He had been quite unconscious of anything around him in his absorbed interest in the ceremony below him. This manifest interest was evidenced by his nervous hands which he clinched and opened and shut as varying expressions of enthusiasm, resentment and disappointment, humiliation, disdain and determination came and went over his face. He, Hayward Graham, had applied to enlist in this regiment a month before, and had been refused admission because of the small portion of negro blood in his veins,—and that in a manner, too, that added unnecessary painfulness to the refusal. He rather despised himself for coming to witness the regiment's response to the call for troops, but his patriotic interest and his love for his friend Hal Lodge, who had loyally assisted his effort to enlist in the 71st, overcame his pride, and he had come to see the decision of Hal's enthusiastic wager that nine-tenths of the regiment would volunteer.
The first trumpet-call had stirred his enthusiasm, only to have it turned to chagrin and resentfulness when the roll-calls brought to him the realization that his name was not among the elect, and the black humiliation of the thought that he might not even offer to die for his country in this select company because he was part—so small a part—negro; and he gnawed his lips in irritation. But when the flags had come in so suddenly—he involuntarily straightened up and took in his breath quickly to relieve the smothering sensation in his throat, and forgot his wrongs in an exaltation of patriotic fervour.
He stood abstracted for some time after the outflow from the galleries began, and came down just behind the three women of the Colonel's family. At the foot of the stairs Lieutenant Morgan met the party and said, "Mrs. Phillips, the Colonel told me to bring you ladies over to his office."
"So that's the Colonel's wife and daughters," thought Graham, as he passed out into the street. "Where have I seen that little one?"
CHAPTER II
After lingering at the entrance of the armory for a few minutes to see Hal Lodge, and failing to find him, Graham, still gloomily and resentfully meditating upon his rejection by the regiment, started briskly toward the temporary lodgings of his mother and himself as if he had some purpose in mind. Arrived there, he began catechizing her even while removing his overcoat.
"Look here, mother, put down that work for awhile, and tell me all about my people."
"What is it, Hayward? What do you want to know?" his mother asked.
"I want you to tell me all about my father and grandfathers and grandmothers, everything you know—who they were, and what they were, and what they did, and where they lived—the whole thing."
"And what is the matter that you want to know all that at once? Are you still worrying about not getting into that regiment?"