Watchfires Read online

  "You mean you might become abusive?"

  She had certainly not anticipated such insistency. "Feelings run high about slavery. As you, of all people, should have discovered, Mr. Halsted."

  "But can't we still love each other?"

  "Love each other?" She allowed her tone to be startled. There was something in the softness of his voice that seemed to suggest a more than Christian warmth.

  "Doesn't Christ tell us to love each other?" he asked.

  "I might find it difficult to love a priest who preaches that Christ preaches slavery."

  "Preaches it? I never suggested that. I said that slavery was not abhorrent to nature. That it is the way in which a weak and undeveloped race may be usefully employed by a stronger one. In an ideal society slavery would disappear. And it will disappear, dear Mrs. Fairchild, believe me. It will." As she stared at him, half-hypnotized by his gentle, persevering tone, she made out two yellow gleams in the center of his eyes. "In the meanwhile, so long as the slave is loved by his master, I believe that Christ condones his condition."

  "And how many slaves are loved by their masters?"

  "More than we know of, I hope. More than we know of, I pray."

  "Well, you had better pray long and hard, Mr. Halsted!" Rosalie exclaimed, giving vent at last to her swelling anger. "And may I remind you that I am doing my best to behave like a lady in my father's house? Don't try me too hard!"

  "I have no wish to try you. I feel as strongly as you about the humane aspects of the question. I deem it a mortal sin to beat slaves or to break up their families. I believe that a slave-owner has a duty to treat his slaves exactly as he would his paid employees."

  Rosalie turned now in her chair so that they regarded each other face to face.

  "That's all very well, sir, but it misses the point altogether. Let me put it this way. If all the slaves in the South were totally content with their lot; if they all had the mild and loving masters that you so fantastically suppose, and if all the laborers and mechanics in the North were as downtrodden and wretched as I happen to believe the slaves now are, I should still be dedicated with all my heart and soul to the abolition of your peculiar institution!"

  Once again she thought she could make out the yellow gleam in his eyes.

  "I like the way you talk, Mrs. Fairchild. Do you think you could convert me?"

  "I am afraid you're not convertible. Anyone who has written a book!"

  "Ah, you give me up!" he exclaimed, with a little wail and a smile, as she turned abruptly to her other neighbor.

  ***

  That afternoon Joanna called for her in their father's carriage to drive her to the new park at Fifty-ninth Street. Dexter and the boys had gone for a hike along the East River. But Rosalie was surprised when the carriage pulled up before the parish house of the marble Gothic church of Saint Jude's on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street.

  "You didn't know we were going to call on the Reverend Francis Halsted, did you?" Joanna asked, with an arch smile.

  "Joanna Handy, will you please tell Tom to drive on! Do you think I'd set foot in that man's house?"

  "It's not his house. It's God's house."

  "Then there must be two gods. Mine doesn't believe in slavery."

  "Rosey, you made a great impression on that man. He wants to go on with your lunchtime discussion. I think you've converted him."

  "You can't be serious!"

  "I swear!" And Joanna at this piously crossed her heart. "Come in for a minute. As a favor to me. Please!"

  Rosalie, utterly bewildered, at last shrugged her shoulders and descended from the carriage. They were ushered into a high-ceilinged office on the ground floor with tall Gothic windows that looked out on a green yard. Halsted was standing behind his desk wearing a beaming smile as they entered.

  "Welcome, Rosalie Fairchild!" he exclaimed. "Welcome to the Trinity Station of the Underground Railway!"

  Rosalie sat down suddenly on a chair by the desk. She was conscious only of Joanna's vivid pleasure at her shock.

  "So it was all a front?" she gasped. "Even the book? You wrote it as a cover?"

  "No! It was genuine enough when I wrote it. I was very deep in error. I cannot describe to you adequately what it is like to be so deeply in the clutches of the devil. For I have no doubt now that such was my unhappy state. I was possessed. It was like a dream, not a dream of frustration where everything is constantly escaping or eluding you, but a dream where everything seems to fit exactly into place, like magic. And magic it was. Black magic.

  "My experience in writing the book was the strangest part of it. Always before, writing had come to me with difficulty, even with agony. But then the pen seemed to race over the paper as if guided by another hand. Even my style seemed more formed and mellifluous. One of my reviewers who had read an earlier work of mine about the desert fathers remarked that I seemed to have developed a totally different style, and a better one at that. I greeted my new fame humbly, reminding myself that I was simply the instrument of a greater force, that I might be enjoying the blessing of having been chosen as the tool needed by the almighty to prevent a terrible war, just as Mrs. Stowe had been chosen by Satan as the tool to bring that war on.

  "And then came the experience which I no longer think it is irreligious to compare to Saint Paul's on the road to Damascus. I was preaching one Sunday morning, right here in Saint Jude's, and I saw our great west window suddenly irradiated by sunlight through a break in the clouds, and I heard a voice crying out the same question: why was I persecuting him? That very night I went to a friend, a holy man, and he told me how to become a member of this great movement."

  "And he advised you not to publish your change of view?" Rosalie asked.

  "Yes, that, after a fashion, was to be my penance. To give up the balm of recantation. To provide a station in the Underground that no Federal or Southern agent would ever suspect. The top floor of this parish house has been used for more than a year now as a place where escaped slaves can rest and recuperate and receive medical attention. Joanna has been with us for three months. She tells me that you can nurse and cook and give us money. She assures me that you are totally discreet. As to your views on slavery, I can testify myself as to their soundness! Will you join us?"

  "But my coming here to work—which is what I take it you want—won't it give you away?"

  "Because of the supposed divergence of our philosophies? I think not. You are identified with your husband's political conservatism, as Joanna is identified with your father's dislike of abolition. Neither of you has made any public denunciation of me. It would not seem strange for a lady of your station to come to a parish house for volunteer work."

  Rosalie felt an odd tingling that seemed to emanate from deep within her. She did not know if it were thrill at the honor of being called to such a task, or simply relief that she should have so unexpectedly found a seeming answer to her inner problems.

  "Of course, I'll do it!" she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "I'll do anything you need!"

  Joanna got up, too, and kissed her, and Halsted, smiling benignly, led them off to a tour of the house.

  At the top of the second stairway he opened a door to a long attic room, dimly lit by low dormer windows and two large candelabra set on what appeared to be trunks. Rosalie first thought that the chamber was empty, until, following her sister in, she saw five negroes, two men and three women, seated on a rug, in a circle, with cards in their hands. They looked up silently at their visitors, without surprise and without greeting.

  "Please go on with your game, my friends," Halsted enjoined them, which they thereupon did. "Harris here and his wife will leave for Portland tonight on the S.S. Atalanta," he told Rosalie. "With a cargo of textiles. They should be safe in Canada in three days' time. The others are going via Buffalo and Lake Erie. We can only be sure of absolute security for two on the Atalanta."

  "How do you get them in here?"

  "They come in coffins to the church funeral
parlor."

  One of the women turned around at this. She told Halsted with evident apprehension that she didn't want to leave the parish house that way, that it had scared her "worse than the bloodhounds."

  "No, Amy, you're going on board as a lady, in deep mourning with black gloves and a veil. I shall escort you myself."

  "But don't they suffocate in the coffins?" Rosalie asked in alarm.

  "They have holes in them," one of the men answered cheerfully. "I was even cold!"

  Halsted now led Joanna and Rosalie to the other rooms on the attic floor. There was a dispensary, a kitchen and four bedrooms. He explained that during the hours when the ordinary parish activities were conducted on the floors below, everyone had to talk in whispers. One of the bedrooms was occupied by a man who had contracted pneumonia hiding in a swamp. His case was grave and required nursing at all times. Rosalie offered to start her turn the very next day.

  As Joanna was taking hers that same afternoon, Rosalie came home alone in the carriage.

  "How was your drive?" Dexter asked her.

  "Delightful," she responded firmly. "I really think Central Park is going to be as fine as anything in a European capital."

  In her exultation she thought she might even forgive him what he was doing to Bleeker.

  "On our way home Jo took me to Saint Jude's," she continued. "She's trying to persuade me to do some work with her at the parish house. I might run the sketching class."

  "Saint Jude's? But that's Halsted's church!"

  "Yes, but I won't have to see him. There's no necessary relation between his views on slavery and the work at the house."

  He looked at her in surprise. "Did you see him this afternoon?"

  She hesitated. "As a matter of fact, I did."

  "And you talked with him? Despite the row you had with him at lunch?"

  "Well, I guess I owed him an apology. After all, he was Father's guest."

  Dexter whistled. "That fellow must have the silver tongue he's credited with. To get you to come around! I guess we could use some of his forensic talent at Fairchild & Fairchild!"

  Rosalie turned to her work bag. She had a long way to go, she decided grimly, in the art of deception. But she would get there.

  11

  ON NEW YEAR'S DAY of 1860 Dexter started his long walk north, with its pleasant if arduous prospect of some dozen house calls, at Broadway and Canal Street. He proposed to end it by six o'clock at his home in Union Square where Rosalie would be giving her reception. It was a bright, cold day, and his spirits were high. The frigid air seemed to clean the city, to intensify its colors, to make the whites more white, the blacks more richly black. The white-blue sky was so clear that the taller buildings as far north as Fourth Street seemed an easy walk, and the great cast-iron stores along Broadway, with their walls of curve-topped windows separated only by their frames, suggested to him the Venetian palaces along the Grand Canal that he had only seen in pictures.

  The campaign against Bleeker was proceeding apace. Dexter had prepared his ground carefully, and now it was time to call in his loans. He proposed to speak to some seven or eight important persons in the course of his visits. Only a few words should now be necessary to close the iron wall that he had been building against the intruder.

  Everything, personal as well as national, seemed suddenly to point to hope. Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, whose speeches he had been carefully following, appeared to be offering a feasible compromise between slaveholders and abolitionists, if the two sides would only accept it. Dexter was convinced that if a resort to arms could be put off, the Northern states, with their bursting populations and growing industry, would find themselves ultimately in a position to dictate abolition without bloodshed. If they would but have patience! And they might yet; they might...

  His first call was on old Mrs. Verplanck, who still lived in the red brick house on Canal Street where she had been born eighty years before. She wore a lace cap and powdered her hair in what some persons called an affectation of the past, but which devoted antiquarians, like himself, cherished for its reminder of a more elegant day. He never tired of hearing her tell of how she had been taken to the White House as a little girl and presented by her father to President Washington. Dexter relished his popularity with the old; he was proud that John Church Hamilton, son of the great Alexander, had said of him, "That young man knows more about us than we know about ourselves!"

  As Mrs. Verplanck's first caller, he was free to discourse on the abominations of his enemy.

  "Dear me, isn't it lucky that you told me!" the old lady exclaimed. "Mrs. John Hone was going to bring Mr. Bleeker here next week. Apparently he has shown a great desire to meet me. He seems to think I can give him some background for an article he wants to do on 'old New York.' But now of course I shall tell Mrs. Hone that it's quite out of the question."

  "I promise you, ma'am, you'll never regret it."

  "Oh, my trust in you is complete, dear boy!"

  Dexter felt that his heart was full to bursting as he continued his northward trek. Did it not do him a bit of good, subject as he was to the muffled criticism of his home, to feel appreciated, once in a while, if only by a dear little old lady? And why, after all, should not a dear little old lady be able to evaluate his character as well as anyone else? Better even? Had Rosalie known George Washington and Chief Justice Jay?

  It was three o'clock when he entered the great marble house with the tall fluted white columns and Corinthian capitals that formed one unit of the noble arcade at Astor Place. It was here that Silas Cranberry, amid his fantastic collection of modern Roman statues, entertained as many of the social world as one so newly rich could induce to visit him. Caesars, Huns, martyrs and gladiators stood on pedestals above the multitude of his chattering visitors. Dexter, glancing around the principal chamber, suspected that the crowd was largely drawn from the staff of his host's great emporium.

  He spotted Cranberry, bald, heavy-jawed, with tiny glittering eyes, standing, thumbs in his vest pockets, amid a respectful circle of younger men who fell back as Dexter came up, recognizing that their function was only to provide an audience until the advent of a real guest.

  The roughness of Cranberry's greeting was only slightly mitigated by his perfunctory smile: "So you'll come to my house, Fairchild, when you want a favor from the lowly storekeeper? Is that the size of it?"

  "So it might appear. But it also happens that I was planning to give myself the pleasure of calling on you and Mrs. Cranberry before I needed the favor."

  "Without your Mrs.?"

  "My wife happens to be receiving today."

  "How would I know? She didn't ask me."

  "She will next year. I have her word for it."

  Dexter's gentle tone at last placated his brusque host. "Well, I guess I shouldn't be too rough on a man who comes to bid me a happy New Year. But this business of Bleeker sticks in my craw. What's it to me if the man's a bounder? Is that a reason to tell his newspaper I'll pull out my advertisements?"

  "We hoped that you might regard our cause as yours. And that you might agree that such a wrong inflicted on a gentleman like my cousin affects all the leaders of the city."

  Cranberry pursed his lips to emit a low whistle. "I ain't in your crowd, Fairchild."

  "Isn't that your choice, sir?"

  "My choice! Are you telling me I could get into the Patroons' Club?"

  "I'm not telling you that. That would be a question for the Admissions Committee. But I am certainly telling you that I should be glad to write you a letter of endorsement."

  Cranberry snickered at this, frankly uncivil. "Oh, I know that dodge! 'Dear Board of Admissions: I promised Mr. Silas Cranberry that I would write a letter for him. This is the letter.'"

  Dexter tried not to look too exultant. "I cannot conceive, sir, what there may have been in our past relations to justify your impugning my honor. If I were to write for you, it would be to endorse your candidacy heartily. After what you've just said,
of course, there can be no further question of that."

  He turned to stride away, but just slowly enough to allow his host to catch him by the sleeve.

  "Don't take offense, Fairchild. I was too hasty."

  "I'm afraid you were."

  "Maybe one day I'll ask you for that letter. In the meantime, thank you. God knows, Jules Bleeker doesn't mean a tinker's damn to me. He's probably a horse's ass, anyhow. When do you want his head?"

  By five o'clock Dexter had penetrated the world of the chocolate brownstone and was ascending the high stoop that led to the porticoed entrance and fine mahogany double doors of the Rutgers Van Rensselaers. These opened before him without need of a bell, and he gave a friendly New Year's greeting to the old butler who welcomed him. Lily Van Rensselaer, larger and more stately than her sister Rosalie, stepped out of the receiving line to take him to a corner for a private word.

  "Annie's here," she said in a low voice. "That man Bleeker called, though I left strict orders he was not to be admitted. He refused to take a 'no' from a servant, and Rutgers had to go to the door to speak to him. There were raised voices. It was very awkward."

  "Lily, the worst is over. By next week nobody will have heard of Jules Bleeker."

  And then he saw her. She was standing alone, in a black dress, at the far end of the room, looking directly at him. Without another word he crossed the floor to her.

  "I come to report to Queen Guinevere," he announced with mock gravity. "My mission is accomplished."

  Annie stared back at him with an air of equal sobriety. "You mean that the damsel in distress has been rescued?"

  "Just so. A certain gentleman—if that is not too polite a term for him—is going to find New York a rather difficult place in which to earn a living."

  Annie's brow was almost puckered in a frown, a rather arch one. Then she shrugged. "Was that what all the hubbub in the hall was about? Poor Juley! How brave you all are! And, now, having removed one pernicious influence from the damsel's life, are you prepared to supply her with another? For I don't suppose you intend to leave a defenseless damsel without a single pernicious influence?"