flamed to
scarlet.
"Margaret, my own, I love you," he cried with joy. "You could have told
that story only to the one man whom you love--is it not true?"
"Yes. I've loved you always," said the low, sweet voice.
"Always?" asked Phil through a tear.
"Before I saw you, when they told me you were as Ben's twin brother, my
heart began to sing at the sound of your name----"
"Call it," he whispered.
"Phil, my sweetheart!" she said with a laugh.
"How tender and homelike the music of your voice! The world has never seen
the match of your gracious Southern womanhood! Snowbound in the North, I
dreamed, as a child, of this world of eternal sunshine. And now every
memory and dream I've found in you."
"And you won't be disappointed in my simple ideal that finds its all
within a home?"
"No. I love the old-fashioned dream of the South. Maybe you have enchanted
me, but I love these green hills and mountains, these rivers musical with
cascade and fall, these solemn forests--but for the Black Curse, the South
would be to-day the garden of the world!"
"And you will help our people lift this curse?" softly asked the girl,
nestling closer to his side.
"Yes, dearest, thy people shall be mine! Had I a thousand wrongs to
cherish, I'd forgive them all for your sake. I'll help you build here a
new South on all that's good and noble in the old, until its dead fields
blossom again, its harbours bristle with ships, and the hum of a thousand
industries make music in every valley. I'd sing to you in burning verse if
I could, but it is not my way. I have been awkward and slow in love,
perhaps--but I'll be swift in your service. I dream to make dead stones
and wood live and breathe for you, of victories wrung from Nature that are
yours. My poems will be deeds, my flowers the hard-earned wealth that has
a soul, which I shall lay at your feet."
"Who said my lover was dumb?" she sighed, with a twinkle in her shining
eyes. "You must introduce me to your father soon. He must like me as my
father does you, or our dream can never come true."
A pain gripped Phil's heart, but he answered bravely:
"I will. He can't help loving you."
They stood on the rustic seat to carve their initials within a circle,
high on the old beechwood book of love.
"May I write it out in full--Margaret Cameron--Philip Stoneman?" he
asked.
"No--only the initials now--the full names when you've seen my father and
I've seen yours. Jeannie Campbell and Henry Lenoir were once written thus
in full, and many a lover has looked at that circle and prayed for
happiness like theirs. You can see there a new one cut over the old, the
bark has filled, and written on the fresh page is 'Marion Lenoir' with the
blank below for her lover's name."
Phil looked at the freshly cut circle and laughed:
"I wonder if Marion or her mother did that?"
"Her mother, of course."
"I wonder whose will be the lucky name some day within it?" said Phil
musingly as he finished his own.