"They were happening, and they are not done happening yet. Now, I've brought you Miss Lady. You take care of her. Better keep that Frenchwoman here, too, if you can. Decherd may turn up again sometime, or maybe Mrs. Ellison, though I think Decherd's teeth are pretty well pulled, I can't act as Miss Lady's lawyer, but I'll promise to act as your friend."
"And hers?"
"Yes, and hers," said Eddring, hesitatingly. "We are hardly through with all this yet."
"It's been pretty bad down here," said the old planter.
"Yes, and we know now how it happened and who was at the head of the trouble, and what cat's-paws were used in it all. Decherd fails in his first attempt to get rid of Delphine legally, so he stirs her up to still worse acts; tells her there is no profit in law and order, but only in destruction. He tells her how to incite these ignorant niggers; how to bring up all the old talk of their day of deliverance, the time when they won't have to work, the time when they will be not only the equals, but the superiors of the whites. He tells Delphine that she is the naturally appointed Queen of these people. She is savage enough to fit in with all their savagery. She does rule it as a queen. In her soul there are thoughts, wild thoughts which you and I can never understand, because we are white, and all white. Delphine is neither white nor black, neither red, nor white, nor black. She is a product of race amalgamation, a monstrosity, a horror, the germ of a national destruction. She is a queen—a queen of annihilation!
"And so this thing went on," resumed Eddring, after a time, "this plotting which meant war and destruction, not for this household alone, nor this district, nor this state, but for this nation! What prevented it? I'll tell you. It was our Miss Lady. It was the White Woman, the white woman of America. Whatever happens, whatever stands or falls, whatever is the law or is not the law, that is the thing to be cherished always and to be protected at any cost or any risk. This house is no better than the women in it, nor is any home, nor is any nation. Lawless, American men may be, but not so the women; and in them we reverence the law. When the women go, the nation goes. They are the salvation of this nation—the stronghold of its purity. In the commercialization and the corruption of a people the women are the last to go. In the South we have taken care of them always. I'm not preaching. I only say, it was our Miss Lady who, by the Providence of God, acted here as the spirit of all that means progress, all that means development and civilization.
"Cal, you think I'm a visionary, that I'm a dreamer. Perhaps I am. But I think on my honor that the angel of our salvation here was one girl who had no conception of the part she played. I have told you, she is our Miss Lady. There's nothing in this for me personally, but at least you and I can take off our hats to her. Maybe sometime the picture will blur and merge, so that, for us two old fellows, Miss Lady will just mean Woman. I reckon all of us old fellows, and all the young ones, can take care of Her."
The two sat looking at each other a moment. Ere their silence was broken there came the sound of a quick step down the hall, and a light tap at the door. There appeared, framed in the doorway, the figure of Miss Lady herself; but not Miss Lady the dancer of New Orleans, nor yet Miss Lady as recently garbed for her voyage through the wilderness. In her rummaging about the once familiar recesses of the Big House, she had come across a simple gown of lawn, which she had worn long ago, when scarce more than a child. Now, albeit rounder, firmer and fuller of figure than when she had departed in search of that bigger world beyond the rim of the hedging forest, it was the same Miss Lady of the Big House once more. She had come back to her old friends, and to a world which now seemed strangely sweet and strangely dear. Her sleeves were rolled up; her hair was tumbled about her brow, and her eyes were dancing with new merriment.
"Please, gentlemen," said she, with a dainty courtesy, "and would you come out to dinner? You really should see what Madame Delchasse has done with her new sauce-pan."
Blount and Eddring both arose; there was gravity in the gaze of either, though the heart of either might have leaped.