A TORTURE WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN SPARED.
A week after the conflagration Carter received his commission as
Brigadier-General. His first impression was one of exultation: his
enemies and his adverse fate had been beaten; he was on the road to
distinction; he could wear the silver star. Then came a feeling of
despondency and fear, while he remembered the crime into which he had
been driven, as he thought or tried to think, by the lack of this just
recognition of his services. Oh the bitterness of good fortune, long
desired, which comes too late!
"A month ago this might have saved me," he muttered, and then burst into
curses upon his political opponents, his creditors, himself, all those
who had brought about his ruin.
"My only crime! The only ungentlemanly act of my life!" was another
phrase which dropped from his lips. Doubtless he thought so: many people
of high social position hold a similarly mixed moral creed; they allow
that a gentleman may be given to expensive immoralities, but not to
money-getting ones; that he may indulge in wine, women, and play, but
not in swindling. All over Europe this curious ethical distinction
prevails, and very naturally, for it springs out of the conditions of a
hereditary aristocracy, and makes allowance for the vices to which
wealthy nobles are tempted, but not for vices to which they are not
tempted. A feeble echo of it has traversed the ocean, and influenced
some characters in America both for good and for evil.
Carter was almost astonished at the child-like joy, so contradictory to
his own angry remorse, with which Lillie received the news of his
promotion.
"Oh!--My General!" she said, coloring to her forehead with delight,
after a single glance at the commission which he dropped into her lap.
She rose up and gave him a mock military salute; then sprang at him and
covered his bronzed face and long mustache with kisses.
"I am so happy! They have done you justice at last--a little justice.
Oh, I am so glad and proud! I am going with you to buy the star. You
shall let me choose it."
Then, her mind taking a forward leap of fifteen years, she added, "We
will send Ravvie to West Point, and he shall be a general, too. He is
going to be very intelligent. And brave, also. He isn't in the least
timid."
Carter laughed for the first time since he had received the commission.
"My dear," said he, "Ravvie will probably become a general long after I
have ceased to be one. I am a volunteer. I am only a general while the
war lasts."
"But the war will last a long time," hopefully replied the monster in
woman's guise, who loved her husband a hundred times as much as she did
her country.
"There is one unpleasant result of this promotion," observed Carter.
"What! You are not going to the field?" asked Lillie, clutching him by
the sleeve. "Oh, don't do that!"
"My little girl, I cannot hold my present position. A Brigadier-General
can't remain quartermaster, not even of a department. I must resign it
and report for duty. Headquarters may order me to the field, and I
certainly ought to go."
"Oh no! It can't be necessary. To think that this should come just when
we were so happy. I wish you hadn't been promoted."
"My darling, you want to make a woman of me," he said, holding her close
to his side. "I must show myself a man, now that my manhood has been
recognized. My honor demands it."
He talked of his honor from long habit; conscious, however, that the
word stung him.
"But don't ask to be sent to the field," pleaded Lillie. "Resign your
place and report for duty, if you must. But please don't ask to be sent
to the field. Promise me that; won't you?"
Looking into his wife's tearful eyes, with his strong and plump hands on
her sloping shoulders, the Colonel promised as she asked him. But that
evening, writing from his office, he sent a communication to the
headquarters of the Department of the Gulf, requesting that he might be
relieved from his quartermastership and assigned to duty with the army
in the field. What else should he do? He had proved himself unfit for
family life, unfit for business; but, by (this and that and the other)
he could command a brigade and he could fight. He would do what he had
done, and could do again, with credit. Besides, if he should win
distinction at Grande Ecore, it might prevent an investigation into that
infernal muddle of cotton and steamboats. A great deal is pardoned by
the public, and even by the War Department, to courage, capacity, and
success.
In a few days he received orders from the General commanding, directing
him to report to the headquarters of the army in the field. He signed
his last quartermaster papers gaily, kissed his wife and child sadly,
shook hands with Ravenel and Mrs. Larue, and took the first boat up the
river.
Lillie was amazed and shocked at discovering how little she missed him.
She accused herself of being wicked and heartless; she would not accept
the explanation that she was a mother. It was all the more hateful in
her to forget him, she said, now that he was the father of her child.
Still, she could not be miserable; she was almost always happy with her
baby. Such a lovely baby he was; charming because he was heavy, because
he ate, because he slept, because he cried! His wailing troubled her
because it denoted that he was ill at ease, and not because the sound
was in itself disagreeable to her ear. If she heard it at a little
distance from the house, for instance when returning from a walk, she
quickened her step and smiled gaily, saying, "He is alive. You will see
how he will stop when I take him."
People who feel so strongly are rarely interesting except to those who
share their feelings, or who have learned to love them under any
circumstances, and through all the metamorphoses of which a single
character is capable. She would have been perfectly tedious at this
period to any ordinary acquaintance who had not been initiated into the
sweet mystery of love for children. Her character and conversation
seemed to be all solved in the great alembic of maternity. She was a
mother as passionately as she had been a betrothed and a wife; and
indeed it appeared as if this culminating condition of her womanhood was
the most absorbing of all. This exquisite life, delicious in spite of
her occasional anxieties and self-reproaches concerning her husband,
flowed on without much mixture of trouble until one day she picked up a
letter on the floor of her father's study which opened to her a hitherto
inconceivable fountain of bitterness. Let us see how this unfortunate
manuscript found its way into the house.
Doctor Ravenel, deprived for the last two years of his accustomed summer
trip to Europe, or the north, or other countries blessed with a
mineralogy, sought health and amusement in long walks about New Orleans
and its flat, ugly vicinity. Lillie, who used to be his comrade in these
exercises, now took constitutionals in the pony carriage or in company
with the wicker wagon of Master Ravvie. These strolls of the Doctor were
therefore somewhat dull business. A country destitute of stones was to
him much like a language destitute of a literature. He fell into a way
of walking without paying much attention to his surroundings, revolving
the while new systems of mineralogy, crystallizing his knowledge into
novel classifications, recalling to memory the characteristics of his
specimens, as Lillie recollected the giggles and cunning ways of her
baby. In one of these absent-minded moods he was surprised by a heavy
shower, three or four miles from home. The only shelter was a deserted
shanty, once probably the dwelling of a free negro. A minute or two
after the Doctor found himself in its single room, and before he had
discovered the soundest part of its leaky roof, a man in the undress
uniform of a United States officer, dripping wet, reeled into the
doorway, with the observation, "By Jove! this is watering my rum."
The Doctor immediately recognized in the herculean form, bronzed face,
black eyes and twisted nose, the personality of Lieutenant Van Zandt. He
had not seen him for nearly two years, but the man's appearance and
voice were unforgettable. The Doctor was charitable in philosophising
concerning coarse and vicious people, but he abominated their society
and always avoided it if possible. He looked about him for a means of
escape and found none; the man filled up the only door-way, and the rain
was descending in torrents. Accordingly the Doctor turned his back on
the Lieutenant and ruminated mineralogy.
"I prefer plain whisky," continued Van Zandt, staring at the rain with a
contemptuous grin. "I don't want, by Jove! so much water in my grog.
None of your mixed drinks, by Jove! Plain whisky!"
After a minute more of glaring and smiling, he remarked, "Dam slow
business, by Jove! Van Zandt, my bully boy, we won't wait to see this
thing out. We'll turn in."
Facing about with a lurch he beheld the other inmate of the shanty.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. Then recollecting the breeding of his youth, he
added, "I beg pardon, sir. Am I intruding?"
"Not at all; of course not," replied Ravenel. "Our rights here are the
same."
"I am glad to hear it. And, by the way, have the kindness to understand
me, sir. I didn't mean to insinuate that I supposed this to be your
residence. I only thought that you might be the proprietor of the
estate."
"Not so unfortunate," said the Doctor.
The Lieutenant laughed like a twelve-pound brass howitzer, the noisiest
gun, I believe, in existence.
"Very good, sir. The more a man owns here in Louisiana, the poorer he
is. That's just my opinion, sir. I feel honored in agreeing with you,
sir. By Jove, I own nothing. I couldn't afford it--on my pay."
A stream of water from a hole in the roof was pattering on his broad
back, but he took no notice of it, and probably was not conscious of it.
He stared at the Doctor with unblinking, bulging eyes, not in the least
recollecting him, but perfectly conscious that he was in the presence of
a gentleman. Drunk or sober, Van Zandt never forgot that he came of old
Knickerbocker stock, and never failed to accord respect to aristocratic
demeanor wherever he found it.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he resumed. "You must excuse me for addressing
you in this free and easy way. I only saw you indistinctly at first,
sir, and couldn't judge as to your social position and individual
character. I perceive that you are a gentleman, sir. You will excuse me
for mentioning that I come of an old Knickerbocker family which dates in
American history from the good old jolly Dutch times of Peter
Stuyvesant--God bless his jolly old Dutch memory! You will understand,
sir, that a man who feels such blood as that in his veins is glad to
meet a gentleman anywhere, even in such a cursed old hovel as this, as
leaky and rickety, by Jove! as the Southern Confederacy. And, sir, in
that connection allow me to say, hoping no offence if you hold a
contrary opinion, that the Confederacy is played out. We licked them on
the Red River, sir. The bully old First Division--God bless its ragged
old flags! I can't speak of them without feeling my eyes water--much as
I hate the fluid--the jolly, fighting old First Division fairly murdered
them at Sabine Cross Roads. At Pleasant Hill the old First, and Andrew
Jackson Smith's western boys laid them out over two miles square of
prairie. If we had had a cracker in our haversacks we would have gone
bang up to Shreveport--if we had had a cracker apiece, and the firm of
W. C. Do you know what I mean, sir, by W. C? Weitzel and Carter! Those
are the boys for an advance. That's the firm that our brigade and
division banks on. Weitzel and Carter would have taken us to Shreveport,
with or without crackers, by Jove! We wanted nothing but energy. If we
had had half the go, the vim, the forward march, to lead us, that the
rebels had, we would have finished the war in the southwest. We must
take a leaf out of Johnny Reb's book. _Fas est ab hostes doceri._ I
believe I quote correctly. If not, please correct me. By the way, did I
mention to you that I am a graduate of Columbia College in New York
City? Allow me to repeat the statement. I have reason to be proud of the
fact, inasmuch as I took the Greek salutatory, the second highest honor,
sir, of the graduation. You are a college man yourself, sir, I perceive,
and can make allowance for my vanity in the circumstance. But I am
wandering from my subject. I was speaking, I believe, of Colonel
Carter--I beg his pardon--General Carter. At last, sir, the
Administration has done justice to one of the most gallant and capable
officers in the service. So much the better for the Administration.
Colonel Carter--I beg pardon--General Carter is not only an officer but
a gentleman; not one of those plebeian humbugs whom our ridiculous
Democracy delights to call nature's gentlemen; but a gentleman born and
bred--_un échantillon de bonne race_--a jet of pure old sangre azul. I,
who am an old Knickerbocker--as I believe I had the honor to inform
you--I delight to see such men put forward. Don't you, sir?"
The Doctor admitted with a polite smile that the promotion of General
Carter gave him pleasure.
"I knew it would, sir. You came of good blood yourself. I can see it in
your manners and conversation, sir. Well, as I was saying, the promotion
of Carter is one of the most intelligent moves of the Administration.
Carter--I beg pardon--I don't mean to insinuate that I am on familiar
terms with him--I acknowledge him as my superior officer and keep my
distance--General Carter is born for command and for victory. Wherever
he goes he conquers. He is triumphant in the field and in the boudoir.
He is victorious over man and women. By Jove, sir," (here he gave a
saturnine chuckle, and leer.) "I came across the most amusing proof of
his capacity for bringing the fair sex to a surrender."
The Doctor grew uneasy, and looked out anxiously at the pouring rain,
but saw no chance of effecting an escape.
"You see, sir, I am wounded," continued Van Zandt. "They gave me a welt
at Port Hudson, and they gave me another at Pleasant Hill."
"My dear sir, you will catch your death, standing under the dripping in
that way," said the Doctor.
"Thank you, sir," replied Van Zandt, changing his position. "No great
harm, however. Water, sir, doesn't hurt me, unless it gets into my
whiskey. Exteriorly it is simply disagreeable; interiorly the same, as
well as injurious. Not that I am opposed to bathing. On the contrary, it
is my practice to take a sponge bath every morning--that is, when I
don't sleep within musket range of the enemy. Well, as I was saying,
they gave me a welt at Pleasant Hill--a mere flesh wound through the
thigh--nothing worth blathering about--and I was sent to St. James
Hospital. I can't stand the hospital. I don't fancy the fare at the
milk-toast table, sir. (This with a grimace of unutterable disgust.) I
took out a two-legged leave of absence to-day, and went over to the Lake
House; lost my horse there, and had to foot it back to the city. That is
how I came to have the pleasure of listening to your conversation here,
sir. But I believe I was speaking of General Carter. Some miserable
light wine which I had the folly to drink at the Lake has muddled my
head, I fancy. Plain whisky is the only safe thing. Allow me to
recommend you to stick to it. I wish we had a canteen of honest
commissary now; we could pass the night very comfortably, sir. But I was
speaking of General Carter, and his qualities as an officer. Ah! I
remember. I mentioned a letter. And, by Jove! here it is in my
breast-pocket, soaked with this cursed water. If you will have the
goodness to peruse it, you will see that I am not exaggerating when I
boast of the conquests of my superior officer. The lady frankly owns up
to the fact that she has surrendered to him; no capitulation, no terms,
no honors of war; unconditional surrender, by Jove! a U. S. G.
surrender. It is an unreserved coming down of the coon."
"It is one of Lillie's letters," thought Ravenel. "This drunkard does
not know that the General is married, and mistakes the frank affection
of a wife for the illicit passion of an _intriguante_. It is best that I
should expose the mistake and prevent further misrepresentation."
He took the moist, blurred sheet, unfolded it, and found the envelope
carefully doubled up inside. It was addressed to "Colonel J. T. Carter,"
with the addition in one corner of the word "personal." The handwriting
was not Lillie's, but a large, round hand, foreign in style, and, as he
judged, feigned. Glancing at the chirography of the note itself, he
immediately recognized, as he thought, the small, close, neat penmanship
of Mrs. Larue. Van Zandt was too drunk to notice how pale the Doctor
turned, and how his hand trembled.
"By Jove! I am tired," said the Bacchanal. "I shall, with your
permission, take the d--st nap that ever was heard of since the days of
the seven sleepers. Don't be alarmed, sir, at my snoring. I go off like
a steamboat bursting its boiler."
Tearing a couple of boards from the wall of the shanty, he laid them
side by side in one corner, selected a blackened stone from the
fire-place for a pillow, put his cap on it, stretched himself out with
an inebriated smile, and was fast asleep before the Doctor had decided
whether he would or would not read the letter. He was most anxious to
establish innocence; if there was any guilt, he did not want to know it.
He ran over all of Mrs. Larue's conduct since the marriage, and could
not call to mind a single circumstance which had excited in him a
suspicion of evil. She was coquettish, and, he feared, unprincipled; but
he could not believe that she was desperately wicked. Nevertheless, as
he did not understand the woman, as he erroneously supposed her to be of
an ardent, impulsive nature, he thought it possible that she had been
fascinated by the presence of such a masculine being as Carter. Of him
as yet he had no suspicion: no, he could not have been false, even in
thought, to his young wife; or, as Ravenel phrased it to himself, "to my
daughter." He would read the letter and probe the ugly mystery and
discover the falsity of its terrors. As he unfolded the paper he was
checked by the thought that to peruse unbidden a lady's correspondence
was hardly honorable. But there was a reply to that: the mischief of
publicity had already commenced; the sleeping drunkard there had read
the letter. After all, it might be a mere joke, a burlesque, an
April-Fool affair; and if so, it was properly his business to discover
it and to make the explanation to Van Zandt. And if, on the other hand,
it should be really a confession of criminal feeling, it was his duty to
be informed of that also, in order that he might be able to protect the
domestic peace of his daughter.
He read the letter through, and then sat down on the door-sill,
regardless of the driving rain. There was no charitable doubt possible
in the matter; the writer was a guilty woman, and she addressed a guilty
man. The letter alluded clearly and even grossly to past assignations,
and fixed the day and hour for a future one. Carter's name did not
appear except on the envelope; but his avocations and business hours
were alluded to; the fact of their voyage together to New York was
mentioned; there was no doubt that he was the man. The Doctor was more
miserable than he remembered to have been before since the death of his
wife. After half an hour of wretched meditation, walking meanwhile up
and down the puddles which had collected on the earthen floor of the
shanty, he became aware that the rain had ceased, and set out on his
miserable walk homeward.
Should he destroy the letter? Should he give it to Mrs. Larue and crush
her? Should he send it to Carter? Should he show it to Lillie? How could
he answer any one of these horrible questions? What right had Fate to
put such questions to him? It was not his crime.
On reaching home he changed his wet clothes, put the billet in his
pocket-book, sat down to the dinner-table and tried to seem cheerful.
But Lillie soon asked him, "What is the matter with you, papa?"
"I got wet, my dear. It was a very hard walk back through the mud. I am
quite worn out. I believe I shall go to bed early."
She repeated her question two or three times: not that she suspected the
truth, or suspected anything more than just what he told her: but
because she was anxious about his health, and because she had a habit of
putting many questions. Even in the absorption of his inexplicable
trouble she worried him, so that he grew fretful at her importunity, and
answered her crisply, that he was well enough, and needed nothing but
quiet. Then suddenly he repented himself with invisible tears, wondering
at his irrational and seemingly cruel peevishness, and seeming to excuse
himself to himself by calling to mind that he was tormented on her
account. He almost had a return of his vexation when Lillie commenced
upon him about her husband, asking, "Isn't it time to hear, papa? And
how soon do you think I will get a letter?"
"Very soon, my dear," he replied gloomily, remembering the wicked letter
in his pocket, and clenching his hands under the table to resist a
sudden impulse to give it to her.
"I hope there will be no more battles. Don't you think that the
fighting is over?"
"Perhaps it may be best for him to have a battle."
"Oh no, papa! He has his promotion. I am perfectly satisfied. I don't
want him to fight any more."
The father made no answer, for he could not tell her what he thought,
which was that perhaps her husband had better die. It must be remembered
that he did not know that the intrigue had terminated.
"Here comes the little Brigadier," said Lillie, when the baby made his
usual after-dinner irruption into the parlor.
"Isn't he sweet?" she asked for the ten thousandth time, as she took him
from the hands of the nurse and put him in her father's lap. The cooing,
jumping, clinging infant clawing at watch-chain, neck-tie and
spectacles, soft, helpless and harmless, gave the Doctor the first
emotion similar to happiness which he had felt for the last three hours.
How we fly for consolation to the dependent innocence of childhood when
we have been grievously and lastingly wounded by the perfidy or cruelty
of the adult creatures in whom we had put our trust! Stricken ones who
have no children sometimes take up with dogs and cats, knowing that, if
they are feeble, they are also faithful. But with the baby in his arms,
Ravenel could not decide what to do with the baby's father; and so he
handed the boy back to his mother, saying with more significance of
manner than he intended, "There, my dear, there is your comfort."
"Papa, you are sick," replied Lillie, looking at him anxiously. "Do lie
down on the sofa."
"I will go to my room and go to bed," said he. "It is eight o'clock; and
it will do me no harm if I sleep twelve hours to-night. Now don't follow
me, my child; don't tease me. I only want rest."
After kissing her and the child he hurried away, for he heard Mrs. Larue
coming through the back hall toward the parlor, and as frequently
happens, the innocent had not the audacity to face the guilty. In the
passage he paused, glanced back through the crack of the door, and was
amazed, almost infuriated, to see that woman kneel at Lillie's feet and
fondle the baby with her usual air of girlish gayety.
"What infernal hypocrisy!" he muttered as he turned away, a little
indignant at the giggling delight with which Ravvie welcomed the
well-known visitor. His charitable philosophy had all evaporated for the
time, and he could not believe that this wicked creature had a spark of
good in her, not even enough to smile upon a child honestly. To his mind
the caresses which she lavished on Ravvie were part of a deep-laid plan
of devilish deceit.
Four wretched hours passed over him, and at midnight he was still
undecided what to do. There were fathers in Louisiana who did not mind
this sort of thing; but he could not understand those fathers; he minded
it. There were fathers who would simply say to an erring son-in-law over
a glass of wine, "Now look here, my dear sir, you must be cautious about
publicity;" or who would quietly send Mrs. Larue her letter, with a note
politely requesting that she would make arrangements which would not
interfere with the quiet of, "Yours very respectfully," etc. But such
fathers could not love their daughters as he loved his, and could not
have such a daughter as he had. To be false to Lillie was an almost
unparalleled crime--a crime which demanded not only reproach but
punishment; a crime which, if passed over, would derange the moral
balance of the universe. It seemed to him that he must show Lillie the
letter, and take her away from this unworthy husband, and carry her
north or somewhither where she should never see him more. This was what
ought to be; but then it might kill her. Late in the night, when he fell
asleep on the outside of his bed, still dressed, his light still
burning, the letter in his hand, he had not yet decided what to do.
About dawn, awakened early as usual by the creeping of Ravvie, Lillie
thought of her father, and slipping on a dressing-gown, stole to his
room to see if he were well or ill. She was alarmed to find him dressed,
and looking pale and sunken. Before she had decided whether to let him
sleep on, or to awaken him and tell him to go to bed as a sick man
should, her eye fell upon the letter. It must be that which had made him
so gloomy and strange. What could it be about? Had he lost his place at
the hospital? That need not trouble him, for her husband had left her
two thousand dollars in bank, and he would not object to have her share
it with her father. Her husband was so generous and loving, that she
could trust his affection for any thing! She was accustomed to open and
read her father's letters without asking his permission. She took up
this one, and glanced through it with delirious haste. The Doctor was
awakened by a shriek of agony, and found Lillie senseless on the floor,
with the open letter under her hand.
Now he knew what to do; she must go far away at once--she must never
again see her husband.