CHAPTER XXVII.
"THE ABSENT ARE ALWAYS IN THE WRONG."
Under Vincent's ardent escort Mrs. Sprague and Merry traveled from Richmond northward in something like haste and with as much comfort as was possible to the limited means of transportation at the command of the Confederate commissary. Even in those early days of the war, the railway system of the South was worn out and inadequate. Such a luxury as a parlor car was unknown. The trains were filled with military personages on their way to the field. Mrs. Sprague and Merry were the only women in the car in which they passed from Richmond to Fredericksburg. The route brought them through a land covered with hamlets of camps, drilling squadrons, and the panoply of war. While the elder lady gave a divided mind to the strange panorama, Merry watched everything eagerly, amused and interested by this spectacle of preparation. Such soldiers as she could see distinctly looked like farmers in holiday homespun; the cavalry like nondescript companies of backwoods hunters. There seemed to be no uniformity in infantry equipment or cavalry accoutrements, and the discipline struck her as in keeping with this diversity of dress and ornament. The men could be seen hurrying in boyish glee toward the train as it drew near the temporary station, where mail-bags were thrown out and sometimes supplies of food or munitions of war. Jocular remarks were passed between the soldiery at the windows when the wistful groups gathered along the railway line.
"I say, North Cal'ina, you'n's goin' straight through to Yankee land?" a man in the throng shouts to some one on the train.
"Straight."
"Send us a lock o' Lincoln's hair to poison blind adders, will you?"
"No—promised his scalp to my sweetheart to cover the rocking-chair."
Then, as the laugh that met this sally died away, another humorist piped, out:
"Tell Uncle Joe Johnston we're just rustin' down here for a fight; ef he don't hurry up we'll go ahead ourselves. We're drilled down so fine now that we can't think 'cept by the rule o' tactics."
"Jest you never mind, boys. Uncle Joe'll do enough thinkin' fur ye when he gets ready to tackle the Yanks."
"Hurrah for Uncle Joe!" And as the cheery cry swelled farther and farther, the train drew out, everybody looking from the windows as the patient soldiery straggled back campward.
"Your soldiers seem very gay, Vincent. One would think that war, the dreadful uncertainty of their movements, absence of friends, and lack of good food would sadden them," Mrs. Sprague said wistfully at one of the stations when raillery like this had been even more pointed and boisterous.
"A wise commander will do all he can to keep his men gay; if they were not jovial they'd go mad. Think of it! Day after day, week after week, who knows but year after year, the wearisome monotony of camp and march! Where the men are educated, or at least readers, they make better soldiers, because they brood less. Brooding saps the best fiber of the army. Your Northern men ought to have an advantage there, for education is more general with you than it is with us. It is not bravery that makes a man eager for the campaign, it is unrest. As a rule, the best soldiers in action are those who have a mortal dread of battle."
"That surprises me."
"It is true. I always distrust men that clamor to be led on; they are the first to break when the brush comes. Jack will tell you that, for we are agreed on it."
"Jack himself was eager for battle," Mrs. Sprague said, sighing.
"No, Jack was eager for the field. When the battle comes he meets it coolly, but he has no hunger for it, nor have I. General Johnston is as brave a man as ever headed an army, yet he has often told us that his blood freezes when the guns open. I'm sure no one would ever suspect it, for he is as calm and confident as if he were in a quadrille when he rides to the field."
"We in the North have heard more of Beauregard than Johnston, yet I never hear you mention him. Wasn't it he who commanded at Bull Run?"
"Yes and no. General Beauregard is a superb soldier. He is, it has been agreed among us, better for a desperate charge, or some sudden inspiration in an emergency, than the complicated strategy that half wins a battle before it is begun. For example, at Manassas he would have been defeated, our whole army captured, if fortune had not exposed General McDowell's plans before they were completed. As it was, we should have been driven from the field if General Johnston had not come up in time and rearranged the Confederate lilies."
"Yes, Jack has described that. Battles, after all, are decided by luck."
"And genius."
"Luck won Waterloo."
"Partly, but genius, too, for Wellington and Blücher practiced one of Napoleon's most perfect maxims, and won because he despised them both so much that he didn't dream them capable of even imitating him. Nor, left to themselves, would they have been equal to it. But renegade Frenchmen, taught under Napoleon's eye, prompted them."
"General Johnston was very considerate to us when we came down. I wish you would make him know how grateful we are."
"Oh, he couldn't be anything else; he is the ideal of a chivalrous knight."
"Yes, I believe you claim chivalry as your strong point in the South, and accuse us of being a race of sordid money-getters."
"I don't, for I know better, but our people do. They will learn better in time. Men who fought as your army fought at Manassas must be more than mere sordid hucksters."
"And yet it is curious," Mrs. Sprague continued, musingly, "it is we who are warring for an idea and you are warring for property."
"How do you mean?" Vincent said, quickly.
"You are fighting to continue slavery, to extend it; we to abolish it or limit it. But even I can see that slavery is doomed. No Northern party would ever venture to give it toleration after this."
"But if we succeed, it will exist in our union at least."
"Ah, Vincent, can't you see that such a people as ours may be checked, beaten even, but they will never give up the Union? Why, much as I love Jack, I would never let him leave the colors while there was an army in the field. Don't you know every Northern mother has the same feeling?"
"And every Southern mother, too."
"Yes, I believe that, but there's this difference: Your Southern mothers are counting on what doesn't exist—a higher physical courage—a prowess in battle, I may call it, that you must know the Southern soldier has not, as distinguished from the Northern. As time goes on and the war does not end; as our armies become disciplined, the confidence that supports your side will die, and then the struggle, though it may be prolonged, will end in our triumph."
"I don't think it. I can't think it. But don't let us talk about it. We, at least, are as much friends as though Jack and I were under one flag, and if it depends on me it shall be always so."
"If it depends on us, it shall never be otherwise." She gave the young man a kind, scrutinizing glance, which made his heart beat joyously and his handsome cheeks mount color. At Fairfax Court-House they said farewell, the ladies continuing the journey in an ambulance under Federal guard.
They passed over the long bridge three days after the famous night at Rosedale, of whose exciting sequel they were profoundly ignorant. In her husband's time Mrs. Sprague had lived in hotels in the capital, as the sessions were short; she had never remained in the city when the warm weather set in, no matter how long the term lasted. But on her arrival at the old hotel now, she was a good deal disturbed to learn that she could not be accommodated in her former quarters. The military crowded not only this but every hotel in the city, and it was only after long search that a habitable apartment was found in Georgetown. On the whole, the necessity that drove her thither was not an unmitigated adversity, for Georgetown then was far more desirable for residence than Washington. Nothing could be more depressing than the city at that epoch. Every visible object in the vast circumference of its spreading limits was then naked unkempt. Even the trees, that ranged themselves irregularly in the straggling squares and wide street areas, stretched out a draggled and piebald plumage, as if uncertain whether beauty or ugliness were their function in the ensemble.
The photographic realism of the later newspaper correspondent had not come into play in these earlier years of the war, and, as a consequence, the thousands who poured down to the Army of the Potomac beheld the city with something of the incredulous scorn with which the effeminate Byzantines regarded the capital of the Goths, when the corrupt descendant of Constantine made the savage Dacians his allies, rather than fight them. Patriotism, however, not pride, marked the common mold of the men of the civil war. It may have been that many an honest plowman, marching through the muddy quagmires of Pennsylvania Avenue, bethought himself that such a capital was hardly worth while marching so far to protect—more emphatically so when the enemy was really to be found on lines far north of it! Sentiment is the heart and soul of war; if it were not, there would be no war, for war never gained as much as it loses; never settled as much as it unsettles; never left victor or vanquished better when the last gun was fired! In old times the capture of a nation's capital meant the end of the war, but we have seen capitals captured and the war not modified a bit by it. Washington was seized and burned by the British in 1814, and the war went on; Paris was held by the Germans for half a year, and the war went on.
Our civil war would have been three campaigns shorter—Burnside's, Hooker's, and the stupid massacre of Pope—to say nothing of the saving of untold treasure, had the political authorities abandoned a capital which must be defended for a secure seat like New York or Philadelphia. The sagacious Lincoln, whose action in army matters was paralyzed by cliques, in the end saw through sham with an inspired clarity of vision, and proposed the measure, but the backwoods Mazarin, Seward, prepared such voluminous "considerations" in opposition that the good-natured President withdrew his suggestion, and, as a consequence, the dismal Ilium on the Potomac became the bone of a four years' contention, whose vicissitudes exceed the incidents of the Iliad. Great armies, created by an inspired commander, were wasted upon the defense of a capital that no one would have lamented had it been again burned, and of which to-day there is scarcely a remnant, save in the public buildings and the topographical charts. A new race entered the sleepy city. The astute, far-seeing Yankee divined the possibilities of the future, where the indolent, sentimental Southerner had never taken thought of a nation's growth and a people's pride! The thrifty and shifty patriots sent from the North at once took a stake in the city, and thenceforward there was growth, if not grace, in the capital.
Lincoln's Washington was to the capital of to-day what the Rome of Numa was to the imperial city of Augustus. Never, in its best days, more imposing than a wild Western metropolis of to-day, the sudden inrush of armies and the wherewithal to supply and house them, soon gave the vast spaces laid out for the capital the uncouthness and incompleteness of an exaggerated mining town or series of towns. Contrasted even with its rival on the James, Washington was raw, chaotic, squalid.
Long tenure of estates and little change in the people had given Richmond the venerableness we associate with age. Many of her picturesque seven hills were transformed into blooming fields or umbrageous groves, under which vast villa-like edifices clustered in Grecian repose. Save in the bustling main streets none of the edifices were new or raw, or wholly unlovely in design or fabric. In Washington nothing of this could be seen. Staring brick walls, buildings of unequal height and fatiguingly ugly designs, uprose here and there in morasses of mud that were meant for streets. Disproportionate outline, sharp conjunctures of affluence and squalor, accented the disheartening hideousness of the scene.
But upon this uncouth stage a great drama was going on; great figures were in action; momentous events were hourly taking form and consequence; men, and women at their best and worst were working out the awful ends of Fate. In the large mansion yonder, the wisest, greatest, simplest of mankind—by times Diogenes and Cromwell, Lafayette and Robespierre was, in jest and joke, mirth and sadness, working out his own and a people's sublime destiny. It was to this curiously unequal personage that Mrs. Sprague, after fruitless pleading with her husband's friends, came finally to secure action on behalf of her son. There was little of the ceremonial needed to gain access to the Chief Magistrate which is now the fashion.
She found a care-worn man, deeply harassed, standing in the low-ceiled room, in which the Cabinet had met a few moments before. A sweet, wan smile—the instinctive, inborn sensitiveness of a noble nature-flickered over the rugged lines of the face as the usher, retiring, said:
"Mr. President, this is Mrs. Sprague, whom you ordered to be admitted."
"I am both glad and sorry to meet you, madam. I knew your husband, the Senator, in other and happier times. I wish that it were in my power to do for him or his what he was always doing for the unhappy or distressed."
"Ah! how kind you are! How—"
She was going to say different from what she expected, but bethought herself of the ungraciousness of this form, since at that time Mr. Lincoln was the object of almost universal misreport and caricature.
"How can I say what a mother should say?"
While she spoke he began pacing the apartment, each time, as he came to the double window near which she sat, peering out with a yearning, far-away look toward the river and the red lines of the hills beyond it. Then turning back, he strode the length of the long baize-covered table, sometimes absently picking up a document, until, facing her again as she narrated the story of Jack's misfortunes, he would fling it hastily on the scattered heaps and fix his mild eye upon her.
"I know all this already, dear madam. It has come to me from the boy's friends, and"—he hesitated a second—"and from his—or from those who are not his friends."
"Not his friends?" the mother cried, half rising. "Why, Mr. President,
Jack hasn't an enemy in the world!"
"You came through from Richmond last week? Have you heard nothing from your son since you saw him?"
"Nothing. Oh, is there anything about him?"
"You have not even read the newspapers, I see."
"No, no; I have been so uncertain, so agitated, so constantly in attendance upon our members, that I have had no time to read or even talk. But, pray tell me! Your manner indicates that something has happened. O Mr. President, think of my anxiety! My only son!"
"Ah, Mrs. Sprague! It is I that should be pitied here. You came to me for comfort. You came in reliance on my power to restore your son, and I—I have the burden of telling you very grievous news. No, no, your son is not dead, have no fear of that, if in the end it prove a comfort. Last night your townsman, Elisha Boone, came to me with his heart-broken daughter, demanding vengeance for his son's death, whom your boy had slain the very night you left him on the James. He shot Captain Boone in the house you visited, and defeated a well-arranged plan to capture the rebel chief, Davis. Not only this, but he endangered the escape of a number of sorely-worn prisoners who had succeeded in reaching the Rosedale place and halted only to make Davis's capture certain."
"My son shot Wesley! oh no, no; it can not be; or, if he did, it was because his own life was in peril. Ah! no, no, Mr. President, do not believe this. I know my son. I know the misery he endured in Wesley's company; endured like a hero; endured like a Sprague. He must have been in peril of his life."
"Dear madam, I feel for you. I feel with you, but these facts are all in the possession of the Secretary of War. Mr. Boone will no doubt give you all the details. If it can be made to seem as you say, have no fear that I will wink at mere revenge, or make the machinery of justice an instrument of family feuds. Get your lawyer; have the matter investigated, and rely upon me for every proper clemency and aid in your hard lot."
She had arisen long before, and, recognizing this as a dismissal, she bowed, unable to speak, and, with blinded eyes, staggered toward the two steps leading upward from the room. She would have fallen had the ready arm of the President not been near to support her. In the anteroom he said, huskily:
"Captain, send an orderly to accompany this lady to her carriage."
Merry was in the carriage. One glance at Mrs. Sprague's face told that dire news had been heard. She did not ask a question, but, embracing and supporting the sobbing mother, awaited patiently for the dreaded revelation. When at length the miserable story came in gaspings and sobs, the spinster exhibited an unexpected firmness.
"I don't believe a word of it. If Jack shot Wesley, it was because he was in some sort of treacherous business. You may depend upon it, that, when we get the true story, Jack's part will prove him in the right. I am going this instant to Boone to learn his source of information. He can have nothing but rumors."
"I will go. It is better for me to see Mr. Boone. He will not venture to misrepresent to me."
At Willards, where Boone was stopping, the ladies were obliged to wait a long time, and, in the end, it was Kate who appeared before them in deep black, with a half-yearning, half-defiant expression in the sadly worn face. They would never have recognized her, and, as it was, Merry started with a slight scream as the dark figure stopped before them.
"Papa begs to be excused. He supposes that you want to hear the particulars of the—the affair at Rosedale, and bids me tell you."
"O Kate, Kate, it is not true! it can not be true. Oh, you who knew Jack so well, you know that he never could have—have—"
Kate had seized a chair and drawn it before the two who sat on one of the long sofas that filled without adorning the vast hotel parlor, dim even at noonday in its semi-subterranean light.
"Yes, Mrs. Sprague, your son shot Wesley deliberately; shot him as deliberately as if I should draw a pistol and take your life now and here."
"And—and killed him?"
"He never spoke again. He—he—ah! I can not, I can not! We brought him here. His body is in the cemetery, waiting the military formalities."
"But tell us how it happened, Kate," Merry sobbed, entreatingly. "We know nothing but what you have told us. Tell us all. It is so startling, so awful, that we can not comprehend such a thing happening where we left everybody in the most friendly spirit."
Kate, struggling with her tears, told the story so far as she knew it, but of course she knew little beyond the mere fact that Wesley had come to his death in Mrs. Atterbury's room; that Jack stood over him with the smoking pistol, and owned that he had fired in the darkness. She told the tale as gently as might be, her own heart secretly pleading for everything of extenuation that might lessen Jack's guilt, but she had insensibly taken the darker view her father had instantly adopted, that Jack's enmity had led him to seize the chance to rid himself of a rival and enemy under cover of defending the Atterburys. She did not hint this to the mother, but Merry, knowing Boone, at once saw what the President's words meant. Boone had charged Jack with deliberate murder. Dreading the realization of this by Mrs. Sprague at this time, Merry made a sign to Kate, who, comprehending at once, arose and begged to go back to her father, who was in need of her.
"Oh, if Olympia were here! she has so much self-control! she would advise so well what should he done!" the mother moaned, as she passed down through the long, barrack-like parlor.
"But, dear Mrs. Sprague, Olympia is just where her good sense is most needed. She is near Jack. He needs comfort and counsel. You can have your lawyer, and you shall see the case isn't so bad as we have heard. You must remember that the Boones are not likely to take an impartial view. It is only human nature that they should think the worst of the—the death of son and brother. Wait till we hear Jack's story, and you will see that it puts a different face on the matter."
"But it's Jack's disgrace and death they want. That was what the President meant. I didn't understand it then: I do understand it now. They shall not murder him! I shall command him to remain in Richmond. I shall command him to join Vincent. The North is unworthy of such men as my son. He is too pure, too innocent, too high-minded to be understood by the coarse natures that have come to power in the country. I shall not let this odious Boone destroy him as he ruined your brother."
"O Mrs. Sprague, think what you are saying! Think how fatal such words would be, if Jack were brought to trial. You see every day in the press how all are suspected of treason who were Democrats in the old days. I know very well that you do not mean this. Much as I love Jack, I would rather see him in his grave with the Union flag over him than in the rebel lines, a soldier of that bad cause. As to my poor brother, Boone was only an accident in his ruin. If it had not been Boone, it would have been some one else. Put the whole matter in the hands of Simon Brodie. He is almost a Sprague. He will see that the son of his old patron has justice."
Simon Brodie, of Warchester, was the chief advocate of the three counties. He had studied law with the late Senator Sprague, and, at his death, from partner succeeded to his lucrative law practice. He came at once to Washington at Mrs. Sprague's summons, and set about learning the status of the case. The affair was no easy matter to trace, but, after inconceivable delays and persistent misleading, he found that Jack was in the military archives charged with desertion, murder, and treason: desertion in quitting his company and regiment without orders, treason in consorting with armed rebels, and murder in joining with the enemies of the country to take the life of his commanding officer. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sprague and Merry had returned to Acredale, and the lawyer sent letters to Richmond setting forth the case to Jack—letters which, by some mysterious jugglery, never reached their address, as we have seen. Nothing could be done until Jack was either exchanged or until his advocate had made out a documentary case that could be presented to the military authorities. As he surmised, every one in authority had been prejudiced against Jack. The Congressman from Warchester dared not work against Boone, who was potent as a Cabinet minister in the councils of the Government. One of Senator Sprague's old friends, still in the Senate, advised Brodie to let Jack remain at Richmond till the peace came, "for," said he, "no Democrat nor any one identified with that party can hope for impartial justice here."
"But what am I to do? I can get no assistance here. Every bureau containing documents bearing on the poor boy's case is either closed to me, or the officials so hostile that I can not work with or through them."
"You must go about the affair as if it were a State matter. You must go to McClellan. He is a young man of the most spotless honor, the most generous sympathies. He is as rigid as a Prussian in discipline, but his methods are enlightened and above board. He is the only man in authority that has any real conception of the magnitude of the struggle the North has entered upon. He is, however, miserably hampered. The new rulers have come down to Washington very much in the spirit of the Goths when they captured Rome. Every one is on the make. The contract system is something beyond the wildest excesses I ever read of in pillage and chicanery. Shoes by the million have been accepted that melt as soon as they are wet; garments are stacked mountain-high in the storehouses that blow into rags so soon as the air goes through them. Food, moldy, filthy, is accumulated on the wharves of Washington, Baltimore, and Alexandria that would be forbidden as infectious in any carefully guarded port in the world. Contracts for vessels have been signed where steamships are called for, and the contractor sends canal-boats. Lines of ships are paid for to run to ports not known in navigation; and the chief men in the great departments share the money with the rings—"
"But why don't you expose it?"
"Expose it? A word in the Senate against these villainies is set down as disloyalty. All that a rascal needs to gain any scope he pleases, is to say 'rebel sympathizer,' and Fort Warren or Lafayette is held up as a menace."
Among the confidential aides of McClellan Brodie knew intimately a young officer, the son of a distinguished lady, whose writings delighted cultivated people fifty years ago. This young man, Captain Churchland, had often been a guest at the Spragues, and to him Brodie went for advice. Inheriting a great deal of his mother's intellect, with a droll sense of humor, not then so well understood as the lighter school of writers have since made it, Churchland was the delight of the headquarters. He listened to the melancholy story of Jack's compromising plight.
"It's a bad fix—no mistake," he said, gravely; "but I suggest that your fiery young friend come home and shoot the father, marry the daughter, and, as a wife can't testify against the husband, your client is secure."
"Ah, captain, it's not a matter for joking. Think of his wretched mother."
"That's just what I do think of—murder's no joke, though it's more of a fine art than it was when De Quincey wrote. I'm perfectly serious. I would shoot the scoundrel Boone. Why, do you know the man has cleared a million dollars on rotten blankets since he came here? McClellan ordered a report made out showing his rascalities a few weeks ago. It was disapproved at the War Office, and the condemned blankets have gone to Halleck's army. Doesn't that deserve shooting? Napoleon directed all the army contractors to be hanged. I say shoot them. For every one put out of the way a thousand soldiers' lives will be saved."
"Well, well, let Boone go. It's Sprague I'm interested in."
"So am I. It is Sprague that Boone seems to be interested in, too, for he has filled the new Secretary with, what he himself would call, righteous wrath against the poor boy and his friends. But make your mind easy. The exchange of prisoners will soon begin. Sprague's turn will come among the first, and then I will keep track of the affair. Beyond that I can promise nothing. You may be sure, so far as purely military men have to do with the business, there will be impartial justice. When the politicians take hold, I can give no assurance."
And with this cold comfort the disheartened lawyer betook himself to Acredale, where his report, guardedly given, brought no very strong hope to the anxious mother.