The raw legions had been victorious in the first pitched battle of the war on the plains of Manassas, and what might not be reasonably hoped from them under the training of such muster-minds as Johnston, Beauregard, Jackson, and Lee? Wasn't it the common talk among diplomats, the concurrent opinion of the French and English press, the despairing admission of the half-hearted and panic-stricken North, that one more such decisive victory would bring the South peace and independence? Wasn't it, indeed, well known among the favored juntas that those sagacious diplomats, Senators Mason and Slidell, had delayed their journey to Europe in order to aid the President in the treaty of peace that the victorious legions of Johnston were to exact in Washington?
Jack was amazed and disheartened at what he saw and heard. The activity, resources, gayety, and confidence of the authorities and people, recalled to his mind, Oxford, the jocund capital of Charles II and the royalists, while the Commonwealth leaders were drilling their armies. But instead of the chaos of rapine, the wanton excesses, the pillage of churches and colleges that marked the tenure of the miserable Charles, Richmond was as orderly, serene, the Congress as deliberate, and the people as content, as the Rome of the conquest of Persia or France after Jemmapes. The army was hot for battle, and as confident of the result as the Guard at Austerlitz or McClellan at Malvern. The work done and the way of its doing showed that the populace, as well as the rulers, were convinced of the destiny of the city to be henceforth mistress of herself, the preordained metropolis of half the continent—perhaps the whole continent—for, would the North be able to resist joining States with a destiny so glorious—a regal republic where birth and rank were tacitly enthroned? The city's greatness was taken by the mass, as a matter of course—like an heir in chancery who has won all but the final decree in the suit, or like a great nobleman who has come to his inheritance.
Though it was the first week of November when the Atterburys found home affairs going on smoothly in the town-house, summer still disputed with winter the short lovely days of fall, as Jack described the lingering May-day mildness of this seductive Southern autumn. It was the first season he had ever spent south of New York, and, like most Americans, he realized, with wonder, that the wind which brought ice and snow to New York, visited lower Virginia with only a sharp evening and morning reminder that summer was gone. The balm and beauty of the climate came with something of healing to the hurt his heart and hope had suffered at Rosedale. If anything could have mitigated the pangs of a young warrior perplexed in love and held in leash in war, it was such an existence as the Atterburys inveigled him into leading. The part of carpet-knight is not difficult to learn, and the awkwardness of it is to some extent atoned for when the service is constrained. At least Jack took this philosophical view of it, and soon gave himself up to the merry social life of his surroundings with an animation that led his hosts to hope that he might be won over to the Confederate cause. Very young men do not sorrow long or deeply, and Jack was young. He was neither reckless nor trifling, but I am sure that none of the adulating groups that made much of the handsome Yankee in Richmond that season would have suspected that the young man looked in his mirror night and morning, frowned darkly at the reflected image he saw there, and said, solemnly, "You are a murderer!" It was by no means a tragic accent in which this thrilling apostrophe was spoken. It was very much in the tone that a woman employs when she looks hastily in the mirror and utters a soft "What a fright I am!" apparently receiving comforting contradiction enough from the mirror to make the remark worth frequent repetition.
As a matter of fact, however, Jack was not insensible to the awkward complication of his predicament. Grief as a mantle is difficult to adjust to the shoulders of the young. It is melted by the ardor of companionship as swiftly as it is spun by the loom of adversity. His interest in the strange scenes that the war brought to pass, his association with people—intimate in a sense with the leading forces of rebellion, the airs of incipient grandeur, these raw instruments of government gave themselves—all these things engrossed the observant faculties of the young man, who looked out upon the serio-comic harlequinade playing about him as a hostage of the Roundheads might have taken part in the showy festivities of the Cavaliers, in the years when the chances of battle had not gone over wholly to the Puritans. Not that the figure illustrates the contrasting conditions adequately. For, if the South prided itself at all—and the South did pride itself vauntingly, clamorously, and incessantly—it made its chief boast the point that its people were the gentry of the land, and that under the rebel banner the hosts of chivalry had assembled anew to make all manner of fine things the rule of life. Jack, writing and talking of his few months' experience, dwelt with wonder upon the curious ignorance of the two peoples respecting each other. Mason and Dixon's line separated two civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea. The hierarchy not only seemed to love war for war's sake; they possessed that feudal facalty, so incomprehensible in the middle ages, the power of making those who suffered most by it believe in it too, and sacrifice themselves for it.
The people—Jack sagaciously remarked, in discussing the topic with Olympia—seemed made for such a climate, rather than made by it. They would have been out of place in the bleak autumn blasts, and wan, colorless seasons of Acredale, where the sun, bleary and dim, furtively skirted the low horizon from November until April, as if ashamed to be identified with the glorious courser that rode the radiant summer sky. Here the sun came up of a morning—a little tardy, 'tis true, but quite in the manner of the people—warm and engaging, and when he went down in the afternoon he covered the western sky with a roseate mantle that fairly kept out the chill of the Northern night. "No wonder," Jack said to his sister, watching this daily spectacle—"no wonder these people are warm, impulsive, and even energetic; here is an Italian climate without the enervating languor of that sensuous sunshine."
The Atterbury house was the gayest in Richmond. Mrs. Atterbury, though the mother of a son in the army and a daughter with a coterie of her own in society, insisted on maintaining the leadership she had long held among the social forces of the capital. "All Richmond," and that meant a good deal in a city whose women had been adored for beauty and wit on two continents, received Mrs. Atterbury's bidding to her drawing-room with proud alacrity. Never had her "teas," her musicales, her receptions, and fêtes been merrier or more convivial than during this memorable autumn that Jack and Olympia passed as prisoners of war. It was generally believed that the brother and sister were occult agents of the Federal power, negotiating with the Davis Cabinet, and Jack's whimsical sobriety of speech and manner, contrasting with his former high animal spirits, carried out the notion of his being a secret ambassador.
It was at a reception given to the Cabinet by Mrs. Atterbury that the rumor of this accredited function came to Jack's ears. "All Richmond" was among the guests. Olympia, in spite of her abhorrence of the cause, couldn't resist a glow of sympathetic admiration of the women who, in dress, in speech, in tact, in all the artifices which make feminine diplomacy so potent an agency in statecraft, bent every faculty to inspire confidence in the new Administration. Mrs. Davis herself was not the least of the factors that made the President's policy the creed of the land. There was no elaboration of costume—no obtrusive jewels. The most richly dressed dame in the company was a Madame Gannat, the deity of the most charming drawing-room at the capital. At her house society was always sure to meet the European noblemen traveling in the country, the quasi official agents of France, England, and Austria, accredited to the new Confederacy, the generals of the Southern armies on leave in the city, and the political leaders able to snatch an evening's relaxation. For some reason this potential personage let Olympia and Jack see that she was deeply interested in them. She took the young man's arm late in the evening, and whispering, "Find a place where we can have a little talk," accompanied him to a small apartment joining a conservatory, where Mrs. Atterbury transacted business with her agents.
"You must take down a book, so that, in case the curious remark us, our tête-à-tête may not be regarded as conspiracy."
"No one would be apt to associate you with such a thing," Jack said, vaguely.
"I don't know. Like all conspiracies, this Confederate comedy is suspicious."