Читать книгу Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty - John William De Forest - Страница 7

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"Papa, are we going to stay in New Boston forever?" asked Miss Ravenel.

"My dear, I am afraid we shall both have to die some day, after which we can't expect to stay here, pleasant as it might be," replied the Doctor.

"Nonsense, papa! You know what I mean. Are you going to make New Boston a permanent place of residence?"

"How can I tell, my dear? We can't go back to New Orleans at present; and where else should we go? You know that I must consult economy in my choice of a residence. My bank deposits are not monstrous, and there is no telling how long I may be cut off from my resources. New Boston presents two advantages; it gives me some employment and it is tolerably cheap. Through the friendliness of these excellent professors I am kept constantly busy, and am not paid so very badly, though I can't say that I am in any danger of growing suddenly rich. Then I have the run of the university library, which is a great thing. Finally, where else in the United States should we find a prettier or pleasanter little city?"

"The people are dreadfully poky."

"My daughter, I wish you would have the goodness to converse with me in English. I never became thoroughly familiar with the Gold Coast dialects, and not even with the court language of Ashantee."

"It isn't Ashantee at all. Everybody says poky; and it is real poky in you to pretend not to understand it; don't you think so yourself now? Besides these New Bostonians are so ferociously federal! I can't say a word for the South but the women glare at me as though they wanted to hang me on a sour apple tree, like Jeff Davis."

"My dear, if one of these loyal ladies should say a word for her own lawful government in New Orleans, she would be worse than glared at. I doubt whether the wild-mannered cut-throats of your native city would let her off with plain hanging. Let us thank Heaven that we are among civilized people who only glare at us, and do not stick us under the fifth rib, when we differ with them in opinion."

"Oh papa! how bitter you are on the southerners! It seems to me you must forget that you were born in South Carolina and have lived twenty-five years in Louisiana."

"Oh! oh! the beautiful reason for defending organized barbarism! Suppose I had had the misfortune of being born in the Isle of Pines; would you have me therefore be the apologist of piracy? I do hope that I am perfectly free from the prejudices and trammels of geographical morality. My body was born amidst slavery, but my conscience soon found the underground railroad. I am not boasting; at least I hope not. I have had no plantations, no patrimony of human flesh; very few temptations, in short, to bow down to the divinity of Ashantee. I sincerely thank Heaven for these three things, that I never owned a slave, that I was educated at the north, and that I have been able to visit the free civilization of Europe."

"But why did you live in Louisiana if it was such a Sodom, papa?"

"Ah! there you have me. Perhaps it was because I had an expensive daughter to support, and could pick up four or five thousand dollars a year there easier than anywhere else. But you see I am suffering for having given my countenance to sin. I have escaped out of the burning city, like Lot, with only my family. It is my daily wonder, Lillie, that you are not turned into a pillar of salt. The only reason probably is that the age of miracles is over."

"Papa, when I am as old as you are, and you are as young as I am, I'll satirize you dreadfully.—Well, if we are going to live in New Boston, why can't we keep house?"

"It costs more for two people to keep house than to board. Our furniture, rent, food, fuel, lights and servants would come to more than the eighteen dollars a week which we pay here, now that we have given up our parlor. In a civilized country elbow-room is expensive."

"But is it exactly nice to stay forever in a hotel? English travellers make such an outcry about American families living in hotels."

"I know. At the bottom it is bad. But it is a sad necessity of American society. So long as we have untrained servants—black barbarians at the South and mutinous foreigners at the North—many American housekeepers will throw down their keys in despair and rush for refuge to the hotels. And numbers produce respectability, at least in a democracy."

"So we must give up the idea of a nice little house all to ourselves."

"I am afraid so, unless I should happen to find diamonds in the basaltic formation of the Eagle's Nest."

The Doctor falls to his writing, and Miss Ravenel to her embroidery. Presently the young lady, without having anything in particular to say, is conscious of a desire for further conversation, and, after searching for a subject, begins as follows.

"Papa, have you been in the parlor this morning?"

"Yes, my dear," answers papa, scratching away desperately with his old-fashioned quill pen.

"Whom did you see there?"

"See?—Where?—Oh, I saw Mr. Andrew Smith," says the Doctor, at first absent-minded, then looking a little quizzical.

"What did he have to say?"

"Why, my dear, he spoke so low that I couldn't hear what he said."

"He did!" responds Miss Ravenel, all interest. "What did that mean? Why didn't you ask him to repeat it?"

"Because, my dear, he wasn't talking to me; he was talking to Mrs. Smith."

Here Miss Ravenel perceives that her habitual curiosity is being made fun of, and replies, "Papa, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"My child, you must give me some chance to write," retorts the Doctor; "or else you must learn to sit a little in your own room. Of course I prefer to have you here, but I do demand that you accord me some infinitesimal degree of consideration."

Father and daughter used to have many conversations not very dissimilar to the above. It was a constant prattle when they were together, unless the Doctor raised the standard of revolt and refused to talk in order that he might work. Ever since Lillie's earliest recollection they had been on these same terms of sociability, companionship, almost equality. The intimacy and democracy of the relation arose partly from the Doctor's extreme fondness for children and young people, and partly from the fact that he had lost his wife early, so that in his household life he had for years depended for sympathy upon his daughter.

Twice or thrice every morning the Doctor was obliged to remonstrate against Lillie's talkativeness, something after the manner of an affectionate old cat who allows her pussy to jump on her back and bite her ears for a half hour together, but finally imposes quiet by a velvety and harmless cuffing. Occasionally he avenged himself for her untimely demands on his attention by reading to her what he considered a successful passage of the article which he might then be composing. In this, however, he had not the least intention of punishment, but supposed that he was conferring a pleasure. It was an essential element of this genial, social, sympathetic nature to believe that whatever interested him would necessarily interest those whom he loved and even those with whom he simply came in contact. When Lillie offered corrections on his style, which happened frequently, he rarely hesitated to accept them. Vanity he had none, or at any rate displayed none, except on two subjects, his daughter and his scientific fame. As a proof of this last he gloried in an extensive correspondence with European savants, and made Lillie read every one of those queer-shaped letters, written on semi-transparent paper and with foreign stamps and postmarks on their envelopes, which reached him from across the Atlantic. Although medicine was his profession and had provided him with bread, he had latterly fallen in love with mineralogy, and in his vacation wanderings though that mountainous belt which runs from the Carolinas westward to Arkansas and Missouri he had discovered some new species which were eagerly sought for by the directors of celebrated European collections. Great was his delight at receiving in New Boston a weighty box of specimens which he had shipped as freight from New Orleans just previous to his own departure, but which for two months he had mourned over as lost. It dowered him with an embarrassment of riches. During a week his bed, sofa, table, wash-stand, chairs and floor were littered with the scraps of paper and tufts of cotton and of Spanish moss which had served as wrappers, and with hundreds of crystals, ores and other minerals. Over this confusion the Doctor domineered with a face wrinkled by happy anxiety, laying down one queer-colored pebble to pick up another, pronouncing this a Smithite and that a Brownite trying his blowpipe on them and then his hammer, and covering all the furniture with a layer of learned smudge and dust and gravel.

"Papa, you have puckered your forehead up till it is like a baked apple," Lillie would remonstrate. "You look more than five thousand years old; you look as though you might be the grandfather of all the mummies. Now do leave off bothering those poor Smithites and Hivites and Amelekites, and come and take a walk."

"My dear, you havn't the least idea how necessary it is to push one's discoveries to a certainty as quickly as possible," would answer the Doctor, meanwhile peering at a specimen through his magnifying glass. "The world won't wait for me to take your time. If I don't work fast enough in my researches, it will set somebody else at the job. It makes no allowance for Louisiana ideas of leisure and,"—here he suddenly breaks off his moralizing and exclaims, "My dear, this is not a Brownite; it is a Robinsonite—a most unquestionable and superb Robinsonite."

"Oh papa! I wish I was an unquestionable Robinsonite; then you would take some sort of interest in me," says Miss Lillie.

But the Doctor is lost in the ocean of his new discovery, and for fifteen minutes has not a word to say on any subject comprehensible to the young lady.

Two hours of every afternoon were devoted by father and daughter to a long walk in company, sometimes a mere shopping or calling tour, but generally an excursion into the pure country of fields and forest as yet so easily reached from the centre of New Boston. The Doctor preserved a reminiscence of his college botany, and attempted to impart some of his knowledge of plants to Lillie. But she was a hopeless scholar; she persisted in caring for little except human beings and such literature as related directly to them, meaning thereby history, biography, novels and poetry; she remained delightfully innocent of all the ologies.

"You ought to have been born four thousand years ago, Lillie," he exclaimed in despair over some new instance of her incapacity to move in his favorite grooves. "So far as you are concerned, Linnæus, Humboldt, Lyell, Faraday, Agassiz and Dana might as well not have lived. I believe you will go through life without more knowledge of science than just enough to distinguish between a plant and a pebble."

"I do hope so, papa," replied the incorrigible and delightful ignoramus.

When they met one of their acquaintance on these walks the Doctor would not allow him to pass with a nod and a smile, after the unobtrusive New Boston fashion. He would stop him, shake hands cordially, inquire earnestly after his health and family, and before parting contrive to say something personally civil, if not complimentary; all of which would evidently flatter the New Bostonian, but would also as evidently discompose him and turn his head, as being a man unaccustomed to much social incense.

"Papa, you trouble these people," Lillie would sometimes expostulate. "They don't know where to put all your civilities and courtesies. They don't seem to have pockets for them."

"My child, I am nothing more than ordinarily polite."

"Nothing more than ordinary in Louisiana, but something very extraordinary here. I have just thought why all the gentlemen one meets at the South are so civil. It is because the uncivil ones are shot as fast as they are discovered."

"There is something in that," admitted the Doctor. "I suppose duelling has something to do with the superficial good manners current down there. But just consider what an impolite thing shooting is in itself. To knock and jam and violently push a man into the other world is one of the most boorish and barbarous discourtesies that I can imagine. How should I like to be treated that way! I think I never should be reconciled to the fact or its author."

"But these New Bostonians are so poky—so awfully serious."

"I have some consideration for anti-jokers. They are not amusing, but they are generally useful. It is well for the race, no doubt, to have many persons always in solemn earnest. I don't know what the world would come to if every body could see a joke. Possibly it might laugh itself to death."

Frequently on these walks they were met and joined by Mr. Colburne. That young gentleman, frank as his clear hazel eyes and hearty laugh made him appear, was awkwardly sly in bringing about these ostensibly accidental meetings. Not that his clumsy male cunning deceived Miss Ravenel: she was not by any means fond enough of him to fail to see through him; she knew that he walked in her paths with malice aforethought. Her father did not know it, nor suspect it, nor ever, by any innate consciousness or outward hint, feel his attention drawn toward the circumstance. And, what was most absurd of all, Mr. Colburne persisted in fearing that the Doctor, that travelled and learned man of the world, guessed the secret of his slyness, but never once attributed that degree of sharp-sightedness to the daughter. I sometimes get quite out of patience with the ugly sex, it is so densely stupid with regard to these little social riddles. For example, it happened once at a party that while Colburne, who never danced, was talking to Miss Ravenel, another gentleman claimed her hand for a quadrille. She took her place in the set, but first handed her fan to Colburne. Now every lady who observed this action understood that Miss Ravenel had said to Colburne as plainly as it was possible to express the thing without speaking or using force, that she wished him to return to her side as soon as the quadrille was over, and that in fact she preferred his conversation to that of her dancing admirer. But this masculine blunderer comprehended nothing; he grumbled to himself that he was to be put off with the honor of holding a fan while the other fellow ran away with the owner; and so, shoving the toy into his pocket, he absented himself for half an hour, to the justifiable disapprobation of Miss Ravenel, who did not again give him any thing to hold for many evenings.

But this was an exceptional piece of stupidity in Colburne, and probably he would not have been guilty of it but for a spasm of jealousy. He was not grossly deficient in social tact, any more than in natural cleverness or in acquired information. Conversation, and very sensible conversation too, flowed like a river when he came into confluence with the Ravenels. The prevailing subject, as a matter of course, was the rebellion. It was every body's subject; it was the nightmare by night and the delirium by day of the American people; it was the one thing that no one ignored and no one for an hour forgot. The twenty loyal millions of the North shuddered with rage at the insolent wickedness of those conspirators who, merely that they might perpetuate human bondage and their own political supremacy, proposed to destroy the grandest social fabric that Liberty ever built, the city of refuge for oppressed races, the hope of the nations. For men who through such a glorious temple as this could rush with destroying torches and the cry of "Rule or ruin," the North felt a horror more passionate than ever, on any occasion, for any cause, thrilled the bosom of any other people. This indignation was earnest and wide-spread in proportion to the civilization of the century and the intelligence of the population. The hundreds of telegraph lines and thousands of printing presses in the United States, sent the knowledge of every new treason, and the reverberation of every throb of patriotic anger, in a day to all Americans outside of nurseries and lunatic asylums. The excitement of Germany at the opening of the Thirty Years' War, of England previous to the Cromwellian struggle, was torpid and partial in comparison with this outburst of a modern, reading and swiftly-informed free democracy. As yet there was little bloodshed; the old respect for law and confidence in the processes of reason could not at once die, and men still endeavored to convince each other by argument while holding the pistol to each other's heads; but from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf there was a spiritual preparedness for slaughter which was to end in such murderous contests as should make ensanguined Europe rise from its thousand battle-fields to stare in wonder.

Women and children were as wild with the patriotic excitement as men. Some of the prettiest and gentlest-born ladies of New Boston waited in a mixed crowd half the night at the railroad station to see the first regiments pass towards Washington, and flung their handkerchiefs, rings, pencil-cases, and other trinkets to the astonished country lads, to show them how the heart of woman blessed the nation's defenders. In no society could you be ten minutes without hearing the words war, treason, rebellion. And so, the subject being every body's subject, the Ravenels and Colburne frequently talked of it. It was quite a sad and sore circumstance to the two gentlemen that the lady was a rebel. To a man who prides himself on his superior capacity and commanding nature, (that is to say, to almost every man in existence) there can be few greater grievances than a woman whom he cannot convert; and more particularly and painfully is this true when she bears some near relationship to him, as for instance that of a wife, sister, daughter and sweetheart. Thus Ravenel the father and Colburne the admirer, fretted daily over the obstinate treasonableness of Miss Lillie. Patriotism she called it, declaring that Louisiana was her country, and that to it she owed her allegiance.

It is worthy of passing remark how loyal the young are to the prevailing ideas of the community in which they are nurtured. You will find adult republicans in England, but no infant ones; adults monarchists in our own country, but not in our schools and nurseries. I have known an American of fifty whose beliefs, prejudices and tastes were all European, but who could not save his five children from being all Yankee. Accordingly this young lady of nineteen, born and nurtured among Louisianians, held firm for Louisiana in spite of the arguments of the adored papa and the rather agreeable admirer.

The Doctor liked Colburne, and respected his intellect. He rarely tired of talking with him on any subject, and concerning the war they could go on interminably. The only point on which they disagreed was the probable length of the contest; the southerner prophecying that it would last five or six years, and the northerner that the rebels would succumb in as many months. Miss Ravenel sometimes said that the North would give up in a year, and sometimes that the war would last forty years, both of which opinions she had heard sustained in New Orleans. But, whatever she said, she always believed in the superior pluck and warlike skill of the people of her own section.

"Miss Ravenel," said Colburne, "I believe you think that all southerners are giants, so tall that they can't see a Yankee without lying down, and so pugnacious that they never go to church without praying for a chance to fight somebody."

She resented this satire by observing, "Mr. Colburne, if I believe it you ought not to dispute it."

I am inclined to think that the young man in these days rather damaged his chances of winning the young lady's kind regards (to use a hackneyed and therefore decorous phrase) by his stubborn and passionate loyalty to the old starry banner. It was impossible that the two should argue so much on a subject which so deeply interested both without occasionally coming to spiritual blows. But why should Mr. Colburne win the kind regards of Miss Ravenel? If she were his wife, how could he support her?

He had little, and she had nothing.

While they were talking over the war it went on. One balmy summer day our little debating club of three sat in one of the small iron balconies of the hotel, discussing the great battle which had been fought, and rumor said won, on the heights around Manassas Junction. For a week the city had been wild about the 'on to Richmond' movement; and to-day the excitement culminated in a general joy which was impatient for official announcements, flags, bells and cannon. It was true that there was one suspicious circumstance; that for twenty-four hours no telegrams concerning the fight had come over the wires from Washington; but, excepting a few habitual croakers and secret copperheads, who were immediately frowned into silence, no one predicted evil tidings. At the last accounts "the grand army of the Potomac" was driving before it the traitorous battalions of the South; McDowell had gained a great victory, and there was an end of rebellion.

"I don't believe it—I don't believe it," Miss Ravenel repeatedly asseverated, until her father scolded her for her absurd and disloyal incredulity.

"The telegraph is in order again," observed Colburne. "I heard one of those men who just passed say so. Here comes somebody that we know. Whitewood!—I say, Whitewood! Any thing on the bulletin-board?"

The pale young student looked up with a face of despair and eyes full of tears.

"It's all up, Colburne," said he. "Our men are running, throwing away their guns and every thing."

His trembling voice hardly sufficed for even this short story of shame and disaster. Miss Ravenel, the desperate rebel, jumped to her feet with a nervous shriek of joy and then, catching her father's reproving eye, rushed up stairs and danced it out in her own room.

"It's impossible!" remonstrated Colburne in such excitement that his voice was almost a scream. "Why, by the last accounts—"

"Oh! that's all gone up," groaned Whitewood, who was in such a state of grief that he could hardly talk intelligibly. "We've got more. We've got the end of the battle. Johnson came up on our right, and we are whipped all to pieces."

"Johnson! Why, where was Patterson?"

"Patterson is an old traitor," shouted Whitewood, pushing wildly on his way as if too sick at heart to talk more.

"It is very sad," observed the Doctor gravely. The thought occurred to him that for his own interests he had better have stayed in New Orleans; but he lost sight of it immediately in his sorrow for the seeming calamity which had befallen country and liberty and the human race.

"Oh! it's horrible—horrible. I don't believe it. I can't believe it," groaned Colburne. "It's too much to bear. I must go home. It makes me too sick to talk."