"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 mésalliance, 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.