I: October 29, 1860

“I’ll introduce you. Later.”

“It will be a privilege, ma’am, to meet any granddaughter of yours,” he assured her gallantly, and they laughed together, without much reason but with understanding, like old friends. Eden, catching sight of it from across the room thought, There, Gran’s done it—Gran’s got the kinks out of him—

I knew it could be done, thought Eden, behind the tea-urn—I wonder what she said to make him look so unbent—if ever he looks like that with me, Eden thought, I shall be past praying for. “In fact,” he was saying to her grandmother, so that nobody else in the room could hear, “if ever I found a girl I could be absolutely certain would be just like you all her life long—

I’d throw up my hands and surrender so fast it would make her head swim!”

“I fancy it would, at that.” Tibby Day’s gaze travelled slowly from the top of his crisp black head to his well-polished boots and back to his bold, waiting eyes—he was so confident of the verdict as to be almost indifferent to the form it took; so accustomed to feminine appraisal as to be almost impudent under it, no matter, whose. “All the same, it’s a job I’d think more than twice about taking on, myself,” she decided. “At any age.”

“Are you refusing me, ma’am?” he inquired, grinning.

“Regretfully,” she nodded, well pleased with him. “But quite finally. It will be useless to ask me again.”

He leaned towards her, as though she was the only woman in the room, in the whole world.

“Why don’t they make ’em like you any more?” he asked, very low.

“My dear child, the room is full of women like me,” she told him, choosing her words with care. “Only not so old.”

“You lie in your teeth,” he said deliberately. “And you know it.”

Well, at least he had stayed out in the open this time. At least she had another try coming.

“Who raised you?” she asked recklessly.

“My father.”

Apparently it was the wrong thing to ask, for he looked away from her, rocky and withheld, watching the people who chatted in groups round the

refreshment tables. She thought she saw his eyes catch Eden’s and pass on without recognition; with, in fact, a monstrous indifference.

“I understand your father was a West Point man,” she insisted wilfully.

“Did you go there too?”

“I went to Princeton. I wanted a year at Oxford, but that was out of bounds. I was allowed three months to see the world after I graduated.” He shot her a dark, resentful glance, as though she had been to blame. “It’s not long enough,” he said.

“You went abroad.” She was still groping.

“For three whole months!” His lips were scornful. “Then my funds were cut off and I had to get home as best I could.”

“How was that?”

“I shipped from Liverpool as an able seaman.”

“You mean your father took that way of forcing you to return? He sounds a hard man.”

“There’s no love lost between us,” he said briefly.

“Still, three months abroad is more than I ever had,” she sighed, and he turned to her with a smile.

“I’ve got money of my own now. Let’s elope.”

“If you’d asked me thirty years ago—”

“Don’t rub that in!” he interrupted almost roughly.

“Talking to you is like blind man’s buff,” she remarked. “One never knows what one will lay hold of next.”

“I suppose it’s time I apologized for my manners. I usually have to, sooner or later.”

“It is not your manners I object to, Mr. Murray, it is what they are supposed to conceal.”

Just at that point the Creswells came up to take their leave of her, and Cabot Murray rose and stood beside her chair, jealously, while they did so.

Then he sat down again, drawing his chair still closer to hers. But he did not reopen the conversation, and she was sure that he was covertly watching Eden, who had risen and was moving among the guests with Grafton Crabb at her side.

“Where were we?” Tibby Day asked at last, gently nudging his attention back to herself.

“You were saying that I myself am even worse than my manners,” he reminded her, without even turning his head.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she objected meekly. “I think you are very nice indeed—when you let yourself go.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I have been called many things by your sex before now, but I don’t recollect that a lady has ever told me that I was nice!”

“You are much too young, it seems to me, to be so—embittered.”

That drew him.

“I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

She thought of Julian at twenty-seven—the summer she said goodbye to him on the bridge at Queen’s Creek Landing before he went away to the war. Odd how the years closed up as she grew older, so that Julian at twenty-seven seemed clearer to her than Julian at seventy-two, when he died. She remembered every detail of that evening at the Landing—the fireflies and the peepers, and the size of him in her unaccustomed arms, and the scent of the pomade on his hair—she had said him a bit of the Ninety-third Psalm— For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways….

“You are thinking of your husband,” Cabot Murray said unexpectedly.

“What was he like, at my age?”

“As tall as you,” she said, looking back, “but narrower. Thoughtful, but not—disillusioned. Easier to talk to—gentle with children—”

“I don’t as a rule trample children under foot,” he said, nettled.

“But you wouldn’t know how to talk to them.”

“How do you know? Hey, missy—” He reached a long arm and caught Myrta by the sash. “Come and protect me, your grandmother is tearing me to shreds.”

“What did you do?” asked the logical Myrta with interest.

“Not a thing. I’m just sitting here, a harmless guest under her roof, minding my own business and paying her compliments in my clumsy Yankee way—and whang! she went for me like a chicken hawk!”

“Did you criticize Eden?” Myrta inquired shrewdly. “Gran won’t ever stand for that.”

“On the contrary, I am willing to go on record that I think Miss Eden is a most attractive young lady.”

“Gran won’t let you marry her either,” Myrta warned him. “Not if Eden would have to go up North to live.”

“Well, now, whoa, is it all right if I just go on admiring her from a safe distance?”

Myrta considered him a wit.

“I should think Eden would hate that, though!” she said through giggles.

“If anybody was admiring her she would want to know!”

“God in heaven, femininity starts early!” Cabot Murray’s mouth went wry. “I beg your pardon, missy, that is exactly the sort of thing your grandmother was objecting to.”

“Oh, I’m used to swearing,” Myrta said, to put him at his ease. “Uncle Lafe does. Shall I tell Eden you’re admiring her?”

“By all means. And make sure that the gentleman on her left hears you.”

Myrta was again convulsed with giggles, and withdrew importantly on her mission.

“Myrta is not my favourite grandchild,” remarked Tibby Day into a silence. “I don’t recall that Eden was ever so silly.”

“I have a sister about that age,” he said unsentimentally. “They’re all pretty much alike, I guess—at an age.”

She rejected in quick succession several things she would have liked to say regarding cheap cynicism and the sort of remarks he should have outgrown by now—after all, he had spoken to Myrta as an equal, which is the right way to speak to children. Myrta was obviously taken with him.

“It occurred to me to wonder,” she began, elaborately circuitous, “how you happened to meet Sally.”

“Coming out of church. With the Ewells.”

“Ah!” It was a little crow of satisfaction, but he seemed not to notice.

“Who is that fellow?” he demanded, tacitly confessing that his eyes and his thoughts dwelt on Eden.

“Grafton Crabb.”

“Any good?”

“The Crabbs have always been rich as Jews. His father was in the Legislature at Richmond—died last year. The pretty girl in yellow is his sister Charlotte, and his mother is just beyond. They have a big house in Richmond and a family place here, and the children grew up with ours.”

“Money, eh! Slaves too, I suppose—hundreds.”

“None at all.”

“What? Are they Abolitionists?” He said the word with loathing.

“Oh, no. His grandfather freed all his slaves by his Will, just as my own husband did. It makes very little difference to the darkies, of course, except that it’s likely to hurt their feelings. They go right on living in the quarters, unless you turn them out, but nobody does that.”

“Then—these girls here—?” He indicated the two white-turbaned maids who were serving the guests under the Negro butler’s direction. “They’re not slaves?”

“All our servants,” she told him with a faint stress on the word, “are free.”

“I knew that a few people like George Wythe had freed their slaves, of course. But I didn’t realize it was a general practice.”

“Mr. Wythe impoverished himself to give each freedman a competence.

When St. John Sprague inherited his wife’s property, the plantation called Farthingale, he gave all the servants the ownership of their cabins and enough land to make a living on—and then soon found he couldn’t afford to keep the big house going for even part of the year. So Farthingale is closed, except for a caretaker, and as a consequence none of the darkies on the place now is living as comfortably, and certainly not as merrily, as when they were beholden to the Spragues for everything.”

“That’s very interesting.” She had caught his attention in a different way

—keen, impersonal, searching attention—all insolence, all languor, all mockery had left him. His questions came like a lawyer’s, quick, crackling, boring towards the facts. “You don’t think, then, that freedom betters the lot of the slaves?”

“I think in most cases it worsens it.”

“How?”

“They don’t understand it, you know. The first thing a darky says when he is told that he is free is, ‘Do I have to?’ And the second is, ‘Who gwine take care of me now?’ It robs them of their childlike pride of belonging in

—they wouldn’t say to—a beloved household. And it imposes a far greater financial strain on their masters, with exactly the same obligations, to feed and clothe and doctor them. Darkies take no joy in shifting for themselves, and they are terrified at the idea that they might be sent back to Africa. All

they want, as a rule, is to be allowed to stay on as they are, in spite of being free.”

“That presupposes that they are happy in their masters, of course,” he put in. “Have you, personally, ever known of cruelty to slaves here in Williamsburg?”

“A few instances—mostly dealt with very promptly by public opinion.

In most households there is an unwritten law that no servant shall be whipped.”

“But further south—in the Cotton States?”

“Ah, well—there you have a different situation. Two, in fact. The labour down there is largely gang labour in the fields—and the majority of slaves are field niggers, many of them half wild.”

“I realize that—yes. Go on,” he urged.

“Secondly, the white population in the Cotton States is mostly very come-by-chance—Northerners, of the wrong sort, out to get rich quick in cotton—or people from other parts of the South who have made a mistake at home and had to leave.”

“Well!” he said triumphantly. “For the first time since I came south of the Mason-Dixon Line I have got a simple answer to a simple question!

May I come back and talk to you about this, some other day?”

“Certainly. I don’t say my ideas aren’t a bit old-fashioned—”

Late comers eddied into the room, presented their compliments to Grandmother Day, acknowledged her introduction of Cabot Murray rather coolly, and drifted on towards the refreshments and Felicity’s efficient hospitality. As he resumed his chair he said thoughtfully, “It’s just barely possible that you would do better not to devote yourself so exclusively to the only Yankee in the room. Ought I to go away?”

“Nonsense, I’m old enough to devote myself where I please. I’ve known these people ever since they were born, and I see some of them every day.

The Crabb boy isn’t getting anywhere, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

She smiled as his glance snapped back to her, revealing his surprise. “He’s just like his grandfather,” she said, remembering with indulgence Archer’s endless, uncomplaining devotion which, though Julian was a quiet man himself, had seemed to her so tame. The Crabb women were always pretty and charming and the Crabb men were dull, and there it was.

“It’s none of my business anyway,” he conceded, and then the shutters swung back open a crack—“Now, if it was you he was beauing around I’d sail in and cut him out!”

“Eden is part of me,” she reminded him.

“So is Sally!” he replied, with that wilful twist of his lips.

“Just what is it that you can’t forgive Sally for?” she inquired curiously.

“Proverbs, 1-17,” he remarked tersely, and gazed in astonishment when she uttered what in a younger woman would have been called a peal of laughter. “I thought you’d have to look it up after I’d gone,” he said, chagrined.

“Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird,” she quoted with relish. “I learned my Bible very thoroughly when I was a child, Mr.

Murray. You think Eden is less—obvious, then,” she pursued, fascinated.

“Eden has no more guile than a kitten,” he agreed, and added, “Bless their sharp little claws!”

A general leave-taking began then and they had no chance for further conversation. He seized an interval in the goodbyes and said he must find Sally and take his own leave.

“Sally will be staying to supper,” she said. “The family always does. I would like you to join us, Mr. Murray, if you have no other engagement.”

His pleasure was a heart-catching thing, she thought, but it clouded quickly with the inevitable gibe.

“Do you think the family would be pleased with that?” he suggested.

“I am not accustomed to consult the family when I give an invitation.

Besides, you haven’t had a chance to talk to Eden.”

“You’re very good to me,” he said with a sudden touching humility. “I shall try to be deserving.”

Felicity approached them then with a group of departing guests, and was informed that Mr. Murray was staying to supper. Felicity took it very well, under her grandmother’s eye, and her response was cordial. Before the last guest had been sped it was candle-lighting time, and Cabot Murray found himself, a little incredulously, making one of the group round Grandmother Day’s chair like a son of the household.

V

They sat down fourteen to supper, and during the meal what had been to him just a confusion of Days and Spragues, most of them with a strong family resemblance to each other, separated themselves into personalities and formed a family pattern.

There were only four Spragues—Lafe and his wife Louise, who had been born a Day, and their two children, Sally and Sedgwick. And there were nine Days, beginning with the eldest, who had placed him on her right hand, ousting from his usual place her grandson Ransom, who was next in seniority. Eden was on their guest’s right, and with her help he sorted out the rest of them: her mother Felicity, who had been born a Sprague; her eldest brother, Dabney, twenty-one and something of a dandy, just home from a year at the American Legation in London and a Continental tour; her second brother, Fauquier, eighteen, a “rat” in his first term at the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, out on very special furlough for the occasion; Eden herself was the third child; then came Susannah; then Barry, thirteen, and very envious of Fauquier’s tight-fitting uniform; and lastly Myrta.

With Gran’s eye upon them, they accepted the outsider graciously as one of themselves, not singling him out for special attention, but paying him the compliment of letting him alone. Mrs. Ewell’s illness during his visit had so far curtailed the hospitality of the President’s household, and this was the first time Cabot Murray had dined en famille in Virginia.

He was finding it a new experience. His hard, hooded eyes went from face to face along the festive, candle-lighted table with its low centrepiece of hothouse flowers. They were a handsome family, but the thing that interested him more than their good looks or the obvious ease in which they lived, was the undisguised, unself-conscious affection they had for each other. That they should all adore Grandmother Day was natural enough. It was doubtless natural too, Cabot reflected, that Ransom should be devoted to the still beautiful, fair-haired wife who had borne him this engaging brood of healthy children. And there was no reason why those children should not cherish an extravagant love for such charming parents. Cabot did not know that Lafe Sprague had courted Louise all his life, but their tenderness for each other was always noticeable even to the most casual stranger. Sally—well, perhaps of them all only Sally thought first and last of Sally. Her brother Sedgwick was seated next to Susannah Day and they

kept up a constant light-hearted tomfoolery which drew Cabot’s glance again and again, until Eden said, smiling, “Those two never let up. Most of the time they might as well be talking Cherokee, for all the sense it makes to anyone else, but it amuses them all day long!”

“Mr. Murray is not quite sure how to take us,” remarked Tibby Day on his other side. “Any of us.”

“Perhaps he is not accustomed to such a large and noisy family,”

Ransom suggested from across the table on his grandmother’s left hand. His thin, kind face broke into its irradiating smile as Cabot looked back at him searchingly.

“Is it always like this?” Cabot asked, with a nod towards a burst of laughter at the other end of the table. To the three who heard him it was as though he wanted to believe and could not.

“Like what?” said Eden gently, trying to come at the cause of his apparent bewilderment.

“Yes, Mr. Murray, tell us what we are like, to you,” Tibby Day encouraged him quietly.

He took his time about it, as though hunting for words. He looked away from them, down the row of happy faces in the candlelight—Sedgwick was now weeping with laughter, his hand held up as though to shield his eyes from Susannah’s childlike mirth, while the others joined in enjoying some hilarious point she had scored in their endless tug of war. Susannah had a misplaced dimple close to the upper corner of her mouth—her teeth were small and straight—her hazel eyes were pansy-dark in the soft glow from the candles, her throat rose small and young above her round young bosom, her springing curls shone like the satin ribbon which threaded them. She was dainty and sweet as a porcelain shepherdess, but she was alive—

terribly, pitifully alive….

“You are all so—so fond of each other,” Cabot got out inadequately.

“And are you accustomed in the North to families who hate each other, Mr. Murray?” Eden inquired, voicing what was to her an absurdity, and was startled by the way his face closed in, black and bitter, and he said, not looking at her:

“I have heard of such things.”

Eden glanced at her grandmother, then at her father, in swift appeal for them to say something to cover her blunder. Ransom spoke too quickly, and

only made things worse.

“It takes a family occasion like this one,” he said, without looking ahead into his sentence, “to bring home to a man how empty a life of single blessedness can be.”

“Does it?” said Cabot coldly, and added, devoting himself to the food on his plate, “You talk more like a parson than a schoolmaster.”

“Ransom means,” interposed Ransom’s grandmother, “that he enjoys feeling patriarchal and smug. He takes himself very seriously as head of the family, since his father died a few years ago.”

“I agree that it is a very serious business,” Cabot replied, ostentatiously civil. “To be responsible for the welfare and happiness of so many helpless, delightful creatures would worry me into an early grave. If we have war between the States, Mr. Day, and I do not see how we are going to avoid it, I shall have only my own skin to think of. Whereas you will have to see your sons march away and your women weep. I would not change places with you then.”

The word had been said—the small and terrifying word that carries such a weight of dread. War. Nobody wanted to hear the word, no one wanted to think beyond this pleasant moment. But Ransom never shirked words, and he had been wondering what the Yankee viewpoint would reveal. It should have waited till the men were left alone in the dining-room to smoke—but since it had come now he met it with quickening interest.

“Then you think Lincoln will be elected,” he said at once.

“Sure to be. Not so much because a true majority wants him, as because his opposition is hopelessly divided.”

“If only one knew more about him!” Ransom said impatiently.

“Such as what?”

“Well—what he is really like, without exaggeration—and what he really believes in, apart from politics.”

“I’ll try to answer both those questions, I think. He isn’t like anything you have been led to think, you can take my word for that. He is a simple, humble, almost bewildered man, driven by destiny. And he has no politics, except to preserve the Union.”

“Have you seen him?” demanded Eden, breathless. “You sound as though you had talked to him!”

“I have. You won’t like to hear this, sir—perhaps I shouldn’t say it in your house at all—but I believe, for reasons I would be put to it to get into words, that Abraham Lincoln is a great man, even as Washington was great.” In the silence of their incredulous surprise, Cabot looked round at them defiantly under his brows. “I have probably said the wrong thing,” he surmised, without apology.

“You have said a very interesting thing,” remarked Ransom without animus. “I would very much like to hear more.”

“But Washington was a gentleman born,” said Tibby Day unexpectedly.

“He had dignity, he had presence, he had a great kindliness.”

“Oddly enough, so has this man Lincoln—all three,” Cabot told her, and leaned forward, his alert curiosity awakened as she had seen it when they spoke of Emancipation. “Would it be tactless to inquire, ma’am, if you ever really saw Washington?”

“I saw him many times,” she said simply. “We all did, here in Williamsburg. He was kind to me when I was a child.”

“I envy you that,” said Cabot from his heart. “But do you know, I have a strange feeling that some day—if any of us lives to tell it as you have done

—we who have spoken with Lincoln will be as enviable as you are.”

“Are you a friend of his?” Ransom’s question was academically keen.

There was an odd absence of sectional feeling in the discussion which was developing between them.

“I don’t know that one could safely say he has friends, in the intimate sense you mean. I have had access to him, informally. I have seen him off guard, for whatever that may be worth.”

“And you believe in him?”

“Yes. But don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”

“Lafe.” Ransom’s voice cut into the chatter beyond, causing a silence to fall on the whole table. “Lafe, Mr. Murray is qualified to speak about Lincoln. I think we should listen.”

“That ape!” cried Lafe, bristling. “If he’s elected we sha’ have to secede.

No other course left to us!”

“On the contrary,” Cabot began, and they could see that he weighted his words, “if Virginia stood out for patience—for moderation—”

“Politics!” cried Sally, and made a face. “Not politics, for pity’s sake, at Gran’s party!”

“Be quiet, Sally!” commanded her brother Sedgwick, and at the same time his hand came down on Sue’s arm, suppressing protest from her.

“We’re going to get Lincoln, we might as well know about him!”

“I’d rather know about his wife,” said Sally perversely. “Is it true, Mr.

Murray, that he is sorely hen-pecked?”

Cabot’s eyes rested on her sardonically. It was the sort of thing he would have expected from her, that was plain to see.

“I think it would take real talent,” he said drily, “to hen-peck Abe Lincoln—successfully.”

“Have you ever seen her? Tell us what she’s like!”

“I have dined with them in Springfield. But I am no judge of women, and must beg to be excused from expressing an opinion.”

“That means you didn’t like her!” crowed Sally. “Is she a good hostess?

Was it a good dinner?”

Cabot’s eyes went from her pert prettiness to the serene, mellow beauty of Felicity Day, across the table from him, sitting next her husband as the custom was at these family parties. She was roundabout forty, he supposed

—she would have to be, with that great galumphing Dabney for a son. But her lips were wide and tender, her broad brow was smooth, and her eyelids, weighted with long curving lashes, gave her the look of a drowsy, brooding child in the candlelight. He knew that he had judged Mrs. Lincoln, and he knew a sudden swirl of rekindled anger against her—why?—because she was not Felicity Day, soft and kind and soothing, for a man to come home to? He knew with a sort of savage surprise that he wanted a woman like this one for Lincoln, who was most certainly going to need sanctuary in the months to come, instead of—

“Mrs. Lincoln greets a guest,” he heard himself saying flatly, “as though she hoped he had wiped his feet before he came in.”

The table gasped, then broke into pleased laughter. Cabot permitted himself a rueful smile, and looked apologetically at Tibby Day.

“You see, ma’am, already your Virginia hospitality leads me to make unkind comparisons. If Lincoln lived here—” He left the sentence unfinished in his own astonishment at having begun it. If any man had the good fortune to live here, would not his viewpoint on the world undergo drastic changes? And yet, to Ransom it was the usual thing. Ransom already had that viewpoint. To Dabney and Fauquier and young Barry—to

the fire-eating Lafe and his tall son Sedgwick, it was the stiff, chilly house in Springfield which would seem strange. Lincoln would never know what he had missed. But Cabot Murray was beginning to know, though he was still unable to accept this Virginia household as anything but the exception.

“I wish first of all you could manage not to think of Lincoln as an Abolitionist,” he went on slowly. “He has no convictions about slavery, so far as I can tell—only about the Union.”

“But surely—”

“But can you be sure—”

“But then why—”

“Quiet! ” yelled Sedgwick, watching their guest, his face alert and grave, his fingers still lying, half caressing, half warning, on Susannah’s arm. “Let the poor man hear himself think, can’t you? How does he propose to save the Union regardless of slavery, Mr. Murray?”

“He will go to war to save it.”

At the low, simple words pandemonium threatened again, but Lafe’s voice topped them all, crying hotly, “Compulsory union is a contradiction in terms!”

“I know that, sir. So does Mr. Lincoln, no doubt. But if the South cannot mediate—cannot come to some kind of terms with Emancipation, it will have to—”

“If your Mr. Lincoln cannot stop the Government in Washington from meddling in our private affairs, the South will secede!” shouted Lafe.

“And be damned,” Cabot agreed softly.

“Don’t be too sure about that, Mr. Murray! The best officers in the Army are from the South—we may send them up to West Point to learn their trade, but by God they still belong to us and not to that gang of politicians in Washington! They will resign their commissions, you see if they don’t!

They will come back home and organize an army of the South—”

“And how will they equip it, sir? The guns and ammunition are all manufactured in the Northern factories. The supplies are endless, but the South will have only what it has got on hand at the time of Secession. With a blockade of Southern ports, it would be difficult to bring in more. The war would soon be over because the seceding States would have to cease firing.”

“Virginia will never secede,” said Tibby Day, and every head turned towards the small, erect figure at the end of the table. “Virginia made the Union. I saw it done. If the Cotton States want to go, let them go. They are riff-raff—black sheep. We can do without them.”

“Why, Gran—!”

“Gran, darling, really—!”

“I don’t see what you are all staring at. You all know very well that Virginia will emancipate in her own way. I remember when the Legislature here at Williamsburg passed the law that made the importation of any more slaves illegal. It was the New Englanders who kept it up—they owned the ships, they made the money out of it. Tom Jefferson passed that law—he hated slavery, and he always said it would have to go, ’way back when I was still a girl. Julian agreed with him. But it can’t be done just by passing a law in Washington. It can’t be done by a war, either. You’ll have to give us a little more time,” she said, looking at Cabot Murray.

They all saw his face soften as he met her confident, confiding gaze—

saw his big brown hand come out to rest reassuringly on hers where it lay beside her plate—heard the affection in his voice as he said gravely, “And I am convinced that Mr. Lincoln would see eye to eye with you, ma’am.”

“How on earth can you say that, man?” cried Lafe, unable to contain himself even though Mr. Murray was their guest. “Mr. Lincoln is the fellow who said two years ago that this government cannot endure half slave and half free, and reminded us that a house divided against itself cannot stand!”

So close on his last word as to be almost an interruption, Cabot’s hard Yankee voice dominated the attentive table.

“‘Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation,’” he said, and looked from Lafe to Sedgwick to Fauquier to Ransom in one swift black glance. “Mr. Lincoln said that too, more recently, in his speech at New York.”

“But that would mean he has no desire to interfere with us at all!” said Eden incredulously.

“Which is what I am myself trying to convey to you,” Cabot assented.

There was a bewildered silence.

“B-but I thought—” Eden began, gazing at him with a puzzled frown.

“But you don’t think,” Cabot cut in. “You guess—and assume—and dash off at tangents, even the best of you! I tell you again that this man Lincoln is not an Abolitionist. He himself has told you so over and over again. But you don’t hear. You listen to everybody but him. Has any one of you at this table read the speech he made last February in New York? No, I thought not. Yet four newspapers printed it in full, the Tribune reprinted it as a pamphlet, and it was pamphletized again as a campaign document last summer. It was one of the greatest speeches ever made in this country. I heard it, and I’m not ashamed to say I yelled as loud as anybody at the end.”

“Now, wait a minute, let’s be calm about this.” Lafe was being calm with a visible effort, open-minded by main force. Louise’s loving brown eyes rested on him knowingly, amused at his unhabitual mildness of approach. “Where was this speech? Tell us about it.”

Cabot looked again round the table, this time at the women’s faces—

Susannah sweet and serious under Sedgwick’s hand, beautiful Felicity polite but not really interested in politics, Sally frankly bored—and came to the bright, watching eyes of the elder Mrs. Day.

“I hope you will forgive me, ma’am—I had no intention of creating an issue—”

“Tell us about the speech,” she said gently. “We all want to hear.”

“How did the fellow get to New York?” demanded Lafe. “Illinois is his stamping ground!”

“They were turning out the political cupboards in search of a man to beat Seward and his machine. They thought Chase might do it. But just so as not to overlook anything they offered Lincoln two hundred and fifty dollars to address an audience at the Cooper Union. After that we didn’t hear much more about Chase.”

“What happened?” Ransom was the first to voice their question.

“They damned near—excuse me, ma’am—they very nearly tore the hall apart and gave it to him when he finished.”

“Why?” That was Lafe, simmering.

“It’s hard to say why, in a dozen words.”

“Take hundreds,” said Tibby Day on his left. “But tell us how it was.”

He turned to her, with that prompt softening of face and voice she always won from him. And as though he spoke to her alone, as though she

were a beloved, intelligent child, with no other listeners around them, he began.

“It was snowing that night in New York,” he told her, “and they said that would keep people away. The admission was twenty-five cents, to hear what Seward calls ‘the prrrairie statesman’—and they said that was too much. Anyway, the auditorium wasn’t full—only about fifteen hundred people, waiting to hear the wild man from the backwoods make a fool of himself. It was a very select and high-nosed Republican audience. The one and only Horace Greeley himself was sitting on the platform, and William Cullen Bryant, no less, was to introduce the speaker. I’m not notoriously tender-hearted myself, but I was feeling pretty sorry for him before he appeared. It was a den of lions he walked into when he followed Bryant on to the stage, and his suit was new and didn’t fit very well, and a black broadcloth coat musses anyway if it’s rolled up in a carpet-bag for a two-day journey. He could have had it pressed at the Astor House where he was staying, but he hadn’t thought of that. He looked just about the way they expected him to—fairly wild and woolly, and all hands and feet. I’m a tall man, myself, and I know how that feels—Bryant was brief and not very helpful, and the applause was businesslike and cool, and Lincoln stepped forward into it and began to talk.” Cabot was not looking at any of them now, and his right hand was busy turning the stem of his wine glass slowly against the pattern of the handsome tablecloth beneath it. He watched the play of the circle against the linen scrolls absorbedly, his head down, and they all watched him, fascinated by a simplicity of utterance and emotion as naked as Lincoln’s own. “His voice was too high for such a big man,”

Cabot was saying slowly in his own rough, burly tones, so unlike the cadence of the gentle speech habitual to that table. “They might have tittered at that, but they were waiting for something funnier. They were so sure that something funnier would come soon, even if it was only one of the raw stories he was supposed to let off every chance he got. But he didn’t make any jokes. He started right in talking sense to them—facts about the founding of this Republic, and the men who framed its Constitution. He flattered them by assuming that none of the sound research behind what he said would be new to them. In no time at all he made a monkey of Douglas and his airy statements about the founding fathers intending that slavery should be universal in this country. Lincoln had the chapter and verse. He

argued like a lawyer—a brilliant lawyer. And they listened. They couldn’t help themselves. And pretty soon they applauded something he said. And then they cheered something else. His voice had got back into a normal register, he had forgotten his hands and feet and the creases in his black coat. He spoke for two hours. At the end they stood up and shouted and waved their hats and handkerchiefs, and began to push towards the platform to congratulate him and shake his hand. The reporters went crazy. I heard one of them say that no man had ever made such an impression on a New York audience. And it was just Old Abe Lincoln in a mussy suit that didn’t fit, speaking the truth that was in him.”

“Then—you believe he can save us,” Tibby Day murmured into the silence.

“So help me, ma’am, I believe he will try,” he affirmed very low. “And that is more than I can say for the rest of ’em!” He raised his head and his eyes sought Felicity’s sweet, drowsy stare, and he gave her a smile more disarmed and friendly than anyone but Tibby Day had yet won from him. “I beg everybody’s pardon,” he said lightly, “for introducing such a dull note into a happy evening. But this is the first time since I arrived in Virginia that I have seen any hope of reaching an understanding with the inhabitants. You have all been very patient with me”—his smiling gaze ran on to Susannah, who instantly smiled back at him as though she had known him all her life and shared with him a secret no one else knew—“and I hope you will ruminate over what I have said. Virginia’s weight will mean so much in the balance between peace and war during the days to come—and your own attitude here in Williamsburg must be of great consequence.” His eyes came now to Lafe at the other end of the table. “I cannot help hoping that you will all throw your influence on the side of patience—give Mr. Lincoln a chance to solve this thing without stacking all the cards against him before he can deal. And now, Miss Susannah, I have quite finished. Aren’t you glad?”

VI

When the gentlemen returned to the drawing room they found the chairs set back against the wall, leaving a cleared space in the middle of the room.

Again there was a place between Eden and her grandmother awaiting Cabot, and it occurred to him to wonder how Sally felt about having what

she doubtless considered a new conquest snatched away from her by her grandmother. After all, he had come to this party as Sally’s beau. A glance at her perfect, rather expressionless face told him nothing. She flashed him no provocative message, nor did she appear to be sulking. Merely she accepted the fact that Gran had pre-empted him and apparently bore Eden no malice either. For all his wayward, cynical knowledge of her type, he did not comprehend that once a man’s attention wandered from Sally he ceased, so far as she was concerned, to exist. Already Sally, the professional Southern belle, was developing some of the less pleasant attributes of the female spider—she would have all of a man or none of him. If Cabot allowed himself to be enticed away from her by any means at all, Sally was not sufficiently interested in him to lift a finger to bring him back. Besides

—she suspected him of laughing at her, though she couldn’t think why, and that was not a thing she was accustomed to, and she didn’t like it. She decided, before the evening was over, that she didn’t like Cabot Murray anyway.

After everyone was seated Susannah stepped forward, her dimple much in evidence.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began formally, “as you all know, it is our beloved Grandmother Day’s birthday, and we are gathered together in celebration of that very happy event. She thinks she has had all her presents, but there is one more still in store for her. Some time ago she was heard to express interest in this shocking new dance called the Waltz. And so—if Mrs. Lafayette Sprague will kindly oblige at the pianoforte, Mr. Sedgwick Sprague and I will demonstrate—a waltz.” She curtsied deeply, impudently, and went to where Sedgwick waited at the doorway, and they disappeared hand in hand into the hall, as Louise started towards the piano.

Eden said hastily to her grandmother and Cabot:

“They’ve worked at this for days, and we must all applaud like anything.

Aunt Louise says they nearly wore her fingers to the bone, getting every step and every turn just right.” She finished with a glance at Cabot which appealed to him not to scoff at the performance and the music began, and Sedgwick swung his green-clad partner lightly into the room, his every move designed to show her off from each exquisite angle as they circled slowly across the carpet.