Chapter III: Part 3

Miss Lydia herself settled the matter out of hand. “I have a piece of Christmas news for you, Junior,” she said, with a very tender smile. “Your father’s coming home on leave of absence--soon. And until he comes I think you’d better stay right here and get acquainted with your grandparents. Then you can _both_ stay with me.”

“All right!” said Junior, rather sleepily.

“He’s going to stay, Aaron. We can have him!” said his grandmother, and she bestowed upon Miss Lydia a look full of gratitude.

“And play with the Fairy. I love the Fairy,” said Junior, more drowsily. His eyelids couldn’t stay open; he went to sleep.

With immense pride and tenderness his grandfather bent over him. Delicately he moved the fair head on the pillow and touched the ruffled hair. Then he laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and kissed her as he hadn’t kissed her since the Princess went away.

“Bone of our bone, Jenny, flesh of our flesh,” he said. “My grandson--my little grandson!” He bent over and kissed Junior, and his wife and Miss Lydia knew he was kissing Junior’s mother then too.

Even McAndrews, who had come to see his lad, hadn’t a word to say.

“Give me his father’s address, Miss Lydia,” the grandfather said presently. “I’m going to cable my son to come home to us. And now you women clear out. Jenny, you’re to fix--_her_ room for my grandson. Miss Lydia, won’t you please help us to get his Christmas tree ready? Sit down in the library and write out a list of the things you think he might like--you help her, McAndrews, please. We’re to have the big-best Christmas ever, Miss Lydia. Why, I want the whole town to come here Christmas night and welcome my boy home.” He sat down and waved his stick at them to leave him.

As they went out McAndrews grudgingly held forth his hand. “_I_ loved him before _you_ ever clapped an eye upon him,” he said, surlily.

But Aaron Holcomb only shook his head. “That’s why I have to sit here and get acquainted with him,” he said. “You see, he was born nine years old to me. Besides, he might wake up and want something, and I’ve got to pray, McAndrews, that that something’ll be me.”

LINDEN GOES HOME

LINDEN GOES HOME

Over the entire region, through which distracted beings wandered like lost souls, there hung by day a column of smoke and by night a pillar of fire. A calamity that one named Sherman--a vast, awful blue thundercloud edged with crooked, bright gleams of bayonets--spread from Atlanta to the sea.

Everybody was running; one’s destination did not seem to make much difference, so long as it happened to be somewhere else. Then when one reached somewhere else, folks were flying from there, too; so that women and young children and old men and scared negro servants milled around in a horrid circle of fear.

When her fleeing friends besought the little lady in black--not alone for her own sake--to leave lone “Linden,” just off the Hardeeville Road, she shook her head with the obstinacy of the meek. Wherefore they went their ways and left her.

“I feel,” she remarked presently to old Cindy, “I feel as if I were the only person left in the big, empty, lost world the day after the Day of Judgment. Everything’s happened that could happen; everything’s finished and done with.”

What she really meant was that _he_ had fallen. Understanding this, Cindy reached over and soothingly patted her hand.

Only the master and mistress had never been afraid of Cindy; they had always been kind to the gruesomely ugly old African. Cindy remembered; and now that the other negroes had gone like chaff before the wind, and the little desolate lady needed immediate help, Cindy marched unasked up to the Big House and took capable charge.

So long as Cindy stayed in the Big House, no negro would willingly cross its threshold. _Cindy was obi._ Dowered with evil power, in the dark she dug baleful roots, and with these and the fearsome “swamp-puppy,” cast spells and talked with h’ants. Her very appearance inspired terror. She was nearly six feet tall, though age had somewhat stooped her broad shoulders, and under her black turban her head was quite bald. Her little red eyes were so deep-set that one felt rather than saw their snake-bright glitter. From her blue gums (_blue-gummed negroes are poison; if one should bite you, you would die_) projected canine teeth of incredible length. When Cindy drew back her withered lips, and her face, with its wrinkled forehead, and enormous nostrils, twitched in silent laughter, one wished to run away. Only the gentle eyes of the little mistress had ever looked with affection and trust upon that grotesque mask.

When the disturbing rumor spread that they were coming toward Linden, Cindy instantly decided to remove her mistress, willy-nilly, to some place less lonely. There was in Columbia a favorite kinswoman, Mrs. DeSaussure. They would go to her. Linden was left to its fate.

At Hardeeville an old man who had loved the master of Linden managed to find a place in the overcrowded train for his widow, and big Cindy crouched at her feet. At every station were dolorous crowds; and long lines of vehicles, all piled with household effects, came and went, moving endlessly, aimlessly, in a horrible confusion, as in a nightmare. Always, in a cleared space upon the platforms, were narrow, long pine boxes--waiting. Sometimes the old negroes who had come to receive these boxes broke into lamentable cries and wailings. But the white men and women took them away silently, being as silently watched by the rows of sad faces in the train windows. The little lady in black, looking upon them, gripped her hands together in her lap; she also had received such a six-foot box from the front.

They reached Columbia at night; and here, too, was the nightmare of people and things moving aimlessly, always, always moving, moving.

It was bitterly cold; there were no conveyances to be had, and the little lady’s knees were trembling. She was shudderingly ill. An old priest, noting her pitiful plight, came mercifully to Cindy’s aid. Upon the threshold of the DeSaussure house, the moaning creature collapsed.

“I’m afraid,” said the priest to Mrs. DeSaussure, “that I can’t find you a doctor. They’re pretty nearly all gone. But I’ll try. God help us! God help us!” He wrung his hands, and disappeared, running.

No doctor came. But at dawn, in the bare, stripped drawing-room whose hangings and carpets had long since been made into saddlebags, the little boy who was the last of his race opened his huckleberry-blue eyes.

“Poor--little--baby!” murmured his young mother faintly. “Poor--poor--little--fatherless--baby! Never, never--to know--_him_!” Two slow, cold tears crept down her white cheeks.

Aline DeSaussure bent over and kissed the child compassionately. This frail old woman, whose diseased heart had rendered her hold upon life purely tentative for many years, had yet, by the irony of fate, survived her stalwart husband, her strong young sons. Over the baby’s unconscious head, the two unhappy women looked at each other piteously. Cindy looked at both, and muttered prayers not addressed to the white man’s God. That God had come to Cindy along with slavery. Now the opportunity had come to let them both go; the old pagan felt herself free to return to her own gods, the old gods, the bush gods. It was a great relief, as if one removed tormenting tight shoes and stretched at ease one’s cramped and aching feet.

That day Columbia, stored with the treasures of half a State, bursting with loot, was invested. Ominous hours dragged by, leadenly, oppressively, with a sense of inevitable disaster overhanging and imminent. In the middle of the night there arose of a sudden a glare; and then upon all sides sounded the crackle of flames. Bells clanged; dogs began to howl dismally. Shouts arose, and shrill and piercing screams. One heard the frightened crying of children suddenly aroused from sleep. As the flames spread, the light of burning buildings showed unbelievable things, things grotesque and heroic and sometimes terrible.

In the Catholic Church, the orphans, hastily gathered, stood in a huddled group, looking with frightened eyes at the pale, praying sisters, and at the vestmented priest, who addressed with passionate words and gestures certain grim-faced men in alien blue uniforms.

One of these men rapped out an order; the priest cried aloud; and then the children, at a word from the sisters, began to move. They hurried out into the frightful din and clamor of the streets, while behind them church and convent began to burn. When the door fell in, one glimpsed statues wrapped and writhing in flame, as the damned in the Florentine’s hell. Columbia was a gigantic torch lighting up the black night of war.

When the house on the corner was ablaze and thunderous knocks resounded on the DeSaussure door, Cindy answered the summons.

“Who’s here?” There were bayonets beyond the voice, and Cindy looked upon the group witheringly.

“White women’s hyuh, white men!” said she savagely. “Two uh dem--an’ a new-come chile.”

“Get ’em out!” was the sharp order. “Get ’em out--or they’ll burn with the house!”

Already the intruders were trampling through the rooms. They helped themselves, rather whimsically, one thought, to whatever caught their fancy; the owner looked on silently, with that disdainful and desperate calmness with which intrepid souls face fate.

The baby and his mother were carried out, on a cot hastily piled with such coverlets as could be snatched up, and set down in the nearest clear space, a small square brilliantly lighted by the burning house on the corner. The woman, who was extremely weak, had lapsed into a merciful unconsciousness, but the baby squirmed and cried. Mrs. DeSaussure, bareheaded, and with a worsted shawl about her thin shoulders, sank down beside them. It was piercingly cold, and in the grip of a bitter frost the torn and trampled streets were like iron, over which swept a cruel February wind.

Toward dawn the woman on the cot opened her eyes.

“C-Cindy!”

“Yes, missis. Yes, chile.”

“I’m--I’m going.” Her stiff blue lips formed the words with difficulty, but her eyes besought. “Promise--you’ll take the baby--back home--to Linden. _Oh! God! God!_”

From a near-by street had come a hoarse and confused murmur of many voices. Men in soiled uniforms tramped into sight. Capering negroes, shouting, laughing, clapping, accompanied them. And of a sudden the black people burst into an exultant and measured singing:

“B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’! B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’!
An’ de dar-kies gwine ter oc-cu-py de lan’!”

Bitten through by the teeth of the fire, the walls of the majestic old house on the corner crashed down with a roar. Wild chant and wilder figures swept by.

The little lady was shaken, head to foot, with a long, slow shudder. A deep, deep sigh escaped from her bosom, and her head, crowned with very heavy, bright hair, fell forward. Mrs. DeSaussure presently drew the sheet up over her face. Under Cindy’s shawl, held close to her flat black breast for greater warmth, the baby mewed with cat-like plaintiveness.

The DeSaussure house had been adding its quota of illumination. As they crouched upon the ground beside the cot, the two watchers could see flames leap upward from its roof. When the roof fell in, Aline DeSaussure moaned. It had sheltered generations; it had covered her young wifehood, her lads’ childhood.

Presently, detaching itself from a chaotic background of smoke and flame, there came a figure, clapping its hands, staring, screaming with staccato laughter. Now she minced and bowed, smiling horribly, with bitten lips. A torn velvet robe hung about her, soiled and disheveled. She flung up her hands, and, catching the unbound black hair that streamed about her, tore it, and laughed and laughed and laughed. Vainly clutching at the flying, fantastic figure, which always lightly eluded her, stumbled and panted a fat black mammy, calling with endearing and coaxing tenderness upon her stark nursling.

Aline DeSaussure looked with wide and anguished eyes upon the terrible and tragic figure, but a little while since the honored, the beloved, the beautiful; and it seemed to her that Carolina herself, distraught, ruined Carolina, went by in the wind of the mad-woman’s passing. She uttered a lamentable cry; her hands flew to her heart, rent by a mortal pang; and, as if to shut from her sight that poignant vision, her eyes closed.

Cindy lifted her to the cot and drew the sheet over both women, who were so slim that they did not crowd each other on its one pillow. The black woman stood looking down upon them reflectively.

“Ain’t scared uh dem white folkses’ God no mo’. Not me!” she grumbled.

An hour or so later, at a cabin in the outside country, Cindy got some milk for the well-nigh famished baby. Her evil aspect, and the significant bag now openly worn about her neck, commandeered respect--and necessities. But she was warned that not only season and weather, but ruin, starvation, and soldiers, lay between herself and Linden.

Cindy smiled awesomely.

“I done got powerful spell tuh lan’ dis chile home,” she confided. “He natchelly _’bleeged_ tuh git home. Uh-huh! I done call muh own ol’ big black god clean f’um Afficky ’count uh dis hyuh same chile.” She paused, and added, with dark impressiveness: “Wouldn’t like ter be de pusson tarrygatin’ _him-all_!”

With the speck of humanity snuggled in her shawl, Cindy set out.

What was given willingly, she repaid with charms; what was not, she took--when there was anything to take. If milk was procurable, Cindy nosed it out with a truffle-hound’s flair. But far too often there was no milk; then the child fed upon teas made from simples gathered by the roadside, or for days at a time he lived upon corn meal boiled into a very thin gruel. By all the fancied laws of hygiene he should have succumbed. He grew.

At night, in some lonely thicket under the open sky, the witch woman would squat upon her heels beside a small fire of crossed sticks and with a palmful of earth and another of water would mutter spells over his bald, innocent head. If there were any powers Cindy failed to call to his aid, it was because she had never heard of them; and Cindy was a witch doctor’s daughter.

Once, indeed, she had dared to call Names that filled even her rock-ribbed heart with cold, awful fear. That, however, had happened upon a most auspicious occasion, in the full of the moon, and when she had captured one of the last few cocks left in Carolina--a black cock, young and perfect. For these Names must never be uttered unless one has a black cock’s blood to offer. They will come then to eat the smell of the blood, and also because of certain prayers and words. Now if they are to be petitioned to grant their favor and protection to, say, a young child, that child must be laid mother naked upon Mother Earth between Father Fire and Sister Water. And his skin must be pricked a certain number of times, until drops of blood appear. Three times, then, shall the Names be named, with the Word of each for a sign. And then--if they are pleased--they will put upon that child their spell--and Earth and Fire and Water shall never harm him--and all his life people must love him and serve him. It is a very good spell for any child to have put upon him.

When one is burdened with a young and lusty baby for whom food must be foraged far and wide over a war-swept country-side, one’s progress is necessarily slow, particularly when one is past fourscore, and overdriven old legs and lungs show signs of wearing out. The indomitable old woman, despite all obstacles, had made each week’s end find her a little nearer to Linden. But one evening at sundown she felt herself suddenly fail, as an old horse fails in harness.

It was long past dark when Cindy reached the nearest shelter, a cabin set down at the edge of a swamp. In the incredibly old, wrinkled, and palsied man who opened the door, the conjure woman recognized one of her own calling, and sighed with relief. _They_ had not failed her yet; she had found in her extremity the very help she stood most in need of.

Long, long into the night, while the baby slept peacefully upon a bed of gunny-sacks, Cindy and the old man communed. Presently Sally, one of his two granddaughters, was called in, and upon a tuft of the black cock’s feathers, dipped in blood and tied with a seven-knotted string, the scared girl was made to swear that she would take the baby home to Linden when Cindy was gone. Cindy, in fact, had managed to stay only long enough thus to settle her affairs to the best of her ability. So the baby passed into the slack hands of strange negroes.

They were very kind to him; negroes are, as a rule, kind to children. But in that parlous time, with a cabinful of hungry children and no men to help them, the women had neither means nor time to send the child forward, much as they would have liked to obey their grumbling old grandfather’s repeated urgings.

In the meantime the child slept beside the youngest black baby in an overcrowded cabin; and presently he was learning to walk, by the simple process of getting up when he fell down and falling down when he got up, with many an unnoticed bump and bawl between. He grew fat and rosy on corn-meal mush and bacon grease eaten from a tin plate with a mouth-stretching iron spoon. The many little negroes taught him early to talk. He was not a year old when he would lisp his name--Linden. Cindy had so insistently mentioned Linden that they named him thus; he had no other name. On the whole, he fared, perhaps, as well as most babies fared just then in war-worn Carolina.

Through the big teamster who just then caught her fancy, Sally at last saw her chance to keep her troublesome promise. The teamster, in the employ of the Union forces, had seen the unravaged and prosperous North, and he wished Sally to go thither with him. Colored Canaan did not lie in the South. Zeke knew the men who were coming home--in rags and tags, battered, scattered, maimed and halt and in driblets--_but who were coming home_. And he rather thought he would prefer to be somewhere else for a while. Sally was quite willing to go; but first she must fulfil the promise wrung from her by her baleful old grandfather and the black witch with the red eyes and gorilla teeth. If she did not do what they had made her swear to do--_and that big, awful old woman came up out of the swamp some night--with all those teeth_--

Zeke hastily agreed that Sally had better keep her word; it is very unsafe to meddle with witches’ doings. When his job of hauling timber for the Government was finished, and the last money collected, they two would take the child back to Linden and then turn their faces northward.

Linden, however, no longer belonged to the baby; for, by one of those summary military transfers common in conquered provinces, it had been declared confiscated, and so passed into the strong hands of John MacLean.

Full of a fierce and fiery faith--and full of Scotch-Irish prejudice and obstinacy as well--John had seen in the South a field ripe for a great spiritual harvest, and had laid aside the gun to arm himself with the gospel. Having valiantly helped to free enslaved bodies, he started in just as valiantly and as stubbornly to free enslaved souls.

In that country of wrecked plantations, of ruined rice-fields and roofless houses, calm Linden, fronting the bright May River, pleased him. Save that it bore sad evidences of marauders and that a great deal of the fine furniture had been either broken or stolen outright, the house was intact. Once in secure possession, John settled down to what he meant to make his life-work, and called in the lighthearted, sensuous colored people to drink deep of the cold well of orthodox Calvinism. They were appreciative: they wished to please the white man who offered them, for the mere taking, Thirty-nine unbreakable Articles; but they found the well-water unpleasant to the palate and--slyly made a sieve of the dipper.

He opened for the colored children a school, in the stately dining-room from whose walls arrogant patricians looked out of splendid frames; the room’s marble mantel bore their carved escutcheon; beneath which one read: “_Ad Astra_.” John thought that such stars as these slave-holding gentry had looked to were evil ones. He smiled to see their painted semblances look down helplessly upon the sons and daughters of Ham learning their A B abs in the room of their feastings; and his dour humor was tickled at the contrast between the grinning little negroes and the fine, gay, bare-bosomed ladies, with slim, pointed fingers that had never toiled and slim necks one might think would break under the weight of heads crammed with such damnable pride.

He was very hopeful. When he saw his dusky audience swaying like barley in the breeze of his words of sound counsel, John MacLean felt himself glimpsing the mountain peaks of coming Canaan, rising, rosy-pink, in the dawn. He was as yet unaware of the neat holes bored in his gospel-gourd.

When he did finally begin to be aware of the nature and extent of the leakage, he was seized with stern, wrathful impatience. It was very difficult for him to view the subject in any clear perspective. He had been at first too far off; and now, being too near, he put his eye against the object he wished to study and so blinded himself. One could wish that all reformers should take a preliminary course in optics.

Why should a race be so childishly frivolous, behave with such naked and unshamed untruthfulness, at so great a turning-point in its career? Perhaps, he reflected, it was because they had not as yet been taught their value as human beings,--free human beings, with a part, and that no mean part, to play in the world. Yes, that must be it. John began to teach them their great value as human beings, very persistently and insistently.

But if black faces beamed approval, when he went abroad among his new neighbors white faces looked upon him with a cold and hostile contempt. He had come in their most evil hour, and he had been allied with those forces which had crushed the South. Therefore they judged him even as they were judged by him. They were engaged in the most frightful struggle in which any people can engage,--the struggle to preserve the integrity and purity of a race in the midst of a world turned topsy-turvy. They neither asked nor desired outside help or counsel; they insisted upon their inherent right to manage their own affairs in their own way. And it was in order to do this that they had of late called into being a force born of desperation and duty--the Klan--against which John MacLean thundered without fear, but not without fanged and ravening reproach.

John could no more understand that movement than the men behind it could understand _him_. With flashing eyes and compressed lips he had listened to dark and wild tales, to whispered, fearful confidences, to terrified comments.

Of the seed that burned bravely at market crosses, fell singing fighting hymns on lonesome moors, starved unwhimpering in forgotten dungeons,--he was devoid of fear. A man of his hands, his utmost Christianity could not keep his blood from kindling joyously to a rousing battle. He had no faintest notion of counseling meekness. Bareheaded, on the front steps of Linden, he called the colored country-side around him and advised them to get guns and to use them. For himself, he said disdainfully, he had no tinge of fear; and he asked them to remember that for such a cause as this had his old friend John Brown died at Charlestown.

They left Linden glory-hallelujahing; it was John MacLean’s gauntlet thrown down openly for all members of the outlaw Klan to see.

The Klan watched silently. And presently they decided that they had most grievous ground of complaint against this cantankerous carpet-bagger; a fact perfectly well known to Mr. MacLean, who, like a particularly bad-tempered St. George in conflict with a particularly devilish dragon, honed up the tongue of denunciation accordingly.

And, while the storm lowered over Linden, and the cruel, bleak winter of direst want and woe drew near to one of those sad, sad Christmases after the war, Zeke and Sally, with the little boy between them, were journeying homeward by ox-cart express. The baby was simply and chastely clad in a parti-colored shift worn next to his grimy skin, a man’s old coat with the sleeves rolled up to allow his small arms free play, and a battered and shapeless felt hat pulled down over his ears in the effective fashion of an extinguisher. Of shoes he had none. Cindy’s bag, sewed up in a very dirty piece of calico, was tied about his neck; and his cheeks--such as one might glimpse of them under the enshrouding headgear--bore upon them etchings done in wet points of bread and molasses.

On Christmas Eve, in a chill and dreary twilight, they left the ox-cart in a thicket and entered the path that leads through the pines to Linden. Wet, swaying pendants of trailing moss, hanging from the huge oaks that interspersed the pines, brushed against them with a clammy and ghostly touch. Zeke and Sally, both nervous and silent, were filled with exaggerated fears. All along the long road, terrible and wild stories had been whispered, filling tellers and listeners alike with apprehension.

They breathed deep with relief when at last Linden lay before them, dark, quiet deserted, with closed doors and windows, and light showing in one room only. Stepping noiselessly upon the pillared porch, Zeke swung the sleeping baby off his shoulder and plumped him down with his back against the closed door. Linden had come home.

The baby was quite used to cold and darkness, but not at all used to being left alone and supperless. He called softly: “Thally! Thally!” But “Thally” did not come back. His lip trembled; tears filled his eyes; the vague, formless fear of aloneness assailed him, and lifting up his voice he cried loudly.

The door was hastily opened by a big, fair, bearded man who held a candle in one hand and shaded his keen blue eyes with the other. The bundle of rags upon the threshold waited no further invitation than the opened door, but trotted into the hall, his small bare feet pattering on the uncovered floor. A sleeve of the coat unrolled and flapped beside him emptily, grotesquely.

Whether the outlandish waif were black or white John could not for the moment tell; in truth, it mattered little, all children being dear to him. He ushered his small visitor into a room warm with fire and candlelight, and removed the evil odored coat, the shapeless hat. Periwinkle eyes, white brow, gold hair, revealed themselves.

“And where will _you_ be from?” John wondered.

“Thally gone. Thally leave Linden,” said the baby gravely, shaking his head over Thally’s defection.

“And who’s Sally, now?”

But the child had imparted all the information at his command. Sally was Sally, and Sally had gone and left him. He patted the big man’s hand to make him understand.

The big man was absurdly grateful for that friendly, light touch. He had been feeling most horribly alone; he had, in all truth, felt that same vague honor of aloneness which had made the child cry out at his door. The house was quite deserted, save for himself, the cook having gone into Bluffton for the night, on Christmas business of her own. But the emptiness that John recognized was not so much in the house as in himself, the inevitable result of social ostracism.

The Bible opened at random, which he had been reading when the cry at his door interrupted him, had given him for his pains the lugubrious eighty-eighth:

Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me
an abomination unto them....

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, _and_ mine acquaintance
into darkness.

The words stung him. For he was most absolutely cut off from his kind, a thing calamitous for a white man. The evil, greedy carpet-baggers exploiting ignorant ex-slaves, making of them political pawns upon the bloody chess-board of the South, filled him with a stern disgust and anger; and he viewed the ex-slaves’ former owners very much as, say, a biblical Jew might have viewed Baal worshipers overthrown, hewed hip and thigh by the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. He said, therefore, in substance:

“Gentlemen, I am everybody’s enemy.”

And they replied unanimously: “For this, be anathema.”

And already the light, volatile natures, the easy, pilfering morality, the irresponsible, gay inconsequence of the pupils and protégés for whom he labored had begun to chafe and fret his own honest and truthful nature. He had no thought, however, of giving up a fight just begun. But to keep him sweet he needed communion with his equals.

That the wee visitor, come mysteriously out of the dusk of Christmas Eve, should be a white child touched him curiously and tenderly. Blood is thicker than water. He did not love the black babies less but the white baby more.

Moreover, the white baby was looking at him with starry eyes full of the sweetest trust and friendliness. And John did so greatly need trust and friendliness just then. One may have very, very, very little, and still not be without some inward and sure staff of comfort and of hope; but, oh, to be alone and hated, without love, without intelligent sympathy, without friendliness--on Christmas Eve!

The childless man felt his heart melt in his bosom, remembering old, tender stories of that dear Baby of the Star, who at times delights to reveal himself to sad men on pilgrimage; and always in the guise of the beggar and of the lowly whom he loved.

On the table, beside the big Bible, stood the remains of John’s supper. The child pointed to it eagerly, for he was very hungry.

“Linden wan’ thuppeh.”

Linden! Why, the child’s name was Linden! What a pleasant and curious coincidence!

Having supped, the baby yawned, looking about him for a good spot to curl up and go to sleep, like a puppy with a full stomach. He decided upon the hearthrug. But John’s bachelor neatness and cleanliness were scandalized at the bare idea of any human creature going to sleep anywhere in such a shocking state of grime. He wished that Viny, the cook, were there to help him; but she was not, and John rolled up his sleeves and set himself seriously to the task, fearsome to any man, of getting a thoroughly dirty child thoroughly clean. The one discolored garment made him shudder, as he consigned it to the fire. Cindy’s bag was laid upon the table for later investigation, and he handled it as gingerly as if he had seen the old black woman mumbling her spells with its aid.

Linden enjoyed the warm water hugely. He splashed and shouted and laughed, and grabbed at the soap, and worried the wash-rag; and he howled only when John, with more zeal than deftness, soaped his eyes and mouth. It was a drastic scouring, but there presently emerged from it a sweet and rosy cherub, hard to be recognized as the dirty little grub of an hour since.

When he had been trussed in an undershirt by way of a nighty, and the room decently put to order again, Master Linden decided that the nice big man should sing him “nighty-night”; he stood on tiptoes to be taken up and rocked.

“Thing by-bye,” he urged, settling himself comfortably in the crook of a big arm, and the big arm that was all too empty closed about him hungrily, instinctively, God having made all big arms for the great purpose of cuddling soft, snuggling little bodies. An inexpressible, exquisite sense of fatherhood welled up in John’s heart. He pressed his face down against the damp curls. He began to sing:

“God rest you, merry gentlemen! Let nothing you dismay.
For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.”

The baby, with half-closed eyes, crooned a tuneless tune to the fire, his hand patting John’s arm. Then he went to sleep in the arms of the man who had taken his inheritance, and was held close and lovingly. Reluctantly John laid him down upon the sofa and covered him with a blanket brought from his own bed.

He had time then to examine the extremely dirty little bag tied with knotted string, and to marvel at the unchancy plunder it contained. But he whistled when, from the midst of the conjure stuff, there came to light the rings Cindy had taken from a dead hand. With them was a man’s very handsome and heavy gold watch-fob, stamped with a coat of arms--the same arms blazoned upon the marble mantels and over the great doors of Linden. John stared at the jewel almost unbelievingly. Then he stole over and looked long and earnestly upon the sleeping baby, and saw how race and breeding marked every lovely line of him. John knew him now, bone of the bone and blood of the blood of those proud patricians whose portraits still hung upon the walls of their despoiled home, men and women allied to the lordliest names of England and of France. Eh, but this was a bonny baby! In his secretest heart the dour, doughty Puritan adored his strength and grace and comeliness.

When he had taken over Linden for the glory of the Lord, John had heard, of course, of the little widow and her flight to Columbia; also he knew that there had been an heir expected. But the little widow was dead, and no one had heard of any child surviving. Yet--here he was!

Who had brought him home, or why, or how, John never knew; but he was quite, quite sure Who had sent him, and he had no thought of refusing the heavenly gift. He would have thought such a refusal sacrilegious, he who saw the hand of the Almighty in all his affairs, shaping his destiny and guiding his days. With all humility and willingness and gratitude, he took over his new stewardship and all that it implied. He sat by the fire, and, full of a happy awe, dreamed and planned. There was a far, fair future in which he and this child, viewing the great work they should do together, might, too, say reverently: “What hath God wrought!” He smiled; he was no longer alone.

His Christmas present presently stirred in his sleep, woke, and sat up.

“Wanterjinkerwater!” said he plaintively. “Dimmyjinkerwater!”

Vain of the delightful fact that he so readily understood this angelic lingo, John got the water, eager to wait fatherlily upon his child. The little man drank slowly, with long and deliberate pauses between little sips. Then he stuck his fat fingers in the glass, paddled them, laughed, and looked up at John with bright, mischievous eyes.

And even then sheeted figures were dismounting from sheeted horses before the pillared porch of Linden. They moved soundlessly, as might the phantoms they resembled, and their appearance, in that lonely place and hour, was such as froze the blood. Under the tall leader’s hand the great hall door swung open, for in his surprise at the child’s entrance John had forgotten to draw the bolts. Soundlessly they moved down the wide hall toward the room from which light issued. The leader opened this door, too.

Candles and firelight dancing on the walls; upon the table nothing worse than bread and milk and an open bible. And John himself, kneeling, smiling fatherlily upon a rosy and roguish elf who paddled in a glass of water and laughed gleefully.

The child saw them first, and gasped. At that John looked up and knew his fate was upon him. Rage shook him head to foot, and he would have rushed upon them, unarmed as he was, but--one could not endanger a child’s life in such a mêlée of killing as must ensue. He got to his feet and faced them, disdaining words, without a trace of fear, but with eyes blazing with bitter contempt. Twenty pairs of eyes cold with condemnation looked back at him, the carpet-bagger, the preaching fire-brand, the enemy. The tall leader beckoned, an imperious and menacing gesture. John shrugged his shoulders, a grim, scornful smile curling his lips.

“So much mummery for one lone man’s murder!” said he, bitingly.

Something in that tense, electric atmosphere troubled the young child’s spirit. He slipped off the sofa, and as the big undershirt tripped him, and John, with a quick gesture, stooped to raise him, the little man gripped the big one with warm, moist fingers. He frowned disapprovingly at the things in the doorway.

“Go ’way, boogermans!” he ordered, with pretty imperiousness. “Go ’way!”

When the boogermans failed to go, the baby wished John to take him up in his arms. But John shook his head regretfully. His brows puckered then as the problem of the child’s fate presented itself. He looked about desperately, praying for an inspiration for the child’s sake. Then, holding up his hand impressively, he addressed the tall leader, and told of the child’s coming, of what Cindy’s bag contained.

But the baby himself, after vainly twitching his friend’s trouser leg, began to roar dismally, with the fearless lack of restraint that is a baby’s most potent weapon. John and his visitors looked at one another, not so much with hate as with perplexity. There was a thing to be done; but, in the doing, what of the baby?

“And _you’re_ of his kin and his race!” spat John, with sudden exasperation. “Christmas Eve--and an innocent roused from his sleep to witness murder! Could you find no fitter time for your devil’s prankjankins than the birth-night of the Lord?”

Nobody answered. In sheer desperation, John went on his knees to comfort the wailing child, and as the baby strangled his sobs on the big man’s breast, they in the door looked on through the slits of forty eyeholes.

“If you can dare to handle innocence with bloody hands--if there’s one among you that’s a father--take the child home to some woman to-night, for the love of God!” said John. And gently he put the child aside. “It goes sore against my grain to part with you, my bonny man,” he said softly and regretfully. “I looked to be a father to you. But the will of God be done! Never yet did John MacLean gainsay a decree of his Maker. And in my Maker’s name I beseech my murderers to deal fairly with you after I am done away with, and to put you into possession of what must be yours. Stay!”

He fished a stubby pencil from his pocket, drew a chair to the table, seated himself calmly, and on the fly-leaf of his Bible made his brief will, leaving Linden to the child. When he had signed and dated it, he rose and nodded.

“That will make it surer,” said he, with a satisfied smile.

And all the while the baby, refusing to be lightly put aside, clutched at his knees, protesting against such neglectful treatment with raised, tearful eyes and heartbroken sobs.

“And now,” said John to his gentlemen-in-waiting, “there is but one thing more.” He fished a handful of small change from his pocket, bowed to them, and laid the money on the table. “You will be so kind,” he said politely, “as to buy with this some little baubles to please him? It’s Christmas, remember--Christmas! I think it would ease me in my extremity to remember I had made the wee thing happy on Christmas!” He straightened his shoulders at that, and his head went up. “And now I’m ready,” said he calmly.

Once more he had to put aside the clutching little hands as he bent to kiss the child’s fair head. With a firm and manly tread, he walked toward the men, who were already moving through the hall. The door shut upon the baby’s wails.

“God forefend he’ll set himself on fire!” said John anxiously. “You might hurry,” he suggested as they stepped upon the porch.

Night hung over the dark earth, wet with rain and sweet with woodsy odors. Above the dim, slim pines clouds scurried about, trying to clear a space in the sky for a few timid Christmas stars. One caught, too, the salty sweetness of the tide-water. John drew a deep, deep breath, filling his lungs with it.

At the foot of the steps, ghostly horses drifted up to meet ghostly riders. Their movements were very deliberate.

“And the child alone with fire!” snarled John, and stamped his feet.

The tall leader spoke in a slow, low voice, and instantly the men mounted and began to move off. From the house came a muffled cry, and John sucked his teeth sympathetically. Dear baby,--so bright and brave and beautiful, so loving and loyal and like the Holiest Baby of all--good night, good night, and good-by!

The masked horsemen, drifting into the shadows of the pines, melted into the night. Then the leader drew near and laid a firm hand upon his captive’s shoulder.

“Ah can’t spare any of my men to-night to tend babies,--not even white babies,” he remarked in a soft, pleasant voice. “Didn’t reckon _you_ ever had time to tend babies--white babies--either.” He paused meditatively. “Ah don’t believe,” he murmured, “Ah don’t believe that God A’mighty was just projeckin’ when He sent that little chap hyuh to-night of all nights to you of all men. No, suh, Ah don’t believe it! Aftuh you’ve had him a spell--and learned to use yo’ white man’s eyes, you everlastin’ fool, you--you’ll understand it’s because of him and his mothuh and his sistuh--that the Klan’s hyuh.”

He walked down the steps and swung a lithe leg over his mount.

“If Ah were you, Ah’d go on back in the house and keep that little chap from burstin’ himself cryin’,” he said casually.

Once in the saddle, he leaned forward and waved a slim, capable hand--such a hand as had gripped by the hair of its drowning head the safety of a race and held it alive above a black flood. A note of amused and tolerant understanding, of a new respect and kindness, crept into his soft, dangerous voice.

“_Merry Christmas!_” said he, genially, and was off.

John’s throat, which had not tightened at the thought of a rope collar, felt of a sudden a big, aching lump crowd into it. He swallowed tolerance and understanding gulpingly; the underlying kindness helped them go down--and stay down.

“M-merry Christmas!” he found himself stammering.

And as the flying horseman vanished, he ran back to the warm and lighted room and gathered the weeping spirit of Christmas into fatherly and consoling arms.

THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE

THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE

The senator’s wife was returning from the very smartest of afternoon affairs; her white-haired and fresh-colored loveliness had charmed and delighted the most famous and fastidious of diplomats, and the Chinese minister had expressed frank amaze at the magical youthfulness of the American Grandmother; as she stepped into her car the magically youthful rose still blew in her cheeks.

To avoid a crush, her chauffeur had made a detour, swung down two or three residential streets, slipped through the region of fashionable boarding-houses, and turned into a side street, quiet, tree-shaded, peaceful, as if, like the birds, it were going to bed with the sun. On a corner, with a hedge between it and another small house next door, stood the Little Brown House.

The chauffeur wasn’t speeding then, so the senator’s wife had a chance really to see the place. It was quite as if the Little Brown House had seen her first, and called out friendlily, as one may to one’s own.

She came out of her pleasant self-satisfaction with a start; as usual she had been telling herself that she hadn’t failed _him_; that step by step she had kept the pace set by his boundless ambition. An international figure now, the West had hammered him out of her giant forge--one of those wonderful Americans about whom, some day in the far future, not the Great American Novel alone, but the greatest epic of the entire race is going to be written. Not the least of his successes was the fact that for forty years he had retained the single love and adoration of his wife; she was proud of him with an almost terrible pride.

There had been times when she had wanted to pause, and catch breath, and rest; but always he had been marching upward, and she had gone with him. Once she had thought that afterward--when, say, the children had grown up and settled--they two might grow peacefully and gently old together, in the evening of their day. But that dream had been foregone; she had but grown old youthfully, wonderfully, with a ripening beauty. Now it was only at times, when, disrobed and massaged, she was at last alone, that she admitted she was--tired.

Her social secretary--and _she_ knew her social centers like the palm of her hand--said that the senator’s new house was the one perfect house in all America, and those affairs at which his wife presided the most delightful outside of Vienna. She never knew that, deep down in the other woman’s soul weariness, a longing for simpler things, stung at times like a nettle.

But when her car rolled slowly by the Little Brown House something broke in her breast; something became alive and fluttered as with wings. Why, it was just such a little house as she had dreamed of, always, in her secretest dreams! It was a pity, she thought, that a great “For Sale” sign was nailed on the front porch, and that all the windows were closed. Little brown houses should never, never be spoiled by “For Sale” signs, and their windows should always be open.

She was going to dine at the White House that night, in a Paris gown, wearing the pearls that the senator had lately given her. And--she would come home weary. She wished that for just one night out of these gold-and-glory public nights they two might linger over a small table whose simple meal was lighted by the lamp of home. Oh, just for once to be only a gray-haired man and his gray-haired wife, in life’s calm closing day, looking steadfastly out into the fading sky, in whose deepening twilight would presently shine, like a beacon, the evening star! No light save that, and the bedtime candle; no noise, no glitter; no great orchestra, only the dear every-day music of the tea-kettle, and the cricket, and the settling log.

The car swung around a corner; the Little Brown House was left behind. She had left behind so much, she thought. Old neighbors, old faiths, old friends, old simplicities. She had advanced, but to what? What, of all the great essentials, had she gained? In all this success, what was hers--to _keep_?

At dinner she met her youngest daughter, married to a title incidental to a big blond Englishman of unimpeachable morals and a goodly rent-roll. The other daughter, Milly, had married the millions of Kilian van Cuypt. Dick, the only son, had married a virtually penniless Virginian, but Dick’s wife brought connections. The children had all done well: she was satisfied with things as they were; but at dawn she admitted again that she was tired, too tired to sleep.

The Little Brown House crept into her mind soothingly. In the room shaded by that one great tree the lights would long since have been out. That would be a very simple room; the toilet articles wouldn’t be of crystal and of hammered gold, for instance; there would be no inlaid and priceless furniture: it would be just dear and clean and cozy; after a quiet day one might pass there a quieter night.

She wondered what it would be like, living in a little brown house. Whimsically she lay awake and furnished it, room by room. At first she failed to note the significance of her omissions, the curious sense of rest and freedom which the mere thought of eliminating a great retinue of servants gave her. Little brown houses haven’t room for retinues; one had perhaps a little maid whom one really knew, and in whose affairs one was interested. It occurred to her that she knew just about as much of the lives of _her_ servants as she knew about the man in the moon. But in little brown houses one might come into pleasant human contact with one’s few necessary helpers. She surmised that this was the right way, the good way, the Galilean Carpenter’s way.

_The Carpenter!_

Her thoughts drifted back to her girlhood’s churchgoing, the churchgoing of people in little homes, who have sometimes not enough, sometimes just enough, but never, oh never, too much. Of a sudden she remembered her mother’s sweet untrained soprano, her father’s stern bass:

“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide!”

And her mother had had but one best cashmere; her father a sacred suit, religiously laid out on the bed of a Sunday morning!

There had been Wednesday-night prayer-meetings; she had gone, a little, little girl, holding tight to the hired girl’s hard, kind hand. She wondered, with a tightening of the heart, what had become of Martha. Perhaps she was some gray-haired grandmother to-night; perhaps Martha too slept under the stars and the night wind and the grass, in a corner of that old cemetery wherein, lying very close together, her own father and mother rested.

How calm and serene those two time-worn faces had been! The simplicity of their lives and their faith seemed to make a deeper gulf between her and them than death or years. As in a dream she remembered the quavering voice of their oldest friend reading over them:

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, ... the love of God, ... the
fellowship of the Holy Ghost....”

Ah, but to them these things had been the real and the essential--“the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” To her they had been for many a year but empty echoes, to which one listened, if one listened at all, with polite inattention and unemotion.

And then she thought with astonishment, “Why, perhaps _they_ succeeded, who held fast to things they were never to lose; perhaps it is _we_ who fail--we who have only the things we can touch with our hands.” In her carved and lace-hung bed, which had cost more than all the furniture in her father’s house, she began to weep softly; but as if those tears had cleared her vision she saw what she might do.

The senator was more than scrupulous about his wife’s more than liberal allowance; if was a very easy matter for her to purchase the Little Brown House. Never, she thought, had the mere possession of any one thing given her so much pure pleasure.

It wasn’t, however, the sort of house you can furnish by a wholesale order at the nearest furniture store. No, indeed; you have to hunt carefully for things to put into little brown houses. Piece by piece the senator’s wife found her belongings: here an old dresser, there an old chair or an older table; all good and solid and beautiful, with the beauty of being _lived with_.

She was tired of the pitiless bright glare of electricity; so on her dining-table stood a softly shaded family lamp. The sort of lamp _you_ used to sit beside once, long ago, while your brother and your sister studied their lessons near by, and your mother, a stocking of yours on her hand, looked up, smiling, from time to time to answer your many questions; and your father twinkled over his glasses and his paper at all of you. You remember now, don’t you? You wouldn’t take anything life might offer, for just that memory, would you? And isn’t it strange that, looking back at them now that they’ve gone, just these simplest memories seem somehow the holiest?