THE SECRETARY MOVES
Nearly all the guests left the Markham house at the same time and stood
for a few moments in the white Greek portico, bidding one another
good-night. It seemed to Prescott that it was a sort of family parting.
The last good-by said, Robert and Helen started down the street, toward
the Harley home six or seven blocks away. Her gloved hand rested lightly
on his arm, but her face was hidden from him by a red hood. The cold
wind was still blustering mightily about the little city and she walked
close beside him.
"I cannot help thinking at this moment of your army. Which way does it
lie, Robert?" she asked.
"Off there," he replied, and he pointed northward.
"And the Northern army is there, too. And Washington itself is only two
hundred miles away It seems to me sometimes that the armies have always
been there. This war is so long. I remember I was a child when it began,
and now----"
She paused, but Prescott added:
"It began only three years ago."
"A long three years. Sometimes when I look toward the North, where
Washington lies, I begin to wonder about Lincoln. I hear bad things
spoken of him here, and then there are others who say he is not bad."
"The 'others' are right, I think."
"I am glad to hear you say so. I feel sorry for him, such a lonely man
and so unhappy, they say. I wish I knew all the wrong and right of this
cruel struggle."
"It would take the wisdom of the angels for that."
They walked on a little farther in silence, passing now near the
Capitol and its surrounding group of structures.
"What are they doing these days up there on Shockoe?" asked Prescott.
"Congress is in session and meets again in the morning, but I imagine it
can do little. Our fate rests with the armies and the President."
A deep mellow note sounded from the hill and swelled far over the city.
In the dead silence of the night it penetrated like a cannon shot, and
the echo seemed to Prescott to come back from the far forest and the
hills beyond the James. It was quickly followed by another and then
others until all Richmond was filled with the sound.
Prescott felt the hand upon his arm clasp him in nervous alarm.
"What does that noise mean?" he cried.
"It's the Bell Tower!" she cried, pointing to a dark spire-like
structure on Shockoe Hill in the Capitol Square.
"The Bell Tower!"
"Yes; the alarm! The bell was to be rung there when the Yankees came!
Don't you hear it? They have come! They have come!"
The tramp of swift feet increased and grew nearer, there was a hum, a
murmur and then a tumult in the streets; shouts of men, the orders of
officers and galloping hoof-beats mingled; metal clanked against metal;
cannon rumbled and their heavy iron wheels dashed sparks of fire from
the stones as they rushed onward. There was a noise of shutters thrown
back and lights appeared at innumerable windows. High feminine voices
shouted to each other unanswered questions. The tumult swelled to a
roar, and over it all thundered the great bell, its echo coming back in
regular vibrations from the hills and the farther shore of the river.
After the first alarm Helen was quiet and self-contained. She had lived
three years amid war and its tumults, and what she saw now was no more
than she had trained herself to expect.
Prescott drew her farther back upon the sidewalk, out of the way of the
cannon and the galloping cavalry, and he, too, waited quietly to see
what would happen.
The garrison, except those posted in the defenses, gathered about
Capitol Square, and women and children, roused from their beds, began to
throng into the streets. The whole city was now awake and alight, and
the cries of "The Yankees! The Yankees!" increased, but Prescott,
hardened to alarms and to using his eyes, saw no Yankees. The sound of
scattered rifle shots came from a point far to the eastward, and he
listened for the report of artillery, but there was none.
As they stood waiting and listening, Sefton and Redfield, who had been
walking home together, joined them. The Secretary was keen, watchful and
self-contained, but the Member of Congress was red, wrathful and
excited.
"See what your General and your army have brought upon us," he cried,
seizing Prescott by the arm. "While Lee and his men are asleep, the
Yankees have passed around them and seized Richmond."
"Take your hand off my arm, if you please, Mr. Redfield," said Prescott
with quiet firmness, and the other involuntarily obeyed.
"Now, sir," continued Robert, "I have not seen any Yankees, nor have
you, nor do I believe there is a Yankee force of sufficient size to be
alarming on this side of the Rapidan."
"Don't you hear the bell?"
"Yes, I hear the bell; but General Lee is not asleep nor are his men. If
they had the habit of which you accuse them the Yankee army would have
been in this city long ago."
Helen's hand was still lying on Prescott's arm and he felt a grateful
pressure as he spoke. A thrill of delight shot through him. It was a
pleasure to him to defend his beloved General anywhere, but above all
before her.
The forces of cavalry, infantry and artillery increased and were formed
about Capitol Square. The tumult decreased, the cries of the women and
children sank. Order reigned, but everywhere there was expectation.
Everybody, too, gazed toward the east whence the sound of the shots had
come. But the noise there died and presently the great bell ceased to
ring.
"I believe you are right, Captain Prescott," said the Secretary; "I do
not see any Yankees and I do not believe any have come."
But the Member of Congress would not be convinced, and recovering his
spirit, he criticized the army again. Prescott scorned to answer, nor
did Helen or the Secretary speak. Soon a messenger galloped down the
street and told the cause of the alarm. Some daring Yankee cavalrymen, a
band of skirmishers or scouts, fifty or a hundred perhaps, coming by a
devious way, had approached the outer defenses and fired a few shots at
long range. The garrison replied, and then the reckless Yankees galloped
away before they could be caught.
"Very inconsiderate of them," said the Secretary, "disturbing honest
people on a peaceful night like this. Why, it must be at least half-past
two in the morning."
"You will observe, Mr. Redfield," said Prescott, "that the Yankee army
has not got past General Lee, and the city will not belong to the
Yankees before daylight."
"Not a single Yankee soldier ought to be able to come so near to
Richmond," said the Member of Congress.
"Why, this only gives us a little healthy excitement, Mr. Redfield,"
said the Secretary, smoothly; "stirs our blood, so to speak, and teaches
us to be watchful. We really owe those cavalrymen a vote of thanks."
Then putting his hand on Redfield's arm, he drew him away, first bidding
Prescott and Miss Harley a courteous good-night.
A few more steps and they were at Helen's home. Mr. Harley himself, a
tall, white-haired man, with a self-indulgent face singularly like his
son Vincent's, answered the knock, shielding from the wind with one
hand the flame of a fluttering candle held in the other.
He peered into the darkness, and Prescott thought that he perceived a
slight look of disappointment on his face when he saw who had escorted
his daughter home.
"He wishes it had been the Secretary," thought Robert.
"I was apprehensive about you for awhile, Helen," he said, "when I heard
the bell ringing the alarm. It was reported that the Yankees had come."
"They are not here yet," said Prescott, "and we believe it is still a
long road to Richmond."
As he bade Helen good-night at the door, she urged him not to neglect
her while he was in the capital, and her father repeated the invitation
with less warmth. Then the two disappeared within, the door was shut and
Robert turned back into the darkness and the cold.
His own house was within sight, but he had made his mother promise not
to wait for him, and he hoped she was already asleep. Never had he been
more wide awake, and knowing that he should seek sleep in vain, he
strolled down the street, looking about at the dim and silent city.
He gazed up at the dark shaft of the tower whence the bell had rung its
warning, at the dusky mass of the Capitol, at the spire of St. Paul's,
and then down at a flickering figure passing rapidly on the other side
of the street. Robert's eyes were keen, and a soldier's life had
accustomed him to their use in the darkness. He caught only a glimpse of
it, but was sure the figure was that of the Secretary.
Though wondering what an official high in the Government was about
flitting through Richmond at such an hour, he remembered philosophically
that it was none of his business. Soon another man appeared, tall and
bony, his face almost hidden by a thick black beard faintly touched with
silver in the light of the moon. But this person was not shifty nor
evasive. He stalked boldly along, and his heavy footsteps gave back a
hard metallic ring as the iron-plated heels of his boots came heavily
in contact with the bricks of the sidewalk.
Prescott knew the second figure, too. It was Wood, the great cavalryman,
the fierce, dark mountaineer, and, wishing for company, Robert followed
the General, whom he knew well. Wood turned at the sound of his
footsteps and welcomed him.
"I don't like this town nor its folks," he said in his mountain dialect,
"and I ain't goin' to stay long. They ain't my kind of people, Bob."
"Give 'em a chance, General; they are doing their best."
"What the Gov'ment ought to do," said the mountaineer moodily, "is to
get up ev'ry man there is in the country and then hit hard at the enemy
and keep on hittin' until there ain't a breath left in him. But
sometimes it seems to me that it's the business of gov'ments in war to
keep their armies from winnin'!"
They were joined at the corner by Talbot, according to his wont brimming
over with high spirits, and Prescott, on the General's account, was glad
they had met him. He, if anybody, could communicate good spirits.
"General," said the sanguine Talbot, "you must make the most of the
time. The Yankees may not give us another chance. Across yonder, where
you see that dim light trying to shine through the dirty window,
Winthrop is printing his paper, which comes out this morning. As he is a
critic of the Government, I suggest that we go over and see the task
well done."
The proposition suited Wood's mood, and Prescott's, too, so they took
their way without further words toward Winthrop's office, on the second
floor of a rusty two-story frame building. Talbot led them up a shabby
staircase just broad enough for one, between walls from which the crude
plastering had dropped in spots.
"Why are newspaper offices always so shabby," he asked. "I was in New
York once, where there are rich papers, but they were just the same."
The flight of steps led directly into the editorial room, where
Winthrop sat in his shirt sleeves at a little table, writing. Raymond,
at another, was similarly clad and similarly engaged. A huge stove
standing in the corner, and fed with billets of wood, threw out a
grateful heat. Sitting around it in a semi-circle were four or five men,
including the one-armed Colonel Stormont and another man in uniform. All
were busy reading the newspaper exchanges.
Winthrop waved his hand to the new visitors.
"Be all through in fifteen minutes," he said. "Sit down by the stove.
Maybe you'd like to read this; its Rhett's paper."
He tossed them a newspaper and went on with his writing. The three found
seats on cane-bottomed chairs or boxes and joined the group around the
stove.
Prescott glanced a moment at the newspaper which Winthrop had thrown to
them. It was a copy of the Charleston _Mercury_, conducted by the famous
secessionist Rhett, then a member of the Confederate Senate, and edited
meanwhile by his son. It breathed much fire and brimstone, and called
insistently for a quick defeat of the insolent North. He passed it on to
his friends and then looked with more interest at the office and the men
about him. Everything was shabby to the last degree. Old newspapers and
scraps of manuscript littered the floor, cockroaches crawled over the
desks, on the walls were double-page illustrations from _Harper's
Weekly_ and _Leslie's Weekly_, depicting battle scenes in which the
frightened Southern soldiers were fleeing like sheep before the valiant
sons of the North.
"It's all the same, Prescott," said Talbot. "We haven't any illustrated
papers, but if we had they'd show the whole Yankee army running fit to
break its neck from a single Southern regiment."
General Wood, too, looked about with keen eyes, as if uncertain what to
do, but his hesitation did not last long. A piece of pine wood lay near
him, and picking it up he drew from under his belt a great keen-bladed
bowie-knife, with which he began to whittle long slender shavings that
curled beautifully; then a seraphic smile of content spread over his
face.
Those who were not reading drifted into a discussion on politics and the
war. The rumble of a press just starting to work came from the next
room. Winthrop and Raymond wrote on undisturbed. The General, still
whittling his pine stick, began to stare curiously at them. At last he
said:
"Wa'al, if this ain't a harder trade than fightin', I'll be darned!"
Several smiled, but none replied to the General's comment. Raymond
presently finished his article, threw it to an ink-blackened galley-boy
and came over to the stove.
"You probably wonder what I am doing here in the enemy's camp," he said.
"The office of every newspaper but my own is the camp of an enemy, but
Winthrop asked me to help him out to-night with some pretty severe
criticism of the Government. As he's responsible and I'm not, I've
pitched into the President, Cabinet and Congress of the Confederate
States of America at a great rate. I don't know what will happen to him,
because while we are fighting for freedom here we are not fighting for
the freedom of the press. We Southerners like to put in some heavy licks
for freedom and then get something else. Maybe we're kin to the old
Puritans."
They heard a light step on the stair, and the two editors looked up
expecting to see some one of the ordinary chance visitors to a newspaper
office. Instead it was the Secretary, Mr. Sefton, a conciliatory smile
on his face and a hand outstretched ready for the customary shake.
"You are surprised to see me, Mr. Winthrop," he said, "but I trust that
I am none the less welcome. I am glad, too, to find so many good men
whom I know and some of whom I have met before on this very evening.
Good-evening to you all, gentlemen."
He bowed to every one. Winthrop looked doubtfully at him as if trying to
guess his business.
"Anything private, Mr. Sefton?" he said "If so we can step into the next
room."
"Not at all! Not at all!" replied the Secretary, spreading out his
fingers in negative style. "There is nothing that your friends need not
hear, not even our great cavalry leader, General Wood. I was passing
after a late errand, and seeing your light it occurred to me that I
might come up to you and speak of some strange gossip that I have been
hearing in Richmond."
All now listened with the keenest interest. They saw that the wily
Secretary had not come on any vague errand at that hour of the morning.
"And may I ask what is the gossip?" said Winthrop with a trace of
defiance in his tone.
"It was only a trifle," replied the Secretary blandly; "but a friend may
serve a friend even in the matter of a trifle."
He paused and looked smilingly around the expectant circle. Winthrop
made an impatient movement. He was by nature one of the most humane and
generous of men, but fiery and touchy to the last degree.
"It was merely this," continued the Secretary, "and I really apologize
for speaking of it at all, as it is scarcely any business of mine, but
they say that you are going to print a fierce attack on the Government."
"What then?" asked Winthrop, with increasing defiance.
"I would suggest to you, if you will pardon the liberty, that you
refrain. The Government, of which I am but a humble official, is
sensitive, and it is, too, a critical time. Just now the Government
needs all the support and confidence that it can possibly get. If you
impair the public faith in us how can we accomplish anything?"
"But the newspapers of the North have entire freedom of criticism,"
burst out Winthrop. "We say that the North is not a free country and the
South is. Are we to belie those words?"
"I think you miss the point," replied the Secretary, still speaking
suavely. "The Government does not wish to repress the freedom of the
press nor of any individual, nor in fact have I had any such matter in
mind in giving you this intimation. I think that if you do as I hear you
purpose to do, some rather extreme men will be disposed to make you
trouble. Now there's Redfield."
"The trouble with Redfield," broke in Raymond, "is that he wants all the
twenty-four hours of every day for his own talking."
"True! true in a sense," said the Secretary, "but he is a member of the
House Committee on Military Affairs and is an influential man."
"I thank you, Mr. Secretary," said Winthrop, "but the article is already
written."
A shade crossed the face of Mr. Sefton.
"And as you heard," continued Winthrop, "it attacks the Government with
as much vigour as I am capable of putting into it. Here is the paper
now; you can read for yourself what I have written."
The galley-boy had come in with a half-dozen papers still wet from the
press. Winthrop handed one to the Secretary, indicated the editorial and
waited while Sefton read it.
The Secretary, after the perusal, put down the paper and spoke gently as
if he were chiding a child: "I am sorry this is published, Mr.
Winthrop," he said. "It can only stir up trouble. Will you permit me to
say that I think it indiscreet?"
"Oh, certainly," replied Winthrop. "You are entitled to your opinion,
and by the same token so am I."
"I don't think our Government will like this," said Mr. Sefton. He
tapped the newspaper as he spoke.
"I should think it would not," replied Winthrop with an ironical laugh.
"At least, it was not intended that way. But does our Government expect
to make itself an oligarchy or despotism? If that is so, I should like
to know what we are fighting for?"
Mr. Sefton left these questions unanswered, but continued to express
sorrow over the incident. He did not mean to interfere, he said; he had
come with the best purpose in the world. He thought that at this stage
of the war all influences ought to combine for the public good, and
also he did not wish his young friends to suffer any personal
inconvenience. Then bowing, he went out, but he took with him a copy of
the paper.
"That visit, Winthrop, was meant for a threat, and nothing else," said
Raymond, when he was sure the Secretary was safely in the street.
"No doubt of it," said Winthrop, "but I don't take back a word."
They speculated on the result, until General Wood, putting up his knife
and throwing down his pine stick, drew an old pack of cards from an
inside pocket of his coat.
"Let's play poker a little while," he said. "It'll make us think of
somethin' else and steady our nerves. Besides, it's mighty good trainin'
for a soldier. Poker's just like war--half the cards you've got, an'
half bluff. Lee and Jackson are such mighty good gen'rals 'cause they
always make the other fellow think they've got twice as many soldiers as
they really have."
Raymond, an inveterate gambler, at once acceded to the proposition;
Winthrop and one of the soldiers did likewise, and they sat down to
play. The others looked on.
"Shall we make the limit ten cents in coin or ten dollars Confederate
money?" asked Winthrop.
"Better make it ten dollars Confederate; we don't want to risk too
much," replied Raymond.
Soon they were deep in the mysteries and fascinations of the game. Wood
proved himself a consummate player, a master of "raise" and "bluff," but
for awhile the luck ran against him, and he made this brief comment:
"Things always run in streaks; don't matter whether it's politics, love,
farmin' or war. They don't travel alone. At Antietam nearly half the
Yankee soldiers we killed were red-headed. Fact, sure; but at
Chancellorsville I never saw a single dead Yankee with a red head."
The luck turned by and by toward the General, but Prescott thought it
was time for him to be seeking home and he bade good-night. Colonel
Stormont accompanied him as he went down the rickety stairs.
"Colonel," asked Prescott, as they reached the street, "who, in reality,
is Mr. Sefton?"
"That is more than any of us can tell," replied the Colonel; "nominally
he is at the head of a department in the Treasury, but he has acquired a
great influence in the Cabinet--he is so deft at the despatch of
business--and he is at the White House as much as he is anywhere. He is
not a man whom we can ignore."
Prescott was of that opinion, too, and when he got into his bed, not
long before the break of day, he was still thinking of the bland
Secretary.