The colonel's eyes were heavy with grief that night, and yet he lay awake late, and with his sorrow were mingled many consoling thoughts. The people, his people, had been kind, aye, more than kind. Their warm hearts had sympathised with his grief. He had sometimes been impatient of their conservatism, their narrowness, their unreasoning pride of opinion; but in his bereavement they had manifested a feeling that it would be beautiful to remember all the days of his life. All the people, white and black, had united to honour his dead.
He had wished to help them--had tried already. He had loved the town as the home of his ancestors, which enshrined their ashes. He would make of it a monument to mark his son's resting place. His fight against Fetters and what he represented should take on a new character; henceforward it should be a crusade to rescue from threatened barbarism the land which contained the tombs of his loved ones. Nor would he be alone in the struggle, which he now clearly foresaw would be a long one. The dear, good woman he had asked to be his wife could help him. He needed her clear, spiritual vision; and in his lifelong sorrow he would need her sympathy and companionship; for she had loved the child and would share his grief. She knew the people better than he, and was in closer touch with them; she could help him in his schemes of benevolence, and suggest new ways to benefit the people. Phil's mother was buried far away, among her own people; could he consult her, he felt sure she would prefer to remain there. Here she would be an alien note; and when Laura died she could lie with them and still be in her own place.
"Have you heard the news, sir," asked the housekeeper, when he came down to breakfast the next morning.
"No, Mrs. Hughes, what is it?"
"They lynched the Negro who was in jail for shooting young Mr. Fetters and the other man."
The colonel hastily swallowed a cup of coffee and went down town. It was only a short walk. Already there were excited crowds upon the street, discussing the events of the night. The colonel sought Caxton, who was just entering his office.
"They've done it," said the lawyer.
"So I understand. When did it happen?"
"About one o'clock last night. A crowd came in from Sycamore--not all at once, but by twos and threes, and got together in Clay Johnson's saloon, with Ben Green, your discharged foreman, and a lot of other riffraff, and went to the sheriff, and took the keys, and took Johnson and carried him out to where the shooting was, and----"
"Spare me the details. He is dead?"
"Yes."
A rope, a tree--a puff of smoke, a flash of flame--or a barbaric orgy of fire and blood--what matter which? At the end there was a lump of clay, and a hundred murderers where there had been one before.
"Can we do anything to punish _this_ crime?"
"We can try."
And they tried. The colonel went to the sheriff. The sheriff said he had yielded to force, but he never would have dreamed of shooting to defend a worthless Negro who had maimed a good white man, had nearly killed another, and had declared a vendetta against the white race.
By noon the colonel had interviewed as many prominent men as he could find, and they became increasingly difficult to find as it became known that he was seeking them. The town, he said, had been disgraced, and should redeem itself by prosecuting the lynchers. He may as well have talked to the empty air. The trail of Fetters was all over the town. Some of the officials owed Fetters money; others were under political obligations to him. Others were plainly of the opinion that the Negro got no more than he deserved; such a wretch was not fit to live. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of suicide, a grim joke which evoked some laughter. Doctor McKenzie, to whom the colonel expressed his feelings, and whom he asked to throw the influence of his church upon the side of law and order, said:
"It is too bad. I am sorry, but it is done. Let it rest. No good can ever come of stirring it up further."
Later in the day there came news that the lynchers, after completing their task, had proceeded to the Dudley plantation and whipped all the Negroes who did not learn of their coming in time to escape, the claim being that Johnson could not have maintained himself in hiding without their connivance, and that they were therefore parties to his crimes.
The colonel felt very much depressed when he went to bed that night, and lay for a long time turning over in his mind the problem that confronted him.
So far he had been beaten, except in the matter of the cotton mill, which was yet unfinished. His efforts in Bud Johnson's behalf--the only thing he had undertaken to please the woman he loved, had proved abortive. His promise to the teacher--well, he had done his part, but to no avail. He would be ashamed to meet Taylor face to face. With what conscience could a white man in Clarendon ever again ask a Negro to disclose the name or hiding place of a coloured criminal? In the effort to punish the lynchers he stood, to all intents and purposes, single-handed and alone; and without the support of public opinion he could do nothing.
The colonel was beaten, but not dismayed. Perhaps God in his wisdom had taken Phil away, that his father might give himself more completely and single-mindedly to the battle before him. Had Phil lived, a father might have hesitated to expose a child's young and impressionable mind to the things which these volcanic outbursts of passion between mismated races might cause at any unforeseen moment. Now that the way was clear, he could go forward, hand in hand with the good woman who had promised to wed him, in the work he had laid out. He would enlist good people to demand better laws, under which Fetters and his kind would find it harder to prey upon the weak.
Diligently he would work to lay wide and deep the foundations of prosperity, education and enlightenment, upon which should rest justice, humanity and civic righteousness. In this he would find a worthy career. Patiently would he await the results of his labours, and if they came not in great measure in his own lifetime, he would be content to know that after years would see their full fruition.
So that night he sat down and wrote a long answer to Kirby's letter, in which he told him of Phil's death and burial, and his own grief. Something there was, too, of his plans for the future, including his marriage to a good woman who would help him in them. Kirby, he said, had offered him a golden opportunity for which he thanked him heartily. The scheme was good enough for any one to venture upon. But to carry out his own plans, would require that he invest his money in the State of his residence, where there were many openings for capital that could afford to wait upon development for large returns. He sent his best regards to Mrs. Jerviss, and his assurance that Kirby's plan was a good one. Perhaps Kirby and she alone could handle it; if not, there must be plenty of money elsewhere for so good a thing.
He sealed the letter, and laid it aside to be mailed in the morning. To his mind it had all the force of a final renunciation, a severance of the last link that bound him to his old life.
Long the colonel lay thinking, after he retired to rest, and the muffled striking of the clock downstairs had marked the hour of midnight ere he fell asleep. And he had scarcely dozed away, when he was awakened by a scraping noise, as though somewhere in the house a heavy object was being drawn across the floor. The sound was not repeated, however, and thinking it some trick of the imagination, he soon slept again.
As the colonel slept this second time, he dreamed of a regenerated South, filled with thriving industries, and thronged with a prosperous and happy people, where every man, having enough for his needs, was willing that every other man should have the same; where law and order should prevail unquestioned, and where every man could enter, through the golden gate of hope, the field of opportunity, where lay the prizes of life, which all might have an equal chance to win or lose.
For even in his dreams the colonel's sober mind did not stray beyond the bounds of reason and experience. That all men would ever be equal he did not even dream; there would always be the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish. But that each man, in his little life in this our little world might be able to make the most of himself, was an ideal which even the colonel's waking hours would not have repudiated.
Following this pleasing thread with the unconscious rapidity of dreams, the colonel passed, in a few brief minutes, through a long and useful life to a happy end, when he too rested with his fathers, by the side of his son, and on his tomb was graven what was said of Ben Adhem: "Here lies one who loved his fellow men," and the further words, "and tried to make them happy."
* * * * * * *
Shortly after dawn there was a loud rapping at the colonel's door:
"Come downstairs and look on de piazza, Colonel," said the agitated voice of the servant who had knocked. "Come quick, suh."
There was a vague terror in the man's voice that stirred the colonel strangely. He threw on a dressing gown and hastened downstairs, and to the front door of the hall, which stood open. A handsome mahogany burial casket, stained with earth and disfigured by rough handling, rested upon the floor of the piazza, where it had been deposited during the night. Conspicuously nailed to the coffin lid was a sheet of white paper, upon which were some lines rudely scrawled in a handwriting that matched the spelling:
Kurnell French:
Take notis. Berry yore ole nigger somewhar else. He can't stay in Oak Semitury. The majority of the white people of this town, who dident tend yore nigger funarl, woant have him there. Niggers by there selves, white peepul by there selves, and them that lives in our town must bide by our rules.
By order of CUMITTY.
The colonel left the coffin standing on the porch, where it remained all day, an object of curious interest to the scores and hundreds who walked by to look at it, for the news spread quickly through the town. No one, however, came in. If there were those who reprobated the action they were silent. The mob spirit, which had broken out in the lynching of Johnson, still dominated the town, and no one dared to speak against it.
As soon as Colonel French had dressed and breakfasted, he drove over to the cemetery. Those who had exhumed old Peter's remains had not been unduly careful. The carelessly excavated earth had been scattered here and there over the lot. The flowers on old Peter's grave and that of little Phil had been trampled under foot--whether wantonly or not, inevitably, in the execution of the ghoulish task.
The colonel's heart hardened as he stood by his son's grave. Then he took a long lingering look at the tombs of his ancestors and turned away with an air of finality.
From the cemetery he went to the undertaker's, and left an order; thence to the telegraph office, from which he sent a message to his former partner in New York; and thence to the Treadwells'.