House Divided (14 page)

And again that instant change, so that it was as though they listened not to one man but to two who were met in awed, half-frightened conversation.

An angry murmur ran among his listeners, and the words evoked in Faunt's imagination the picture of a Negro with a blazing torch of lightwood racing through the darkest night, touching his torch to homes and barns and corn cribs, planting everywhere a swift-growing seed of flame. The voice was half-whispering now, hushed terror in its tones.

Some country man, drawn to the fringes of the little crowd, cried delightedly: “That's right! I heared a squinch owl yesterday!” Two or three men laughed, nervous tension in their tones; but the speaker laid his spell on them again, his voice this time a woman's, shaken with deep terror.

He paused, and now he held them all breathlessly waiting till he spoke. When he did, his tone had become natural, conversational, deprecating—and this made his words the more impressive.

“And I believe these are portentous things. Portentous to the people upon whom they descend. That was a day in Rome; but in Richmond today there are omens in the sky for any eye to read.”

A stir almost of relief ran among his listeners, the tension slackened, each man spoke to his neighbor; Faunt to Jennings Wise. “That's a remarkable young man. Who is he?”

“You don't know him? I'll present you.” Wise led Faunt forward. “Mr. Booth, may I present Mr. Currain, of Belle Vue. Mr. Currain is looking forward to the pleasure of witnessing one of your performances.”

Booth bowed. “Your servant, Mr. Currain.”

“Sir!” Faunt returned the other's greeting; and he said courteously:
“I was impressed, a moment ago, by your remarks. You are a Virginian?”

“By sympathies only. I was born in Maryland, in Harford County; but my ambition since childhood has been to become the most beloved actor in the South. Last winter, and again this, I have come to feel toward Richmond as though it were my home.”

“And won our friendship,” Jennings Wise graciously assented. “Mr. Booth will always find a ready welcome here.”

Someone else came to grasp Booth's hand, and Faunt went thoughtfully to his room; but he found himself remembering that little man, faintly ridiculous in his big fur-trimmed coat until you heard him speak and warmed to the fire in him. Yet he was amused by his own susceptibility to the impression the other had made. The man was only an actor, after all, playing a part by rote.

 

Monday Faunt set out for Belle Vue. His horse, stabled during these days in Richmond, was in lively humor; and on the long gentle rise from the last houses of Richmond to the crest of the low ridge toward Mechanicsville, he let the beast work off its first zeal. They came down toward the Chickahominy at an easier pace, paused at the toll gate and went on by the many wooden bridges that leapfrogged from one patch of hard ground to the next across the wide marsh to the river itself. Faunt was in no hurry. When he reached the Old Church, he remembered that Edmund Ruffin, of whom Trav so often spoke admiringly, lived at Marlbourne not far ahead; and Ruffin these ten years and more, using the written word—for the man was no orator—had been a violent advocate of Southern independence. Curious to hear his comments on Brown's enterprise, Faunt watched for Mr. Ruffin's gateway. It was at the crest of a long hill where the road broke down to the Pamunkey bottoms, and Faunt turned aside to call upon the old gentleman.

He lodged there that night. Marlbourne was set a quarter of a mile off the highway, a compact and comfortable frame house with a wide hallway and lofty ceilings and a white-pillared double balcony that looked across the well-drained lowlands toward the trees that marked the river two or three miles away. The house was on a bold bluff perhaps a hundred feet high, with terraced walks and plantings down the
steep slope to the levels below. Mr. Ruffin, a frail little man inches shorter than Faunt, with a wide mouth and curiously gentle deep-set eyes, and long spidery white hair hanging uncut below his shoulders, received him with a gracious hospitality; and these two had, that evening and next morning, long hours of talk. Faunt was the listener, prompting the other with a question now and then.

But Mr. Ruffin had little need of prompting. He was hot with words. “Harper's Ferry, sir? Why, the outrage there is but the beginning—premature, to be sure—of a campaign long prepared. This butcher from Kansas, self-blinded to the universal affection throughout the South between master and slaves, driven by his own hatred, thought he need only sound the tocsin to rouse every slave in that part of Virginia. The Northern papers justify and applaud everything about this invasion of Virginia's sacred soil except its rashness. You will see Massachusetts sending her ablest pleaders to try to avert from these murderers the doom they have earned; the prayers of Northern pulpits will go with them to their shameful graves; yes, they will be canonized as martyrs. Had Brown succeeded in setting the slaves at our throats, the North would have held a jubilee of gladness!”

Faunt thought this unlikely, and he urged: “Not responsible men, surely, sir.”

“If there were men of courage, responsible men, in the North, they would have silenced the abolitionists long ago,” Mr. Ruffin retorted, and he added: “The South should welcome this incursion as proof that the North is ready to support treason, murder, open insurrection, to destroy slavery. Henry Clay and his damnable compromise postponed the inevitable conflict, made our victory more difficult. Had we struck in 1850, there would be two nations on this continent now. But it is not too late. They call me a radical. Well sir, I accept that designation proudly; yes and triumphantly. For me John Brown is the answer to prayer, to the prayer of the Southern radicals that the South awake to its danger.”

He planned, he said, to go at once to Harper's Ferry. “I hope the abolitionists will try a rescue,” he declared. “Let every would-be rescuer be put to death like a rabid wolf. For ten years it has been my holy purpose to reveal the North in its true character; to prepare the South for independence. Now my goal is in sight. It is still necessary
to rouse the people of the South; but John Brown has given me the means. I shall take possession of the pikes with which he intended to arm the negroes and send one to be displayed as an object lesson in every state capital in the South. The way to rouse the people is to play upon their fears, spread rumors of negro bands preparing to attack their homes, fan their anger. Do you know Yancey?” Faunt did not. “He's a useful instrument, an eloquent and powerful public speaker,” the old man said. “Too wordy for my taste, to be sure. I have heard him, full of liquor and obviously so, speak for four hours on end. But he is effective. I used him to start the ‘League of United Southerners.' With that as a nucleus, we can move mountains! If Yancey and the League will but stiffen Alabama into a resolute demand for independence, the Cotton States will follow her.” His eyes burned with a strong fire. “Yancey will control the League; the League will control Alabama; Alabama's leadership will inspire the rest. The lower South, safe against Northern invasion behind the bulwark of the Border States, will erect a new nation, to which one by one the Border States will then adhere.”

Faunt, recognizing the profound sincerity in the other, saw too his unscrupulous readiness to adopt any device to serve his ends. This was a frightening old man. Was he not in his way as mad as John Brown—and more dangerous? He asked quietly: “Would that not mean war, sir, with the North?”

The other said hotly: “So be it! The South can face the prospect without fear. If Northern armies invade our soil, every Southerner of military age will leap to arms, well mounted, to meet them. Leaving our slaves to their labors, we will be free to fight. Victory will be quick and sure.”

They talked, or rather Mr. Ruffin talked and Faunt listened, till late at night; and in the morning the old gentleman was reluctant to let his guest depart. He thrust into Faunt's hands four pamphlets.

“Read them, sir,” he urged. “I wrote them. They have been printed by the thousands at my expense, franked out to every corner of the South by Mr. Hammond, Mr. Mason, and others. Here, for instance, is
The Influence of Slavery, or its Absence, on Manners, Morals and Intellect.
Read it! Do you realize that in the industrial North, fattened by the tariff at the expense of every farmer in the North and in
the South, the farmer has been forced to a life of endless toil, of mental and economic poverty! Only in the South under slavery is the farmer still a gentleman.” He added: “Then here is
The Political Economy of Slavery,
and then
African Colonization Unveiled
and finally,
Slavery and Free Labor Described and Compared.”
He laid the four, with a gesture almost affectionate, in Faunt's hand. “I'm proud of them, sir. I believe you will find them worthy of your closest attention.”

 

When Faunt took the road again, his eyes were grave. Was it conceivable that this sincere, violent, unscrupulous old man—and others like him—could precipitate the whole nation, North and South, into terrible and bloody war? Faunt nodded grimly. Yes, for it was thus that wars were made. Passionate men obsessed with an idea could by long reiteration persuade even the calmest of their fellows to take arms, to attack, to resist, to kill, to die! Ideas were devils, men became possessed, they raced to their own destruction. Mr. Ruffin and such men as he, in the North and in the South, were springs to set in motion forces which once started no man could control.

Profound despondency rode with Faunt on his way across the rolling hills that beyond the Mattapony began to sink into a level plain. The sun was still high when he caught a first glimpse of the Rappahannock still well ahead, and the long blue line of the Northern Neck beyond. He lodged that night in Tappahannock, listening to the talk of the men in the common room, hearing a dozen opinions on the topic that filled every mind. In the morning he boarded the ferry at the end of the long pier for the half-mile crossing. From the ferry landing his road followed firm ground four or five miles along the border of a grassy marsh before he could turn toward Belle Vue; but his horse, sensing journey's end, was eager, and so when Faunt came up from the riverside to higher levels he took a straight course cross-country toward home, delighting in the spring of the muscular body between his knees, avoiding cultivated fields, threading the forest ways.

As he crossed the Tudor lands adjoining his own, he met Judge Tudor and Anne riding together, and stayed to tell them the news from Richmond and to answer the Judge's troubled questions. When he proceeded, Anne turned to ride with him a while, and he found as always pleasure in her company, conscious of her frank affection,
happy because of it. Today, seeing that he was troubled, she matched her mood to his, trying to understand what it was about the violence at Harper's Ferry that so disturbed him.

“Isn't Mr. Brown just crazy, Uncle Faunt?”

He thought of Mr. Ruffin, but he said: “Yes. Violence is a part of him. He had a hand in the Kansas troubles, and one night he and some others took five helpless men from their homes and butchered them.” He said apologetically: “You're young to hear such things, Anne, but I've always talked to you as though you were grown up.”

“I like you to. Papa never treats me like a baby either.”

“The men he killed at Harper's Ferry weren't hurting him,” Faunt explained. “He even shot a negro porter off the train because the poor fellow tried to run away when they told him to halt.”

“What will they do to him?”

“Bring him to orderly trial, I hope. Try him and punish him.”

“Punish him how?”

“Hang him, I suppose.”

“Oh, the poor old man!”

He stared straight ahead. “I'm afraid many people will feel as you do, Anne; will think of him as a poor old man—or as a hero, or a martyr.” And he added: “The abolitionists in the North are already doing so. The Richmond paper yesterday quoted Henry Ward Beecher—and he's a minister—as saying that unless John Brown's act was part of a plot it was madness; but he said that even if John Brown was a plain criminal, slavery was to blame for provoking him to do what he did.”

“Do they have to hang him, Uncle Faunt? Maybe if they didn't, people wouldn't be sorry for him.”

“I don't know whether I can make you understand. Perhaps I don't understand myself. But it seems to me John Brown's not a fact; he's a symbol. He's all the hatred built up between North and South by years of lying, abusive talk on both sides; all that anger and hatred personified in one—well, as you say, in one poor old man. Hanging him will do no good; may do harm. But it won't be men who hang him, you know. It will be the law that he has broken. If you touch a hot stone, you will be burned. That's one kind of law. If you do
murder—and John Brown is a murderer—you will be hanged. That's another kind of law.”