Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty Part 51

"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," a.s.serted 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! n.o.body 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 h.o.a.ry 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 s.h.i.+pwreck. 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 succ.u.mb 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 n.o.ble 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 ent.i.tled 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 cavalry. 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

LILLIE'S ATTENTION IS RECALLED TO THE RISING GENERATION.

On or about the first of January, 1865, Lillie chanced to go out on a shopping excursion, and descended the stairway of the hotel just in time to catch sight of a newly arrived guest, who was about entering his room on the first story. One servant directed the unsteady step and supported the wavering form of the stranger, while another carried a painted wooden box eighteen or twenty inches square, which seemed to be his sole baggage. As Lillie was in the broad light and the invalid was walking from her down a dark pa.s.sage, she could not see how thin and yellow his face was, nor how weather-stained, threadbare, and even ragged was his fatigue uniform. But she could distinguish the dark blue cloth, and gilt b.u.t.tons which her eye never encountered now without a sparkle of interest.

She had reached the street before the question occurred to her. Could it be Captain Colburne? She reasoned that it could not be, for he had written to them only a fortnight ago without mentioning either sickness or wounds, and the time of his regiment would not be up for ten days yet. Nevertheless she made her shopping tour a short one for thinking of that sick officer, and on returning to the hotel she looked at the arrival-book, regardless of the half-dozen students who lounged against the office counter. There, written in the clerk's hand, was "Capt.

Colburne, No. 18." As she went up stairs she could not resist the temptation of pa.s.sing No. 18, and was nearly overcome by a sudden impulse to knock at the door. She wanted to see her best friend, and to know if he were really sick, and how sick, and whether she could do anything for him. She determined to send a servant to make instant inquiries; but on reaching her room she found her father playing with Ravvie.

"Papa, Captain Colburne is here," were her first words.

"Is it possible!" exclaimed the Doctor, leaping up with delight. "Have you seen him?"

"Not to speak with him. I am afraid he is sick. He was leaning on the porter's arm. He is in number eighteen. Do go and ask how he is."

"I will. You are certain that it is our Captain Colburne?"

"It must be," answered Lillie as he went out; and then thought with a blush, "Will papa laugh at me if I am mistaken?"

When Ravenel rapped at the door of No. 18, a deep but rather hoa.r.s.e voice answered, "Come in."

"My dear friend!" exclaimed the Doctor, rus.h.i.+ng into the room; but the moment that he saw the Captain he stopped in surprise and dismay.

"Don't get up," he said. "Don't stir. Bless me! how long have you been in this way?"

"Only a little while--a month or two," answered Colburne with his customary cheerful smile. "Soon be all right again. Sit down."

He was stretched at full length on his bed, evidently quite feeble, his eyes underscored with lines of blueish yellow, his face sallow and features sharpened. The eyes themselves were heavy and dull with the effects of the opium which he had taken to enable him to undergo the day's journey. Besides his long brown mustache, which had become ragged with want of care, he had on a beard of three weeks' growth; and his face and hands were stained with the dust and smirch of two days'

continuous railroad travel, which he had not yet had time to wash away--in fact, as soon as he had reached his room he had thrown himself on the bed and fallen asleep. His only clothing was a summer blouse of dark blue flannel, a common soldier's s.h.i.+rt of knit woolen, Government trousers of coa.r.s.e light-blue cloth without a welt, and brown Government stockings worn through at toe and heel. On the floor lay his shoes, rough kip-skin brogans, likewise of Government issue. All of his clothing was ineradically stained with the famous mud of Virginia; his blouse was threadbare where the sword-belt went, and had a ragged bullet-hole through the collar. Altogether he presented the spectacle of a man pretty thoroughly worn out in field service.

"Is that all you wear in this season?" demanded, or rather exclaimed the Doctor. "You will kill yourself."

Colburne's answering laugh was so feeble that its cheerfulness sounded like mockery.

"There isn't a chance of killing me," he said. "I am not cold. On the contrary, I am suffering with the heat of these fires and close rooms.

It's rather odd, considering how run down I am. But actually I have been quarreling all the way home to keep my window in the car open, I was so stifled for want of air. Three years spent out of doors makes a house seem like a Black Hole of Calcutta."