Dr. Sevier

A quiet order for attention runs down the column. Attention it is. Another order follows, higher-keyed, longer drawn out, and with one sharp “clack!” the sword-bayoneted rifles go to the shoulders of as fine a battalion as any in the land of Dixie.

“En avant!” – Narcisse’s heart stands still for joy – “Marche!”

The bugle rings, the drums beat; “tramp, tramp,” in quick succession, go the short-stepping, nimble Creole feet, and the old walls of the Rue Chartres ring again with the pealing huzza, as they rang in the days of Villeré and Lafrénière, and in the days of the young Galvez, and in the days of Jackson.

The old Ponchartrain cars move off, packed. Down at the “Old Lake End” the steamer for Mobile receives the burden. The gong clangs in her engine-room, the walking-beam silently stirs, there is a hiss of water underneath, the gang-plank is in, the wet hawser-ends whip through the hawse-holes, – she moves; clang goes the gong again – she glides – or is it the crowded wharf that is gliding? – No. – Snatch the kisses! snatch them! Adieu! Adieu! She’s off, huzza – she’s off!

Now she stands away. See the mass of gay colors – red, gold, blue, yellow, with glitter of steel and flutter of flags, a black veil of smoke sweeping over. Wave, mothers and daughters, wives, sisters, sweethearts – wave, wave; you little know the future!

And now she is a little thing, her white wake following her afar across the green waters, the call of the bugle floating softly back. And now she is a speck. And now a little smoky stain against the eastern blue is all, – and now she is gone. Gone! Gone!

Farewell, soldier boys! Light-hearted, little-forecasting, brave, merry boys! God accept you, our offering of first fruits! See that mother – that wife – take them away; it is too much. Comfort them, father, brother; tell them their tears may be for naught.

“And yet – and yet – we cannot forgetThat many brave boys must fall.”

Never so glad a day had risen upon the head of Narcisse. For the first time in his life he moved beyond the corporate limits of his native town.

“‘Ezcape fum the aunt, thou sluggud!’” “Au ’evoi’” to his aunt and the uncle of his aunt. “Au ’evoi’! Au ’evoi’!” – desk, pen, book – work, care, thought, restraint – all sinking, sinking beneath the receding horizon of Lake Ponchartrain, and the wide world and a soldier’s life before him.

Farewell, Byronic youth! You are not of so frail a stuff as you have seemed. You shall thirst by day and hunger by night. You shall keep vigil on the sands of the Gulf and on the banks of the Potomac. You shall grow brown, but prettier. You shall shiver in loathsome tatters, yet keep your grace, your courtesy, your joyousness. You shall ditch and lie down in ditches, and shall sing your saucy songs of defiance in the face of the foe, so blackened with powder and dust and smoke that your mother in heaven would not know her child. And you shall borrow to your heart’s content chickens, hogs, rails, milk, buttermilk, sweet potatoes, what not; and shall learn the American songs, and by the camp-fire of Shenandoah valley sing “The years creep slowly by, Lorena” to messmates with shaded eyes, and “Her bright smile haunts me still.” Ah, boy! there’s an old woman still living in the Rue Casa Calvo – your bright smile haunts her still. And there shall be blood on your sword, and blood – twice – thrice – on your brow. Your captain shall die in your arms; and you shall lead charge after charge, and shall step up from rank to rank; and all at once, one day, just in the final onset, with the cheer on your lips, and your red sword waving high, with but one lightning stroke of agony, down, down you shall go in the death of your dearest choice.

CHAPTER LI.

BLUE BONNETS OVER THE BORDER

One morning, about the 1st of June, 1861, in the city of New York, two men of the mercantile class came from a cross street into Broadway, near what was then the upper region of its wholesale stores. They paused on the corner, near the edge of the sidewalk.

“Even when the States were seceding,” said one of them, “I couldn’t make up my mind that they really meant to break up the Union.”

He had rosy cheeks, a retreating chin, and amiable, inquiring eyes. The other had a narrower face, alert eyes, thin nostrils, and a generally aggressive look. He did not reply at once, but, after a quick glance down the great thoroughfare and another one up it, said, while his eyes still ran here and there: —

“Wonderful street, this Broadway!”

He straightened up to his fullest height and looked again, now down the way, now up, his eye kindling with the electric contagion of the scene. His senses were all awake. They took in, with a spirit of welcome, all the vast movement: the uproar, the feeling of unbounded multitude, the commercial splendor, the miles of towering buildings; the long, writhing, grinding mass of coming and going vehicles, the rush of innumerable feet, and the countless forms and faces hurrying, dancing, gliding by, as though all the world’s mankind, and womankind, and childhood must pass that way before night.

“How many people, do you suppose, go by this corner in a single hour?” asked the man with the retreating chin. But again he got no answer. He might as well not have yielded the topic of conversation as he had done; so he resumed it. “No, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Why, look at the Southern vote of last November – look at New Orleans. The way it went there, I shouldn’t have supposed twenty-five per cent. of the people would be in favor of secession. Would you?”

But his companion, instead of looking at New Orleans, took note of two women who had come to a halt within a yard of them and seemed to be waiting, as he and his companion were, for an opportunity to cross the street. The two new-comers were very different in appearance, the one from the other. The older and larger was much beyond middle life, red, fat, and dressed in black stuff, good as to fabric, but uncommonly bad as to fit. The other was young and pretty, refined, tastefully dressed, and only the more interesting for the look of permanent anxiety that asserted itself with distinctness about the corners of her eyes and mouth. She held by the hand a rosy, chubby little child, that seemed about three years old, and might be a girl or might be a boy, so far as could be discerned by masculine eyes. The man did not see this fifth member of their group until the elder woman caught it under the arms in her large hands, and, lifting it above her shoulder, said, looking far up the street: —

“O paypy, paypy, choost look de fla-ags! One, two, dtree, – a tuzzent, a hundut, a dtowsant fla-ags!”

Evidently the child did not know her well. The little face remained without a smile, the lips sealed, the shoulders drawn up, and the legs pointing straight to the spot whence they had been lifted. She set it down again.

“We’re not going to get by here,” said the less talkative man. “They must be expecting some troops to pass here. Don’t you see the windows full of women and children?”

“Let’s wait and look at them,” responded the other, and his companion did not dissent.

“Well, sir,” said the more communicative one, after a moment’s contemplation, “I never expected to see this!” He indicated by a gesture the stupendous life of Broadway beginning slowly to roll back upon itself like an obstructed river. It was obviously gathering in a general pause to concentrate its attention upon something of leading interest about to appear to view. “We’re in earnest at last, and we can see, now, that the South was in the deadest kind of earnest from the word go.”

“They can’t be any more in earnest than we are, now,” said the more decided speaker.

“I had great hopes of the peace convention,” said the rosier man.

“I never had a bit,” responded the other.

“The suspense was awful – waiting to know what Lincoln would do when he came in,” said he of the poor chin. “My wife was in the South visiting her relatives; and we kept putting off her return, hoping for a quieter state of affairs – hoping and putting off – till first thing you knew the lines closed down and she had the hardest kind of a job to get through.”

“I never had a doubt as to what Lincoln would do,” said the man with sharp eyes; but while he spoke he covertly rubbed his companion’s elbow with his own, and by his glance toward the younger of the two women gave him to understand that, though her face was partly turned away, the very pretty ear, with no ear-ring in the hole pierced for it, was listening. And the readier speaker rejoined in a suppressed voice: —

“That’s the little lady I travelled in the same car with all the way from Chicago.”

“No times for ladies to be travelling alone,” muttered the other.

“She hoped to take a steam-ship for New Orleans, to join her husband there.”

“Some rebel fellow, I suppose.”

“No, a Union man, she says.”

“Oh, of course!” said the sharp-eyed one, sceptically. “Well, she’s missed it. The last steamer’s gone and may get back or may not.” He looked at her again, narrowly, from behind his companion’s shoulder. She was stooping slightly toward the child, rearranging some tie under its lifted chin and answering its questions in what seemed a chastened voice. He murmured to his fellow, “How do you know she isn’t a spy?”

The other one turned upon him a look of pure amusement, but, seeing the set lips and earnest eye of his companion, said softly, with a faint, scouting hiss and smile: —

“She’s a perfect lady – a perfect one.”

“Her friend isn’t,” said the aggressive man.

“Here they come,” observed the other aloud, looking up the street. There was a general turning of attention and concentration of the street’s population toward the edge of either sidewalk. A force of police was clearing back into the by-streets a dense tangle of drays, wagons, carriages, and white-topped omnibuses, and far up the way could be seen the fluttering and tossing of handkerchiefs, and in the midst a solid mass of blue with a sheen of bayonets above, and every now and then a brazen reflection from in front, where the martial band marched before. It was not playing. The ear caught distantly, instead of its notes, the warlike thunder of the drum corps.

The sharper man nudged his companion mysteriously.

“Listen,” he whispered. Neither they nor the other pair had materially changed their relative positions. The older woman was speaking.

“’Twas te fun’est dting! You pe lookin’ for te Noo ’Leants shteamer, undt me lookin’ for te Hambourg shteamer, undt coompt right so togeder undt never vouldn’t ’a’ knowedt udt yet, ovver te mayne exdt me, ‘Misses Reisen, vot iss your name?’ undt you headt udt. Undt te minudt you shpeak, udt choost come to me like a flash o’ lightenin’ – ‘Udt iss Misses Richlin’!’” The speaker’s companion gave her such attention as one may give in a crowd to words that have been heard two or three times already within the hour.

“Yes, Alice,” she said, once or twice to the little one, who pulled softly at her skirt asking confidential questions. But the baker’s widow went on with her story, enjoying it for its own sake.

“You know, Mr. Richlin’ he told me finfty dtimes, ‘Misses Reisen, doant kif up te pissness!’ Ovver I see te mutcheenery proke undt te foundtries all makin’ guns undt kennons, undt I choost says, ‘I kot plenteh moneh – I tdtink I kfit undt go home.’ Ovver I sayss to de Doctor, ‘Dte oneh dting – vot Mr. Richlin’ ko-in to tdo?’ Undt Dr. Tseweer he sayss, ‘How menneh pa’ls flour you kot shtowed away?’ Undt I sayss, ‘Tsoo hundut finfty.’ Undt he sayss, ‘Misses Reisen, Mr. Richlin’ done made you rich; you choost kif um dtat flour; udt be wort’ tweny-fife tollahs te pa’l, yet.’ Undt sayss I, ‘Doctor, you’ right, undt I dtank you for te goodt idea; I kif Mr. Richlin’ innahow one pa’l.’ Undt I done-d it. Ovver I sayss, ‘Doctor, dtat’s not like a rigler sellery, yet.’ Undt dten he sayss, ‘You know, mine pookkeeper he gone to te vor, undt I need’” —

A crash of brazen music burst upon the ear and drowned the voice. The throng of the sidewalk pushed hard upon its edge.

“Let me hold the little girl up,” ventured the milder man, and set her gently upon his shoulder, as amidst a confusion of outcries and flutter of hats and handkerchiefs the broad, dense column came on with measured tread, its stars and stripes waving in the breeze and its backward-slanting thicket of bayoneted arms glittering in the morning sun. All at once there arose from the great column, in harmony with the pealing music, the hoarse roar of the soldiers’ own voices singing in time to the rhythm of their tread. And a thrill runs through the people, and they answer with mad huzzas and frantic wavings and smiles, half of wild ardor and half of wild pain; and the keen-eyed man here by Mary lets the tears roll down his cheeks unhindered as he swings his hat and cries “Hurrah! hurrah!” while on tramps the mighty column, singing from its thousand thirsty throats the song of John Brown’s Body.

Yea, so, soldiers of the Union, – though that little mother there weeps but does not wave, as the sharp-eyed man notes well through his tears, – yet even so, yea, all the more, go – “go marching on,” saviors of the Union; your cause is just. Lo, now, since nigh twenty-five years have passed, we of the South can say it!

“And yet – and yet, we cannot forget” —

and we would not.

CHAPTER LII.

A PASS THROUGH THE LINES

About the middle of September following the date of the foregoing incident, there occurred in a farmhouse head-quarters on the Indiana shore of the Ohio river the following conversation: —

“You say you wish me to give you a pass through the lines, ma’am. Why do you wish to go through?”

“I want to join my husband in New Orleans.”

“Why, ma’am, you’d much better let New Orleans come through the lines. We shall have possession of it, most likely, within a month.” The speaker smiled very pleasantly, for very pleasant and sweet was the young face before him, despite its lines of mental distress, and very soft and melodious the voice that proceeded from it.

“Do you think so?” replied the applicant, with an unhopeful smile. “My friends have been keeping me at home for months on that idea, but the fact seems as far off now as ever. I should go straight through without stopping, if I had a pass.”

“Ho!” exclaimed the man, softly, with pitying amusement. “Certainly, I understand you would try to do so. But, my dear madam, you would find yourself very much mistaken. Suppose, now, we should let you through our lines. You’d be between two fires. You’d still have to get into the rebel lines. You don’t know what you’re undertaking.”

She smiled wistfully.

“I’m undertaking to get to my husband.”

“Yes, yes,” said the officer, pulling his handkerchief from between two brass buttons of his double-breasted coat and wiping his brow. She did not notice that he made this motion purely as a cover for the searching glance which he suddenly gave her from head to foot. “Yes,” he continued, “but you don’t know what it is, ma’am. After you get through the other lines, what are you going to do then? There’s a perfect reign of terror over there. I wouldn’t let a lady relative of mine take such risks for thousands of dollars. I don’t think your husband ought to thank me for giving you a pass. You say he’s a Union man; why don’t he come to you?”

Tears leaped into the applicant’s eyes.

“He’s become too sick to travel,” she said.

“Lately?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t heard from him for months.” The officer looked at her with narrowed eyes.

“I said I hadn’t had a letter from him.” The speaker blushed to find her veracity on trial. She bit her lip, and added, with perceptible tremor: “I got one lately from his physician.”

“How did you get it?”

“What, sir?”

“Now, madam, you know what I asked you, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes. Well, I’d like you to answer.”

“I found it, three mornings ago, under the front door of the house where I live with my mother and my little girl.”

“Who put it there?”

“I do not know.”

The officer looked her steadily in the eyes. They were blue. His own dropped.

“You ought to have brought that letter with you, ma’am,” he said, looking up again; “don’t you see how valuable it would be to you?”

“I did bring it,” she replied, with alacrity, rummaged a moment in a skirt-pocket, and brought it out. The officer received it and read the superscription audibly.

“‘Mrs. John H – .’ Are you Mrs. John H – ?”

“That is not the envelope it was in,” she replied. “It was not directed at all. I put it into that envelope merely to preserve it. That’s the envelope of a different letter, – a letter from my mother.”

“Are you Mrs. John H – ?” asked her questioner again. She had turned partly aside and was looking across the apartment and out through a window. He spoke once more. “Is this your name?”

“What, sir?”

He smiled cynically.

“Please don’t do that again, madam.”

She blushed down into the collar of her dress.

“That is my name, sir.”

The man put the missive to his nose, snuffed it softly, and looked amused, yet displeased.

“Mrs. H – , did you notice just a faint smell of – garlic – about this – ?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I have no less than three or four others with the very same odor.” He smiled on. “And so, no doubt, we are both of the same private opinion that the bearer of this letter was – who, Mrs. H – ?”

Mrs. H – frequently by turns raised her eyes honestly to her questioner’s and dropped them to where, in her lap, the fingers of one hand fumbled with a lone wedding-ring on the other, while she said: —

“Do you think, sir, if you were in my place you would like to give the name of the person you thought had risked his life to bring you word that your husband – your wife – was very ill, and needed your presence? Would you like to do it?”

The officer looked severe.

“Don’t you know perfectly well that wasn’t his principal errand inside our lines?”

“No.”

“No!” echoed the man; “and you don’t know perfectly well, I suppose, that he’s been shot at along this line times enough to have turned his hair white? Or that he crossed the river for the third time last night, loaded down with musket-caps for the rebels?”

“No.”

“But you must admit you know a certain person, wherever he may be, or whatever he may be doing, named Raphael Ristofalo?”

“I do not.”

The officer smiled again.

“Yes, I see. That is to say, you don’t admit it. And you don’t deny it.”

The reply came more slowly: —

“I do not.”

“Well, now, Mrs. H – , I’ve given you a pretty long audience. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. But do you please tell me, first, you affirm on your word of honor that your name is really Mrs. H – ; that you are no spy, and have had no voluntary communication with any, and that you are a true and sincere Union woman.”

“I affirm it all.”

“Well, then, come in to-morrow at this hour, and if I am going to give you a pass at all I’ll give it to you then. Here, here’s your letter.”

As she received the missive she lifted her eyes, suffused, but full of hope, to his, and said: —

“God grant you the heart to do it, sir, and bless you.”

The man laughed. Her eyes fell, she blushed, and, saying not a word, turned toward the door and had reached the threshold when the officer called, with a certain ringing energy: —

“Mrs. Richling!”

She wheeled as if he had struck her, and answered: —

“What, sir!” Then, turning as red as a rose, she said, “O sir, that was cruel!” covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud. It was only as she was in the midst of these last words that she recognized in the officer before her the sharper-visaged of those two men who had stood by her in Broadway.

“Step back here, Mrs. Richling.”

She came.

“Well, madam! I should like to know what we are coming to, when a lady like you – a palpable, undoubted lady – can stoop to such deceptions!”

“Sir,” said Mary, looking at him steadfastly and then shaking her head in solemn asseveration, “all that I have said to you is the truth.”

“Then will you explain how it is that you go by one name in one part of the country, and by another in another part?”

“No,” she said. It was very hard to speak. The twitching of her mouth would hardly let her form a word. “No – no – I can’t – tell you.”

“Very well, ma’am. If you don’t start back to Milwaukee by the next train, and stay there, I shall” —

“Oh, don’t say that, sir! I must go to my husband! Indeed, sir, it’s nothing but a foolish mistake, made years ago, that’s never harmed any one but us. I’ll take all the blame of it if you’ll only give me a pass!”

The officer motioned her to be silent.

“You’ll have to do as I tell you, ma’am. If not, I shall know it; you will be arrested, and I shall give you a sort of pass that you’d be a long time asking for.” He looked at the face mutely confronting him and felt himself relenting. “I dare say this does sound very cruel to you, ma’am; but remember, this is a cruel war. I don’t judge you. If I did, and could harden my heart as I ought to, I’d have you arrested now. But, I say, you’d better take my advice. Good-morning! No, ma’am, I can’t hear you! So, now, that’s enough! Good-morning, madam!”

CHAPTER LIII.

TRY AGAIN

One afternoon in the month of February, 1862, a locomotive engine and a single weather-beaten passenger-coach, moving southward at a very moderate speed through the middle of Kentucky, stopped in response to a handkerchief signal at the southern end of a deep, rocky valley, and, in a patch of gray, snow-flecked woods, took on board Mary Richling, dressed in deep mourning, and her little Alice. The three or four passengers already in the coach saw no sign of human life through the closed panes save the roof of one small cabin that sent up its slender thread of blue smoke at one corner of a little badly cleared field a quarter of a mile away on a huge hill-side. As the scant train crawled off again into a deep, ice-hung defile, it passed the silent figure of a man in butternut homespun, spattered with dry mud, standing close beside the track on a heap of cross-tie cinders and fire-bent railroad iron, a gray goat-beard under his chin, and a quilted homespun hat on his head. From beneath the limp brim of this covering, as the train moved by him, a tender, silly smile beamed upward toward one hastily raised window, whence the smile of Mary and the grave, unemotional gaze of the child met it for a moment before the train swung round a curve in the narrow way, and quickened speed on down grade.

The conductor came and collected her fare. He smelt of tobacco above the smell of the coach in general.

“Do you charge anything for the little girl?”

The purse in which the inquirer’s finger and thumb tarried was limber and flat.

“No, ma’am.”

It was not the customary official negative; a tawdry benevolence of face went with it, as if to say he did not charge because he would not; and when Mary returned a faint beam of appreciation he went out upon the rear platform and wiped the plenteous dust from his shoulders and cap. Then he returned to his seat at the stove and renewed his conversation with a lieutenant in hard-used blue, who said “the rebel lines ought never to have been allowed to fall back to Nashville,” and who knew “how Grant could have taken Fort Donelson a week ago if he had had any sense.”

There were but few persons, as we have said, in the car. A rough man in one corner had a little captive, a tiny, dappled fawn, tied by a short, rough bit of rope to the foot of the car-seat. When the conductor by and by lifted the little Alice up from the cushion, where she sat with her bootees straight in front of her at its edge, and carried her, speechless and drawn together like a kitten, and stood her beside the captive orphan, she simply turned about and pattered back to her mother’s side.

“I don’t believe she even saw it,” said the conductor, standing again by Mary.

“Yes, she did,” replied Mary, smiling upon the child’s head as she smoothed its golden curls; “she’ll talk about it to-morrow.”

The conductor lingered a moment, wanting to put his own hand there, but did not venture, perhaps because of the person sitting on the next seat behind, who looked at him rather steadily until he began to move away.