Chapter XII: The Wail of the Lowly

It was "Gordon" now, always "Gordon"--though of course nobody called him that but me. For he had made yet another little addition to his visit--and he and I had improved the time. But his departure was near at hand.

And it does seem sad that what occurred had to happen just before he left. For everything had gone so beautifully. Mother, it is true, used to sigh sometimes, and once or twice expressed the hope that Charlie hadn't killed himself when he got the tidings and the ring. I had no such fears; for the brief note that came back informed me that he would say nothing till he came and saw me; which, he said, he would do as soon as some very urgent business would permit. But mother declared she knew this was only said to conceal the fact that he was prostrate in his bed.

I believe Aunt Agnes and Uncle Henry were quite composed about the whole affair--they thought so much of Gordon. And even mother was getting fond of him; she couldn't very well have helped it, he was so strong and tender and dignified and true. And I can't tell how happy it made me to see mother warming up to him; a few days before he intended to go away--and the very day of the explosion I am about to describe--I saw mother pull his hair. Just a little tug, it's true, a little playful pinch of a few of the auburn strands--but it filled my soul with joy, for I think it means more for certain kinds of women to give the hair a little pull like that than if they took the whole man into their arms. So I pretended not to see, lest my Gordon's hair should never be pulled again.

We were all pretty resigned, as I have said--especially Gordon and myself. And if Gordon had only gotten away to his Canadian field before that eventful night--or if every negro in the South had only died or been deported the day before--the whole tenor of our after lives might have been changed.

We were seated on the porch, uncle and Gordon and I. My mood, I fear, was a rather plaintive one, for I didn't know when my lover would be coming back. Uncle, however, seemed in a very jovial frame of mind; but the worst storms always come on the most placid evenings. He had just been telling Gordon that he thought I would make a pretty fair minister's wife after all.

"You know, Mr. Laird," he remarked in mock seriousness, "there's one feature of Helen's record that makes me think she's right religious after all."

"Let us have the symptoms," said Gordon, and he couldn't have looked at me more tenderly if he hadn't had a drop of Scotch blood in his whole make-up.

"Well, it's this," drawled my uncle; "I've never known Helen to miss a Sunday-school picnic since she was able to toddle--she'd go without her lessons before she'd miss one. Now don't you think that's a good sign?" and uncle indulged himself in the merriment his little joke deserved.

Gordon made some laughing response, I have forgotten what. And it was then that uncle began the fatal strain. It really seemed as if it had to be; for, ever since that other darkey outbreak, both men had been careful to steer clear of the dangerous topic.

"You'll have to look out," uncle began, "that those folks up North don't tramp on your wife's Southern corns." Gordon gave me a funny look--whether it referred to the sublime word, or the grotesque one, I couldn't tell. "For instance," uncle went on, "the first thing you know, some of them'll be expressing their opinion about slavery and airing their views on the whole question of the darkies. Now I want you to protect her from that--don't let them bring the subject up if you can help it. And, just as like as not, they'll be flaunting that Uncle Tom's Cabin nigger show under your noses. There was a company brought it down here once--but we read the riot act to them. It was 'Katy, bar the door' for them. Some of them just got off with their necks. And I want you to promise me, Helen, that you'll never look at their infernal show; they say it's all whips, and handcuffs, and bloodhounds, and all the rest of the lies that Harriet Beecher Stowe concocted. You'll promise me, won't you, Helen?"

"Don't trouble yourself about that, uncle," I answered evasively, being always a cautious maiden along certain lines; "most likely Mr. Laird doesn't know what you're talking about. Do you, Gordon?" I enquired, the change of name very sweet.

"Oh, yes," he promptly replied. "Yes, I've read the book--read it on the heathery hills, when I was quite a wee laddie."

"Did you ever read such a parcel of lies, sir?" demanded my uncle, fully expecting that there could be only one answer.

"I'm really not in a position to give an opinion," Gordon replied judiciously; "you see, I never saw slavery."

"Well, I have," uncle responded vigorously, "and the book's a bunch of lies. Of course, I suppose some brutes might mistreat their niggers. But it wasn't natural, sir--it wasn't to their interest to do so--a man wouldn't do it with his horse. And the niggers were enough sight happier then than they are now--they were perfectly contented, sir."

"That's the worst of it," said Gordon tersely.

"What say, sir? I don't know that I understand you."

"That was the saddest feature of it--that they were contented," repeated Gordon calmly; "that's what slavery did for them. But it seems to me, Mr. Lundy," he went on, warming a little to the argument, "it seems to me the book in question doesn't deny that most of the negroes were well used."

"It doesn't?" uncle began in a rather fiery tone; "it doesn't, doesn't it? It's the most one-sided book that was ever written--has niggers dying under the lash, and hunted with hounds, and all that sort of thing. What's that, if it isn't one-sided, sir?"

"As far as I remember, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' impressed me as decidedly fair, quite impartial," Gordon ventured, his voice very calm.

"It's a pack of Yankee lies, sir," interrupted my uncle warmly.

Gordon flushed a little. "That's hardly argument, Mr. Lundy," he replied slowly. "You remind me of what Burke said of Samuel Johnson--he said Johnson's style of argument reminded him of a highwayman; if his pistol missed fire, he knocked you down with the butt end of it."

"What's that got to do with niggers?" enquired my uncle blankly.

"Nothing--just with the argument," answered Gordon. "I said I thought 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' impressed me as impartial--and you retorted it was Yankee lies. That's like calling Euclid a liar because you dissent from his proposition, as your great Lincoln said."

"He wasn't ours--and he isn't great," retorted uncle vigorously.

"Half of that may be true," Gordon answered in the most amiable tone. "But about the book--I'll state my position. Mrs. Stowe portrays three men, if I remember right, who had to do with slaves. Shelby, St. Clair, Legree, were the names, I think. Well, one of them, Legree, is depicted as a brute--but the other two were like fathers to their slaves. Now, if that isn't fair--two to one--I don't know what is," concluded Gordon placidly, "especially as you've just admitted yourself that the brutal type was always to be found, even if the exception."

I was growing nervous by this time, and with abundant cause. It was with a sense of hearty relief I heard Aunt Agnes hurrying towards the porch; and before the argument could further go, she blew in upon the scene with tidings of an invitation she had just received for me and Gordon for that very evening. I wasn't slow to make the most of the digression, and soon the ship of domestic peace was clear of the threatening rocks.

Yet I could see, all through the early evening, that the debate had left its impress upon Gordon. It was really wonderful how a question of this kind took hold of him; anything human, especially if connected with sorrow or injustice, seemed to kindle him as nothing else could do. More than once he harked back to it within the next hour or two when he and I were alone. "It's beyond my understanding," he broke out, "how any man--especially a Christian gentleman like your uncle--can defend an institution that made one man a slave of another."

"But they were good to them," I defended.

"Yet they were in bondage," was his terse reply; "and besides, Helen, you know they often had to sell them--even when they didn't want to. I've talked to coloured women on the streets here, who told me their children were sold away from them long years ago--and they've never seen them since. And they cried," he added, his voice taking what was almost a shrill note, plaintive with sympathy. "And I don't care if they did keep their slaves in luxury---if they had clothed them in purple and fine linen and fanned them all day long--any institution that makes it possible for a child to be sold from his mother, it's--it's damnable," he declared passionately, "and neither God nor man could convince me to the contrary."

I was almost frightened at Gordon's vehemence--and I was powerless before his argument. A kind of chill foreboding had me in its grip, I knew not why, that his strange intensity on this so fiery theme was yet to work us ill. For, like other strangers, he had no conception of how deep, almost desperately deep, were the convictions of Southern men on the subject that seemed so thoroughly to engross him. He harboured the romantic notion that all men were created equal, as the framers of our Constitution solemnly decreed, their slaves cringing at their feet the while. He held the quixotic view, too, that it was wrong to cheat the darkies out of their votes--I always thought he was astray on this point, and I think so yet. Gordon contended, also, that they had the same kind of feelings as white folks--but I suppose that will be a debated point while time shall last. Gordon did not know, however, how necessary it was that the darkies should be kept in their proper place; nor did he know the long purgatory our Southland had gone through in the days of reconstruction, and carpetbaggers, and negro rule, and all that sort of thing. He had no idea of the fiery zeal with which white men had to guard their supremacy, enforcing the social distinction, keeping the negro where he belonged, piously preserving the curse of Ham upon him. In a word, Gordon hadn't grasped this fundamental truth--which the world may just as well accept first as last--that, no matter how the negro race may predominate in numbers, or grow in wealth, or develop in intelligence, the white man never will be ruled by the black man. And the only way to prevent his being on top is to keep him at the bottom. So I have heard ten thousand times--and so I heartily believe.

I think Gordon and I were discussing this very matter that night as we were walking home from the little gathering of which I have made mention already. Coming along the street that skirts the river, my attention was suddenly attracted by the sound of voices from near the water's edge, negro voices evidently, and marked by tokens of excitement. I at once stopped and called Gordon's attention to it.

"They're darkies," I whispered; "what can they be doing there at this hour of the night?" For it was midnight. "And that's uncle's property," which was true enough, he being the possessor of a shed and warehouse there that stood on the river's bank.

"What indeed?" Gordon echoed. "You don't suspect anything wrong, do you?"

I made some incoherent reply, muttering something about fire, I think. For that is a constant form of dread to the Southern mind.

"I'll go over and see," said Gordon. "You come part of the way--wait there, I won't let you out of my sight," as he moved on towards the shadowy figures that could be seen moving in the darkness. A low mysterious wail broke from them at frequent intervals.

"What are you doing here?" I heard Gordon's stern Scotch voice ring out a moment after he had left me. A sharp cry of fear broke from the two crouching forms as they turned their dusky faces up to his through the night. They were two negro women and their rolling eyes shone white in the darkness. They stood before him trembling.

"Come, speak; what are you doing here?" Gordon's voice came sterner than before.

"Please, sah, we's lookin' fo' our chil'uns," one liquid voice wailed forth.

I was Southern born and Southern bred--and I had been taught, as carefully as any, the non-humanity of the black. Yet I do not know that I ever felt such a gush of inward tears as rushed upon my heart that moment. The scene is before me yet; the stalwart frame in clerical attire, towering above the cowed and obeisant figures of the stooping women who seemed to crave, rather than expect, some word of human sympathy, some hand of human help. Poor, despised, ignorant, their cry yet echoed with the great note of love, the throb of primal passion pulsing through it; the age-old cry of the mother calling for her child. And I felt a wave of pity surging over me, such as I had never felt before. I rushed forward to where they stood; for the time, at least, we belonged to the self-same race--mine, too, was a woman's heart.

Their story was soon told, for it was brief. The two children, a son of each, had been out playing together in the early evening. The last they could learn of them was to the effect that a negro man, named Simkins, had been seen talking to them. Simkins was a drunken loafer. The unhappy women had themselves discovered that a little skiff, in which Simkins had a part interest, was missing from its place--and the tracks of boyish feet in the sand could be seen where the bow of the boat had been. Doubtless Simkins had beguiled them with the prospect of a cruise--and what then?

In a moment Gordon was questioning them with eager interest, interpreting their replies with difficulty; for their dialect, unfamiliar to him at the best, was now more unintelligible by reason of their grief. While he spoke with them the women instinctively drew closer, as if confident of a friend.

"Where do you suppose he rowed them to?" he asked quickly.

The women didn't know.

"Where does this man Simkins live?" he asked, after some further questioning.

"'Way down by Pickett's Landin'--by de long wauf," one of the women said. "But he done started from heah, sah."

"The long wharf," repeated Gordon, turning to me, "where is that wharf? For that's where he'd try to land, likely enough--and if anything's happened, that's where it likely occurred."

"I know the place," I answered, "but it's about a mile away."

"We'll search this place first," he said decisively, "and if we find no sign we'll look there. Have you any idea where we could get a lantern?"

I thought there might possibly be one in uncle's warehouse. A minute later Gordon was inside, having found an unlocked window. Two or three matches flared and spluttered; then a steady light, and in a moment he had reappeared with the lantern.

Up and down he strode, examining all the locality, the moaning women following at his heels.

"There isn't a sign of anything here," he announced as he jumped down from a little landing from which he had been flashing his lantern on the water. "I've got a feeling, somehow, that this man Simkins would try to land at the wharf nearest his home. Come away--we'll go there."

"But you'll have to take me home first," I interposed.

"Is it on the way?" Gordon paused long enough to ask.

"No, it's the opposite direction."

"Then it can't be done," he answered, in a tone no Southern woman is accustomed to hear; "you'll have to come with us," and with a word or two more which I have forgotten, but whose tone of mastery I remember well, he asked the women which road to take. If his manner had been less noble and self-forgetful I would have said he was lacking in the chivalric deference I was accustomed to receive at the hands of gentlemen. But this never seemed to enter Gordon's mind, surrendered as it was to the business in hand. Before I knew it he was off, and I had no option but to follow.

A strange procession we must have made as we wound our way through the silent streets. In front marched Gordon, the lantern swinging to his stride, pausing now and then to enquire about a turn in the way; behind him shuffled the crooning women, gratitude and woe mingling in their constant moan; last of all came I, keeping up as best I could.

As we moved out on the rickety wharf, to which we came at last, I heard Gordon utter an exclamation of some sort and rush forward. Then he stopped, holding the lantern low; its beams revealed the face of a negro man, lying in drunken oblivion on the wharf. With shrill intonation, rudely shaking him, the women demanded of the unconscious Simkins the whereabouts of their children. But Simkins' only response was a temporarily half-opened eye, immediately reclosed, and a groan of drunken content as he sank deeper into his bestial slumber. An empty bottle lay beside him.

Gordon turned from him with a murmur of contempt, bidding the women cease from their pitiful pleading with the unconscious man. Swinging the lantern high, its farthest beams just disclosed a little skiff floating idly near the shore. "He's upset it climbing out, as sure as death," I heard him mutter--"it has shot out from under him." Then like a flash he made his way over the side, creeping stealthily down the unsteady timbers till he was at the water's edge, the lantern still in his hand.

A cry of horror broke from his lips, echoed in unreasoning woe from the women above him. He was peering down into the water.

"They're there--in each others' arms," broke from him a moment later in a tone of ineffable sadness. "Come down and hold the lantern, Helen." He reached up his hand to me without a word; and, to the accompaniment of sounds of anguish strangely and suddenly subdued, I clambered down till I stood on the broad beam beside him. Still the strange, low chant went on above us, still the silent stars looked down. Slowly, resolutely, still gazing into the placid depths, Gordon removed his coat and vest while I held the lantern as he directed. But I kept my eyes upward to the stars. A swift plunge, a half minute's silence, and he reappeared, one of the hapless playmates in his hand. A second pilgrimage into the depths, and both were side by side upon the beam on which we stood. One by one, he bore them, climbing, and laid them together on the wharf. With loud outcry of anguish the women flung themselves upon their unresponsive dead.

They lay together, those little offshoots of an unhappy race, their own life tragedy past and done. Dripping they lay, the peace of death upon their faces, as though the relentless wave had given them kindly welcome. About eight or nine years of age, poor, ragged, despised, they had yet been seeking some scant share of pleasure--out to play--when death claimed them for his own. It was the birthday of one of them--so his mother said, while each wailed above her own--and that was why they had been permitted to play late. Each had her simple tale of love, of admiration; each told, with alternating gusts of grief, of the goodness of her own. Each spoke of the brothers and sisters at home; each wondered what life would be without the one who was gone.

I stood, helpless. But I saw, and for the first time, that God had called Gordon to be a pastor. For he knelt beside them--I think sometimes his dripping white-clad arm rested gently on the shoulder of one or the other--and he tried to comfort them. He spoke, so low and tenderly that sometimes I could scarcely hear his voice, of many things; most of which I have forgotten. But I do remember that he said God didn't love them any less than they; and I recall yet how wonderfully he spoke of Everlasting Life. Those very words, and he couldn't have said them more grandly if it had been a Cathedral service. And I think he helped them a little, for they sometimes lifted their heads and looked at him in a dumb, grateful way. But their hearts were broken. It came over me strangely that this was the first time I had ever stood so close to death, and to sorrow--and these mourners were of the dusky race.

There was little more that we could do. Of course, Gordon roused somebody and sent for the proper persons. But finally we had to leave them alone, the women and their dead. Silently, as if he were revolving some thought in which I had no share, Gordon walked home beside me. Only one thing I can remember that he said. I think he stood still and looked at me through the dark as he said it:

"Helen, the Bible says that God made of one blood all the nations of the earth, doesn't it?"

"Yes," I agreed, wondering what was coming.

"They don't believe it down here, do they?--the white folks, I mean?"

"Maybe not," I answered hesitatingly; "at least, I reckon they don't think it's meant to be taken literally."

"Perhaps not," and his eyes glowed like fire and his voice cut like steel; "perhaps not--but He's made of one blood all the mothers of the earth, by God," the words coming out aflame with passion as if his soul were rent with bitter protest. Which indeed it was.

"What's that?" I suddenly cried, pointing in the direction of our house, from which we were not far distant now. "Oh, Gordon, quick, what's that?" as the dread sound fell upon my ear again.

For a dread sound it was indeed. I do not know that I had ever heard it before--certainly not more than once, and then when but a child--but it had the awful note that can be best described as the baying of furious and avenging men. The Southern heart, I fancy, would recognize it anywhere, just as a huntsman's child would know the far-off voice of hounds. I have heard many sounds since then, sounds that might well strike terror to the stoutest heart, but none so fraught with the savage omen of death and doom as the voice of strong and noble men when they are maddened with revengeful hate and aflame with thirst for blood.

Gordon was already hurrying. "Good heavens," I heard him murmur as we turned a sudden jog in the road, "what a furious scene! They're mad, Helen, they're mad," he cried as we hurried closer; "what on earth means this?--look, they've got a halter round the wretch's neck."

"Take me home," I said faintly, pointing towards the house, now but a few yards from us.

"What does it mean, I say?" he repeated huskily, pressing on as though he did not hear.

"It means death," I faltered; "they're going to kill him---- Oh! take me home," as I clutched his arm and staggered half fainting towards the door.