University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.
COLONEL CARTER MAKES AN ASTRONOMICAL EXPEDITION
WITH A DANGEROUS FELLOW TRAVELLER.

A prospect of flat peace and boundless prosperity is
tiresome to the human eye. Although it is morally agreeable
to think about the domestic happiness and innocence
of the Carters, as sketched in a late chapter, there is danger
that the subject might easily prove tiresome to the
reader, and moreover it is difficult to write upon it. I
announce therefore with intellectual satisfaction that our
Colonel is summoned to the trial of bidding good-bye to
his wife, and undertaking a journey to Washington.

It was his own work and for his own interests. He felt
the necessity of adding to his income, and desired the
honor and claimed the justice of promotion. High Authority
in the department admitted that the star of a brigadier
was not too high a reward for this brave man,
thoroughly instructed officer, model colonel. High Authority
was tired of gerrymandering seniorities so as to give a
superb brigade of three thousand men to the West Point
veteran, Carter, and a skeleton division of nine hundred
men to the ex-major-general of militia, ex-mayor of Pompoosuc,
Brigadier-General John Snooks. Accordingly
when the Colonel applied for a month's leave of absence,
with the understood purpose of sueing for an acknowledgment
of his services, High Authority made him bearer of
dispatches to Washington, so that, being on duty, he
might pay his travelling expenses out of the Government

pocket. The same mail which brought him his order informed
him that a steamer would sail for the north on the
next day but one. Acting with the rapidity which always
marked his movements when he had once decided on his
course, he took the next morning's train for New Orleans,
first pressing his wife for many times to his breast and
kissing away such of her tears as he could stay to witness.
To good angels, and other people capable of appreciating
such things, it would have been a pretty though
pathetic spectacle to see this slender, blonde-haired girl
clinging to the strong, bronzed, richly colored man with
the burning black eyes.

“Oh, what shall I do without you?” she moaned.
“What shall I do with myself?”

“My dear little child,” he said, “you will do just what
you like. If you choose to stay here and keep house,
Captain Colburne will see that you are cared for. Perhaps
it may be best, however, to join your father. Here are
two hundred dollars, all the money that I have except
what is necessary to take me to New Orleans. I shall get
a month's pay there. Don't settle any bills. Tell people
that I will attend to them when I come back.—There.
Don't keep me, my dear one. Don't make me lose the
train.”

So he went, driving to the railroad in an ambulance,
while Lillie looked after him with tearful eyes, and waved
her handkerchief and kissed her hand till he was out of
sight. At first she decided that she would remain at
Thibodeaux and think of her husband in every room of the
house, and every walk of the garden; but after two days
she found herself so miserably lonesome that she shut up
the cottage, went to New Orleans and threw herself upon
her father for consolation. Having told so much in anticipation
we will go back to the Colonel. The two hundred
dollars which he left with his wife had been borrowed
from the willing Colburne. Carter had no pay due him
as he had hinted, but he hoped to obtain a month's advance

from a paymaster, or, failing in that, to borrow from
some one, say the commanding general. In fact, one hundred
and fifty dollars, abstracted from Government funds.
I fear, were furnished him by a neglected quartermaster,
who likewise wanted promotion and was willing to run
this risk for the sake of securing the benign influences of
Carter's future star. With this friend in need the Colonel
took the first glass of plain whiskey which he had swallowed
in three months. To this followed other glasses, proffered
by other friends, whose importunity he could not now resist,
although yesterday he had repulsed them with ease.
Every brother colonel, every appreciating brigadier,
seemed possessed of Satan to lead him to a bar or to his
own quarters and there to toast his health, or his luck, or
his star. It was “Here's how!” and “Here's towards
you!” from ten o'clock in the morning when he got his
money, until four in the afternoon when he sprang on
board the Creole just as she loosed her moorings from the
shaky posts of the tattered wooden wharf. Being in that
state of exhilaration which enabled Tam O'Shanter to gaze
on the witches of Alloway kirk-yard without flinching, the
Colonel was neither astonished nor alarmed at encountering
on the quarter-deck the calm, beautiful, dangerous eyes
of Madame Larue. The day before he would have been almost
willing to lose the steamer rather than travel with her.
Now, in the fearlessness of plain whiskey, he shook both her
hands with impetuous warmth and said, “'Pon honor, Mrs.
Larue, perfectly delighted to see you.”

“And so am I delighted,” she answered with a flash of
unfeigned pleasure in her eyes, which might have alarmed
the Carter of yesterday but which gratified the Carter of
to-day.

“Now I shall have a cavalier,” she continued, allowing
him to pull her down on a seat by his side. “Now I shall
have a protector and adviser. I have had such need of
one. Did you know that I was going on this boat? I am
so flattered if you meant to accompany me! I am going

north to invest my little property. I still fear that it is
not safe here. No one knows what may happen here. As
soon as I could sell for a convenable sum, I resolved to
go north. I shall expect you to be my counsellor how to
invest.”

Carter laughed boisterously.

“My dear, I never invested a picayune in my life,” he
said.

She noticed the term of endearment and the fact of
semi-intoxication, but she was not vexed nor alarmed by
either. She was tolerably well accustomed to drunken
gentlemen, and she was not easily hurt by love-making,
no matter how vigorous.

“You have always invested in the Bank of Love,” she
remarked with one of those amatory glances which black
eyes, it seems to me, can make more effective than blue
ones.

“And in monte and faro, and bluff and euchre,” he
added, laughing loudly again. “In wine bills, and hotel
bills, and tailors' bills, and all sorts of negatives.”

The debts which weighed somewhat heavily yesterday
were mere comicalities and piquancies of life to-day.

“Oh! you are a terrible personage. I fear you are not
the protector I ought to choose.”

He made no reply, feeling vaguely that the conversation
was growing dangerous, and sending back a thought
to his wife like a cry for help. Mrs. Larue divined his
alarm and changed the subject.

“What makes you voyage north?” she asked with a
knowing smile. “Are you in search of a new planet?”

Through his plain whiskey the Colonel could not see her
joke on the star which he was seeking, but he was still
clever enough to shun the confession that he was on an expedition
in search of promotion.

“I am bearer of dispatches,” he said. “Nothing to do
now in Louisiana. I shall be back before any more fighting
comes off.”

“Shall you? I am enchanted of it. I shall return soon,
and hope to make the voyage with you. I am not going
to forsake New Orleans. I love the city well enough—and
more, I cannot sell my house. Remember, you must let
me know when you return, and arrange yourself to come
on my steamer.”

Next morning, in possession of his sober senses, Carter
endeavored to detach himself a little from Mrs. Larue,
impelled to this seeming lack of chivalry by remembrance
of his wife, and mistrust of his own power of self-government.
But this prudent course soon appeared to be impossible
for a variety of reasons. In the first place it happened,
whether by chance or through her forethought
he did not know, that their state-rooms opened on the
same narrow passage. In the second place, he was the
only acquaintance that Mrs. Larue had on board, and there
was not another lady to take her up, the Creole being a
Government transport, and civilian travel being in those
times rare between New York and New Orleans. Moreover,
the other passengers were in his estimation low, or
at least plain people, such as sutlers, speculators, and
rough volunteer officers—so that, if he left her, she was
alone, and could not even venture on deck for a breath of
fresh air. At any rate, that was the way that she chose
to put it, although there was not the least danger that
she would be insulted, and although, had Carter been
absent, she would not have failed to strike up a flirtation
with some other representative of my noble sex.
Finally, he was obliged to consider that she was a relative
of his wife. Thus before the second day was over,
he found himself under bonds of courtesy to be the constant
attendant of Mrs. Larue. They sat together next
the head of the table, the lady being protected from the
ignoble crowd of volunteers by the Colonel on one side,
and the captain of the Creole on the other. Opposite them
were a major and a chaplain, highly respectable persons
so far as one could judge from their conversation, but who

never got a word, rarely a look, from Mrs. Larue or Carter.
The captain talked, first with one party, then with
the other, but never with both at once. He was a polite
and considerate man, accustomed to his delicate official
position as a host, and he saw that he would not be thanked
for making the conversation general. Except to him, to
Carter, and to the servants, Mrs. Larue did not speak
one word during the first seven days of the passage. All
the volunteer officers admired her nun-like demeanor. Kept
afar off, and with no other woman in sight, they began
to worship her, much as the brigade at Thibodeaux
adored that solitary planet of loveliness, Mrs. Carter.
The fact that she was a widow, which crept out in some
inexplicable manner, only heightened the enthusiasm.

“By Heavens!” declared one flustered Captain, “if I
only had Colonel before my name, and a hundred thousand
dollars after it, I would rush to her and say, `Madame,
are you inconsolable? Could I persuade you to
forget the dear departed?' ”

While these gentlemen worshipped her, Carter hoped
she would get sea sick. This great, brawny, boisterous,
domineering, heroic fighter had just enough moral vitality
to know when he was in danger of falling, and to wish for
safety. Those were perilous hours at evening, when the
ship swept steadily through a lulling whisper of waters,
when a trail of foamy phosphorescense, like a transitory
Milky Way, followed in pursuit, when a broad bar of rippling
light ran straight out to the setting moon, when the
decks were deserted except by slumberers, and Mrs. Larue
persisted in dallying. The temptation of darkness, the
temptation of solitude, the fever which begins to turn
sleepless brains at midnight, made this her possible hour
of coquettish conquest. She varied from delicately phrased
sentimentalities to hoydenish physical impertinences. He
was not permitted for five minutes together to forget that
she was a bodily, as well as a spiritual presence. He was
not checked in any transitory license of speech or gesture.

Meantime she quoted fine rhapsodies from Balzae, and repeated
telling situations from Dumas le Jeune, and commented
on both in the interest of the sainte passion de
l'amour. Once, after a few moments of silence and revery,
she said with an air of earnest feeling, “Is it not a horrible
fate for a woman—solitude? Do you not pity me? Thirty
years old, a widow, and childless! No one to love; no
right to love any one.”

She changed into French now, as she frequently did when
she was animated and wished to express herself freely.
Such talk as this sounds unnatural in the language of the
Anglo-Saxon, but is not so unbecoming to the tongue of
the Gauls.

“A woman to whom the affections are forbidden, is deprived
of the use of more than half her being. Whatever
her possibilities, she is denied all expansion beyond a certain
limit. She may not explore, much less use, her own
heart. It contains chambers of joy which she can only
guess of, and into which she must not enter. There is a
nursery of affections there, but she can only stand with
her ear to the door, trying to hear the sweet prattle within.
There is an innermost chapel, with an altar all set for the
communion of love, but no priest to invite her to the holy
banquet. She is capable of a mother's everlasting devotion,
but she scarcely dares suspect it. She is fitted to
enter upon the tender mysteries of wifehood, and yet she
is constantly fearing that she shall never meet a man whom
she can love. That is the old maid, horrible name! The
widow is less ashamed, but she is more unhappy. She has
been taught her possibilities, and then suddenly forbidden
the use of them.”

Had the Colonel been acquainted with Michelet and his
fellow rhapsodists on women, he might have suspected
Madame of a certain amount of plagiarism. But he only
thought her amazingly clever, at the same time that he
was unable to answer her in her own style.

“Why don't you marry?” he asked, striking with Anglo-Saxon
practicality at the root of the matter.

“Satirical question!” responded Madame, putting her
face close to his, doubtless in order to make her smile visible
by moonlight. “It is not so easy to marry in these
frightful times. Besides,—shall I avow it?—what if I
cannot marry the man of my choice?”

“That's bad.”

“What if he would marry some one else?—Is it not a
humilating confession?—Do you know what is left to a
woman then? Either hidden love, or spiritual self-murder.
Which is the greater of the two crimes? Is the former
a crime? Society says so. But are there not exceptions
to all rules, even moral ones? Love always has this
great defence—that nature prompts it, commands it. As
for self-repression, asphyxia of the heart, Nature never
prompts that.”

The logical conclusion of all this sentimental sophistry
was clear enough to Carter's intellect, although it did not
deceive his Anglo-Saxon conscience. He understood,
briefly and in a matter of fact way that Madame was quite
willing to be his wife's rival. He was not yet prepared to
accept the offer; he only feared and anticipated that he
should be brought to accept it.

Mrs. Larue was a curious study. Her vices and virtues
(for she had both) were all instinctive, without a taint of
education or effort. She did just what she liked to do,
unchecked by conscience or by anything but prudence.
She was as corrupt as possible without self-reproach, and
as amiable as possible without self-restraint. Her serenity
was at all times as unrippled as was that of Lillie in her
happiest conditions. Her temper was so sunny, her smile
so ready, and her manner so flattering, that few persons of
the male sex could resist liking her. But she was the detestation
of most of her lady acquaintance—who were
venomously jealous of her attractions—or rather seductions—and
abhorred her for the unscrupulous manner in

which she put them to use, abusing her in a way which
was enough to make a man rally to her rescue. She really
cared little for that divin sens du genesiaque concerning
which she prattled so freely to her intimates; and therefore
she was cool and sure in her coquetries, at the same
time that vanity gave her motive force which some naughty
flirts derive from passion. She took a pride in making
conquests of men, at no matter what personal sacrifice.

Carter saw where he was drifting to, and groaned over
it in spirit, and made resolutions which he broke in half
an hour, and rowed desperately against the tide, and then
drifted again.

“A woman in the same house has so many devilish
chances at a fellow,” he repeated to himself with a bitter
laugh; and indeed he coarsely said as much to Mrs. Larue,
with a desperate hope of angering and alienating her. She
put on a meekly aggrieved air, drew away from him, and
answered, “That is unmanly in you. I did not think you
could be so dishonorable.”

He was deeply humiliated, begged her pardon, swore
that he was merely jesting, and troubled himself much to
obtain forgiveness. During the whole of that day she was
distant, dignified and silently reproachful. Yet all the
while she was not a bit angry with him; she was as mali
cious as Mephistopheles, but she was also as even-tempered;
moreover she was flattered and elated by the evident
desperation which drove him to the impertinence.
In his efforts to obtain a reconciliation Carter succeeded
so thoroughly that the scene took place late at night, his
arm around her waist and his lips touching her cheek.
You must remember—charitably or indignantly, as you
please—that she was his wife's relative. From this time
forward he pretty much stopped his futile rowing against
the tide. He let Mrs. Larue take the helm and guide him
down the current of his own emotions, singing meawhile
her syren lyrics about la sainte passion, etc. etc. There
were hours, indeed, when he grated over reefs of remorse.

At the thought of his innocent, loving, trusting wife he
shut his eyes as if to keep out the gaze of a reproachful
spectre, clenched his hands as if trying to grasp some rope
of escape, and cursed himself for a fool and a villain. But
it was a penitence without fruit, a self-reproach without
self-control.

Mrs. Larue treated him now with a familiar and confiding
fondness which he sometimes liked and sometimes not,
according as the present or the past had the strongest hold
on his feelings.

“I am afraid that you do not always realize that we are
one for life,” she said in one of her earnest, French speaking
moods. “You are my sworn friend forever. You
must never hate me; you cannot. You must never change
towards me; it would be a perjury of the heart. But I
do not doubt you, my dear friend. I have all confidence
in you. Oh, I am so happy in feeling that we are united
in such an indissoluble concord of sympathy.”

Carter could only reply by taking her hand and pressing
it in silence. He was absolutely ashamed of himself
that he was able to feel so little and to say nothing.

“I never shall desire a husband,” she proceeded. “I can
now use all my heart. What does a woman need more? How
strangely Heaven has made us! A woman is only happy
when she is the slave, body and soul, of some man. She
is happy, just in proportion to her obedience and self-sacrifice.
Then only she is aware of her full nature. She
is relieved from prison and permitted the joy of expansion.
It is a seeming paradox, but it is solemnly true.”

Carter made no answer, not even by a look. He was
thinking that his wife never philosophised concerning her
love, never analyzed her sentiments, and a shock of self-reproach,
as startling as the throb of a heart-complaint,
struck him as he called to mind her purity, trust and affection.
It is curious, by the way, that he suffered no remorse
on account of Mrs. Larue. In his opinion she fared
no worse than she deserved, and in fact fared precisely as

she desired, only he had not the nerve to tell her so.
When, late one night, on the darkened and deserted
quarter-deck, she cried on his shoulder and whispered, “I
am afraid you don't love me—I have a right to claim
your love,” he felt no affection, no gratitude, not even any
profound pity. It annoyed him that she should weep, and
thus as it were reproach him, and thus trouble still further
his wretched happiness. He was not hypocrite enough to
say, “I do love you;” he could only kiss her repeatedly,
penitently and in silence. He still had a remnant of a conscience,
and a mangled, sore sense of honor. Nor should
it be understood that Mrs. Larue's tears were entirely hypocritical,
although they arose from emotions which were
so trivial as to be somewhat difficult to handle, and so
mixed that I scarcely know how to assort them. In the
first place she was not very well that evening, and was
oppressed by the despondency which all human beings, especially
women, suffer from when vitality throbs less vigorously
than usual. Moreover a little emotion of this sort
was desirable, firstly to complete the conquest of Carter by
reminding him how much she had sacrificed for him, and
secondly to rehabilitate herself in her own esteem by proving
that she possessed a species of conscience. No woman
likes to believe herself hopelessly corrupt: when
she reaches that point she is subject to moral spasms which
make existance seem a horror; and we perhaps find her
floating in the river, or asphyxiated with charcoal. Therefore
let no one be surprised at the temporary tenderness,
similar to compunction, which overcame Mrs. Larue.

Now that these two had that conscience which makes
cowards of us all, they dropped a portion of the reserve
with which they had hitherto kept their fellow-passengers
at a distance. The captain was encouraged to introduce
his two neighbors, the major and chaplain; and
Mrs. Larue cast a few telling glances at the former and
discussed theological subjects with the latter. To one
who knew her, and was not shocked by her masquerades,

nothing could be more diverting than the nun-like airs
which she put on pour achalander le prêtre. Carter and
she laughed heartily over them in their evening asides.
She would have made a capital actress in the natural comedy
school known on the boards of the Gymnase and at
Wallack's, for it was an easy amusement to her to play a
variety of social characters. She had no strong emotions
nor profound principles of action, it is true, but she was
sympathetic enough to divine them, and clever enough to
imitate their expression. Her manner to the chaplain was
so religiously respectful as to pull all the strings of his
unconscious vanity, personal and professional, so that he
fell an easy prey to her humbugging, declared that he considered
her state of mind deeply interesting, prayed for
her in secret, and hoped to convert her from the errors of
papacy. Indeed her profession of faith was promising if
not finally satisfactory.

“I believe in the holy catholic church,” she said. “But
I am not dogmatique. I think that others also may have
the truth. Our faith, yours and mine, is at bottom one,
indivisible, uncontradictory. It is only our human weakness
which leads us to dispute with each other. We dispute,
not as to the faith, but as to who holds it. This is
uncharitable. It is like quarrelsome children.”

The chaplain was charmed to agree with her. He thought
her the most hopefully religious catholic that he had ever
met; he also thought her the wittiest, the most graceful,
and on the whole the handsomest. Her eyes alone were
enough to deceive him: they were inexhaustible green-rooms
of sparkling masks and disguises; and he was
especially taken with the Madonnesque gaze which issued
from their recesses. He was bamboozled also by the prim,
broad, white collar, like a surplice, which she put on expressly
to attract him; by the demure air of childlike piety
which clothed her like a mantle; by her deference to his
opinion; by her teachable spirit. Perhaps he may also
have been pleased with her plump shoulders and round

arms, and he certainly did glance at them occasionally as
their outlines showed through the transparent muslin; but
he said nothing of them in his talks concerning Mrs. Larue
with his room-mate the Major.

“J'ai apprivoisé le prêtre,” she observed laughingly to
Carter. “I have assured myself a firm friend in his reverence.
He will defend me the character always. He has
asked me to visit his family, and promised to call to see
me at New York. Madame La Prêtresse is to call also.
He is quite capable of praying me to stand godmother to
his next child. If he were not married, I should have an
offer. I believe I could bring him to elope with me in a
fortnight.”

“Why don't you?” asked Carter. “It would make a
scandal that would amuse you,” he added somewhat bitterly,
for he was at times disgusted by her heartlessness.

“No, my dear,” she replied gently, pressing his arm.
“I am quite satisfied with my one conquest. It is all I
desire in the world.”

They were leaning against the taffrail, listening to the
gurgling of the waters in the luminous wake and watching
the black lines of the masts waving against the starlit sky.

“You are silent,” she observed. “Why are you so sad?”

“I am thinking of my wife,” he replied, almost sullenly.

“Poor Lillie! I wish she were here,” said Mrs. Larue.

“My God! what a woman you are!” exclaimed the
Colonel. “Don't you know that I should be ashamed to
look her in the face?”

“My dear, why do you distress yourself so? You can
love her still. I am not exacting. I only want a corner
in your heart. If I might, I would demand the whole;
but I know I could not have it. You ought not to be unhappy;
that is my part in the drama. I have sacrificed
much. What have you sacrificed? A man risks nothing,
loses nothing, in these affairs du cœur. He has a bonne fortune,
voilà tout.”

Carter was heavy laden in secret with his bonne fortune.

He was glad when the voyage ended, and he could leave
Mrs. Larue at New York, with a pleasing chance that he
might never meet her again, and a hope that he had heard
the last of her sainte passion de l'amour. Of course he
was obliged, before he quitted her, to see that she was
established in a good boarding house, and to introduce
her to one or two respectable families among his old acquaintance
in the city. Of course also he said nothing to
these families about her propensities towards the divin
sens and the sainte passion. She quickly made herself a
character as a southern loyalist, and as such became quite
a pet in society. Before she had been a week in the city
she was an inmate of the household of the Rev. Dr. Whitehead,
a noted theologian and leading abolitionist, who
worked untiringly at the seemingly easy task of converting
her from the errors of slavery and papacy. It somewhat
scandalized his graver parishioners, especially those
of Copperhead tendencies, that he should patronize so gay
a lady. But the Reverend Doctor did not see her pranks,
and did not believe the tale when others related them.
How could he when she looked the picture of a saint,
dressed entirely in black and white, wore her hair plain a
la Madonne, and talked theology with those earnest eyes,
and that childlike smile? To the last he honestly regarded
her as very nigh unto the kingdom of heaven. It was to
shield her from envious slanders, to cover her with the
ægis of his great and venerable name, that the warm-hearted,
unsuspicious old gentleman dedicated to her his
little work on moral reform, entitled “St. Mary Magdalen.”
How ecstatically Mrs. Larue laughed over this book when
she got to her own room with it, after the presentation! She
had not had such a paroxysm of merriment before, since
she was a child; for during all her adult life she had been
too blasee to laugh often with profound heartiness and
honesty: her gayety had been superficial, like most of her
other expressions of feeling. I can imagine that she looked
very attractive in her spasm of jollity, with her black eyes
sparkling, her brunette cheeks flushed, her jetty streams
of hair waving and her darkly roseate arms and shoulders
bare in the process of undressing. Before she went to bed
she put the book in an envelope addressed to Carter, and
wrote a playful letter to accompany it, signed “Your best
and most loving friend, St. Marie Madeleine.”