"But the grandest part of Gov. Vance's long and active life was that embraced in the four years of the war. He was the bravest of the brave in the fore-front of battle for the Lost Cause. He was a knight without fear and without reproach. I had the honor to be on his staff, and can testify that wherever the fight was fiercest, wherever the Yankee hordes were thickest, there was seen the tall form and white hair of our beloved old leader. He was a Southern patriot whose whole energies and whose every thought went into the struggle for our rights. It broke his heart when we were overpowered; but he had the high courage to never acknowledge defeat, and I may be pardoned for saying here, that, if his health and powers of mind could have been preserved for us, we would not now be pandering to Northern sentiments, and harboring in our midst the emissaries of Yankee political organization."
Upon Cauthorne's ear such sentiments struck with the hateful ring of treason. But what affected him more was the fact that Judge La Rue, sitting as chairman of the meeting, nodded approval at the end of every sentence. He embraced the first opportunity of going out of the hall. It seemed so strange to hear such language publicly used, and to see it publicly recognized as fitting the occasion. But why should he immediately fall to thinking of Lucie, and, in some remote way, connecting her with these Lost Cause orations?
A few days afterwards he saw a company of men, dressed in Confederate uniform, march in splendid order to meet the remains of Gov. Vance at the railway-station. It was a military funeral of the most impressive character, that followed later; but Cauthorne could not get rid of a guilty feeling while attending it. He felt in his heart that it would have been better if he had not given countenance, even by his reluctant presence, to a thing which had the appearance of nurturing the old sentiments of rebellion.
Hatch, with his party of excursionists, attended the funeral. The cemetery was a place worth seeing, and the solemnities of such a burial could not be passed by. All those gay dresses, scattered about under the huge live-oaks which shade the stuccoed vaults of the Tallahassee dead, added a curiously picturesque feature to the scene. The fair faces and yellow hair of the Northern girls, despite the nature of the occasion, attracted much attention from the soldierly youths of the military company. The careless ease and grace of these girls, the fact that the question of dress was entirely out of their minds, and moreover the beautiful naturalness with which they connected themselves with the solemn affair, were sweetly impressive. Cauthorne found Willard disconsolately straying among the tombs on the outskirts of the crowd. The young man's face was in strict mourning gloominess, and his thoughts were evidently very far from pleasant. They nodded and passed each other by without a word.
The day was one of extreme loveliness, such as comes so frequently to that high, breeze-swept region. A cloudless blue sky, a rich sunshine tempered by a swelling wind from the Gulf, spicy fragrance, flower-perfumes, the washing sound in the leaves, the near horizon-line, the island-like look of the landscape, induced a sensation of blessed isolation commingled, in the minds of Cauthorne and Willard, with the sadness of exile. They wandered restlessly around wrapped in dreams of the far-off land and the elusive bowers of Love. Hatch could not account for their dry, irritable manner. He could not get them to talk.
The Tallahassee cemetery resembles Bonaventure at Savannah; but it is smaller, and is not so regularly set with trees. Wide-armed live-oaks and water-oaks make a pleasant gloom in the place. Many heavy-arched brick vaults, stuccoed with a grayish cement, are overrun with flowering vines; but there are few of those chilling white slabs and cenotaphs which disfigure our graveyards. Here and there a grave is surrounded with a thick stuccoed wall in the form of a rectangle filled in with blooming shrubs; many are marked with simple head and foot stones. Thrushes and mocking-birds sing in the grand treetops all day.
As Cauthorne slowly wandered about, he now and then came upon a striking picture. He noticed one young Northern girl, fifteen years old perhaps, sitting upon a low, flat tombstone, her blue dress spread wide, her hands carelessly embedded in her lap, her palmetto hat set far back, and her long, fair hair caught into a thick brush by a bright blue ribbon. She was a living, breathing statue of innocence. Only a few paces farther on, a negro girl of the same age, and also dressed in blue, was leaning against the wall of a tomb. Her face was yellowish-black, vacant, horribly ugly. She held a little white child by the hand. Her head was bound up in a white napkin. The child was sweetly dressed, and showed its aristocratic blood in its small ears, delicate, high-arched feet, and straight, slender nose. There was an old Cracker man, queerly clad in seedy jeans, whose hat-crown ran up like a sugar-loaf, and whose trousers were drawn about his crooked legs like a second skin. He was standing with his feet far apart, his body bent forward, his chin thrust out, and his hands clasped behind him. He was chewing an enormous quid of dark tobacco.
A short hymn was sung at the grave by four or five good voices, and then some one began a prayer. Cauthorne turned, and saw Victor La Rue with upraised hands and heavenward-looking face. Those stubbed fingers thrilled him more than the cadenced tenderness of the prayer.
Beyond the preacher Lucie stood leaning on her father's arm. Willard had come up behind her, and stopped with his head uncovered and his eyes downcast. A little to one side, and nearer the grave, Col. Vance stood very erect with folded arms.
When the ceremony was over, Willard joined Cauthorne, and went with him to the hotel. On their way they passed the hot, sandy market-square, with its two or three trees and its little trellised market-house. Some carts, whose oxen stood between the heavy shafts chewing their cud, while the negro owners lay sleeping in the sun, were grouped in one spot; in another, a pile of vegetables was wilting on a rude table. An enormously fat black woman sat in a door of the market-house smoking a pipe. The low-roofed lines of business buildings, which had been closed in token of respect for the dead statesman, were now being opened, and a few forlorn-looking Cracker women were waiting to get in to barter eggs for groceries or calico.
Knots of freedmen had gathered here and there at the street-corners; and Cauthorne, who had watched political matters closely, understood this to mean a meeting in the interest of the carpet-bagger. Later in the afternoon the negroes poured into Tallahassee by every road, from far and near, walking, riding on mules, driving in those primitive ox-carts, coming any way, so as to get to the "rally," as they termed it.
At night the carpet-bagger, a corpulent middle-aged man, addressed the motley crowd in the street in front of the Capitol. His harangue was a tirade against the leading white politicians of the State, in which he shrewdly argued that unless the negroes rose in their might, and asserted their authority to rule by reason of their numbers, the yoke of slavery would again be fastened on their necks. "Think of it!" he cried, "here in Leon County you outnumber the whites as four to one! Nearly seventeen thousand of you, and only about four thousand of them, and yet every official is a white man! Here in Tallahassee you are two to their one. How does it come that the mayor and nearly all the city officers are white men? You are to blame. You are cowards, and you know you are, or you would turn out on election-days, and vote them out of office and out of sight. What are you afraid of? You could trample your enemies under your feet. They wouldn't dare to chirp if you once said, ' Here, we are going to die fighting, or have our rights. The men of the North bled and died for our freedom, and we are not going to lose it now. Stand aside, for we are coming!' They'd stand aside, I tell you; and you colored men could reap the reward of freemen by taking possession of all these paying offices. You could get rich, you could be gentlemen, you could ride in your carriages. What are you going to do? It's a long time till another election. You'll have a chance to talk and collogue together. Make up your minds to be men. Meet these white bullies face to face, and, if needs be, pistol to pistol, gun to gun, knife to knife, and say to them, 'Beware! open the way to that ballot-box, or we will open a way through your infernal rebel bodies!'" A yell of savage approval greeted this part of the address, and the mottled throng swayed and jostled and gesticulated. But the scene changed very quickly. A compact body of armed white men, with the steady, regular tramp of well-drilled soldiers at a sharp double-quick, swept around the outskirts of the dusky assembly. There was a loud order. The carpet-bagger got down from his improvised rostrum; the crowd noiselessly and quickly dispersed. The law against riotous behavior in the streets had been enforced. The freedom of speech had been cut short. The intelligent co-operation of a few had been stronger than the ignorant confusion of the many. Brain had triumphed, even if it had resorted to a show of brute argument.
Willard had returned to La Rue place, and Cauthorne went out upon the now quiet and almost deserted streets. As he crossed the veranda he met Hatch, who said, with great indignation in his voice,—
"A deuced fine example of republican government, this!"
Cauthorne did not stop to argue the question. He flung back his reply as he walked on,—
"Oh! that fool carpet-bagger ought to be shot as an insurrectionist and incendiary. He is either a lunatic, or a base, unscrupulous fraud upon his party."
The moon was rising through a scattered line of fleece clouds which flecked the eastern hill-broken horizon, and a strange stillness hovered in the air. Some plaintive sounds came from afar in several directions,— the voices of negroes singing camp-meeting songs, as they sought their distant cabin homes after their unsuccessful political venture. Once the words,—
"Praise de Lor', praise de Lor',
He's de sinner's frien',
Praise de Lor', praise de Lor',
Sinners say amen!"
floating into Cauthorne's ears, affected him powerfully.
He walked about in the streets, seeing only now and then a person. Many of the old business buildings had been turned into drinking and gambling dens. These were full of young men, most of them of good families. The vice of strong drink is greater in the South than all other vices taken together.
When he returned to the hotel, the excursionists were dancing in the parlor. From a funeral to a political row; from a political row past the gambling hells to a dance! Surely here were contrasts strong enough for any purpose!
But the moon came up over beautiful, drowsy old Tallahassee, and flooded the gray roofs and dark groves with splendor. Little breezes alternated with calms; the mocking-birds stirred in their sleep, and dreamily sang in the leafy depths of the orchards. "The sweetest city in the world,— the home of the loveliest girl that ever lived!" Cauthorne murmured, and then he went to bed and dreamed of Lucie. He had not yet found time to digest the conditions being thrust upon him. To-morrow maybe, or at least very soon, he must take up all the threads of the situation, and decide for himself. Now he would sleep and dream.
