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[Illustration: John Fox, Jr.]
CRITTENDEN
A KENTUCKY STORY OF
LOVE AND WAR
BY
JOHN FOX, JR.
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. GRAHAM COOTES
* * * * *
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1911
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
To
THE MASTER OF
BALLYHOO
* * * * *
ILLUSTRATIONS
John Fox, Jr. (from a photograph) Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
"Go on!" said Judith 76
"Nothin', Ole Cap'n--jes doin' nothin'--jes lookin' for you" 132
* * * * *
CRITTENDEN
I
Day breaking on the edge of the Bluegrass and birds singing the dawn in.
Ten minutes swiftly along the sunrise and the world is changed: from
nervous exaltation of atmosphere to an air of balm and peace; from grim
hills to the rolling sweep of green slopes; from a high mist of thin
verdure to low wind-shaken banners of young leaves; from giant poplar to
white ash and sugar-tree; from log-cabin to homesteads of brick and
stone; from wood-thrush to meadow-lark; rhododendron to bluegrass; from
mountain to lowland, Crittenden was passing home.
He had been in the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to fish
and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his
custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when he
was in the mountains--alone. As usual, he had gone in with bitterness
and, as usual, he had set his face homeward with but half a heart for
the old fight against fate and himself that seemed destined always to
end in defeat. At dusk, he heard the word of the outer world from the
lips of an old mountaineer at the foot of the Cumberland--the first
heard, except from his mother, for full thirty days--and the word
was--war. He smiled incredulously at the old fellow, but, unconsciously,
he pushed his horse on a little faster up the mountain, pushed him, as
the moon rose, aslant the breast of a mighty hill and, winding at a
gallop about the last downward turn of the snaky path, went at full
speed alongside the big gray wall that, above him, rose sheer a thousand
feet and, straight ahead, broke wildly and crumbled into historic
Cumberland Gap. From a little knoll he saw the railway station in the
shadow of the wall, and, on one prong of a switch, his train panting
lazily; and, with a laugh, he pulled his horse down to a walk and then
to a dead stop--his face grave again and uplifted. Where his eyes rested
and plain in the moonlight was a rocky path winding upward--the old
Wilderness Trail that the Kentucky pioneers had worn with moccasined
feet more than a century before. He had seen it a hundred times
before--moved always; but it thrilled him now, and he rode on slowly,
looking up at it. His forefathers had helped blaze that trail. On one
side of that wall they had fought savage and Briton for a home and a
country, and on the other side they had done it again. Later, they had
fought the Mexican and in time they came to fight each other, for and
against the nation they had done so much to upbuild. It was even true
that a Crittenden had already given his life for the very cause that was
so tardily thrilling the nation now. Thus it had always been with his
people straight down the bloody national highway from Yorktown to
Appomattox, and if there was war, he thought proudly, as he swung from
his horse--thus it would now be with him.
If there was war? He had lain awake in his berth a long while, looking
out the window and wondering. He had been born among the bleeding
memories of one war. The tales of his nursery had been tales of war. And
though there had been talk of war through the land for weeks before he
left home, it had no more seemed possible that in his lifetime could
come another war than that he should live to see any other myth of his
childhood come true.
Now, it was daybreak on the edge of the Bluegrass, and, like a dark
truth from a white light, three tall letters leaped from the paper in
his hand--War! There was a token in the very dawn, a sword-like flame
flashing upward. The man in the White House had called for willing
hands by the thousands to wield it, and the Kentucky Legion, that had
fought in Mexico, had split in twain to fight for the North and for the
South, and had come shoulder to shoulder when the breach was closed--the
Legion of his own loved State--was the first body of volunteers to reach
for the hilt. Regulars were gathering from the four winds to an old
Southern battlefield. Already the Legion was on its way to camp in the
Bluegrass. His town was making ready to welcome it, and among the names
of the speakers who were to voice the welcome, he saw his own--Clay
Crittenden.
II
The train slackened speed and stopped. There was his
horse--Raincrow--and his buggy waiting for him when he stepped from the
platform; and, as he went forward with his fishing tackle, a
livery-stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse's head.
"Bob lef' yo' hoss in town las' night, Mistuh Crittenden," he said.
"Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin' home this
mornin'."
Crittenden smiled--it was one of his mother's premonitions; she seemed
always to know when he was coming home.
"Come get these things," he said, and went on with his paper.
"Yessuh!"
Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-Confederates
were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his father's old
comrades--little Jerry Carter--was to be made a major-general. Among the
regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a
friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was
going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old
battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for
the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other
against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the
field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after
the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the
war from his brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come
home--Judith was to unveil those statues--Judith Page.
The town was asleep, except for the rattle of milk-carts, the banging of
shutters, and the hum of a street-car, and Crittenden moved through
empty streets to the broad smooth turnpike on the south, where Raincrow
shook his head, settled his haunches, and broke into the swinging trot
peculiar to his breed--for home.
Spring in the Bluegrass! The earth spiritual as it never is except under
new-fallen snow--in the first shy green. The leaves, a floating mist of
green, so buoyant that, if loosed, they must, it seemed, have floated
upward--never to know the blight of frost or the droop of age. The air,
rich with the smell of new earth and sprouting grass, the long, low
skies newly washed and, through radiant distances, clouds light as
thistledown and white as snow. And the birds! Wrens in the hedges,
sparrows by the wayside and on fence-rails, starlings poised over
meadows brilliant with glistening dew, larks in the pastures--all
singing as they sang at the first dawn, and the mood of nature that
perfect blending of earth and heaven that is given her children but
rarely to know. It was good to be alive at the breaking of such a
day--good to be young and strong, and eager and unafraid, when the
nation called for its young men and red Mars was the morning star. The
blood of dead fighters began to leap again in his veins. His nostrils
dilated and his chin was raised proudly--a racial chord touched within
him that had been dumb a long while. And that was all it was--the blood
of his fathers; for it was honor and not love that bound him to his own
flag. He was his mother's son, and the unspoken bitterness that lurked
in her heart lurked, likewise, on her account, in his.
On the top of a low hill, a wind from the dawn struck him, and the paper
in the bottom of the buggy began to snap against the dashboard. He
reached down to keep it from being whisked into the road, and he saw
again that Judith Page had come home. When he sat up again, his face was
quite changed. His head fell a little forward, his shoulders drooped
slightly and, for a moment, his buoyancy was gone. The corners of the
mouth showed a settled melancholy where before was sunny humour. The
eyes, which were dreamy, kindly, gray, looked backward in a morbid glow
of concentration; and over the rather reckless cast of his features, lay
at once the shadow of suffering and the light of a great tenderness.
Slowly, a little hardness came into his eyes and a little bitterness
about his mouth. His upper lip curved in upon his teeth with
self-scorn--for he had had little cause to be pleased with himself while
Judith was gone, and his eyes showed now how proud was the scorn--and he
shook himself sharply and sat upright. He had forgotten again. That part
of his life belonged to the past and, like the past, was gone, and was
not to come back again. The present had life and hope now, and the
purpose born that day from five blank years was like the sudden birth of
a flower in a desert.
The sun had burst from the horizon now and was shining through the tops
of the trees in the lovely woodland into which Crittenden turned, and
through which a road of brown creek-sand ran to the pasture beyond and
through that to the long avenue of locusts, up which the noble portico
of his old homestead, Canewood, was visible among cedars and firs and
old forest trees. His mother was not up yet--the shutters of her window
were still closed--but the servants were astir and busy. He could see
men and plough-horses on their way to the fields; and, that far away, he
could hear the sound of old Ephraim's axe at the woodpile, the noises
around the barn and cowpens, and old Aunt Keziah singing a hymn in the
kitchen, the old wailing cry of the mother-slave.
"Oh I wonder whur my baby's done gone,
Oh Lawd!
An' I git on my knees an' pray."
The song stopped, a negro boy sprang out the kitchen-door and ran for
the stiles--a tall, strong, and very black boy with a dancing eye, white
teeth, and a look of welcome that was little short of dumb idolatry.
"Howdy, Bob."
"Howdy, Ole Cap'n." Crittenden had been "Ole Captain" with the
servants--since the death of "Ole Master," his father--to distinguish
him from "Young Captain," who was his brother, Basil. Master and servant
shook hands and Bob's teeth flashed.
"What's the matter, Bob?"
Bob climbed into the buggy.
"You gwine to de wah."
Crittenden laughed.
"How do you know, Bob?"
"Oh, I know--I know. I seed it when you was drivin' up to de stiles, an'
lemme tell you, Ole Cap'n." The horse started for the barn suddenly and
Bob took a wide circuit in order to catch the eye of a brown milkmaid in
the cowpens, who sniffed the air scornfully, to show that she did not
see him, and buried the waves of her black hair into the silken sides of
a young Jersey.
"Yes," he said, shaking his head and making threats to himself, "an'
Bob's gwine wid him."
As Crittenden climbed the stiles, old Keziah filled the kitchen-door.
"Time you gittin' back, suh," she cried with mock severity. "I been
studyin' 'bout you. Little mo' an' I'd 'a' been comin' fer you myself.
Yes--suh."
And she gave a loud laugh that rang through the yard and ended in a
soft, queer little whoop that was musical. Crittenden smiled but,
instead of answering, raised his hand warningly and, as he approached
the portico, he stepped from the gravel-walk to the thick turf and began
to tiptoe. At the foot of the low flight of stone steps he
stopped--smiling.
The big double front door was wide open, and straight through the big,
wide hallway and at the entrance of the dining-room, a sword--a long
cavalry sabre--hung with a jaunty gray cap on the wall. Under them stood
a boy with his hands clasped behind him and his chin upraised. The lad
could see the bullet-hole through the top, and he knew that on the visor
was a faded stain of his father's blood. As a child, he had been told
never to touch the cap or sword and, until this moment, he had not
wanted to take them down since he was a child; and even now the habit of
obedience held him back for a while, as he stood looking up at them.
Outside, a light wind rustled the leaves of the rose-bush at his
mother's window, swept through the open door, and made the curtain at
his elbow swell gently. As the heavy fold fell back to its place and
swung out again, it caught the hilt of the sword and made the metal
point of the scabbard clank softly against the wall. The boy breathed
sharply, remembered that he was grown, and reverently reached upward.
There was the stain where the blood had run down from the furrowed wound
that had caused his father's death, long after the war and just before
the boy was born. The hilt was tarnished, and when he caught it and
pulled, the blade came out a little way and stuck fast. Some one stepped
on the porch outside and he turned quickly, as he might have turned had
some one caught him unsheathing the weapon when a child.
"Hold on there, little brother."
Crittenden stopped in the doorway, smiling affectionately, and the boy
thrust the blade back to the hilt.
"Why, Clay," he cried, and, as he ran forward, "Are you going?" he
asked, eagerly.
"I'm the first-born, you know," added Crittenden, still smiling, and the
lad stretched the sabre out to him, repeating eagerly, "Are you going?"
The older brother did not answer, but turned, without taking the weapon,
and walked to the door and back again.
"Are you?"
"Me? Oh, I have to go," said the boy solemnly and with great dignity, as
though the matter were quite beyond the pale of discussion.
"You do?"
"Yes; the Legion is going."
"Only the members who volunteer--nobody has to go."
"Don't they?" said the lad, indignantly. "Well, if I had a son who
belonged to a military organization in time of peace"--the lad spoke
glibly--"and refused to go with it to war--well, I'd rather see him dead
first."
"Who said that?" asked the other, and the lad coloured.
"Why, Judge Page said it; that's who. And you just ought to hear Miss
Judith!"
Again the other walked to the door and back again. Then he took the
scabbard and drew the blade to its point as easily as though it had been
oiled, thrust it back, and hung it with the cap in its place on the
wall.
"Perhaps neither of us will need it," he said. "We'll both be
privates--that is, if I go--and I tell you what we'll do. We'll let the
better man win the sword, and the better man shall have it after the
war. What do you say?"
"Say?" cried the boy, and he gave the other a hug and both started for
the porch. As they passed the door of his mother's room, the lad put one
finger on his lips; but the mother had heard and, inside, a woman in
black, who had been standing before a mirror with her hands to her
throat, let them fall suddenly until they were clasped for an instant
across her breast. But she gave no sign that she had heard, at breakfast
an hour later, even when the boy cleared his throat, and after many
futile efforts to bring the matter up, signalled across the table to his
brother for help.
"Mother, Basil there wants to go to war. He says if he had a son who
belonged to a military organization in time of peace and refused to go
with it in time of war, that he'd rather see him dead."
The mother's lip quivered when she answered, but so imperceptibly that
only the older son saw it.
"That is what his father would have said," she said, quietly, and
Crittenden knew she had already fought out the battle with
herself--alone. For a moment the boy was stunned with his good
fortune--"it was too easy"--and with a whoop he sprang from his place
and caught his mother around the neck, while Uncle Ben, the black
butler, shook his head and hurried into the kitchen for corn-bread and
to tell the news.
"Oh, I tell you it's great fun to _have_ to go to war! Mother," added
the boy, with quick mischief, "Clay wants to go, too."
Crittenden braced himself and looked up with one quick glance sidewise
at his mother's face. It had not changed a line.
"I heard all you said in the hallway. If a son of mine thinks it his
duty to go, I shall never say one word to dissuade him--if he thinks it
is his duty," she added, so solemnly that silence fell upon the three,
and with a smothered, "Good Lawd," at the door, Ben hurried again into
the kitchen.
"Both them boys was a-goin' off to git killed an' ole Miss Rachel not
sayin' one wud to keep 'em back--not a wud."
After breakfast the boy hurried out and, as Crittenden rose, the
mother, who pretended to be arranging silver at the old sideboard, spoke
with her back to him.
"Think it over, son. I can't see that you should go, but if you think
you ought, I shall have nothing to say. Have you made up your mind?"
Crittenden hesitated.
"Not quite."
"Think it over very carefully, then--please--for my sake." Her voice
trembled, and, with a pang, Crittenden thought of the suffering she had
known from one war. Basil's way was clear, and he could never ask the
boy to give up to him because he was the elder. Was it fair to his brave
mother for him to go, too--was it right?
"Yes mother," he said, soberly.
III
The Legion came next morning and pitched camp in a woodland of oak and
sugar trees, where was to be voiced a patriotic welcome by a great
editor, a great orator, and young Crittenden.
Before noon, company streets were laid out and lined with tents and,
when the first buggies and rockaways began to roll in from the country,
every boy-soldier was brushed and burnished to defy the stare of
inspection and to quite dazzle the eye of masculine envy or feminine
admiration.
In the centre of the woodland was a big auditorium, where the speaking
was to take place. After the orators were done, there was to be a
regimental review in the bluegrass pasture in front of historic Ashland.
It was at the Colonel's tent, where Crittenden went to pay his respects,
that he found Judith Page, and he stopped for a moment under an oak,
taking in the gay party of women and officers who sat and stood about
the entrance. In the centre of the group stood a lieutenant in the blue
of a regular and with the crossed sabres of the cavalryman on his
neck-band and the number of his regiment. The girl was talking to the
gallant old Colonel with her back to Crittenden, but he would have known
her had he seen but an arm, a shoulder, the poise of her head, a single
gesture--although he had not seen her for years. The figure was the
same--a little fuller, perhaps, but graceful, round, and slender, as was
the throat. The hair was a trifle darker, he thought, but brown still,
and as rich with gold as autumn sunlight. The profile was in outline
now--it was more cleanly cut than ever. The face was a little older, but
still remarkably girlish in spite of its maturer strength; and as she
turned to answer his look, he kept on unconsciously reaffirming to his
memory the broad brow and deep clear eyes, even while his hand was
reaching for the brim of his hat. She showed only gracious surprise at
seeing him and, to his wonder, he was as calm and cool as though he were
welcoming back home any good friend who had been away a long time. He
could now see that the lieutenant belonged to the Tenth United States
Cavalry; he knew that the Tenth was a colored regiment; he understood a
certain stiffness that he felt rather than saw in the courtesy that was
so carefully shown him by the Southern volunteers who were about him;
and he turned away to avoid meeting him. For the same reason, he
fancied, Judith turned, too. The mere idea of negro soldiers was not
only repugnant to him, but he did not believe in negro regiments. These
would be the men who could and would organize and drill the blacks in
the South; who, in other words, would make possible, hasten, and prolong
the race war that sometimes struck him as inevitable. As he turned, he
saw a tall, fine-looking negro, fifty yards away, in the uniform of a
sergeant of cavalry and surrounded by a crowd of gaping darkies whom he
was haranguing earnestly. Lieutenant and sergeant were evidently on an
enlisting tour.
Just then, a radiant little creature looked up into Crittenden's face,
calling him by name and holding out both hands--Phyllis, Basil's little
sweetheart. With her was a tall, keen-featured fellow, whom she
introduced as a war correspondent and a Northerner.
"A sort of war correspondent," corrected Grafton, with a swift look of
interest at Crittenden, but turning his eyes at once back to Phyllis.
She was a new and diverting type to the Northern man and her name was
fitting and pleased him. A company passed just then, and a smothered
exclamation from Phyllis turned attention to it. On the end of the line,
with his chin in, his shoulders squared and his eyes straight forward,
was Crittenden's warrior-brother, Basil. Only his face coloured to show
that he knew where he was and who was looking at him, but not so much as
a glance of his eye did he send toward the tent. Judith turned to
Crittenden quickly:
"Your little brother is going to the war?" The question was thoughtless
and significant, for it betrayed to him what was going on in her mind,
and she knew it and coloured, as he paled a little.
"My little brother is going to the war," he repeated, looking at her.
Judith smiled and went on bravely:
"And you?"
Crittenden, too, smiled.
"I may consider it my duty to stay at home."
The girl looked rather surprised--instead of showing the subdued sarcasm
that he was looking for--and, in truth, she was. His evasive and
careless answer showed an indifference to her wish and opinion in the
matter that would once have been very unusual. Straightway there was a
tug at her heart-strings that also was unusual.
The people were gathering into the open-air auditorium now and, from all
over the camp, the crowd began to move that way. All knew the word of
the orator's mouth and the word of the editor--they had heard the one
and seen the other on his printed page many times; and it was for this
reason, perhaps, that Crittenden's fresh fire thrilled and swayed the
crowd as it did.
When he rose, he saw his mother almost under him and, not far behind
her, Judith with her father, Judge Page. The lieutenant of regulars was
standing on the edge of the crowd, and to his right was Grafton, also
standing, with his hat under his arm--idly curious. But it was to his
mother that he spoke and, steadfastly, he saw her strong, gentle face
even when he was looking far over her head, and he knew that she knew
that he was arguing the point then and there between them.
It was, he said, the first war of its kind in history. It marked an
epoch in the growth of national character since the world began. As an
American, he believed that no finger of mediævalism should so much as
touch this hemisphere. The Cubans had earned their freedom long since,
and the cries of starving women and children for the bread which fathers
and brothers asked but the right to earn must cease. To put out of mind
the Americans blown to death at Havana--if such a thing were
possible--he yet believed with all his heart in the war. He did not
think there would be much of a fight--the regular army could doubtless
take good care of the Spaniard--but if everybody acted on that
presumption, there would be no answer to the call for volunteers. He was
proud to think that the Legion of his own State, that in itself stood
for the reunion of the North and the South, had been the first to spring
to arms. And he was proud to think that not even they were the first
Kentuckians to fight for Cuban liberty. He was proud that, before the
Civil War even, a Kentuckian of his own name and blood had led a band of
one hundred and fifty brave men of his own State against Spanish tyranny
in Cuba, and a Crittenden, with fifty of his followers, were captured
and shot in platoons of six.
"A Kentuckian kneels only to woman and his God," this Crittenden had
said proudly when ordered to kneel blindfolded and with his face to the
wall, "and always dies facing his enemy." And so those Kentuckians had
died nearly half a century before, and he knew that the young
Kentuckians before him would as bravely die, if need be, in the same
cause now; and when they came face to face with the Spaniard they would
remember the shattered battle-ship in the Havana harbour, and something
more--they would remember Crittenden. And then the speaker closed with
the words of a certain proud old Confederate soldier to his son:
"No matter who was right and who was wrong in the Civil War, the matter
is settled now by the sword. The Constitution left the question open,
but it is written there now in letters of blood. We have given our word
that they shall stand; and remember it is the word of gentlemen and
binding on their sons. There have been those in the North who have
doubted that word; there have been those in the South who have given
cause for doubt; and this may be true for a long time. But if ever the
time comes to test that word, do you be the first to prove it. You will
fight for your flag--mine now as well as yours--just as sincerely as I
fought against it." And these words, said Crittenden in a trembling
voice, the brave gentleman spoke again on his death-bed; and now, as he
looked around on the fearless young faces about him, he had no need to
fear that they were spoken in vain.
And so the time was come for the South to prove its loyalty--not to
itself nor to the North, but to the world.
Under him he saw his mother's eyes fill with tears, for these words of
her son were the dying words of her lion-hearted husband. And Judith had
sat motionless, watching him with peculiar intensity and flushing a
little, perhaps at the memory of her jesting taunt, while Grafton had
stood still--his eyes fixed, his face earnest--missing not a word. He
was waiting for Crittenden, and he held his hand out when the latter
emerged from the crowd, with the curious embarrassment that assails the
newspaper man when he finds himself betrayed into unusual feeling.
"I say," he said; "that was good, _good_!"
The officer who, too, had stood still as a statue, seemed to be moving
toward him, and again Crittenden turned away--to look for his mother.
She had gone home at once--she could not face him now in that crowd--and
as he was turning to his own buggy, he saw Judith and from habit started
toward her, but, changing his mind, he raised his hat and kept on his
way, while the memory of the girl's face kept pace with him.
She was looking at him with a curious wistfulness that was quite beyond
him to interpret--a wistfulness that was in the sudden smile of welcome
when she saw him start toward her and in the startled flush of surprise
when he stopped; then, with the tail of his eye, he saw the quick
paleness that followed as the girl's sensitive nostrils quivered once
and her spirited face settled quickly into a proud calm. And then he
saw her smile--a strange little smile that may have been at herself or
at him--and he wondered about it all and was tempted to go back, but
kept on doggedly, wondering at her and at himself with a miserable grim
satisfaction that he was at last over and above it all. She had told him
to conquer his boyish love for her and, as her will had always been law
to him, he had made it, at last, a law in this. The touch of the
loadstone that never in his life had failed, had failed now, and now,
for once in his life, desire and duty were one.
He found his mother at her seat by her open window, the unopened buds of
her favourite roses hanging motionless in the still air outside, but
giving their fresh green faint fragrance to the whole room within; and
he remembered the quiet sunset scene every night for many nights to
come. Every line in her patient face had been traced there by a sorrow
of the old war, and his voice trembled:
"Mother," he said, as he bent down and kissed her, "I'm going."
Her head dropped quickly to the work in her lap, but she said nothing,
and he went quickly out again.
IV
It was growing dusk outside. Chickens were going to roost with a great
chattering in some locust-trees in one corner of the yard. An aged
darkey was swinging an axe at the woodpile and two little pickaninnies
were gathering a basket of chips. Already the air was filled with the
twilight sounds of the farm--the lowing of cattle, the bleating of
calves at the cowpens, the bleat of sheep from the woods, and the nicker
of horses in the barn. Through it all, Crittenden could hear the nervous
thud of Raincrow's hoofs announcing rain--for that was the way the horse
got his name, being as black as a crow and, as Bob claimed, always
knowing when falling weather was at hand and speaking his prophecy by
stamping in his stall. He could hear Basil noisily making his way to the
barn. As he walked through the garden toward the old family graveyard,
he could still hear the boy, and a prescient tithe of the pain, that he
felt would strike him in full some day, smote him so sharply now that he
stopped a moment to listen, with one hand quickly raised to his
forehead. Basil was whistling--whistling joyously. Foreboding touched
the boy like the brush of a bird's wing, and death and sorrow were as
remote as infinity to him. At the barn-door the lad called sharply:
"Bob!"
"Suh!" answered a muffled voice, and Bob emerged, gray with oatdust.
"I want my buggy to-night." Bob grinned.
"Sidebar?"
"Yes."
"New whip--new harness--little buggy mare--reckon?"
"I want 'em all."
Bob laughed loudly. "Oh, I know. You gwine to see Miss Phyllis dis
night, sho--yes, Lawd!" Bob dodged a kick from the toe of the boy's
boot--a playful kick that was not meant to land--and went into the barn
and came out again.
"Yes, an' I know somewhur else you gwine--you gwine to de war. Oh, I
know; yes, suh. Dere's a white man in town tryin' to git niggers to
'list wid him, an' he's got a nigger sojer what say he's a officer
hisself; yes, mon, a corpril. An' dis nigger's jes a-gwine through town
drawin' niggers right _an'_ left. He talk to me, but I jes laugh at him,
an' say I gwine wid Ole Cap'n ur Young Cap'n, I don't keer which. An'
lemme tell you, Young Capn', ef you ur Ole Cap'n doan lemme go wid you,
I'se gwine wid dat nigger corpril an' dat white man what 'long to a
nigger regiment, an' I know you don't want me to bring no sech disgrace
on de fambly dat way--no, suh. He axe what you de cap'n of," Bob went
on, aiming at two birds with one stone now, "an' I say you de cap'n of
ever'body an' ever'ting dat come 'long--dat's what I say-an' he be cap'n
of you wid all yo' unyform and sich, I say, if you jest come out to de
fahm--yes, mon, dat he will sho."
The boy laughed and Bob reiterated:
"Oh, I'se gwine--I'se gwine wid you--" Then he stopped short. The
turbaned figure of Aunt Keziah loomed from behind the woodpile.
"What dat I heah 'bout you gwine to de wah, nigger, what dat I heah?"
Bob laughed--but it was a laugh of propitiation.
"Law, mammy. I was jes projeckin' wid Young Cap'n."
"Fool nigger, doan know what wah is--doan lemme heah you talk no more
'bout gwine to de wah ur I gwine to w'ar you out wid a hickory--dat's
whut I'll do--now you min'." She turned on Basil then; but Basil had
retreated, and his laugh rang from the darkening yard. She cried after
him:
"An' doan lemme heah you puttin' dis fool nigger up to gittin' hisself
killed by dem Cubians neither; no suh!" She was deadly serious now. "I
done spanked you heap o' times, an' 'tain't so long ago, an' you ain'
too big yit; no, suh." The old woman's wrath was rising higher, and Bob
darted into the barn before she could turn back again to him, and a
moment later darted his head, like a woodpecker, out again to see if she
were gone, and grinned silently after her as she rolled angrily toward
the house, scolding both Bob and Basil to herself loudly.
A song rose from the cowpens just then. Full, clear, and quivering, it
seemed suddenly to still everything else into silence. In a flash, Bob's
grin settled into a look of sullen dejection, and, with his ear cocked
and drinking in the song, and with his eye on the corner of the barn, he
waited. From the cowpens was coming a sturdy negro girl with a bucket of
foaming milk in each hand and a third balanced on her head, singing with
all the strength of her lungs. In a moment she passed the corner.
"Molly--say, Molly."
The song stopped short.
"Say, honey, wait a minute--jes a minute, won't ye?" The milkmaid kept
straight ahead, and Bob's honeyed words soured suddenly.
"Go on, gal, think yo'self mighty fine, don't ye? Nem' min'!"
Molly's nostrils swelled to their full width, and, at the top of her
voice, she began again.
"Go on, nigger, but you jes wait."
Molly sang on:
"Take up yo' cross, oh, sinner-man."
Before he knew it, Bob gave the response with great unction:
"Yes, Lawd."
Then he stopped short.
"I reckon I got to break dat gal's head some day. Yessuh; she knows whut
my cross is," and then he started slowly after her, shaking his head
and, as his wont was, talking to himself.
He was still talking to himself when Basil came out to the stiles after
supper to get into his buggy.
"Young Cap'n, dat gal Molly mighty nigh pesterin' de life out o' me. I
done tol' her I'se gwine to de wah."
"What did she say?"
"De fool nigger--she jes laughed--she jes laughed."
The boy, too, laughed, as he gathered the reins and the mare sprang
forward.
"We'll see--we'll see."
And Bob with a triumphant snort turned toward Molly's cabin.
The locust-trees were quiet now and the barn was still except for the
occasional stamp of a horse in his stall or the squeak of a pig that was
pushed out of his warm place by a stronger brother. The night noises
were strong and clear--the cricket in the grass, the croaking frogs from
the pool, the whir of a night-hawk's wings along the edge of the yard,
the persistent wail of a whip-poor-will sitting lengthwise of a willow
limb over the meadow-branch, the occasional sleepy caw of crows from
their roost in the woods beyond, the bark of a house-dog at a
neighbour's home across the fields, and, further still, the fine high
yell of a fox-hunter and the faint answering yelp of a hound.
And inside, in the mother's room, the curtain was rising on a tragedy
that was tearing open the wounds of that other war--the tragedy upon
which a bloody curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The
mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son
spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to
himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.
There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the two
Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the
garden.
And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant
Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his
father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old
Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that
morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left
him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive,
would have him do?
And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart,
faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had
left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the moonlight
and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white tomb under
which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle, slept side
by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their footsteps, since
the one part that he was fitted to play was the _rôle_ they and their
ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them,
failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for
Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil
War, Crittenden would have played that _rôle_ worthily and without
question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright
was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood, he
had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was
nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each
year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in
the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the
particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the
realization that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever
gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its
name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a
white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its
slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still
clung rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and
patriarchal--out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His
friends--even the boy, his brother--had caught the modern trend of
things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work--some to law,
some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining
and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had
studied law--his type of Southerner always studies law--and he tried the
practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his
own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the
humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a
small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and
had passed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the
dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through
some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a
fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and
went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there
was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those
wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but
the pace was too swift, competition was too undignified and greedy, and
business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life,
which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.
Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.
He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept
in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the
wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now,
and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The
little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him
at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the
deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong
vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept
under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom,
was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will
take possession of an abandoned field.
But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that
while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth
while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing
something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a
woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own
people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race,
and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the
indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant
student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He
had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen
argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his
class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a
discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his
mother's pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little,
and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in
private. So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he
did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was
making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so
freely down upon him. And so without suffering greatly in public
estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were
changing fast, he passed into the old-young period that is the critical
time in the lives of men like him--when he thought he had drunk his cup
to the dregs; had run the gamut of human experience; that nothing was
left to his future but the dull repetition of his past. Only those who
knew him best had not given up hope of him, nor had he really given up
hope of himself as fully as he thought. The truth was, he never fell
far, nor for long, and he always rose with the old purpose the same,
even if it stirred him each time with less and less enthusiasm--and
always with the beacon-light of one star shining from his past, even
though each time it shone a little more dimly. For usually, of course,
there is the hand of a woman on the lever that prizes such a man's life
upward, and when Judith Page's clasp loosened on Crittenden, the castle
that the lightest touch of her finger raised in his imagination--that
he, doubtless, would have reared for her and for him, in fact, fell in
quite hopeless ruins, and no similar shape was ever framed for him above
its ashes.
It was the simplest and oldest of stories between the two--a story that
began, doubtless, with the beginning, and will never end as long as two
men and one woman, or two women and one man are left on earth--the story
of the love of one who loves another. Only, to the sufferers the tragedy
is always as fresh as a knife-cut, and forever new.
Judith cared for nobody. Crittenden laughed and pleaded, stormed,
sulked, and upbraided, and was devoted and indifferent for years--like
the wilful, passionate youngster that he was--until Judith did love
another--what other, Crittenden never knew. And then he really believed
that he must, as she had told him so often, conquer his love for her.
And he did, at a fearful cost to the best that was in him--foolishly,
but consciously, deliberately. When the reaction came, he tried to
reëstablish his relations to a world that held no Judith Page. Her
absence gave him help, and he had done very well, in spite of an
occasional relapse. It was a relapse that had sent him to the mountains,
six weeks before, and he had emerged with a clear eye, a clear head,
steady nerves, and with the one thing that he had always lacked, waiting
for him--a purpose. It was little wonder, then, that the first ruddy
flash across a sky that had been sunny with peace for thirty years and
more thrilled him like an electric charge from the very clouds. The
next best thing to a noble life was a death that was noble, and that was
possible to any man in war. One war had taken away--another might give
back again; and his chance was come at last.
It was midnight now, and far across the fields came the swift faint beat
of a horse's hoofs on the turnpike. A moment later he could hear the hum
of wheels--it was his little brother coming home; nobody had a horse
that could go like that, and nobody else would drive that way if he had.
Since the death of their father, thirteen years after the war, he had
been father to the boy, and time and again he had wondered now why he
could not have been like that youngster. Life was an open book to the
boy--to be read as he ran. He took it as he took his daily bread,
without thought, without question. If left alone, he and the little girl
whom he had gone that night to see would marry, settle down, and go hand
in hand into old age without questioning love, life, or happiness. And
that was as it should be; and would to Heaven he had been born to tread
the self-same way. There was a day when he was near it; when he turned
the same fresh, frank face fearlessly to the world, when his nature was
as unspoiled and as clean, his hopes as high, and his faith as
child-like; and once when he ran across a passage in Stevenson in which
that gentle student spoke of his earlier and better self as his "little
brother" whom he loved and longed for and sought persistently, but who
dropped farther and farther behind at times, until, in moments of
darkness, he sometimes feared that he might lose him forever--Crittenden
had clung to the phrase, and he had let his fancy lead him to regard
this boy as his early and better self--better far than he had ever
been--his little brother, in a double sense, who drew from him, besides
the love of brother for brother and father for son, a tenderness that
was almost maternal.
The pike-gate slammed now and the swift rush of wheels over the
bluegrass turf followed; the barn-gate cracked sharply on the night air
and Crittenden heard him singing, in the boyish, untrained tenor that is
so common in the South, one of the old-fashioned love-songs that are
still sung with perfect sincerity and without shame by his people:
"You'll never find another love like mine,
"You'll never find a heart that's half so true."
And then the voice was muffled suddenly. A little while later he entered
the yard-gate and stopped in the moonlight and, from his window,
Crittenden looked down and watched him. The boy was going through the
manual of arms with his buggy-whip, at the command of an imaginary
officer, whom, erect and martial, he was apparently looking straight in
the eye. Plainly he was a private now. Suddenly he sprang forward and
saluted; he was volunteering for some dangerous duty; and then he walked
on toward the house. Again he stopped. Apparently he had been promoted
now for gallant conduct, for he waved his whip and called out with low,
sharp sternness;
"Steady, now! Ready; fire!" And then swinging his hat over his head:
"Double-quick--charge!" After the charge, he sat down for a moment on
the stiles, looking up at the moon, and then came on toward the house,
singing again:
"You'll never find a man in all this world
Who'll love you half so well as I love you."
And inside, the mother, too, was listening; and she heard the elder
brother call the boy into his room and the door close, and she as well
knew the theme of their talk as though she could hear all they said. Her
sons--even the elder one--did not realize what war was; the boy looked
upon it as a frolic. That was the way her two brothers had regarded the
old war. They went with the South, of course, as did her father and her
sweetheart. And her sweetheart was the only one who came back, and him
she married the third month after the surrender, when he was so sick and
wounded that he could hardly stand. Now she must give up all that was
left for the North, that had taken nearly all she had.
Was it all to come again--the same long days of sorrow, loneliness, the
anxious waiting, waiting, waiting to hear that this one was dead, and
that this one was wounded or sick to death--would either come back
unharmed? She knew now what her own mother must have suffered, and what
it must have cost her to tell her sons what she had told hers that
night. Ah, God, was it all to come again?
V
Some days later a bugle blast started Crittenden from a soldier's cot,
when the flaps of his tent were yellow with the rising sun. Peeping
between them, he saw that only one tent was open. Rivers, as
acting-quartermaster, had been up long ago and gone. That blast was
meant for the private at the foot of the hill, and Crittenden went back
to his cot and slept on.
The day before he had swept out of the hills again--out through a
blossoming storm of dogwood--but this time southward bound.
Incidentally, he would see unveiled these statues that Kentucky was
going to dedicate to her Federal and Confederate dead. He would find his
father's old comrade--little Jerry Carter--and secure a commission, if
possible. Meanwhile, he would drill with Rivers's regiment, as a soldier
of the line.
At sunset he swept into the glory of a Southern spring and the hallowed
haze of an old battlefield where certain gallant Americans once fought
certain other gallant Americans fiercely forward and back over some six
thousand acres of creek-bottom and wooded hills, and where Uncle Sam was
pitching tents for his war-children--children, too--some of them--of
those old enemies, but ready to fight together now, and as near shoulder
to shoulder as the modern line of battle will allow.
Rivers, bronzed, quick-tempered, and of superb physique, met him at the
station.
"You'll come right out to camp with me."