The Man in Gray. Jr. Thomas Dixon
inspired them. His stature was small in height, measured by inches, but of such dignity, power and magnetism that he suggested Napoleon.
He smiled into Colonel Lee's face and his smile lighted the room. Every man and woman present was warmed by it.
Douglas had scarcely greeted Mrs. Lee and passed into an earnest conversation with the young Congressman when Robert Toombs of Georgia entered.
Toombs had become within two years the successor of John C. Calhoun. He had the genius of Calhoun, eloquence as passionate, as resistless; and he had all of Calhoun's weaknesses. He called a spade a spade. He loathed compromise. Three years before he had swept the floor and galleries of the House with a burst of impassioned eloquence that had made him a national figure.
Lifting his magnificent head he had cried:
"I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the Territory of California and New Mexico, purchased by the blood of Southern white people, and to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this Confederacy, I am for disunion. The Territories are the common property of the United States. You are their common agents; it is your duty while they are in the Territorial state to remove all impediments to their free enjoyment by both sections—the slave holder and the non-slave holder!"
He was the man of iron will, of passionate convictions. He might lead a revolution. He could not compromise.
His rapidly growing power was an ominous thing in the history of the
South. Lee studied his face with increasing fascination.
In this gathering no man or woman thought of wealth as the source of power or end of life. No one spoke of it. Office, rank, position, talent, beauty, charm, personality—these things alone could count. These men and women lived. They did not merely exist. They were making the history of the world and yet they refused to rush through life. Their souls demanded hours of repose, of thought, of joy and they took them.
Toombs' pocket was stuffed with a paper-backed edition of a French play. It was his habit to read them in the original with keen enjoyment in moments of leisure. The hum of social life filled the room and strife was forgotten. Douglas and Toombs were boys again and Lee was their companion.
Mary Lee managed to avoid Stuart and took her seat beside Phil Sheridan—not to tease her admirer but to give to her Western guest the warmest welcome of the old South. She knew the dinner would be a revelation to Phil and she would enjoy his appreciation.
The long table groaned under the luxuries of the season. Course succeeded course, cooked with a delicate skill unknown to the world of to-day. The oysters, fresh, fat, luscious, were followed by diamond-back terrapin stew as a soup.
Phil tasted it and whispered to his fair young hostess.
"Miss Mary, what is this I'm eating?"
"Don't you like it?"
"I never expected to taste it on earth. I've only dreamed about it on high."
"It's only terrapin stew. We serve it as a soup."
"The angels made it."
"No, Aunt Hannah."
"I won't take it back. Angels only could brew this soup."
The terrapin was followed by old Virginia ham and turnip greens. And then came the turkey with chestnut stuffing and jellies. The long table, flashing with old china and silver, held the staples of ham and turkey as ornaments as well as dainties for the palate. The real delicacies were served later, the ducks which Doyle had sent the Colonel, and plate after plate of little, brown, juicy birds called sora, so tender and toothsome they could be eaten bones and all.
When Phil wound up with cakes and custards, apples, pears and nuts from the orchard and fields, his mind was swimming in a dream of luxury. And over it all the spirit of true hospitality brooded. A sense of home and reality as intimate, as genuine as if he sat beside his mother's chair in the little cottage in Ohio.
"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one hope, to own a plantation and a home like this—"
Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.
The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet. Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of the Southern Whig.
His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.
Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.
He could depend on the genius of Douglas when the supreme crisis came. He felt the quality of his mind tonight. But could Douglas control the mob impulse of the North where such appeals as Uncle Tom's Cabin had gripped the souls of millions and reason no longer ruled life?
There was the rub.
There was no question of the genius of Douglas. The question was could any leadership count if the mob, not the man, became our real ruler? The task of Douglas was to hold the fanatic of the North while he soothed the passions of the radical of the South. Henry Clay had succeeded. But Uncle Tom's Cabin had not been written in his day.
Toombs was becoming a firebrand. His eloquence was doing in the South what Mrs. Stowe's novel was doing in the North—preparing the soil for revolution—planting gunpowder under the foundations of society.
Could these forces yet be controlled or were they already beyond control?
CHAPTER V
After dinner, Jeb Stuart succeeded in separating Mary from Phil and began again his adoration. The men adjourned to the library to discuss the Presidential Campaign and weigh the chances of General Scott against Franklin Pierce. The comment of Toombs was grim in its sarcasm and early let him out of the discussion.
"It doesn't matter in the least, gentlemen, who is elected in November," he observed. "There's nothing before the country as yet. Not even an honest-to-God man."
Lee shook his head gravely.
Toombs parried his protest.
"I know, Colonel Lee, you're fond of the old General. You fought with him in Mexico. But—" he dropped his voice to a friendly whisper—"all the same, you know that what I say is true."
He took a cigar from the mantel, lighted it and waved to the group.
"I'll take a little stroll and smoke."
Custis took Phil to the cottage of the foreman to see a night school in session.
"You mean the overseer's place?" Phil asked eagerly, as visions of Simon
Legree flashed through his mind.
"No—I mean Uncle Ike's cottage. He's the foreman of the farm. We have no white overseer."
Phil was shocked. He had supposed