University of Virginia Library

35. CHAPTER XXXV.
CAPTAIN COLBURNE AS MR. COLBURNE.

During three months Colburne rested from marches,
battles, fatigues, emotions. He was temporarily so worn
out in body and mind that he could not even rally vigor
enough to take an interest in any but the greatest of the
majestic passing events. It is to be considered that he
had been case-hardened by war to all ordinary agitations;
that exposure to cannon and musketry had so calloused
him as that he could read newspapers with tranquillity.
Accordingly he troubled himself very little about the
world; and it got along at an amazing rate without his
assistance. There were no more Marengos in the Shenandoah
Valley, but there was a Waterloo near Petersburg,
and an Ulm near Raleigh, and an assassination of a greater
than William of Orange at Washington, and over all a
grand, re-united, triumphant republic.

As to the battles Colburne only read the editorial summaries
and official reports, and did not seem to care much
for “our own correspondent's” picturesque particulars.
Give him the positions, the dispositions, the leaders, the
general results, and he knew how to infer the minutiæ. To
some of his civilian friends, the brother abolitionists of
former days, this calmness seemed like indifference to the
victories of his country; and such was the eagerness and
hotness of the times that some of them charged him with
want of patriotism, sympathy with the rebels, copperheadism,
etc. One day he came into the Ravenel parlor with
a smile on his face, but betraying in his manner something
of the irritability of weakness and latent fever.

“I have heard a most astonishing thing,” he said. “I
have been called a Copperhead. I who fought three

years, marched the skin off my feet, have been wounded,
starved, broken down in field service, am a Copperhead.
The man who inferred it ought to know; he has lived
among Copperheads for the last three years. He has never
been in the army—never smelled a pinch of rebel powder.
There were no Copperheads at the front; they were all
here, at the rear, where he was. He ought to know them,
and he says that I am one of them. Isn't it amazing!”

“How did he discover it?” asked the Doctor.

“We were talking about the war. This man—who has
never heard a bullet whistle, please remember—asserted
that the rebel soldiers were cowards, and asked my opinion.
I demurred. He insisted and grew warm. `But,'
said I, `don't you see that you spoil my glory? Here I
have been in the field three years, finding these rebels a
very even match in fighting. If they are cowards, I am a
poltroon. The inference hurts me, and therefore I deny
the premise.' I think that my argument aggravated him.
He repeated positively that the rebels were cowards, and
that whoever asserted the contrary was a southern sympathiser.
`But,' said I, `the rebel armies differ from ours
chiefly in being more purely American. Is it the greater
proportion of native blood which causes the cowardice?'
Thereupon I had the Copperhead brand put upon my
forehead, and was excommunicated from the paradise of
loyalty. I consider it rather stunning. I was the only
practical abolitionist in the company—the only man who
had freed a negro, or caused the death of a slaveholder.
Doctor, you too must be a Copperhead. You have suffered
a good deal for the cause of freedom and country;
but I don't believe that you consider the rebel armies
packs of cowards.”

The Doctor noted the excitement of his young friend,
and observed to himself, “Remittent malarious fever.”

“I get along very easily with these earnest people,” he
added aloud. “They say more than they strictly believe,
because their feelings are stronger than can be spoken.

They are pretty tart; but they are mere buttermilk or
lemonade compared with the nitric acid which I used to
find in Louisiana; they speak hard things, but they don't
stick you under the fifth rib with a bowie-knife. Thanks
to my social training in the South, I am able to say to a
man who abuses me for my opinions, `Sir, I am profoundly
grateful to you for not cutting my throat from ear to ear.
I shall never forget your politeness.”'

The nervous fretfulness apparent in Colburne's manner
on this occasion passed away as health and strength returned.
Another phenomenon of his recovered vigor was
that he began to show a stronger passion for the society
of Mrs. Carter than he had exhibited when he first returned
from the wars. On his well days he made a span with
young Whitewood at the baby wagon; only it was observable
that, after a few trials, they came to a tacit understanding
to take turns in this duty; so that when one
was there, the other kept away, in a magnaminous, man
fashion. Colburne found Mrs. Carter, in the main, a much
more serious person in temper than when he bade her
good-bye in Thibodeaux. The interest which this shadow
of sadness gave her in his eyes, or, perhaps I should say,
the interest with which she invested the subject of sadness
in his mind, may be inferred from the somewhat wordy
fervor of the following passage, which he penned about
this time in his common-place book.

“The Dignity of Sorrow. Grand is the heart which is
ennobled, not crushed, by sorrow; by mighty sorrows
worn, not as manacles, but as a crown. Try to conceive
the dignity of a soul which has suffered deeply and borne
its sufferings well, as compared with another soul which
has not suffered at all. Remember how we respect a
veteran battle-ship—a mere dead mass of timber, ropes,
and iron—the Hartford—after her decks have run with
blood, and been torn by shot. No spectacle of new frigates
just from the stocks, moulded in the latest perfected
form, can stir our souls with sympathy like the sight of

the battered hulk. Truly there is something of divinity
in the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, even when
his body is but human, provided always that his soul has
grown purer by its trials.”

At one time Colburne was somewhat anxious about
Mrs. Carter lest her character should become permanently
sombre in consequence of lonely brooding over her troubles.
He remembered with pleasure her former girlish
gayety, and wished that it might be again her prevailing
expression.

“Do you think you see people enough?” he asked her.
“I mean, a sufficient variety of people. Monotony of intellectual
diet is as bad for the spirit as monotony of physical
nourishment for the body.”

“I am sure that papa and Mr. Whitewood constitute a
variety,” she answered.

Colburne was not badly pleased with this speech, inasmuch
as it seemed to convey a slight slur upon Mr. Whitewood.
He was so gratified, in fact, that he lost sight of
the subject of the conversation until she recalled him to it.

“Do you think I am getting musty?” she inquired.

“Of course not. But there is danger in a long-continued
uniformity of spiritual surroundings: danger of running
into a habit of reverie, brooding, melancholy: danger of
growing spiritually old.”

“I know it. But what can a woman do? It is one of
the inconveniences of womanhood that we can't change
our surroundings—not even our hoops—at our own pleasure.
We can't run out into the world and say, Amuse us.”

“There are two worlds for the two sexes. A man's
consists of all the millions of earth and of future time—
unless he becomes a captain in the Tenth Barataria—then
he stays where he began. A woman's consists of the
people whom she meets daily. But she can enlarge it;
she can make it comprehend more than papa and Mr.
Whitewood.”

“But not more than Ravvie,” said Lillie.

As Colburne listened to this declaration he felt something
like jealousy of the baby, and something like indignation
at Mrs. Carter. What business had she to let herself
be circumscribed by the limits of such a diminutive
creature? This was not the only time that Lillie shot this
single arrow in her quiver at Mr. Colburne. She talked
a great deal to him about Ravvie, believing all the while
that she kept a strict rein upon her maternal vanity, and
did not mention the boy half as often as she would have
been justified in doing by his obesity and other remarkable
characteristics. I do not mean to intimate that the
subject absolutely and acrimoniously annoyed our hero.
On the whole her maternal fondness was a pleasant spectacle
to him, especially when he drew the inference that
so good a mother would be sure to make an admirable
wife. Moreover his passion for pets easily flowed into an
affection for this infant, and the child increased the feeling
by his grateful response to the young bachelor's attentions.
Mrs. Carter blushed more than once to see her baby quit
her and toddle across the room and greet Colburne's entrance.

“Ravvie, come here,” she would say. “You trouble
people.”

“No, no,” protested Colburne, picking up the little man
and setting him on his shoulder. “I like to be troubled
by people who love me.”

Then after a slight pause, he added audaciously, “I never
have been much troubled in that way.”

Mrs. Carter's blush deepened a shade or two at this observation.
It was one of those occasions on which a woman
always says something as mal-apropos as possible; and
in accordance with this instinct of her sex, she spoke of
the Russian Plague, which was then a subject of gossip
in the papers.

“I am so afraid Ravvie will take it,” she said. “I have
heard that there is a case next door, and I am really
tempted to run away with him for a week or two.”

“I wouldn't,” replied Colburne. “You might run into
it somewhere else. One case is not alarming. If I had
forty children to be responsible for, I wouldn't break up
for a single case.”

“If you had forty you mightn't be so frightened as if
you had only one,” remarked Mrs. Carter, seriously.

Then the Doctor came in, to declare in his cheerful way
that there was no Russian Plague in the city, and that,
even if there were, it was no great affair of a disease among
a well-fed and cleanly population.

“We are more in danger of breaking out with national
vanity,” said he. “They are singing anthems, choruses,
pæans of praise to us across the water. All the nations of
Europe are welcoming our triumph, as the daughters of
Judea went out with cymbals and harps to greet the giant
killing David. Just listen to this.”

Here he unfolded the Evening Post of the day, took off
his eye-glasses, put on his spectacles, and read extracts
from European editorials written on the occasion of the
fall of Richmond and surrender of Lee.

“They are more flattering than Fourth of July orations,”
said Colburne. “I feel as though I ought to go
straight down to the sea-shore and make a bow across the
Atlantic. It is enough to make a spread peacock-tail
sprout upon every loyal American. I am not sure but that
the next generation will be furnished with the article, as
being absolutely necessary to express our consciousness of
admiration. On the Darwinian theory, you know; circumstances
breed species.”

“The Europeans seem to have more enthusiastic views
of us than we do of ourselves,” observed Lillie. “I never
thought of our being such a grand nation as Monsieur Laboulaye
paints us. You never did, papa.”

“I never had occasion to till now,” said the Doctor.
“As long as we were bedraggled in slavery there was not
much room for honest, intelligent pride of country. It is
different now. These Europeans judge us aright; we have

done a stupendous thing. They are outside of the struggle,
and can survey its proportions with the eyes with
which our descendants will see it. I think I can discover
a little of its grandeur. It is the fifth act in the grand
drama of human liberty. First, the Christian revelation.
Second, the Protestant reformation. Third, the war of
American Independence. Fourth, the French revolution.
Fifth, the struggle for the freedom of all men, without
distinction of race and color; this Democratic struggle
which confirms the masses in an equality with the few.
We have taught a greater lesson than all of us think or
understand. Once again we have reminded the world of
Democracy, the futility of oligarchies, the outlawry of
Cæsarism.”

“In the long run the right conquers,” moralized Colburne.

“Yes, as that pure and wise martyr to the cause of
freedom, President Lincoln, said four years ago, right
makes might. A just system of labor has produced power,
and an unjust system has produced weakness. The North,
living by free industry, has twenty millions of people, and
wealth inexhaustible. The South, living by slavery, has
twelve millions, one half of whom are paupers and secret
enemies. The right always conquers because it always
becomes the strongest. In that sense `the hand of God'
is identical with `the heaviest battalions.' Another thing
which strikes me is the intensity of character which our
people have developed. We are no longer a mere collection
of thirty millions of bores, as Carlyle called us.
There never was greater vigor or range. Look at Booth,
the new Judas Iscariot. Look at Blackburn, who packed
up yellow fever rags with the hope of poisoning a continent.
What a sweep, what a gamut, from these satanic
wretches to Abraham Lincoln! a purer, wiser and greater
than Socrates, whom he reminds one of by his plain sense
and homely humor. In these days—the days of Lincoln,
Grant and Sherman—faith in the imagination—faith in

the supernatural origin of humanity—becomes possible.
We see men who are demoniacal and men who are divine.
I can now go back to my childhood, and read Plutarch as
I then read him, believing that wondrous men have lived
because I see that they do live. I can now understand
the Paradise Lost, for I have beheld Heaven fighting with
Hell.”

“The national debt will be awful,” observes Lillie,
after the brief pause which naturally follows the Doctor's
Cyricism. “Three thousand millions! What will my
share be?”

“We will pay it off,” says the Doctor, “in a series of
operatic entertainments, at a hundred thousand dollars the
dress seats—back seats fifty thousand.”

“The southern character will be improved by the struggle,”
observed Colburne, after another silence. “They
will be sweetened by adversity, as their persimmons are
by frost. Besides, it is such a calming thing to have one's
fight out! It draws off the bad blood. But what are
we to do about punishing the masses? I go for punishing
only the leaders.”

“Yes,” coincided the Doctor. “They are the responsible
criminals. It is astonishing how imperiously strong
characters govern weak ones. You will often meet with
a man who absolutely enters into and possesses other men,
making them talk, act and feel as if they were himself.
He puts them on and wears them, as a soldier crab puts
on and wears an empty shell. For instance, you hear a
man talking treason; you look at him and say, `It is that
poor fool, Cracker.' But all the while it is Planter, who,
being stronger minded than Cracker, dwells in him and
blasphemes out of his windows. Planter is the living
crab, and Cracker is the dead shell. The question comes
up, `Which shall we hang, and which shall we pardon?' I
say, hang Planter, and tell Cracker to get to work.
Planter gone, some better man will occupy Cracker and
make him speak and live virtuously.”

But strange as it may seem, unpatriotic as it may seem,
there was a subject which interested Colburne more than
these great matters. It was a woman, a widow, a mother,
who, as he supposed, still mourned her dead husband, and
only loved among the living her father and her child.
How imperiously, for wise ends, we are governed by the
passion of sex for sex, in spite of the superficial pleas of
selfish reason and interest! What other quality, physical
or moral, have we that could take the place of this beneficently
despotic instinct? Do you believe that conscience,
sense of duty, philanthropy, would induce men and women
to bear with each other—to bring children into the world
—to save the race from extinction? Strike out the affection
of sex for sex, and earth would be, first a hell, then a
desert. God is not very far from every one of us. The
nation was not more certainly guided by the hand of
Providence in overthrowing slavery, than was this man
in loving this woman. I do not suspect that any one of
these reflections entered the mind of Colburne, although
he was intellectually quite capable of such a small amount
of philosophy. We never, or hardly ever think of applying
general principles to our own cases; and he believed,
as a matter of course, that he liked Mrs. Carter simply because
she was individually loveable. On other subjects
he could think and talk with perfect rationality; he could
even discourse transcendentally to her concerning her own
heart history. For instance, one day when she was sadder
than usual, nervous, irritable, and in imperious need of a
sympathising confidant, she alluded shyly to her sorrows,
and, finding him willing to listen, added frankly, “Oh, I
have been so unhappy!”

It is rather strange that he did not sieze the opportunity
and say, “Let me be your consoler.” But he too was in
a temporarily morbid state, his mind unpractical with
fever and weakness, wandering helplessly around the ideas
of trouble and consolation like a moth around the bewilderment

of a candle, and not able to perceive that the
great comforter of life is action, labor, duty.

“So have multitudes,” he answered. “There is some
comfort in that.”

“How can you say so?” she asked, turning upon him
in astonishment.

“Look here,” he answered. “There are ten thousand
blossoms on an apple tree, but not five hundred of them
mature into fruit. So it is with us human beings: a few
succeed, the rest are failures. It is a part of the method
of God. He creates many, in order that some may be
sure to reach his proposed end. He abounds in means;
he has more material than he needs; he minds nothing but
his results. You and I, even if we are blighted blooms,
must be content with knowing that his purposes are certain
to be fulfilled. If we fail, others will succeed, and in
that fact we can rejoice, forgetting ourselves.”

“Oh! but that is very hard,” said Lillie.

“Yes; it is. But what right have we to demand that
we shall be happy? That is a condition that we have no
right and no power to make with the Creator of the Universe.
Our desire should be that we might be enabled to
make others happy. I wonder that this should seem hard
doctrine to you. Women, if I understand them, are full
of self-abnegation, and live through multitudes of self-sacrifices.”

“And still it sounds hard,” persisted Lillie. “I could
not bear another sacrifice.”

She closed her eyes under an impulse of spiritual agony,
as the thought occurred to her that she might yet be
called on to give up her child.

“I am sorry you have been unhappy,” he said, much
moved by the expression of her face at this moment. “I
have sympathised with you, oh, so much! without ever
saying a word before.”

She did not stop him from taking her hand, and for a
few moments did not withdraw it from his grasp. Far

deeper than the philosophy, which she could understand
but not feel, these simple and common-place words, just
such as any child might utter stole into her heart, conveying
a tearful sense of comfort and eliciting a throb of
gratitude.

But their conversation was not often of so melancholy
and sentimental a nature. She had more gay hours with
this old friend during a few weeks than she had had during
six months previous to his arrival. She often laughed
when the tears were ready to start; but gradually the
spirit of laughter was expelling the spirit of tears. She
was hardly sensible, I suspect, how thoroughly he was
winding himself into all her emotions, her bygone griefs,
her present consolations, her pitying remembrance of her
husband, her love for her father and child, her recollections
of the last four years, so full for her of life and feeling.
His presence recalled by turns all of these things,
sweeping gently, like a hand timid because of affection,
over every chord of her heart. Man has great power over
a woman when he is so gifted or so circumstanced that
he can touch that strongest part of her nature, her sentiments.

However, it must not be supposed that Mr. Colburne
was at this time playing a very audible tune on Mrs. Carter's
heart-strings, or that he even distinctly intended to
touch that delicate instrument. He was quite aware that
he must better his pecuniary condition before he could
honorably meddle in such lofty music.

“I must go to work,” he said, after he had been at
home nearly three months. “I shall get so decayed with
laziness that I sha'n't be able to pick myself up. I shall
cease to be respectable if I lounge any longer than is obsolutely
necessary to restore my health.”

“Yes, work is best,” answered the Doctor. “It is our
earthly glory and blessing. It is a great comfort to think
that the evil spirit of no-work is pretty much exorcised
from our nation. The victory of the North is at bottom

the triumph of laboring men living by their own industry,
over non-laboring men who wanted to live by the industry
of others. Europe sees this even more plainly than we
do. All over that continent the industrious classes hail
the triumph of the North as their own victory. Slavery
meant in reality to create an idle nobility. Liberty has
established an industrious democracy. In working for
our own living we are obeying the teachings of this war,
the triumphant spirit of our country and age. The young
man who is idle now belongs to bygone and semi-barbarous
centuries; he is more of an old fogy than the narrowest
minded farm-laborer or ditch-digging emigrant. What
a prosperous hive this will be now that it contains no class
of drones! There was no hope of good from slavery. It
was like that side of the moon which never sees the bright
face of the Earth and whose night is always darkness, no
matter how the heavens revolve. Yes, we must all go to
work. That is, we must be useful and respectable. I am
very glad for your sake that you have studied a profession.
A young man brought up in literary and scientific
circles is subject to the temptation of concluding that it
will be a fine thing to have no calling but letters. He is
apt to think that he will make his living by his pen. Now
that is all wrong; it is wrong because the pen is an uncertain
means of existence; for no man should voluntarily
place himself in the condition of living from hand to
mouth. Every university man, as well as every other
man, should learn a profession, or a business, or a trade.
Then, when he has something solid to fall back upon, he
may if he chooses try what he can do as a scholar or author.”

“I shall re-open my law office,” said Colburne.

“I wonder if it would be unhandsome or unfair,”
queried the Doctor, “if I too should open an office and
take such patients as might offer.”

“I don't see it. I don't see it at all,” responded Colburne.

“Nor do I, either—considering my necessities,” said
Ravenel, meanwhile calculating internally how much
longer his small cash capital would last at the present
rate of decrease.

Within a week after this conversation two offices were
opened, and the professional ranks of New Boston were
reinforced by one doctor and one lawyer.

“Papa, now that you have set up a sign,” said Lillie,
“I will trust you entirely with Ravvie.”

“Yes, women always ask after a sign,” observed Ravenel.
“It is astonishing how much the sex believes in
pretense and show. If I should advertise myself—no
matter how ignorant I might be—as a specialist in female
maladies, I could have all the lady invalids in New Boston
for patients. Positively I sometimes get out of patience
with the sex for its streaks of silliness. I am occasionally
tempted to believe that the greatest difficulty which man
has overcome in climbing the heights of civilization is the
fact that he has had to tote women on his shoulders.”

“I thought you never used negro phrases, papa.”

“I pass that one. Tote has a monosyllabic vigor about
it which pleads for it.”

“You know Mrs. Poyser says that women are fools because
they were made to match the men.”

“Mrs. Poyser was a very intelligent woman—well
worthy of her son, Ike,” returned the Doctor, who knew
next to nothing of novels.

“Now go to your office,” said Lillie, “and if Mrs. Poyser
calls on you, don't give her the pills meant for Mrs.
Partington. They are different ladies.”

Colburne did not regret that he had been a soldier; he
would not have missed the battle of Cedar Creek alone
for a thousand dollars; but he sometimes reflected that if
he had remained at home during the last three years, he
might now be in a lucrative practice. From his salary as
captain he had been able to lay up next to nothing. Nominally
it was fifteen hundred and sixty dollars; but the income

tax took out thirty dollars, and he had forfeited the
monthly ten dollars allowed for responsibility of arms,
etc., during the time he was on staff duty; in addition to
which gold had been up to 290, diminishing the cash value
of his actual pay to less than five hundred dollars. Furthermore
he had lent largely to brother officers, and in
consequence of the death of the borrowers on heroic fields,
had not always been repaid. Van Zandt owed him two
hundred dollars, and Carter had fallen before he could return
him a similar sum. Nevertheless, thanks to the industry
and economy of a father long since buried, the
young man had a sufficient income to support him while
he could plant the slowly growing trees of business and
profit. He could live; but could he marry? Gold was
falling, and so were prices; but even before the war one
thousand dollars a year would not support two; and now
it certainly would be insufficient for three. He considered
this question a great deal more than was necessary for a
man who meant to be a bachelor; and occasionally a
recollection of Whitewood's eighty thousand gave him a
pang of envy, or jealousy, or both together.

The lucre which he so earnestly desired, not for its own
stupid sake, but for the gratification of a secretly nursed
purpose, began to flow in upon him in small but constant
driblets. Some enthusiastic people gave him their small
jobs in the way of conveyancing, etc., because he had
fought three years for his country; and at least, somewhat
to his alarm, a considerable case was thrust upon him,
with a retaining fee which he immediately banked as being
too large for his pocket. Conscious that his legal erudition
was not great, he went to a former fellow student
who during the past four years had burrowed himself
into a good practice, and proposed that they should take
the case in partnership.

“You shall be counsellor,” said he, “and I will be advocate.
You shall furnish the law skeleton of the plea,
and I will clothe it with appeals to the gentlemen of the

jury. I used to be famous for spouting, you know; and I
think I could ask a few questions.”

“I will do it for a third,” said the other, who was not
himself a pleader.

“Good!”

It was done and the case was gained. The pecuniary
profits were divided, but Colburne carried away all the
popular fame, for he had spouted in such a manner as
quite to dissolve the gentlemen of the jury. The two
young men went into partnership on the basis afforded by
their first transaction, and were soon in possession of a
promising if not an opulent business. It began to seem
possible that, at a not very distant day, Colburne might
mean something if he should say, “I endow thee with my
worldly goods.”