ALICE WESTMORE
It is remarkable how small a part of our real life the world knows—how little our most intimate friends know of the secret influences which have proven to be climaxes, at the turning points of our existence.
There was no more beautiful woman in Alabama than Alice Westmore; and throughout that state, where the song birds seem to develop, naturally, along with the softness of the air, and the gleam of the sunshine, and the lullaby of the Gulf's soft breeze among the pine trees, there was no one, they say, who could sing as she sang.
And she seemed to have caught it from her native mocking-birds, so natural was it. Not when they sing in the daylight, when everything is bright and joyous and singing is so easy; but when they waken at midnight amid the arbor vitæ trees, and under the sweet, sad influence of a winter moon, pour out their half awakened notes to the star-sprays which fall in mist to blend and sparkle around the soft neck of the night.
For like the star-sprays her notes were as clear; and through them ran a sadness as of a mist of moonlight. And just as moonbeams, when they mingle with the mist, make the melancholy of night, so the memory of a dead love ran through everything Alice Westmore sang.
And this made her singing divine.
Why should it be told? What right has a blacksmith to pry into a grand piano to find out wherein the exquisite harmony of the instrument lies? Who has the right to ask the artist how he blended the colors that crowned his picture with immortality, or the poet to explain his pain in the birth of a mood which moved the world?
Born in the mountains of North Alabama, she grew up there and developed this rare voice; and when her father sent her to Italy to complete her musical education, the depth and clearness of it captured even that song nation of the world.
The great of all countries were her friends and princes sought her favors. She sang at courts and in great cathedrals, and her genius and beauty were toasts with society.
“Still, Mademoiselle will never be a great singer, perfect as her voice is,”—said her singing master to her one day—a famous Italian teacher, “until Mademoiselle has suffered. She is now rich and beautiful and happy. Go home and suffer if you would be a great singer,” he said, “for great songs come only with great suffering.”
If this were true, Alice Westmore was now, indeed, a great singer; for now had she suffered. And it was the death of a life with her when love died. For there be some with whom love is a separate life, and when love dies all that is worth living dies with it.
From childhood she and Cousin Tom—Captain Thomas Travis he lived to be—had been sweethearts. He was the grandson of Colonel Jeremiah Travis of “The Gaffs,” and Tom and Alice had grown up together. Their love was one of those earthly loves which comes now and then that we may not altogether lose our faith in heaven.
Both were of a romantic temperament with high ideals, and with keen and sensitive natures.
Their love was the poem of their lives.
And though a toast in society, and courted by the nobility of the old world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.
Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home on vacation before being assigned to duty. To-night he had ridden John Paul Jones—the pick of his grandfather's stable of thoroughbreds—a present from the sturdy old horse-racing, fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first in a class of fifty-six.
How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the music of the crepe-myrtle in the air—the music of it, wet with the night dew—for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest in the tree.
Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one dying far away from it all.
How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.
There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night, though often from her window she had looked out on Venice, moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in the hedgerows.
Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's sanctuary.
Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even sentiment from the world—sentiment that is stronger than common sense, and which moves the world.
On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice, whom he had not seen since her return.
He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel Westmore into a rage.
“To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter—” he shouted. “To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols quicker than I can use mine.”
“Oh, Tom,” said Alice when they were alone—“how—how could you do it?”
“But it is my side,” he said quietly. “I was born, reared, educated in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico. I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a Tennessean—Thomas a Virginian—and there are hundreds of others, men who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice—Alice—I do not love you less because I am true to my oath—my flag.”
“Your flag,” said Alice hotly—“your flag that would overrun our country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!”
She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin Tom. “You will choose between us now,” she said.
“Alice—surely you will not put me to that test. I will go—” he said, rising. “Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor—my sacred oath—write me and—and—I will come.”
And that is the way it ended—in tears for both.
Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.
That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and thought.
He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he rode away:
“All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make, with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved boy—your father's life—in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back on your rearing?
“Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but God, controls the course of an honest mind?
“Go, my son—I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right.”
The young man wept when he read this—he was neither too old nor too hardened for tears—and when he rode away, from the ridge of the Mountain he looked down again—the last time, on all that had been his life's happiness.
It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his overseer.
“Watts,” he said, “in the accursed war which is about to wreck the South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you to hear it.”
He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil:
“Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall fight—it matters not to me on which side—so that he fights. For The Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my faithful overseer, Hillard Watts.”
In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined, and put the will in it.
“It shall remain there unchanged,” he said, “and only you and I shall know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the war, and then do as you think best.”