Part 25

The blow had fallen! And with all his preparation he was unprepared! Helen was confused and bewildered by the incoherency of his talk, by his hurried, disjointed speeches, by his half-made questions. He was making a blind effort to put off and push back the inevitable. His eyes had grown accustomed to the subdued light of the room and as his vision became clear his heart almost ceased to beat. The baby! In that half light was revealed the darkness of the little fellow's face!--many, many shades darker than the face of Hayward Graham: and the spectral fear that had been with Mr. Phillips at noonday, at morning, at evening, at all the midnights through the last months, was now a real, weakening, flesh-and-blood terror.

With a hope that was faltering indeed had he prayed for the miracle that might deliver Helen entirely from the consequences of her thoughtless folly, but with all his faith had he besought a merciful Heaven that the child which would come to her should not fall below a fair average of its parental graces. Even that were a torture, that were horrible enough: that Helen's gentle blood should be _evenly_ mixed and tainted with a baser sort. But this recession below the father's type!--this resurgence of the negro blood, with its "vile unknown ancestral impulses!"--there came to him an almost overpowering desire, such as had come of late with increasing frequency but never with such physical weakness as now: the desire to lie down at full length and to rest.

As he talked volubly and scatteringly to Helen, his shaking soul cried against fate. Why should Nature have chosen his Helen, the very flower of his heart, as a subject upon which to demonstrate her eccentric laws! Why, oh--but he must keep his tongue going to distract Helen from his distress--why, oh, why should atavism have thought to play its tricks and assert its prerogative here! Were there not enough other mongrel children in all the earth through whom heredity could establish her heartless caprices without the sacrifice of Helen and of Helen's baby! Oh, the sarcasm of pitiless Chance, that the most dear, the _very_ highest, should be sacrificed to establish the law of the Persistence of the Lowest in the blood of men! Surely, in _this_ lesson, that law had been taught at an awful cost: and, as if to show that it had been taught beyond cavil, there was poked out from under the white coverlet a tight-shut baby fist that was almost black.

* * * * *

All things human must have an end,--and Mr. Phillips' subterfuge was very human. His expedients finally failed, he had not a word more to say: and yet he was no nearer being prepared for the inevitable than before. The supreme test was come, and his spirit cowered before it. For the first time in his life he greeted flight as a deliverer, and decided to run away from danger.

"Well, little woman, I must go and rid myself of the dust of travel;" and he was half way to the door when Helen's weak voice arrested him.

"Are you not going to notice the baby, daddy?"

The pathos in that trembling question would have called him to go against all the Furies. Turning, he hesitated an instant, of which the double would have been fatal: but he saved the moment from disaster.

"Dear me, I was about forgetting the youngster."

He walked quickly around the bed and sat down beside the boy. Pulling the covering a little away, he took the tiny hand in his, and grandfather and grandson looked for the first time each into the face of the other.

It was a negro baby: the colour that was of Ethiopia, the unmistakable nose, the hair that curled so tightly, the lips that were African, the large whites of the eyes. Verily a negro baby: and yet in an indefinable way a likeness to Helen, a caricature of Helen, a horrible travesty of Helen's features in combination with--with whose? Not Hayward Graham's. But whose, then? Helen's and whose? ... Mr. Phillips could not answer his own question--he had never seen Guinea Gumbo.

In a moment the smaller hand closed over the man's finger as if in approval; but the man straightened up as if to get a freer breath, and glanced involuntarily at the pale mother. Her eyes were painfully intent upon him. Driving himself, he turned. Murmuring a nursery commonplace, he leaned over and kissed the little darkey as tenderly as he might.

There was no escape from Helen's eyes. He prayed that she had not seen that his were shut when he kissed her son--it was his only concession to himself.

With another pat or two of the small fist he stood up by the bedside, bracing his knees against the rail that he might stand steadily. The fever was not yet gone from Helen's eyes. She had smiled when he caressed the boy, but she was yet expectant. On her father's verdict hung all her hopes, and his face for once in her life she was unable to read. She was vaguely uneasy. His manner was inscrutable, and she had never seen him look just like that. Their eyes met, and the unconscious pleading in hers would have wrung any verdict from him.

"He's a fine boy, isn't he, little woman? ... So strong and healthy looking.... Shakes hands as if he meant it.... And he looks somewhat like you, missy. That will be the making of him.... But I must go now,"--and he went rather precipitately.

"And will you hurry back to us, daddy?" Helen called to him.

"Yes, child; I'll hurry back," he answered,--as he hurried away.

His secretary handed him a telegram. He took the yellow envelope and, without so much as glancing at it, went into the library and shut the door.

* * * * *

Very late in the afternoon the library door was opened, without invitation from within. Mr. Phillips was sitting in a chair with his arms upon his desk and his face upon his arm--dead.

*CHAPTER XXXVIII*

Again, and of necessity, is the reader cited to the newspapers of the time.

It is not meet that the passing of a chief magistrate of this nation should be passed over quickly or lightly in any history. The people stopped to mourn, to cast up his life in total, and pay respect to its multiplied excellences, to study his virtues as if in hope to reincarnate them, and to glory in his life as a common possession of his country. And yet this narrative may not pause to pay befitting tribute to him, nor to detail the tides of grief that swept the hearts of his countrymen with his outgoing, or the stateliness and grandeur of the ceremonies with which they committed his body to the ground. We may not here give the comprehensive view, for our canvas is not broad enough. Let it be said only that he died as he had lived: a gentleman brave and tender,--honest to his undoing, but dead without having known defeat,--faithful to his love for Helen even to the death, yet making no plaint against love.

The physicians ascribed the President's death to heart failure,--which meant little more than that he was dead. They ventured to say that the heart failure had been superinduced by overwork. This verdict doubtless would have stood if a newspaper man the first at Hill-Top had not chanced to hear of a telegram.

The telegram could not be found although the secretary searched diligently for it. The energetic reporter conceived that that statement was a subterfuge which in some way betokened a lack of confidence in his discretion, and, besides, it smacked of mystery for a telegram to evaporate into thin air in a dead man's hand. Put on his mettle thus, he made it his business to know what was in that telegram. Being an old telegraph man himself, he hied him down to the station and made himself pleasant and useful to the youngish man in charge.

President Phillips had intended to await the decision of the convention in Washington, and all telegraphic arrangements for convention bulletins had been made accordingly. At the last moment Helen's trembling little letter had changed his purpose, and he had slipped quietly off to Hill-Top, notifying only Mr. Mackenzie how to communicate with him directly.

The moment the President's death had flashed upon the wires, the capacity of the little Stag Inlet office became sadly overtaxed. The perspiring and flustered operator was very grateful for the assistance of the kindly newspaper man who modestly proffered his help in getting the deluge of messages speedily copied, enveloped, addressed and dispatched. Once having his hand on the copy-file it was an easy thing for the good Samaritan to get the full text of the last message that had gone to Hill-Top.

He could not decide whether it was so very valuable now that Mr. Phillips was dead; but he sent it to his paper along with his other stuff, riding a dozen miles in a midnight search for an open telegraph key. Much pride he had in his achievement when he added to his news report a statement to his managing editor that the text of the telegram was a "beat" for his paper and might be displayed as "exclusive." But his feelings were very much hurt next day that they should have published his find under a Chicago dateline and robbed him of his glory.

THE PRESIDENT DIES OF A BROKEN HEART

He Takes the Telegram which Tells of Defeat and Is Seen No More Alive

Chicago, July 3d--After a conference of the leaders of the Phillips cohorts this afternoon the following telegram was sent to the President at Stag Inlet: "We are moving heaven and earth; but the forces of evil are too many for us. First ballot to-morrow."

The news column was after that fashion. The leading editorial was a scream under the caption, "The Trusts Have Murdered Him!"

Mr. Mackenzie, who had sent the telegram, was mortally angry that the odium of actual defeat from which death had relieved his friend should have been fixed thus upon his memory. He was offended almost beyond endurance with his confidential clerk despite that young man's violent disclaimer of responsibility for the leak; but he was most enraged at the diabolical discretion of the managing editor of _The Yellow_ in omitting the name of the sender of the telegram: which would necessitate that he admit having sent it before he could demand to know whence the paper had knowledge of it.

The convention took a recess for ten days, and, upon reassembling after Mr. Phillips' burial, passed by a unanimous vote a set of resolutions that lifted him to the stars and gave him place among the gods. Then it set out upon a long round of balloting; and without being altogether conscious of the reasons and causes impelling, it finally nominated a "safe" man for President.

* * * * *

Helen could not attend her father's funeral. Pitifully weakened by the awful shock of his sudden passing, she cried out with all her remaining strength to be carried in to look upon his face in death. Her physician's consent after long refusal was due to his kindliness of heart, and the result vindicated his professional judgment, in that it came frightfully near to taking her life.

In utter desolation of spirit was she left when they had taken the great man out of the house upon his stately procession to Washington and the grave. Her husband was unfailing in devoted and anxious attendance, but she was listless to his tenderest efforts to console her. Elise's letters, coming now every day from the bedside of the prostrated mother, Helen read faithfully to the last word, and really tried to take comfort and courage from them, but they could not get down, it seemed, to touch and dissolve the cold mists of desolation in the deeps of her heart. Her father, the stay and fixative of her life, was gone: and there was nothing now to give her footing upon the earth. No one to interpret life, to give meaning to life, to give purpose to life, to give value to life. The days might as well move backward as forward. They appeared not to be moving at all. There was no one to give them direction. He toward whom or from whom or about whom the days had always turned as a sort of first cause or incarnation of the reason and sense of things, was gone: and she was in chaos.

With her weakness of body, her mental processes were weak, and her mind did not take vigorous hold of things: but, confidently as it had followed her father's sentimental speeches about the negro race and loyally as she would defend and abide his words and the consequences of them, she could not control her thinking, even in its weakness, and put down the thoughts which her every look upon her baby brought to disturb her. Very slowly the natural spring and rebound of youth brought her out of her physical relapse, and yet more slowly out of her mental depression. But, even as strength of body and mind returned, there came more insistently the questioning that could not be answered.

In her heart she had always glorified mother-love. In the days and weeks before the baby's coming she had revelled in the dreams of motherhood, and her heart had been overcharged with love and visions of it.

But this little fellow was not the baby of her dreams. Never in all the hundred varied pictures her heart had painted had there been a child like him. He was not of her mind, surely; and vaguely uneasy and distressed was she that he was not of her kind. Nervously she swung between the moments when pent-up mother-love swept away all questions and poured itself out upon her little son in fullness of tenderness, and the other moments of revulsion when she could not coerce her rebellious spirit.

Feverishly in the doubting moments would she repeat over and over her father's brief words of assurance. Hungrily had she awaited them before he had come to look upon the boy, greedily had she seized upon them when he had pronounced a favourable judgment, and longingly she wished now that he could come back to reinforce them and reassure her faint confidence that all was well. Not finding a sufficient volume of testimony in the few words he had spoken in that last interview, she supplemented them with all she could recall of everything she had ever heard him say about the excellence of the negro race, and added to that all the nurse had to say of the proverbial uncomeliness and possibilities of phenomenal "come out" in very young babies: and for days her pitiful daily mental task was to lie with closed eyes and interminably to construct and reconstruct of these things an argument to prop up her ever-wavering faith.

* * * * *

Hayward Graham was a man of too much intelligence not to see the uncertainty of his wife's attitude toward the boy. He was of too much white blood in his own veins not to have suffered measurably the same torments because of the baby's recession in type. What Mr. Phillips had said of it, he did not know, and dared not ask Helen. In all kindliness of purpose he encouraged her to believe _The Yellow's_ theory that her father's heart had broken under defeat. He did not know that she was agonizingly fearful of having contributed to that defeat.

* * * * *

Helen was rummaging through her father's desk in the library. With the first escape from the prison-house of her bedroom, her feet had turned instinctively toward the workshop which had been the scene of Mr. Phillips' labours at Hill-Top, and the scene also of much that had been joyous in her association with him. But even as she idly tumbled the odds and ends of papers about--in solemn and fascinated inspection, for that they seemed in a way to breathe his spirit and to invoke his presence--the undercurrent of her mind was busy as ever with its never-ending task.

She turned up a small package of notes marked "Cincinnati speech," and examined them absent-mindedly; but found nothing that caught her interest. Tossing them back in the desk, she picked up a letter addressed to her father in her own hand. She recognized a rambling and rollicking message she had sent to him more than a year before. From the appearance of the envelope she judged that he must have carried it in his pocket awhile. She had a little cry when she came to the characteristic closing sentence: "Daddy, I want to see you so bad." That had been a simple message of love. Now it was the cry of her heart's loneliness and need.

* * * * *

Dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief, she pulled out from the bottom of the drawer an unbound section of the _Congressional Record_, from which protruded a slip of paper. Opening it at this marker, she saw a blue pencil-mark which indicated the beginning of a speech before the Senate by Mr. Rutledge. Half-way down the second column her father had made the marginal comment "good." Further along was a blue cross without explanatory note. Still further, "very good." With such commendations in her father's own words she began to read what Mr. Rutledge had to say.... For a short space she noticed her father's occasional marginal notes, favourable or critical, and the more frequent non-committal blue cross. It appeared that he had contemplated preparing an answer of some sort. Very soon Helen became so interested that she saw only the text.

* * * * *

With faster beating heart and breath that came more irregularly she was drawn irresistibly along. It was an answer to her soul's cry for a word; and whether true or false, welcome or unwelcome, she could not but listen to that answer with quickening pulse as it ran hurriedly under her eyes. Long before she reached the end her anger was ablaze and her fears a-tremble, but she could not throw the speech from her unfinished. Almost in a frenzy of excitement and resentment she rushed along to the very last word: and with a gasping cry of horror and wrath grabbed at the desk-drawer with the intention to hurl the pamphlet viciously back into it. She caught the slide instead, and pulled that out with a jerk. Lying on the slide was a telegraph envelope which her violence threw on the floor. With another impatient trial she slammed the pamphlet into the drawer, and mechanically picked up the telegram.

It was addressed to "The President, Hill-Top." Turning it over to take out the message, she found it sealed. Instinctively she hesitated a moment, long enough for the question to come, "Why is it unopened?" Then she tore the end off the envelope.

The message read, "We are moving heaven and earth but the forces of evil are too many for us. First ballot to-morrow," and was signed by Mr. Mackenzie.

She read it over and over, stupidly at first, for her mind was excited by other things. Then the meaning of it began to be appreciated, and her heart sank. Confirmation of the newspaper story! The telegram _had_ been sent! And her father _had_ been defeated, and death alone had saved him from the damning ballot! Defeated, yes, really defeated!--and she had contributed, if only a mite, to that defeat which broke his heart! Guilty--_guilty_! She bowed her head in grief and agonized self-condemnation....

But no:--she started up--the telegram! He had not read it! Had he read it?--she caught up the envelope and examined it feverishly.... It could not have been opened--it had not been opened! He had not read it--he did not know! He had not known of his defeat--he had not died of his defeat--and she had not helped to send him to his death! Oh the joy of this acquittal!--and she held the envelope as one under sentence might clasp a reprieve, and almost caressed it as she made sure of its testimony in her behalf.

When she had assured herself that the envelope had not been opened, the burden upon her heart would have been lifted entirely if the telegram had not confirmed the fact of his defeat. He had not died because of defeat, and she was acquitted therefore of his death, yet she was acutely sensible of the fact that he had gone to his grave in the shadow of defeat, and that death alone had saved him from the shameful actuality.

This was gall and wormwood to her, for his name could never be flung free of that shadow. The very time and manner of his going-out had fixed failure eternally upon him. Oh why, her heart cried, could he not have died before or lived beyond it? Why had he died _then_? Mr. Mackenzie might have been mistaken, or the sentiment might have changed with the balloting, victory have come out of defeat and his fame have been without a cloud upon it. Oh, why had he not lived?--lived to outlive that one reverse--lived to overwhelm his enemies in another trial, lived to put those hateful Southern delegates again under heel? Why had he died so inopportunely? ... Why had he died at all? ... _Why had he died_? ... How could death have taken him so quickly and so unawares? He had gone briskly out of her room with the promise on his lips to hurry back. He had kissed the baby and said it looked like her.... Yes, said it looked like her--the baby--

Hurriedly she snatched the _Congressional Record_ out of the drawer into which she had angrily flung it! Breathlessly she turned the pages to see what comment he had made upon that last part of Rutledge's speech.

Mr. Phillips had put but one marginal note against all that fearful presentation. Opposite the words, "when the blood of your daughter ... is mixed with that of one of this race, however 'risen,' redolent of newly applied polish," etc., Helen saw the single written word, "unthinkable."

Unthinkable! Quickly she searched again that portion of the speech that had given supreme offence--and found nothing. Nothing beside the word "unthinkable." No denial had her father entered that "vile unknown ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart" by such unions as hers. No hint of his thought as to a "mongrel progeny." No answer to the question, "How shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment...?" A free expression, critical or approving, of the first half of the speech; but silence, an awful silence, when it comes to this part so pertinent to her situation. Silence!--_for the reason_ that her situation is UNTHINKABLE!

In an illuminating flash she sees the Truth--sees all the minute incidents of the past months, the looks, the gestures, the things unsaid, which, unnoted by her at the time, were yet registered in her subconsciousness, and which make so plain, now that she reads them aright, all her father's thoughts and sufferings and sacrifice from the moment when he had cried, "But a _negro_, Helen! How could you!" until the time he had rushed away after kissing her negro baby--rushed away to die! .... She knew! ... _Despoiled herself!--polluted her blood beyond cleansing!--brought to life a mongrel fright, and brought to death her father!_--with a scream of horror she staggered to her feet.... At the door she met the nurse, who was hurrying to her, still holding in her arms the baby whom she had not tarried to put down.

"Take it away! _Take it away_!" shrieked Helen, pushing it from her so violently as to hurl it from the nurse's arms, and staggered on through the hall, out the door, and down the path toward the lake.

*CHAPTER XXXIX*

The candidates for the Senate were come to Spartanburg in their canvass of the State before the primary election. The campaign was about half finished and had already reached the very personal stage of discussion so dear and so interesting to the South Carolina heart. LaRoque, Rutledge, Preston and Darlington were all out after Mr. Killam's scalp, and that gentleman was making it sufficiently entertaining for the four of them and for the crowds who flocked to hear.