had been honestly and truly thinking, for some brief time past, whether
it would not be possible and worth while for him to shake himself free
of this life, of which he was growing heartily tired, and make a name
for himself in the world in some other fashion than by winging Russians,
importing new dancers, taking French women to the Bads, scandalizing
society, and beggaring himself. He had begun to wonder whether it was
not yet, after all, too late, and whether if----when down had come the
request from the Horse Guards for him to sell out, and the rush of all
his creditors upon him, and away forever went all his stray shapeless
fancies of a possible better future. And--consolation or aggravation,
whichever it be--he knew that he had no one, save himself, to thank for
it; for no man ever had a more brilliant start in the race of life than
he, and none need have made better running over the course, had he only
kept straight or put on the curb as he went down-hill. Poor Bertie! you
must have known many such lives, or I can't tell where your own has been
spent; lives which began so brilliantly that none could rival them, and
which ended--God help them!--so miserably and so pitifully that you do
not think of them without a shudder still?
Poor Bertie!--a man of a sweeter temper, a more generous nature, a more
lavish kindliness, never lived. He had the most versatile talents and
the gentlest manners in the world; and yet here he was, having fairly
come to ruin, and very nearly to disgrace.
It was little wonder that his father, looking at him and thinking of all
he might have been, and all he might have done, was lashed into a
terrible bitterness of passionate grief, and hurled words at him of a
deadly wrath, in the morning that followed on the Grand Military. Fiery
as his comrades the Napiers, of a stern code as a soldier, and a lofty
honor as a man, haughty in pride and swift to passion, old Sir Lionel
was stung to the quick by his son's fall, and would have sooner, by a
thousand-fold, have followed him to his grave, than have seen him live
to endure that tacit dismissal from the service of the country--the
deepest shame, in his sight, that could have touched his race.
"I knew you were lost to morality, but I did not know till now that you
were lost to honor!" said the old Lion, with such a storm of passion in
him that his words swept out, acrid and unchosen, in a very whirlwind.
"I knew you had vices, I knew you had follies, I knew you wasted your
substance with debtors and gamblers like yourself, on courtesans and
gaming-tables, in Parisian enormities, and vaunted libertinage, but I
did not think that you were so utterly a traitor to your blood as to
bring disgrace to a name that never was approached by shame until _you_
bore it!"
Bertie's face flushed darkly, then he grew very pale. The indolence
with which he lay back in an ecarte-chair did not alter, however, and he
stroked his long moustaches a little with his habitual gentle
indifferentism.
"It is all over. Pray do not give it that tremendous earnestness," he
said, quietly. "Nothing is ever worth that; and I should prefer it if we
kept to the language of gentlemen!"
"The language of gentlemen is _for_ gentlemen," retorted the old man,
with fiery vehemence. His heart was cut to the core, and all his soul
was in revolt against the degradation to his name that came in the train
of his heir's ruin. "When a man has forgot that he has been a gentleman,
one may be pardoned for forgetting it also! You may have no honor left
for your career to shame; _I_ have--and, by God, sir, from this hour you
are no son of mine. I disown you--I know you no longer! Go and drag out
all the rest of a disgraced life in any idleness that you choose. If you
were to lie dying at my feet, I would not give you a crust!"
Bertie raised his eyebrows slightly.
"_Soit!_ But would it not be possible to intimate this quietly? A scene
is such very bad style--always exhausting, too!"
The languid calmness, the soft nonchalance of the tone, were like oil
upon flame to the old Lion's heart, lashed to fury and embittered with
pain as it was. A heavier oath than print will bear broke from him, with
a deadly imprecation, as he paced the library with swift, uneven steps.
"It had been better if your 'style' had been less and your decency and
your honor greater! One word more is all you will ever hear from my
lips. The title must come to you; that, unhappily, is not in my hands to
prevent. It must be yours when I die, if you have not been shot in some
gambling brawl or some bagnio abroad before then; but you will remember,
not a shilling of money, not a rood of the land are entailed; and, by
the heaven above us, every farthing, every acre shall be willed to the
young children. _You_ are disinherited, sir--disowned for ever--if you
died at my feet! Now go, and never let me see your face again."
As he spoke, Bertie rose.
The two men stood opposite to each other--singularly alike in form and
feature, in magnificence of stature, and distinction of personal beauty,
save that the tawny gold of the old Lion's hair was flaked with white,
and that his blue eyes were bright as steel and flashing fire, while the
younger man's were very worn. His face, too, was deeply flushed and his
lips quivered, while his son's were perfectly serene and impassive as he
listened, without a muscle twitching, or even a gleam of anxiety coming
into his eyes.
They were of different schools.
Bertie heard to the end; then bowed with a languid grace. "It will be
fortunate for Lady Winton's children! Make her my compliments and
congratulations. Good-day to you."
Their eyes met steadily once--that was all; then the door of the library
closed on him; Bertie knew the worst; he was face to face with beggary.
As he crossed the hall, the entrance to the conservatories stood open;
he looked through, paused a moment, and then went in. On a low chair,
buried among the pyramids of blossom, sat a woman reading, aristocrat to
the core, and in the earliest bloom of her youth, for she was scarcely
eighteen, beautiful as the morning, with a delicate thorough-bred
beauty, dark lustrous eyes, arched pencilled brows, a smile like
sunshine, and lips sweet as they were proud. She was Ida Deloraine, a
ward of Sir Lionel, and a cousin of his young second wife's.
Bertie went up to her and held out his hand.
"Lady Ida, I am come to wish you good-bye."
She started a little and looked up.
"Good-bye! Are you going to town?"
"Yes--a little farther. Will you give me that camellia by way of _bon
voyage_?"
A soft warmth flushed her face for a moment; she hesitated slightly,
toying with the snowy blossom; then she gave it him. He had not asked it
like a love gage.
He took it, and bowed silently over her hand.
"You will find it very cold," said Lady Ida, with a trifle of
embarrassment, nestling herself in her dormeuse in her warm bright nest
among the exotics.
He smiled--a very gentle smile.
"Yes, I am frozen out. Adieu!"
He paused a moment, looking at her--that brilliant picture framed in
flowers; then, without another word, he bowed again and left her, the
woman he had learned too late to love, and had lost by his own folly for
ever.
"Frozen out? What could he mean?--there is no frost," thought Lady Ida,
left alone in her hot-house warmth among the white and scarlet blossoms,
a little startled, a little disappointed, a little excited with some
vague apprehension, she could not have told why; while Bertie Winton
went on out into the cold gray winter's morning from the old
Northamptonshire Hall that would know him no more, with no end so likely
for him as that which had just been prophesied--a shot in a gambling
hell.
_Facilis descensus Averni_--and he was at the bottom of the pit. Well,
the descent had been very pleasant. Bertie set his teeth tight, and let
the waters close over his head and shut him out of sight. He knew that a
man who is down has nothing more to do with the world, save to quietly
accept--oblivion.
* * * * *
It was a hot summer night in Secessia.
The air was very heavy, no wind stirring the dense woods crowning the
sides of the hills or the great fields of trodden maize trampled by the
hoofs of cavalry and the tramp of divisions. The yellow corn waved above
the earth where the dead had fallen like wheat in harvest-time, and the
rice grew but the richer and the faster because it was sown in soil
where slaughtered thousands rotted, unsepulchred and unrecorded. The
shadows were black from the reared mountain range that rose frowning in
the moonlight, and the stars were out in southern brilliancy, shining as
calmly and as luminously as though their rays did not fall on graves
crammed full with dead, on flaming homesteads, crowded sick-wards,
poisonous waters that killed their thousands in deadly rivalry with shot
and shell, and vast battalions sleeping on their arms in wheat-fields
and by river-swamps, in opposing camps, and before beleaguered cities,
where brethren warred with brethren, and Virginia was drenched with
blood. There was no sound, save now and then the challenge of some
distant picket or the faint note of a trumpet-call, the roar of a
torrent among the hills, or the monotonous rise and fall from miles away
in the interior, of the negroes' funeral song, "Old Joe,"--more
pathetic, somehow, when you catch it at night from the far distance
echoing on the silence as you sit over a watch-fire, or ride alone
through a ravine, than many a grander requiem.
It was close upon midnight, and all was very still; for they were in the
heart of the South, and on the eve of a perilous enterprise, coined by a
bold brain and to be carried out by a bold hand.
It was in the narrow neck of a valley, pent up between rocky shelving
ridges, anywhere you will between Maryland and Georgia--for he who did
this thing would not care to have it too particularly drawn out from the
million other deeds of "derring-do" that the mighty story of the Great
War has known and buried. Eight hundred Confederate Horse, some of
Stuart's Cavalry, had got driven and trapped and caged up in this
miserable defile, misled and intercepted; with the dense mass of a
Federal army marching on their rear, within them by bare fifteen miles,
and the forward route through the crammed defile between the hills, by
which alone they could regain Lee's forces, dammed up by a deep, rapid,
though not broad river; by a bridge strongly fortified and barricaded;
and, on the opposite bank, by some Federal corps a couple of thousand
strong, well under cover in rifle-pits and earthworks, thrown up by keen
woodsmen and untiring trench-diggers. It was close peril, deadly as any
that Secessia had seen, here in the hot still midnight, with the columns
of the Federal divisions within them by eight hours' march, stretching
out and taking in all the land to the rear in the sweep of their
semicircular wings; while in front rose, black and shapeless in the deep
gloom of the rocks above, the barricades upon the bridge, behind which
two thousand rifles were ready to open fire at the first alarm from the
Federal guard. And alone, without the possibility of aid, caged in among
the trampled corn and maize that filled the valley, imprisoned between
the two Federal forces as in the iron jaws of a trap, the handful of
Southern troopers stood, resolute to sell their lives singly one by one,
and at a costly price, and perish to a man, rather than fall alive into
the hands of their foes.
When the morning broke they would be cut to pieces, as the chaff is cut
by the whirl of the steam-wheels. They knew that. Well, they looked at
it steadily; it had no terrors for them, the Cavaliers of Old Virginia,
so that they died with their face to the front. There was but one chance
left for escape; aid there could be none; and that chance was so
desperate, that even to them--reckless in daring, living habitually
between life and death, and ever careless of the issue--it looked like
madness to attempt it. But one among them had urged it on their
consideration--urged it with passionate entreaty, pledging his own life
for its success; and they had given their adhesion to it, for his name
was famous through the Confederacy.
He had won his spurs at Manasses, at Antietam, at Chancellorsville; he
had been in every headlong charge with Stuart; he had been renowned for
the most dashing Border raids and conspicuous staff service of any
soldier in Secessia; he had galloped through a tempest of the enemy's
balls, and swept along their lines to reconnoitre, riding back through
the storm of shot to Lee, as coolly as though he rode through a summer
shower at a review; and his words had weight with men who would have
gone after him to the death. He stood now, the only man dismounted, in
true Virginia uniform; a rough riding-coat, crossed by an undressed
chamois belt, into which his sabre and a brace of revolvers were thrust,
a broad Spanish sombrero shading his face, great Hessians reaching above
his knee, and a long silken golden-colored beard sweeping to his
waist,--a keen reconnoitrer, a daring raider, a superb horseman, and a
soldier heart and soul.
When he had laid before them the solitary chance of the perilous
enterprise that he had planned, each man of the eight hundred had sought
the post of danger for himself; but there he was, inexorable--what he
had proposed he alone would execute. The Federals were ignorant of their
close vicinity, for their near approach had been unheard, the trodden
maize and rice, and the angry foaming of the torrent above, deadening
the sound of their horses' hoofs; and the Union-men, satisfied that the
"rebels" were entrapped beyond escape, were sleeping securely behind
their earth-works, the passage of the river blockaded by their
barricade, while the Southerners were drawn up close to the head of the
bridge in sections of threes, screened by the intense shadow of the
overhanging rocks; shadow darker from the brilliance of the full summer
moon that, shining on the enemy's encampment, and on the black boiling
waters thundering through the ravine, was shut out from the defile by
the leaning pine-covered walls of granite. It was terribly still, that
awful silence, only filled with the splashing of the water and the
audible beat of the Federal sentinel's measured tramp, as they were
drawn up there by the bridge-head; and though they had cast themselves
into the desperate effort with the recklessness of men for whom death
waited surely on the morrow, it looked a madman's thought, a madman's
exploit, to them, as their leader laid aside his sword and pistols, and
took up a small barrel of powder, part of some ammunition carried off
from some sappers and miners' stores in the raid of the past day, the
sight of which had brought to remembrance a stray, half-forgotten story
told him in boyhood of one of Soult's Army--the story on which he was
about to act now.
"For God's sake, take care!" whispered the man nearest him; and though
he was a veteran who had gone through the hottest of the campaign since
Bull's Run, his voice shook, and was husky as he spoke.
The other laughed a little--a slight, soft, languid laugh.
"All right, my dear fellow," he whispered back. "There's nothing in it
to be alarmed at; a Frenchman did it in the Peninsula, you know. Only if
I get shot, or blown up, and the alarm be given, do you take care to
bolt over and cut your way through in the first of the rush, that's
all."
Then, without more words, he laid himself down at full length with a
cord tied round his ankle, that they might know his progress, and the
cask of gunpowder, swathed in green cloth, that it should roll without
noise along the ground; and, creeping slowly on his way, propelling the
barrel with his head, and guiding it by his hands, was lost to their
sight in the darkness. By the string, as it uncoiled through their
hands, they could tell he was advancing; that was all.
The chances were as a million to one that his life would pay the forfeit
for that perilous and daring venture; a single shot and he would be
blown into the air a charred and shapeless corpse; one spark on that
rolling mass that he pushed before him, and the explosion would hurl him
upward in the silent night, mangled, dismembered, blackened, lifeless.
But his nerve was not the less cool, nor did his heart beat one throb
the quicker, as he crept noiselessly along in the black shade cast by
the parapet of the bridge, with the tramp of the guard close above on
his ear, and rifles ready to be levelled on him from the covered
earthworks if the faintest sound of his approach or the dimmest streak
of moonlight on his moving body told the Federals of his presence. He
had looked death in the teeth most days through the last five years; it
had no power to quicken or slacken a single beat of his pulse as he
propelled himself slowly forward along the black, rugged, uneven ground,
and on to the passage of the bridge, as coolly, as fearlessly, as he
would have crept through the heather and bracken after the slot of a
deer on the moor-side at home.
He heard the challenge and the tramp of the sentinel on the opposite
bank; he saw the white starlight shine on the barrels of their
breech-loaders as they paced to and fro in the stillness, filled with
the surge and rush of the rapid waters beneath him. Shrouded in the
gloom, he dragged himself onward with slow and painful movement,
stretched out on the ground, urging himself forward by the action of his
limbs so cautiously that, even had the light been on him, he could
scarcely have been seen to move, or been distinguished from the earth on
which he lay. Eight hundred lives hung on the coolness of his own; if he
were discovered, they were lost. And, without haste, without excitation,
he drew himself along under the parapet until he came to the centre of
the bridge, placed the barrel close against the barricades, uncovered
the head of the cask, and took his way back by the same laborious,
tedious way, until he reached the Virginian Troopers gathered together
under the shelving rocks.
A deep hoarse murmur rolling down the ranks, the repressed cheer they
dared not give aloud, welcomed him and the dauntless daring of his act;
man after man pressed forward entreating to take his place, to share his
peril; he gave it up to none, and three times more went back again on
that deadly journey, until sufficient powder for his purpose was lodged
under the Federal fortifications on the bridge. Two hours went by in
that slow and terrible passage; then, for the last time, he wound a
saucisson round his body serpent-wise, and, with that coil of powder
curled around him, took his way once more in the same manner through the
hot, dark, heavy night.
And those left behind in the impenetrable gloom, ignorant of his fate,
knowing that with every instant the crack of the rifles might roll out
on the stillness, and the ball pierce that death-snake twisted round his
limbs, and the rocks echo with the roar of the exploding powder,
blasting him in the rush of its sheet of fire and stones, sat mute and
motionless in their saddles, with a colder chill in their bold blood,
and a tighter fear at their proud hearts, than the Cavaliers of the
South would have known for their own peril, or than he knew for his.
Another half-hour went by--an eternity in its long drawn-out
suspense--then in the darkness under the rocks his form rose up amongst
them.
"Ready?"--"Ready."
The low whisper passed all but inaudible from man to man. He took back
his sabre and pistols and thrust them into his belt, then stooped,
struck a slow match, and laid it to the end of the saucisson, whose
mouth he had fastened to the barrels on the bridge, and rapidly as the
lightning, flung himself across the horse held for him, and fell into
line at the head of the troop.
There was a moment of intense silence while the fire crept up the long
stick of the match; then the shrill, hissing, snake-like sound, that
none who have once heard ever forget, rushed through the quiet of the
night, and with a roar that startled all the sleeping echoes of the
hills, the explosion followed; the columns of flame shooting upward to
the starlit sky, and casting their crimson lurid light on the black
brawling waters, on the rugged towering rocks, on the gnarled trunks of
the lofty pines, and on the wild, picturesque forms and the bold,
swarthy, Spanish-like faces of the Confederate raiders. With a shock
that shook the earth till it rocked and trembled under them, the pillar
of smoke and fire towered aloft in the hush of the midnight, blasting
and hurling upward, in thunder that pealed back from rock to rock,
lifeless bodies, mangled limbs, smouldering timbers, loosened stones,
dead men flung heavenward like leaves whirled by the wind, and iron torn
up and bent like saplings in a storm, as the mass of the barricades
quivered, oscillated, and fell with a mighty crash, while the night was
red with the hot glare of the flame, and filled with the deafening din.
The Federals, sleeping under cover of their intrenchments, woke by that
concussion as though heaven and earth were meeting, poured out from pit
and trench, from salient and parallel, to see their fortifications and
their guard blown up, while the skies were lurid with the glow of the
burning barricades, and the ravine was filled with the yellow mist of
the dense and rolling smoke. Confused, startled, demoralized, they ran
together like sheep, vainly rallied by their officers, some few hundred
opening an aimless desultory fire from behind their works, the rest
rushing hither and thither, in that inextricable intricacy, and nameless
panic, which doom the best regiments that were ever under arms, when
once they seize them.
"Charge!" shouted the Confederate leader, his voice ringing out clear
and sonorous above the infernal tempest of hissing, roaring, shrieking,
booming sound.
With that resistless impetus with which they had, over and over again,
broken through the granite mass of packed squares and bristling
bayonets, the Southerners, raising their wild war-whoop, thundered on to
the bridge, which, strongly framed of stone and iron, had withstood the
shock, as they had foreseen; and while the fiery glare shone, and the
seething flame hissed, on the boiling waters below, swept, full gallop,
over the torn limbs, the blackened bodies, the charred wood, the falling
timbers, the exploding powder, with which the passage of the bridge was
strewn, and charged through the hellish din, the lurid fire, the heavy
smoke, at a headlong pace, down into the Federal camp.
A thousand shots fell like hail amongst them, but not a saddle was
emptied, not even a trooper was touched; and with their line unbroken,
and the challenge of their war-shout pealing out upon the uproar, they
rode through the confusion worse confounded, and cutting their way
through shot and sabre, through levelled rifles, and through piled
earthworks, with their horses breathing fire, and the roar of the
opening musketry pealing out upon their rear, dashed on, never drawing
rein, down into the darkness of the front defile, and into the freshness
of the starry summer night, saved by the leader that they loved,
and--FREE!
* * * * *
"Tarnation cheeky thing to do. Guess they ain't wise to rile us that
way," said a Federal general from Vermont, as they discussed this
exploit of the Eight Hundred at the Federal head-quarters.
"A splendid thing!" said an English visitor to the Northern camp, who
had come for a six months' tour to see the war for himself, having been
in his own time the friend of Paget and Vivian and Londonderry, the
comrade of Picton, of Mackinnon, and of Arthur Wellesley. "A magnificent
thing! I remember Bouchard did something the same sort of thing at
Amarante, but not half so pluckily, nor against any such odds. Who's the
fellow that led the charge? I'd give anything to see him and tell him
what I think of it. How Will Napier would have loved him, by George!"
"Who's the d----d rebel, Jed?" said the General, taking his gin-sling.
"Think he's an Englishman. We'd give ten thousand dollars for him, alive
or dead: he's fifty devils in one, that _I_ know," responded the Colonel
of Artillery, thus appealed to, a gentlemanlike, quiet man, educated at
West Point.
"God bless the fellow! I'm glad he's English!" said the English visitor,
heartily, forgetting his Federal situation and companions. "Who is he?
Perhaps I know the name."
"Should say you would. It's the same as your own--Winton. Bertie Winton,
they call him. Maybe he's a relative of yours!"
The blood flushed the Englishman's face hotly for a second; then a stern
dark shadow came on it, and his lips set tight.
"I have no knowledge of him," he said, curtly.
"Haven't you now? That's curious. Some said he was a son of yours,"
pursued the Colonel.
The old Lion flung back his silvery mane with his haughtiest
imperiousness.
"No, sir; he's no son of mine."