The Bishop of Cottontown Part 21

Both were of a romantic temperament with high ideals, and with keen and sensitive natures.

Their love was the poem of their lives.

And though a toast in society, and courted by the n.o.bility of the old world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.

Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home on vacation before being a.s.signed to duty. To-night he had ridden John Paul Jones--the pick of his grandfather's stable of thoroughbreds--a present from the st.u.r.dy old horse-racing, fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first in a cla.s.s of fifty-six.

How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the music of the crepe-myrtle in the air--the music of it, wet with the night dew--for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that they pa.s.s out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest in the tree.

Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one dying far away from it all.

How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.

There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night, though often from her window she had looked out on Venice, moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in the hedgerows.

Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's sanctuary.

Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even sentiment from the world--sentiment that is stronger than common sense, and which moves the world.

On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice, whom he had not seen since her return.

He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel Westmore into a rage.

"To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter--" he shouted. "To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you d.a.m.ned before you shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols quicker than I can use mine."

"Oh, Tom," said Alice when they were alone--"how--how could you do it?"

"But it is my side," he said quietly. "I was born, reared, educated in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico.

I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a Tennessean--Thomas a Virginian--and there are hundreds of others, men who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice--Alice--I do not love you less because I am true to my oath--my flag."

"Your flag," said Alice hotly--"your flag that would overrun our country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!"

She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin Tom. "You will choose between us now," she said.

"Alice--surely you will not put me to that test. I will go--" he said, rising. "Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor--my sacred oath--write me and--and--I will come."

And that is the way it ended--in tears for both.

Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.

That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and thought.

He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he rode away:

"All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make, with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved boy--your father's life--in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back on your rearing?

"Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but G.o.d, controls the course of an honest mind?

"Go, my son--I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right."

The young man wept when he read this--he was neither too old nor too hardened for tears--and when he rode away, from the ridge of the Mountain he looked down again--the last time, on all that had been his life's happiness.

It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his overseer.

"Watts," he said, "in the accursed war which is about to wreck the South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you to hear it."

He took up a lengthy doc.u.ment and read the last codicil:

"_Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall fight--it matters not to me on which side--so that he fights. For The Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my faithful overseer, Hillard Watts._"

In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined, and put the will in it.

"It shall remain there unchanged," he said, "and only you and I shall know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the war, and then do as you think best."

CHAPTER II

THE REAL HEROES

The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.

On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set, into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered.

Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope--hung, though the bravest of the brave.

Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,--unloved, unsoothed, unpitied--giving their life with a last smile in the joy of martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never came back and sons who died of sh.e.l.l and fever, make a tiara around the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels, weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves, faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the front, filling the granaries that the war might go on--faithful to their trust though its success meant their slavery--faithful and true.

O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for they also were faithful.

Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with the greatest of them.

The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that was great and good.

Tom and Alice,--on the neighboring plantations--ran wild over the place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.

As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among the thousand of other wrecked dreams, went the dream of the overseer.

The rest is soon told: After the battle of s.h.i.+loh, Hillard Watts, Chief of Johnston's scouts, was captured and sent to Camp Chase.

Scarcely had he arrived before orders came that twelve prisoners should be shot, by lot, in retaliation for the same number of Federal prisoners which had been executed, it was said, unjustly, by Confederates. The overseer drew one of the black b.a.l.l.s. Then happened one of those acts of heroism which now and then occur, perhaps, to redeem war of the base and b.l.o.o.d.y.

On the morning before the execution, at daylight, Thomas Travis arrived and made arrangements to save his friend at the risk of his own life and reputation. It was a desperate chance and he acted quickly. For Hillard Watts went out a free man dressed in the blue uniform of the Captain of Artillery.

The interposition of the great-hearted Lincoln alone saved the young officer from being shot.

The yellow military order bearing the words of the martyred President is preserved to-day in the library of The Gaffs: