An Arkansas Planter Part 16

"There is one misfortune of mine that has always been apparent to you and that is my painful sensitiveness. It was, however, not looked upon as a misfortune, but rather as a fault which at will I might correct, but I could no more have obviated it than I could have changed my entire nature. When father charged me with ingrat.i.tude I realized the justice of the rebuke (from his point of view), while feeling on my side the injustice of the imputation, for I was not ungrateful, but simply in a desperate state of mind. I am afraid that I am not making myself clear.

But let me affirm that I do not lose sight of the debt I owe him, the debt of gallantry. I had always admired him for his bravery, and hundreds of times have I foolishly day-dreamed of performing a life-saving office for him. But the manner--and pardon me for saying it--the arrogance which he a.s.sumed over me, wounded me, and the wound is still slowly bleeding. But in time it will heal, and when it does I will go to him, but now I cannot."

"But she must come to me or let me go to her!" the Major broke in. "I confess that I didn't understand her. Why, there is heroism in her composition. Go ahead, Margaret. She's got more sense than all of us. Go ahead."

Mrs. Cranceford continued: "I can conceive of nothing more useless than my life at home would be. The truth is, I must do something, see something, feel the throb rather than the continuous pressure of life.

Thousands of women are making their way in the world. Why should not I?

And it is not that I mean wholly to desert you or to love you less, but I must go away, and before this letter reaches you I shall be on my journey----"

Mrs. Cranceford's trembling hands let the paper fall. The Major grabbed it up, fumbled with it, put it upon the desk and sat down. In silence they looked at each other, and their vision was not clear. "Read on," he said. "We can stand anything now."

She wiped her eyes and obeyed him: "Shall be on my journey. I have in mind a certain place, but what place it is I must not tell you. If I succeed I shall let you know, and if I fail--but I will base nothing upon the probability of failure. I know that you will look upon this almost as an act of insanity, and carrying out my resolve to be frank, I must say that I do not know but that it is. It is, though, the only course that promises relief and therefore I must take it. You must not charge me with a lack of love for you and never must you lose faith in me. It is singular that after all these years, after all our confidences, I should choose a pen wherewith to make myself known to you, and you may call me a most unnatural daughter, but you must charge my unnaturalness to nature, and nothing that nature does should appear unnatural when once we have come to understand it. I have money enough to last me until I can secure employment. I hope that I know what sort of employment it may be, but as there is in my hope a fear of failure, I will not tell you. My training has not been systematic enough to enable me to be a school teacher, for I know a little of many things, but am thorough in nothing. But in some other line the mannish books may help me. In reading this over I realize that I am vain and affected. But put it down as another frankness. G.o.d bless you and good-bye."

"I told you she would disgrace herself," the Major exclaimed, slapping his hand upon the desk.

"She has done nothing of the sort," his wife replied, stepping out and closing the door.

CHAPTER XIV.

The neighbors were curious to know why Louise had left home and whither she was gone. Day and night they came to ask questions, and though told that she was visiting relatives in Kentucky, they departed suspecting that something must be wrong. The gossips were more or less busy, and Jim Taylor s.n.a.t.c.hed another idler off the fence and trounced him in the sand.

Weeks pa.s.sed and no letter came from Louise. The Major worried over her until at last he forbade the mention of her name. During the day Mrs.

Cranceford was calm and brave, but many a time in the night the Major heard her crying. Every Sunday afternoon Jim Taylor's tread was heard on the porch. To the Major he talked of various things, of the cotton which was nearly all picked, of the weakening or strengthening tendency of the market, but when alone with Mrs. Cranceford his talk began and ended with Louise. But in this he observed the necessity for great care, lest the Major might hear him, and he chose occasions when the old gentleman was in his office or when with Gid he strolled down into the woods. In the broad parlor, in the log part of the house, Jim and Mrs. Cranceford would sit, hours at a time; and never did she show an impatience of his long lapses of silence nor of his monotonous professions of faith in the run-away. And upon taking his leave he would never fail to say: "I believe we'll hear from her to-morrow; I am quite sure of it."

In the midst of the worry that followed the young woman's departure, there had been but one mention of the young man's affair with the niece of Wash Sanders. Mrs. Cranceford had spoken to him, not directly, but with gentle allusion, and he had replied with an angry denunciation of such meddlesomeness. "I'm not going to marry a dying woman," he declared; "and I'm not going to take up any faded ninny that you and father may pick out. I'm going to please myself, and when you decide that I mustn't, just say the word and I'll hull out. And I don't want to hear anything about crackers or white trash, either. That's me."

His mother must have agreed that it was, for the weeks went by and not again did she drop a hint of her anxiety.

One rainy afternoon the Major and old Gid were sitting on a tool-box under the barn shed, when Father Brennon came riding down the road.

"As they say over the creek, light and look at your saddle!" the Major shouted.

With a nod and a smile the priest rode through the gate, dismounted, gave his horse over to a negro who, in answer to a shout, had come forward from some mysterious precinct of the barn-yard, shook hands with the Major and Gid, and gracefully declining a seat on the tool-box, rolled a barrel from against the wall and upon it seated himself.

"More in accordance with the life of a priest," he said, tapping the barrel with his knuckles. "It is rolling."

"Ah," replied the Major, "and a barrel may also typify the reckless layman. It is often full."

The priest gave to this remark the approval of a courteous laugh. Even though he might stand in a slippery place, how well he knew his ground.

To call forth a weak joke and then to commend it with his merriment--how delightful a piece of flattery. And it can, in truth, be said that in his heart he was sincere. To be pleasing was to him an art, and this art was his second nature.

"Mr. Brennon," said the Major (and under no compulsion would he have said father), "I have thought a great deal of the argument we had some time ago; and I have wondered, sir, that in coming to this community to proselyte the negro, you did not observe the secrecy with which the affairs of your church are usually conducted. But understand, please, that I do not mean to reflect upon the methods of your creed, but simply wonder that you have not followed a recognized precedent."

The priest had taken hold of the chine at each end of the barrel and was slowly rolling himself backward and forward. "I fail to see why any secrecy should be observed in my work," he replied. "The Catholic church has never made a secret of doing good--for we believe in the potency of example. If we elevate the moral condition of one man, it is well that another man should know it. The Methodist holds his revival and implores the sinner to come forward and kneel at the altar. And as it were, I am holding a revival--I am persuading the negro and the white man as well to kneel under the cross. Should there be any secrecy in such a work?"

"Well, no, not when you put it that way. But you know that we look upon the Catholic religion as a foreign religion. It does not somehow seem native to this soil. It is red with the pomp of monarchy, it has the ceremonious restraint of the king's court; it hasn't the free noise of a republic. I will not question its sincerity or the fact that it has in view the betterment of man, but to us it will always seem an importation."

"It was here first," the priest replied, gravely smiling. "It discovered this country."

"We must grant that," the Major rejoined, "but still I insist that the native born American regards it as a foreign inst.i.tution, foreign to his nature, to his sense of liberty, if not to his soul."

"My dear Major, Christ is foreign to no soil. The earth is His Father's foot-stool. The soul of man is the abiding place of the love of the Saviour, and no heart is out-landish. What you may call liberty is an education, but the soul as G.o.d's province is not made so by training, but came with the first twinkling of light, of reason, the dawn of time."

"That's about as straight as any man can give it," old Gid joined in.

"But what puzzles me is why G.o.d is more at home in one man's heart than in another. He fills some hearts with love and denies it to others; and the heart that has been denied is cursed, through no fault of its own--simply because it has not received--while the other heart is blessed. I reckon the safest plan is to conclude that we don't know anything about it. I don't, and that settles it so far as I'm concerned.

I can't accept man's opinion, for man doesn't know any more about it than I do; so I say to myself, 'Gideon Batts, eat, drink and be merry, for the first thing you know they will come along and lay you out where the worm is whetting his appet.i.te.' You have raked up quite a pa.s.sle of negroes, haven't you, colonel?"

The priest looked at him, but not resentfully. "My work has not been without a fair measure of success," he answered, now sitting upright and motionless. "You must have noticed that we are building quite a large church."

"So I see," said the Major. "And you still believe that you are going to preserve the negro's body as well as save his soul."

"We are going to save his soul, and a soul that is to be saved serves to protect its habitation."

"But you foresee a race war?"

"I foresee racial troubles, which in time may result in a war of extermination."

"I agree with you, Mr. Brennon," the Major replied. "As time pa.s.ses it will become more and more clear that the whites and the negroes cannot live together. Their interests may be identical, but they are of a different order and can never agree. And now let us face the truth. What sowed the seeds of this coming strife? Emanc.i.p.ation? No, enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. The other day Mr. Low gave me a copy of the London Spectator, calling my attention to a thoughtful paper on this very subject. It deeply impressed me, so much so that I read parts of it a number of times. Let me see if I can recall one observation that struck me. Yes, and it is this: 'We want a principle on which republicans can work and we believe that the one which would be the most fruitful is that the black people should be declared to be foreign immigrants, guests of the state, ent.i.tled to the benefit of every law and every privilege, education, for example, but debarred from political power and from sitting on juries, which latter, indeed, in mixed cases, ought to be superseded by properly qualified magistrates and judges.' The paper goes on to show that this would not be oppressive, and that the blacks would be in the position of a majority of Englishmen prior to 1832, a position compatible with much happiness. But the trouble is we have gone too far to retrace our steps. It was easy enough to grant suffrage to the negro, but to take it away would be a difficult matter. So what are we to do? To let the negro exercise the full and unrestrained measure of his suffrage, would, in some communities, reduce the white man to the position of political nonent.i.ty. And no law, no cry about the rights of a down-trodden race, no sentiment expressed abroad, could force the white man to submit quietly to this degradation. Upon the negro's head the poetry of New England has placed a wreath of sentiment. No poet has placed a wreath upon the brow of the California Chinaman, nor upon the head of any foreign element in any of the northern states. Then why this partiality? Is the negro so gentle that he must always be defended, and is the white man of the south so hard of heart that he must always be condemned?"

"What you say is perfectly clear to me," the priest replied, "and it is natural that you should defend your position."

"It is the only position and the only course left to a thinking and a self-respecting white man," the Major rejoined.

"Yes, I will agree to that, too."

"Ah, and that's the trouble, Mr. Brennon. You agree while you oppose."

"My dear Major, I am not here to oppose, nor to destroy, but to save fragments when the hour of destruction shall have come."

"But if your church believes that it can save fragments why doesn't it exert itself to save the whole?"

"Major, salvation comes of persuasion and persuasion is slow."

"Yes, and let me tell you that your form of religion will never become popular among the negroes. The negro is emotional, and to make a display of his religious agitation is too great a luxury to be given up. Your creed entails too much belief and too little excitement; upon the layman it doesn't confer sufficient importance. The negro must shout and hug.

The quiet mysticism of the divine spirit does not satisfy him. He wants to be exorcised; he wants what is known as the mourners'-bench jerks. If his brother loves him he doesn't want a quiet a.s.surance of that fact, conveyed by a year of conduct; he demands a noisy proof, the impulse of a moment of joy."

With a slow shake of his head old Gid confirmed this view, and the priest looked on, gravely smiling. "You have now touched upon a mistaken phase of the negro's character," said he. "And to make my point clear, I must speak plainly with regard to the appearance of our form of worship.

I must present it as it impresses the ignorant and the superst.i.tious. In doing so I make myself appear almost irreverent, but in no other way can I show you the possibilities of my work among the colored race. Mystery appeals to the negro. Behind all mystery there is power. Under the influence of the sensationalist the negro may shout, demand an impulsive proof of love, hug his brother; but in his heart G.o.d is a fearful and silent mystery. And the Catholic church shows him that the holy spirit is without noise. In the creation of the great tree there has not been a sound; all has been the noiseless will of G.o.d. It is not difficult to show him that ours was the first church; it may be shown that the Protestant Bible held him a slave; and above all we prove to him that in the Catholic church there is no discrimination against his color, that a negro may become a Cardinal. We convince him that shouting is but a mental agitation and a physical excitement. I have know many a negro, on the scaffold, to renounce the religion which for years he had practiced, and with cool discernment embrace the parent church. The germ of Catholicism is in his blood. He cannot be a free thinker. The barbarian is subdued by the solemn and majestic form of the Church of Rome, while he might regard with disdain the intricate reason of the Presbyterian faith. And in this respect the negro is akin to the barbarian. He is moved by music and impressed by ceremony."

"You are plain-spoken, indeed," the Major replied. "The boldness with which you recount your shams is most surprising. I didn't expect it."

"I told you that I would be bold."

"But you didn't say that you would acknowledge your insincerity."

"Nor have I done so. I have simply shown you why our church appeals to the superst.i.tious blood of the African. To accomplish a good we must use the directest means. If I were seeking to convert you, I should adopt a different method. I would appeal to your reason; convince you of a truth which the wisest men have known and still know--that the Catholic church is G.o.d's church. It is now time for me to go," he added, after a short pause. "Please tell your man that I want my horse."