When Colburne reached Port Hudson, it had capitulated; the stars and stripes were flying in place of the stars and bars. With a smile of triumph he climbed the steep path which zig-zagged up the almost precipitous breast—earth changing into stone—of the gigantic bluff which formed the river front of the fortress. At the summit was a plateau of nearly three-quarters of a mile in diameter, verdant with turf and groves, and pleasantly rolling in surface. He had never been here before; he and twelve thousand others had tried to come here on the 27th of May, but had failed; and he paused to take a long look at the spot and its surroundings. Not a sign of fortification was visible, except five or six small semi-lunes of earth at different points along the edge of the bluff, behind which were mounted as many monstrous guns, some smooth-bore, some rifled. Solid shot from these giants had sunk the Mississippi, and crippled all of Farragut's fleet but two in his audacious rush up the river. Shells from them had flown clean over the bluff, and sought out the farthest camps of Banks's army, bursting with a sonorous, hollow thunder which seemed to shake earth and atmosphere. On the land side the long lines of earthworks which had sosteadily and bloodily repulsed our columns were all below the line of sight, hidden by the undulations of the ground, or by the forest. The turf was torn and pitted by the bombardments; two-hundred-pound shells, thrown by the long rifles of the fleet, lay here and there, some in fragments, some unexploded; the church, the store, and half a dozen houses, which constituted the village, were more or less shattered. The bullets of the Union sharpshooters had reached as far as here, and had even gone quite over and fallen into the Mississippi. A gaunt, dirty woman told Colburne that on the spot where he stood a soldier of the garrison had been killed by a chance rifle-ball while drinking a glass of beer. Leaving his cicerone, he joined a party of officers who were lounging in the shade of a tree, and inquired for the residence of Colonel Carter.
"Here you are," answered a lieutenant, pointing to the nearest house. "Can I do any thing for you, Captain? I am his aid. I wouldn't advise you to call on him unless you have something very particular to say. Every body has been celebrating the surrender, and the Colonel isn't exactly in a state for business."
Colburne hesitated; but he had letters from Carter's wife and father-in-law, and of course he must see him, drunk or sober. At that moment he heard a voice that he recognized; a voice that had demanded and obtained what he had not dared to ask for—a voice that, as he well knew,shelonged for as the sweetest of earth's music.
"Hi! hi!" said the Colonel, making his appearance upon the unpainted, warped, paralytic verandah of his dwelling. Through the low-cut window from which he issued could be seen a sloppy table, with bottles and glasses, and the laughing faces of two bold-browed, slatternly girls, the one seventeen, the other twenty. He had on an old dressing-gown, fastened around his waist with a sword-belt, and his trousers hung loose about the heels of a pair of dirty slippers. His face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot; he was winking, leering, and slightly unsteady.Colburne slunk behind a tree, humiliated for his sake, and ready to rave or weep as he thought of the young wife to whom this man's mere name was a comfort.
"Hi! hi!" repeated Carter. "Where are all these fellows?"
The aid advanced and saluted. "Do you want any one, Colonel?"
"No, no. Don't want any one. What for? Celebrate it alone. Man enough for it."
Presently catching the eye of another officer, he again chuckled, "Hi! hi!"
The person thus addressed approached and saluted.
"I say," observed the Colonel, "I got letters last night addressed General Carter—Brigadier-General John T. Carter. What do you think of that?"
"I hope it means promotion," said the officer. "Colonel, do you think we shall go into quarters?"
"No, no; no go into quarters; no go into quarters for us. Played out—quarters. In ole, ole times, after fought a big battle, used to stop—look out good quarters, and stop. But now nix cum rouse the stop."
Back he reeled through the window, to sit down to his whiskey and water, amidst the laughter and rather scornful blandishments of the Secession lasses.
Nevertheless I must see him, decided Colburne. "Ask Colonel Carter," he said to an orderly, "if he can receive Captain Colburne, who brings letters and messages from Mrs. Carter."
In a minute the man returned, saluted and said, "The Colonel sends his compliments and asks you to walk in, sir."
When Colburne entered Carter's presence he found him somewhat sobered in manner; and although the bottles and glasses were still on the table, the bold-faced girls had disappeared.
"Captain, sit down. Take glass plain whiskey," werethe Colonel's first words. "Good for your arm—good for every thing. Glad you got off without a—cut-off."
He would have used the word amputation, only he knew that his tongue could not manage it.
"Thank you, Colonel. Here are two letters, sir, from Mrs. Carter and the Doctor. Just as I was leaving, when it was too late to write, Mrs. Carter charged me to say to you that her father had decided to go at once to New Orleans, so that your letters must be directed to her there."
"I understand," answered Carter slowly and with the solemnity of enforced sobriety. "Thank you."
He broke open his wife's letter and glanced hurriedly through it.
"Captain, I'm 'bliged to you," he said. "You've saved my wife from im-prisn—ment. She's 'bliged to you. You're noble fellah. I charge myself with your pro—mosh'n."
It was so painful to see him struggle in that humiliating manner to appear sober, that Colburne cut short the interview by pretexting a necessity of reporting immediately to his regiment.
"Come to-morrow," said Carter. "All right to-morrow. Business to-morrow. To-day—celebrash'n."
The Colonel, although not aware of the fact, was far advanced in the way of the drunkard. He had long since passed the period when it was necessary to stimulate his appetite for spirituous liquors by sugar, lemon-peel, bitters and other condiments. He had lived through the era of fancy drinks, and entered the cycle of confirmed plain whiskey. At the New Orleans bars he did not call for the fascinating mixtures for which those establishments are famous; he ran his mind's eye wearily over the milk-punches, claret-punches, sherry-cobblers, apple-toddies, tom-and-jerries, brandy-slings, and gin-cocktails; then said in a slightly hoarsebasso profondo, "Give me some plain whiskey." He had swallowed a great deal of strongdrink during the siege, and since the surrender he had not known a sober waking moment. His appetite was poor, especially at breakfast. His face was constantly flushed, his body had an appearance of being bloated, and his hands were tremulous. Nevertheless, obedient to a delusion common to men of his habits, he did not consider himself a hard drinker. He acknowledged that he got intoxicated at times and thoroughly, but he thought not more frequently or thoroughly than the average of good fellows. He was kept in countenance by a great host of comrade inebriates in the old service and in the new, in the navy as well as in the army, in high civilian position and at the front, in short throughout almost every grade and class of American society. He could point to men whose talents and public virtues the nation honors, and say, "They get as drunk as I do, and as often." He could point to such cases on this side of the water and on the other. Does anybody remember the orgies of theviri clari et venerabili, who gathered at Boston to celebrate the obsequies of John Quincy Adams, and at Charleston to lament over the remains of John C. Calhoun? Does anybody remember the dinner speeches on board of Sir Charles Napier's flagship, just before the Baltic fleet set out for Cronstadt? Latterly this vice has increased upon us in America, thanks to the reaction against the Maine liquor law, thanks to the war. Perhaps it is for the best; perhaps it is a good thing that hundreds of leading Americans and hundreds of thousands of led Americans should be drunkards; it may be, in some incomprehensible manner, for the interest of humanity. To my unenlightened mind the contrary seems probable; but I am liable to error, and sober at this moment of writing: a pint of whiskey might illuminate me to see behind the veil. It is wonderful to me, a member of the guzzling Anglo-Saxon race, that the abstemious Latin nations have not yet got the better of us. Nothing can account for it, unless it is that spiritual, and intellectual, and political tyranny more than counterbalance theadvantages of temperance. Boozing John Bull and Jonathan have kept an upper hand because their geographical conditions have enabled them to remain free; and on their impregnable islands and separated quarters of the globe they have besotted themselves for centuries with political impunity.
Next day, as Carter had promised, he was able to attend to business. His first act was to issue an order assigning Captain Colburne to his staff as "Acting Assistant Adjutant-General, to be obeyed and respected accordingly." When the young officer reported for duty he found the Colonel sober, but stern and gloomy with the woful struggle against his maniacal appetite, and shaky in body with the result of the bygone debauch.
"Captain," said he, "I wish you would do me the favor to join my mess. I want a temperance man. No more whiskey for one while!—By the way, I owe you so much I never can repay you for saving my wife from those savages. If admiration is any reward, you have it. My wife and her father both overflow with your praises."
Colburne bowed and replied that he had done no more than his duty as an officer and a gentleman.
"I am glad it was you who did it," replied the Colonel. "I don't know any other person to whom I would so willingly be under such an obligation."
It was certainly rather handsome in Carter that he should cheerfully permit his wife to feel admiration and gratitude towards so handsome a young man as Colburne.
"That infernal poltroon of a Gazaway!" he broke out presently. "I ought to have cashiered him long ago. I'll have him court-martialed and shot. By the way, he was perfectly well when you saw him, wasn't he?"
"I should think so. He looked like a champion of the heavy weights. The mere reflection of his biceps was enough to break a looking-glass."
"I thought he had run away from the service altogether. He came up to the regiment once during the siege. Theofficers kicked him out, and he disappeared. Got in at some hospital, it seems—By (this and that) three quarters of the hospitals are a disgrace to the service. They are asylums for shirks and cowards. I wish you would make it your first business to inform yourself of all Gazaway's sneakings—misbehavior in presence of the enemy, you understand—violation of the fifty-second article of war—and draw up charges against him. I want charges that will shoot him."
Here I may as well anticipate the history of the Major. When the charges against him were forwarded, he got wind of them, and, making a personal appeal to high authority, pleaded hard for leave to resign on a surgeon's certificate of physical disability. The request was granted for some mysterious reason, probably of political origin; and this vulgar poltroon left the army, and the department with no official stigma on his character. On reaching Barataria he appealed to his faithful old herd of followers and assailed Colonel Carter and Captain Colburne as a couple of aristocrats who would not let a working man hold a commission.
Two days subsequent to Colburne's arrival at Port Hudson the brigade sailed to Fort Winthrop and from thence followed the trail of the retreating Texans as far as Thibodeaux, where Carter established his head-quarters. A week later, when the rebels were all across the Atchafalaya and quiet once more prevailed in the Lafourche Interieur, he sent to New Orleans for his wife, and established her in a pretty cottage, with orange trees and a garden, in the outskirts of the little French American city. The Doctor's plantation house had been burned, his agricultural implements destroyed, and his cattle eaten or driven away by the rebels, who put a devout zeal into the task of laying waste every spot which had been desecrated by the labor of manumitted bondsmen. His grand experiment of reorganizing southern industry being thus knocked on the head, he had applied for and obtained his old positionin the hospital. Lillie wept at parting from him, but nevertheless flew to live with her husband.
The months which she passed at Thibodeaux were the happiest that she had ever known. The Colonel did not drink; was with her every moment that he could spare from his duties; was strongly loving and noisily cheerful, like a doting dragoon as he was; abounded with attentions and presents, bouquets from the garden, and dresses from New Orleans; was uneasy to make her comfortable, and exhibit his affection. The whole brigade knew her, and delighted to look at her, drilling badly in consequence of inattention when she cantered by on horseback. The sentinels, when not watched by the lieutenant of the guard, gratified themselves and amused her with the courteous pleasantry of presenting arms as she passed. Such officers as were aristocratic enough or otherwise fortunate enough to obtain a bowing acquaintance, still more to be invited to her receptions and dinner parties, flattered her by their evident admiration and devotion. A second lieutenant who once had a chance to shorten her stirrup leather, alluded to it vain-gloriously for weeks afterward, and received the nickname from his envious comrades of "Acting Assistant Flunkey General, Second Brigade, First Division, Nineteenth Army Corps." It made no difference with the happy youth; he had shortened the stirrup of the being who was every body's admiration; and from his pedestal of good fortune he smiled serenely at detraction. Lillie was the queen, the goddess, the only queen and goddess, of the Lafourche Interieur. In the whole district there was no other lady, except the wives of two captains, who occupied a much lower heaven, and some bitter Secessionists, who kept aloof from the army, and were besides wofully scant in their graces and wardrobe. The adulation which she received did not come from the highest human source, but it was unmixed, unshared, whole-souled, constant. She thought it was the most delightful thing conceivable to keep house, to bemarried, to be the wife of Colonel Carter. If she had been twenty-five or thirty years old, a veteran of society, I should be inclined to laugh at her for the child-like pleasure she took in her conditions and surroundings; but only twenty, hardly ever at a party, married without a wedding, married less than six months, I sympathise with her, rejoice with her, in her unaccustomed intoxication of happiness. It was curious to see how slowly she got accustomed to her husband. For some time it seemed to her amazing and almost incredible that any man should call himself by such a title, and claim the familiarity and the rights which it implied. She frequently blushed at encountering him, as if he were still a lover. If she met the bold gaze of his wide-open brown eyes, she trembled with an inward thrill, and wanted to say, "Please don't look at me so!" He could tyrannize over her with his eyes; he could make her come to him and try to hide from them by nestling her head on his shoulder; he used to wonder at his power, and gratify his vanity as well as his affection, by using it.
An officer of the staff, who believed in the marvels of the so-called psychologists, observed the emotion awakened in the wife by the husband's gaze, and mentioned it to Colburne as a proof of the actuality of magnetíco-spiritualistic influence. The Captain was not convinced, and felt a strong desire to box the officer's ears. What right had the fellow to make the movements and inclinations of that woman's soul an object of curiosity and a topic of conversation? He offered no reply to the remark, and glared in a way which astonished the other, who had the want of delicacy common to men of one idea. Colburne divined Mrs. Carter too well to adopt the magnetic theory. Judging her nature out of the depths of his own, he believed that love was the true and all-sufficient explanation of her nervousness under the gaze of her husband. It was a painful belief: firstly, for the very natural reason that he was not himself the cause of the emotion; secondly,because he feared that the Colonel might be a blight to the delicate affection which clasped him with its tendrils.
His relations with both were the most familiar, the frankest, the kindest. When Carter could not ride out with his wife, he detailed Colburne for the agreeable duty. When Mrs. Carter made a visit to headquarters, and did not find the Colonel there, she asked for the adjutant-general. The friend sent the lady bouquets by the hands of the husband. Carter knew to some extent how Colburne adored Lillie, but he had a fine confidence in the purity and humility of the adoration, and he trusted her to him as he would have trusted her to her father. The Captain was not a member of the family: the cottage was too far from his official duties to allow of that; but he dined there every Sunday, and called there every other evening. Ravenel's letters to one or the other, were the common property of both. If Lillie did not hear from her father twice a week, and therefore became anxious about him, because it was the yellow fever season, or because of the broad fact that man is mortal, she applied to Colburne as well as to her husband for comforting suggestions and assurances. In company with some chance fourth, these three had the gayest evenings of whist and euchre. Lillie never looked at her cards without exciting the laughter of the two men, by declaring that she hadn't a thing in her hand—positively not a single thing—couldn't take a trick—not one. She talked perpetually, told what honors she held, stole glances at her opponent's hand, screamed with delight when she won, and in short violated all the venerable rules of whist. She forgot the run of the cards, trumped her partner's trick, led diamonds when he had trashed on hearts, led the queen when she held ace and king. To her trumps she held on firmly, never showing them till the last moment, and scolding her partner if he called them out. She invariably claimed the deal at the close of each hand, thereby getting it oftener than she had a right to it. But she might do what she pleased, sure that those who playedwith her would not complain. Was she not queen and goddess, Semiramis and Juno? Who would rebel, even in the slightest particular, against the dominion of a happiness which overflowed in such gayety, such confidence in all around, such unchangeable amiability?
She was in superb health of body, and spirit without a pain, or a sickly moment, or a cloud of foreboding, or a thrill of pettishness. A physical calmness so deliciously placid as to remind one of that spiritual peace which passeth understanding, bore her gently through the summer, smiling on all beholders. Do you remember the serene angel in the first picture of Cole's Voyage of Life, who stands at the helm of the newly launched bark, guiding it down the gentle river? It is the mother voyaging with her child, whether before its birth or after. Just now she looked much like this angel, only more frolicsomely happy. Her blue eyes sparkled with the lustre of health so perfect that the mere consciousness of a life was a pleasure. Her cheeks, usually showing more of the lily than of the rose, were so radiant with color that it seemed as if every throb of emotion might force the blood through the delicate skin. Her arms, neck and shoulders were no longer Dianesque, but rounded, columnal, Junonian. It was this novel, this almost superwomanly health which gave her such an efflorescence of happiness, amiability and beauty.
She had repeatedly hinted to her husband that she had a secret to tell him. When he asked what it was she blushed, laughed at him for the question, and declared that he should never know it, that she had no secret at all, that she had been joking. Then she wondered that he should not guess it; thought it the strangest thing in the world that he should not know it. At last she made her confession: made it to him alone, with closed doors and in darkness; she could no more have told it in the light of day than in the presence of a circle. Then for many minutes she nestled close to him with wet cheeks and clinging arms, listening eagerly to his assurances of love anddevotion, hungering unappeaseably for them, growing to him, one with him.
After this Carter treated his wife with increased tenderness. Nothing that she desired was too good for her, or too difficult to get. He sought to check the constant exercise which she delighted in, and especially her long rides on horseback; and when with a sweet, laughing wilfulness she defied his authority, he watched her with evident anxiety. He wrote about it all to her father, and the consequence was a visit from the Doctor. This combination of natural potentates was victorious, and equestrianism was given up for walking and tending flowers. At this time she had so much affection to spare that she lavished treasures of it, not only on plants, but on birds, cats, dogs, and ponies. Here Colburne drifted into the circle of her sympathies. He was fond of pets, especially of weak ones, for instance liking cats better than dogs, and liking them all the more because most people abused and, as he contended, misunderstood them. He had stories to tell of feline creatures who had loved him with a love like that of Jonathan for David, passing the love of woman. There was the abnormally sensitive Tabby who pined away with grief when his mother died, and the uncomformably intelligent Tom who persisted in getting into his trunk when he was packing it to go to the wars.
"I am confident," he asserted, "that Puss knew I was about to leave, and wanted to be taken along."
Lillie did not question it; all love, even that of animals, seemed natural to her; she felt (not thought) that love was the teacher of the soul.
By the way, Colburne's passion for pets had deep roots in his character. It sprang from his pitying fondness for the weak, and was closely related to his sympathies with humanity. It extended to the feebler members of his own race, such as children and old ladies, whom, he befriended and petted whenever he could, and who in return granted him their easily-won affection. For flowers, and ingeneral for inanimate nature, he cared little; never could be induced to study botany, nor to understand why other people should study it; could not see any human interest in it. Geology he liked, because it promised, he thought, some knowledge of the early history of man, or at least of the grand cosmical preparation for his advent. Astronomy was also interesting to him, inasmuch as we may at some future time traverse sidereal spaces. The most interesting star in the heavens, to his mind, was that one in the Pleiades which is supposed to be the central sun of our solar and planetary system. Around this all that he knew and all whom he loved revolved, even including Mrs. Carter.
I presume that this summer was the happiest period in the life of the Colonel. He was in fine health, thanks to his present temperate ways, although they reduced his weight so rapidly that his wife thought he was sick, and became alarmed about him. He frequently recommended marriage to Colburne, and they had long conversations on the subject; not, however, before Mrs. Carter, whose entrance always caused the Captain to drop the subject. The Telemachus was as fully persuaded of the benefits, happiness and duty of wedded life as the Mentor, and was much the best theorizer.
"I believe," he said, "that neither man nor woman is a complete nature by himself or herself, and that you must unite the two in one before humanity is perfected, and, to use an Emersonianism, comes full circle. The union is affection, and the consecration of it is marriage. You remember Baron Munchausen's horse; how he was cut in two, and the halves got on very poorly without each other; and how they were reunited with mutual benefit. Now this is the history of every bachelor and single woman, who having miserably tried for a while to go it alone, finally coalesce happily in one flesh."
"By Jove, Captain, you talk like a philosopher," said the Colonel. "You ought to write something. You oughtto practice, too, according to your preaching. There is Mrs. Larue, now. No," he added seriously. "Don't take her. She isn't worthy of you. You deserve the best."
Colburne was a better conversationalist than Carter, except in the way of small talk with comparative strangers, wherein the latter's confidence in himself, strengthened by habits of authority, gave him an easy freedom. Indeed, when Carter was actually brilliant in society, you might be sure he had taken five or six plain whiskeys, and that five or six more (what a head he sported!) would make him moderately drunk. If my readers will go back to the dinner at Professor Whitewood's, and the evening which followed it, and the next day's pic-nic when he was under the influence of a whiskey fever, they will see the best that he could do as a talker. With regard to subjects which implied ever so little scholarship, the Colonel accorded the Captain a facile admiration which at first astonished the latter. Talking one day of the earth-works of Port Hudson, Colburne observed that the Romans threw up field fortifications at the close of every day's march, one legion standing under arms to protect the workmen, while another marched out and formed line of battle to cover the foragers. If the brigade commander had ever known these things, he had evidently forgotten them. He looked at Colburne with undisguised astonishment, and set him down from that moment as a fellow of infinite erudition. This was far from being the only occasion on which the volunteer captain was led to notice the narrow professional basis from which most of the officers of the old service talked and thought. Now and then he met a philosopher like Phelps, or a chemist like Franklin; but in general he found them as little versed in the ways and ideas of the world as so many old sea-captains; and even with regard to their own profession they were narrowly practical and technical.
Amidst all these pleasant sentiments and conversings, Carter had his perplexities and anxieties. He wasspending more than his income, and neither knew how to increase it, nor how to curtail his outlay. Besides his colonel's pay he had no resources, unless indeed dunning letters could be made into negotiable paper. He was not very sensitive on the subject of these missives; and in fact he was what most people would consider disgracefully callous to their influence; but he looked forward with alarm to a time when his credit might fail altogether, and his wife might suffer for luxuries.
A perusal of the letters of Colburne has decided me to sketch some of the smaller incidents of his experience in field service. The masculine hardness of the subject will perhaps be an agreeable relief to the reader after the scenes of domestic felicity, not very comprehensible or interesting to bachelors, which are depicted in the preceding chapter.
The many minor hardships of a soldier are, I presume, hardly suspected by a civilian. As an instance of what an officer may be called on to endure, even under favorable circumstances, when for instance he is not in Libby Prison, nor in the starvation camp at Andersonville, I cite the following passage from the Captain's correspondence:
"I think that the severest trial I ever had was on a transport. The soldiers were on half rations; and officers, you know, must feed themselves. We had not been paid for four months, and I commenced the voyage, which was to last three days, with seventy-five cents in my pocket. The boat charged a quarter of a dollar a meal. Such were the prospects, and I considered them solemnly. I said to myself, 'Dinner will furnish the greatest amount of nourishment, and I will eat only dinner.' The first day I went without breakfast and supper. On the morning of thesecond day I awoke fearfully hungry, and could not resist the folly of breakfast. I had character enough to refuse dinner, but by night I was starving again. Possibly you do not know what it is to be ravening after food. I ate supper. That was my last possible meal on board the steamer. I had no chance of borrowing, for every one was about as poor as myself; and to add to my sufferings, the weather was superb and I had a seafaring appetite. I was truly miserable with the degrading misery of hunger, thinking like a dog of nothing but food, when a brother officer produced a watermelon which he had saved for this supreme moment of destitution. He was charitable enough to divide it among four follow paupers; and on that quarter of a watermelon I lived twenty-six hours, very wretchedly. When we landed I was in command of the regiment, but could hardly give an order loud enough to be heard by the shrunken battalion. Two hours afterwards Henry brought me a small plate of stewed onions, without meat or bread, not enough to feed a Wethersfield baby. I ate them all, too starved to ask Henry whether he had anything for himself or not. Shameful, but natural. Ridiculous as it may seem, I think I can point to this day as the only thoroughly unhappy one in two years of service. It was not severe suffering; but it was so contemptible, so animal; there was no heroic relief to it. I felt like a starved cur, and growled at the Government, and thought I wanted to resign. Hunger, like sickness, has a depressing effect on the morale, and changes a young man into his grandmother."
It appears that these little starvation episodes were of frequent recurrence. In one letter he speaks of having marched all day on a single biscuit, and in another, written during his Virginia campaign, of having lived for eighteen hours on green apples. He often alluded with pride to the hardihood of soul which privations and dangers had given to the soldiers.
"Our men are not heroes in battle alone," he writes."Three months without shelter, drenched by rain or scorched by the sun, tormented by mosquitoes, tainted with fever, shaking with the ague, they appear stoically indifferent to all hardships but their lack of tobacco. Out of the four hundred men whom we brought to this poisonous hole [Brashear City], forty are dead and one hundred and sixty are in hospital. We can hear their screams a mile away as they go into the other world in their chariots of delirium. The remainder, half sick themselves, thin and yellow ghosts in ragged uniforms, crawl out of their diminutive shanties and go calmly to their duties without murmuring, without a desertion. What a scattering there would be in a New England village, in which one tenth of the inhabitants should die in six weeks of some local disease! Yet these men are New Englanders, only tempered to steel by hardships, by discipline, by a profound sense of duty. How I have seen them march with blistered and bleeding feet! march all night after having fought all day! march when every step was a crucifixion! Oh, these noblemen of nature, our American common soldiers! In the face of suffering and of death they are my equals; and while I exact their obedience, I accord them my respect."
The mud of Louisiana appears to have been as troublesome a footing, as the famous sacred soil of Virginia.
"It is the most abominable, sticky, doughy stuff that ever was used in any country for earth," he says. "It 'balls up' on your feet like damp snow on a horse's hoofs. I have repeatedly seen a man stop and look behind him, under the belief that he had lost off his shoe, when it was merely the dropping of the immense mud-pie which had formed around his foot. It is like travelling over a land of suet saturated with pudding sauce.
"Just now the rain is coming down as in the days of Noah. I am under a tent, for an unusual mercy; but the drops are driven through the rotten canvass by the wind. The ditch outside my dwelling is not deep enough to carryoff all the water which runs into it, and a small stream is stealing under my bedding and forming a puddle in the centre of my floor. But I don't care for this;—I know that my rubber-blanket is a good one: the main nuisance is that my interior will be muddy. By night I expect to be in a new tent, enlarged and elevated by a siding of planks, so that I shall have a promenade of eight feet in length sheltered from the weather. I only fear that the odor will not be agreeable; for the planks were plundered from the molasses-vats of a sugar-mill and are saturated with treacle; not sticky, you understand, but quite too saccharinely fragrant."
It appears that the army, even in field service, is not altogether barren of convivialities. In the letter following the one, quoted above he says, "My new dwelling has been warmed. I had scarcely taken possession of it when a brother officer, half seas over, and with an inscrutable smile on his lips, stalks in and insists upon treating the occasion. I cannot prevent it without offending him, and there is no strong reason why I should prevent it. He sends to the sutler for two bottles of claret, and then for two more, and finishes them, or sees that they are finished. It is soon evident that he is crowded full and can't carry any more for love or politeness. At dress parade I do not see him out, and learn that he is in his tent, with a prospect of remaining there for the next twelve hours. Yet he is a brave, faithful officer, this now groggiest of sleepers, and generally a very temperate one, so that everybody is wondering, and, I am sorry to say, giggling, over his unusual obfuscation."
In another letter he describes a "jollification by division" on the anniversary of the little victory of Georgia Landing.
"All the officers, not only of the old brigade but of the entire division, were invited to headquarters. Being a long way from our base, the eatables were limited to dried beef, pickles and hard-tack, and the only refreshmentsto be had in profusion were commissary whiskey and martial music. Such a roaring time as there was by midnight in and around the hollow square formed by the headquarter tents. By dint of vociferations the General was driven to make the first speech of a life-time. He confined himself chiefly to reminiscences of our battles, and made a very pleasant, rambling kind of talk, most of it, however, inaudible to me, who stood on the outside of the circle. When he closed, Tom Perkins, our brave and bossy band-drummer, roared out, 'General, I couldn't hear much of what you said, but I believe what you said was right'."
"This soldierly profession of faith was followed by three-times-three for our commander, everybody joining in without regard to grade of commission. Then Captain Jones of our regiment shouted, 'Tenth Barataria! three cheers for our old comrades at Georgia Landing and everywhere else, the Seventy-Fifth New York!' and the cheers were given. Then Captain Brown of the Seventy Fifth replied, 'There are not many of us Seventy-Fifth left; but what there are, we can meet the occasion; three cheers for the Tenth Barataria!' Then one excited officer roared for Colonel Smith, and another howled for Colonel Robinson, and another screamed for Colonel Jackson, in consequence of which those gentlemen responded with speeches. Nobody seemed to care for what they said, but all hands yelled as if it was a bayonet charge. As the fun got fast and furious public attention settled on a gigantic, dark-complexioned officer, stupendously drunk and volcanically uproarious; and twenty voices united in shouting, 'Van Zandt! Van Zandt!'—The great Van Zandt, smiling like an intoxicated hyæna, plunged uncertainly at the crowd, and was assisted to the centre of it. There, as if he were about to make an oration of an hour or so, he dragged off his overcoat, after a struggle worthy of Weller Senior in his pursiest days; then, held up by two friends, in a manner which reminded me obscurely of Aaron and Hur sustaining Moses, he stretched out both hands, and deliveredhimself as follows. 'G'way from th' front thar! G'way from the front thar! An' when say g'way from th' front—thar——'
"He probably intended to disperse some musicians and contrabands who were grinning at him; but before he could explain himself another drunken gentleman reeled against him, vociferating for Colonel Robinson. Van Zandt gave way with a gigantic lurch, like that of an overbalanced iceberg, which carried him clean out of the circle. Somebody brought him his overcoat and held him up while he surged into it. Then he fell over a tent rope and lay across it for five minutes, struggling to regain his feet and smiling in a manner incomprehensible to the beholder. He made no effort to resume his speech, and evidently thought that he had finished it to public satisfaction; but he subsequently addressed the General in his tent, requesting, so far as could be understood, that the Tenth might be mounted as cavalry. Tom Perkins also staggered into the presence of our commander, and made him a pathetic address, weeping plentifully over his own maudlin, and shaking hands repeatedly, with the remark, 'General, allow me to take you by the hand.'
"It was an All Fools' evening. For once distinctions of rank were abolished. This morning we are subordinates again, and the General is our dignified superior officer."
One of the few amusements of field service seems to consist in listening to the facetiæ of the common soldiers, more particularly the irrepressible Hibernians.
"These Irishmen," he says, "are certainly a droll race when you get used to their way of looking at things. My twenty-five Paddies have jabbered and joked more since they entered the service than my seventy Americans backed up by my ten Germans. To give you an idea of how they prattle I will try to set down a conversation which I overheard while we were bivouacking on the field of our first battle. The dead are buried; the wounded have been carried to a temporary hospital; the pickets are out, watchful,we may be sure, because half-frozen in the keen October wind; the men who remain with the colors are sitting up around camp fires, their knapsacks, blankets and overcoats three miles to the rear. This seems hard measure for fellows who have made a twenty-mile march, and gained a victory since morning. But my Irishmen are as jolly as ever, blathering and chaffing each other after their usual fashion. The butt of the company is Sweeney, a withered little animal who walks as if he had not yet thoroughly learned to go on his hind legs, a most curious mixture of simplicity and humor, an actual Handy Andy.
'Sweeney,' says one, 'you ought to do the biggest part of the fightin'. You ate more'n your share of the rashins.'
'I don't ate no more rashins than I get,' retorts Sweeney, indignant at this stale calumny. 'I'd like to see the man as did.'
'Oh, you didn't blather so much whin thim shells was a-flying about your head.'
Here Sweeney falls back upon his old and sometimes successful dodge of trying to turn the current of ridicule upon some one else:
'Wasn't Mickey Emmett perlite a-comin' across the lot?' he demands. 'I see him bowin' like a monkey on horseback. He was makin' faces as 'ud charrm the head off a whalebarry. Mickey, you dodged beautiful.'
Mickey.Thim shells 'ud make a wooden man dodge. Sweeney's the bye for dodgin'. He was a runnin' about like a dry pea in a hot shovel.
Sweeney.That's what me legs was made for.
Sullivan.Are ye dead, Sweeney? (An old joke which I do not understand.)
Sweeney.An I wud be if I was yer father, for thinkin' of the drrunken son I had.
Sullivan.Did ye see that dead rebel with his oye out?
Sweeney.The leftenant ate up all his corn cake while he wasn't noticin'.
Sullivan.It was lookin' at Sweeney put his oye out.
Sweeney.It's lucky for him he didn't see the pair av us.
Jonathan.Stop your yawping, you Paddies, and let a fellow sleep if he can. You're worse than an acre of tomcats.
Sullivan.To the divil wid ye! It's a pity this isn't all an Oirish company, for the credit of the Captin.
Touhey.Byes, it's mighty cowld slapin' with niver a blanket, nor a wife to one's back.
Sweeney.I wish a man 'ud ask me to lisht for three years more. Wouldn't I knock his head off?
Sullivan.Ye couldn't raich the head av a man, Sweeney. Ye hav'n't got the hoight for it.
Sweeney.I'd throw him down. Thin I'd be tall enough.
"And so they go on till one or two in the morning, when I fall asleep, leaving them still talking."
Even the characteristics of a brute afford matter of comment amid the Sahara-like flatness of ordinary camp life.
"I have nothing more of importance to communicate," he says in one letter, "except that I have been adopted by a tailless dog, who, probably for the lack of other following, persists in laying claim to my fealty. If I leave my tent door open when I go out, I find him under my bunk when I come in. As he has nothing to wag, he is put to it to express his approval of my ways and character. When I speak to him he lies down on his back with a meekness of expression which I am sure has not been rivalled since Moses. He is the most abnormally bobbed dog that ever excited my amazement. I think I do not exaggerate when I declare that his tail appears to have been amputated in the small of his back. How he can draw his breath is a wonder. In fact, he seems to have lost his voice by the operation, as though the docking had injured his bronchial tubes, for he never barks, nor growls, nor whines. I often lose myself in speculation over his absent appendage, questioning whether it was shot away in battle, or left behind in a rapid march, or bitten off, or pulled out. Perhaps it is on detached service as awaggin-master, or has got a promotion and become a brevet lion's tail. Perhaps it has gone to the dog heaven, and is wagging somewhere in glory. Venturing again on a pun I observed that it is very proper that an army dog should be detailed. I wish I could find his master;—I have just one observation to make to that gentleman;—I would say to him, 'There is your dog.—I don't want the beast, and I don't see why he wants me; but I can't get rid of him, any more than I can of Henry, who is equally useless.' I sometimes try to estimate the infinitessimal loss which the world would experience if the two should disappear together, but always give up the problem in despair, not having any knowledge of fractions small enough to figure it."
"In a general way," says Colburne, "we are sadly off for amusements. Fowling is not allowed because the noise of the guns alarms the pickets. Even alligators I have only shot at once, when I garrisoned a little post four miles from camp, and, being left without rations, was obliged to subsist my company for a day on boiled Saurian. The meat was eatable, but not recommendable to persons of delicate appetite, being of an ancient and musky flavor, as though it had been put up in its horny case a thousand years ago. By the way, a minie ball knocks a hole in these fellows' celebrated jackets without the slightest difficulty. As for riding after hounds or on steeple chases, or boxing, or making up running or rowing matches, after the gymnastic fashion of English officers, we never think of it. Now and then there is a horse-race, but for the most part we play euchre. Drill is no longer an amusement as at first, but an inexpressibly wearisome monotony. Conversation is profitless and dull, except when it is professional or larkish. With the citizens we have no dealings at all, and I have not spoken to a lady since I left New Orleans. Books are few because we cannot carry them about, being limited in our baggage to a carpet-sack; and moreover I have lost my taste for reading, and even for all kinds ofthinking except on military matters. My brother officers, you know, are brave, sensible and useful men, but would not answer to fill the professorial chairs of Winslow University. They represent the plain people whose cause is being fought out in this war against an aristocracy. When I first went into camp with the regiment they humorously recognized my very slight fashionable elevation by styling my company, which then numbered eighteen men, 'The Upper Ten Thousand.' Now all such distinctions are rubbed out; it is, who can fight best, march best, command best; each one stands on the base of his individual manhood. In the army a man cannot remain long on a social pedestal which will enable him to overlook the top of his own head. He can obtain no respect which is not accorded to rank or merit; and very little merit is acknowledged except what is of a professional character."
With trueesprit du corpshe frequently expatiates on the excellencies of his regiment.
"The discipline in the Tenth is good," he declares, "and consequently there are no mutinies, no desertions and not much growling. Ask the soldiers if they are satisfied with the service, and they might answer, 'No;' but you cannot always judge of a man by what he says, even in his impulsive moments; you must also consider what he does. Look at an old man-of-war's man: he growls on the forecastle, but is as meek as Moses on the quarter-deck; and, notwithstanding all his mutterings, he is always at his post and does his duty with a will. Just so our soldiers frequently say that they only want to get out of the service, but never run away and rarely manœuvre for a discharge."
This, it will be observed, was before the days of substitutes and bounty-jumpers, and while the regiments were still composed of the noble fellows who enlisted during the first and second years of the war.
From all that I can learn of Captain Colburne I judge that he was a model officer, at least so far as a volunteerknew how to be one. While his men feared him on account of his reserve and his severe discipline, they loved him for the gallantry and cheerful fortitude with which he shared their dangers and hardships. The same respect which he exacted of them he accorded, at least outwardly, to all superior officers, even including the contemptible Gazaway. He did this from principle, for the good of the service, believing that authority ought not to be questioned lightly in an army. By the way, the Major did not like him: he would have preferred to have the Captain jolly and familiar and vulgar; then he would have felt at ease in his presence. This gentlemanly bearing, this dignified respect, kept him, the superior, at a distance. The truth is that, although Gazaway was, in the emphatic language of Lieutenant Van Zandt, "an inferior cuss," he nevertheless had intelligence enough to suspect the profound contempt which lay behind Colburne's salute. Only in the Captain's letters to his intimate friend, Ravenel, does he speak unbecomingly of the Major.
"He is," says one of these epistles, "a low-bred, conceited, unreasonable, domineering ass, who by instinct detests a gentleman and a man of education. He will issue an order contrary to the Regulations, and fly into a rage if a captain represents its illegality. I have got his ill-will in this way, I presume, as well perhaps as by knowing how to spell correctly. His orders, circulars, etc., are perfect curiosities of literature until they are corrected by his clerk, who is a private soldier. Sometimes I am almost tired of obeying and respecting my inferiors; and I certainly shall not continue to serve a day after the war is over."
However, these matters are now by-gones, Gazaway being out of the regiment. I mention them chiefly to show the manliness of character which this intelligent and educated young officer exhibited in remaining in the service notwithstanding moral annoyances more painful to bear than marches and battles. He is still enthusiastic; hasnot by any means had fighting enough; wants to go to Virginia in order to be in the thickest of it. He is disappointed at not receiving promotion; but bears it bravely and uncomplainingly, for the sake of the nation; bears it as he does sickness, starvation, blistered feet and wounds.
A prospect of flat peace and boundless prosperity is tiresome to the human eye. Although it is morally agreeable to think about the domestic happiness and innocence of the Carters, as sketched in a late chapter, there is danger that the subject might easily prove tiresome to the reader, and moreover it is difficult to write upon it. I announce therefore with intellectual satisfaction that our Colonel is summoned to the trial of bidding good-bye to his wife, and undertaking a journey to Washington.
It was his own work and for his own interests. He felt the necessity of adding to his income, and desired the honor and claimed the justice of promotion. High Authority in the department admitted that the star of a brigadier was not too high a reward for this brave man, thoroughly instructed officer, model colonel. High Authority was tired of gerrymandering seniorities so as to give a superb brigade of three thousand men to the West Point veteran, Carter, and a skeleton division of nine hundred men to the ex-major-general of militia, ex-mayor of Pompoosuc, Brigadier-General John Snooks. Accordingly when the Colonel applied for a month's leave of absence, with the understood purpose of sueing for an acknowledgment of his services, High Authority made him bearer of dispatches to Washington, so that, being on duty, he might pay his travelling expenses out of the Governmentpocket. The same mail which brought him his order informed him that a steamer would sail for the north on the next day but one. Acting with the rapidity which always marked his movements when he had once decided on his course, he took the next morning's train for New Orleans, first pressing his wife for many times to his breast and kissing away such of her tears as he could stay to witness. To good angels, and other people capable of appreciating such things, it would have been a pretty though pathetic spectacle to see this slender, blonde-haired girl clinging to the strong, bronzed, richly colored man with the burning black eyes.
"Oh, what shall I do without you?" she moaned. "What shall I do with myself?"
"My dear little child," he said, "you will do just what you like. If you choose to stay here and keep house, Captain Colburne will see that you are cared for. Perhaps it may be best, however, to join your father. Here are two hundred dollars, all the money that I have except what is necessary to take me to New Orleans. I shall get a month's pay there. Don't settle any bills. Tell people that I will attend to them when I come back.—There. Don't keep me, my dear one. Don't make me lose the train."
So he went, driving to the railroad in an ambulance, while Lillie looked after him with tearful eyes, and waved her handkerchief and kissed her hand till he was out of sight. At first she decided that she would remain at Thibodeaux and think of her husband in every room of the house, and every walk of the garden; but after two days she found herself so miserably lonesome that she shut up the cottage, went to New Orleans and threw herself upon her father for consolation. Having told so much in anticipation we will go back to the Colonel. The two hundred dollars which he left with his wife had been borrowed from the willing Colburne. Carter had no pay due him as he had hinted, but he hoped to obtain a month'sadvance from a paymaster, or, failing in that, to borrow from some one, say the commanding general. In fact, one hundred and fifty dollars, abstracted from Government funds, I fear, were furnished him by a neglected quartermaster, who likewise wanted promotion and was willing to run this risk for the sake of securing the benign influences of Carter's future star. With this friend in need the Colonel took the first glass of plain whiskey which he had swallowed in three months. To this followed other glasses, proffered by other friends, whose importunity he could not now resist, although yesterday he had repulsed them with ease. Every brother colonel, every appreciating brigadier, seemed possessed of Satan to lead him to a bar or to his own quarters and there to toast his health, or his luck, or his star. It was "Here's how!" and "Here's towards you!" from ten o'clock in the morning when he got his money, until four in the afternoon when he sprang on board the Creole just as she loosed her moorings from the shaky posts of the tattered wooden wharf. Being in that state of exhilaration which enabled Tam O'Shanter to gaze on the witches of Alloway kirk-yard without flinching, the Colonel was neither astonished nor alarmed at encountering on the quarter-deck the calm, beautiful, dangerous eyes of Madame Larue. The day before he would have been almost willing to lose the steamer rather than travel with her. Now, in the fearlessness of plain whiskey, he shook both her hands with impetuous warmth and said, "'Pon honor, Mrs. Larue, perfectly delighted to see you."
"And so am I delighted," she answered with a flash of unfeigned pleasure in her eyes, which might have alarmed the Carter of yesterday but which gratified the Carter of to-day.
"Now I shall have a cavalier," she continued, allowing him to pull her down on a seat by his side. "Now I shall have a protector and adviser. I have had such need of one. Did you know that I was going on this boat? I am so flattered if you meant to accompany me! I am goingnorth to invest my little property. I still fear that it is not safe here. No one knows what may happen here. As soon as I could sell for a convenable sum, I resolved to go north. I shall expect you to be my counsellor how to invest."
Carter laughed boisterously.
"My dear, I never invested a picayune in my life," he said.
She noticed the term of endearment and the fact of semi-intoxication, but she was not vexed nor alarmed by either. She was tolerably well accustomed to drunken gentlemen, and she was not easily hurt by love-making, no matter how vigorous.
"You have always invested in the Bank of Love," she remarked with one of those amatory glances which black eyes, it seems to me, can make more effective than blue ones.
"And in monte and faro, and bluff and euchre," he added, laughing loudly again. "In wine bills, and hotel bills, and tailors' bills, and all sorts of negatives."
The debts which weighed somewhat heavily yesterday were mere comicalities and piquancies of life to-day.
"Oh! you are a terrible personage. I fear you are not the protector I ought to choose."
He made no reply, feeling vaguely that the conversation was growing dangerous, and sending back a thought to his wife like a cry for help. Mrs. Larue divined his alarm and changed the subject.
"What makes you voyage north?" she asked with a knowing smile. "Are you in search of a new planet?"
Through his plain whiskey the Colonel could not see her joke on the star which he was seeking, but he was still clever enough to shun the confession that he was on an expedition in search of promotion.
"I am bearer of dispatches," he said. "Nothing to do now in Louisiana. I shall be back before any more fighting comes off."
"Shall you? I am enchanted of it. I shall return soon, and hope to make the voyage with you. I am not going to forsake New Orleans. I love the city well enough—and more, I cannot sell my house. Remember, you must let me know when you return, and arrange yourself to come on my steamer."
Next morning, in possession of his sober senses, Carter endeavored to detach himself a little from Mrs. Larue, impelled to this seeming lack of chivalry by remembrance of his wife, and mistrust of his own power of self-government. But this prudent course soon appeared to be impossible for a variety of reasons. In the first place it happened, whether by chance or through her forethought he did not know, that their state-rooms opened on the same narrow passage. In the second place, he was the only acquaintance that Mrs. Larue had on board, and there was not another lady to take her up, the Creole being a Government transport, and civilian travel being in those times rare between New York and New Orleans. Moreover, the other passengers were in his estimation low, or at least plain people, such as sutlers, speculators, and rough volunteer officers—so that, if he left her, she was alone, and could not even venture on deck for a breath of fresh air. At any rate, that was the way that she chose to put it, although there was not the least danger that she would be insulted, and although, had Carter been absent, she would not have failed to strike up a flirtation with some other representative of my noble sex. Finally, he was obliged to consider that she was a relative of his wife. Thus before the second day was over, he found himself under bonds of courtesy to be the constant attendant of Mrs. Larue. They sat together next the head of the table, the lady being protected from the ignoble crowd of volunteers by the Colonel on one side, and the captain of the Creole on the other. Opposite them were a major and a chaplain, highly respectable persons so far as one could judge from their conversation, but whonever got a word, rarely a look, from Mrs. Larue or Carter. The captain talked, first with one party, then with the other, but never with both at once. He was a polite and considerate man, accustomed to his delicate official position as a host, and he saw that he would not be thanked for making the conversation general. Except to him, to Carter, and to the servants, Mrs. Larue did not speak one word during the first seven days of the passage. All the volunteer officers admired her nun-like demeanor. Kept afar off, and with no other woman in sight, they began to worship her, much as the brigade at Thibodeaux adored that solitary planet of loveliness, Mrs. Carter. The fact that she was a widow, which crept out in some inexplicable manner, only heightened the enthusiasm.
"By Heavens!" declared one flustered Captain, "if I only had Colonel before my name, and a hundred thousand dollars after it, I would rush to her and say, 'Madame, are you inconsolable?CouldI persuade you to forget the dear departed?'"
While these gentlemen worshipped her, Carter hoped she would get sea-sick. This great, brawny, boisterous, domineering, heroic fighter had just enough moral vitality to know when he was in danger of falling, and to wish for safety. Those were perilous hours at evening, when the ship swept steadily through a lulling whisper of waters, when a trail of foamy phosphorescense, like a transitory Milky Way, followed in pursuit, when a broad bar of rippling light ran straight out to the setting moon, when the decks were deserted except by slumberers, and Mrs. Larue persisted in dallying. The temptation of darkness, the temptation of solitude, the fever which begins to turn sleepless brains at midnight, made this her possible hour of coquettish conquest. She varied from delicately phrased sentimentalities to hoydenish physical impertinences. He was not permitted for five minutes together to forget that she was a bodily, as well as a spiritual presence. He was not checked in any transitory license of speech or gesture.Meantime she quoted fine rhapsodies from Balzac, and repeated telling situations from Dumas le Jeune, and commented on both in the interest of thesainte passion de l'amour. Once, after a few moments of silence and revery, she said with an air of earnest feeling, "Is it not a horrible fate for a woman—solitude? Do you not pity me? Thirty years old, a widow, and childless! No one to love; no right to love any one."
She changed into French now, as she frequently did when she was animated and wished to express herself freely. Such talk as this sounds unnatural in the language of the Anglo-Saxon, but is not so unbecoming to the tongue of the Gauls.
"A woman to whom the affections are forbidden, is deprived of the use of more than half her being. Whatever her possibilities, she is denied all expansion beyond a certain limit. She may not explore, much less use, her own heart. It contains chambers of joy which she can only guess of, and into which she must not enter. There is a nursery of affections there, but she can only stand with her ear to the door, trying to hear the sweet prattle within. There is an innermost chapel, with an altar all set for the communion of love, but no priest to invite her to the holy banquet. She is capable of a mother's everlasting devotion, but she scarcely dares suspect it. She is fitted to enter upon the tender mysteries of wifehood, and yet she is constantly fearing that she shall never meet a man whom she can love. That is the old maid, horrible name! The widow is less ashamed, but she is more unhappy. She has been taught her possibilities, and then suddenly forbidden the use of them."
Had the Colonel been acquainted with Michelet and his fellow rhapsodists on women, he might have suspected Madame of a certain amount of plagiarism. But he only thought her amazingly clever, at the same time that he was unable to answer her in her own style.
"Why don't you marry?" he asked, striking with Anglo-Saxon practicality at the root of the matter.
"Satirical question!" responded Madame, putting her face close to his, doubtless in order to make her smile visible by moonlight. "It is not so easy to marry in these frightful times. Besides,—shall I avow it?—what if I cannot marry the man of my choice?"
"That's bad."
"What if hewouldmarry some one else?—Is it not a humiliating confession?—Do you know what is left to a woman then? Either hidden love, or spiritual self-murder. Which is the greater of the two crimes?Isthe former a crime? Society says so. But are there not exceptions to all rules, even moral ones? Love always has this great defence—that nature prompts it, commands it. As for self-repression, asphyxia of the heart, Nature never prompts that."
The logical conclusion of all this sentimental sophistry was clear enough to Carter's intellect, although it did not deceive his Anglo-Saxon conscience. He understood, briefly and in a matter of fact way that Madame was quite willing to be his wife's rival. He was not yet prepared to accept the offer; he only feared and anticipated that he should be brought to accept it.
Mrs. Larue was a curious study. Her vices and virtues (for she had both) were all instinctive, without a taint of education or effort. She did just what she liked to do, unchecked by conscience or by anything but prudence. She was as corrupt as possible without self-reproach, and as amiable as possible without self-restraint. Her serenity was at all times as unrippled as was that of Lillie in her happiest conditions. Her temper was so sunny, her smile so ready, and her manner so flattering, that few persons of the male sex could resist liking her. But she was the detestation of most of her lady acquaintance—who were venomously jealous of her attractions—or rather seductions—and abhorred her for the unscrupulous manner inwhich she put them to use, abusing her in a way which was enough to make a man rally to her rescue. She really cared little for thatdivin sens du génésiaqueconcerning which she prattled so freely to her intimates; and therefore she was cool and sure in her coquetries, at the same time that vanity gave her motive force which some naughty flirts derive from passion. She took a pride in making conquests of men, at no matter what personal sacrifice.
Carter saw where he was drifting to, and groaned over it in spirit, and made resolutions which he broke in half an hour, and rowed desperately against the tide, and then drifted again.
"A woman in the same house has so many devilish chances at a fellow," he repeated to himself with a bitter laugh; and indeed he coarsely said as much to Mrs. Larue, with a desperate hope of angering and alienating her. She put on a meekly aggrieved air, drew away from him, and answered, "That is unmanly in you. I did not think you could be so dishonorable."
He was deeply humiliated, begged her pardon, swore that he was merely jesting, and troubled himself much to obtain forgiveness. During the whole of that day she was distant, dignified and silently reproachful. Yet all the while she was not a bit angry with him; she was as malicious as Mephistopheles, but she was also as even-tempered; moreover she was flattered and elated by the evident desperation which drove him to the impertinence. In his efforts to obtain a reconciliation Carter succeeded so thoroughly that the scene took place late at night, his arm around her waist and his lips touching her cheek. You must remember—charitably or indignantly, as you please—that she was his wife's relative. From this time forward he pretty much stopped his futile rowing against the tide. He let Mrs. Larue take the helm and guide him down the current of his own emotions, singing meanwhile her syren lyrics aboutla sainte passion, etc. etc. There were hours, indeed, when he grated over reefs of remorse.At the thought of his innocent, loving, trusting wife he shut his eyes as if to keep out the gaze of a reproachful spectre, clenched his hands as if trying to grasp some rope of escape, and cursed himself for a fool and a villain. But it was a penitence without fruit, a self-reproach without self-control.
Mrs. Larue treated him now with a familiar and confiding fondness which he sometimes liked and sometimes not, according as the present or the past had the strongest hold on his feelings.
"I am afraid that you do not always realize that we are one for life," she said in one of her earnest, French speaking moods. "You are my sworn friend forever. You must never hate me; you cannot. You must never change towards me; it would be a perjury of the heart. But I do not doubt you, my dear friend. I have all confidence in you. Oh, I am so happy in feeling that we are united in such an indissoluble concord of sympathy."
Carter could only reply by taking her hand and pressing it in silence. He was absolutely ashamed of himself that he was able to feel so little and to say nothing.
"I never shall desire a husband," she proceeded. "I can now use all my heart. What does a woman need more? How strangely Heaven has made us! A woman is only happy when she is the slave, body and soul, of some man. She is happy, just in proportion to her obedience and self-sacrifice. Then only she is aware of her full nature. She is relieved from prison and permitted the joy of expansion. It is a seeming paradox, but it is solemnly true."
Carter made no answer, not even by a look. He was thinking that his wife never philosophised concerning her love, never analyzed her sentiments, and a shock of self-reproach, as startling as the throb of a heart-complaint, struck him as he called to mind her purity, trust and affection. It is curious, by the way, that he suffered no remorse on account of Mrs. Larue. In his opinion she fared no worse than she deserved, and in fact fared precisely asshe desired, only he had not the nerve to tell her so. When, late one night, on the darkened and deserted quarter-deck, she cried on his shoulder and whispered, "I am afraid you don't love me—I have a right to claim your love," he felt no affection, no gratitude, not even any profound pity. It annoyed him that she should weep, and thus as it were reproach him, and thus trouble still further his wretched happiness. He was not hypocrite enough to say, "Idolove you;" he could only kiss her repeatedly, penitently and in silence. He still had a remnant of a conscience, and a mangled, sore sense of honor. Nor should it be understood that Mrs. Larue's tears were entirely hypocritical, although they arose from emotions which were so trivial as to be somewhat difficult to handle, and so mixed that I scarcely know how to assort them. In the first place she was not very well that evening, and was oppressed by the despondency which all human beings, especially women, suffer from when vitality throbs less vigorously than usual. Moreover a little emotion of this sort was desirable, firstly to complete the conquest of Carter by reminding him how much she had sacrificed for him, and secondly to rehabilitate herself in her own esteem by proving that she possessed a species of conscience. No woman likes to believe herself hopelessly corrupt: when she reaches that point she is subject to moral spasms which make existence seem a horror; and we perhaps find her floating in the river, or asphyxiated with charcoal. Therefore let no one be surprised at the temporary tenderness, similar to compunction, which overcame Mrs. Larue.
Now that these two had that conscience which makes cowards of us all, they dropped a portion of the reserve with which they had hitherto kept their fellow-passengers at a distance. The captain was encouraged to introduce his two neighbors, the major and chaplain; and Mrs. Larue cast a few telling glances at the former and discussed theological subjects with the latter. To one who knew her, and was not shocked by her masquerades,nothing could be more diverting than the nun-like airs which she put onpour achalander le prêtre. Carter and she laughed heartily over them in their evening asides. She would have made a capital actress in the natural comedy school known on the boards of the Gymnase and at Wallack's, for it was an easy amusement to her to play a variety of social characters. She had no strong emotions nor profound principles of action, it is true, but she was sympathetic enough to divine them, and clever enough to imitate their expression. Her manner to the chaplain was so religiously respectful as to pull all the strings of his unconscious vanity, personal and professional, so that he fell an easy prey to her humbugging, declared that he considered her state of mind deeply interesting, prayed for her in secret, and hoped to convert her from the errors of papacy. Indeed her profession of faith was promising if not finally satisfactory.
"I believe in the holy catholic church," she said. "But I am notdogmatique. I think that others also may have the truth. Our faith, yours and mine, is at bottom one, indivisible, uncontradictory. It is only our human weakness which leads us to dispute with each other. We dispute, not as to the faith, but as to who holds it. This is uncharitable. It is like quarrelsome children."