THE DRAMATIC PERSONAGES GET NEWS FROM BULL RUN.
"Papa, are we going to stay in New Boston forever?" asked Miss Ravenel.
"My dear, I am afraid we shall both have to die some day, after which we
can't expect to stay here, pleasant as it might be," replied the Doctor.
"Nonsense, papa! You know what I mean. Are you going to make New Boston
a permanent place of residence?"
"How can I tell, my dear? We can't go back to New Orleans at present;
and where else should we go? You know that I must consult economy in my
choice of a residence. My bank deposits are not monstrous, and there is
no telling how long I may be cut off from my resources. New Boston
presents two advantages; it gives me some employment and it is tolerably
cheap. Through the friendliness of these excellent professors I am kept
constantly busy, and am not paid so very badly, though I can't say that
I am in any danger of growing suddenly rich. Then I have the run of the
university library, which is a great thing. Finally, where else in the
United States should we find a prettier or pleasanter little city?"
"The people are dreadfully poky."
"My daughter, I wish you would have the goodness to converse with me in
English. I never became thoroughly familiar with the Gold Coast
dialects, and not even with the court language of Ashantee."
"It isn't Ashantee at all. Everybody says poky; and it is real poky in
you to pretend not to understand it; don't you think so yourself now?
Besides these New Bostonians are so ferociously federal! I can't say a
word for the South but the women glare at me as though they wanted to
hang me on a sour apple tree, like Jeff Davis."
"My dear, if one of these loyal ladies should say a word for her own
lawful government in New Orleans, she would be worse than glared at. I
doubt whether the wild-mannered cut-throats of your native city would
let her off with plain hanging. Let us thank Heaven that we are among
civilized people who only glare at us, and do not stick us under the
fifth rib, when we differ with them in opinion."
"Oh papa! how bitter you are on the southerners! It seems to me you must
forget that you were born in South Carolina and have lived twenty-five
years in Louisiana."
"Oh! oh! the beautiful reason for defending organized barbarism! Suppose
I had had the misfortune of being born in the Isle of Pines; would you
have me therefore be the apologist of piracy? I do hope that I am
perfectly free from the prejudices and trammels of geographical
morality. My body was born amidst slavery, but my conscience soon found
the underground railroad. I am not boasting; at least I hope not. I have
had no plantations, no patrimony of human flesh; very few temptations,
in short, to bow down to the divinity of Ashantee. I sincerely thank
Heaven for these three things, that I never owned a slave, that I was
educated at the north, and that I have been able to visit the free
civilization of Europe."
"But why did you live in Louisiana if it was such a Sodom, papa?"
"Ah! there you have me. Perhaps it was because I had an expensive
daughter to support, and could pick up four or five thousand dollars a
year there easier than anywhere else. But you see I am suffering for
having given my countenance to sin. I have escaped out of the burning
city, like Lot, with only my family. It is my daily wonder, Lillie, that
you are not turned into a pillar of salt. The only reason probably is
that the age of miracles is over."
"Papa, when I am as old as you are, and you are as young as I am, I'll
satirize you dreadfully.--Well, if we are going to live in New Boston,
why can't we keep house?"
"It costs more for two people to keep house than to board. Our
furniture, rent, food, fuel, lights and servants would come to more than
the eighteen dollars a week which we pay here, now that we have given up
our parlor. In a civilized country elbow-room is expensive."
"But is it exactly nice to stay forever in a hotel? English travellers
make such an outcry about American families living in hotels."
"I know. At the bottom it is bad. But it is a sad necessity of American
society. So long as we have untrained servants--black barbarians at the
South and mutinous foreigners at the North--many American housekeepers
will throw down their keys in despair and rush for refuge to the hotels.
And numbers produce respectability, at least in a democracy."
"So we must give up the idea of a nice little house all to ourselves."
"I am afraid so, unless I should happen to find diamonds in the basaltic
formation of the Eagle's Nest."
The Doctor falls to his writing, and Miss Ravenel to her embroidery.
Presently the young lady, without having anything in particular to say,
is conscious of a desire for further conversation, and, after searching
for a subject, begins as follows.
"Papa, have you been in the parlor this morning?"
"Yes, my dear," answers papa, scratching away desperately with his
old-fashioned quill pen.
"Whom did you see there?"
"See?--Where?--Oh, I saw Mr. Andrew Smith," says the Doctor, at first
absent-minded, then looking a little quizzical.
"What did he have to say?"
"Why, my dear, he spoke so low that I couldn't hear what he said."
"He did!" responds Miss Ravenel, all interest. "What did that mean? Why
didn't you ask him to repeat it?"
"Because, my dear, he wasn't talking to me; he was talking to Mrs.
Smith."
Here Miss Ravenel perceives that her habitual curiosity is being made
fun of, and replies, "Papa, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"My child, you _must_ give me some chance to write," retorts the Doctor;
"or else you must learn to sit a little in your own room. Of course I
prefer to have you here, but I do demand that you accord me some
infinitesimal degree of consideration."
Father and daughter used to have many conversations not very dissimilar
to the above. It was a constant prattle when they were together, unless
the Doctor raised the standard of revolt and refused to talk in order
that he might work. Ever since Lillie's earliest recollection they had
been on these same terms of sociability, companionship, almost equality.
The intimacy and democracy of the relation arose partly from the
Doctor's extreme fondness for children and young people, and partly from
the fact that he had lost his wife early, so that in his household life
he had for years depended for sympathy upon his daughter.
Twice or thrice every morning the Doctor was obliged to remonstrate
against Lillie's talkativeness, something after the manner of an
affectionate old cat who allows her pussy to jump on her back and bite
her ears for a half hour together, but finally imposes quiet by a
velvety and harmless cuffing. Occasionally he avenged himself for her
untimely demands on his attention by reading to her what he considered a
successful passage of the article which he might then be composing. In
this, however, he had not the least intention of punishment, but
supposed that he was conferring a pleasure. It was an essential element
of this genial, social, sympathetic nature to believe that whatever
interested him would necessarily interest those whom he loved and even
those with whom he simply came in contact. When Lillie offered
corrections on his style, which happened frequently, he rarely hesitated
to accept them. Vanity he had none, or at any rate displayed none,
except on two subjects, his daughter and his scientific fame. As a proof
of this last he gloried in an extensive correspondence with European
_savants_, and made Lillie read every one of those queer-shaped letters,
written on semi-transparent paper and with foreign stamps and postmarks
on their envelopes, which reached him from across the Atlantic. Although
medicine was his profession and had provided him with bread, he had
latterly fallen in love with mineralogy, and in his vacation wanderings
though that mountainous belt which runs from the Carolinas westward to
Arkansas and Missouri he had discovered some new species which were
eagerly sought for by the directors of celebrated European collections.
Great was his delight at receiving in New Boston a weighty box of
specimens which he had shipped as freight from New Orleans just previous
to his own departure, but which for two months he had mourned over as
lost. It dowered him with an embarrassment of riches. During a week his
bed, sofa, table, wash-stand, chairs and floor were littered with the
scraps of paper and tufts of cotton and of Spanish moss which had served
as wrappers, and with hundreds of crystals, ores and other minerals.
Over this confusion the Doctor domineered with a face wrinkled by happy
anxiety, laying down one queer-colored pebble to pick up another,
pronouncing this a Smithite and that a Brownite trying his blowpipe on
them and then his hammer, and covering all the furniture with a layer
of learned smudge and dust and gravel.
"Papa, you have puckered your forehead up till it is like a baked
apple," Lillie would remonstrate. "You look more than five thousand
years old; you look as though you might be the grandfather of all the
mummies. Now do leave off bothering those poor Smithites and Hivites and
Amelekites, and come and take a walk."
"My dear, you havn't the least idea how necessary it is to push one's
discoveries to a certainty as quickly as possible," would answer the
Doctor, meanwhile peering at a specimen through his magnifying glass.
"The world won't wait for me to take your time. If I don't work fast
enough in my researches, it will set somebody else at the job. It makes
no allowance for Louisiana ideas of leisure and,"--here he suddenly
breaks off his moralizing and exclaims, "My dear, this is _not_ a
Brownite; it is a Robinsonite--a most unquestionable and superb
Robinsonite."
"Oh papa! I wish I was an unquestionable Robinsonite; then you would
take some sort of interest in me," says Miss Lillie.
But the Doctor is lost in the ocean of his new discovery, and for
fifteen minutes has not a word to say on any subject comprehensible to
the young lady.
Two hours of every afternoon were devoted by father and daughter to a
long walk in company, sometimes a mere shopping or calling tour, but
generally an excursion into the pure country of fields and forest as yet
so easily reached from the centre of New Boston. The Doctor preserved a
reminiscence of his college botany, and attempted to impart some of his
knowledge of plants to Lillie. But she was a hopeless scholar; she
persisted in caring for little except human beings and such literature
as related directly to them, meaning thereby history, biography, novels
and poetry; she remained delightfully innocent of all the ologies.
"You ought to have been born four thousand years ago, Lillie," he
exclaimed in despair over some new instance of her incapacity to move in
his favorite grooves. "So far as you are concerned, Linnæus, Humboldt,
Lyell, Faraday, Agassiz and Dana might as well not have lived. I believe
you will go through life without more knowledge of science than just
enough to distinguish between a plant and a pebble."
"I do hope so, papa," replied the incorrigible and delightful ignoramus.
When they met one of their acquaintance on these walks the Doctor would
not allow him to pass with a nod and a smile, after the unobtrusive New
Boston fashion. He would stop him, shake hands cordially, inquire
earnestly after his health and family, and before parting contrive to
say something personally civil, if not complimentary; all of which would
evidently flatter the New Bostonian, but would also as evidently
discompose him and turn his head, as being a man unaccustomed to much
social incense.
"Papa, you trouble these people," Lillie would sometimes expostulate.
"They don't know where to put all your civilities and courtesies. They
don't seem to have pockets for them."
"My child, I am nothing more than ordinarily polite."
"Nothing more than ordinary in Louisiana, but something very
extraordinary here. I have just thought why all the gentlemen one meets
at the South are so civil. It is because the uncivil ones are shot as
fast as they are discovered."
"There is something in that," admitted the Doctor. "I suppose duelling
has something to do with the superficial good manners current down
there. But just consider what an impolite thing shooting is in itself.
To knock and jam and violently push a man into the other world is one of
the most boorish and barbarous discourtesies that I can imagine. How
should I like to be treated that way! I think I never should be
reconciled to the fact or its author."
"But these New Bostonians are so poky--so awfully serious."
"I have some consideration for anti-jokers. They are not amusing, but
they are generally useful. It is well for the race, no doubt, to have
many persons always in solemn earnest. I don't know what the world would
come to if every body could see a joke. Possibly it might laugh itself
to death."
Frequently on these walks they were met and joined by Mr. Colburne. That
young gentleman, frank as his clear hazel eyes and hearty laugh made him
appear, was awkwardly sly in bringing about these ostensibly accidental
meetings. Not that his clumsy male cunning deceived Miss Ravenel: she
was not by any means fond enough of him to fail to see through him; she
knew that he walked in her paths with malice aforethought. Her father
did not know it, nor suspect it, nor ever, by any innate consciousness
or outward hint, feel his attention drawn toward the circumstance. And,
what was most absurd of all, Mr. Colburne persisted in fearing that the
Doctor, that travelled and learned man of the world, guessed the secret
of his slyness, but never once attributed that degree of
sharp-sightedness to the daughter. I sometimes get quite out of patience
with the ugly sex, it is so densely stupid with regard to these little
social riddles. For example, it happened once at a party that while
Colburne, who never danced, was talking to Miss Ravenel, another
gentleman claimed her hand for a quadrille. She took her place in the
set, but first handed her fan to Colburne. Now every lady who observed
this action understood that Miss Ravenel had said to Colburne as plainly
as it was possible to express the thing without speaking or using force,
that she wished him to return to her side as soon as the quadrille was
over, and that in fact she preferred his conversation to that of her
dancing admirer. But this masculine blunderer comprehended nothing; he
grumbled to himself that he was to be put off with the honor of holding
a fan while the other fellow ran away with the owner; and so, shoving
the toy into his pocket, he absented himself for half an hour, to the
justifiable disapprobation of Miss Ravenel, who did not again give him
any thing to hold for many evenings.
But this was an exceptional piece of stupidity in Colburne, and probably
he would not have been guilty of it but for a spasm of jealousy. He was
not grossly deficient in social tact, any more than in natural
cleverness or in acquired information. Conversation, and very sensible
conversation too, flowed like a river when he came into confluence with
the Ravenels. The prevailing subject, as a matter of course, was the
rebellion. It was every body's subject; it was the nightmare by night
and the delirium by day of the American people; it was the one thing
that no one ignored and no one for an hour forgot. The twenty loyal
millions of the North shuddered with rage at the insolent wickedness of
those conspirators who, merely that they might perpetuate human bondage
and their own political supremacy, proposed to destroy the grandest
social fabric that Liberty ever built, the city of refuge for oppressed
races, the hope of the nations. For men who through such a glorious
temple as this could rush with destroying torches and the cry of "Rule
or ruin," the North felt a horror more passionate than ever, on any
occasion, for any cause, thrilled the bosom of any other people. This
indignation was earnest and wide-spread in proportion to the
civilization of the century and the intelligence of the population. The
hundreds of telegraph lines and thousands of printing presses in the
United States, sent the knowledge of every new treason, and the
reverberation of every throb of patriotic anger, in a day to all
Americans outside of nurseries and lunatic asylums. The excitement of
Germany at the opening of the Thirty Years' War, of England previous to
the Cromwellian struggle, was torpid and partial in comparison with
this outburst of a modern, reading and swiftly-informed free democracy.
As yet there was little bloodshed; the old respect for law and
confidence in the processes of reason could not at once die, and men
still endeavored to convince each other by argument while holding the
pistol to each other's heads; but from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf
there was a spiritual preparedness for slaughter which was to end in
such murderous contests as should make ensanguined Europe rise from its
thousand battle-fields to stare in wonder.
Women and children were as wild with the patriotic excitement as men.
Some of the prettiest and gentlest-born ladies of New Boston waited in a
mixed crowd half the night at the railroad station to see the first
regiments pass towards Washington, and flung their handkerchiefs, rings,
pencil-cases, and other trinkets to the astonished country lads, to show
them how the heart of woman blessed the nation's defenders. In no
society could you be ten minutes without hearing the words war, treason,
rebellion. And so, the subject being every body's subject, the Ravenels
and Colburne frequently talked of it. It was quite a sad and sore
circumstance to the two gentlemen that the lady was a rebel. To a man
who prides himself on his superior capacity and commanding nature, (that
is to say, to almost every man in existence) there can be few greater
grievances than a woman whom he cannot convert; and more particularly
and painfully is this true when she bears some near relationship to him,
as for instance that of a wife, sister, daughter and sweetheart. Thus
Ravenel the father and Colburne the admirer, fretted daily over the
obstinate treasonableness of Miss Lillie. Patriotism she called it,
declaring that Louisiana was her country, and that to it she owed her
allegiance.
It is worthy of passing remark how loyal the young are to the prevailing
ideas of the community in which they are nurtured. You will find adult
republicans in England, but no infant ones; adults monarchists in our
own country, but not in our schools and nurseries. I have known an
American of fifty whose beliefs, prejudices and tastes were all
European, but who could not save his five children from being all
Yankee. Accordingly this young lady of nineteen, born and nurtured among
Louisianians, held firm for Louisiana in spite of the arguments of the
adored papa and the rather agreeable admirer.
The Doctor liked Colburne, and respected his intellect. He rarely tired
of talking with him on any subject, and concerning the war they could go
on interminably. The only point on which they disagreed was the probable
length of the contest; the southerner prophecying that it would last
five or six years, and the northerner that the rebels would succumb in
as many months. Miss Ravenel sometimes said that the North would give up
in a year, and sometimes that the war would last forty years, both of
which opinions she had heard sustained in New Orleans. But, whatever she
said, she always believed in the superior pluck and warlike skill of the
people of her own section.
"Miss Ravenel," said Colburne, "I believe you think that all southerners
are giants, so tall that they can't see a Yankee without lying down, and
so pugnacious that they never go to church without praying for a chance
to fight somebody."
She resented this satire by observing, "Mr. Colburne, if I believe it
you ought not to dispute it."
I am inclined to think that the young man in these days rather damaged
his chances of winning the young lady's kind regards (to use a hackneyed
and therefore decorous phrase) by his stubborn and passionate loyalty to
the old starry banner. It was impossible that the two should argue so
much on a subject which so deeply interested both without occasionally
coming to spiritual blows. But why should Mr. Colburne win the kind
regards of Miss Ravenel? If she were his wife, how could he support her?
He had little, and she had nothing.
While they were talking over the war it went on. One balmy summer day
our little debating club of three sat in one of the small iron balconies
of the hotel, discussing the great battle which had been fought, and
rumor said won, on the heights around Manassas Junction. For a week the
city had been wild about the 'on to Richmond' movement; and to-day the
excitement culminated in a general joy which was impatient for official
announcements, flags, bells and cannon. It was true that there was one
suspicious circumstance; that for twenty-four hours no telegrams
concerning the fight had come over the wires from Washington; but,
excepting a few habitual croakers and secret copperheads, who were
immediately frowned into silence, no one predicted evil tidings. At the
last accounts "the grand army of the Potomac" was driving before it the
traitorous battalions of the South; McDowell had gained a great victory,
and there was an end of rebellion.
"I don't believe it--I don't believe it," Miss Ravenel repeatedly
asseverated, until her father scolded her for her absurd and disloyal
incredulity.
"The telegraph is in order again," observed Colburne. "I heard one of
those men who just passed say so. Here comes somebody that we know.
Whitewood!--I say, Whitewood! Any thing on the bulletin-board?"
The pale young student looked up with a face of despair and eyes full of
tears.
"It's all up, Colburne," said he. "Our men are running, throwing away
their guns and every thing."
His trembling voice hardly sufficed for even this short story of shame
and disaster. Miss Ravenel, the desperate rebel, jumped to her feet with
a nervous shriek of joy and then, catching her father's reproving eye,
rushed up stairs and danced it out in her own room.
"It's impossible!" remonstrated Colburne in such excitement that his
voice was almost a scream. "Why, by the last accounts--"
"Oh! that's all gone up," groaned Whitewood, who was in such a state of
grief that he could hardly talk intelligibly. "We've got more. We've got
the end of the battle. Johnson came up on our right, and we are whipped
all to pieces."
"Johnson! Why, where was Patterson?"
"Patterson is an old traitor," shouted Whitewood, pushing wildly on his
way as if too sick at heart to talk more.
"It is very sad," observed the Doctor gravely. The thought occurred to
him that for his own interests he had better have stayed in New Orleans;
but he lost sight of it immediately in his sorrow for the seeming
calamity which had befallen country and liberty and the human race.
"Oh! it's horrible--horrible. I don't believe it. I can't believe it,"
groaned Colburne. "It's too much to bear. I must go home. It makes me
too sick to talk."