Heaven and Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

locate a teacher. I went to do it-- / think I must, in spite of the bad feeling it will surely generate.
    In the bitterness of defeat, few white people are inclined to help those liberated by Lincoln's pen and Sherman's sword.
    Before thinking of a school, however, we must think of survival.
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    The rice will not be enough to support us. I know dear George Hazard would grant us unlimited credit, but I perceive it as a weakness to ask him. In that regard I surely am a Southerner--full of stiff-necked pride.
    We may be able to sell off lumber from the stands of pine and cypress so abundant on Mont Royal. I know nothing of operating a sawmill, but I can learn. We would need equipment, which would mean another mortgage. The banks in Charleston may soon open again--both Geo. Williams and Leverett Dawkins, our old Whig friend, speculated in British sterling during the war, kept it in a foreign bank, and will now use it to start the commercial blood of the Low Country flowing again. If Leverett's bank does open, I will apply to him.
    Shall also have to hire workers, and wonder if 1 can. There is wide concern that the Negroes prefer to revel in their freedom rather than labor for their old owners, however benevolent. A vexing problem for all the South.
    But, my sweetest Orry, I must tell you of my most unlikely dream--and the one I have promised myself to realize above all others. It was born some days ago, out of my love for you, and
    *ny longing, and my eternal pride in being your wife. . . .
    24 HEAVEN AND HELL
    After midnight of that day, unable to sleep, Madeline left the whitewashed house that now had a wing with two bedrooms. Nearing forty, Orry Main's widow was still as full-bosomed and smallwaisted as she had been the day he rescued her on the river road, although age and stress were beginning to mark and roughen her face.
    She'd been crying for an hour, ashamed of it, yet powerless to stop. Now she rushed down the broad lawn under a moon that shone, blinding white, above the trees bordering the Ashley River. At the bank where the pier once jutted out, she disturbed a great white heron. The bird rose and sailed past the full moon.
    She turned and gazed back up the lawn at the house among the live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. A vision filled her mind, a vision of the great house in which she and Orry had lived as man and wife.
    She saw its graceful pillars, lighted windows. She saw carriages drawn up, gentlemen and ladies visiting, laughing.
    The idea came then. It made her heart beat so fast it almost hurt.
    Where the poor whitewashed place stood now, she would build another Mont Royal. A fine great house to endure forever as a memorial to her husband and his goodness, and all that was good about the Main family Page 27

    and its collective past.
    In a rush of thought, it came to her that the house must not be an exact replica of the burned mansion. That beauty had represented-- hidden--too much that was evil. Although the Mains had been kind to
    their slaves, they had indisputably kept them as property, thereby endorsing a system that embraced shackles and floggings and death or castration for those rash enough to run away. By war's end, Orry had all but disavowed the system; Cooper, in his younger days, had condemned it openly. Even so, the new Mont Royal must be truly new, for it was a new time. A new age.
    Tears welled. Madeline clasped her hands and raised them in the moonlight. "I'll do it somehow. In your honor--"
    She saw it clearly, standing again, the phoenix risen from the ashes.
    Like some pagan priestess, she lifted her head and hands to whatever gods watched from the starry arch of the Carolina night. She spoke to her husband there amid the far stars.
    "I swear before heaven, Orry. I will build it, for you."
    A surprise visitor today. Gen. Wade Hampton, on his way home from Charleston. Because of his rank, and his ferocity as a soldier, they say it will be years before any amnesty reaches high enough