University of Virginia Library

33. CHAPTER XXXIII.
LILLIE DEVOTES HERSELF ENTIRELY TO THE RISING
GENERATION.

Lillie wished to return, at least for a while, to her old
quarters in the New Boston House. A desire to go back
by association to some part of her life which had been
happy may have influenced her in this choice; and she was
so quietly earnest in it that her father yielded, although
he feared that the recollections connected with the place
would increase her melancholy. They had been there
only three days when he read with a shock the newspaper
report of the battle of Cane River, and the death of “the
lamented General Carter.” He did not dare mention it
to her, and sought to keep the journals out of her reach.
This was easy enough, for she never went out alone,
rarely spoke to any one but her father, and devoted her
time mostly to her child and her sewing. But about a
week after their arrival, as the Doctor came in to dinner
from a morning's reading in the college library, he found
her weeping quietly over a letter which lay open in her
lap. She handed it to him, merely saying, “Oh, papa!”

He glanced through it hastily; it was Colburne's account
of Carter's death.

“I knew this, my dear,” he said. “But I did not dare
to tell you. I hope you are able to bear it. There is a
great deal to bear in this world. But it is for our good.”

“Oh, I don't know,” she replied with a weary air. She
was thinking, not of his general consolations, but of his
hope that she could endure her trial; for a trial it was,
this sudden death of her husband, though she had thought
of him of late only as separated from her forever. After
a short silence she sobbed, “I am so sorry I quarreled

with him. I wish I had written to him that I was not
angry.”

She went on crying, but not passionately, nor with a
show of unendurable sorrow. From that time, as he
watched the patient tranquillity of her grief, the Doctor
conceived a firm hope that she would not be permanently
crushed by her afflictions. She kept the letter in her own
writing desk, and read it many times when alone; sometimes
laying it down with a start to take up the unconscious
giggling comforter in the cradle; sometimes telling
him what it all meant, and what her tears meant, saying,
“Poor baby! Baby's papa is dead.”

Only once did an expression savoring of anger at any
one force its way through her lips.

“I don't see why I should have been made miserable
because others are wicked,” she said.

“It is one of the necessary consequences of living,” answered
the Doctor. “Other people's sins are sometimes
brought to our doors, just as other people's infants are
sometimes left there in baskets. God has ordained that
we shall help bear the burdens of our fellow creatures,
even down to the consequences of their crimes. It is one
way of teaching us not to sin. I have had my small share
of this unpleasant labor. I lost my home and my income
because a few men wanted to found a slave-driving oligarchy
on the ruins of their country.”

“We have had nothing but trials,” sighed Lillie.

“Oh yes,” said the Doctor. “Life in the average is a
mass of happiness, only dotted here and there by trials.
Our pleasures are so many that they grow monotonous
and are overlooked.”

I must now include the history of eight months in a few
pages. The Doctor, ignorant of the steamboat transaction,
allowed his daughter to draw the money which she had
left behind on deposit, considering that Carter's child unquestionably
had a right to it. Through the good offices
of that amiable sinner, Mrs. Larue (of which he was equally

unaware), he was enabled to let his house in New Orleans
as a Government office. Thus provided with ready money
and a small quarterly payment, he resumed his literary
and scientific labors, translating from a French Encyclopedia
for a New York publisher, and occasionally securing
a job of mineralogical discovery. The familiar life of
former days, when father and daughter were all and all to
each other, slowly revived, saddened by recollections, but
made joyful also by the new affection which they shared.
As out of the brazen vase of the Arabian Nights arose the
malignant Jinn whose head touched the clouds, and whose
voice made the earth tremble, so out of the cradle of Ravvie
arose an influence, perhaps a veritable angel, whose
crown was in the heavens, and whose power brought down
consolation. There was no cause of inner estrangement;
nothing on which father and child could not feel alike.
Ravenel had found some difficulty in liking his daughter's
husband, but he had none at all in loving his daughter's
baby. So, agreeing on all subjects of much importance to
either, and disposed by affection and old habit to take a
strong interest in each other's affairs, they easily returned
to their former ways of much domestic small-talk. Happily
for Lillie she was not taciturn, but a prattler, and by nature
a light-hearted one. Now prattlers, like workers of
all kinds, physical and moral, unconsciously dodge by their
activity a great many shafts of suffering which hit their
quieter brothers and sisters. A widow who orders her
mourning, and waits for it with folded hand and closed
lips, is likely to be more melancholy than a widow who
must trim her gowns, and make up her caps with her own
fingers, and who is thereby impelled to talk of them to
her mother, sisters, and other born sympathisers. It was
a symptom of returning health of mind when Lillie could
linger before the glass, arrange her hair with the old taste,
put on a new cap daintily and say, “Papa, how does that
look?”

“Very well, my dear,” answers papa, scratching away

at his translation. Then, remembering what his child had
suffered, and transferring his thoughts to the subject which
she proffers for consideration, he adds, “It seems to me
that it is unnecessarily stiff and parchment like. It looks
as if it was made of stearine.”

“Why, that's the material,” says Lillie. “Of course it
looks stiff; it ought to.”

“But why not have some other material?” queries the
Doctor, who is as dull as men usually are in matters of
the female toilet. “Why not use white silk, or something?”

“Silk, papa!” exclaims Lillie, and laughs heartily.
“Who ever heard of using silk for mourning?”

Woe to women when they give up making their own
dresses and take to female tailors! Five will then die of
broken hearts, of ennui, of emptiness of life, where one dies
now.

But her great diverter and comforter was still her child.
Like most women she was born for maternity more distinctly
and positively even than for love. She had not
given up her dolls until she was fourteen; and then she
had put them reverentially and tenderly away in a trunk
where she could occasionally go and look at them; and
less than seven years later she had a living doll, her own,
her soul's doll, to care for and worship. It was charming
to see this slender, Diana-like form, overloaded and leaning,
but still bearing, with an affection which was careless of
fatigue, the disproportionate weight of that healthy, succulent,
ponderous Ravvie. His pink face, and short flaxen
hair bobbed about her shoulders, and his chubby hands
played with her nose, lips, hair, and white collars. When
he went out on an airing she almost always went with
him, and sometimes took the sole charge of his wicker
wagon, proud to drag it because of its illustrious burden.
Ravvie had a promenade in the morning with mamma and
nurse, and another late in the afternoon with mamma and
grandpapa. Lillie meant to make him healthy by keeping

him constantly in the open air, and burning him brown
in the sunshine, after the sensible fashion of southern nurseries,
and in consonance with the teaching of her father.
The old Irish nurse, a veteran and enthusiast in her profession,
had more than one contest with this provokingly
devoted mother. Not that Rosann objected to the child
being out; she would have been glad to have him in the
wicker wagon from breakfast to dinner, and from dinner
to sundown; but she wanted to be the sole guide and
companion of his wanderings. When, therefore she was
ordered to stay at home and do the small washing and
ironing, while the mistress went off with the baby, she set
up an indignant ullaloo, and threatened departure without
warning. Sometimes Lillie was satirical and said, “Rosann,
since you can't nurse the baby, I hope you will allow
me to do so.”

To which Rosann, with Irish readiness, and with an
apologetic titter, would reply, “An' since God allows ye
to do it, ma'am, I don't see as I can make an objection.”

“I would turn her away if she wasn't so fond of Ravvie,”
affirmed Lillie in a pet. “She is the most selfish
creature that I ever saw. She wants him the whole time.
I declare, papa, I only keep her out of pity. I believe it
would break her heart to deprive her of the child.”

“It's a very odd sort of selfishness,” observed the Doctor.
“Most people would call it devotion, self-abnegation,
or something of that sort.”

“But he isn't her child,” answered Lillie, half vexed,
half smiling. “She thinks he is. I actually believe she
thinks that she had him. But she didn't. I did.”

She tossed her head with a pretty air of defiance, which
was as much as to say that she was not ashamed of the
feat.

Long before Master Ravvie could say a word in any
language, she had commenced the practice of talking to
him only in French. He should be a linguist from his
cradle; and she herself would be his teacher. When he

got old enough her father should instruct him in the
sciences, and, if he chose to be a doctor, in the theory and
practice of medicine. They would never send him to
school, nor to college: thus they would save money, have
him always by them and keep him from evil. Concerning
this project she had long arguments with her father, who
thought a boy should be with boys, learn to rough it away
from home, study human nature as well as languages and
sciences, and grow up with a circle of emulators and life
comrades.

“You will give up this little plan of yours,” he said,
“when he gets old enough to make it necessary. When
he is fifteen he won't wear the shell that fits him now, and
meantime we must let another one grow on his back
against he needs it.”

But Lillie could not yet see that her child ought even
to be separated from her. She was constantly arranging,
and re-arranging her imaginary future in such ways as
seemed best fitted to make him a permanent feature of it.
In every cloud-castle that she built he occupied a central
throne, with her father sitting on the right hand and she
on the left. Of course, however, she was chiefly occupied
with his present, desiring to make it as delightful to him
as possible.

“I wonder if Ravvie would like the sea-shore,” she said,
on one of the first warm days of summer.

“Why so?” asks papa.

“Oh, it would be so pleasant to spend a week or so on
the sea-shore. I think I could get a little fatter and
stronger if I might have the sea-breeze and sea-bathing. I
am tired of being so thin. Besides, it would be such fun
to take Ravvie down to the beach and see him stare at the
waves rolling in. How round his eyes would be! Do
you remember how he used to turn his head up when he
was a month old, and stare at the sky with his eyes set
like a doll-baby's. I wish I knew what he used to think
of it.”

“I presume he thought just about as much as the hollyhocks
do when they turn their faces toward the sun,” says
the Doctor.

“For shame, papa! Do you compare him to a vegetable?”

“Not now. But in those days he was only a grade
above one. There wasn't much in him but possibilities.
Well; he may have perceived that the sky was very fine;
but then the hollyhocks perceive as much.”

“What! don't you suppose he had a soul?”

“Oh yes. He had a tongue too, but he hadn't learned
to talk with it. I doubt whether his soul was of much use
to him in that stage of his existence.”

“Papa, it seems to me that you talk like an infidel. Now
if Ravvie had died when he was a month old, I should
have expected to meet him in Heaven—that is, if I am
ever fit to go there.”

“I have no doubt you would—no doubt of it,” affirmed
the Doctor with animation. “I never intended to dispute
the little man's immortality.”

“Then why did you call him a hollyhock?”

“My dear, I take it all back. He isn't a hollyhock and
never was.”

“If we can hire a house I want it in the suburbs,” said
Lillie, after a meditation. “I want it outside the city so
that Ravvie can have plenty of air. His room must be on
the sunny side, papa—hear?”

“Yes,” answered papa, who had also had his revery,
probably concerning Smithites and Brownites.

“You don't hear at all,” said Lillie. “You don't pay
any attention.”

“Well, my child, there is plenty of time. We sha'n't
have a house for the next five minutes.”

“I know it. Not for five years perhaps. But I want
you to pay attention when I am talking about Ravvie.”

Meantime the two were very popular in New Boston.
As southern refugees, as martyrs in the cause of loyalty,

as an organizer of free black labor, as the widow of a
distinguished Union officer, both and each were personages
whom the fervent Federalists of the little city delighted
to honor. As soon as they would receive calls or
accept of new acquaintances they had all that they wanted.
Professor Whitewood had been killed at Chancellorsville,
although bodily more than three hundred miles from
the field of battle; and his son was now worth eighty
thousand dollars, besides seven hundred dollars yearly
from a tutorship, and the prospect of succeeding to his
father's position. This well-to-do, virtuous, amiable, and
intelligent young gentleman was more than suspected of
being in love with the penniless widow. His sister made
the affair a subject of much meditation, and even of prayer,
being anxious above all things on earth, that her brother
should be happy. Whitewood was more than once observed
to drop his Hindustani, sidle out upon the green
and beg the privilege of drawing Ravvie's baby-wagon;
and what was particularly suspicious about the matter
was, that he never attempted to join Rosann in this manner,
but only Mrs. Carter. Lillie colored at the significance
of the shyly-preferred request, and would not consent
to it, but nevertheless was not angry. Her bookish
admirer's interest in her increased when he found that she
aided her father in his translations; for from his childhood
he had been taught to like people very much in proportion
to their intellectuality and education. Of evenings
he was frequently to be seen in the little parlor of the
Revenels on the fourth floor of the New Boston House.
Lillie would have been glad to have him bring his sister,
so that they four could make up a game of whist; but since
the dawn of history no Whitewoods had ever handled a
pack of cards, and the capacity of learning to do so was
not in them. Moreover they still retained some of the old
New England scruples of conscience on the subject.
Whitewood talked quite as much with the Doctor as with
Lillie; quite as much about minerals and chemistry as
about subjects with which she was familiar; but it was
easy to see that, if he had known how, he would have
made his conversation altogether feminine. At precisely
ten o'clock he rose with a start and sidled to the door;
stuck there a few moments to add a postcript concerning
science or classic literature; then with another start opened
the door, and said, “Good evening” after he was in the
passage.

“How awkward he is!” Lillie would sometimes observe.

“Yes—physically,” was the Doctor's answer. “But
not morally. I don't see that he tramples on any one's
feelings, or breaks any one's heart.”

The visitor gone, father and daughter walked in the
hall while Rosann opened the windows for ventilation.
After that the baby's cradle was dragged into the parlor
with much ceremony, the whole family either directing or
assisting; a mattress and blankets were produced from a
closet and made up on the floor into a bed for the nurse;
grandpapa kissed both his children and went to his own
room next door; and Lillie proceeded to undress, talking
to Rosann about Ravvie.

“An' do ye know, ma'am, what the little crater did to
me to-day?” says the doting Irishwoman. “He jist pulled
me spectacles off me nose an' stuck 'em in his own little
mouth. He thought, mebbe, he could see with his mouth.
An' thin he lucked me full in the face as cunnin as could
be, an' give the biggest jump that iver was. I tell ye,
ma'am, babies is smarter now than they used to be.”

This remarkable anecdote, with the nurse's commentary,
being repeated to the Doctor in the morning, he philosophised
as follows.

“There may be something in Rosann's statement. It
is not impossible that the babies of a civilized age are more
exquisitely sensitive beings than the babies of antique
barbarism. It may be that at my birth I was a little ahead
of my Gallic ancestor at his birth. Perhaps I was able to
compare two sensations as early in life as he was able to

perceive a single sensation. It might be something like
this. He at the age of ten days would be capable of
thinking, `Milk is good.' I at the same age could perhaps
go so far as to think, `Milk is better than Dally's Mixture.'
Babies now-a-days have need of being cleverer than they
used to be. They have more dangers to evade, more
medicines to spit out.”

“I know what you mean,” said Lillie. “You always
did rebel against Dally. But what was I to do? He
would have the colic.”

“I know it! He would! But Dally couldn't help it.
Don't, for pity's sake, vitiate and torment your poor little
angel's stomach, so new to the atrocities of this world,
with drugs. These mixers of baby medicines ought to be
fed on nothing but their own nostrums. That would soon
put a stop to their inventions of the adversary.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Lillie. “I don't know what to do
with him sometimes. I am so afraid of not doing enough,
or doing too much!”

Then the argumentem ad hominem occurred to her: that
argumentem which proves nothing, and which women love
so well.

“But you have given him things, papa. Don't you remember
the red fluid?”

“I never gave it to him,” asserted the Doctor.

“But you gave it to me to give to him—when you threw
the Dally out of the window.”

“And do you know what the red fluid was?”

“No. It did him good. It was just as powerful as the
Dally. Consequently it must have been a drug.”

“It was pure water, slightly colored. That was all,
upon my honor—as we say down south. It used to amuse
me to see you drop it according to prescription—five drops
for a dose—very particular not to give him six. He
might have drunk the vial full.”

“Papa,” said Lillie when she had fully realized this

awful deception, “you have a great many sins to repent
of.”

“Poisoning my own grandchild is not one of them,
thank Heaven!”

“But suppose Ravvie had become really sick?” she
suggested more seriously.

“Ah! what a clear conscience I should have had! Nobody
could have laid it to me.”

“How healthy, and strong, and big he is?” was her
next observation. “He will be like you. I would bet
anything that he will be six feet high.”

Ravenel laughed at a bet which would have to wait
some sixteen or eighteen years for a decision, and said it
reminded him of a South Carolinian who offered to wager
that in the year two thousand slavery would prevail the
world over.

“This whole subject of infancy's perceptions, and opinions
is curious,” he observed presently. “What a world
it would be, if it were exactly as these little people see it!
Yes, and what a world it would be, if it were as we grown
people see it in our different moods of depression, exhilaration,
vanity, spite, and folly! I suppose that only Deity
sees it truly.”

In this kind of life the spring grew into summer, the summer
sobered into autumn, and the autumn began to grow
hoary with winter. Eight months of paternal affection received,
and maternal cares bestowed had decided that
Lillie should neither die of her troubles nor suffer a life-long
blighting of the soul. In bloom she was what she
used to be; in expression alone had she suffered a change.
Sometimes sudden flashes of profoundly felt pain troubled
her eyes, as she thought of her venture of love and its
great shipwreck. She had not the slightest feeling of
anger toward her husband; she could not be angry with
the buried father of her child. But she felt, and sometimes
reproached herself for it, that his crime had made
her grieve less over his death, just as his death had led her

to pardon his crime. She often prayed for him, not that
she believed in Purgatory and its deliverance, but rather
because the act soothed painful yearnings which she could
not dispel by reason alone. Her devotional tendencies
had been much increased by her troubles. In fact, she
was far more religious than some of the straiter New
Bostonians were able to believe when they knew that she
played whist, and noted how tastefully she was dressed,
and how charmingly graceful she was in social intercourse.
She never went to sleep without reading a chapter in the
Bible, and praying for her child, her father, and herself.
It is possible that she may have forgotten the heathen, the
Jews, and the negroes. Well, she had not been educated
to think much of far away people, but rather to interest
herself in such as were near to her, and could be made
daily happy or unhappy by her conduct. She almost offended
Mrs. Whitewood by admitting that she loved Ravvie
a thousand times more than the ten tribes, or, as Mrs.
W. called them, the wandering sheep of the house of
Israel. Nor could this excellent lady enlist her interest
in favor of the doctrine of election, owing perhaps to the
adverse remarks of Doctor Ravenel.

“My dear madame,” he said, “let us try to be good,
repent of our short-comings, trust in the atonement,
and leave such niceties to those whose business it is to
discuss them. Doctrines are no more religion than geological
bird-tracks are animated nature. Doctrines are the
footprints of piety. You can learn by them where devout-minded
men have trod in their searchings after the truth.
But they are not in themselves religion, and will not save
souls.”

“But think of the great and good men who have made
these doctrines the study and guide of their lives,” said
Mrs. Whitewood. “Think of our Puritan forefathers.”

“I do,” answered the Doctor. “I think highly of them.
They have my profoundest respect. We are still moving
under the impetus which they gave to humanity. Dead

as they are, they govern this continent. At the same time
they must have been disagreeable to live with. Their
doctrines made them hard in thought and manner. When
I think of their grimness, uncharity, inclemency, I am
tempted to say that the sinners of those days were the salt
of the earth. Of course, Mrs. Whitewood, it is only a
temptation. I don't succumb to it. But now, as to these
doctrines, as to merely dogmatic religion, it reminds me
of a story. This story goes (I don't believe it), that an
ingenious man, having found that a bandage drawn tight
around the waist will abate the pangs of hunger, set up a
boarding-house on the idea. At breakfast the waiters
strapped up each boarder with a stout surcingle. At dinner
the waistbelts were drawn up another hole—or two,
if you were hungry. At tea there was another pull on the
buckle. The story proceeds that one dyspeptic old bachelor
found himself much better by the evening of the second
day, but that the other guests rebelled and left the house
in a body, denouncing the gentlemanly proprietor as a
humbug. Now some of our ethical purveyors remind me
of this inventor. They put nothing into you; they give
you no sustaining food. They simply bind your soul, and
now and then take up a hole in your moral waistbelt.”

It is pretty certain that Lillie even felt more interest in
Captain Colburne than in the vanished Hebrews. It will
be remembered that she has never ceased to like him since
she met him, more than three years ago, in this same New
Boston House, which is now in some faint degree fragrant
to her with his memory. Here commenced that loyal
affection which has followed her through her love for another,
her marriage, and her maternity, and which has
risked life to save her from captivity. She would be ungrateful
if she did not prefer him in her heart to every
other human being except her father and Ravvie. Next
to her intercourse with this same parent and child, Colburne's
letters were her chief social pleasures. They were
invariably directed to the Doctor; but if she got at them

first, she had no hesitation about opening them. It was
her business and pleasure also to file them for preservation.

“If he never returns,” she said, “I will write his life.
But how horrible to hear of him killed!”

“In five months more his three years will be up,” observed
the Doctor. “I hope that he will be protected
through the perils that remain.”

“I hope so,” echoed Lillie. “I wonder if the war will
last long enough to need Ravvie. He shall never go to
West Point.”

“He is pretty certain not to go for the next fourteen
years,” said Ravenel, smiling at this long look ahead.

Lillie sighed; she was thinking of her husband; it was
West Point which had ruined his noble character; nothing
else could account for such a downfall; and her child
should not go there.

In July (1864) they heard that the Nineteenth Corps
had been transferred to Virginia, and during the autumn
Colburne's letters described Sheridan's brilliant victories
in the Shenandoah Valley. The Captain was present in
the three pitched battles, and got an honorable mention
for gallantry, but no promotion. Indeed advancement
was impossible without a transfer, for, although his regiment
had only two field-officers, it was now too much reduced
in numbers to be entitled to a colonel. More than
two-thirds of the rank and file, and more than two-thirds
of the officers had fallen in those three savage struggles.
Nevertheless the young man's letters were unflagging in
their tone of elation, bragging of the bravery of his regiment,
describing bayonet charges through whistling storms
of hostile musketry, telling of captured flags and cannon
by the half hundred, affectionate over his veteran corps
commander, and enthusiastic over his youthful general in
chief.

“Really, that is a most brilliant letter,” observed Ravenel,
after listening to Colburne's account of the victory
of Cedar Creek. “That is the most splendid battle-piece

that ever was produced by any author, ancient or modern,”
he went on to say in his enthusiastic and somewhat hyperbolical
style. “Neither Tacitus nor Napier can equal it.
Alison is all fudge and claptrap, with his granite squares
of infantry and his billows of calvalry. One can understand
Colburne. I know just how that battle of Cedar
Creek was fought, and I almost think that I could fight
such an one myself. There is cause and effect, and their
relations to each other, in his narrative. When he comes
home I shall insist upon his writing a history of this war.”

“I wish he would,” said Lillie, with a flash of interest
for which she blushed presently.