Читать книгу Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (Historical Novel) - John William De Forest - Страница 9

Table of Contents

The settlement of his mother's estate and of his own pecuniary affairs occupied Colburne's time until the early part of October. By then he had invested his property as well as might be, rented the much-loved old homestead, taken a room in the New Boston House, and was fully prepared to bid good-bye to native soil, and, if need be, to life. Miss Ravenel was a strong though silent temptation to remain and to exist, but he resisted her with the heroism which he subsequently exhibited in combating male rebels.

One morning, as he left the hotel rather later than usual to go to his office, his eyes fell upon a high-colored face and gigantic brown mustache, which he could not have failed to recognize, no matter where nor when encountered. There was the wounded captive of Bull Run, as big chested and rich complexioned, as audacious in eye and haughty in air, as if no hurt nor hardship nor calamity had ever befallen him. He checked Colburne's eager advance with a cold stare, and passed him without speaking. But the young fellow hardly had time to color at this rebuff, when, just as he was opening the outer door, a baritone voice arrested him with a ringing, "Look here!"

"Beg pardon," continued the Lieutenant-Colonel, coming up hastily. "Didn't recognize you. It's quite a time since our pic-nic, you know."

Here he showed a broad grin, and presently burst out laughing, as much amused at the past as if it did not contain Bull Run.

"What a jolly old pic-nic that was!" he went on. "I have shouted a hundred times to think of myself passing the wine and segars to those prim old virgins. Just as though I had bowsed into the House Beautiful, among Bunyan's damsels, and offered to treat the crowd!"

Again the Lieutenant-Colonel laughed noisily, his insolent black eyes twinkling with merriment. Colburne looked at him and listened to him with amazement. Here was a man who had lately been in what was to him the terrible mystery of battle; who had fallen down wounded and been carried away captive while fighting heroically for the noblest of causes; who had witnessed the greatest and most humiliating overthrow which ever befel the armies of the republic; who yet did not allude to any of these things, nor apparently think of them, but could chat and laugh about a pic-nic. Was it treasonable indifference, or levity, or the sublimity of modesty? Colburne thought that if he had been at Bull Run, he never could have talked of any thing else.

"Well, how are you?" demanded Carter. "You are looking a little pale and thin, it seems to me."

"Oh, I am well enough," answered Colburne, passing over that subject with modest contempt, as not worthy of mention. "But how are you? Have you recovered from your wound?"

"Wound? Oh! yes; mere bagatelle; healed up some time ago. I shouldn't have been caught if I hadn't been stunned by my horse falling. The wound was nothing."

"But you must have suffered in your confinement," said Colburne, determined to appreciate and pity.

"Suffered! My dear fellow, I suffered with eating and drinking and making merry. I had the deuce's own time in Richmond. I met loads of my old comrades, and they nearly killed me with kindness. They are a nice set of old boys, if they are on the wrong side of the fence. You didn't suppose they would maltreat a brother West Pointer, did you?"

And the Lieutenant-Colonel laughed heartily at the civilian blunder.

"I didn't know, really," answered the puzzled Colburne. "I must say I thought so. But I am as poor a judge of soldiers as a sheep is of catamounts."

"Why, look here. When I left they gave me a supper, and not only made me drunk, but got drunk themselves in my honor. Opened their purses, too, and forced their money on me."

All this, it will be noted, was long previous to the time when Libby Prison and Andersonville were deliberately converted into pest-houses and starvation pens.

"I am afraid they wanted to bring you over," observed Colburne. He looked not only suspicious, but even a little anxious, for in those days every patriot feared for the faith of his neighbor.

"I suppose they did," replied Carter carelessly, as if he saw nothing extraordinary in the idea. "Of course they did. They need all the help that they can get. In fact the rebel Secretary of War paid me the compliment of making me an offer of a regiment, with an assurance that promotion might be relied on. It was done so delicately that I couldn't be offended. In fact it was quite natural, and he probably thought it would be bad taste to omit it. I am a Virginian, you know; and then I was once engaged in some southern schemes and diplomacies—before this war broke out, you understand—oh, no connection with this war. However, I declined his offer. There's a patriot for you."

"I honor you, sir," said Colburne with a fervor which made the Lieutenant-Colonel grin. "You ought to be rewarded."

"Quite so," answered the other in his careless, half-joking style. "Well, I am rewarded. I received a letter yesterday afternoon from your Governor offering me a regiment. I had just finished an elegant dinner with some good fellows, and was going in for a roaring evening. But business before pleasure. I took a cold plunge bath and the next train for New Boston, getting here at midnight. I am off at ten to see his Excellency."

"I am sincerely delighted," exclaimed the young man. "I am delighted to hear that the Governor has had such good sense."

After a moment's hesitation he added anxiously, "Do you remember your invitation to me?"

"Certainly. What do you say to it now? Will you go with me?"

"I will," said Colburne emphatically. "I will try. I only fear that I can neither raise nor command a company."

"Never fear," answered Carter in a tone which pooh-poohed at doubt. "You are just the man. Come round to the bar with me, and let's drink success to our regiment. Oh, I recollect; you don't imbibe. Smoke a segar, then, while we talk it over. I tell you that you are just the man. Noblesse oblige. Any gentleman can make a good enough company officer in three months' practice. As to raising your men, I'll give you my best countenance, whatever that may amount to. And if you actually don't succeed in getting your quota, after all, why, we'll take somebody else's men. Examinations of officers and consolidations of companies bring all these things right, you know."

"I should be sorry to profit by any other man's influence and energy to his harm," answered the fastidious Colburne.

"Pshaw! it's all for the good of the service and of the country. Because a low fellow who keeps a saloon can treat and wheedle sixty or eighty stout fellows into the ranks, do you suppose that he ought to be commissioned an officer and a gentleman? I don't. It can't be in my regiment. Leave those things to me, and go to work without fear. Write to the Adjutant-General of the State to-day for a recruiting commission, and as soon as you get it, open an office. I guarantee that you shall be one of the Captains of the Tenth Barataria."

"Who are the other field officers?" asked Colburne.

"Not appointed yet. I am alone in my glory. I am the regiment. But the Lieutenant-Colonel and Major shall be of the right stamp. I mean to have a word to say as to the choice. I tell you that we'll have the bulliest regiment that ever sprang from the soil of New England."

"Well, I'll try. But I really fear that I shall just get my company recruited in time for the next war."

"Never fear," laughed Carter, as though war were a huge practical joke. "We are in for a four or five years' job of fighting."

"You don't mean it!" said the young man in amazement. "Why, we citizens are all so full of confidence. McClellan, every body says, is organizing a splendid army. Did Bull Run give you such an opinion of the superior fighting qualities of the southerners?"

"Not at all. Both sides fought timidly, as a rule, just as greenhorns naturally would do. The best description of the battle that I have heard was given in a single sentence by my old captain, Lamar, now in command of a Georgia regiment. Said he, 'There never was a more frightened set than our fellows—except your fellows.—Why, we outfought them in the morning; we had them fairly whipped until Johnston came up on our right. The retreat was a mathematical necessity; it was like saying, Two and two make four. When our line was turned, of course it had to retreat."

"Retreat!" groaned Colburne in bitterness over the recollection of that calamitous afternoon. "But you didn't see it. They ran shamefully, and never stopped short of Washington. One man reached New Boston inside of twenty-four hours. It was a panic unparalleled in history."

"Nonsense! Beg your pardon. Did you never read of Austerlitz and Jena and Waterloo? Our men did pretty well for militia. I didn't see the panic, to be sure;—I was picked up before that happened. But I have talked with some of our officers who did see it, and they told me that the papers exaggerated it absurdly. Newspaper correspondents ought not to be allowed in the army. They exaggerate every thing. If we had gained a victory, they would have made it out something greater than Waterloo. You must consider how easily inexperience is deceived. Just get the story of an upset from an old stage-driver, and then from a lady passenger; the first will tell it as quite an ordinary affair, and the second will make it out a tragedy. Now when some old grannies of congressmen and some young ladies of newspaper reporters, none of whom had ever seen either a victory or a defeat before, got entangled among half a dozen disordered regiments they naturally concluded that nothing like it had happened in history. I tell you that it wasn't unparalleled, and that it ought not to have been considered surprising. Whichever of those two green armies got repulsed was pretty sure to be routed. That was a very pretty manœuvre, though, that coming up of Johnston on our right. Patterson ought to be court-martialed for his stupidity."

"Stupidity! He is a traitor," exclaimed Colburne.

"Oh! oh!" expostulated the Colonel with a cough. "If we are to try all our dull old gentlemen as traitors, we shall have our hands full. That's something like hanging homely old women for witches.—By the way, how are the Allstons? I mean the—the Ravenels. Well, are they? Young lady as blooming and blushing as ever? Glad to hear it. Can't stop to call on them; my train goes in ten minutes.—I am delighted that you are going to fall in with me. Good bye for to-day."

Away he went, leaving Colburne in wonder over his contrasts of slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and insouciance of character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual temples common in New Boston. The young man would have preferred that his future Colonel should not drink and swear; but he would not puritanically decide that a man who drank and swore could not be a good officer. He did not know army men well enough to dare judge them with positiveness; and he certainly would not try them by the moral standards according to which he tried civilians. The facts that Carter was a professional soldier, and that he had shed his blood in the cause of the country, were sufficient to make Colburne regard with charity all his frank vices.

I must not allow the reader to suppose that I present Carter as a type of all regular officers. There were men in the old army who never tasted liquors, who never blasphemed, who did not waste their substance in riotous living, who could be accused of no evil practices, who were models of Christian gentlemen. The American service, as well as the English, had its Havelocks, its Headly Vicars, its Colonel Newcomes. Nevertheless I do venture to say that it had also a great many men whose moral habits were cut more or less on the Carter pattern, who swore after the fashion of the British army in Flanders, whose heads could carry drink like Dugald Dalgetty's, and who had even other vices concerning which my discreet pen is silent.

Within a week after the conversation above reported Colburne opened a recruiting office, advertised the "Putnam Rangers" largely, and adorned his doorway with a transparency representing Old Put in a brand-new uniform riding sword in hand down the stone steps of Horse-neck. His company, as yet in embryo, was one of the ten accepted out of the nineteen offered for Carter's regiment. It was supposed that the name of a West Point colonel would render the organization a favorite one with the enlisting classes; and accordingly all the chiefs of incomplete companies throughout the State of Barataria wanted to seize the chance for easy recruiting. But Colburne soon found that the dullness of a young lawyer's office was none too prosy an exordium for the dullness of a recruiting office at this particular period. Passed was that springtide of popular enthusiasm when companies were raised in a day, when undersized heroes wept at being rejected by the mustering officer, when well-to-do youths paid a hundred dollars to buy out a chance to be shot at. Bull Run had disenchanted some romantic natures concerning the pleasures of war, and the vast enlistments of the summer had drawn heavily on the nation's fighting material. Moreover, Colburne had to encounter obstacles of a personal nature, such as did not trouble some of his competitors. A student, a member of a small and shy social circle, neither business man nor one of the bone and sinew, not having belonged to a fire company or militia company, nor even kept a bar or billiard-saloon, he had no retainers nor partisans nor shopmates to call upon, no rummy customers whom he could engage in the war-dance on condition of unlimited whiskey. He had absolutely no personal means of influencing the classes of the community which furnish that important element of all military organizations, private soldiers. For a time he remained almost as solitary in his office as Old Put in the perilous glory of his breakneck descent. In short the raising of his company proved a slow, vexatious and expensive business, notwithstanding the countenance and aid of the Colonel.

Miss Ravenel was much spited in secret when she saw his advertisement; but she was too proud to expose her interest in the matter by opposition. What object had she in keeping him at home and out of danger? Moreover, after the fashion of most southern women, she believed in fighting, and respected a man the more for drawing the sword, no matter for which party. After a while, when his activity and cheerfulness of spirit had returned to him, she began to talk with her old freedom of expression, and indulged in playful prophecies about the Bull Runs he would fight, the masterly retreats he would accomplish, and the captivities he would undergo.

"When you are a prisoner in Richmond," she said, "I'll write to my Louisiana friends in the southern army and tell them what a spiteful abolitionist you are. I'll get them to put a colored friend and brother into the same cell with you. You won't like it. You'll promise to go back to your law office, if they'll send that fellow to his plantation."

The Doctor was all sympathy and interest, and brimmed over with prophecies of Colburne's success. He judged the people of Barataria by the people of Louisiana; the latter preferred gentlemen for officers, and so of course would the former. Notwithstanding his hatred of slavery he was still somewhat under the influence of its aristocratical glamour. He had not yet fully comprehended that the war was a struggle of the plain people against an oligarchy, and that the plain people had, not very understandingly but still very resolutely, determined to lead the fighting as well as to do it. He had not yet full faith that the northern working-man would beat the southern gentleman, without much guidance from the northern scholar.

"Don't be discouraged," he said to Colburne. "I feel the utmost confidence in your prospects. As soon as it is generally understood who you are and what your character is, you will have recruits to give away. It is impossible that these bar-tenders and tinkers should raise good men as easily as a gentleman and a graduate of the university. They may get a run of ruff-scuff, but it won't last. I predict that your company will be completed sooner and composed of better material than any other in the regiment. I would no more give your chance for that of one of these tinkers than I would exchange a meteorite for its weight in old nails."

The Doctor abounded in promising but unfruitful schemes for helping forward the Putnam Rangers. He proposed that Colburne should send a circular to all the clergymen and Sabbath-school superintendents of the county, calling upon each parish to furnish the subscriber with only one good recruit.

"If they do that," said he, "as they unquestionably will when the case is properly presented to them, why the company is filled at once."

He advised the young man to make an oratorical tour, delivering patriotic speeches in the village lyceums, and circulating an enlistment paper at the close of each performance. He told him that it would not be a bad move to apply to his professional brethren far and near for aid in rousing the popular enthusiasm. He himself wrote favorable notices of the captain and his company, and got them printed in the city journals. One day he came home in a hurry, and with great glee produced the evening edition of the New Boston Patriot.

"Our young friend has hit it at last," he said to Lillie. "He has called the muses to his aid. Here is a superb patriotic hymn of his composition. It is the best thing of the kind that the literature of the war has produced." (The Doctor was somewhat given to hyperbole in speaking well of his friends.) "It can't fail to excite popular attention. I venture to predict that those verses alone will bring him in fifty men."

"Let me see," said Lillie, making an impatient snatch at the paper; but the Doctor drew it away, desirous of enjoying the luxury of his own elocution. To read a good thing aloud and to poke the fire are simple but real pleasures, which some people cannot easily deny themselves—and which belong of right, I think, to the head of a family. The Doctor settled himself in an easy chair, adjusted his collar, put up his eyeglass, dropped it, put on his spectacles in spite of Lillie's remonstrances, and read as follows—

A NATIONAL HYMN.

Tune: America.

Be thou our country's Chief

In this our year of grief,

Allfather great;

Go forth with awful tread,

Crush treason's serpent head,

Bring back our sons misled,

And save our State.

Uphold our stripes and stars

Through war's destroying jars

With thy right hand;

Oh God of battles, lead

Where our swift navies speed,

Where our brave armies bleed

For fatherland.

Break every yoke and chain,

Let truth and justice reign

From sea to sea;

Make all our statutes right

In thy most holy sight;

Light us, O Lord of light,

To follow Thee.

God bless our fatherland,

God make it strong and grand

On sea and shore;

Ages its glory swell,

Peace in its borders dwell,

God stand its sentinel

For ever more.

"Let me see it," persisted Lillie, making a second and more successful reach for the paper. She read the verses to herself with a slight flush of excitement, and then quietly remarked that they were pretty. It has been suspected that she kept that paper; at all events, when her father sought it next morning to cut out the verses and paste them in his common-place book, he could not find it; and while Lillie pretended to take an interest in his search, she made no distinct answer to his inquiries. I am told by persons wise in the ways of young ladies that they sometimes lay aside trifles of this sort, and are afterwards ashamed, from some inexplicable cause, of having the fact become patent even to their nearest relatives. It must not be understood, by the way, that Miss Ravenel had lost her slight admiration for that full-blown specimen of the male sex, Colonel Carter. He was too much in the style of a Louisiana planter not to be attractive to her homesick eyes. She welcomed his rare visits with her invariable but nevertheless flattering blush, and talked to him with a vivacity which sent flashes of pain into the soul of Colburne. The young man admitted the fact of these spasms, but tried to keep up a deception as to their cause. In his charity towards himself he attributed them to an unselfish anxiety for the happiness of that sweet girl, who, he feared, would find Carter an unsuitable husband, however grandiose as a social ornament and accomplished as an officer.

In spite of these sentimental possibilities of disagreement between the Colonel and the Captain, their friendship daily grew stronger. The former was not in the least influenced by lovelorn jealousy, and set much store by Colburne as being the only officer in his regiment who was precisely to his taste. He had desired, but had not been able to obtain, the young gentlemen of New Boston, the sons of the college professors, and of the city clergymen. The set was limited in number and not martial nor enthusiastic in character. It had held aristocratically aloof from the militia, from the fire companies, from personal interference in local politics, from every social enterprise which could bring it into contact with the laboring masses. It needed two years of tremendous war to break through the shy reserve of this secluded and almost monastic little circle, and let loose its sons upon the battlefield. The Colonel was disgusted with his raft of tinkers and tailors, as he called his officers, although they were mostly good drill-masters and creditably zealous in learning the graver duties of their new profession. The regular army, he said, had not been troubled with any such kind of fellows. The brahminism of West Point and of the old service revolted from such vulgar associations. It required the fiery breath of many fierce battles, in which the gallantry of volunteers shone conspicuous, to blow this feeling into oblivion.

One day the Colonel related in confidence to the Doctor a circumstance which had given him peculiar disgust. The Governor having permitted him to nominate his own Lieutenant-Colonel, he had selected an ex-officer of a three months' regiment who had shown tactical knowledge, and gallantry. The field position of Major he had finally resolved to demand for Colburne. Hence an interview, and an unpleasant one, with the chief magistrate of Barataria.

"Governor," said Carter, "I want that majority for a particular friend of mine, the best officer in the regiment and the best man for the place that I know in the State."

The Governor was in his little office reclining in a high-backed oaken chair, and toasting his feet at a fire. He was a tall, thin, stooping gentleman, slow in gait because feeble in health, with a benign dignity of manner and an unvarying amiability of countenance. His eyes were a pale blue, his hair a light chestnut slightly silvered by fifty years, his complexion had once been freckled and was still fair, his smile was frequent and conciliatory. Like President Lincoln he sprang from the plain people, who were to conquer in this war, and like him he was capable of intellectual and moral growth in proportion to enlargement of his sphere of action. A modest, gentle-tempered, obliging man, patriotic in every impulse, devout in the severe piety of New England, distinguished for personal honor and private virtues, he was in the main a credit to the State which had selected him for its loftiest dignity.

He had risen from his chair and saluted the Colonel with marked respect. Although he did not like his moral ways, he valued him highly for his professional ability and courage, and was proud to have him in command of a Baratarian regiment. To his shy spirit this aristocratic and martial personage was in fact a rather imposing phenomenon. Carter had a fearful eye; by turns audaciously haughty and insolently quizzical; and on this occasion the Governor felt himself more than usually discomposed under its wide open, steady, confident stare. He seemed even a little tremulous as he took his seat; he dreaded to disagree with the representative of West Point brahminism; and yet he knew that he must.

"Captain Colburne."

"Oh—Captain Colburne," hesitated the Governor. "I agree with you, Colonel, in all that you say of him. I hope that there will be an opportunity yet of pushing him forward. But just now," he continued with a smile that was apologetical and almost penitent, "I don't see that I can give him the majority. I have promised it to Captain Gazaway."

"To Gazaway!" exclaimed Carter. A long breath of angry astonishment swelled his broad breast, and his cheek would have flushed if any emotion could have deepened the tint of that dark red bronze.

"You don't mean, I hope, Governor, that you are resolved to give the majority of my regiment to that boor."

"I know that he is a plain man," mildly answered the Governor, who had begun life himself as a mechanic.

"Plain man! He is a plain blackguard. He is a toddy-mixer and shoulder-hitter."

The Governor uttered a little troubled laugh; he was clearly discomposed, but he was not angry.

"I am willing to grant all that you say of him," he answered. "I have no personal liking for the man. Individually I should prefer Captain Colburne. But if you knew the pressure that I am under—"

He hesitated as if reflecting, smiled again with his habitual gentleness, folded and unfolded his hands nervously, and proceeded with his explanation.

"You must not expose our little political secrets, Colonel. I am obliged to permit certain schemes and plots which personally I disapprove of. Captain Gazaway lives in a very close district, and influences a considerable number of votes. He is popular among his class of people, as you can see by the ease with which he filled his company. He and his friends insist upon the majority. If we refuse it we shall probably lose the district and a member of Congress. That is a serious matter at this time when the administration must be supported by a strong house, or the nation may be shipwrecked. Still, if I were left alone I would take the risk, and appoint good officers and no others to all our regiments, satisfied that success in the field is the best means of holding the masses firm in support of the Government. But in the meantime Burleigh, who is our candidate in Gazaway's district, is defeated, we will suppose. Burleigh and Gazaway understand each other. If Gazaway gets the majority, he promises to insure the district to Burleigh. You see the pressure I am under. All the leading managers of our party concur in urging upon me this promotion of Gazaway. I regret extremely that I can do nothing now for your favorite, whom I respect very much. I hope to do something for him in the future."

"When an election is not so near at hand," suggested Carter.

"Here," continued the Governor, without noticing the satire, "I have been perfectly frank with you. All I ask in return is that you will have patience."

"'Pon my honor, I can't of course find fault with you personally, Governor," replied the Colonel. "I see how the cursed thing works. You are on a treadmill, and must keep stepping according to the machinery. But by—! sir, I wish this whole matter of appointments was in the hands of the War Department."

"I almost wish it was," sighed the Governor, still without a show of wounded pride or impatience.

It was this conversation which the Colonel repeated to the scandalized ears of Doctor Ravenel, when the latter urged the promotion of Colburne.

"I hope you will inform our young friend of your efforts in his favor," said the Doctor. "He will be exceedingly gratified, notwithstanding the disappointment."

"No," said the Colonel. "I beg your pardon; but don't tell him. It would not be policy, it would not be soldierly, to inform him of any thing likely to disgust him with the service."