Part 26

Major Darlington and "Judge" Preston were running each in the hope that "something might happen:" Mr. Rutledge and Colonel LaRoque each in an effort to poll the largest vote next to Mr. Killam and thus be left to try conclusions alone with the old man in a second primary--provided the four of them in an unformulated coalition could keep the old man from winning out of hand in the first trial.

At the hotels on the Saturday morning of the Spartanburg meeting, each of the candidates was surrounded by a coming and going crowd of his admirers and supporters and persons curious to see what he looked like. Senator Killam, as by right, was the centre of the largest interest. Nearest about him were his most trusted lieutenants in the county, who did not come and go with the changing crowd but stood by to whisper confidences to the Senator, to receive his more intimate disclosures, and to present formally sundry citizens who desired to shake the great man's hand and be called by name.

A little further removed from the Senator's person were the inevitable two or three of that super-admiring yokel type which, too ignorant, unwashed and boorish to stand in the Very Presence, is yet vastly joyed to hang about, open-mouthed and open-eared, in the immediate neighbourhood of greatness, in the hope to be counted in among its _entourage_. Still further out the curious viewed "the old man" from a respectful distance and commented upon him, freely and respectfully or otherwise, as freeborn American citizens are wont to do. The while the crowd shifted and eddied, came and went. As about Senator Killam, so in less degree moved the tides about the other aspirants.

"Senator," asked one of the inner circle in a quiet moment, "what do you think of our chances with the national ticket?"

"Not so good as they'd have been with Phillips against us," answered Mr. Killam.

"Oh, of course not," said the questioner, glad to display his political wisdom, "I've told the boys all along that we could have beaten Phillips with that nigger son-in-law of his sure as shootin'."

"That's where you are mistaken," replied the Senator oracularly. "We might have beaten Phillips if we had nominated a dyed-in-the-wool corporation law-agent like they have now put up against us; but the nigger son-in-law wouldn't have cut any ice. I believe at heart they don't like that any more than we do, but if the Trusts would have permitted it they would have put Phillips and his nigger back there just to show us they could do it.... They've got a lot of fool notions about 'justice to the nigger' that make me sick.... Justice to the nigger is to make him know his place and teach him to be happy in it; but the Yankees haven't got the sense to see it. Rutledge, even, had a lot of that damn nonsense in his speech on the Hare Bill. Half of what he said was very good, if he had only voted accordingly and left out all that rot about educating the nigger.... How in the devil he got his ideas I can't see. He didn't inherit 'em, for his aristocratic old daddy thought it was a dangerous thing to educate the lower classes of white folks."

"You are not worrying yourself much about Rutledge in this race, are you, Senator?"

"No, no, he'll never hear the gun fire. Why man, he's neither one thing nor the other. Some of his ideas about the nigger will make any _white_ man mad, and yet nobody ever did make a more forcible protest against Phillips' nigger luncheon, nor paint a more horrible picture of miscegenation.... Strange thing about that, too,"--the Senator lowered his voice to reach only the inmost circle, and the yokels almost dislocated their necks in attempts to burglarize his confidence--"do you know it was whispered that Rutledge was engaged to Phillips' oldest daughter"--the Senator's voice dropped still lower--"no doubt, they say, that he is, or was, very much in love with her."

The smaller circle exchanged glances of interest, and a smile went round.

"Gosh, isn't that a situation!" said one of them.

"Yes, but don't mention it," Mr. Killam requested.

"Certainly not."

* * * * *

"What was it he told 'em?" asked one of the unwashed of his more fortunately placed fellow.

"I didn't ketch it all," replied the other, proud nevertheless to possess even a fragment of a state secret.

* * * * *

The crowd was far too large for the Spartanburg court-house, so the public discussion was had under the oaks of Burnett Park. An improvised platform of planks laid upon empty boxes lifted the candidates high into view of the assembled Spartans, who stood without thought of fatigue for six hours and listened to the merry war of words, and encouraged, interrogated, cheered and howled at the speakers in good old primary campaign fashion.

The primary campaign is inherently prolific of heat and hate: for the candidates, being agreed on political principles, are driven perforce to the discussion of personal records and foibles. This campaign had developed the most friction between Mr. LaRoque and Mr. Killam, these two having been long in public life and having accumulated the usual assorted odds and ends of memories they would desire to forget.

In the very beginning of the canvass the Senator and the Colonel had rushed through Touchstone's category from the Retort Courteous to the Quip Modest, the Reply Churlish, the Reproof Valiant, the Countercheck Quarrelsome, the Lie with Circumstance, and had pulled up on the very ragged edge of the Lie Direct. There they had hung for days, while an appreciative public feigned to wait in breathless suspense for the moment when the unequivocal words "You are a liar" should precipitate a tragedy and the coroner count one of the gentlemen out of the race. At many of the meetings, the reports had it, were the people "standing on the crust of a muttering volcano," or in tense situations where "a single spark to the powder" would have--played hell; and especially at Gaffney on the preceding day, so the newspapers said, was the feeling so bitter and the words so caustic that partisans of Killam and LaRoque, "desperate men who would shoot at the drop of a hat, had stood with bated breath, hand on pistol, imminently expectant of the fatal word that should cause rivers of blood to flow."

Non-residents who occasionally read of the South Carolina campaigns and have formed the idea that they are things of blood, battle, murder and sudden death, may be somewhat relieved and reassured to learn that in the last thirty years not a single volcano has erupted, not a powder-mine has exploded, not a teaspoonful of blood have all the candidates together shed--notwithstanding the fact that a fiery Lie Direct has more than once been pitched sputtering hot into the powder of these debates. Let timid outsiders not be too much overwrought, therefore, because of these bated breaths and hands full of pistols,--it is just a cute way the good South Carolinians have of manifesting an interest in the proceedings.

The Spartanburg debate drew itself along after the usual fashion. There was plenty of noise, gesticulation and heat, and the usual allotment of "critical moments" when "tragedy was miraculously averted" by the "marvelous self-control and cool head of the Honourable" Thomas, Richard or Henry.

Senator Killam followed Colonel LaRoque, and long before he had finished, the crust over the volcano had been worn thinner than ever, the crowd was in a tumult, and no man could have made an altogether coherent speech to it.

The Senator had not referred to Rutledge in his talk, but at the end of it, as Rutledge was to follow him, he introduced him to the people as "my young friend who believes it is possible for a negro to become the equal of a white man." It had been Mr. Killam's studied practice to ignore Rutledge and treat his candidacy as a harmless youthful caper, and he usually referred to his former colleague briefly in the very words in which he then presented him to the assembled Spartans.

Mr. Killam's shrewd but unfair characterization of him gave Rutledge a fine opening for a speech, but it gave him no little trouble also, for the Senator always appeared to make the statement casually with an air that said it didn't make the slightest difference anyway what the young Mr. Rutledge thought; and it was a difficult thing for Rutledge to straighten the matter out without magnifying the gravity of the charge.

Rutledge was quite able to take care of himself in any controversy where calm and intelligent reason was the arbiter, but it requires a peculiar order of ability to be master of such assemblies as was gathered there. While far from being a novice or a failure at stump-speaking, Rutledge was not in Senator Killam's class at that business. He had not learned that, whatever else it may be, and however much it may be such incidentally, a stump-speech is not primarily an appeal to reason. He took too much pains to be perfectly accurate, consistent and logical in all the details of his argument. He dealt too much in argument. His reasoning was excellent--as far as he was permitted to deliver it; but many of his choicest webs of logic were demolished half-spun by the irrelevant, irreverent, impertinent questions yelled at him by the crowd.

It takes a shifty man to accept all these challenges and turn them to his own account. Rutledge was well aware of that fact, but it was not for that reason alone that he ignored them as far as possible. He had started out on the campaign with the high purpose and resolve to pay his countrymen the compliment to talk to them as to men who think, and he had held as religiously to that ideal as his countrymen would permit.

Like the other three he was addressing himself principally to the record and claims of Mr. Killam, and the Killam partisans, already fomented by LaRoque's speech, were in a ferment of disorder. In a perfect shower of interruptions Rutledge had held his way unturned and apparently unnoticing when--

"You want to marry ol' Phillips' oldes' daughter, don't yuh?" split the air like the crack of a bull-whip.

Rutledge, hand uplifted in the middle of a sentence, stopped so quickly, so astonished, that he forgot to lower his arm.

"Um-huh! Thought that'd fetch yuh! When're yuh goin' to marry the nigger's sister?"

Before Rutledge could locate the disturber the crowd was in an uproar.

"Kill him!" "Kick him out!" "Hit him in the head with an axe!"--these were only a few of the cries that tore themselves through the pandemonium.

Rutledge stood, pale with passion, while the outburst spent itself. It seemed a very long time.

"My fellow countrymen," he said, when his voice could be heard--and at the sound of it the assemblage became very quiet--"I will answer my unknown and unseen questioner as though he were a man and not a dog. I have not the honour or the hope to be engaged to Miss Phillips; but, if I had, I would account myself most fortunate. So much for the question.... As for the man who asked it, we certainly have come upon strange times in South Carolina, my countrymen, if the names of women are to be bandied in political debates. It has not surprised me to see you rebuke it. By your quick indignation at such an outrage you have spontaneously vindicated the good name of your State. The dog who made this attack cannot be of South Carolina. If born so he is a degenerate hound. You have no part with him: and before you kick him out there is only left for you to inquire whose collar he wears. What master has fed him and trained him and taught him this trick, and secretly has set him on to make this attack? That is the only question, my countrymen: _Whose hound dog is this_?"

"Rutledge! Rutledge! Hurrah for Rutledge!" "Kick him out!" "Shoot the dog!" "Tie a can to his tail!" "Who's lost a dog?" "Hurrah for Rutledge!" Rutledge's supporters bestirred their lungs to make the most of the situation.

"You go to hell! Hurrah for Killam!"--the defiant voice was the voice of the offender.

Senator Killam sprang to his feet with the bound of a panther.

"Say, you!"--he leaned far over the edge of the platform and shook his fist in a towering rage at his admirer who now stood revealed--"I give you to understand that I don't want the support of any such damn scoundrel as you or any of your folks, you infernal--" but bless you, though the Senator was screaming his denunciation, the rest of it was lost to history in the war of applause in which "Killam!" and "Rutledge!" seemed to bear about equal weight. The deafening crash of sound seemed to double when Mr. Killam, ceasing his screaming pantomime, stepped quickly over to Rutledge and extended his hand, which Rutledge took and shook with warmth as the old man spoke something that of course the crowd could not hear.

* * * * *

After the speaking was finished, Rutledge went back to his hotel, and, taking from the clerk a bundle of mail that had been forwarded to him, climbed up to his room to look it over.

The third letter he opened was in a plain business envelope with typewritten address. He read:

"Unspeakably false? No, no, Evans, I am not false. I have not been false: for I love you. Such a long time I have loved you. Sometimes I have believed you loved me, and sometimes I have doubted; but I do not doubt since you told me to-night I was unspeakably false. Shame on you to swear at your sweetheart so!--and bless you for saying it, for now I know. O why did you not say it earlier so that I might not have misread you? I thought you felt yourself committed, and must go on: that your love was dead, but honour held you. You looked so distressed, dear heart, that I was misled. Forgive me. And do not think I do not know your distress. I, too--but no, I must not. I love you, I cannot do more. In your rage were you conscious that your kiss fell upon _my lips_, dearest? Blind you were when you said I was unspeakably false--"

*CHAPTER XL*

Elise Phillips had not stirred from Virginia Springs since coming there with her mother and two little sisters early in April. Her father had visited them regularly each week-end except when imperative official duties forbade, and had suggested at his almost every coming that Elise take some little outing from her mother's bedside. Elise would not go. She was as constant in ministering to her mother as was the nurse in charge.

Not even when her father died did she go to look upon him in farewell, for she was momentarily fearful lest her mother go away also for ever. It was a forced choice between the claims of the living and the dead. Her heart was torn with a distressing sense of her father's loneliness in death--going to his grave in state, thousands following his catafalque--and yet not a single member of his family beside him: her mother and Helen prostrated, Katherine and May too very young, and she herself drawn on the rack of a divided duty.

Her daily life had been secluded and monotonous, except in the moments when her cumulating sorrows were so poignant that they drove out monotony. With religious regularity and with tenderest love--as for a wayward unfortunate child--she had written to Helen at Hill-Top, and at the private hospital in which she was now detained, until the physician in charge had requested that she discontinue her letters except at such times as he should advise.

Only in the last fortnight, since her mother was beginning slowly to recover strength, had Elise given the slightest heed to her physician's orders that she herself take some appreciable outdoor exercise and care of her health. Few of the summer visitors stopping at the one hotel of the quiet resort ever had a glimpse of her, for the reason that the cottage taken by Mrs. Phillips was quite removed and secluded. The few friends who did see her remarked upon her loss of flesh and added beauty.

Elise was never beautiful after an assertive, flamboyant fashion, but was of that sublimated type of loveliness that, stealing slowly and softly in upon the senses, at last holds them rapt before the Rare Vision: Woman in Excelsis. Now, however, vigils and griefs had touched her face and form with a spirituelle quality not ordinarily possessed by them, and this ethereal effect caught the eye more quickly, and revealed at once the fine and exquisite modelling of her beauty.

She had seen and heard very little of Rutledge for half a year. During the remainder of the Washington season after Helen's marriage was announced she had bravely kept up appearances by missing none of the functions and gayeties that had claim upon her time and interest, and on one or two occasions had been face to face with him and exchanged brief but formal salutations. Since she had been at Virginia Springs an occasional brief press notice of the South Carolina senatorial campaign was all the word she had of him except a couple of lines in a letter from Lola Hazard in May.

On the Sunday morning after the Spartanburg meeting, at about the usual hour of eleven o'clock, the boy brought the Washington papers. As Elise sat down in the shadow of the porch and unfolded _The Post_ she experienced the most acute sensations of interest that had stirred her for months. Over and again she read that Mr. Rutledge had neither "the honour nor the hope to be engaged to" her.

After the first surprise, came anger. The publicity was very offensive; and, beyond that, the denial itself was to be resented. As she understood it, no gentleman has the right to deny an engagement to any _lady_--that was the woman's privilege: and for the man's denial to savour of meeting an accusation--unpardonable!

But he had said "the honour:" oh, yes, of course; she admitted the word was all right, but at best it was such a formal word: and it might have been sarcasm--she could hardly imagine it other--for had he not told her she was unspeakably false? If she only could have heard how he said it! ... "Nor the hope:" worse still, he was trying to purge himself of the very slightest mental taint of guilt. It was an utter repudiation of her--in the face of the mob, he had not even _the hope_--very well, let it be so--doubtless his political career and a South Carolina mob was what he had in mind when he had said to her, "It is better so." ... "Would account himself most fortunate:" oh, certainly, Elise sneered, make a brave show of gallantry, but be particular to have the mob understand that you have _not even the hope_ (by which it will understand _desire_)--it will be better so, for the politician.... Resentment possessed Elise.

This state of mind did abide with her--on through luncheon, and after. She thought of little else.

As evening approached she took Katherine and May for a stroll. Following the roadway some little distance toward the hotel, the three turned into a well-defined path leading up the hill that robbed the cottagers of their sunsets.

With an open prospect toward the east, the Virginia Springs folk might have all the glories of the morning as the free gift of God; but to possess the sunsets they must pay tribute of breath and strength in a climb of what the low-country visitors called "the mountain." The long ridge was really not of montane height, but was sufficiently uplifted to stay the feet of all except such as "in the love of Nature hold communion with her visible forms."

Once on top, however,--with its broad, open, wind-swept reaches rolling down to the wide river valley on the west and southwest, with a sweep of vision over the lower hills and lowlands to the north, east and south, and in the west across the river to the far-lying mountains showing under the afternoon sunlight only their smoky heads indistinct above the white haze that veiled the foothills: one had measurably the sensation of standing on top of the world.... The climb was a favourite diversion of Elise, and the red-splashed and golden sunsets and the sense of physical and spiritual uplift, a passion with her.

Before they reached the summit on this summer afternoon, the little May was sufficiently exercised, and wished to return. Permitting her and Katherine to go back alone, Elise climbed on to the top of the hill. and sitting down in her favourite seat, looked steadily into the west--into the future--into her heart.... Pride is inherently not a bad thing. Nor are its works always evil. Elise's pride in her love finally rebelled against her evil thinking of her lover. It preferred to think good of him, and it began to construct a defence of him.... First it set up that she had refused him pointblank, had denied her own love, and that after such a dismissal she certainly could demand from him nothing in the way of loyalty. Further, before dismissing him she had led him on to hope, no doubt about that; and in the light of her conduct his denunciation was just: she had mocked him--he was justified in thinking she was unspeakably false. What right, then, had she now to demand of his love that it should be loyal, that it should sacrifice his political future, that it should confess to a hope,--or even to a desire, if he had so meant it? Her heart admitted she was estopped.... Yet it could not be content and dismiss the matter from her thinking.... Had he meant to deny desire in denying hope? She asked herself the question.... Could one negative hope without admitting desire? ... Is there not desire in the dead as in the living hope? Do not hope and hopeless premise desire? ... Elise's mind was wandering in the maze of the psychology of hope, when she looked about to see coming up toward her _the man_.

* * * * *

Rutledge caught a train Washington bound in thirty minutes after reading Elise's fragment of a letter. He sent a telegram to his campaign manager, Robertson: "I am called north on business. Will miss Greenville meeting. Represent me there. It is probable I can make Laurens meeting Tuesday."

The hurry of his departure over, he sat in the Pullman and persuaded himself that he was undecided as to what he should do and was giving a judicial consideration to the advisability of marrying a woman sister-in-law to a negro: but the while he thought he was debating the matter Kale Lineberger was whisking the New York and New Orleans Limited along the curves of the Big Thicketty and across the bridges of the Broad and the Catawba--speeding him on toward the girl--as fast as an expert handling of throttle, lever and "air" could turn the driving-wheels of the mammoth "1231" and keep her feet on the rails....

As Rutledge in the cool of Sunday morning stepped from the rear sleeper, Jim McQueen climbed down from the engine, oil-can in hand.

"Well," said Jim, taking a look at his watch, "here's one Southern train under a Washington shed on time,--if I do say it, as shouldn't." ... Rutledge had not lost ten seconds in his coming to Elise.

Buying a copy of _The Mail_ from a boy, he took a cab to his lodgings. From habit he looked first at the editorials. Turning then to the first page he saw under a modest headline an accurate account of the yesterday's episode at Spartanburg, and his statement that he was not engaged to Miss Phillips. He read it over a second time. Then, as if by the recurrence of a lapsed instinct, unthinkingly he turned the leaves and was reading an item on the "society page."

"Virginia Springs, Va.--Her physician states that Mrs. Hayne Phillips is recovering very slowly from the effects of the terrible shock caused by Mr. Phillips' death, and will hardly be strong enough to be removed to her home in Cleveland before the first of October."