Part 14

"If his life is a hard one, hers is not easier. Every morning she walks nearly three miles to the school she teaches, gives her day there, and walks back in the late afternoon. The evening she passes in sewing, a book on the table before her. She catches a line as she draws out her thread, and fixes it in her memory with the setting of the next stitch. Besides Reginald, there are two other boys to make and mend for, not yet so mindful of the cost of clothes as he has learned to be; and she has her own education to carry on, as well as that of the little community among whom she must hold her place as one who has nothing left to learn.

"Her mother works at the same table, evenly, continuously, not to disturb or distract by haste or casual movement, and under a spell of silence, which only the child whose first subject she is is privileged to break. It is broken from time to time,--the study being suspended, though not the needlework. These intervals are filled with little, happy confidences,--hopes, and dreams, which the two cherish apart and together, and whose exchange, a hundred times renewed, never loses its power to refresh and reassure. If you were near enough to hear the emphatic word in these snatches of conversation, be sure you would hear 'Reginald.'"

"Do you know them so well?"

"Perhaps I may have spent a summer in the country town where they live. Perhaps it has been my chance some evening to walk by the little, old, black house they moved into after their father's death, from the nice, white, green-blinded one he built for them, and the astral lamp on the round table may have lighted for me the tableau I am showing you. Our heroine works and studies late, perhaps; but she must not the less be up early the next morning, to do the heavier portion of the house-work before her mother is stirring. If ever you hear a severe tone in her voice, be sure the mother has been encroaching upon the daughter's prerogative by rising first, or by putting her hand to some forbidden toil.--Well, is all this enough? Not for Anna Westlake. There is a music lesson to be given, before she sets off for her regular day's work."

"Is her name Anna?"--Westlake had once a sister Anna, whom he loved.--"Is she pretty?"

"She might have been."

"Fair hair? Blue eyes?"

"Yes; a true Westlake in features and complexion; but somewhat thin for one of your family, as you may believe."

"Pale, delicate?"

"The winds of heaven have visited her too roughly."

"Graceful?"

"I should not dare to say Yes, seeing that grace is denied to New-England women; still less do I dare to say No, remembering how I have seen her taking her small brothers to their school, on the way to her own, making believe run races with them, to get the little wilful loiterers over the ground the quicker."

"Borrow, it is a hard life for Anna Westlake,--for my cousin's child."

"You would be a severe taskmaster, if you demanded of a slave such a day's work as hers. Of a slave! He would be insane who should expect it of any woman who had not the developed brain, the steady nerves, the abounding vitality of the born aristocrat.

"But how is Reginald ever going to pay his debt to this sister? Do you think she will be satisfied with anything short of seeing him President? Who knows but she looks for more yet? The Puritan stamp is as strong on her as on her grandfather. Who knows but she looks to see him one of the lights of the world,--one of the benefactors of his race,--a discoverer in science,--a reformer? Here are responsibilities for a boy to set out under!"

"For the boys, let them rough it; I have nothing to say. But, Borrow, when you go back, tell Anna Westlake there is a home for her here, whenever she is ready to come and take it."

"I will tell her, if you will, that her cousins here wish to have news of her, and are ready to love her and hers. But propose to her a life of dependence! You must get a bolder man to do that errand."

"It should not be a life of dependence. She may surely do for her own kindred what she does for a pack of village children. She should be an elder sister to my girls. Why, Borrow, I should like to have her here. I don't put it in the form of a favor to her. Her being here would be a great pleasure and a great good to my little Fanny."

"And her own brothers?"

"She should be able to do for them all she does now."

"All she does now! Do you know what that is?"

"She should be able to do more than she does now. Reginald should live as he ought."

"He shall have three good meals a day, and cooked for him: is that it? And the two little boys?"

"They should be as much better off as he. I do not forget that I have the whole inheritance, which might have been divided."

"Yes, the means for their material bread might be supplied by another; but it is from her own soul that she feeds theirs. And then, homage, Westlake,--homage, that sweetest draught! Do you suppose it is least sweet when most deserved?"

"I have nothing, then, to offer which could tempt her?" asked Westlake, a little crestfallen.

"You have nothing to offer, the world has nothing to offer, which could tempt her to resign her little empire;--little now, but which she sees widening out in futurity through her three brothers' work and their children's."

"I knew," said Westlake, after he had sat for a few moments in dissatisfied silence, "I knew I had once an uncle who went off to parts unknown; but it never occurred to me that he might have descendants to whom I might owe duties. Have they not claims upon me?"

"No more than you on them. Their ancestor made his choice, as yours made his. They have the portion of goods that falleth to them. They are quite as content with their share as you are with yours. Moreover, each party is free to complete his inheritance without prejudice to the other. They can recover the worldly wealth they gave up, if they choose to turn their endeavors in that direction; and nothing forbids to your children the energy and self-denial which are their birthright as much as that of their cousins.

"New England never gives up her own. A son of hers may think he has separated himself forever from her and from her principles, but she reclaims him in his children or in his children's children.

"You have forgotten your tie to the old home. The conditions of your life forbid you to remember it. But your heart formerly rebelled against these conditions. It has never ceased to protest. Reginald's protests already, and will some day protest to purpose."

"You think so!" cried Westlake; then, checking himself, "I am glad, at least, that you think so; it proves that you like him. I was afraid"----

"You are right. I do not like him as he is, but only as he is to be. I saw what you feared I did, and marked it. I saw him knock down the boy whom he had condescended to make his playmate in default of better, for taking too much in earnest the accorded equality. But I saw, too, that his own breast was sorer with the blow than the one it hit. That is not always a cruel discipline which teaches a man early what he is capable of, whether in good or evil. When your Reginald comes to the responsible age, his conscience will hand in the account of his minority. Looking, then, on this item and on others like it, he will ask himself, 'Am I a dog that I have done these things?' and he will become a man, and a good one.

"We see farcical pretensions enough down here, where men are daily new-created from the mud. There is Milsom. He does not own even the name he wears. His father borrowed it for a time, and, having worn it out, left it with this son, decamping under shelter of a new one. The son, abandoned to his wits at twelve years old, relieved his father from the charge of inhumanity by proving them sufficient. His first exploit was the betraying of a fugitive who had shared a crust with him. This success revealed to him his proper road to fortune. He passed through the regular degrees of slave-catcher and slave-trader, to the proud altitude of slave-holder; then, moving out of the reach of old associations, proclaims himself a gentleman by descent as well as by desert. His sons take it on his word; in all simplicity believe themselves an integral part of time-honored aristocracy, and think it beneath them to do anything but mischief.

"Your claims I neither blame nor make light of. I know what their foundation is better than you do yourself. Only dismiss illusions, and accept realities, which do not yield to them even in charm to the imagination. When you know the ground under your feet, you will stand more quietly as well as more firmly. You will understand then that the silence of the New-Englander in regard to his extraction is not indifference, but security. Nowhere is the memory of ancestry so sacredly cherished as in New England, nowhere so humbly. What are we in presence of those majestic memories? We may lead our happy humdrum lives; may fulfil creditably our easy duties; we may plant and build and legislate for those who come after us; but it will still be to these great primitive figures that our descendants will look back; it will still be the debt owed there that will pledge the living generation to posterity.

"John Westlake, your first paternal ancestor in New England had nothing in common with the Puritan leaders. You are well informed there. He came over to seek his fortune. They came to prepare the destinies of a nation. He had nothing to do with them, except in being one of those they worked for. He came when the country was ready for him. His motive was a reasonable one. I shall not impugn it; but it tells of the roturier. The founding of states is an aristocratic tendency. He was a respectable ancestor. I have more than one such of my own. I owe to them the sedate mind which permits me to give myself to my own affairs, without feeling any responsibility about those of the world. But these are not the men who ennoble their descendants in perpetuity. If your breast knows the secret suggestions of lineage, these promptings are not from John Westlake. You must go back to our heroic age to find yours."

"I should be very glad to find myself in an heroic age," said Westlake, with a slight laugh, followed by a heavy sigh. "I feel as if I might have something to do there. But this thought never yet took me back to the Puritans: the battle-field is the hero's place, as I imagine the hero. They, I have understood, were especially men of peace. Is it not one of their first titles to honor?"

"The office of the hero is to create, to organize, to endow;--works of peace which incidentally require him to suppress its disturbers. The heroes have always been men of peace--its winners and maintainers for those who can only enjoy it--from Hercules down, that first great overthrower of oppressions and founder of colonies.

"To the age I call on you to date from--that of the imagining and founding a new England, a renovated world--belongs the brightest and dearest of English heroic names: the name whose associations of valor and tenderness, of high-heartedness and humility are as fresh now as when the love of the noble first canonized it. It is not without good reason that the name of Philip Sidney is a household word throughout New England, held in traditional affection and reverence. He was one of the first to project a new state beyond the seas, in which the simplicity and loyalty of primitive manners were to be restored, and the true Christian Church revived. He turned from these hopes only because he felt that he owed himself to Europe as long as an effort for the vindication of human rights upon its soil was possible. It was not love of war that led him to his fate in the Netherlands. He was not to be misled by false glory. In his Defence of Poesy he makes it a reproach to History, that 'the name of rebel Cæsar, after a thousand six hundred years, still stands in highest honor.' The peace-loving Burleigh, when the expedition in which Sidney fell was setting forth, wrote,--deprecating the reproach of lukewarmness,--that he 'should hold himself a man accursed, if he did not work for it with all the powers of his heart, seeing that its ends were the glory of God and the preservation of England in perpetual tranquillity.'

"'Nec gladio nec arcu' was the motto of Thomas Dudley, Harry's first ancestor in this country. He was a man of peace. But he offered his life to the same cause for which Philip Sidney laid down his,--drawing the sword for it in France, as Sidney had done ten years before in Flanders. He was reserved to aid in carrying out the other more effectual work which Sidney had designed, but from which his early death withdrew him.

"I am not telling you of Harry's ancestor for Harry's sake. You have your own part in all this, Westlake. When Reginald and Harry met and loved each other, blood spoke to blood.

"How many descendants do you suppose there are now from Governor Thomas Dudley's forty grandchildren? Hardly a family of long standing in New England but counts him among its ancestors; hardly a State of our Union into which some of that choice blood has not been carried, with other as precious.

"New England is not limited to that little northeastern corner. Our older country, 'that sceptred isle, that earth of majesty,' did not send forth the happiest of its 'happy breed of men' to found a world no wider than its own: wherever the descendants of those great pioneers set up their home, they plant a new New England.

"Do you know how their regenerate Transatlantic country presented itself to its early projectors? The most sanguine of us do not paint its future more brightly now than it was imaged in 1583.

"A Hungarian poet, on a visit to England, enjoyed the intimacy of Hakluyt, and, through him introduced to the society of such men as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Philip Sidney, was initiated into the hopes and projects of the nobler England of the day. He has celebrated these in a poem addressed to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The return of the Golden Age promised in ancient prophecy is, he believes, impossible in Europe, sunk below the iron one. He sees it, in vision, revive upon the soil of the New World, under the auspices of men who, true colonizers, renounce home and country, and dare the vast, vague dangers of sea and wilderness, not for gain or for glory, but 'for the peace and welfare of mankind.'

"'Oh, were it mine to join the chosen band, Predestined planters of the promised land, My happy part for after-time to trace The earliest annals of a new-born race! There Earth, with Man at amity once more, To willing toil shall yield her willing store. There Law with Equity shall know no strife; Justice and Mercy no divided life. Not there to birth shall merit bend; not there Riches o'ermaster freedom. Tyrant care Shall lay no burden on man's opening years, Nor bow his whitening head with timeless fears; But--every season in its order blest-- Youth shall enjoy its hope, and age its rest!'

"Our poet was in earnest. He did not write the annals of the country that his hero did not found; but he shared his grave under the waves of the Atlantic. Their hope outlived them. Visions like theirs are not for you and me, Westlake. They are for young men,--for the men who never grow old. We may admit that such have their place in the world. Man must strive for something greatly beyond what he can attain, to effect anything. He cannot strive for what he has not faith in. Those men who live in aspirations that transcend this sphere believe that all human hearts can be tuned to the same pitch with theirs. We know better, but let us not for that contemn their efforts. I am no visionary. I have no inward evidence of things not seen; but I am capable of believing what is proved. I believe in work,--that none is lost, but that, whether for good or ill, every exertion of power and patience tells. I believe in race, and I believe in progress for a race with which belief in progress is a tradition, and which inherits, besides, the strength, the courage, and the persistence which make faith prophetic.

"Your institutions, Westlake, are to yield the ground to other forms. They are contrary to the inborn principles of the race that leads on this continent. We at the North, who tolerate them, tolerate them because we know they are ephemeral. It is a consciousness of their transitoriness that enables you yourselves to put up with them."

"Not so fast! If they are not rooted, they are taking root. They have a stronger hold with every year. If any of us felt in the way you suppose, we should have to keep our thoughts to ourselves."

"So you all keep your thoughts to yourselves for fear of each other. What a lightening of hearts, when you once come to an understanding! I wish it soon for your own sakes; but a few years in the life of a people are of small account. I am willing to wait for the fulness of time. The end is sure."

"It all looks very simple to you, I dare say."

"I do not undervalue your difficulties. The greatest is this miserable population that has crept over your borders from the older Slave States: progeny of outcasts and of reckless adventurers, they never had a country and have never found one. Without aims or hopes, they ask of their worthless life only its own continuance. Ignorant that they can never know anything worse than to remain what they are, dreading change more than those who may have something to lose by it, they uphold the system that dooms them to immobility, shameful Atlantes of the dismal structure."

"You will not wonder that we are ready to renounce the theories of equality put forth by the men you would have us look to as founders. We make laws to keep our black servants from getting instruction. Do you think we could legislate the class you speak of into receiving it?"

"Westlake, they are here. They are among you, and will be of you, or you of them."

"We must take our precautions. We intend to do so. The dividing line must be more strongly marked. They must have their level prescribed to them, and be held to it."

"The more you confirm their degradation, the more you prepare your own. The vile and abject, for being helpless, are not harmless. Unapt for honest service, but ready tools of evil, they corrupt the class whose parasites they are, tempting the strong and generous to tyranny and scorn."

"You know them!"

"They are known of old. The world has never wanted such.

'The wretches will not be dragged out to sunlight. They man their very dungeons for their masters, Lest godlike Liberty, the common foe, Should enter in, and they be judged hereafter Accomplices of freedom!'

"But ten righteous men are enough to redeem a state. No State of ours but has men enough, greatly more than enough, to save and to exalt it, whose descent pledges them to integrity and entitles them to authority. Only let them know themselves, and stand by themselves and by each other.

'Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.'

And it will. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, but their virtues are a perpetual inheritance.

"I should not talk as I have been talking out of the family."--The Doctor fell into his familiar tone.--"I take in Colvil, because I know, if we had time to trace it up, we should not go back far without coming upon common ancestors. Our pedigrees all run one into another. When I see a New-England man, I almost take for granted a cousin. I found one out not many days' journey from here, by opening the old family Bible, which made an important part of the furniture of his log-house, and running over the names of his grandmothers. I am so well informed in regard to your great-grandfather, because his story is a part of my own family history. It is through your mother that you are related to Harry. Perhaps, if she had lived long enough for you to remember her, you would not have forgotten New England."

"My mother was an orphan young, and had neither brother nor sister. I have never seen any member of her family. They tell me that Reginald looks like her."

"Where is Reginald? Why did he not come with you?"

"I asked him to come. He said that Dudley and he had agreed on a time of meeting. He is not very communicative with me; but they seem to understand each other."

* * * * *

The parting of the classmates was very kindly. Westlake led his horse as far as the end of our road,--the Doctor, Harry, and I accompanying. When he had mounted, he still delayed. I thought that he looked worn and weary. With his old friend, he had been his old, easy self; but now that his face was turned towards home, it seemed that he felt its vexations and cares confronting him again. The Doctor probably does not know as much of Westlake's position as is known in the neighborhood; he saw in this sadness only that of the separation from himself, and was more gratified than pained by it.

"We shall not see each other again, Borrow," said Westlake, stretching down his hand for a last clasp of his friend's.

"Yes, we shall. Why not, if we both wish it? Say good-bye for me to the little Fanny," the Doctor added, gayly.

Westlake brightened with the one pleasant thought connected with his home, and, under its influence, set forward.

The Doctor stood looking after him with a friendly, contented air. He was pleased with himself for having spoken his mind out, and with Westlake for having heard it. But when he turned and met Harry's happy, affectionate look, his face clouded. He passed us and walked on fast. When we came into the house, he was seated in the arm-chair, looking straight before him. Harry went and stood beside him, waiting for him to give sign that all was right between them again by opening a new conversation.

The Doctor did not hold out long. "I have told, or as good as told, my old friend," he began, with rather a sour smile, "that he is suffering himself to be infected by the meannesses of those below him; and now I am almost ready to tell myself that my grave years are giving into the fanaticisms of boyhood. But I stand where I did, Harry. I stand precisely where I did. I have always told you that I hate slavery as much as you do. The only difference between us is, that I am not for justice though the heavens fall."

"Justice, and the heavens will _not_ fall," Harry answered, firmly, but with a tender deference in look and tone.

"And you make too much account of a name," the Doctor went on. "What does it signify that men are called slaves and slaveholders, if, in their mutual relations, they observe the laws of justice and kindness? You will not deny that this is possible? I object to slavery, as it exists, because it too often places almost absolute power in unqualified hands. But you are too sweeping. Good men are good masters. I should count Harvey among such. Colvil has given you a portrait you will accept in Shaler, who was as good a man when he was a slaveholder as he is now. Cicero, a slaveholder,--and Roman slaveholders have not the best repute,--writing upon justice, does not put the slave beyond its pale; he recognizes his humanity and its rights. Will you suppose that we have not American slaveholders as Christian as Cicero?"

"Cicero has said that to see a wrong done without protesting is to commit one."

"We will not dispute to-night, Harry. I am not altogether insensible to the interests of the world, but I have some regard for yours. Perhaps I should take less thought for them, if there were hope that you would take any. At any rate, we will not dispute to-night."