The Colonel's Dream Page 32

  _Thirty-two_

  Meanwhile the colonel, forgetting his own hurt, hovered, with severalphysicians, among them Doctor Price, around the bedside of his child.The slight cut upon the head, the physicians declared, was not, ofitself, sufficient to account for the rapid sinking which set inshortly after the boy's removal to the house. There had evidently beensome internal injury, the nature of which could not be ascertained.Phil remained unconscious for several hours, but toward the end of theday opened his blue eyes and fixed them upon his father, who wassitting by the bedside.

  "Papa," he said, "am I going to die?"

  "No, no, Phil," said his father hopefully. "You are going to get wellin a few days, I hope."

  Phil was silent for a moment, and looked around him curiously. He gaveno sign of being in pain.

  "Is Miss Laura here?"

  "Yes, Phil, she's in the next room, and will be here in a moment."

  At that instant Miss Laura came in and kissed him. The caress gave himpleasure, and he smiled sweetly in return.

  "Papa, was Uncle Peter hurt?"

  "Yes, Phil."

  "Where is he, papa? Was he hurt badly?"

  "He is lying in another room, Phil, but he is not in any pain."

  "Papa," said Phil, after a pause, "if I should die, and if Uncle Petershould die, you'll remember your promise and bury him near me, won'tyou, dear?"

  "Yes, Phil," he said, "but you are not going to die!"

  But Phil died, dozing off into a peaceful sleep in which he passedquietly away with a smile upon his face.

  It required all the father's fortitude to sustain the blow, with theadded agony of self-reproach that he himself had been unwittingly thecause of it. Had he not sent old Peter into the house, the child wouldnot have been left alone. Had he kept his eye upon Phil until Peter'sreturn the child would not have strayed away. He had neglected hischild, while the bruised and broken old black man in the room belowhad given his life to save him. He could do nothing now to show thechild his love or Peter his gratitude, and the old man had neitherwife nor child in whom the colonel's bounty might find an object. Buthe would do what he could. He would lay his child's body in the oldfamily lot in the cemetery, among the bones of his ancestors, andthere too, close at hand, old Peter should have honourable sepulture.It was his due, and would be the fulfilment of little Phil's lastrequest.

  The child was laid out in the parlour, amid a mass of flowers. MissLaura, for love of him and of the colonel, with her own hands preparedhis little body for the last sleep. The undertaker, who hoveredaround, wished, with a conventional sense of fitness, to remove oldPeter's body to a back room. But the colonel said no.

  "They died together; together they shall lie here, and they shall beburied together."

  He gave instructions as to the location of the graves in the cemeterylot. The undertaker looked thoughtful.

  "I hope, sir," said the undertaker, "there will be no objection. It'snot customary--there's a coloured graveyard--you might put up a nicetombstone there--and you've been away from here a long time, sir."

  "If any one objects," said the colonel, "send him to me. The lot ismine, and I shall do with it as I like. My great-great-grandfathergave the cemetery to the town. Old Peter's skin was black, but hisheart was white as any man's! And when a man reaches the grave, he isnot far from God, who is no respecter of persons, and in whosepresence, on the judgment day, many a white man shall be black, andmany a black man white."

  The funeral was set for the following afternoon. The graves were to bedug in the morning. The undertaker, whose business was dependent uponpublic favour, and who therefore shrank from any step which mightaffect his own popularity, let it be quietly known that Colonel Frenchhad given directions to bury Peter in Oak Cemetery.

  It was inevitable that there should be some question raised about sonovel a proceeding. The colour line in Clarendon, as in all Southerntowns, was, on the surface at least, rigidly drawn, and extended fromthe cradle to the grave. No Negro's body had ever profaned the sacredsoil of Oak Cemetery. The protestants laid the matter before theCemetery trustees, and a private meeting was called in the evening toconsider the proposed interment.

  White and black worshipped the same God, in different churches. Therehad been a time when coloured people filled the galleries of the whitechurches, and white ladies had instilled into black children theprinciples of religion and good morals. But as white and black hadgrown nearer to each other in condition, they had grown farther apartin feeling. It was difficult for the poor lady, for instance, topatronise the children of the well-to-do Negro or mulatto; nor was thelatter inclined to look up to white people who had started, in hismemory, from a position but little higher than his own. In an era ofchange, the benefits gained thereby seemed scarcely to offset thedifficulties of readjustment.

  The situation was complicated by a sense of injury on both sides.Cherishing their theoretical equality of citizenship, which they couldneither enforce nor forget, the Negroes resented, noisly or silently,as prudence dictated, its contemptuous denial by the whites; andthese, viewing this shadowy equality as an insult to themselves, hadsought by all the machinery of local law to emphasise and perpetuatetheir own superiority. The very word "equality" was an offence.Society went back to Egypt and India for its models; to break castewas a greater sin than to break any or all of the ten commandments.White and coloured children studied the same books in differentschools. White and black people rode on the same trains in separatecars. Living side by side, and meeting day by day, the law, made andadministered by white men, had built a wall between them.

  And white and black buried their dead in separate graveyards. Notuntil they reached God's presence could they stand side by side in anyrelation of equality. There was a Negro graveyard in Clarendon, where,as a matter of course the coloured dead were buried. It was not anideal locality. The land was low and swampy, and graves must be usedquickly, ere the water collected in them. The graveyard was unfenced,and vagrant cattle browsed upon its rank herbage. The embankment ofthe railroad encroached upon one side of it, and the passing enginessifted cinders and ashes over the graves. But no Negro had everthought of burying his dead elsewhere, and if their cemetery was notwell kept up, whose fault was it but their own?

  The proposition, therefore, of a white man, even of Colonel French'sstanding, to bury a Negro in Oak Cemetery, was bound to occasioncomment, if nothing more. There was indeed more. Several citizensobjected to the profanation, and laid their protest before the mayor,who quietly called a meeting of the board of cemetery trustees, ofwhich he was the chairman.

  The trustees were five in number. The board, with the single exceptionof the mayor, was self-perpetuating, and the members had been chosen,as vacancies occurred by death, at long intervals, from among thearistocracy, who had always controlled it. The mayor, a member andchairman of the board by virtue of his office, had sprung from thesame class as Fetters, that of the aspiring poor whites, who, freedfrom the moral incubus of slavery, had by force of numbers andambition secured political control of the State and relegated not onlythe Negroes, but the old master class, to political obscurity. Ashrewd, capable man was the mayor, who despised Negroes and distrustedaristocrats, and had the courage of his convictions. He represented inthe meeting the protesting element of the community.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "Colonel French has ordered this Negro to beburied in Oak Cemetery. We all appreciate the colonel's worth, andwhat he is doing for the town. But he has lived at the North for manyyears, and has got somewhat out of our way of thinking. We do not wantto buy the prosperity of this town at the price of our principles. Theattitude of the white people on the Negro question is fixed anddetermined for all time, and nothing can ever alter it. To bury thisNegro in Oak Cemetery is against our principles."

  "The mayor's statement of the rule is quite correct," replied oldGeneral Thornton, a member of the board, "and not open to question.But all rules have their exceptions. It was against the law, for someyears before the wa
r, to manumit a slave; but an exception to thatsalutary rule was made in case a Negro should render some greatservice to the State or the community. You will recall that when, in asister State, a Negro climbed the steep roof of St. Michael's churchand at the risk of his own life saved that historic structure, thepride of Charleston, from destruction by fire, the muncipality grantedhim his freedom."

  "And we all remember," said Mr. Darden, another of the trustees, "weall remember, at least I'm sure General Thornton does, old Sally, whoused to belong to the McRae family, and was a member of thePresbyterian Church, and who, because of her age and infirmities--shewas hard of hearing and too old to climb the stairs to thegallery--was given a seat in front of the pulpit, on the main floor."

  "That was all very well," replied the mayor, stoutly, "when theNegroes belonged to you, and never questioned your authority. Buttimes are different now. They think themselves as good as we are. Wehad them pretty well in hand until Colonel French came around, withhis schools, and his high wages, and now they are getting so fat andsassy that there'll soon be no living with them. The last election didsomething, but we'll have to do something more, and that soon, to keepthem in their places. There's one in jail now, alive, who has shot anddisfigured and nearly killed two good white men, and such an exampleof social equality as burying one in a white graveyard will demoralisethem still further. We must preserve the purity and prestige of ourrace, and we can only do it by keeping the Negroes down."

  "After all," said another member, "the purity of our race is not aptto suffer very seriously from the social equality of a graveyard."

  "And old Peter will be pretty effectually kept down, wherever he isburied," added another.

  These sallies provoked a smile which lightened the tension. A membersuggested that Colonel French be sent for.

  "It seems a pity to disturb him in his grief," said another.

  "It's only a couple of squares," suggested another. "Let's call in abody and pay our respects. We can bring up the matter incidentally,while there."

  The muscles of the mayor's chin hardened.

  "Colonel French has never been at my house," he said, "and I shouldn'tcare to seem to intrude."

  "Come on, mayor," said Mr. Darden, taking the official by the arm,"these fine distinctions are not becoming in the presence of death.The colonel will be glad to see you."

  The mayor could not resist this mark of intimacy on the part of one ofthe old aristocracy, and walked somewhat proudly through the streetarm in arm with Mr. Darden. They paid their respects to the colonel,who was bearing up, with the composure to be expected of a man ofstrong will and forceful character, under a grief of which he wasexquisitely sensible. Touched by a strong man's emotion, which nothingcould conceal, no one had the heart to mention, in the presence of thedead, the object of their visit, and they went away without giving thecolonel any inkling that his course had been seriously criticised. Norwas the meeting resumed after they left the house, even the mayorseeming content to let the matter go by default.