The Iron Game - Henry Francis Keenan
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In this list the Perley sisters, Dick's three maiden aunts, came on a
respectful embassy to implore Jack to discourage their nephew, who had
quite deserted school and gave all his time to drilling with the
"college squad." Jack pledged himself that he would hand Dick over to
the justice of the peace, to be detained at the house of refuge, if he
didn't give up his evil designs. But, when that young aspirant appeared,
so soon as his aunts had gone, and reminded Jack of years of intimate
companionship in dare-deviltry, the elder saw that his own safety would
be in flight, and that night, his company was removed to Warchester.
There in the great camp, surrounded by sentinels, his Acredale cronies
were shut out, and Jack began in earnest his soldier life.
CHAPTER IV.
GUELPH AND GHIBELLINE.
The shifting of Jack's company to the regimental camp in Warchester left
a broad gap in the lines of the social life of Acredale. Jack's going
alone, to say nothing of the others, would have eclipsed the gayety of
many home groups besides his own, in which the Sprague primacy in a
social sense was acknowledged. Since the influx of the new-made rich,
under the stimulus of the war and Acredale's advantages as a resort,
there were a good many who disputed the Sprague leadership--tacitly
conceded rather than asserted. Chief of the dissidents was Elisha Boone,
who, by virtue of longer tenure, vast wealth, and political precedence,
divided not unequally the homage paid the patrician family. Boone was
fond of speaking of himself as a "self-made man," and the satirical were
not slow to add that he had no other worship than his "creator." This
was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even
Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his
prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent
traits. He delighted in showing his affluence--not always in good taste.
He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his
friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days
when he came to Acredale aspired to political leadership in the
Democratic party.
But Senator Sprague was too firmly enshrined in the loyalty of the
district to be overcome by the parvenu's manoeuvres or his money. His
ambition in time turned to rancor as he marked the patrician's
disdainful disregard of his (Boone's) efforts to supplant him. Hatred of
the Spragues became something like a passion in Boone. Sarcasms and
disparagement leveled at his social and political pretensions he
attributed to the Senator and his family. All sorts of slurs and gossip
were reported to him by busybodies, until it became a settled purpose
with Boone to make the Sprague family feel heavy heart-burnings for the
sum of the affronts he had endured. It was to them he attributed the
whispered gibes about his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the
awful story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, the
spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley. Once, too, when he had so well
manipulated the district delegates that he was sure of nomination in the
convention, Senator Sprague had hurried home from Washington and
defeated him just as the prize was in his grasp. The Senator made a
speech to the delegates, in which he pointedly declared that it was men
of honor and brains, not men of money, that should be chosen to make
the laws.
"The time will come, Senator, that you'll be sorry for this hour's
work," Boone said, joining Sprague at the door as he was leaving
the hall.
"How's that?" the other asked, with just the shade of superciliousness
in the tone admired in the Senate for suavity. "I hope I am always sorry
when I do wrong, in speech or act; I teach my children to be."
"Well, if you think it right to run the party for a few lordly idlers
too proud to mix with the people--men who think they are better born and
better bred than the rest of us--I don't want to have anything more to
do with it. I will go elsewhere."
"That's your privilege, sir. The Whigs have plenty of room for self-made
men. Though I do think you are taking too personal a view of to-day's
contest, your defeat was purely a matter of duty. Moore, whom we have
chosen, was a poor Irish settler here before you came. He was promised
the nomination two years ago." With a lofty bow the Senator turned and
stalked in another direction as if he did not care for the other's
further company. Even this small and wholly unintended affront worked in
the poor, misjudging victim of morbid self-esteem, as a cinder in the
eye will torture and blind the sufferer to all the landscape. Boone
mingled no more with the Democrats. He threw himself with the fervor of
the convert into the radical wing of the Whigs, and was brought into
close relation with some of the most admired of the band of great men
who created the young Republican party. If Douglas, Dickinson, Cass, Van
Buren, Seymour, or any eminent Democrat passing through Warchester
stopped to break bread with their colleague Sprague in his Acredale
retreat, straightway the splendid Sumner, the Ciceronian Phillips, or
the Walpole-Seward, or some other of the shining galaxy of agitators,
whose light so shone before men that the whole land was presently
brought out of darkness, met at Boone's table to maintain the balance in
distinction.
It was Boone's liberal purse that paid the expenses of the memorable
campaign in the Warchester district, wherein the Democrats were first
shaken in their hold. It was his money that finally secured the seat in
Congress for Oswald, who was his tenant and debtor. It was therefore no
surprise when Oswald--who had been greatly aided in business affairs by
Senator Sprague--passed over the prior claims of his old patron's son,
and gave the cadetship to Wesley Boone, the son of his new liege. It was
looked upon as another step in the ladder of gratitude when Wesley
carried off the captaincy in the Acredale company, though everybody knew
that young Boone was not in any way so well fitted for the "straps" as
Jack. When one day an item appeared in the local paper to the effect
that President Lincoln had shown the "sagacity for which he was so well
known, in honoring our distinguished townsman, Elisha Boone, Esq., with
the appointment of ambassador to Russia," everybody thought the
statement only natural. There were many congratulations. But when,
having declined this splendid proffer, the authorities pressed the place
of "Assistant Secretary of the Treasury" upon their townsman, the whole
village awoke to the fact that all its greatness had not gone when
Senator Sprague was gathered to his fathers.
The event was potent as the cross Constantine saw, or dreamed he saw, in
the sky, in the conversion of party workers to the new Administration.
Everybody looked forward to an eminent future for the potent partisan
and millionaire, the first of that--now not uncommon--hierarchy that
replace the feudal barons in modern social forces. Had he listened to
the eager urging of Kate, his daughter and prime minister, Boone would
have accepted the foreign mission; but he stubbornly refused to listen
to her in this.
Kate Boone was like her father only in strong will, vehement purpose,
and a certain humorous independence that made her a great delight among
even the anti-Boone partisans in both Acredale and Warchester. Since the
death of her mother, Kate had been head of her father's household--an
imperious, capricious, kind-hearted tyrant, who ruled mostly by jokes
and persuasions of the gentler sort. It was her father's one lament that
Kate was not "the boy of the family, for she had more of the stuff that
makes the man in her little finger than Wes had in his whole body." She
kept him in a perpetual unrest of delight and dismay. She espoused none
of his piques or prejudices; she was as apt to bring people he disliked
to his dinner-table as those he liked. She was forever making him
forgive wrongs, or what he fancied to be wrongs, and causing him seem at
fault in all his squabbles, so that he was often heard to say, when
things went as he didn't want them:
"I don't know whether I am to blame or the other fellow until Kate hears
the story."
His illiteracy and lack of polish were the secret grief of the rich
man's life. Kate was quick in detecting this. Much of it she saw was due
to the shyness that unschooled men feel in the presence of college men,
or those who have been trained. On returning from her seminary life, the
young girl set about remedying the single break in her father's
perfections. She was far too clever to let him know her ambitious
purpose. With a patience almost maternal and an exquisite adroitness,
she interested him in her own reading, which was comprehensive, if not
very well ordered. But she won the main point. During the long winter
evenings her father found no pleasure like that Kate had always ready
for him in the cheery library. He was soon amazed at his keen interest
in the world of mind unrolled to his understanding; more than all, he
retained with the receptivity of a boy all that was read to him. Kate
made believe that she needed his help in reviewing her own studies, and
so carried him through all she had gone over in the seminary classes.
Boone began presently to see that education is not the result of mere
attendance in schools and the parroting of the classics in a few
semesters in college. Without suspecting it, his varied business
enterprises and his wide experience of men had grounded him as well in
the ordinary forms of knowledge as nine in ten college men attain.
"Education, after all, papa, is like a trade. A man may be able to
handle all the tools and not know their names. Now, you are a
well-informed man, but, because you didn't know logic, grammar,
scientific terms, and the like, you thought yourself ignorant."
In the new confidence in himself he was surprised at his own ability in
launching a subject in the presence of his eminent friends when
especially Kate was on hand to support the conversation. She got him not
only to buy fine pictures, as most rich men do, but she made him see
wherein their value lay, so that when artists and amateurs came to
admire his treasures, he could talk to them without gross solecisms.
"I'm not a liberal education to you, papa, as Steele said of the Duchess
of Devonshire. That implies too much, but I am an index. You can find
out what you need to know by keeping track of my ignorance."
Elisha Boone's domestic circle was a termagancy--as Kate often told his
guests--tempered by wit and good-humor. He was prouder of his daughter
than of his self-made rank or his revered million. In moments of
expansive good-nature he invited business or political associates to
"Acre Villa," as his place was called, to enjoy the surprise Kate's
graces wrought in the guests. But these were not always times of delight
to the doting parent. Kate was a shrewd judge of the amenities; and if
the personages who came, at the father's bidding, gave the least sign of
a not unnatural surprise to find a girl so well bred and self-contained
in the daughter of such a man as Boone, she became very frigid and left
the father to do the honors of the evening visit. No entreaty could move
her to reappear on the scene. In time, the prodigal papa was careful to
submit a list of the names of his proposed guests, as chamberlains give
royalty a descriptive list of those to be bidden to court.
Kate was on terms that, if not cordial, were not constrained, with the
Spragues. She had gone to the same seminary with Olympia, had danced
with Jack, and, in the cadetship affair, had plainly given her opinion
that her brother Wesley, having no taste or fitness for military life,
Jack, who had, should have the prize. But two motives entered into the
father's determination: one was to annoy and humiliate the Spragues; the
other, the sleepless craving of the parvenu to get for his son what had
not been his, in spite of all the adulation paid him--the conceded
equality of social condition. The army was then, as I believe it is
considered now, the surest sign of higher caste in a democracy. Wesley,
by the mere right to epaulets, would be of the acknowledged gentility.
Nobody could sneer at him; no doors could be opened grudgingly when he
called. He would, in virtue of his West Point insignia, be a knighted
member of the blood royal of the republic. Some of this mysterious
unction would distill itself into the unconsecrated ichor of the rest of
the family, and Kate, as well as himself, would be part of the patrician
caste. The daughter looked upon all this good-humoredly; she shared none
of her father's morbid delusions on the subject. She rallied the cadet a
good deal on his mission. When Wesley, after the June examinations,
which he passed by the narrowest squeeze--'twas said by outside
influence--came home to display his cadet buttons and his neat gray
uniform in Acredale, Kate bantered the complacent young
warrior jocosely.
"We shall all have to live up to your shoulder-straps and brass buttons
after this, Wesley," she cried, as the proud young dandy strutted over
the arabesques of the library, where the delighted papa marched him, the
better to survey the boy's splendor. "And think of the fate that awaits
you if, in the esteem of Acredale, you should turn out less than a
Napoleon."
"Be serious, Kate, and don't tease the boy. Wesley knows what's expected
of him; he has an opportunity to show what is in his stock. Thank God,
men in the North can now come to their own without going down on their
knees to the South!"
Wesley grinned. He was no match for his sister in the humorous bouts
waged over his head against his father's prejudices and cherished social
schemes. During the vacation she put a heavy penalty of raillery upon
his swelling pride and vanity, sarcasm that tried the paternal patience
as well as his own. Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy
that comes from a high estimate of one's self. He was well favored in
looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and
carefully shod feet. He would have been called a "dude" had the word
been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a
coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father's social
pretensions. He was the first of the golden youth of his set to adopt
the then reviving mode of parting the hair on the middle of the head. In
the teeth of the village derision, he persisted in this with a tenacity
that Kate declared gave promise of a "Wellington." For many who had at
first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it,
discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the
lead. In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had
not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and "the proper thing"
among the "well born" was not so distinctly laid down in the code of the
_elite_. The accent and manners that now mark "good form" seemed queer,
not to say _bouffe_, to even the first circles of home society, and the
first disciples of "Anglomania" had a very hard time polishing the raw
material. The home life of the Boones was something better and sincerer
than the impression made upon their neighbors by the father's invincible
push and high-handed ways. His daughter and son had been born to him in
middle age. They had the reverence for the parent marked in the conduct
of children who associate gray hairs with the venerable. With all her
strong sense and self-assertion, Kate was proud of the fact that she was
her father's daughter. It was a distinction to bear his name. His
solidity, his masterful will, his well-defined, if narrow, convictions,
were to her the sanctities one is apt to associate with lineage or
magistracy. Wesley, though less impressionable than his sister, shared
these secret devotions to the parent's parts, and bowed before his
father's behests, in the filial reverence of the sons of the patriarchs.
When Elisha Boone denounced the outbreak of John Brown at Harper's Ferry
as more criminal than Aaron Burr's treason, his children made his
prepossessions their own; when, three years later, the father proudly
eulogized the uprising he had so luridly condemned, his children saw no
tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay
perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election
to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two
young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions
had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of
parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the
influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually
tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father's
character. Oddly enough, it was through the rival house this came.
Olympia, a sort of ablegate in the social hierarchy of the village, had
been thrown much with Kate, and was greatly amused with her point of
view in many of the snarls arising in a provincial society. The intimacy
had been begun in the New York school, where both had been in the same
classes, and, though the families saw nothing of each other, the girls
did. Kate was soon led to see that the Spragues had none of the
patrician pretension her father attributed to them. Jack, too, had made
much of her, and seemed to delight in her sharp retorts to the inanities
of would-be wits. The episode in Elisha Boone's life, that all his
success, wealth, and after exemplary conduct had not condoned in the
village mind, was his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, I set
this down with something of the delight Carlyle expresses when in the
rubbish of history he found, among the shams called kings and nobles,
anything like a man.
It is worth the noting, this trait of Acredale, at a time when riches
and success are looked upon as condoning every breach of the decalogue.
Just how the intimacy between the two men came about was not known. It,
however, was known that when Boone first came to Acredale he had been
helped in his affairs by Dick Perley's lavish means. In a few years
Boone was the patron and Perley the client. As Boone grew rich Perley
grew poor, until finally all was gone. Then the fairest lands of the
Perley inheritance passed to Boone. It was the fireside history of the
whole Caribee Valley that the rich contractor had encouraged the ruined
gentleman in the excesses that ended the profligate's career; that the
two men had staked large sums at play in Bucephalo, and that inability
to meet his losses to Boone had caused Dick Perley's flight. He had been
seen by one of the village people a year or two before the war in
Richmond, and had been heard of in California later, but no word had
ever reached his family, not even when his wife died, two years after
his exile. There were those who said that Boone was in correspondence
with his victim, and it was known that drafts, made by Dick Perley, had
been paid by Boone at the bank in Warchester. Between Boone and the
Perley ladies, whose house was separated from "Acre Villa" by a wide
lawn and hedge, there had always been the tacit enmity that wrong on one
side and meek unreproach on the other breeds. The rancor that manifested
itself in Boone's treatment of the Misses Perley was not imitated by
them. They never alluded to their affluent neighbor, never suffered
gossip concerning the Boones in what Olympia humorously called the
"Orphic adytum," the "tabby-shop," as Wesley named the Perley parlors.
Young Dick, however, had none of the scruples that kept his aunts
silent. One dreadful day, when he had been nagged to fisticuffs with
Wesley, whose dudish dignity exacted a certain restraint with the
hot-headed youngster, Elisha Boone, behind the thick hedge, heard on the
highway outside his grounds this outrageous anathema:
"You're no more than a thief, Wes Boone; your father stole all he's got.
Some day I'll make him give it back, or send him to jail, where he ought
to be now."
Schoolboy though the railer was, Boone staggered against the hedge, the
words brought a dreadful flush and then a livid pallor to the miserable
parent's cheek. He dared not trust himself to speak then. Nor was the
antipathy the outbreak caused mitigated by the savage thrashing that
Wesley, throwing aside his dignity, proceeded to administer to the
unbridled accuser. After that, by the father's sternest command, neither
of his children was to return the courteous salutation the Perley ladies
had never ceased to bestow in meeting the Boones walking or in company.
Now, Dick was the kind of boy that those who know boy nature would call
adorable. To the Philistine, without humor or sympathy, I'm afraid he
was a very bad boy. He was until late in his teens painfully shy with
grown people and strangers; even under the eyes of his aunts and with
youths of his own age, diffident to awkwardness. He had the face of a
well-fed cherub and the gentle, dreamy, and wistful eye of a girl in
love. With his elders he had the halting, confused speech of a new boy
in a big school. But in the woods or on the playground he was the
merriest, most daring, and winningly obstreperous lad that ever filled
three maiden aunts with terror and delight.
CHAPTER V.
A NAPOLEONIC EPIGRAM.
For weeks the regiment expected every day the order to march. The guns
had been distributed and all their fascinating secrets mastered. In
evolution and manual the men regarded themselves as quite equal to the
regulars. The strict orders forbidding absence overnight were hardly
needed, as no one ventured far, fearing that the regiment would be
whirled away to Washington during the night. Had the men been older or
more experienced in war, the weeks of waiting would have been delightful
rather than dreary. The regiment was the object of universal interest in
the town. Base-ball and the alluring outdoor pastimes that now divert
the dawdlers of cities were unknown. Hence the camp-ground of the
Caribees was the matinee, ball-match, tennis, boating, all in one of the
idle afternoon world of Warchester. At parade and battalion drill the
scene was like the race-ground on gala days.
All the fine equipages of the town drew up in the roads and lanes
flanking the camp, where with leveled glasses the mothers, sisters, and
sweethearts watched the columns as they skirmished, formed squares, or
"passed the defile," quite sure that the rebels would fly in confusion
before such surprising manoeuvres. This daily audience stimulated such a
fierce rivalry among the companies that the men turned out at all hours
of the day to drill and practice in squads, rather than loiter about the
camp. One day great news aroused the camp: the Governor was to review
the regiment and send it to the front. All Warchester poured out to the
Holly Hills, and when at five o'clock the companies filed out on the
shining green there was such a cheer that the men felt repaid for the
tiresome wait of months. The civic commander-in-chief watched the
movements with affable scrutiny, surrounded by a profusely uniformed
staff, to whom he expressed the most politic approval. He was heard to
remark that no such soldiers had been seen on this continent since Scott
had marched to Lundy's Lane.
There was a throb of passionate joy in the ranks when this eulogium
reached the men, for the words were hardly spoken when they were known
in every company by that mysterious telegraphy which makes the human
body a conductor swift as an electric wire among large masses of men.
Nor were the words less relished that the eulogist was as ignorant of
military excellence as a Malay of the uses of a patent mower. The men,
it was easy to see, were much more efficient in movement than the
officers in handling them. Colonel Oswald had wasted weeks in the study
of the occult evolutions of the battalion; they were still a maddening
mystery to him that fatal day. For six weeks his dreams had been haunted
by airy battalions filing over impossible defiles. The commands he gave
that day would have thrown the companies into hopeless confusion had the
junior officers not boldly substituted the right ones for the colonel's
blunders. This, however, passed unnoted, for the crowds, and even the
men, were not the sharp critics they afterward became when mistakes by
an incompetent officer were saluted by shouts of ridicule, and the men
contemptuously disregarded them. When Colonel Oswald ordered them to
"present arms" from a "place rest" there was more perplexity than
merriment, and the admiring crowd saw nothing peculiar in one company
snatching up bayonets to present while others remained perfectly still.
Jack, to whom the manual was a very sacred thing, broke into fierce
ridicule of the commander, declaring that he was better fitted for
sutler than colonel. When the savage speech was reported to headquarters
that young fellow's prospects for the straps--never the best--were by no
means improved. The review brought bitter disappointment to the
regiment. The inspector-general, who was present, informed the colonel
that no more than a thousand men could be accepted in one body; that
five hundred of the Caribees would have to be divided among other troops
in the State. The order aroused wild excitement. Half the men looked
upon the edict as a scheme to give the politicians more places for their
feudatories. Indeed, though that was not the origin of the order, that
was the use made of it. Some of the junior officers, who disliked Oswald
and distrusted his capacity to command, drew out very willingly, and of
course carried many of their men with them.