In her heart she had always glorified mother-love. In the days and weeks before the baby's coming she had revelled in the dreams of motherhood, and her heart had been overcharged with love and visions of it.
But this little fellow was not the baby of her dreams. Never in all the hundred varied pictures her heart had painted had there been a child like him. He was not of her mind, surely; and vaguely uneasy and distressed was she that he was not of her kind. Nervously she swung between the moments when pent-up mother-love swept away all questions and poured itself out upon her little son in fullness of tenderness, and the other moments of revulsion when she could not coerce her rebellious spirit.
Feverishly in the doubting moments would she repeat over and over her father's brief words of assurance. Hungrily had she awaited them before he had come to look upon the boy, greedily had she seized upon them when he had pronounced a favourable judgment, and longingly she wished now that he could come back to reinforce them and reassure her faint confidence that all was well. Not finding a sufficient volume of testimony in the few words he had spoken in that last interview, she supplemented them with all she could recall of everything she had ever heard him say about the excellence of the negro race, and added to that all the nurse had to say of the proverbial uncomeliness and possibilities of phenomenal "come out" in very young babies: and for days her pitiful daily mental task was to lie with closed eyes and interminably to construct and reconstruct of these things an argument to prop up her ever-wavering faith.
* * * * *
Hayward Graham was a man of too much intelligence not to see the uncertainty of his wife's attitude toward the boy. He was of too much white blood in his own veins not to have suffered measurably the same torments because of the baby's recession in type. What Mr. Phillips had said of it, he did not know, and dared not ask Helen. In all kindliness of purpose he encouraged her to believe The Yellow's theory that her father's heart had broken under defeat. He did not know that she was agonizingly fearful of having contributed to that defeat.
* * * * *
Helen was rummaging through her father's desk in the library. With the first escape from the prison-house of her bedroom, her feet had turned instinctively toward the workshop which had been the scene of Mr. Phillips' labours at Hill-Top, and the scene also of much that had been joyous in her association with him. But even as she idly tumbled the odds and ends of papers about—in solemn and fascinated inspection, for that they seemed in a way to breathe his spirit and to invoke his presence—the undercurrent of her mind was busy as ever with its never-ending task.
She turned up a small package of notes marked "Cincinnati speech," and examined them absent-mindedly; but found nothing that caught her interest. Tossing them back in the desk, she picked up a letter addressed to her father in her own hand. She recognized a rambling and rollicking message she had sent to him more than a year before. From the appearance of the envelope she judged that he must have carried it in his pocket awhile. She had a little cry when she came to the characteristic closing sentence: "Daddy, I want to see you so bad." That had been a simple message of love. Now it was the cry of her heart's loneliness and need.
* * * * *
Dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief, she pulled out from the bottom of the drawer an unbound section of the Congressional Record, from which protruded a slip of paper. Opening it at this marker, she saw a blue pencil-mark which indicated the beginning of a speech before the Senate by Mr. Rutledge. Half-way down the second column her father had made the marginal comment "good." Further along was a blue cross without explanatory note. Still further, "very good." With such commendations in her father's own words she began to read what Mr. Rutledge had to say.... For a short space she noticed her father's occasional marginal notes, favourable or critical, and the more frequent non-committal blue cross. It appeared that he had contemplated preparing an answer of some sort. Very soon Helen became so interested that she saw only the text.
* * * * *
With faster beating heart and breath that came more irregularly she was drawn irresistibly along. It was an answer to her soul's cry for a word; and whether true or false, welcome or unwelcome, she could not but listen to that answer with quickening pulse as it ran hurriedly under her eyes. Long before she reached the end her anger was ablaze and her fears a-tremble, but she could not throw the speech from her unfinished. Almost in a frenzy of excitement and resentment she rushed along to the very last word: and with a gasping cry of horror and wrath grabbed at the desk-drawer with the intention to hurl the pamphlet viciously back into it. She caught the slide instead, and pulled that out with a jerk. Lying on the slide was a telegraph envelope which her violence threw on the floor. With another impatient trial she slammed the pamphlet into the drawer, and mechanically picked up the telegram.
It was addressed to "The President, Hill-Top." Turning it over to take out the message, she found it sealed. Instinctively she hesitated a moment, long enough for the question to come, "Why is it unopened?" Then she tore the end off the envelope.
The message read, "We are moving heaven and earth but the forces of evil are too many for us. First ballot to-morrow," and was signed by Mr. Mackenzie.
She read it over and over, stupidly at first, for her mind was excited by other things. Then the meaning of it began to be appreciated, and her heart sank. Confirmation of the newspaper story! The telegram had been sent! And her father had been defeated, and death alone had saved him from the damning ballot! Defeated, yes, really defeated!—and she had contributed, if only a mite, to that defeat which broke his heart! Guilty—guilty! She bowed her head in grief and agonized self-condemnation....
But no:—she started up—the telegram! He had not read it! Had he read it?—she caught up the envelope and examined it feverishly.... It could not have been opened—it had not been opened! He had not read it—he did not know! He had not known of his defeat—he had not died of his defeat—and she had not helped to send him to his death! Oh the joy of this acquittal!—and she held the envelope as one under sentence might clasp a reprieve, and almost caressed it as she made sure of its testimony in her behalf.
When she had assured herself that the envelope had not been opened, the burden upon her heart would have been lifted entirely if the telegram had not confirmed the fact of his defeat. He had not died because of defeat, and she was acquitted therefore of his death, yet she was acutely sensible of the fact that he had gone to his grave in the shadow of defeat, and that death alone had saved him from the shameful actuality.
This was gall and wormwood to her, for his name could never be flung free of that shadow. The very time and manner of his going-out had fixed failure eternally upon him. Oh why, her heart cried, could he not have died before or lived beyond it? Why had he died then? Mr. Mackenzie might have been mistaken, or the sentiment might have changed with the balloting, victory have come out of defeat and his fame have been without a cloud upon it. Oh, why had he not lived?—lived to outlive that one reverse—lived to overwhelm his enemies in another trial, lived to put those hateful Southern delegates again under heel? Why had he died so inopportunely? ... Why had he died at all? ... Why had he died? ... How could death have taken him so quickly and so unawares? He had gone briskly out of her room with the promise on his lips to hurry back. He had kissed the baby and said it looked like her.... Yes, said it looked like her—the baby—
Hurriedly she snatched the Congressional Record out of the drawer into which she had angrily flung it! Breathlessly she turned the pages to see what comment he had made upon that last part of Rutledge's speech.
Mr. Phillips had put but one marginal note against all that fearful presentation. Opposite the words, "when the blood of your daughter ... is mixed with that of one of this race, however 'risen,' redolent of newly applied polish," etc., Helen saw the single written word, "unthinkable."
Unthinkable! Quickly she searched again that portion of the speech that had given supreme offence—and found nothing. Nothing beside the word "unthinkable." No denial had her father entered that "vile unknown ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart" by such unions as hers. No hint of his thought as to a "mongrel progeny." No answer to the question, "How shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment...?" A free expression, critical or approving, of the first half of the speech; but silence, an awful silence, when it comes to this part so pertinent to her situation. Silence!—for the reason that her situation is UNTHINKABLE!
In an illuminating flash she sees the Truth—sees all the minute incidents of the past months, the looks, the gestures, the things unsaid, which, unnoted by her at the time, were yet registered in her subconsciousness, and which make so plain, now that she reads them aright, all her father's thoughts and sufferings and sacrifice from the moment when he had cried, "But a negro, Helen! How could you!" until the time he had rushed away after kissing her negro baby—rushed away to die! .... She knew! ... Despoiled herself!—polluted her blood beyond cleansing!—brought to life a mongrel fright, and brought to death her father!—with a scream of horror she staggered to her feet.... At the door she met the nurse, who was hurrying to her, still holding in her arms the baby whom she had not tarried to put down.
"Take it away! Take it away!" shrieked Helen, pushing it from her so violently as to hurl it from the nurse's arms, and staggered on through the hall, out the door, and down the path toward the lake.