Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty Part 54

"A soldier's life cultivates some of the Christian virtues," he answered; "especially resignation and obedience. Just see here. You are roused at midnight, march twenty miles on end, halt three or four hours, perhaps in a pelting rain; then you are faced about, marched back to your old quarters and dismissed, and n.o.body ever tells you why or wherefore. You take it very hard at first, but at last you get used to it and do just as you are bid, without complaint or comment. You no more pretend to reason concerning your duties than a millstone troubles itself to understand the cause of its revolutions. You are set in motion, and you move. Think of being started out at early dawn and made to stand to arms till daylight, every morning, for six weeks running.

You may grumble at it, but you do it all the same. At last you forget to grumble and even to ask the reason why. You obey because you are ordered. Oh! a man learns a vast deal of stoical virtue in field service. He learns courage, too, against sickness as well as against bullets. I believe the war will give a manlier, n.o.bler tone to the character of our nation. The school of suffering teaches grand lessons."

"And how will the war end?" asked Lillie, anxious, as every citizen was, to get the opinion of a soldier on this great question.

"We shall beat them, of course."

"When?"

"I can't say. n.o.body can. I never heard a military man of any merit pretend to fix the time. Now that I am a civilian, perhaps I shall resume the gift of prophecy."

"Mr. Seward keeps saying, in three months."

"Well, if he keeps saying so long enough he will hit it. Mr. Seward hasn't been serious in such talk. His only object was to cheer up the nation."

"So we shall beat them?" cheerfully repeated the converted secessionist.

"And what then? I hope we shall pitch into England. I hate her for being so underhandedly spiteful toward the North, and false toward the South."

"Oh no; don't hate her. England, like every body else, doesn't like a great neighbor, and would be pleased to see him break up into small neighbors. But England is a grand old nation, and one of the lights of the world. The only satisfaction which I should find in a war with England would be that I could satisfy my curiosity on a point of professional interest. I would like to see how European troops fight compared with ours. I would cheerfully risk a battle for the spectacle."

"And which do you think would beat?" asked Lillie.

"I really don't know. That is just the question. Marengo against Cedar Creek, Leipsic against the Wilderness. I should like, of all things in the world, to see the trial."

Thus they talked for a couple of hours, in a quiet way, strolling over many subjects, but discussing nothing of deep personal interest.

Colburne was too weak to have much desire to feel or to excite emotions.

In studying the young woman before him he was chiefly occupied in detecting and measuring the exact change which the potent incidents of her later life had wrought in her expression. He decided that she looked more serious and more earnest than of old; but that was the total of his fancied discoveries; in fact, he was too languid to a.n.a.lyze.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sistance. There were no more Marengos in the Shenandoah Valley, but there was a Waterloo near Petersburg, and an Ulm near Raleigh, and an a.s.sa.s.sination of a greater than William of Orange at Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 minutiae. 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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--a.s.serted 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 a.s.serted 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 b.u.t.termilk 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 pa.s.sed away as health and strength returned. Another phenomenon of his recovered vigor was that he began to show a stronger pa.s.sion 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 magnanimous, man fas.h.i.+on. 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 pa.s.sage, which he penned about this time in his common-place book.

"_The Dignity of Sorrow._ Grand is the heart which is enn.o.bled, 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-s.h.i.+p--a mere dead ma.s.s 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 const.i.tute 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 s.e.xes. 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 circ.u.mscribed 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.e.x, 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, paeans 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-gla.s.ses, put on his spectacles, and read extracts from European editorials written on the occasion of the fall of Richmond and surrender of Lee.