Part 17 (2/2)

With heads erect, they glanced at each other and pa.s.sed on. And if they spoke, it was with taunt, insult and challenge.

Jennie's keen eyes rested on two vacant chairs on the floor of the Senate--every seat was crowded save these two.

She pressed d.i.c.k's arm.

”See--the vacant seats of South Carolina!”

”They're not vacant,” the boy drawled.

”They are--look--”

”I see a white figure in each--”

”Nonsense!”

”We're going to have war, I tell you! Death sits in those chairs to-day, Jennie--”

”Sh--don't talk like that--”

The boy laughed.

”I'm not afraid, you know--just a sort of second sight--maybe it means I'll be killed--”

South Carolina had felt no forebodings on the day her Convention had recalled those Senators. Kiett the eloquent leader of the Convention sprang to his feet, his face flaming with pa.s.sion that was half delirium as he shouted:

”This day is the culmination of long years of bitterness, of suffering and of struggle. We are performing a great deed, which holds in its magic not only the stirring present, it embraces the ages yet to come. I am content with what has been done to-day. I shall be content with it to-morrow. We have lowered the body of the old Union to its last resting place. We drop the flag over its grave.”

When the vote was announced, without a single dissenting voice, the crowd rose to their feet with a shout of applause which shook the building to its foundations. It died away at last only to rise again with redoubled fury.

Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida had followed in rapid succession, Louisiana's Convention was to meet on the twenty-sixth, Texas on February first. On this the twenty-first day of January the Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their farewell addresses to the Old Union.

The girl's eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress--every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fas.h.i.+on centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice and Brussels.

The South was rich.

And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Was.h.i.+ngton because of his money. Her ruling cla.s.ses were without exception an aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.

The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.

The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for discussion had pa.s.sed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two vast sectional divisions on the issue.

Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown into a consuming pa.s.sion throughout the North and had resulted in the election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate--behind and underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental fact--the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and the fullness thereof were his.

And bigger than the fear of the confiscation of their property and the destruction of the Const.i.tution their fathers had created loomed before the Southern mind the Specter of a new democracy at the touch of whose fetid breath the soul of culture and refinement they believed must die.

In the vulgar ranks of this democracy must march sooner or later four million negroes but yesterday from the jungles of Africa.

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