WHEN Hatch and his excursionists had gone back to Jacksonville to prepare for their return to the North, Tallahassee was again left to its quietness, its sunshine, its shadows, its perfumes, its bird-songs, and its social dulness and languor. It was like a calm hot day, after a sennight of breezy coolness. It was like a picnic-ground after the festivities are over and the merry-makers have vanished.
Cauthorne had completed all the preliminary preparations for his reconnoissance of the so-called volcano; but he was lingering in the city from day to day, trying to convince himself, by some method of reasoning, that his duty was not so plain as it seemed. That he must give up all thought of Lucie La Rue, from a lover's standpoint, was a conclusion towards which his judgment had irresistibly driven him. It was more terrible than any form of death; but it was also inexorable. Love — coming to him so late in life — had seized him with such power that its grip was felt in every fibre of his nature. His indomitable will, his finely-balanced and powerful judgment, his keen sense of duty, his high patriotism, and his peculiar notions of the perfect harmony of sentiment which ought to exist between lover and sweetheart, or husband and wife, were pitted against this pure and beautiful love for the Tallahassee girl; and all they could do was to keep in the strongest light before the lover's eyes the four dead brothers of Lucie on Chickamauga's bloody field, the mangled wreck of the living one, the sentiments of her people, the gray uniforms, the Lost Cause.
He did not take into consideration the rapid change taking place in the South, and the probability of the mutation soon beginning, if it had not already set in, in Tallahassee. To him, for the time, the little conservative city, and its surrounding hills and lakes, were the whole South; the stiff, aristocratic, unchanging Tallahasseeans were the whole Southern people; that Lost-Cause eulogy was the sentiment of every one south of Mason and Dixon's line.
No doubt his love-trouble tended to exaggerate and accentuate his estimate of the meaning of such speeches as he had heard, and to emphasize the enormity of the guilt of those who uttered and those who indorsed them. The fact that the existence of such sentiments stood as a barrier between him and Lucie was of itself enough to imbitter him against the whole community for so long, at least, as his deeper-seated and more distracting cause of perplexity should exist with its present force.
But how could he abandon his hope of one day seeing his way clear to marrying Lucie and being inexpressibly happy? One's judgment may dictate, and one's conscience may thunder, and one's duty may beckon, and despair may be written on one's sky, and yet where there is love there will be hope.
Lucie grew more beautiful to his eyes and more dear to his heart every day; and, strange to say, he was every day more and more tempted to cast himself at her feet, and acknowledge that it was he who had mangled and disfigured Victor at Chickamauga, and then to ask her to forgive him, as Victor had, and be his wife despite the complex horrors of the circumstances. He sometimes harbored the thought that possibly Lucie, having been a mere child during the war, had not become imbued with such bitterness towards the North as still rankled in the bosoms of older Southerners. But now and again he would turn fiercely away from all this to stare the naked facts in the face, acknowledging the utter wretchedness and hopelessness of his situation. And so, blown back and forth, he was tossed upon the waves of torment.
As he sat at his table in his room, late one evening, trying to fill out the last pages of a chapter of his novel, striving to find forgetfulness of his own troubles in picturing those of his hero, Col. Vance came in bearing in his hand a Savannah paper containing a full report of all the eulogies pronounced at the meeting in memory of his father.
"When will this twaddle about the Lost Cause cease among sensible men in the South?" exclaimed the colonel, dropping into a chair. "It pains me beyond expression to see my father's friends perpetrating such mischievous platitudes in connection with their memorial meeting."
"I am glad to see you indignant," said Cauthorne; "but your indignation has no real value while it is only expressed in private. It is high time for you and all Southern men who acknowledge that there was really nothing in the Lost Cause but the perpetuity of slavery, to come out publicly and denounce every thing which tends to keep alive sectional hate."
"I know it is," replied Vance; "but the Northern politicians are forever harping on the war from their standpoint, and of course that keeps our people in no humor to tolerate any lessening of the spirit of resistance and retort."
"There is an easily appreciable difference," said Cauthorne, "between the spirit of a boastful patriot who has fought for his country and the rights of man, and the spirit of the defeated rebel who snarls because his slaves are freed, and his country is still undivided."
"Now you are bitter," said Vance, his face reddening. "You ought to remember that defeat is annoying at best, and that utter abasement at the feet of an enemy is not American. I hold that we of the South have a perfect right to honor our dead soldiers as heroes, and to remember our victories as well as our defeats; but I am in favor of educating our people up to that patriotic self-sacrifice which can and will make them willing to forego mere talk for the sake of the whole country, and the future glory of our government."
"It never can be, so long as slavery is remembered with affection," rejoined Cauthorne.
"The secret does not lie there," said Vance. "You of the North forget that a small part comparatively of the Confederate soldiery were slave-owners. No, sir, the tender place in our people's hearts is where the dead are kept remembered, where our widows and orphans, our maimed soldiers"—
"Hold!" cried Cauthorne, suddenly interrupting him. "We are getting on forbidden ground. Let's not go farther. We should differ, and not be able to accomplish any good."
"So far as remembering slavery with affection is concerned, it is not true of our people," said Vance, giving no notice to Cauthorne's suggestion about dropping the subject. "We are glad slavery is ended; but we do not like being taunted as rebels for the rest of our days. The thing must end some time, and for one, I think there ought to be charity and forbearance on both sides; wherefore I say those speeches I have referred to were unwise."
"Well, well," said Cauthorne, "perhaps we don't differ so widely, after all. I confess that I am ready to see the 'Bloody Shirt' go out of politics." As he spoke he poured some wine, and pushed a glass to Vance. Then in an effort at a lighter manner he said, —
"In my novel here I am trying to exemplify the idea you advanced a while ago."
"What idea?"
"The idea that so long as the maimed and mutilated soldiers of the war live there can be no perfect union between the North and the South."
"You mistook me," said Vance quickly: "I did not intend to convey that impression. What I did mean was, that it wounded and irritated our people to have Northern politicians all the time calling our dear dead ones, and our dear maimed and crippled living ones, rebels and traitors. We love our dead fathers and husbands, and our crippled brothers and sons, even if we are ready to repudiate the Lost Cause."
"Let the idea be mine, then," said Cauthorne, actually hurrying to present his own experience under the cover of his novel. "The incident I attempt to portray in my story is the case of a young man from the North who falls in love with a Southern girl, and is on the point of proposing marriage to her when he chances to discover that her brother, who was terribly maimed and crippled in the war, is the same rebel soldier whom he shot on a certain battlefield, and that it was his bullets that had wrought the complete physical ruin of his sweetheart's only surviving male relative. I am making the case a strong one, for a purpose. I desire the story to have a mere touch of allegory in it. It is to raise the question between the North and the South: How are we to wed while the hideous reminders of our struggle exist? I may not be able to draw the lines parallel, but you and every one can see the question presented in the picture. It is a question as hard to settle between the sections as between my supposed lovers. It is no more political in one instance than in the other. It is a grand moral proposition which must be considered, and its relations determined."
"Your lover," said Vance, "might easily settle the question by an appeal to his sweetheart's womanhood and human passions; but the sections each have millions of mouths and millions of conflicting passions and interests. There is no parallel. Your young Northerner could go boldly up to the Southern girl, and say, ' I love you. It is true I shot your brother; but it was in battle, and without malice. It was the misfortune of war. I love you for your own self.' If she loved him she would kiss him, and go with him to the world's end, even if he had killed a dozen brothers."
Cauthorne rose, and walked back and forth. His brain was in a whirl, but he looked calm and walked steadily. Vance sat in a thoughtful attitude, little dreaming what application his companion was making of his last expression. He rose presently, and went away in the bitterest mood of a vexed politician.
Cauthorne continued to walk back and forth in his room. Vance's sentence, "If she loved him she would kiss him, and go with him to the world's end, even if he had killed a dozen brothers," kept ringing in his ears. He imagined Lucie putting up her sweet mouth to kiss him, and to say, "I will go with you." His passion seemed to scorch and shrivel his face. Great wrinkles came in his cheeks and forehead.
"Heaven!" he muttered, "if it could be!" And the sound of his own voice startled him, it was so husky and broken.
He went and leaned out of the window, and let the coolness of the night fall upon his hot head. No thought of sleep came to him. The moon climbed over the zenith, and sank towards the west. The night began to wane. Gray streaks glimmered on the eastern horizon. Far and near the cocks crowed, and presently the birds over in the Capitol grounds awoke and sang.
"If she loved him she would kiss him, and go with him to the world's end," he repeated.
The first rays of the sun fell through the window; and, as if its fire had touched some combustible in his heart, his face lit up. "I will go and see her," he thought, "and she shall say whether she loves me. If she loves me she will kiss me, and go with me!"
All day he nursed his purpose, and in the cool of the afternoon he went to La Rue place. But Col. Vance and Lucie were just starting out to drive as he reached the gate. She looked so contented and happy there by the dark Southerner's side, that it almost maddened Cauthorne. He turned back, and the next morning he left for the swamp of Wakulla.
