The Purchase Price Part 29

"Visionary, subjective!"

"Then let us be concrete if you like. Take the case of the girl Lily. She was the actual cause of your getting hurt, of many men being killed. Why?"

"Because she was a runaway slave. The law has to be enforced, property must be protected, even if it costs life sometimes.

There'd be no government otherwise. We men have to take our chances in a time like that. The duty is plain."

"How utterly you fail of the truth! That's not why there was blood spilled over her. Do you know who she is?"

"No," he said.

"She is the daughter of your _friend_, Judge Clayton, of the bench of justice in your commonwealth. _That_ is why she wants to run away! Her father does not know he is her father. G.o.d has His own way of righting such things."

"There are things we must not talk about in this slavery question.

Stop! I did not, of course, know this. And Clayton did not know!"

"There are things which ought not to be; but if you vote for oppression, if you vote yonder in your legislature for the protection of this inst.i.tution, if you must some day vote yonder in Congress for its extension, for the right to carry it into other lands--the same lands where now the feet of freedom-seekers are hurrying from all over the world, so strangely, so wonderfully--then you vote for a compromise that G.o.d never intended to go through or to endure. Is that your vote? Come now, I will tell you something."

"You are telling me much."

"I will tell you--that night, when Carlisle would have killed you in your room there, when I afterward put you all on parole--"

"Yes, yes."

"I saved you then; and sent them away. Do you know why?"

"I suppose it was horror of more blood."

"I don't think so. I believe it was just for this--for this very talk I'm having now with you. I saved you then so that some day I might demand you as hostage.

"I want you to vote with me," she continued, "for the 'higher law.'

I want you to vote with the west-bound wheels, with G.o.d's blades of gra.s.s!"

"G.o.d! woman! You have gift of tongues! Now listen to me. Which shall we train with, among your northern men, John Quincy Adams or William Lloyd Garrison, with that sane man or the hysterical one?

Is Mr. Beecher a bigger man than Mr. Jefferson was?"

"I know you're honest," she said, frowning, "but let us try to see.

There's Mr. Birney, of Alabama, a Southerner who has gone over, through all, to the abolitionists as you call them. And would you call Mr. Clay a fool? Or Mr. Benton, here in your own state, who--"

"Oh, don't mention Benton to me here! He's anathema in this state."

"Yet you might well study Mr. Benton's views. He sees the case of Lily first, the case of the Const.i.tution afterward. Ah, why can't _you_? Why, Sir, if I could only get you to think as he does--a man with your power and influence and faculty for leaders.h.i.+p--I'd call this winter well spent--better spent than if I'd been left in Was.h.i.+ngton."

"Suppose I wanted to change my beliefs, how would I go about it?"

He frowned in his intent effort to follow her, even in her enthusiasm. "Once I asked a preacher how I could find religion, and he told me by coming to the Saviour. I told him that was begging the question, and asked him how I could find the Saviour.

All he could say was to answer once more, 'Come to the Saviour!'

That's reasoning in a circle. Now, if a man hasn't _got_ faith, how's he going to get it--by what process can he reach out into the dark and find it? What's the use of his saying he has found faith when he knows he hasn't? There's a resemblance between clean religion and honest politics. The abolitionists have never given us Southerners any answer to this."

"No," said she. "I can not give you any answer. For myself, I have found that faith."

"You would endure much for your convictions?" he demanded suddenly.

"Very much, Sir."

"Suffer martyrdom?"

"Perhaps I have done so."

"Would you suffer more? You undertake the conversion of a sinner like myself?"

The flame of his eye caught hers in spite of herself. A little flush came into her cheek.

"Tell me," he demanded imperiously, "on what terms?"

"You do not play the game. You would ask me to preach to you--but you would come to see the revival, not to listen to grace. It isn't playing the game."

"But you're seeking converts?"

"I would despise no man in the world so much as a hypocrite, a turn-coat! You can't purchase faith in the market place, not any more than--"

"Any more than you can purchase love? But I've been wanting not the sermon, but the preacher. You! You! Yes, it is the truth. I want nothing else in the world so much as you."

"I'd never care for a man who would admit that."

"There never was a woman in the world loved a man who did not."

"Oh, always I try to a.n.a.lyze these things," she went on desperately, facing him, her eyes somber, her face aglow, her att.i.tude tense. "I try to look in my mirror and I demand of what I see there. 'What are you?" I say. 'What is this that I see?'

Why, I can see that a woman might love her own beauty for itself.

Yes, I love my beauty. But I don't see how a woman could care for a man who only cared for that,--what she saw in her mirror, don't you know?"

"Any price, for just that!" he said grimly.

"No, no! You would not. Don't say that! I so much want you to be bigger than that."

"The woman you see in your mirror would be cheap at any cost."

"But a man even like yourself. Sir, would be very cheap, if his price was such as you say. No turncoat could win me--I'd love him more on his own side yonder threefold wall, _with_ his convictions, than on my side without them. I couldn't be bought cheap as that, nor by a cheap man. I'd never love a man who held himself cheap.

"But then," she added, casting back at him one of his own earlier speeches, "if you only thought as I did, what could not we two do together--for the cause of those human blades of gra.s.s--so soon cut down? Ah, life is so little, so short!"

"No! No! Stop!" he cried out. "Ah, now is the torture--now you turn the wheel. I can not recant! I can not give up my convictions, or my love, either one; and yet--I'm not sure I'm going to have left either one. It's h.e.l.l, that's what's left for me. But listen! What for those that grow as flowers, tall, beautiful, there among the gra.s.s that is cut down--should they perish from the earth? For what were such as they made, tall and beautiful?--poppies, mystic, drug-like, delirium producing? Is that it--is that your purpose in life, then, after all? You--what you see in your mirror there--is it the purpose of _that_ being--so beautiful, so beautiful--to waste itself, all through life, over some vague and abstract thing out of which no good can come? Is that all? My G.o.d! Much as I love you, I'd rather see you marry some other man than think of you never married at all. G.o.d never meant a flower such as you to wither, to die, to be _wasted_. Why, look at you! Look . . . at . . . you! And you say you are to be wasted! G.o.d never meant it so, you beauty, you wonderful woman!"

Even as she was about to speak, drawn by the pa.s.sion of him, the agony of his cry, there came to the ears of both an arresting sound--one which it seemed to Josephine was not wholly strange to her ears. It was like the cry of a babe, a child's wail, difficult to locate, indefinite in distance.

"What was it?" she whispered. "Did you hear?"

He made no answer, except to walk to her straight and take her by the arms, looking sadly, mournfully into her face.

"Ah, my G.o.d! My G.o.d! Have I not heard? What else have I heard, these years? And you're big enough not to ask--