The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

Mrs. Phillips was too heart-broken to utter a word in opposition or condemnation, and Elise did not open her lips to speak. It was against accusing silence, therefore, and upbraiding tears, that the father made his desperate defence.... Such a debate can never be brought to any real finish; and it was at last only in exhaustion, Helen of nerves, her father of words, and Elise and her mother of lamentation, that the distressed family found peace—enough at least to permit of dispersal to their rooms for the night.

Elise was bowed down in grief for Helen, and for Helen she wept upon her pillow till the fountain of tears was dry: but even then there was no sleep for her. Her mind was painfully alive to her own personal problems, and her brain was awake the night long although weariness held her scalded eyelids down. The incident of the evening, like an electric storm, had clarified the haze of uncertainty for her heart—but only to plunge it into a more intense perplexity.

No longer unchoosing, her heart had spoken its choice. It were better had it never spoken at all; but there could be no mistaking its decree—she loved Evans Rutledge. As she had looked upon the three men who loved her in that brief time when Helen proclaimed her husband, she had known: and she had known that not for her was the man who in the fleetest moment could smile while her heart was breaking; nor for her that other, who, with his alien point of view, was untouched with her distress, and who with his perfect breeding—she resented it—could be so contained, so unmoved, in a situation which brought anguish to her. In the throes of that anguish her soul had turned, unerring, to its affinity in suffering, to the heart that understood and wept, not in a ready sympathy for her pain, but in the pains of a common grief.

In such manner Elise accounted for the reading of her heart's message. She believed that it had been undecipherable, confused, until that evening. Yet in all her distress then, and in the heartaches afterward resulting from its choosing, she was strangely happy because her heart had been true to the fancy of its earlier years, had been faithful to its first girlish inclination to love, had not misled her, had not been fickle in any degree, or false. She told herself with a tremor of rapturous, prideful humility that one man had been the master of her love from the beginning.

Thinking on it as she lay unsleeping through the night, she more than once forgot her tears and was lost in the transport of loving. She petted and caressed her heart for its constancy. She made excuses for its indecision in that long time when the man's love had seemed unworthy. She murmured tender things to it because it had prevailed, even though with a hesitating loyalty, against her head's capricious disapproval.

In her wanderings back and forth through the desert of her miseries on that night, she straggled back many times to this oasis of her love and stopped to soothe her troubled heart with its upspringing freshnesses.... And yet a wildness of perplexity was set about her, and she could not find a way out. She knew that Rutledge loved her—had loved her from the time he declared it on the flood-beaten rock in the St. Lawrence till the moment of his tender unspoken good-night three hours ago. That his love could not be shaken by any act not her own, she verily believed. But would he have loved her?—would he have dared to love her?—could he, with his blood-deep, immutable ideas, could he have loved her?—if he had known that his love would bring him to this unspeakable extremity, to this heart-breaking dilemma, where he must be traitor to himself and to her—or become brother-in-law to a negro?

Yes, he would have loved her—her of all women—despite the slings and arrows of the most outrageous fortune, her heart told her: but, with prescience of such calamity, would he have spoken his love?—would he have asked for that interview for to-morrow evening that he might tell it to her again? Was he not even now regretting that appointment? Was he not even now pitying his love for her? She must know. But how could she know? By what means could she learn the truth? ... Way there was none: and yet she must know. Doubt, uncertainty, here would be unendurable—and implacable for she could no longer find peace in indifference. She loved Evans Rutledge, and her love would fight, was fighting, desperately for its own.... But again, her own must be worthy, without compulsion, or she would repudiate it. Her heart's tenderness, virgin, single, measureless, she held too precious to barter for a love, withal sincere and beautiful, which were weighted with a minim of regret or limitation. Rather would she crush back its fragrance eternally in her own bosom, than dishonour it by exchange for less than the highest.... Yes, she must know.... And she could not know.... And the morning came, bringing no relief for heart or brain....

Mr. Phillips was at some pains to intimate to his wife and Elise what he thought a proper pride demanded in the way of the "front" they should show to the public. Queer that he should have thought it necessary: but, unhappy man, he spoke out of his fears for his own steadiness. Elise, at least, had no need for his admonitions. Her pride was the pride of youth: the pride which finds all sufficiency in itself, and needs not the prop of outward circumstance which age requires to hold its chin in air.

It was this pride which gave Elise some hesitation in deciding what she should do with her promise to see Rutledge that evening. Pride said: "Meet him as if nothing has happened to disturb the serenity of your life. Do not show—to him, of all men—chagrin at this episode en famille." But pride said: "No! Recall that engagement. Do not appear to hold him by so much as a hair. His love must be undistrained!"

She wavered between these conflicting demands of a consistent self-respect until the middle afternoon. Then the pride of her love overmastered the pride in her pride: and she wrote Rutledge a short note.