The Iron Game - Henry Francis Keenan
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One glimpse revealed the dog with distended tongue and half-glazed eyes,
but still alive. Jack loosed the band from the neck. The dog gave a
convulsive thrill and uttered a plaintive moan.
"Set a basin of water down here. He may recover. Poor fellow! This was a
cruel return for his kindness to Wesley," Jack said, forcing the dog's
nose into the basin. He began to lap the cool water greedily. But now
Dick, in the doorway, littered a cry.
"They are in the house. I hear them moving in the vestibule. Come, for
God's sake, Jack! They are making for Mrs. Atterbury's apartment.
Evidently some one who knows that the family jewels are there, for what
else can they want?"
The dog staggered to his feet as the two stole softly from the room.
They followed with high-wrought, loudly-beating hearts and tingling
nerves. The marauders in front of them moved on like men accustomed to
the house. They made, as the light footfalls indicated, straight for
Mrs. Atterbury's door, which, unlike the others, fronted the length of
the hall in a small vestibule sunk into the lateral wall. The invaders
were thus screened from Jack and Dick when they had turned the corner,
and the latter were forced to move with painful caution to get the
advantage of surprise to offset superior numbers. But now a new peril
menaces them. A shuffling in the long corridor behind them freezes the
current of their blood. They have been caught in a trap. There are two
forces in the house. They both turn and halt, silent and trembling,
against the south wall and wait. The steps still advance, the scraping
of the nailed boots tears the light matting.
"We will wait until the new-comer or new-comers are abreast," Jack
breathes in Dick's ear, "and then fire a volley into them point blank."
At the instant Rosa's shriek, blood-curdling and electric, breaks from
the corner. Dick is over the intervening steps in two mighty bounds,
Jack at his heels and the foe in the rear following. Against the open
window Dick catches the outlines of his darling in the brawny arms of
Tarquin. He has the advantage of the light, and, as the ruffian retreats
to the window, Dick is at his side, and in an instant deals him a
stunning blow on the head. Jack, in the dim light, sees the dark figure
dashing at him with the gleam of steel in his hand. He levels his
weapon, three reports ring out at once, and the miserable Wesley falls
with a dreadful gurgling gasp on the floor.
But there are interlopers in the rear as well! Jack turned to confront
them. He realized vaguely hearing a struggle as he confronted the
robbers. Ah! yes, the dog; the dog has come upon the scene. There is
sound of low, fierce, growling, flying footsteps on the floor, and Jack,
assuring himself by a quick glance that there were no more marauders in
the room, hurried to see that the front door was closed before
re-enforcements could come to the invaders. But Pizarro's lusty growls,
denoting recovered strength, attracted him kitchenward, and he
encountered Barney, and with Barney something of a clew to the hideous
attempt. One prayer was in his heart--one hope--that Wesley had escaped;
but with shuddering horror he hastened with Barney back to the scene of
blood and death. The great candelabra on the mantel had been lighted,
and the room was visible as in daylight. Jack halted, transfixed,
horror-stricken, in the doorway. The women in hastily snatched robes
were all there, and on the floor, wailing over the dead body of Wesley,
Kate sat, prone and disheveled, calling to him to look at her, to speak
to her, as she kissed the cold lips in incredulous despair. She paid no
heed to Mrs. Atterbury, to Olympia, kneeling beside her--all her heart,
all her senses benumbed in the agony of the cruel blow. Jack moved to
the piteous group, and, dropping on his knees, felt the lifeless pulse,
and sank back, pale and shrinking, with the feeling that he was a
murderer. Mrs. Atterbury turned to him, crying convulsively:
"Oh, what does it mean, Mr. Sprague? what does it mean?"
"It is a dreadful game of cross-purposes. These unhappy men believed Mr.
Davis to be in this room when they entered. They meant to capture him
and carry him North."
"Ah, thank God! thank God! who carried our President away in time," and
the matron clasped her hands fervently as she sank in a chair. But the
sight of Kate, woe-begone, feverishly caressing the dead brother,
brought the tenderer instincts back. She rose again, and, clasping her
arms about the poor girl, said pleadingly:
"Let him be carried to his room; you are covered with blood."
"Ah, it is his blood, his innocent blood! Murdered, when he should have
found merry."
Jack found tongue now. He was hideously calm--the frightful calm of
great-hearted men, who use mirth, levity, and indolency to hide emotion.
"Miss Boone--Kate it was perhaps the shot from my pistol that killed
Wesley. I did it in defense of women in peril, in defense of my own
life. It was an accident in one sense. Had I known the circumstances I
certainly shouldn't have fired, but you must put the blame on me, not
upon this guiltless household."
She looked up at him--looked with a wild, despairing, unbelieving gaze,
pressing the handsome dead face to her bosom, and then, with a wild,
wailing sob, bent her head until the shining dark mass of hair fell like
a funeral veil over her own and the dead face. Rosa, who had disappeared
in the dressing-room, now entered the chamber. Turning from the woful
group on the floor, she glanced hastily about, as if in search of some
one. Her eyes fell upon Dick, dazed and bleeding, on the couch. She ran
to him with a tender cry.
"O Richard! are you hurt? Great heavens! your face is all blood. You are
wounded. O mamma, come--come--Richard is dying!"
The boy tried his best to smile, holding his hand over his left side, as
if stifling pain. He smiled--a bright, contented happy smile--as Rosa
knelt, sobbing, by his side, and, opening his jacket, baring the
blood-stained shirt, plucked a purplish rose from the bleeding bosom.
"The white rose is red now, Rosa."
"Oh, my darling! my darling!" Rosa sobbed; and the boy, smiling in the
joy of it, tried to raise himself to fold her in his arms. But the long
tension had been too much--he fell back unconscious.
Olympia saw that Mrs. Atterbury, the natural head of the house, was
unequal to the dismal burden of control. She took the painful duty of
order upon herself, sent Jack to summon the servants, called Barney to
her aid in removing Dick to his room, and, when the terrified housemaids
came, distributed the rest to the nearest apartments. Morning had dawned
when the work was done, and then Jack set out to investigate the
condition of the quarters. Twenty or more of the negroes had
disappeared. It was easy to trace them to the swamp, but Jack made no
attempt to organize a pursuit. Blood could be traced on the white shell
path leading to the rose-fields, and the pond gate was wide open. He
reported the state of affairs to Mrs. Atterbury. She begged him to take
horse to Williamsburg, bring the surgeon, and deliver a note to the
commanding officer. He returned in two hours with the surgeon, and a
half-hour later a cavalry troop clattered into the grounds.
Dick's wound was first examined. The ball had entered the fleshy part of
his chest, just under the armpit. It was readily extracted, and, if so
much blood had not been lost, the boy would not be in serious danger.
Wesley had died almost instantly. The ball entered his breast just above
the heart. He had passed away painlessly. Jones was shot through the
right shoulder, the ball passing clear across the breast, grazing the
upper ribs, and lodging just above the left lung. He was, by Mrs.
Atterbury's command, removed to the quarters and delivered to the
commander of the cavalry troop as a spy, an inciter of servile
insurrection. By order of the department commander, civilians were
refused all communication with him, as the Davis cabinet meant to make a
stern example so soon as he was able to bear trial. Mrs. Atterbury
announced to Jack and Olympia that so soon as Dick could bear removal
the house would be closed and the family return to Richmond. They heard
this with relief, for the place had become hideous to all now. To Jack
it was a reminder of his misfortune, and to every one of the group it
was associated with crime, treason, and blood. The hardest part of poor
Jack's burden was the seizure of Barney, who was marched off by the
cavalry commander. Vincent gone, Jack had no one to reach the ear of
authority, and he shrank from asking the intervention of the mistress
whose home had been invaded by the guiltless culprit. The case was
stated with all the eloquence Jack was master of to the captain
in command.
"You are a soldier, sir," the officer replied. "You know I have no
latitude in the matter. This Moore has no status as a regular prisoner
of war; he is found on the premises of a non-combatant aiding servile
insurrection. Even President Davis himself could not intervene. The
Southern people are deeply agitated by Butler's attempts to arouse the
negroes. We have been weakened, robbed by the abduction of hundreds
right here on the Peninsula. The gang that Moore came here with was led
by this scoundrel Jones, who is Butler's agent. A very vigorous example
must be made of these wretches, or the country-side will be deserted and
the government will be without produce. We must inspire confidence in
the owners of plantations, or the soldiers in the army will have to come
back to guard their homes."
Jack saw the futility of further pleading. The officer was
unquestionably right. Such scenes as Rosedale had witnessed would end in
the desertion of the rural regions of the Confederacy. At Mrs.
Atterbury's urgent intercession Kate was permitted to leave the lines
with her dead. She was conducted to the rebel outposts in the Atterbury
carriage, and under a flag of truce entered the Union lines near
Hampton. Olympia accompanied her in the carriage, Jack riding with the
escort. Kate refused every suggestion to see Jack; refused his own
prayerful message, and sternly, solemnly with her dead passed from the
scene of her sorrows.
Youth and something else stronger than medicine, more tenacious than any
other motive that keeps the life-current brisk and vigorous, made Dick's
recovery swift and sure. Rosa had no torments for him now. The blood-red
rose had proved a magician's amulet to confirm her mind in the sweet
teachings of her heart. But the patrician mother was with difficulty
brought to listen to the tying of this love-knot. She had looked forward
to a grand alliance for the heiress of Rosedale--an alliance that should
bring the family high up in the dominant hierarchy of the South. She
listened silently to the young girl's pleading prattle of the boy's
bravery, his wit, his manliness. She did not say no, but she hoped to
find a way to distract her daughter from a _mesalliance_, which would
not only diminish her child's rank, but compromise the family
politically. Such a sacrifice could not be. Fortunately, both were mere
children, and the knot would unravel itself without perplexities that
maturer love would have involved. So the mother smiled on the happy
girl, kissed Dick tenderly morning and night, for he had been a hero in
their defense, and she was too kindly of heart, too loyal to obligation,
to permit Dick's attitude of suitor to lessen her fondness and
admiration for the bright, handsome lad. Olympia was the confidante of
both the lovers, listened with her usual good-humor to the boy's
raptures and the girl's panegyrics, and soon came to share Jack's high
place in the happy lovers' devotion.
CHAPTER XXII.
A CARPET-KNIGHT.
Jack meanwhile sank into incurable gloom. The memory of Kate's mute,
reproachful look, her heart-broken outcry, never quitted him. He woke at
times with the dead eyes of Wesley staring into the night at him, the
convicting gaze of Kate fastened upon him. He must fly, or he must die
in this abhorred, guilt-haunted atmosphere. Olympia saw this, Mrs.
Atterbury saw it, and the first week in November Rosedale was turned
over to the military and the household re-established in the stately
house in the official quarter of Richmond, where the bustle and movement
of new conditions gave Jack's mind another direction, or, rather, took
it from the bitter brooding that threatened madness.
When the sun accepted the wind's challenge to contest for the traveler's
cloak, I dare say all the spectators of the novel highway robbery--the
moon, the stars, the trees, birds and beasts, and others that the fable
does not mention--took odds that the wind would snatch off the
wayfarer's garment in triumph. However, the wind whipped and thrashed
the poor man in vain. The stronger it blew and the more it walloped the
cloak's folds, the tighter and more determinedly the traveler held on to
it, as he plodded wearily over the hillside. But when the sun came
caressingly, inspiring gentle confidence, bathing the body in warm
moisture, the tenacious hold was relaxed, then the disputed coat was
thrown over his arm, and as the vista spread far away in golden light,
the victim cast the garment by the wayside and the sun came off victor.
Youth is despoiled of the garment of grief in this sort. Congenial
warmth, the sunshine of friendliness, soon relax the mantle of woe, and
the path that looks wintry and hard becomes a way of light and gayety.
It was by mingling--at first perfunctorily--in the gayety of the
Confederate capital that Jack lost the melancholy in which the tragedy
at Rosedale had clothed his spirits. At worst, the calamity was over; he
had been a guiltless vengeance in the punishment of Wesley's treason. So
he took bond in hope of better things to come. With a stout heart,
strong limbs, a plowman's appetite, and a natural bent to joyousness, a
youth of twenty-two or three is not apt to mistake his memories for his
hopes and hang the horizon in black when the sun is shining in his eyes!
Richmond, always the center of a fascinating society, was at that time
exuberant in her young metropolitan glories. It was the gayest capital
in the Western hemisphere. To resist its seductions would have tasked
the self-denial of a more constant anchorite than our dashing Jack ever
aspired to be, in the lowest stage of his martial vicissitudes. There
was nothing of the garishness of the parvenu in the capital's display.
The patrician caste ruled in camp and court. The walls that had echoed
to the oratory of Jefferson, Henry, Washington, Randolph, now housed the
young Congress of the new Confederacy. An hundred years of political,
military, legal, and social precedence were the inheritance of the men
chief in the cabinet, the council, and the camp. Stirring traditions
clung about every quarter of the town, now devoted to the offices of
administration, from the Mayo wharves to the lodgings of Washington and
Lafayette. On the stately square yonder, where the musing eye of the
rebel chief might study its history, stood the suggestive mansion where
Burr's treason was brought home to that first great rebel.
Not far distant the disdainful pointed out the tenement where Fremont
had instructed the Richmond youth in far other doctrines than those
which made him the abolitionist choice for President in after-times.
Royalist and republican glories mingled in the reliquary edifices that
met the wondering eyes of the provincial Confederates drawn to the
capital in the generous enthusiasm of that first prodigious achievement
at Bull Run. Here a royal Governor had dwelt, yonder a Bonaparte had
sojourned and beguiled the famous beauties of Powhatan, as the
patriarchs loved to call the city. A Lee was the chief of the military
staff, a Randolph ruled the war office; scions of the Washingtons family
filled a dozen subordinate places; the kin of Patrick Henry revived
their ancestor's glory by as zealous a devotion to the new revolution.
With personages like these in every office the society of the new
capital revived the brilliancy of the French Directory and also the
character of the States-General, while Holland held the Spains at bay.
The blockade had not yet pinched the affluent, nor beggared the
industries of the well-to-do. Always famous for a brilliant bar, a
learned judiciary, and a cultivated taste among its women, Richmond in
1861 was the ideal of a political, military, and social rendezvous of a
young nation.
The raw legions had been victorious in the first pitched battle of the
war on the plains of Manassas, and what might not be reasonably hoped
from them under the training of such muster-minds as Johnston,
Beauregard, Jackson, and Lee? Wasn't it the common talk among diplomats,
the concurrent opinion of the French and English press, the despairing
admission of the half-hearted and panic-stricken North, that one more
such decisive victory would bring the South peace and independence?
Wasn't it, indeed, well known among the favored juntas that those
sagacious diplomats, Senators Mason and Slidell, had delayed their
journey to Europe in order to aid the President in the treaty of peace
that the victorious legions of Johnston were to exact in Washington?
Jack was amazed and disheartened at what he saw and heard. The activity,
resources, gayety, and confidence of the authorities and people,
recalled to his mind, Oxford, the jocund capital of Charles II and the
royalists, while the Commonwealth leaders were drilling their armies.
But instead of the chaos of rapine, the wanton excesses, the pillage of
churches and colleges that marked the tenure of the miserable Charles,
Richmond was as orderly, serene, the Congress as deliberate, and the
people as content, as the Rome of the conquest of Persia or France after
Jemmapes. The army was hot for battle, and as confident of the result as
the Guard at Austerlitz or McClellan at Malvern. The work done and the
way of its doing showed that the populace, as well as the rulers, were
convinced of the destiny of the city to be henceforth mistress of
herself, the preordained metropolis of half the continent--perhaps the
whole continent--for, would the North be able to resist joining States
with a destiny so glorious--a regal republic where birth and rank were
tacitly enthroned? The city's greatness was taken by the mass, as a
matter of course--like an heir in chancery who has won all but the final
decree in the suit, or like a great nobleman who has come to his
inheritance.
Though it was the first week of November when the Atterburys found home
affairs going on smoothly in the town-house, summer still disputed with
winter the short lovely days of fall, as Jack described the lingering
May-day mildness of this seductive Southern autumn. It was the first
season he had ever spent south of New York, and, like most Americans, he
realized, with wonder, that the wind which brought ice and snow to New
York, visited lower Virginia with only a sharp evening and morning
reminder that summer was gone. The balm and beauty of the climate came
with something of healing to the hurt his heart and hope had suffered at
Rosedale. If anything could have mitigated the pangs of a young warrior
perplexed in love and held in leash in war, it was such an existence as
the Atterburys inveigled him into leading. The part of carpet-knight is
not difficult to learn, and the awkwardness of it is to some extent
atoned for when the service is constrained. At least Jack took this
philosophical view of it, and soon gave himself up to the merry social
life of his surroundings with an animation that led his hosts to hope
that he might be won over to the Confederate cause. Very young men do
not sorrow long or deeply, and Jack was young. He was neither reckless
nor trifling, but I am sure that none of the adulating groups that made
much of the handsome Yankee in Richmond that season would have suspected
that the young man looked in his mirror night and morning, frowned
darkly at the reflected image he saw there, and said, solemnly, "You are
a murderer!" It was by no means a tragic accent in which this thrilling
apostrophe was spoken. It was very much in the tone that a woman employs
when she looks hastily in the mirror and utters a soft "What a fright I
am!" apparently receiving comforting contradiction enough from the
mirror to make the remark worth frequent repetition.
As a matter of fact, however, Jack was not insensible to the awkward
complication of his predicament. Grief as a mantle is difficult to
adjust to the shoulders of the young. It is melted by the ardor of
companionship as swiftly as it is spun by the loom of adversity. His
interest in the strange scenes that the war brought to pass, his
association with people--intimate in a sense with the leading forces of
rebellion, the airs of incipient grandeur, these raw instruments of
government gave themselves--all these things engrossed the observant
faculties of the young man, who looked out upon the serio-comic
harlequinade playing about him as a hostage of the Roundheads might have
taken part in the showy festivities of the Cavaliers, in the years when
the chances of battle had not gone over wholly to the Puritans. Not that
the figure illustrates the contrasting conditions adequately. For, if
the South prided itself at all--and the South did pride itself
vauntingly, clamorously, and incessantly--it made its chief boast the
point that its people were the gentry of the land, and that under the
rebel banner the hosts of chivalry had assembled anew to make all manner
of fine things the rule of life. Jack, writing and talking of his few
months' experience, dwelt with wonder upon the curious ignorance of the
two peoples respecting each other. Mason and Dixon's line separated two
civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other
on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea. The hierarchy not only
seemed to love war for war's sake; they possessed that feudal facalty,
so incomprehensible in the middle ages, the power of making those who
suffered most by it believe in it too, and sacrifice themselves for it.
The people--Jack sagaciously remarked, in discussing the topic with
Olympia--seemed made for such a climate, rather than made by it. They
would have been out of place in the bleak autumn blasts, and wan,
colorless seasons of Acredale, where the sun, bleary and dim, furtively
skirted the low horizon from November until April, as if ashamed to be
identified with the glorious courser that rode the radiant summer sky.
Here the sun came up of a morning--a little tardy, 'tis true, but quite
in the manner of the people--warm and engaging, and when he went down in
the afternoon he covered the western sky with a roseate mantle that
fairly kept out the chill of the Northern night. "No wonder," Jack said
to his sister, watching this daily spectacle--"no wonder these people
are warm, impulsive, and even energetic; here is an Italian climate
without the enervating languor of that sensuous sunshine."
The Atterbury house was the gayest in Richmond. Mrs. Atterbury, though
the mother of a son in the army and a daughter with a coterie of her own
in society, insisted on maintaining the leadership she had long held
among the social forces of the capital. "All Richmond," and that meant a
good deal in a city whose women had been adored for beauty and wit on
two continents, received Mrs. Atterbury's bidding to her drawing-room
with proud alacrity. Never had her "teas," her _musicales_, her
receptions, and _fetes_ been merrier or more convivial than during this
memorable autumn that Jack and Olympia passed as prisoners of war. It
was generally believed that the brother and sister were occult agents of
the Federal power, negotiating with the Davis Cabinet, and Jack's
whimsical sobriety of speech and manner, contrasting with his former
high animal spirits, carried out the notion of his being a secret
ambassador.
It was at a reception given to the Cabinet by Mrs. Atterbury that the
rumor of this accredited function came to Jack's ears. "All Richmond"
was among the guests. Olympia, in spite of her abhorrence of the cause,
couldn't resist a glow of sympathetic admiration of the women who, in
dress, in speech, in tact, in all the artifices which make feminine
diplomacy so potent an agency in statecraft, bent every faculty to
inspire confidence in the new Administration. Mrs. Davis herself was not
the least of the factors that made the President's policy the creed of
the land. There was no elaboration of costume--no obtrusive jewels. The
most richly dressed dame in the company was a Madame Gannat, the deity
of the most charming drawing-room at the capital. At her house society
was always sure to meet the European noblemen traveling in the country,
the _quasi_ official agents of France, England, and Austria, accredited
to the new Confederacy, the generals of the Southern armies on leave in
the city, and the political leaders able to snatch an evening's
relaxation. For some reason this potential personage let Olympia and
Jack see that she was deeply interested in them. She took the young
man's arm late in the evening, and whispering, "Find a place where we
can have a little talk," accompanied him to a small apartment joining a
conservatory, where Mrs. Atterbury transacted business with her agents.