House Divided (20 page)

Cinda looked at Enid. “Did you and Trav do all those things?”

“Heavens, no! Trav used to spend most of his time with—” Enid
hesitated, looking at Tony; but her tone was still scornful. “With people like Ed Blandy; but of course we never went to any of their doings.” She felt in Tony and in Cinda too a withdrawal, an unspoken criticism; and suddenly she was angry. “I don't see how you can stand them, Tony; all that—trash!”

His eyes hardened; when he spoke there was derision in his tone. “What do you hear from your mother?” It was as though he warned her to curb her tongue. She felt Cinda's inquiring glance, and she spoke quickly.

“Oh, she's fine!” Then, to appease him: “I expect I'd have liked them too if I'd known them; but we never went to their doings. Trav always wanted to stay at home and go to bed!” Flatteringly she added: “I declare I just don't understand a thing about politics, Cousin Tony. You'll have to explain it all to me.” She took the first means she found to avert his tongue from her mother. If Cinda ever guessed that Tony and her mother—Enid shivered with terror at the thought, and her eager, charmingly innocent questions kept Tony in play. If men liked to talk about politics, she must learn to talk too, or at least listen; but it was all so confusing. Apparently everybody hated that old Abe Lincoln, and some of the Democrats were for a man named Bell, and some were for Senator Douglas, and the Convention here in Richmond was going to nominate Mr. Breckenridge. Tony seemed to think it a mistake to have so many different candidates against Lincoln, and Enid protested:

“But I should think three men could beat him easier than one, Cousin Tony.”

He smiled at her innocence. “They might if they all got together. The trouble is they won't. John Bell proposed that all three of them withdraw and unite on someone else, but Mr. Douglas wouldn't do it. So now they'll each beat the others—and let Lincoln win.”

“Why, I think that's awfully silly, if what they want is to beat him!”

“Men do some mighty foolish things.”

 

After the Convention finished its business Enid thought Faunt would at last pay her some attention; but he left at once for Belle Vue. She reminded him in pretty reproach that they had as yet done none of the things he had promised they would do together; but he said he
must go home for a week or two. “Perhaps you'll still be here when I return.”

When he departed, Tony went with him. They would go first to Great Oak, but Tony proposed to proceed from there to Washington. He said he went to see what men in the Capital thought about the campaign, but Enid suspected him of planning to call upon her mother.

Her visit had already been a long one, but she stayed on in Richmond. Faunt was gone and Brett was much too absorbed in something or other to pay her any attention, and Burr spent most of his time with his father or calling on Barbara Pierce, and Vesta had many friends, so Enid was left much alone with Cinda. She remembered Darrell. He had been amusing at Great Oak, and presumably he was in Richmond. “Do you ever see Tilda?” she asked one day, Darrell in her mind.

“Oh, yes,” Cinda said. “But she and Dolly haven't dared face me since that awful business at the Plains.” Enid had heard nothing of this, and her questions flew, and Cinda answered guardedly. “The less said about it, the better,” she declared. “Dolly's conceited enough as it is, without having men fighting over her.”

“Oh, I won't say a word,” Enid vowed; but at her insistence they did go to Tilda's to call, and Enid in an itch of curiosity tried to lead Tilda and Dolly to talk about that fatal picnic at Muster Spring. Cinda's presence and her grim silence kept them silent, too; but thereafter Enid came again, alone, and easily led Dolly to tell her the story. Dolly masked her demure complacency behind many protestations.

“It was simply terrible. I think men are just perfectly ridiculous, Aunt Enid, don't you?”

Enid agreed that they certainly were. She and Dolly fell easily into a surface friendship; and Darrell, happening to come home while Enid was there, joined them, flattering Enid with easy compliments. At his suggestion they strolled over to Pizzini's for an ice, and one of Dolly's many swains joined them, so Darrell escorted Enid back to Fifth Street. She was sparkling with happiness.

“It's been just the nicest time I've had since I came to Richmond, Dal. Thank you kindly.”

He bowed. “A pleasure, ma'am. Now I shall have to answer many questions about Richmond's newest belle.”

Enid blushed and protested that he mustn't make fun of an old married woman, and invited him in; but he said good-by at the door.

 

In her room Enid found a letter from Trav suggesting that she come home; but of course that was ridiculous when she was having such a good time. “He wanted me to come back to Great Oak. But I just told him I was going to stay till he came up to get me,” she confessed to Cinda. “I'm going to make him put himself out for once, if it's the last thing I do!” She added: “Of course I'll go on home if I'm too much bother to you?”

Cinda said politely that she must stay as long as she chose, and Enid stayed till at last Trav surrendered and came to fetch her. He reached Richmond on a Saturday, would stay over Sunday; and Sunday morning, as they were all about to start to church, Faunt and Tony rode up to the door. Enid, when they appeared, was nearest. She cried out a glad welcome and kissed Faunt, and then because some sense of guilt made it seem necessary to do so, she kissed Tony too. She proposed they all stay home from church, but found herself overruled; and all through the service she was furious because she had not pleaded a headache. Trav meant to take her away to Great Oak tomorrow; she would see hardly anything of Faunt at all!

She had, in fact, no moment with him alone. At dinner they were all together, and immediately afterward Mr. Streean and Tilda—having learned at church of Tony's return from Washington—came to hear what he could report. So Enid had to listen rebelliously to hours of tedious talk; but she listened most of all to Faunt, and to him her eyes constantly returned.

Tony thought Lincoln would be beaten. “Even the Republicans are ashamed of themselves for nominating him,” he explained. “Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts made a speech in Congress about the great Republican party, and the Republicans have printed the speech and spread it all over the country—but it doesn't even mention Abe Lincoln's name!” He had brought home a book prepared for use in the campaign. “This is his biography, and some of his speeches, and there's enough right in this book to make anyone vote against him. I'll read you some of the things it says.”

“Oh, do you have to?” Enid protested. “I'm awfully tired of politics.”
But no one answered her, watching Tony as he turned the pages.

“It's written by a man named Howells—W. D. Howells. It starts off with Lincoln's ancestors.” He grinned. “If he had any. They don't seem to be sure.” He read: “‘It is necessary that every American should have an indisputable grandfather——' ”

“‘Indisputable'?” Brett echoed, amused. “That's a modest word. Of course, I've known men who didn't even have an indisputable father, but those men weren't running for President of the United States!”

Tony went on. “This book admits there's an ‘extremely embarrassing uncertainty' about Lincoln's great-grandparents, says it's ‘not very profitable' to try to trace his ancestry.”

Cinda uttered an incredulous exclamation. “You mean to say that book's put out by Lincoln's friends?”

“Yes.”

“Heavens! If that's the best his friends can do, what will his enemies say?”

Tony chuckled. “Of course I'm just reading the funniest parts. They did dig up a grandfather for him.” He read: “‘His grandfather (anterior to whom is incertitude)——'”

Their laughter checked him; but Faunt said thoughtfully: “All the same, lots of us, even our FFV's, are in the same position if the truth were known. Anterior to the grandfathers of a good many of us there is incertitude.”

“Nonsense!” Cinda protested; but he shook his head.

“Not at all,” he assured her. “Studying such things is one of the ways I spend my days at Belle Vue. Many of the fine Virginia families of today were founded by a grandfather or a great-grandfather like ours, by men who became big land owners simply through a superior ability to meet and master wilderness conditions. We like to think of ourselves as cavaliers, but there were mighty few aristocrats among the early settlers, even in Virginia. After all, the dandy who shone at court in London wouldn't choose to come out here and starve and freeze in a log cabin; and if he did come, unless he went to work and worked harder than his neighbors, he soon found himself left behind by the procession.”

Enid watched Faunt and thought how wonderful he was. He went on: “Outside of a few families, most of the best-known Virginia names
don't go back very far beyond the Revolution. The aristocrats of colonial days were usually Tories, so when the King's troops were expelled, they went along. Our grandfathers who stayed behind had to pull themselves up out of the ruck by their own boot straps.”

“Well, I simply don't believe it,” Cinda declared. “There's everything in having a fine inheritance. Why, Faunt, you wouldn't ride a horse that wasn't well bred!”

Faunt smiled, and Enid loved his smile, loved the way he now and then caught her eye as though to assure her she had a part in this conversation. “I value the sort of grandfathers most of us Virginians really had,” he remarked. “They were men who knew how to work and win their way. I value them above the sort of grandfathers most of us like to think we had.”

Redford Streean took the Lincoln biography from Tony's hands, leafing through the pages; and Brett Dewain said reasonably:

“You're overlooking the intangibles, Faunt, aren't you? Pride in our ancestry is often a source of virtue in us. We behave ourselves because we feel that to do so is expected of us, that courtesy and a sense of honor and an acceptance of responsibility are the traditions of our families. You'd better not take that away from us. A lot of us—if we were ever convinced that our grandfathers had been rascals—might readily enough turn to rascally ways ourselves.”

“Yes,” Faunt assented, and he smiled. “Yes, it's probably good for us to believe that Grandfather Currain, and presumably all the Courdains before him, were high-minded gentlemen!”

“Exactly!” Cinda agreed. “Because we think we're fine people, we try to behave in fine ways.”

Streean looked up from the book. “Speaking of Virginia grandfathers,” he said, “Lincoln had one, too. His grandfather migrated from Virginia to Kentucky and the Indians shot him.”

“Too bad they didn't shoot him sooner!” Cinda's dry comment amused them all.

“His father's name was Tom Lincoln,” Streean told them. “Tom married a girl named Lucy Hanks.”
¹
Enid was struck by the familiar
name. Her own daughter's name was Lucy, and so was Mrs. Currain's; and Enid remembered that there had been another Lucy whom Mr. Currain loved long ago, and she fell to wondering about that other Lucy. If Mr. Currain had married her, instead of letting her father take her off to Kentucky, then he would never have married Mrs. Currain; and these children of his here talking together would never have been born at all. She thought maliciously that if Tony and Tilda had never been born, no one would miss them; nor Trav, if it came to that. Cinda was rather nice, though Enid was sometimes a little afraid of her, but of them all, Faunt was the only one who would be any real loss. It was a delight just to watch him move, to see the way his head turned toward anyone who spoke, to hear his quiet voice, to see how respectfully they all attended when he said anything.

When she began to listen again, Streean was speaking. “Abe's father was a squatter, never stayed long in one place. He went from Kentucky to Indiana.” He laughed at something on the page under his eye. “It says here that he wasn't much good as a hunter, never even learned to shoot. Then his father moved on to Illinois, and Abe began to split rails.”

Faunt said in regretful tones: “Brett, the best men in the South have always gone into politics; but if the Government is to fall into the hands of such riffraff as this, the halls of Congress will no longer be tolerable for gentlemen.” Why couldn't Trav be like Faunt, instead of sitting stupidly half-asleep, with never a word to say? Faunt added almost sadly: “And a nation dominated by such uneducated, graceless bumpkins can never command Virginia's loyalty.”

“Yet Virginia will go a long way to avoid disunion,” Brett predicted. Then Streean chuckled at something he read and said in amused derision:

“Here, this is worth hearing. It seems there were some bullies in his neighborhood called the Clary's Grove boys, and Lincoln got into a wrestling match with one of them, and was winning, but the other fellow's friends pitched in, so Lincoln gave up, said he couldn't fight them all. Now here's the funny part!” He read: “‘This gave him a reputation for courage——'”

“Courage?” Cinda cried. “To quit just because the odds were against him! Is that what the North calls courage?”

Tony took the book from Streean. “Let me find you some of the things he's said in his speeches about slavery,” he suggested. “Here.” He read: “‘I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republic of its just influence in the world, and enables our enemies to taunt us as hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.'”

There was a moment's thoughtful silence. Then Faunt commented: “Well, there's some truth in that. Our having slaves has lost us a lot of friends. And we all know slavery's wrong.”