LILLIE DEVOTES HERSELF ENTIRELY TO THE RISING GENERATION.
Lillie wished to return, at least for a while, to her old quarters in
the New Boston House. A desire to go back by association to some part of
her life which had been happy may have influenced her in this choice;
and she was so quietly earnest in it that her father yielded, although
he feared that the recollections connected with the place would increase
her melancholy. They had been there only three days when he read with a
shock the newspaper report of the battle of Cane River, and the death of
"the lamented General Carter." He did not dare mention it to her, and
sought to keep the journals out of her reach. This was easy enough, for
she never went out alone, rarely spoke to any one but her father, and
devoted her time mostly to her child and her sewing. But about a week
after their arrival, as the Doctor came in to dinner from a morning's
reading in the college library, he found her weeping quietly over a
letter which lay open in her lap. She handed it to him, merely saying,
"Oh, papa!"
He glanced through it hastily; it was Colburne's account of Carter's
death.
"I knew this, my dear," he said. "But I did not dare to tell you. I hope
you are able to bear it. There is a great deal to bear in this world.
But it is for our good."
"Oh, I don't know," she replied with a weary air. She was thinking, not
of his general consolations, but of his hope that she could endure her
trial; for a trial it was, this sudden death of her husband, though she
had thought of him of late only as separated from her forever. After a
short silence she sobbed, "I am so sorry I quarreled with him. I wish I
had written to him that I was not angry."
She went on crying, but not passionately, nor with a show of unendurable
sorrow. From that time, as he watched the patient tranquillity of her
grief, the Doctor conceived a firm hope that she would not be
permanently crushed by her afflictions. She kept the letter in her own
writing desk, and read it many times when alone; sometimes laying it
down with a start to take up the unconscious giggling comforter in the
cradle; sometimes telling him what it all meant, and what her tears
meant, saying, "Poor baby! Baby's papa is dead."
Only once did an expression savoring of anger at any one force its way
through her lips.
"I don't see why I should have been made miserable because others are
wicked," she said.
"It is one of the necessary consequences of living," answered the
Doctor. "Other people's sins are sometimes brought to our doors, just as
other people's infants are sometimes left there in baskets. God has
ordained that we shall help bear the burdens of our fellow creatures,
even down to the consequences of their crimes. It is one way of teaching
us not to sin. I have had my small share of this unpleasant labor. I
lost my home and my income because a few men wanted to found a
slave-driving oligarchy on the ruins of their country."
"We have had nothing but trials," sighed Lillie.
"Oh yes," said the Doctor. "Life in the average is a mass of happiness,
only dotted here and there by trials. Our pleasures are so many that
they grow monotonous and are overlooked."
I must now include the history of eight months in a few pages. The
Doctor, ignorant of the steamboat transaction, allowed his daughter to
draw the money which she had left behind on deposit, considering that
Carter's child unquestionably had a right to it. Through the good
offices of that amiable sinner, Mrs. Larue (of which he was equally
unaware), he was enabled to let his house in New Orleans as a Government
office. Thus provided with ready money and a small quarterly payment, he
resumed his literary and scientific labors, translating from a French
Encyclopedia for a New York publisher, and occasionally securing a job
of mineralogical discovery. The familiar life of former days, when
father and daughter were all and all to each other, slowly revived,
saddened by recollections, but made joyful also by the new affection
which they shared. As out of the brazen vase of the Arabian Nights arose
the malignant Jinn whose head touched the clouds, and whose voice made
the earth tremble, so out of the cradle of Ravvie arose an influence,
perhaps a veritable angel, whose crown was in the heavens, and whose
power brought down consolation. There was no cause of inner
estrangement; nothing on which father and child could not feel alike.
Ravenel had found some difficulty in liking his daughter's husband, but
he had none at all in loving his daughter's baby. So, agreeing on all
subjects of much importance to either, and disposed by affection and old
habit to take a strong interest in each other's affairs, they easily
returned to their former ways of much domestic small-talk. Happily for
Lillie she was not taciturn, but a prattler, and by nature a
light-hearted one. Now prattlers, like workers of all kinds, physical
and moral, unconsciously dodge by their activity a great many shafts of
suffering which hit their quieter brothers and sisters. A widow who
orders her mourning, and waits for it with folded hand and closed lips,
is likely to be more melancholy than a widow who must trim her gowns,
and make up her caps with her own fingers, and who is thereby impelled
to talk of them to her mother, sisters, and other born sympathisers. It
was a symptom of returning health of mind when Lillie could linger
before the glass, arrange her hair with the old taste, put on a new cap
daintily and say, "Papa, how does that look?"
"Very well, my dear," answers papa, scratching away at his translation.
Then, remembering what his child had suffered, and transferring his
thoughts to the subject which she proffers for consideration, he adds,
"It seems to me that it is unnecessarily stiff and parchment like. It
looks as if it was made of stearine."
"Why, that's the material," says Lillie. "Of course it looks stiff; it
ought to."
"But why not have some other material?" queries the Doctor, who is as
dull as men usually are in matters of the female toilet. "Why not use
white silk, or something?"
"Silk, papa!" exclaims Lillie, and laughs heartily. "Who ever heard of
using silk for mourning?"
Woe to women when they give up making their own dresses and take to
female tailors! Five will then die of broken hearts, of ennui, of
emptiness of life, where one dies now.
But her great diverter and comforter was still her child. Like most
women she was born for maternity more distinctly and positively even
than for love. She had not given up her dolls until she was fourteen;
and then she had put them reverentially and tenderly away in a trunk
where she could occasionally go and look at them; and less than seven
years later she had a living doll, her own, her soul's doll, to care for
and worship. It was charming to see this slender, Diana-like form,
overloaded and leaning, but still bearing, with an affection which was
careless of fatigue, the disproportionate weight of that healthy,
succulent, ponderous Ravvie. His pink face, and short flaxen hair bobbed
about her shoulders, and his chubby hands played with her nose, lips,
hair, and white collars. When he went out on an airing she almost always
went with him, and sometimes took the sole charge of his wicker wagon,
proud to drag it because of its illustrious burden. Ravvie had a
promenade in the morning with mamma and nurse, and another late in the
afternoon with mamma and grandpapa. Lillie meant to make him healthy by
keeping him constantly in the open air, and burning him brown in the
sunshine, after the sensible fashion of southern nurseries, and in
consonance with the teaching of her father. The old Irish nurse, a
veteran and enthusiast in her profession, had more than one contest with
this provokingly devoted mother. Not that Rosann objected to the child
being out; she would have been glad to have him in the wicker wagon from
breakfast to dinner, and from dinner to sundown; but she wanted to be
the sole guide and companion of his wanderings. When, therefore she was
ordered to stay at home and do the small washing and ironing, while the
mistress went off with the baby, she set up an indignant ullaloo, and
threatened departure without warning. Sometimes Lillie was satirical and
said, "Rosann, since you can't nurse the baby, I hope you will allow me
to do so."
To which Rosann, with Irish readiness, and with an apologetic titter,
would reply, "An' since God allows ye to do it, ma'am, I don't see as I
can make an objection."
"I would turn her away if she wasn't so fond of Ravvie," affirmed Lillie
in a pet. "She is the most selfish creature that I ever saw. She wants
him the whole time. I declare, papa, I only keep her out of pity. I
believe it would break her heart to deprive her of the child."
"It's a very odd sort of selfishness," observed the Doctor. "Most people
would call it devotion, self-abnegation, or something of that sort."
"But he isn't her child," answered Lillie, half vexed, half smiling.
"She thinks he is. I actually believe she thinks that she had him. But
she didn't. I did."
She tossed her head with a pretty air of defiance, which was as much as
to say that she was not ashamed of the feat.
Long before Master Ravvie could say a word in any language, she had
commenced the practice of talking to him only in French. He should be a
linguist from his cradle; and she herself would be his teacher. When he
got old enough her father should instruct him in the sciences, and, if
he chose to be a doctor, in the theory and practice of medicine. They
would never send him to school, nor to college: thus they would save
money, have him always by them and keep him from evil. Concerning this
project she had long arguments with her father, who thought a boy should
be with boys, learn to rough it away from home, study human nature as
well as languages and sciences, and grow up with a circle of emulators
and life comrades.
"You will give up this little plan of yours," he said, "when he gets old
enough to make it necessary. When he is fifteen he won't wear the shell
that fits him now, and meantime we must let another one grow on his back
against he needs it."
But Lillie could not yet see that her child ought even to be separated
from her. She was constantly arranging, and re-arranging her imaginary
future in such ways as seemed best fitted to make him a permanent
feature of it. In every cloud-castle that she built he occupied a
central throne, with her father sitting on the right hand and she on the
left. Of course, however, she was chiefly occupied with his present,
desiring to make it as delightful to him as possible.
"I wonder if Ravvie would like the sea-shore," she said, on one of the
first warm days of summer.
"Why so?" asks papa.
"Oh, it would be so pleasant to spend a week or so on the sea-shore. I
think I could get a little fatter and stronger if I might have the
sea-breeze and sea-bathing. I am tired of being so thin. Besides, it
would be such fun to take Ravvie down to the beach and see him stare at
the waves rolling in. How round his eyes would be! Do you remember how
he used to turn his head up when he was a month old, and stare at the
sky with his eyes set like a doll-baby's. I wish I knew what he used to
think of it."
"I presume he thought just about as much as the hollyhocks do when they
turn their faces toward the sun," says the Doctor.
"For shame, papa! Do you compare him to a vegetable?"
"Not now. But in those days he was only a grade above one. There wasn't
much in him but possibilities. Well; he may have perceived that the sky
was very fine; but then the hollyhocks perceive as much."
"What! don't you suppose he had a soul?"
"Oh yes. He had a tongue too, but he hadn't learned to talk with it. I
doubt whether his soul was of much use to him in that stage of his
existence."
"Papa, it seems to me that you talk like an infidel. Now if Ravvie had
died when he was a month old, I should have expected to meet him in
Heaven--that is, if I am ever fit to go there."
"I have no doubt you would--no doubt of it," affirmed the Doctor with
animation. "I never intended to dispute the little man's immortality."
"Then why did you call him a hollyhock?"
"My dear, I take it all back. He isn't a hollyhock and never was."
"If we can hire a house I want it in the suburbs," said Lillie, after a
meditation. "I want it outside the city so that Ravvie can have plenty
of air. His room must be on the sunny side, papa--hear?"
"Yes," answered papa, who had also had his revery, probably concerning
Smithites and Brownites.
"You don't hear at all," said Lillie. "You don't pay any attention."
"Well, my child, there is plenty of time. We sha'n't have a house for
the next five minutes."
"I know it. Not for five years perhaps. But I want you to pay attention
when I am talking about Ravvie."
Meantime the two were very popular in New Boston. As southern refugees,
as martyrs in the cause of loyalty, as an organizer of free black
labor, as the widow of a distinguished Union officer, both and each were
personages whom the fervent Federalists of the little city delighted to
honor. As soon as they would receive calls or accept of new
acquaintances they had all that they wanted. Professor Whitewood had
been killed at Chancellorsville, although bodily more than three hundred
miles from the field of battle; and his son was now worth eighty
thousand dollars, besides seven hundred dollars yearly from a tutorship,
and the prospect of succeeding to his father's position. This
well-to-do, virtuous, amiable, and intelligent young gentleman was more
than suspected of being in love with the penniless widow. His sister
made the affair a subject of much meditation, and even of prayer, being
anxious above all things on earth, that her brother should be happy.
Whitewood was more than once observed to drop his Hindustani, sidle out
upon the green and beg the privilege of drawing Ravvie's baby-wagon; and
what was particularly suspicious about the matter was, that he never
attempted to join Rosann in this manner, but only Mrs. Carter. Lillie
colored at the significance of the shyly-preferred request, and would
not consent to it, but nevertheless was not angry. Her bookish admirer's
interest in her increased when he found that she aided her father in his
translations; for from his childhood he had been taught to like people
very much in proportion to their intellectuality and education. Of
evenings he was frequently to be seen in the little parlor of the
Ravenels on the fourth floor of the New Boston House. Lillie would have
been glad to have him bring his sister, so that they four could make up
a game of whist; but since the dawn of history no Whitewoods had ever
handled a pack of cards, and the capacity of learning to do so was not
in them. Moreover they still retained some of the old New England
scruples of conscience on the subject. Whitewood talked quite as much
with the Doctor as with Lillie; quite as much about minerals and
chemistry as about subjects with which she was familiar; but it was
easy to see that, if he had known how, he would have made his
conversation altogether feminine. At precisely ten o'clock he rose with
a start and sidled to the door; stuck there a few moments to add a
postscript concerning science or classic literature; then with another
start opened the door, and said, "Good evening" after he was in the
passage.
"How awkward he is!" Lillie would sometimes observe.
"Yes--physically," was the Doctor's answer. "But not morally. I don't
see that he tramples on any one's feelings, or breaks any one's heart."
The visitor gone, father and daughter walked in the hall while Rosann
opened the windows for ventilation. After that the baby's cradle was
dragged into the parlor with much ceremony, the whole family either
directing or assisting; a mattress and blankets were produced from a
closet and made up on the floor into a bed for the nurse; grandpapa
kissed both his children and went to his own room next door; and Lillie
proceeded to undress, talking to Rosann about Ravvie.
"An' do ye know, ma'am, what the little crater did to me to-day?" says
the doting Irishwoman. "He jist pulled me spectacles off me nose an'
stuck 'em in his own little mouth. He thought, mebbe, he could see with
his mouth. An' thin he lucked me full in the face as cunnin as could be,
an' give the biggest jump that iver was. I tell ye, ma'am, babies is
smarter now than they used to be."
This remarkable anecdote, with the nurse's commentary, being repeated to
the Doctor in the morning, he philosophised as follows.
"There may be something in Rosann's statement. It is not impossible that
the babies of a civilized age are more exquisitely sensitive beings than
the babies of antique barbarism. It may be that at my birth I was a
little ahead of my Gallic ancestor at his birth. Perhaps I was able to
compare two sensations as early in life as he was able to perceive a
single sensation. It might be something like this. He at the age of ten
days would be capable of thinking, 'Milk is good.' I at the same age
could perhaps go so far as to think, 'Milk is better than Dally's
Mixture.' Babies now-a-days have need of being cleverer than they used
to be. They have more dangers to evade, more medicines to spit out."
"I know what you mean," said Lillie. "You always did rebel against
Dally. But what was I to do? He _would_ have the colic."
"I know it! He would! But Dally couldn't help it. Don't, for pity's
sake, vitiate and torment your poor little angel's stomach, so new to
the atrocities of this world, with drugs. These mixers of baby medicines
ought to be fed on nothing but their own nostrums. That would soon put a
stop to their inventions of the adversary."
"Oh dear," sighed Lillie. "I don't know what to do with him sometimes. I
am _so_ afraid of not doing enough, or doing too much!"
Then the _argumentem ad hominem_ occurred to her: that _argumentem_
which proves nothing, and which women love so well.
"But you have given him things, papa. Don't you remember the red fluid?"
"I never gave it to him," asserted the Doctor.
"But you gave it to me to give to him--when you threw the Dally out of
the window."
"And do you know what the red fluid was?"
"No. It did him good. It was just as powerful as the Dally. Consequently
it must have been a drug."
"It was pure water, slightly colored. That was all, upon my honor--as we
say down south. It used to amuse me to see you drop it according to
prescription--five drops for a dose--very particular not to give him
six. He might have drunk the vial full."
"Papa," said Lillie when she had fully realized this awful deception,
"you have a great many sins to repent of."
"Poisoning my own grandchild is not one of them, thank Heaven!"
"But suppose Ravvie had become really sick?" she suggested more
seriously.
"Ah! what a clear conscience I should have had! Nobody could have laid
it to me."
"How healthy, and strong, and big he is?" was her next observation. "He
will be like you. I would bet anything that he will be six feet high."
Ravenel laughed at a bet which would have to wait some sixteen or
eighteen years for a decision, and said it reminded him of a South
Carolinian who offered to wager that in the year two thousand slavery
would prevail the world over.
"This whole subject of infancy's perceptions, and opinions is curious,"
he observed presently. "What a world it would be, if it were exactly as
these little people see it! Yes, and what a world it would be, if it
were as we grown people see it in our different moods of depression,
exhilaration, vanity, spite, and folly! I suppose that only Deity sees
it truly."
In this kind of life the spring grew into summer, the summer sobered
into autumn, and the autumn began to grow hoary with winter. Eight
months of paternal affection received, and maternal cares bestowed had
decided that Lillie should neither die of her troubles nor suffer a
life-long blighting of the soul. In bloom she was what she used to be;
in expression alone had she suffered a change. Sometimes sudden flashes
of profoundly felt pain troubled her eyes, as she thought of her venture
of love and its great shipwreck. She had not the slightest feeling of
anger toward her husband; she could not be angry with the buried father
of her child. But she felt, and sometimes reproached herself for it,
that his crime had made her grieve less over his death, just as his
death had led her to pardon his crime. She often prayed for him, not
that she believed in Purgatory and its deliverance, but rather because
the act soothed painful yearnings which she could not dispel by reason
alone. Her devotional tendencies had been much increased by her
troubles. In fact, she was far more religious than some of the straiter
New Bostonians were able to believe when they knew that she played
whist, and noted how tastefully she was dressed, and how charmingly
graceful she was in social intercourse. She never went to sleep without
reading a chapter in the Bible, and praying for her child, her father,
and herself. It is possible that she may have forgotten the heathen, the
Jews, and the negroes. Well, she had not been educated to think much of
far away people, but rather to interest herself in such as were near to
her, and could be made daily happy or unhappy by her conduct. She almost
offended Mrs. Whitewood by admitting that she loved Ravvie a thousand
times more than the ten tribes, or, as Mrs. W. called them, the
wandering sheep of the house of Israel. Nor could this excellent lady
enlist her interest in favor of the doctrine of election, owing perhaps
to the adverse remarks of Doctor Ravenel.
"My dear madame," he said, "let us try to be good, repent of our
short-comings, trust in the atonement, and leave such niceties to those
whose business it is to discuss them. Doctrines are no more religion
than geological bird-tracks are animated nature. Doctrines are the
footprints of piety. You can learn by them where devout-minded men have
trod in their searchings after the truth. But they are not in themselves
religion, and will not save souls."
"But think of the great and good men who have made these doctrines the
study and guide of their lives," said Mrs. Whitewood. "Think of our
Puritan forefathers."
"I do," answered the Doctor. "I think highly of them. They have my
profoundest respect. We are still moving under the impetus which they
gave to humanity. Dead as they are, they govern this continent. At the
same time they must have been disagreeable to live with. Their doctrines
made them hard in thought and manner. When I think of their grimness,
uncharity, inclemency, I am tempted to say that the sinners of those
days were the salt of the earth. Of course, Mrs. Whitewood, it is only a
temptation. I don't succumb to it. But now, as to these doctrines, as to
merely dogmatic religion, it reminds me of a story. This story goes (I
don't believe it), that an ingenious man, having found that a bandage
drawn tight around the waist will abate the pangs of hunger, set up a
boarding-house on the idea. At breakfast the waiters strapped up each
boarder with a stout surcingle. At dinner the waistbelts were drawn up
another hole--or two, if you were hungry. At tea there was another pull
on the buckle. The story proceeds that one dyspeptic old bachelor found
himself much better by the evening of the second day, but that the other
guests rebelled and left the house in a body, denouncing the gentlemanly
proprietor as a humbug. Now some of our ethical purveyors remind me of
this inventor. They put nothing into you; they give you no sustaining
food. They simply bind your soul, and now and then take up a hole in
your moral waistbelt."
It is pretty certain that Lillie even felt more interest in Captain
Colburne than in the vanished Hebrews. It will be remembered that she
has never ceased to like him since she met him, more than three years
ago, in this same New Boston House, which is now in some faint degree
fragrant to her with his memory. Here commenced that loyal affection
which has followed her through her love for another, her marriage, and
her maternity, and which has risked life to save her from captivity. She
would be ungrateful if she did not prefer him in her heart to every
other human being except her father and Ravvie. Next to her intercourse
with this same parent and child, Colburne's letters were her chief
social pleasures. They were invariably directed to the Doctor; but if
she got at them first, she had no hesitation about opening them. It was
her business and pleasure also to file them for preservation.
"If he never returns," she said, "I will write his life. But how
horrible to hear of him killed!"
"In five months more his three years will be up," observed the Doctor.
"I hope that he will be protected through the perils that remain."
"I hope so," echoed Lillie. "I wonder if the war will last long enough
to need Ravvie. He shall never go to West Point."
"He is pretty certain not to go for the next fourteen years," said
Ravenel, smiling at this long look ahead.
Lillie sighed; she was thinking of her husband; it was West Point which
had ruined his noble character; nothing else could account for such a
downfall; and her child should not go there.
In July (1864) they heard that the Nineteenth Corps had been transferred
to Virginia, and during the autumn Colburne's letters described
Sheridan's brilliant victories in the Shenandoah Valley. The Captain was
present in the three pitched battles, and got an honorable mention for
gallantry, but no promotion. Indeed advancement was impossible without a
transfer, for, although his regiment had only two field-officers, it was
now too much reduced in numbers to be entitled to a colonel. More than
two-thirds of the rank and file, and more than two-thirds of the
officers had fallen in those three savage struggles. Nevertheless the
young man's letters were unflagging in their tone of elation, bragging
of the bravery of his regiment, describing bayonet charges through
whistling storms of hostile musketry, telling of captured flags and
cannon by the half hundred, affectionate over his veteran corps
commander, and enthusiastic over his youthful general in chief.
"Really, that is a most brilliant letter," observed Ravenel, after
listening to Colburne's account of the victory of Cedar Creek. "That is
the most splendid battle-piece that ever was produced by any author,
ancient or modern," he went on to say in his enthusiastic and somewhat
hyperbolical style. "Neither Tacitus nor Napier can equal it. Alison is
all fudge and claptrap, with his granite squares of infantry and his
billows of cavalry. One can understand Colburne. I know just how that
battle of Cedar Creek was fought, and I almost think that I could fight
such an one myself. There is cause and effect, and their relations to
each other, in his narrative. When he comes home I shall insist upon his
writing a history of this war."
"I wish he would," said Lillie, with a flash of interest for which she
blushed presently.