MISS LUCIE LA RUE could not be justly measured by the common standard. The aunt who had taken the place of a mother to her, whilst she was a woman of excellent qualities of heart and mind, was a maiden whose views of matrimonial affairs had been unfavorably colored by disappointment, and whose social character was monumental. Judge La Rue, with the loss of his slaves, and the falling to pieces of his great estate, had let go much of his desire and also much of his ability to maintain his old social leadership, even while struggling hard to keep up appearances for political purposes. Of course, therefore, Lucie's domestic education had been obtained without any of those brightening and cheering auxiliary influences caught from contact with progressive, liberal-minded companions in the home circle. In fact, she had been reared, to her present state of development, in an atmosphere of social decay, as plainly visible as if it had been painted on a canvas representing the crumbling homes of her native city. She had come up like a flower among old mossy stones, finding in some way enough soil to furnish the means of growing strong and sweet and beautiful, and of gathering a fragrance entirely unique: but the bloom was single; there was no raceme. It was as though she saw a little hand-breadth of blue, instead of the sky; a hilly periphery only four or five miles distant, instead of the vast horizon of the earth we inhabit. But mere isolation was not all, nor was it the strongest factor among the forces that had influenced her life. She was of the generation whose memory could recall the romantic days of slavery but vaguely, and upon whose childhood the war had made an effect like that of hearing thunder and the roar of a passing cyclone in one's sleep. Naturally she was buoyant, elastic, quick to receive impressions, and hungry for knowledge.
She had formed certain correct notions of life outside the little sphere in which she moved; but all the talk and the teachings of those to whom she looked for guidance were of a retrospective sort, delivered in the light of what had been, and what now existed, but from which every gleam of any future of change and progress was shut away. She was trained to understand that the glory of the South was gone forever, that despots and vandals had swept over it with fire and sword, in the ruthlessness of mere desire for plunder and power, and left it with nothing but its ashes, its broken institutions, its poverty, and its grand past. Of course this sitting with the back to the future and the face to the past is almost the normal state of age and debility. The old and debilitated leaders of Southern life were all Jeremiahs. They wailed. But the new leaders, or would-be leaders, were putting on a show of energy and enterprise. They were calling to the young men and women to rally around the standard of reform and progress. Not much success followed this move, however. The old lords and ladies of the land stood together for utter conservatism.
Against the constantly narrowing tyranny of customs and manners that had outlived the social régime under which they arose, the youthful part of the élite of Tallahassee could, of course, muster but a very weak rebellion. Grandmothers and mothers clung on to the moss-grown and decaying landmarks; grandfathers and fathers had little means with which to institute even the slight reforms their changed agricultural, commercial, and professional situation demanded. In a climate where decay begins at once and goes on rapidly, a few years of unavoidable neglect had worked a physical change that made the country look centuries old; and the people had unwittingly assimilated their bearing to this apparent antiquity of their houses, fences, streets, and fields. To be sure, with the imitative and ambitious impulse of youth, the new generation had caught from the great outside world a touch of the current fashions in dress and deportment; but it was a touch and nothing more. The stiff grandeur of a vanished time overshadowed them, and its spirit was their hereditament: it looked out of their eyes, it was expressed in their walk; their high-held heads and haughty faces emphasized it. This condition of things was prevalent, after the close of the war, all over the South, for a time; but it has not even now changed, in the slightest degree, where there has been no considerable influx of Northern or foreign people. In other words, wherever the old generation of Southerners rule the South, the old order of things, social, domestic, and political, prevails. Slavery exists without the slaves; masters sit on decaying verandas with no one to do their bidding; planters lean against rickety fences, and look proudly over into overgrown fields where the negroes used to work and sing; cavaliers, in patched boots armed with big brass spurs, and wearing dilapidated sombreros, go clattering along on badly groomed steeds. The war has changed every thing but the people: they never can be changed until death has claimed the old generation, and counter-tides of migration and immigration have done their perfect work on the new. But there was a local and special influence of ultra Southernism at Tallahassee which was not touched by the war. The city was a State capital of diminutive size, and of no importance as a military point: hence it stood intact when peace was declared. Every physical feature of its ante-bellum glory was preserved; and on this account the old, haughty, exclusive bearing of its people was easily and naturally retained. It had but one railroad coming in from the outside world, and this by a route so roundabout that the very cars looked stale; it had a negro postmaster, a constant source of vexation to the leading citizens, and its mails were as uncertain as its orange-crop. Its newspapers were ably and honorably conducted, but they affected the reader like a dream of last century. The billiard-tables in the City Hotel were of the kind one wonderingly looked at when one was a boy. But all this made Tallahassee charming. One likes old, dreamy, conservative, tree-shaded cities. One goes there to rest and doze, and sketch and write. It feeds the imagination. But what effect would such an environment produce in the case of a susceptible, healthy, perfectly balanced woman's nature, developed from childhood to maturity within its influence? In a word, how could Lucie La Rue, whose life had dawned, expanded, and reached its present stage of womanly dimensions, within this circle of isolated conservatism, be measured by the same standard as that by which we measure those girls who from infancy are kept in the full light of the most advanced means of culture? And yet the very narrowness of her experience seemed to have perfected in her that freshness, that subtile innocence, that flower-like purity, so rare and so captivating to the best elements of manhood; and the monumental conservatism which surrounded her, as with a wall, had preserved to her the very peach-down of girlish sweetness. It had also kept out of her way, until recently when Willard and Cauthorne came, all the young men who would be likely to woo her, save those belonging to the old first families of Tallahassee and affected by the same influences as herself. No doubt she had had her girlish dreams of the grand and beautiful man who some day would come into her little world from the great universe outside, and claim her as the errant knights and kings claimed their brides of old; but she had allowed Vance to approach closer and closer until they were engaged. She loved him as a good girl is apt to love a worthy man who courts her assiduously and discreetly on the threshold of her womanhood, with a love which often brings great married happiness, the unimpassioned love which is more like tender reverence and unbounded respect and admiration than like that hot frenzy of which the poets sing. Yet it was love of the purest and sweetest sort,—a love which will last after the sordid dregs of a burned-out passion lie like poison in the hollow of the heart.
The coming of Willard and Cauthorne into her sphere had acted as a disturbing force whose very dangers, being hidden as such from her consciousness, were beautifully fascinating. A change came into her life, and her dreams took on new colors. Willard, with his stories of art-life, and his sketchy way of delineating the scenes of grand society, his facile flattery and ready flexibility, his sudden bursts of sentiment, and withal his frankness and gentleness of manners, had been to her a messenger from a world she had greatly longed to see. When he was gone, and she realized that it was probably forever, she cried, hardly knowing why. It was as if a dear friend had died and gone to that other and far-away world. The old house seemed gloomier than ever before. She could scarcely quit sending cut flowers to his room; and she never heard the magnolia-bough brushing across the window without thinking of him, and heaving a little quick sigh. It was such a sigh as a mere child might give to the memory of a playfellow it has left beyond the ocean. She would sing the songs he loved, and wonder where he was, with a sense of loneliness in her heart which she never before had felt. Somehow the little dull town looked smaller and duller than ever, and the hills dryer and more barren.
Her rides and drives with Col. Vance were delightful in every way, and the evening promenades with him up and down the avenue of oaks in front of La Rue place were all that the ravishing weather and the tender communications of her lover could make them: neverthcless she contemplated with maidenly shyness their approaching nuptials, and would have been glad to postpone the wedding for at least a year; but she had surrendered to the importunities of Col. Vance, and to the oft-repeated wishes of her father, and now the day was close at hand.
Victor La Rue, whose love for his sister made him quick to notice the slightest change in her manner, had lately observed something in Lucie's face which seemed to indicate mental disquiet. Her cheeks bore each a little flush not usually there, and her eyes were restless. Her mouth drooped a little, and even her frequent smiles could not entirely dispel a certain lariguor which hung about her lips.
One day, while sitting under his favorite tree on the back lawn, Victor called to Lucie to come and read to him. The book he handed to her was a volume of Paul Hayne's poems. She read aloud, in her musical way, three or four of those charmingly sweet and graceful lyrics that the Southern poet knows so well how to make; then she put aside the dainty volume with a quickly-drawn sigh.
"It is hard work for me to read: the air is not good, is it?" she said, leaning back and putting her hands behind her head.
"It is you, sister, and not the air," said Victor in reply: "you are not happy; I know you are not. I've been watching you for two or three days, and you don't act like yourself. What is it, Lu?"
He always called her Lu when he felt particularly like petting her.
"Oh, nothing at all!" she exclaimed, taking down her hands, and beginning to stroke Victor's hair. "I'm just a little bit lazy, I guess."
"Now you are trying to hide it," he said gravely: "it isn't right to do that, Lu, and you know it isn't. You must tell me what is troubling you."
"But when I don't know, myself, how can I?" she replied. "It's nothing, in fact."
"Sister," said Victor almost sternly, "you have been secretly suffering for several days, and I have been indulging many fears for your happiness. Will you answer me one easy question?"
She looked at her brother quickly, and without hesitation replied,—
"Yes, to be sure," and laughed very lightly and naturally. "I've no secrets, Victor."
"If you have no secrets, I don't care to ask any questions," he rejoined; "but I was going to put a very strange one."
"Ask it," she exclaimed, still smiling: "I'll answer it that quick," snapping her fingers in a playful way.
"You are too anxious," he responded. "I was mistaken, I guess."
Two gay-winged birds fell fighting through the air to the ground near by, and continued their battle there, rolling and pecking and fluttering noisily.
"War, war," exclaimed Victor, gazing at the struggling combatants. "Maim each other, if you can, poor little wretches!"
Lucie rose and went towards the birds. She had nearly reached them when they separated, and flew away in opposite directions, leaving on the ground a single bright feather. She stooped and picked this up.
"It was a mimic fight," she exclaimed: "the blood is only a red breast-feather! I will wear this for the sake of the little knight who wrenched it from his antagonist." She fastened the scarlet trophy at her throat, where it shone like some flower-petal accidentally caught there.
Returning to her place beside her brother, she hummed a snatch from an old song, and gazed abstractedly up into the tree-tops.
Victor watched her in silence. Presently she said,—
"It is time for Mr. Cauthorne to return, I should think."
Victor moved uneasily in his seat at the sound of that name. He had been unwell lately, and inclined to brood over his misfortunes. His leg had pained him, and his crutches chafed him. His face had grown more sallow.
"Is there any danger down in the Wakulla country, Victor?" Lucy added after a while.
"I don't know," he answered: "they are mostly negroes who live there, harmless I should judge. There may be some dangerous characters, however,—fellows who would kill a man for his watch."
"I wish he hadn't gone. It is a profitless undertaking," she resumed, toying with one of Victor's crutches, and sighing again.
"Oh! if he wishes to go wallowing around in those malarious swamps until he takes fever, and dies, or till he's killed and robbed by negroes, it's his own fault," exclaimed Victor petulantly: "he wouldn't hear advice."
A sudden pallor went over Lucie's face. She looked into her brother's eyes, and then allowed her glance to wander restlessly from object to object.
Victor saw it all, and there came into his mind a half-formed suspicion. He contracted his brows, and pondered.
"He has been gone more than two weeks," said Lucie after a long silence. "We ought at least to have heard from him: it's only twenty-eight miles away."
"Oh! he'd likely not think of us any more after he was gone. He may be in New York by this time. He could take a steamer at St. Mark's, I suppose." Victor said this very deliberately, meanwhile closely watching his sister's face.
She looked troubled, and moved restlessly. His suspicions took deeper root, and clearer outlines. With a sort of hysterical promptness he decided upon his course.
"Lucie," he said, "are you going to be very happy after you're married?"
She came back from her painful thoughts of Cauthorne, with a blush and a smile; but the worried look lingered in her eyes.
"Yes, brother," she replied: "Arthur and I will be the happiest couple on earth; don't you think we will?"
She turned her eyes away from his intense and searching gaze.
"Lu," he said, "I want you to be happy. I pray God you may never see any sorrow. You are the only one of us left to be happy. Father is getting old, and I am"—
"Dear brother," she exclaimed, putting an arm around his neck, and kissing his forehead.
"I must tell you a strange thing," he said, "a very strange thing, which it would be a sin to keep from you any longer." He hesitated a moment, and then went on, "You know I have always said that if I should ever meet the man who shot me at Chickamauga, I could not fail to recognize him. Well, I have found him."
She started back from him. With her hands upon his shoulders she gazed into his face. That mysterious power, which belongs exclusively to woman, was at work. She was reading the rest of the story in his eyes.
He waited for her to question him, or signify a desire to know more; but she sat there motionless, voiceless, looking into his very thoughts, as it seemed.
"I am sorry I ever found him," he at last added: "it has made me doubly wretched."
"You won't do any thing bad, Victor?" she said in a low, tremulous voice.
"No," he replied, "no, there is evil enough done already. Can you imagine who he is?"
She did not answer. She took her hands from his shoulders, and let them fall upon her lap.
"Cauthorne," he said in a husky voice.
Lucie remained silent. There was such confusion of thoughts in her mind, that all was blurred and indistinct.
A foot-fall sounded near, and looking up they saw Col. Vance standing before them. He was regarding Lucie with a quiet, happy smile in his fine dark eyes. She sprang up to meet him, and arm in arm they strolled away among the trees.
The breeze rippled over them, and whispered to them, the long moss waved its pale green banners, the flowers gleamed at their feet, and sent up perfume, the leaves rustled, and the birds sang wildly well. The sky was a blessing, and the earth a comfort. The blue, dreamy line of hills that notched the horizon shut out from them all the evil of the great outside world. Their murmuring voices, so in accord with nature's tones, were blown among the leaves and flowers, across the sunshine and the shade, till they could not be distinguished from the drowsy hum of the insects.
