It is not a story, or anything in the semblance of a story, but merely an attempt to depict for you—and in so doing, perhaps make clearer to myself—the aspect and character of a man whom I loved, perplexedly but faithfully, for many years. I make no apology, therefore, for the fact that Bolton Byrne, whose evil shadow ought to fall across all my remaining pages, never again appears in them; and that the last I saw of him (for my purpose) was when, after our exaggeratedly cheerful and even noisy dinner that evening at Jack Alstrop’s, I observed him shaking hands with Hayley Delane, and declaring, with pinched lips and a tone of falsetto cordiality: “Bear malice? Well, rather not—why, what rot! All’s fair in—in polo, ain’t it? I should say so! Yes—off first thing tomorrow. S’pose of course you’re staying on with Jack over Sunday? I wish I hadn’t promised the Gildermeres—.” And therewith he vanishes, having served his purpose as a passing lantern-flash across the twilight of Hayley Delane’s character.
All the while, I continued to feel that it was not Bolton Byrne who mattered. While clubs and drawing-rooms twittered with the episode, and friends grew portentous in trying to look unconscious, and said “I don’t know what you mean,” with eyes beseeching you to speak if you knew more than they did, I had already discarded the whole affair, as I was sure Delane had. “It was the poney, and nothing but the poney,” I chuckled to myself, as pleased as if I had owed Mrs. Delane a grudge, and were exulting in her abasement; and still there ran through my mind the phrase which Alstrop said Delane had kept repeating: “It was the cruelty—it was the cruelty. I hate cruelty.”
How it fitted in, now, with the other fact my host had let drop—the fact that Delane had fought all through the civil war! It seemed incredible that it should have come to me as a surprise; that I should have forgotten, or perhaps never even known, this phase of his history. Yet in young men like myself, just out of college in the ’nineties, such ignorance was more excusable than now seems possible.
That was the dark time of our national indifference, before the country’s awakening; no doubt the war seemed much farther from us, much less a part of us, than it does to the young men of today. Such was the case, at any rate, in old New York, and more particularly, perhaps, in the little clan of well-to-do and indolent old New Yorkers among whom I had grown up. Some of these, indeed, had fought bravely through the four years: New York had borne her part, a memorable part, in the long struggle. But I remember with what perplexity I first wakened to the fact—it was in my school-days—that if certain of my father’s kinsmen and contemporaries had been in the war, others—how many!—had stood aside. I recall especially the shock with which, at school, I had heard a boy explain his father’s lameness: “He’s never got over that shot in the leg he got at Chancellorsville.”
I stared; for my friend’s father was just my own father’s age. At the moment (it was at a school foot-ball match) the two men were standing side by side, in full sight of us—his father stooping, halt and old, mine, even to filial eyes, straight and youthful. Only an hour before I had been bragging to my friend about the wonderful shot my father was (he had taken me down to his North Carolina shooting at Christmas); but now I stood abashed.
The next time I went home for the holidays I said to my mother, one day when we were alone: “Mother, why didn’t father fight in the war?” My heart was beating so hard that I thought she must have seen my excitement and been shocked. But she raised an untroubled face from her embroidery.
“Your father, dear? Why, because he was a married man.” She had a reminiscent smile. “Molly was born already—she was six months old when Fort Sumter fell. I remember I was nursing her when Papa came in with the news. We couldn’t believe it.” She paused to match a silk placidly. “Married men weren’t called upon to fight,” she explained.
“But they did, though, Mother! Payson Gray’s father fought. He was so badly wounded at Chancellorsville that he’s had to walk with a stick ever since.”
“Well, my dear, I don’t suppose you would want your Papa to be like that, would you?” She paused again, and finding I made no answer, probably thought it pained me to be thus convicted of heartlessness, for she added, as if softening the rebuke: “Two of your father’s cousins did fight: his cousins Harold and James. They were young men, with no family obligations. And poor Jamie was killed, you remember.”
I listened in silence, and never again spoke to my mother of the war. Nor indeed to anyone—even myself. I buried the whole business out of sight, out of hearing, as I thought. After all, the war had all happened long ago; it had been over ten years when I was born. And nobody ever talked about it nowadays. Still, one did, of course, as one grew up, meet older men of whom it was said: “Yes, so-and-so was in the war.” Many of them even continued to be known by the military titles with which they had left the service: Colonel Ruscott, Major Detrancy, old General Scole. People smiled a little, but admitted that, if it pleased them to keep their army rank, it was a right they had earned. Hayley Delane, it appeared, thought differently. He had never allowed himself to be called “Major” or “Colonel” (I think he had left the service a Colonel). And besides he was years younger than these veterans. To find that he had fought at their side was like discovering that the grandmother one could remember playing with had been lifted up by her nurse to see General Washington. I always thought of Hayley Delane as belonging to my own generation rather than to my father’s; though I knew him to be so much older than myself, and occasionally called him “sir,” I felt on an equality with him, the equality produced by sharing the same amusements and talking of them in the same slang. And indeed he must have been ten or fifteen years younger than the few men I knew who had been in the war, none of whom, I was sure, had had to run away from school to volunteer; so that my forgetfulness (or perhaps even ignorance) of his past was not inexcusable.