the General's odiously remembered letter of four years earlier, "If we can't make our Negroes white, let us make them as white as we can," and sign it "Social Equality Launcelot." Parson Tombs, sweet, aged, and beloved, prayed from his pulpit – with the preface, "Thou knowest thy servant has never mixed up politics and religion" – that "the machinations of them who seek to join together what God hath put asunder may come to naught."
Halliday laughed. "Why, I'm only a private citizen trying to retrieve my private fortunes." But —
"These are times when a man can't choose whether he'll be public or private!" said Garnet, and the Courier made the bankrupt cotton factor public every day. It quoted constantly from the unpardonable letter, and charged him with "inflaming the basest cupidity of our Helots," and so on, and on. But the General, with his silver-shot curls dancing half-way down his shoulders, a six-shooter under each skirt of his black velvet coat, and a knife down the back of his neck, went on pushing his private enterprise.
"Private enterprise!" cried Garnet. "His jackals will run him for Congress." And they did – against Garnet.
The times were seething. Halliday, viewing matters impartially in the clear, calm light of petroleum torches, justified Congress in acts which Garnet termed "the spume of an insane revenge;" while Garnet, with equal calmness of judgment, under other petroleum torches, gloried in the "masterly inactivity" of Dixie's whitest and best – which Launcelot denounced as a foolish and wicked political strike. All the corruptions bred by both sides in a gigantic war – and before it in all the crudeness of the country's first century – were pouring down and spouting up upon Dixie their rain of pitch and ashes. Negroes swarmed about the polls, elbowed their masters, and challenged their votes. Ragged negresses talked loudly along the sidewalk of one another as "ladies," and of their mistresses as "women." White men of fortune and station were masking, night-riding, whipping and killing; and blue cavalry rattled again through the rocky streets of Suez.
Such was life when dashing Fannie Halliday joined the choir in Parson Tombs's church, becoming at once its leading spirit, and John March suddenly showed a deep interest in the Scriptures. He joined her Sunday-school class.
X.
FANNIE
Was sixteen – she said; had black eyes – the dilating kind – was pretty, and seductively subtle. Jeff-Jack liked her much. They met at Rosemont, where he found her spending two or three days, on perfect terms with Barbara, and treated with noticeable gravity, though with full kindness, by Mrs. Garnet, whom she called, warmly, "Cousin Rose."
Ravenel had pushed forward only two or three pawns of conversation when she moved at one step from news to politics. She played with the ugly subject girlishly, even frivolously, though not insipidly – at least to a young man's notion – riding its winds and waves like a sea-bird. Politics, she said, seemed to her a kind of human weather, no more her business and no less than any other kind. She never blamed the public, or any party for this or that; did he? And when he said he did not, her eyes danced and she declared she disliked him less.
"Why, we might as well scold the rain or the wind as the public," she insisted. "What publics do, or think, or say, or want – are merely – I don't know – sort o' chemical values. What makes you smile that way?"
"Did I smile? You're deep," he said.
"You're smiling again," she replied, and, turning, asked Garnet a guileless question on a certain fierce matter of the hour. He answered it with rash confidence, and her next question was a checkmate.
"Oh, understand," he cried, in reply; "we don't excuse these dreadful practices."
"Yes, you do. You-all don't do anything else – except Mr. Ravenel; he approves them barefaced."
Garnet tried to retort, but she laughed him down. When she was gone, "She's as rude as a roustabout," he said to his wife.
For all this she was presently the belle of Suez. She invaded its small and ill-assorted society and held it, a restless, but conquered province. John's father marked with joy his son's sudden regularity in Sunday-school. If his wife was less pleased it was because to her all punctuality was a personal affront; it was some time before she discovered the cause to be Miss Fannie Halliday. By that time half the young men in town were in love with Fannie, and three-fourths of them in abject fear of her wit; yet, in true Southern fashion, casting themselves in its way with Hindoo abandon.
Her father and she had apartments in Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel. Mr. Ravenel called often. She entered Montrose Academy "in order to remain sixteen," she told him. This institution was but a year or two old. It had been founded, at Ravenel's suggestion, "as a sort o' little sister to Rosemont." Its principal, Miss Kinsington, with her sister, belonged to one of Dixie's best and most unfortunate families.
"You don't bow down to Mrs. Grundy," something prompted Ravenel to say, as he and Fannie came slowly back from a gallop in the hills.
"Yes, I do. I only love to tease her now and then. I go to the races, play cards, waltz, talk slang, and read novels. But when I do bow down to her I bow away down. Why, at Montrose, I actually talk on serious subjects!"
"Do you touch often on religion? You never do to the gentlemen I bring to see you."
"Why, Mr. Ravenel, I don't understand you. What should I know about religion? You seem to forget that I belong to the choir."
"Well, politics, then. Don't you ever try to make a convert even in that?"
"I talk politics for fun only." She toyed with her whip. "I'd tell you something if I thought you'd never tell. It's this: Women have no conscience in their intellects. No, and the young gentlemen you bring to see me take after their mothers."
"I'll try to bring some other kind."
"Oh, no! They suit me. They're so easily pleased. I tell them they have a great insight into female character. Don't you tell them I told you!"
"Do you remember having told me the same thing?"
She dropped two wicked eyes and said, with sweet gravity, "I wish it were not so true of you. How did you like the sermon last evening?"
"The cunning flirt!" thought he that night, as his kneeling black boy drew off his boots.
Not so thought John that same hour. Servants' delinquencies had kept him from Sunday-school that morning and made him late at church. His mother had stayed at home with her headache and her husband. Her son was hesitating at the church-yard gate, alone and heavy-hearted, when suddenly he saw a thing that brought his heart into his throat and made a certain old mortification start from its long sleep with a great inward cry. Two shabby black men passed by on plough-mules, and between them, on a poor, smart horse, all store clothes, watch-chain, and shoe-blacking, rode the president of the Zion Freedom Homestead League, Mr. Cornelius Leggett, of Leggettstown. John went in. Fannie, seemingly fresh from heaven, stood behind the melodeon and sang the repentant prodigal's resolve; and he, in raging shame for the stripes once dealt him, the lie they had scared from him at the time, and the many he had told since to cover that one, shed such tears that he had to steal out, and, behind a tree in the rear of the church, being again without a handkerchief, dry his cheeks on his sleeves.
And now, in his lowly bed, his eyes swam once more as the girl's voice returned to his remembrance: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son."
He left his bed and stood beside the higher one. But the father slept. Even if he should waken him, he felt that he could only weep and tell nothing, and so he went back and lay down again. With the morning, confession was impossible. He thought rather of revenge, and was hot with the ferocious plans of a boy's helplessness.
XI.
A BLEEDING HEART
One night early in November, when nearly all Rosemont's lights were out and a wet brisk wind was flirting and tearing the yellowed leaves of the oaks, the windows of Mrs. Garnet's room were still bright. She sat by a small fire with Barbara at her knee. It had been election-day and the college was silent with chagrin.
"Is pop-a going to get elected, mom-a?"
"I don't