University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.

EIGHT years have passed since the death of Mr. Hawkins.
Eight years are not many in the life of a nation or the
history of a state, but they may be years of destiny that shall
fix the current of the century following. Such years were
those that followed the little scrimmage on Lexington Common.
Such years were those that followed the double-shotted
demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter. History is never
done with inquiring of these years, and summoning witnesses
about them, and trying to understand their significance.

The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted
institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a
people, transformed the social life of half the country, and
wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character
that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three
generations.

As we are accustomed to interpret the economy of providence,
the life of the individual is as nothing to that of the
nation or the race; but who can say, in the broader view and
the more intelligent weight of values, that the life of one

man is not more than that of a nationality, and that there is
not a tribunal where the tragedy of one human soul shall not
seem more significant than the overturning of any human
institution whatever?

When one thinks of the tremendous forces of the upper
and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul
of a woman during the few years in which she passes from
plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may
well stand in awe before the momentous drama.

What capacities she has of purity, tenderness, goodness;
what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must
needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and
centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical
years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness
and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple,
or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated
shrine. There are women, it is true, who seem to be capable
neither of rising much nor of falling much, and whom a
conventional life saves from any special development of
character.

But Laura was not one of them. She had the fatal gift of
beauty, and that more fatal gift which does not always accompany
mere beauty, the power of fascination, a power that
may, indeed, exist without beauty. She had will, and pride
and courage and ambition, and she was left to be very much
her own guide at the age when romance comes to the aid of
passion, and when the awakening powers of her vigorous
mind had little object on which to discipline themselves.

The tremendous conflict that was fought in this girl's soul
none of those about her knew, and very few knew that her
life had in it anything unusual or romantic or strange.

Those were troublous days in Hawkeye as well as in most
other Missouri towns, days of confusion, when between
Unionist and Confederate occupations, sudden maraudings
and bush-whackings and raids, individuals escaped observation
or comment in actions that would have filled the town
with scandal in quiet times.

Fortunately we only need to deal with Laura's life at this

period historically, and look back upon such portions of it as
will serve to reveal the woman as she was at the time of the
arrival of Mr. Harry Brierly in Hawkeye.

The Hawkins family were settled there, and had a hard
enough struggle with poverty and the necessity of keeping
up appearances in accord with their own family pride and the
large expectations they secretly cherished of a fortune in the
Knobs of East Tennessee. How pinched they were perhaps
no one knew but Clay, to whom they looked for almost their
whole support. Washington had been in Hawkeye off and
on, attracted away occasionally by some tremendous speculation,
from which he invariably returned to Gen. Boswell's
office as poor as he went. He was the inventor of no one
knew how many useless contrivances, which were not worth
patenting, and his years had been passed in dreaming and
planning to no purpose; until he was now a man of about
thirty, without a profession or a permanent occupation, a tall,
brown-haired, dreamy person of the best intentions and the
frailest resolution. Probably however the eight years had
been happier to him than to any others in his circle, for the
time had been mostly spent in a blissful dream of the coming
of enormous wealth.

He went out with a company from Hawkeye to the war,
and was not wanting in courage, but he would have been a
better soldier if he had been less engaged in contrivances for
circumventing the enemy by strategy unknown to the books.

It happened to him to be captured in one of his self-appointed
expeditions, but the federal colonel released him,
after a short examination, satisfied that he could most injure
the confederate forces opposed to the Unionists by returning
him to his regiment.

Col. Sellers was of course a prominent man during the
war. He was captain of the home guards in Hawkeye, and
he never left home except upon one occasion, when on the
strength of a rumor, he executed a flank movement and fortified
Stone's Landing, a place which no one unacquainted with
the country would be likely to find.

“Gad,” said the Colonel afterwards, “the Landing is the

[ILLUSTRATION]

CAPTURE OF WASHINGTON.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 171. In-line image of a man being roughed up by a group of military soldiers.] key to upper Missouri, and it is the only place the enemy
never captured. If other places had been defended as well as
that was, the result would have been different, sir.”

The Colonel had his own theories about war as he had in
other things. If everybody had stayed at home as he did, he
said, the South never would have been conquered. For what
would there have been to conquer? Mr. Jeff Davis was constantly
writing him to take command of a corps in the confederate
army, but Col. Sellers said, no, his duty was at home.
And he was by no means idle. He was the inventor of the
famous air torpedo, which came very near destroying the
Union armies in Missouri, and the city of St. Louis itself.

His plan was to fill a torpedo with Greek fire and poisonous
and deadly missiles, attach it to a balloon, and then let it sail
away over the hostile camp and explode at the right moment,
when the time-fuse burned out. He intended to use this
invention in the capture of St. Louis, exploding his torpedoes
over the city, and raining destruction upon it until
the army of occupation would gladly capitulate. He was unable
to procure the Greek fire, but he constructed a vicious
torpedo which would have answered the purpose, but the first

one prematurely exploded in his wood-house, blowing it clean
away, and setting fire to his house. The neighbors helped
him put out the conflagration, but they discouraged any
more experiments of that sort.

The patriotic old gentleman, however, planted so much
powder and so many explosive contrivances in the roads leading
into Hawkeye, and then forgot the exact spots of danger,
that people were afraid to travel the highways, and used to
come to town across the fields. The Colonel's motto was,
“Millions for defence but not one cent for tribute.”

When Laura came to Hawkeye she might have forgotten
the annoyances of the gossips of Murpheysburg and have outlived
the bitterness that was growing in her heart, if she had
been thrown less upon herself, or if the surroundings of her
life had been more congenial and helpful. But she had little
society, less and less as she grew older that was congenial to
her, and her mind preyed upon itself, and the mystery of her
birth at once chagrined her and raised in her the most extravagant
expectations.

She was proud and she felt the sting of poverty. She
could not but be conscious of her beauty also, and she was
vain of that, and came to take a sort of delight in the exercise
of her fascinations upon the rather loutish young men who
came in her way and whom she despised.

There was another world opened to her—a world of books.
But it was not the best world of that sort, for the small
libraries she had access to in Hawkeye were decidedly miscellaneous,
and largely made up of romances and fictions which
fed her imagination with the most exaggerated notions of life,
and showed her men and women in a very false sort of
heroism. From these stories she learned what a woman of
keen intellect and some culture joined to beauty and fascination
of manner, might expect to accomplish in society as she
read of it; and along with these ideas she imbibed other very
crude ones in regard to the emancipation of woman.

There were also other books—histories, biographies of

distinguished people, travels in far lands, poems, especially
those of Byron, Scott and Shelley and Moore, which she eagerly
absorbed, and appropriated therefrom what was to her liking.
Nobody in Hawkeye had read so much or, after a fashion,
studied so diligently as Laura. She passed for an accomplished
girl, and no doubt thought herself one, as she was,
judged by any standard near her.

During the war there came to Hawkeye a confederate
officer, Col. Selby, who was stationed there for a time, in
command of that district. He was a handsome, soldierly
man of thirty years, a graduate of the University of Virginia,
and of distinguished family, if his story might be believed,
and, it was evident, a man of the world and of extensive
travel and adventure.

To find in such an out of the way country place a woman
like Laura was a piece of good luck upon which Col. Selby
congratulated himself. He was studiously polite to her and
treated her with a consideration to which she was unaccustomed.
She had read of such men, but she had never seen
one before, one so high-bred, so noble in sentiment, so entertaining
in conversation, so engaging in manner.

It is a long story; unfortunately it is an old story, and it
need not be dwelt on. Laura loved him, and believed that
his love for her was as pure and deep as her own. She worshipped
him and would have counted her life a little thing to
give him, if he would only love her and let her feed the hunger
of her heart upon him.

The passion possessed her whole being, and lifted her up,
till she seemed to walk on air. It was all true, then, the
romances she had read, the bliss of love she had dreamed of.
Why had she never noticed before how blithesome the world
was, how jocund with love; the birds sang it, the trees whispered
it to her as she passed, the very flowers beneath her
feet strewed the way as for a bridal march.

When the Colonel went away they were engaged to be
married, as soon as he could make certain arrangements

which he represented to be necessary, and quit the army.

He wrote to her from Harding, a small town in the southwest
corner of the state, saying that he should be held in the
service longer than he had expected, but that it would not be
more than a few months, then he should be at liberty to take her
to Chicago where he had property, and should have business,
either now or as soon as the war was over, which he thought
could not last long. Meantime why should they be separated?
He was established in comfortable quarters, and if she
could find company and join him, they would be married,
and gain so many more months of happiness.

Was woman ever prudent when she loved? Laura went
to Harding, the neighbors supposed to nurse Washington
who had fallen ill there.

Her engagement was, of course, known in Hawkeye, and
was indeed a matter of pride to her family. Mrs. Hawkins
would have told the first inquirer that Laura had gone to be
married; but Laura had cautioned her; she did not want to
be thought of, she said, as going in search of a husband; let
the news come back after she was married.

So she traveled to Harding on the pretence we have mentioned,
and was married. She was married, but something
must have happened on that very day or the next that
alarmed her. Washington did not know then or after what
it was, but Laura bound him not to send news of her marriage
to Hawkeye yet, and to enjoin her mother not to speak
of it. Whatever cruel suspicion or nameless dread this was,
Laura tried bravely to put it away, and not let it cloud her
happiness.

Communication that summer, as may be imagined, was
neither regular nor frequent between the remote confederate
camp at Harding and Hawkeye, and Laura was in a measure
lost sight of—indeed, everyone had troubles enough of his
own without borrowing from his neighbors.

Laura had given herself utterly to her husband, and if he
had faults, if he was selfish, if he was sometimes coarse, if

he was dissipated, she did not or would not see it. It was
the passion of her life, the time when her whole nature
went to flood tide and swept away all barriers. Was her
husband ever cold or indifferent? She shut her eyes to
everything but her sense of possession of her idol.

Three months passed. One morning her husband informed
her that he had been ordered South, and must go within two
hours.

“I can be ready,” said Laura, cheerfully.

“But I can't take you. You must go back to Hawkeye.”

“Can't—take—me?” Laura asked, with wonder in her
eyes. “I can't live without you. You said”—

“O bother what I said”—and the Colonel took up his
sword to buckle it on, and then continued coolly, “the fact is
Laura, our romance is played out.”

Laura heard, but she did not comprehend. She caught his
arm and cried, “George, how can you joke so cruelly? I
will go any where with you. I will wait any where. I can't
go back to Hawkeye.”

“Well, go where you like. Perhaps,” continued he with
a sneer, “you would do as well to wait here, for another
colonel.”

Laura's brain whirled. She did not yet comprehend.
“What does this mean? Where are you going?”

“It means,” said the officer, in measured words, “that you
haven't anything to show for a legal marriage, and that I am
going to New Orleans.”

“It's a lie, George, it's a lie. I am your wife. I shall go.
I shall follow you to New Orleans.”

“Perhaps my wife might not like it!”

Laura raised her head, her eyes flamed with fire, she tried
to utter a cry, and fell senseless on the floor.

When she came to herself the Colonel was gone. Washington
Hawkins stood at her bedside. Did she come to herself
Was there anything left in her heart but hate and
bitterness, a sense of an infamous wrong at the hands of the
only man she had ever loved?

She returned to Hawkeye. With the exception of Washington
and his mother, no one knew what had happened.
The neighbors supposed that the engagement with Col. Selby
had fallen through. Laura was ill for a long time, but she
recovered; she had that resolution in her that could conquer
death almost. And with her health came back her beauty,
and an added fascination, a something that might be mistaken
for sadness. Is there a beauty in the knowledge of evil, a
beauty that shines out in the face of a person whose inward
life is transformed by some terrible experience? Is the pathos
in the eyes of the Beatrice Cenci from her guilt or her
innocence?

Laura was not much changed. The lovely woman had a
devil in her heart. That was all.