The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South Part 5

"All right, Beauty Stuart, we'll see--"

CHAPTER IV

The dinner at night was informal. Colonel Lee had invited three personal friends from Washington. He hoped in the touch of the minds of these leaders to find some relief from the uneasiness with which the reading of Mrs. Stowe's book had shadowed his imagination.

The man about whom he was curious was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the most brilliant figure in the Senate. In the best sense he represented the national ideal. A Northern man, he had always viewed the opinions and principles of the South with broad sympathy.

The new Senator from Georgia, on the other hand, had made a sensation in the house as the radical leader of the South. Lee wondered if he were as dangerous a man as the conservative members of the Whig party thought.

Toombs had voted the Whig ticket, but his speeches on the rights of the South on the Slavery issues had set him in a cla.s.s by himself.

Mr. and Mrs. Pryor had spent the night of the dance at Arlington and had consented to stay for dinner.

Douglas had captured the young Virginia congressman. And Mrs. Douglas had become an intimate friend of Mrs. Pryor.

When Douglas entered the library and pressed Lee's hand, the master of Arlington studied him with keen interest. He was easily the most impressive figure in American politics. The death of Calhoun and Clay and the sudden pa.s.sing of Webster had left but one giant on the floor of the Senate. They called him the "Little Giant." He was still a giant.

He had sensed the approaching storm of crowd madness and had sought the age-old method of compromise as the safety valve of the nation.

He had not read history in vain. He knew that all statesmanship is the record of compromise--that compromise is another name for reason. The Declaration of Independence was a compromise between the radicalism of Thomas Jefferson and the conservatism of the colonies. In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had written a paragraph arraigning slavery which had been omitted:

"He (the King of Great Britain) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him; capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he prost.i.tuted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this a.s.semblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

This indictment of Slavery and the Slave trade was stricken from the Declaration of Independence in deference to the opposition of both Northern and Southern slave owners who held that the struggling young colonies must have labor at all hazards.

Lee knew that the Const.i.tution also was a compromise of conflicting interests. But for the spirit of compromise--of reason--this instrument of human progress could never have been created. The word "Slave" or "Slavery" does not occur within it, and yet three of its most important provisions established the inst.i.tution of chattel slavery as the basis of industrial life. The statesmen who wrote the Const.i.tution did not wish these clauses embodied in it. Yet the Union could not have been established without them. Our leaders reasoned, and reasoned wisely, that Slavery must perish in the progress of human society, and, therefore, they accepted the compromise.

There has never been a statesman in the history of the world who has not used this method of constructive progress. There will never be a statesman who succeeds who can use any other method in dealing with ma.s.ses of his fellow men.

Douglas was the coming constructive statesman of the republic and all eyes were being focused on him. His life at the moment was the fevered center of the nation's thought. That his ambitions were boundless no one who knew the man doubted. That his patriotism was as genuine and as great all knew at last.

Lee studied every feature of his fine face. No eye could miss him in an a.s.semblage of people, no matter how great the numbers. His compact figure was erect, aggressive, dominant. A personage, whose sense of power came from within, not without. He was master of himself and of others. He looked the lion and he was one. The lines of his face were handsome in the big sense, strong, regular, masculine. He drew young men as a magnet. His vitality 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sions of the radical of the South. Henry Clay had succeeded. But _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had not been written in his day.