 | CHAPTER V
THE DRAMATIC PERSONAGES GET NEWS FROM BULL RUN. Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty |  |
5. CHAPTER V
THE DRAMATIC PERSONAGES GET NEWS FROM BULL RUN.
“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
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
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
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
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!
“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
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
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
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 interminally. 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.”
| CHAPTER V
THE DRAMATIC PERSONAGES GET NEWS FROM BULL RUN. Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty | |