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RODMAN THE KEEPER
_SOUTHERN SKETCHES_
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
AUTHOR OF "EAST ANGELS" "ANNE" "FOR THE MAJOR" ETC.
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER.
PREFACE.
The sketches included in this volume were written during a residence in
the South, which has embraced the greater part of the past six years. As
far as they go they record real impressions; but they can never give the
inward charm of that beautiful land which the writer has learned to
love, and from which she now severs herself with true regret. Two of
these sketches have appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," four in
"Appletons' Journal," and one each in "Scribner's Monthly," "The
Galaxy," "Lippincott's Monthly," and "Harper's Magazine."
C. F. W.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
RODMAN THE KEEPER 9
SISTER ST. LUKE 42
MISS ELISABETHA 75
OLD GARDISTON 105
THE SOUTH DEVIL 139
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY 178
FELIPA 197
"BRO." 221
KING DAVID 254
UP IN THE BLUE RIDGE 276
RODMAN THE KEEPER.
The long years come and go,
And the Past,
The sorrowful, splendid Past,
With its glory and its woe,
Seems never to have been.
--Seems never to have been?
O somber days and grand,
How ye crowd back once more,
Seeing our heroes' graves are green
By the Potomac and the Cumberland,
And in the valley of the Shenandoah!
When we remember how they died,--
In dark ravine and on the mountain-side,
In leaguered fort and fire-encircled town,
And where the iron ships went down,--
How their dear lives were spent
In the weary hospital-tent,
In the cockpit's crowded hive,
----it seems
Ignoble to be alive!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
"Keeper of what? Keeper of the dead. Well, it is easier to keep the dead
than the living; and as for the gloom of the thing, the living among
whom I have been lately were not a hilarious set."
John Rodman sat in the doorway and looked out over his domain. The
little cottage behind him was empty of life save himself alone. In one
room the slender appointments provided by Government for the keeper, who
being still alive must sleep and eat, made the bareness doubly bare; in
the other the desk and the great ledgers, the ink and pens, the
register, the loud-ticking clock on the wall, and the flag folded on a
shelf, were all for the kept, whose names, in hastily written, blotted
rolls of manuscript, were waiting to be transcribed in the new red-bound
ledgers in the keeper's best handwriting day by day, while the clock was
to tell him the hour when the flag must rise over the mounds where
reposed the bodies of fourteen thousand United States soldiers--who had
languished where once stood the prison-pens, on the opposite slopes, now
fair and peaceful in the sunset; who had fallen by the way in long
marches to and fro under the burning sun; who had fought and died on the
many battle-fields that reddened the beautiful State, stretching from
the peaks of the marble mountains in the smoky west down to the
sea-islands of the ocean border. The last rim of the sun's red ball had
sunk below the horizon line, and the western sky glowed with deep
rose-color, which faded away above into pink, into the salmon-tint, into
shades of that far-away heavenly emerald which the brush of the earthly
artist can never reproduce, but which is found sometimes in the
iridescent heart of the opal. The small town, a mile distant, stood
turning its back on the cemetery; but the keeper could see the pleasant,
rambling old mansions, each with its rose-garden and neglected outlying
fields, the empty negro quarters falling into ruin, and everything just
as it stood when on that April morning the first gun was fired on
Sumter; apparently not a nail added, not a brushful of paint applied,
not a fallen brick replaced, or latch or lock repaired. The keeper had
noted these things as he strolled through the town, but not with
surprise; for he had seen the South in its first estate, when, fresh,
strong, and fired with enthusiasm, he, too, had marched away from his
village home with the colors flying above and the girls waving their
handkerchiefs behind, as the regiment, a thousand strong, filed down the
dusty road. That regiment, a weak, scarred two hundred, came back a year
later with lagging step and colors tattered and scorched, and the girls
could not wave their handkerchiefs, wet and sodden with tears. But the
keeper, his wound healed, had gone again; and he had seen with his New
England eyes the magnificence and the carelessness of the South, her
splendor and negligence, her wealth and thriftlessness, as through
Virginia and the fair Carolinas, across Georgia and into sunny Florida,
he had marched month by month, first a lieutenant, then captain, and
finally major and colonel, as death mowed down those above him, and he
and his good conduct were left. Everywhere magnificence went hand in
hand with neglect, and he had said so as chance now and then threw a
conversation in his path.
"We have no such shiftless ways," he would remark, after he had
furtively supplied a prisoner with hard-tack and coffee.
"And no such grand ones either," Johnny Reb would reply, if he was a man
of spirit; and generally he was.
The Yankee, forced to acknowledge the truth of this statement, qualified
it by observing that he would rather have more thrift with a little less
grandeur; whereupon the other answered that _he_ would not; and there
the conversation rested. So now ex-Colonel Rodman, keeper of the
national cemetery, viewed the little town in its second estate with
philosophic eyes. "It is part of a great problem now working itself out;
I am not here to tend the living, but the dead," he said.
Whereupon, as he walked among the long mounds, a voice seemed to rise
from the still ranks below: "While ye have time, do good to men," it
said. "Behold, we are beyond your care." But the keeper did not heed.
This still evening in early February he looked out over the level waste.
The little town stood in the lowlands; there were no hills from whence
cometh help--calm heights that lift the soul above earth and its cares;
no river to lead the aspirations of the children outward toward the
great sea. Everything was monotonous, and the only spirit that rose
above the waste was a bitterness for the gained and sorrow for the lost
cause. The keeper was the only man whose presence personated the former
in their sight, and upon him therefore, as representative, the
bitterness fell, not in words, but in averted looks, in sudden silences
when he approached, in withdrawals and avoidance, until he lived and
moved in a vacuum; wherever he went there was presently no one save
himself; the very shop-keeper who sold him sugar seemed turned into a
man of wood, and took his money reluctantly, although the shilling
gained stood perhaps for that day's dinner. So Rodman withdrew himself,
and came and went among them no more; the broad acres of his domain gave
him as much exercise as his shattered ankle could bear; he ordered his
few supplies by the quantity, and began the life of a solitary, his
island marked out by the massive granite wall with which the United
States Government has carefully surrounded those sad Southern cemeteries
of hers; sad, not so much from the number of the mounds representing
youth and strength cut off in their bloom, for that is but the fortune
of war, as for the complete isolation which marks them. "Strangers in a
strange land" is the thought of all who, coming and going to and from
Florida, turn aside here and there to stand for a moment among the
closely ranged graves which seem already a part of the past, that near
past which in our hurrying American life is even now so far away. The
Government work was completed before the keeper came; the lines of the
trenches were defined by low granite copings, and the comparatively few
single mounds were headed by trim little white boards bearing generally
the word "Unknown," but here and there a name and an age, in most cases
a boy from some far-away Northern State; "twenty-one," "twenty-two,"
said the inscriptions; the dates were those dark years among the
sixties, measured now more than by anything else in the number of
maidens widowed in heart, and women widowed indeed, who sit still and
remember, while the world rushes by. At sunrise the keeper ran up the
stars and stripes; and so precise were his ideas of the accessories
belonging to the place, that from his own small store of money he had
taken enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy
weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the dead.
This was not patriotism so called, or rather miscalled, it was not
sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph; it was simply a sense of
the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which had in it nothing of
religion, unless indeed a man's endeavor to live up to his own ideal of
his duty be a religion. The same feeling led the keeper to spend hours
in copying the rolls. "John Andrew Warren, Company G, Eighth New
Hampshire Infantry," he repeated, as he slowly wrote the name, giving
"John Andrew" clear, bold capitals and a lettering impossible to
mistake; "died August 15, 1863, aged twenty-two years. He came from the
prison-pen yonder, and lies somewhere in those trenches, I suppose. Now
then, John Andrew, don't fancy I am sorrowing for you; no doubt you are
better off than I am at this very moment. But none the less, John
Andrew, shall pen, ink, and hand do their duty to you. For that I am
here."
Infinite pains and labor went into these records of the dead; one
hair's-breadth error, and the whole page was replaced by a new one. The
same spirit kept the grass carefully away from the low coping of the
trenches, kept the graveled paths smooth and the mounds green, and the
bare little cottage neat as a man-of-war. When the keeper cooked his
dinner, the door toward the east, where the dead lay, was scrupulously
closed, nor was it opened until everything was in perfect order again.
At sunset the flag was lowered, and then it was the keeper's habit to
walk slowly up and down the path until the shadows veiled the mounds on
each side, and there was nothing save the peaceful green of earth. "So
time will efface our little lives and sorrows," he mused, "and we shall
be as nothing in the indistinguishable past." Yet none the less did he
fulfill the duties of every day and hour with exactness. "At least they
shall not say that I was lacking," he murmured to himself as he thought
vaguely of the future beyond these graves. Who "they" were, it would
have troubled him to formulate, since he was one of the many sons whom
New England in this generation sends forth with a belief composed
entirely of negatives. As the season advanced, he worked all day in the
sunshine. "My garden looks well," he said. "I like this cemetery because
it is the original resting-place of the dead who lie beneath. They were
not brought here from distant places, gathered up by contract, numbered,
and described like so much merchandise; their first repose has not been
broken, their peace has been undisturbed. Hasty burials the prison
authorities gave them; the thin bodies were tumbled into the trenches by
men almost as thin, for the whole State went hungry in those dark days.
There were not many prayers, no tears, as the dead-carts went the
rounds. But the prayers had been said, and the tears had fallen, while
the poor fellows were still alive in the pens yonder; and when at last
death came, it was like a release. They suffered long; and I for one
believe that therefore shall their rest be long--long and sweet."
After a time began the rain, the soft, persistent, gray rain of the
Southern lowlands, and he staid within and copied another thousand names
into the ledger. He would not allow himself the companionship of a dog
lest the creature should bark at night and disturb the quiet. There was
no one to hear save himself, and it would have been a friendly sound as
he lay awake on his narrow iron bed, but it seemed to him against the
spirit of the place. He would not smoke, although he had the soldier's
fondness for a pipe. Many a dreary evening, beneath a hastily built
shelter of boughs, when the rain poured down and everything was
comfortless, he had found solace in the curling smoke; but now it seemed
to him that it would be incongruous, and at times he almost felt as if
it would be selfish too. "_They_ can not smoke, you know, down there
under the wet grass," he thought, as standing at the window he looked
toward the ranks of the mounds stretching across the eastern end from
side to side--"my parade-ground," he called it. And then he would smile
at his own fancies, draw the curtain, shut out the rain and the night,
light his lamp, and go to work on the ledgers again. Some of the names
lingered in his memory; he felt as if he had known the men who bore
them, as if they had been boys together, and were friends even now
although separated for a time. "James Marvin, Company B, Fifth Maine.
The Fifth Maine was in the seven days' battle. I say, do you remember
that retreat down the Quaker church road, and the way Phil Kearney held
the rear-guard firm?" And over the whole seven days he wandered with his
mute friend, who remembered everything and everybody in the most
satisfactory way. One of the little head-boards in the parade-ground
attracted him peculiarly because the name inscribed was his own: "----
Rodman, Company A, One Hundred and Sixth New York."
"I remember that regiment; it came from the extreme northern part of the
State. Blank Rodman must have melted down here, coming as he did from
the half-arctic region along the St. Lawrence. I wonder what he thought
of the first hot day, say in South Carolina, along those simmering
rice-fields?" He grew into the habit of pausing for a moment by the side
of this grave every morning and evening. "Blank Rodman. It might easily
have been John. And then, where should _I_ be?"
But Blank Rodman remained silent, and the keeper, after pulling up a
weed or two and trimming the grass over his relative, went off to his
duties again. "I am convinced that Blank is a relative," he said to
himself; "distant, perhaps, but still a kinsman."
One April day the heat was almost insupportable; but the sun's rays were
not those brazen beams that sometimes in Northern cities burn the air
and scorch the pavements to a white heat; rather were they soft and
still; the moist earth exhaled her richness, not a leaf stirred, and the
whole level country seemed sitting in a hot vapor-bath. In the early
dawn the keeper had performed his outdoor tasks, but all day he remained
almost without stirring in his chair between two windows, striving to
exist. At high noon out came a little black bringing his supplies from
the town, whistling and shuffling along, gay as a lark. The keeper
watched him coming slowly down the white road, loitering by the way in
the hot blaze, stopping to turn a somersault or two, to dangle over a
bridge rail, to execute various impromptu capers all by himself. He
reached the gate at last, entered, and, having come all the way up the
path in a hornpipe step, he set down his basket at the door to indulge
in one long and final double-shuffle before knocking. "Stop that!" said
the keeper through the closed blinds. The little darkey darted back; but
as nothing further came out of the window--a boot, for instance, or some
other stray missile--he took courage, showed his ivories, and drew near
again. "Do you suppose I am going to have you stirring up the heat in
that way?" demanded the keeper.
The little black grinned, but made no reply, unless smoothing the hot
white sand with his black toes could be construed as such; he now
removed his rimless hat and made a bow.
"Is it, or is it not warm?" asked the keeper, as a naturalist might
inquire of a salamander, not referring to his own so much as to the
salamander's ideas on the subject.
"Dunno, mars'," replied the little black.
"How do _you_ feel?"
"'Spects I feel all right, mars'."
The keeper gave up the investigation, and presented to the salamander a
nickel cent. "I suppose there is no such thing as a cool spring in all
this melting country," he said.
But the salamander indicated with his thumb a clump of trees on the
green plain north of the cemetery. "Ole Mars' Ward's place--cole spring
dah." He then departed, breaking into a run after he had passed the
gate, his ample mouth watering at the thought of a certain chunk of
taffy at the mercantile establishment kept by Aunt Dinah in a corner of
her one-roomed cabin. At sunset the keeper went thirstily out with a tin
pail on his arm, in search of the cold spring. "If it could only be like
the spring down under the rocks where I used to drink when I was a boy!"
he thought. He had never walked in that direction before. Indeed, now
that he had abandoned the town, he seldom went beyond the walls of the
cemetery. An old road led across to the clump of trees, through fields
run to waste, and following it he came to the place, a deserted house
with tumble-down fences and overgrown garden, the out-buildings
indicating that once upon a time there were many servants and a
prosperous master. The house was of wood, large on the ground, with
encircling piazzas; across the front door rough bars had been nailed,
and the closed blinds were protected in the same manner; from long want
of paint the clapboards were gray and mossy, and the floor of the piazza
had fallen in here and there from decay. The keeper decided that his
cemetery was a much more cheerful place than this, and then he looked
around for the spring. Behind the house the ground sloped down; it must
be there. He went around and came suddenly upon a man lying on an old
rug outside of a back door. "Excuse me. I thought nobody lived here," he
said.
"Nobody does," replied the man; "I am not much of a body, am I?"
His left arm was gone, and his face was thin and worn with long illness;
he closed his eyes after speaking, as though the few words had exhausted
him.
"I came for water from a cold spring you have here, somewhere," pursued
the keeper, contemplating the wreck before him with the interest of one
who has himself been severely wounded and knows the long, weary pain.
The man waved his hand toward the slope without unclosing his eyes, and
Rodman went off with his pail and found a little shady hollow, once
curbed and paved with white pebbles, but now neglected, like all the
place. The water was cold, however, deliciously cold. He filled his pail
and thought that perhaps after all he would exert himself to make
coffee, now that the sun was down; it would taste better made of this
cold water. When he came up the slope the man's eyes were open.
"Have some water?" asked Rodman.
"Yes; there's a gourd inside."
The keeper entered, and found himself in a large, bare room; in one
corner was some straw covered with an old counterpane, in another a
table and chair; a kettle hung in the deep fireplace, and a few dishes
stood on a shelf; by the door on a nail hung a gourd; he filled it and
gave it to the host of this desolate abode. The man drank with
eagerness.
"Pomp has gone to town," he said, "and I could not get down to the
spring to-day, I have had so much pain."
"And when will Pomp return?"
"He should be here now; he is very late to-night."
"Can I get you anything?"
"No, thank you; he will soon be here."
The keeper looked out over the waste; there was no one in sight. He was
not a man of any especial kindliness--he had himself been too hardly
treated in life for that--but he could not find it in his heart to leave
this helpless creature all alone with night so near. So he sat down on
the door-step. "I will rest awhile," he said, not asking but announcing
it. The man had turned away and closed his eyes again, and they both
remained silent, busy with their own thoughts; for each had recognized
the ex-soldier, Northern and Southern, in portions of the old uniforms,
and in the accent. The war and its memories were still very near to the
maimed, poverty-stricken Confederate; and the other knew that they were,
and did not obtrude himself.
Twilight fell, and no one came.
"Let me get you something," said Rodman; for the face looked ghastly as
the fever abated. The other refused. Darkness came; still, no one.
"Look here," said Rodman, rising, "I have been wounded myself, was in
hospital for months; I know how you feel. You must have food--a cup of
tea, now, and a slice of toast, brown and thin."
"I have not tasted tea or wheaten bread for weeks," answered the man;
his voice died off into a wail, as though feebleness and pain had drawn
the cry from him in spite of himself. Rodman lighted a match; there was
no candle, only a piece of pitch-pine stuck in an iron socket on the
wall; he set fire to this primitive torch and looked around.
"There is nothing there," said the man outside, making an effort to
speak carelessly; "my servant went to town for supplies. Do not trouble
yourself to wait; he will come presently, and--and I want nothing."
But Rodman saw through proud poverty's lie; he knew that irregular
quavering of the voice, and that trembling of the hand; the poor fellow
had but one to tremble. He continued his search; but the bare room gave
back nothing, not a crumb.
"Well, if you are not hungry," he said, briskly, "I am, hungry as a
bear; and I'll tell you what I am going to do. I live not far from here,
and I live all alone too; I haven't a servant as you have. Let me take
supper here with you, just for a change; and, if your servant comes, so
much the better, he can wait upon us. I'll run over and bring back the
things."
He was gone without waiting for reply; the shattered ankle made good
time over the waste, and soon returned, limping a little, but bravely
hasting, while on a tray came the keeper's best supplies, Irish
potatoes, corned beef, wheaten bread, butter, and coffee; for he would
not eat the hot biscuits, the corn-cake, the bacon and hominy of the
country, and constantly made little New England meals for himself in his
prejudiced little kitchen. The pine-torch flared in the doorway; a
breeze had come down from the far mountains and cooled the air. Rodman
kindled a fire on the cavernous hearth, filled the kettle, found a
saucepan, and commenced operations, while the other lay outside and
watched every movement in the lighted room.
"All ready; let me help you in. Here we are now; fried potatoes, cold
beef, mustard, toast, butter, and tea. Eat, man; and the next time I am
laid up you shall come over and cook for me."
Hunger conquered, and the other ate, ate as he had not eaten for months.
As he was finishing a second cup of tea, a slow step came around the
house; it was the missing Pomp, an old negro, bent and shriveled, who
carried a bag of meal and some bacon in his basket. "That is what they
live on," thought the keeper.
He took leave without more words. "I suppose now I can be allowed to go
home in peace," he grumbled to conscience. The negro followed him across
what was once the lawn. "Fin' Mars' Ward mighty low," he said
apologetically, as he swung open the gate which still hung between its
posts, although the fence was down, "but I hurred and hurred as fas' as
I could; it's mighty fur to de town. Proud to see you, sah; hope you'll
come again. Fine fambly, de Wards, sah, befo' de war."
"How long has he been in this state?" asked the keeper.
"Ever sence one ob de las' battles, sah; but he's worse sence we come
yer, 'bout a mont' back."
"Who owns the house? Is there no one to see him? has he no friends?"
"House b'long to Mars' Ward's uncle; fine place once, befo' de war; he's
dead now, and dah's nobuddy but Miss Bettina, an' she's gone off
somewhuz. Propah place, sah, fur Mars' Ward--own uncle's house," said
the old slave, loyally striving to maintain the family dignity even
then.
"Are there no better rooms--no furniture?"
"Sartin; but--but Miss Bettina, she took de keys; she didn't know we was
comin'--"
"You had better send for Miss Bettina, I think," said the keeper,
starting homeward with his tray, washing his hands, as it were, of any
future responsibility in the affair.
The next day he worked in his garden, for clouds veiled the sun and
exercise was possible; but, nevertheless, he could not forget the white
face on the old rug. "Pshaw!" he said to himself, "haven't I seen
tumble-down old houses and battered human beings before this?"
At evening came a violent thunderstorm, and the splendor of the heavens
was terrible. "We have chained you mighty spirit," thought the keeper as
he watched the lightning, "and some time we shall learn the laws of the
winds and foretell the storms; then, prayers will no more be offered in
churches to alter the weather than they would be offered now to alter an
eclipse. Yet back of the lightning and the wind lies the power of the
great Creator, just the same."
But still into his musings crept, with shadowy persistence, the white
face on the rug.
"Nonsense!" he exclaimed; "if white faces are going around as ghosts,
how about the fourteen thousand white faces that went under the sod down
yonder? If they could arise and walk, the whole State would be filled
and no more carpet-baggers needed." So, having balanced the one with the
fourteen thousand, he went to bed.
Daylight brought rain--still, soft, gray rain; the next morning showed
the same, and the third likewise, the nights keeping up their part with
low-down clouds and steady pattering on the roof. "If there was a river
here, we should have a flood," thought the keeper, drumming idly on his
window-pane. Memory brought back the steep New England hillsides
shedding their rain into the brooks, which grew in a night to torrents
and filled the rivers so that they overflowed their banks; then,
suddenly, an old house in a sunken corner of a waste rose before his
eyes, and he seemed to see the rain dropping from a moldy ceiling on the
straw where a white face lay.
"Really, I have nothing else to do to-day, you know," he remarked in an
apologetic way to himself, as he and his umbrella went along the old
road; and he repeated the remark as he entered the room where the man
lay, just as he had fancied, on the damp straw.
"The weather _is_ unpleasant," said the man. "Pomp, bring a chair."
Pomp brought one, the only one, and the visitor sat down. A fire
smoldered on the hearth and puffed out acrid smoke now and then, as if
the rain had clogged the soot in the long-neglected chimney; from the
streaked ceiling oozing drops fell with a dull splash into little pools
on the decayed floor; the door would not close; the broken panes were
stopped with rags, as if the old servant had tried to keep out the damp;
in the ashes a corn-cake was baking.
"I am afraid you have not been so well during these long rainy days,"
said the keeper, scanning the face on the straw.
"My old enemy, rheumatism," answered the man; "the first sunshine will
drive it away."
They talked awhile, or rather the keeper talked, for the other seemed
hardly able to speak, as the waves of pain swept over him; then the
visitor went outside and called Pomp out. "_Is_ there any one to help
him, or not?" he asked impatiently.
"Fine fambly, befo' de war," began Pomp.
"Never mind all that; is there any one to help him now--yes or no?"
"No," said the old black with a burst of despairing truthfulness. "Miss
Bettina, she's as poor as Mars' Ward, an' dere's no one else. He's had
noth'n but hard corn-cake for three days, an' he can't swaller it no
more."
The next morning saw Ward De Rosset lying on the white pallet in the
keeper's cottage, and old Pomp, marveling at the cleanliness all around
him, installed as nurse. A strange asylum for a Confederate soldier, was
it not? But he knew nothing of the change, which he would have fought
with his last breath if consciousness had remained; returning fever,
however, had absorbed his senses, and then it was that the keeper and
the slave had borne him slowly across the waste, resting many times, but
accomplishing the journey at last.
That evening John Rodman, strolling to and fro in the dusky twilight,
paused alongside of the other Rodman. "I do not want him here, and that
is the plain truth," he said, pursuing the current of his thoughts. "He
fills the house; he and Pomp together disturb all my ways. He'll be
ready to fling a brick at me too, when his senses come back; small
thanks shall I have for lying on the floor, giving up all my comforts,
and, what is more, riding over the spirit of the place with a
vengeance!" He threw himself down on the grass beside the mound and lay
looking up toward the stars, which were coming out, one by one, in the
deep blue of the Southern night. "With a vengeance, did I say? That is
it exactly--the vengeance of kindness. The poor fellow has suffered
horribly in body and in estate, and now ironical Fortune throws him in
my way, as if saying, 'Let us see how far your selfishness will yield.'
This is not a question of magnanimity; there is no magnanimity about it,
for the war is over, and you Northerners have gained every point for
which you fought. This is merely a question between man and man; it
would be the same if the sufferer was a poor Federal, one of the
carpet-baggers, whom you despise so, for instance, or a pagan Chinaman.
And Fortune is right; don't you think so, Blank Rodman? I put it to you,
now, to one who has suffered the extreme rigor of the other side--those
prison-pens yonder."
Whereupon Blank Rodman answered that he had fought for a great cause,
and that he knew it, although a plain man and not given to
speech-making; he was not one of those who had sat safely at home all
through the war, and now belittled it and made light of its issues.
(Here a murmur came up from the long line of the trenches, as though all
the dead had cried out.) But now the points for which he had fought
being gained, and strife ended, it was the plain duty of every man to
encourage peace. For his part he bore no malice; he was glad the poor
Confederate was up in the cottage, and he did not think any the less of
the keeper for bringing him there. He would like to add that he thought
more of him; but he was sorry to say that he was well aware what an
effort it was, and how almost grudgingly the charity began.
If Blank Rodman did not say this, at least the keeper imagined that he
did. "That is what he would have said," he thought. "I am glad you do
not object," he added, pretending to himself that he had not noticed the
rest of the remark.
"We do not object to the brave soldier who honestly fought for his
cause, even though he fought on the other side," answered Blank Rodman
for the whole fourteen thousand. "But never let a coward, a double-face,
or a flippant-tongued idler walk over our heads. It would make us rise
in our graves!"
And the keeper seemed to see a shadowy pageant sweep by--gaunt soldiers
with white faces, arming anew against the subtle product of peace: men
who said, "It was nothing! Behold, we saw it with our
eyes!"--stay-at-home eyes.
The third day the fever abated, and Ward De Rosset noticed his
surroundings. Old Pomp acknowledged that he had been moved, but veiled
the locality: "To a frien's house, Mars' Ward."
"But I have no friends now, Pomp," said the weak voice.
Pomp was very much amused at the absurdity of this. "No frien's! Mars'
Ward, no frien's!" He was obliged to go out of the room to hide his
laughter. The sick man lay feebly thinking that the bed was cool and
fresh, and the closed green blinds pleasant; his thin fingers stroked
the linen sheet, and his eyes wandered from object to object. The only
thing that broke the rule of bare utility in the simple room was a
square of white drawing-paper on the wall, upon which was inscribed in
ornamental text the following verse:
"Toujours femme varie,
Bien fou qui s'y fie;
Une femme souvent
N'est qu'une plume au vent."
With the persistency of illness the eyes and mind of Ward De Rosset went
over and over this distich; he knew something of French, but was unequal
to the effort of translating; the rhymes alone caught his vagrant
fancy. "Toujours femme varie," he said to himself over and over again;
and when the keeper entered, he said it to him.
"Certainly," answered the keeper; "bien fou qui s'y fie. How do you find
yourself this morning?"
"I have not found myself at all, so far. Is this your house?"
"Yes."
"Pomp told me I was in a friend's house," observed the sick man,
vaguely.
"Well, it isn't an enemy's. Had any breakfast? No? Better not talk,
then."
He went to the detached shed which served for a kitchen, upset all
Pomp's clumsy arrangements, and ordered him outside; then he set to work
and prepared a delicate breakfast with his best skill. The sick man
eagerly eyed the tray as he entered. "Better have your hands and face
sponged off, I think," said Rodman; and then he propped him up
skillfully, and left him to his repast. The grass needed mowing on the
parade-ground; he shouldered his scythe and started down the path,
viciously kicking the gravel aside as he walked. "Wasn't solitude your
principal idea, John Rodman, when you applied for this place?" he
demanded of himself. "How much of it are you likely to have with sick
men, and sick men's servants, and so forth?"
The "and so forth," thrown in as a rhetorical climax, turned into
reality and arrived bodily upon the scene--a climax indeed. One
afternoon, returning late to the cottage, he found a girl sitting by the
pallet--a girl young and dimpled and dewy; one of the creamy roses of
the South that, even in the bud, are richer in color and luxuriance than
any Northern flower. He saw her through the door, and paused; distressed
old Pomp met him and beckoned him cautiously outside. "Miss Bettina," he
whispered gutturally; "she's come back from somewhuz, an' she's awful
mad 'cause Mars' Ward's here. I tole her all 'bout 'em--de leaks an' de
rheumatiz an' de hard corn-cake, but she done gone scole me; and Mars'
Ward, he know now whar he is, an' he mad too."
"Is the girl a fool?" said Rodman. He was just beginning to rally a
little. He stalked into the room and confronted her. "I have the honor
of addressing--"
"Miss Ward."
"And I am John Rodman, keeper of the national cemetery."
This she ignored entirely; it was as though he had said, "I am John
Jones, the coachman." Coachmen were useful in their way; but their names
were unimportant.
The keeper sat down and looked at his new visitor. The little creature
fairly radiated scorn; her pretty head was thrown back, her eyes, dark
brown fringed with long dark lashes, hardly deigned a glance; she spoke
to him as though he was something to be paid and dismissed like any
other mechanic.
"We are indebted to you for some days' board, I believe,
keeper--medicines, I presume, and general attendance. My cousin will be
removed to-day to our own residence; I wish to pay now what he owes."
The keeper saw that her dress was old and faded; the small black shawl
had evidently been washed and many times mended; the old-fashioned
knitted purse she held in her hand was lank with long famine.
"Very well," he said; "if you choose to treat a kindness in that way, I
consider five dollars a day none too much for the annoyance, expense,
and trouble I have suffered. Let me see: five days--or is it six? Yes.
Thirty dollars, Miss Ward."
He looked at her steadily; she flushed. "The money will be sent to you,"
she began haughtily; then, hesitatingly, "I must ask a little time--"
"O Betty, Betty, you know you can not pay it. Why try to disguise--But
that does not excuse _you_ for bringing me here," said the sick man,
turning toward his host with an attempt to speak fiercely, which ended
in a faltering quaver.
All this time the old slave stood anxiously outside of the door; in the
pauses they could hear his feet shuffling as he waited for the decision
of his superiors. The keeper rose and threw open the blinds of the
window that looked out on the distant parade-ground. "Bringing you
here," he repeated--"_here_; that is my offense, is it? There they lie,
fourteen thousand brave men and true. Could they come back to earth they
would be the first to pity and aid you, now that you are down. So would
it be with you if the case were reversed; for a soldier is generous to a
soldier. It was not your own heart that spoke then; it was the small
venom of a woman, that here, as everywhere through the South, is playing
its rancorous part."
The sick man gazed out through the window, seeing for the first time the
far-spreading ranks of the dead. He was very weak, and the keeper's
words had touched him; his eyes were suffused with tears. But Miss Ward
rose with a flashing glance. She turned her back full upon the keeper
and ignored his very existence. "I will take you home immediately,
Ward--this very evening," she said.
"A nice, comfortable place for a sick man," commented the keeper,
scornfully. "I am going out now, De Rosset, to prepare your supper; you
had better have one good meal before you go."
He disappeared, but as he went he heard the sick man say, deprecatingly:
"It isn't very comfortable over at the old house now, indeed it isn't,
Betty; I suffered"--and the girl's passionate outburst in reply. Then he
closed his door and set to work.
When he returned, half an hour later. Ward was lying back exhausted on
the pillows, and his cousin sat leaning her head upon her hand; she had
been weeping, and she looked very desolate, he noticed, sitting there in
what was to her an enemy's country. Hunger is a strong master, however,
especially when allied to weakness; and the sick man ate with
eagerness.
"I must go back," said the girl, rising. "A wagon will be sent out for
you, Ward; Pomp will help you."
But Ward had gained a little strength as well as obstinacy with the
nourishing food. "Not to-night," he said.
"Yes, to-night."
"But I can not go to-night; you are unreasonable, Bettina. To-morrow
will do as well, if go I must."
"If go you must! You do not want to go, then--to go to our own home--and
with me"--Her voice broke; she turned toward the door.
The keeper stepped forward. "This is all nonsense, Miss Ward," he said,
"and you know it. Your cousin is in no state to be moved. Wait a week or
two, and he can go in safety. But do not dare to offer me your money
again; my kindness was to the soldier, not to the man, and as such he
can accept it. Come out and see him as often as you please. I shall not
intrude upon you. Pomp, take the lady home."
And the lady went.
Then began a remarkable existence for the four: a Confederate soldier
lying ill in the keeper's cottage of a national cemetery; a rampant
little rebel coming out daily to a place which was to her
anathema-maranatha; a cynical, misanthropic keeper sleeping on the floor
and enduring every variety of discomfort for a man he never saw
before--a man belonging to an idle, arrogant class he detested; and an
old black freedman allowing himself to be taught the alphabet in order
to gain permission to wait on his master--master no longer in law--with
all the devotion of his loving old heart. For the keeper had announced
to Pomp that he must learn his alphabet or go; after all these years of
theory, he, as a New-Englander, could not stand by and see precious
knowledge shut from the black man. So he opened it, and mighty dull work
he found it.
Ward De Rosset did not rally as rapidly as they expected. The
white-haired doctor from the town rode out on horseback, pacing slowly
up the graveled roadway with a scowl on his brow, casting, as he
dismounted, a furtive glance down toward the parade-ground. His horse
and his coat were alike old and worn, and his broad shoulders were bent
with long service in the miserably provided Confederate hospitals, where
he had striven to do his duty through every day and every night of those
shadowed years. Cursing the incompetency in high places, cursing the
mismanagement of the entire medical department of the Confederate army,
cursing the recklessness and indifference which left the men suffering
for want of proper hospitals and hospital stores, he yet went on
resolutely doing his best with the poor means in his control until the
last. Then he came home, he and his old horse, and went the rounds
again, he prescribing for whooping-cough or measles, and Dobbin waiting
outside; the only difference was that fees were small and good meals
scarce for both, not only for the man but for the beast. The doctor sat
down and chatted awhile kindly with De Rosset, whose father and uncle
had been dear friends of his in the bright, prosperous days; then he
left a few harmless medicines and rose to go, his gaze resting a moment
on Miss Ward, then on Pomp, as if he were hesitating. But he said
nothing until on the walk outside he met the keeper, and recognized a
person to whom he could tell the truth. "There is nothing to be done; he
may recover, he may not; it is a question of strength merely. He needs
no medicines, only nourishing food, rest, and careful tendance."
"He shall have them," answered the keeper briefly. And then the old
gentleman mounted his horse and rode away, his first and last visit to a
national cemetery.
"National!" he said to himself--"national!"
All talk of moving De Rosset ceased, but Miss Ward moved into the old
house. There was not much to move: herself, her one trunk, and Mari, a
black attendant, whose name probably began life as Maria, since the
accent still dwelt on the curtailed last syllable. The keeper went there
once, and once only, and then it was an errand for the sick man, whose
fancies came sometimes at inconvenient hours--when Pomp had gone to
town, for instance. On this occasion the keeper entered the mockery of a
gate and knocked at the front door, from which the bars had been
removed; the piazza still showed its decaying planks, but quick-growing
summer vines had been planted, and were now encircling the old pillars
and veiling all defects with their greenery. It was a woman's pathetic
effort to cover up what can not be covered--poverty. The blinds on one
side were open, and white curtains waved to and fro in the breeze; into
this room he was ushered by Mari. Matting lay on the floor, streaked
here and there ominously by the dampness from the near ground. The
furniture was of dark mahogany, handsome in its day: chairs, a heavy
pier-table with low-down glass, into which no one by any possibility
could look unless he had eyes in his ankles, a sofa with a stiff round
pillow of hair-cloth under each curved end, and a mirror with a
compartment framed off at the top, containing a picture of shepherds and
shepherdesses, and lambs with blue ribbons around their necks, all
enjoying themselves in the most natural and life-like manner. Flowers
stood on the high mantelpiece, but their fragrance could not overcome
the faint odor of the damp straw-matting. On a table were books--a life
of General Lee, and three or four shabby little volumes printed at the
South during the war, waifs of prose and poetry of that highly wrought,
richly colored style which seems indigenous to Southern soil.
"Some way, the whole thing reminds me of a funeral," thought the keeper.
Miss Ward entered, and the room bloomed at once; at least that is what a
lover would have said. Rodman, however, merely noticed that she bloomed,
and not the room, and he said to himself that she would not bloom long
if she continued to live in such a moldy place. Their conversation in
these days was excessively polite, shortened to the extreme minimum
possible, and conducted without the aid of the eyes, at least on one
side. Rodman had discovered that Miss Ward never looked at him, and so
he did not look at her--that is, not often; he was human, however, and
she was delightfully pretty. On this occasion they exchanged exactly
five sentences, and then he departed, but not before his quick eyes had
discovered that the rest of the house was in even worse condition than
this parlor, which, by the way, Miss Ward considered quite a grand
apartment; she had been down near the coast, trying to teach school, and
there the desolation was far greater than here, both armies having
passed back and forward over the ground, foragers out, and the torch at
work more than once.
"Will there ever come a change for the better?" thought the keeper, as
he walked homeward. "What an enormous stone has got to be rolled up
hill! But at least, John Rodman, _you_ need not go to work at it; _you_
are not called upon to lend your shoulder."
None the less, however, did he call out Pomp that very afternoon and
sternly teach him "E" and "F" using the smooth white sand for a
blackboard, and a stick for chalk. Pomp's primer was a Government
placard hanging on the wall of the office. It read as follows:
IN THIS CEMETERY REPOSE THE REMAINS
OF
FOURTEEN THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE
UNITED STATES SOLDIERS.
"Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream;
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
"Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not written of the soul!"
"The only known instance of the Government's condescending to poetry,"
the keeper had thought, when he first read this placard. It was placed
there for the instruction and edification of visitors; but, no visitors
coming, he took the liberty of using it as a primer for Pomp. The large
letters served the purpose admirably, and Pomp learned the entire
quotation; what he thought of it has not transpired. Miss Ward came over
daily to see her cousin. At first she brought him soups and various
concoctions from her own kitchen--the leaky cavern, once the
dining-room, where the soldier had taken refuge after his last dismissal
from hospital; but the keeper's soups were richer, and free from the
taint of smoke; his martial laws of neatness even disorderly old Pomp
dared not disobey, and the sick man soon learned the difference. He
thanked the girl, who came bringing the dishes over carefully in her own
dimpled hands, and then, when she was gone, he sent them untasted away.
By chance Miss Ward learned this, and wept bitter tears over it; she
continued to come, but her poor little soups and jellies she brought no
more.
One morning in May the keeper was working near the flag-staff, when his
eyes fell upon a procession coming down the road which led from the town
and turning toward the cemetery. No one ever came that way: what could
it mean? It drew near, entered the gate, and showed itself to be negroes
walking two and two--old uncles and aunties, young men and girls, and
even little children, all dressed in their best; a very poor best,
sometimes gravely ludicrous imitations of "ole mars'" or "ole miss',"
sometimes mere rags bravely patched together and adorned with a strip of
black calico or rosette of black ribbon; not one was without a badge of
mourning. All carried flowers, common blossoms from the little gardens
behind the cabins that stretched around the town on the out-skirts--the
new forlorn cabins with their chimneys of piled stones and ragged
patches of corn; each little darkey had his bouquet and marched solemnly
along, rolling his eyes around, but without even the beginning of a
smile, while the elders moved forward with gravity, the bubbling,
irrepressible gayety of the negro subdued by the new-born dignity of the
freedman.
"Memorial Day," thought the keeper; "I had forgotten it."