ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR.
Opportunity is an instinct to the man who dares. To him the law of the impossible has no meaning. To him there is no such thing as the unexpected. What he wants comes to pass, because he can not see danger, difficulty, nor any of the obstacles that daunt the prudent and the temporizing. It is, therefore, the impossible that is fulfilled in many of the crises of life. By the same token it is the foolhardy and preposterous thing that is most readily done in determinate conjunctures. We guard against the possible, but we take little note of the enterprises that involve foolhardiness or desperation. Daring has safeguards of its own that are understood only when mad ventures have come to successful issue. Helpless and hopeless as Jack's situation seemed, the very poverty of his resources, helped the daring scheme of escape that filled his mind night and day during these apparently indolent weeks of pleasuring in the ranks of his enemies. Then, too, the arrogant self-confidence of his captors was an inestimable aid. Military discipline and provost vigilance were at their slackest stage in the rebel lines at this triumphant epoch in the fortunes of the Confederacy. The easily won combat at Bull Run had filled the authorities—as well as the rank and file—with overweening contempt for the resources of the North, or the enterprise of its soldiers. It was not until long after the time I am now writing about, that the prisoners were closely guarded and access refused to the idle and curious. But, as a matter of fact, nothing in the fortunes of our friends equals the truth of the thrilling and desperate chances taken by Northern captives to escape the lingering death of prison in the South. Since the war, volumes have been written of personal experience, amply attested, that would in romance receive the derisive mark of the critics. Danger daily met becomes a commonplace to men of resolution. Things which appall us when we read them become a simple part of our purpose when we live in an atmosphere of peril and put our hope only in ending the ordeal.
The incident I am narrating were the work of many hands. Mrs. Gannat had from the first given her heart to the Union cause. A woman of high standing in society, well known throughout the State for her mind, her manners, and her benevolence, it was not difficult for her, by adroit management, to aid such prisoners as fell into rebel hands during the early years of the war. Before Richmond became a mart in the modern sense, the Gannat mansion, set far back among the trees of a noble grove, was a shrine to the tradition loving citizens, for, beyond any Southern city, save perhaps New Orleans, Richmond folk cherished the memory of aristocratic and semi-regal ancestors. There were those still living when the war began, who had heard their fathers and mothers talk of the last royal Governor and the splendid state of the great noblemen who had flocked to the city of Powhatan when Virginia was the gem of England's colonial coronet. The patrician caste of the city still held its own, aided by the helot hand of slavery. Among the most reverently considered in this sanctified group, Mrs. Gannat was, if not first, the conceded equal. She was the dowager of the ancient noblesse. The young Virginian received in her drawing-rooms carried away a distinction which was recognized throughout the State. The dame admitted to Mrs. Gannat's semi-literary leveés was accepted as all that society demanded of its votaries.
In other years this great lady had been the admired center of the court circle in Washington. There she had known very intimately Senator—then Congressman—Sprague. Jack remembered vaguely the gossip of an engagement between his father and a famous Southern beauty; and when the lady in the course of the conspiring said, as they talked, "My son, I might have been your mother," he knew that this gentle-voiced, kindly-eyed matron was the woman his father had loved and lost. I don't propose to rehearse the ingenuities of the complicated plans whereby the group we are interested in were to be delivered. Mrs. Gannat's perfect knowledge of the city, her intimacy with the President, Cabinet, and leading men, her vogue with the officials, all tended to make very simple and easy that which would seem in the telling hare-brained and impossible. Jack's unique position, and Dick's attitude of the half-acknowledged fiancé of an Atterbury, broke down bars that even Mrs. Gannat's far-reaching sagacity might not have been able to cope with in certainty. The night chosen for the escape was fatefully propitious. The President was entertaining the newly arrived French delegate and the ministers Mason and Slidell, just appointed to the courts of St. James and the Tuileries. Everybody that was anybody was of the splendid company.
Jack, however, was tortured by a doubt of Dick's constancy when it came to an abrupt quitting of his sweetheart. Poor lad, he fought the battle bravely, making no sign; and when Rosa, the picture of demure loveliness, in her girlish finery, asked him maliciously as the carriage drove toward the Executive Mansion—
"Don't you feel like a traitor, you sly Yankee?" Dick gave a great groan and said:
"O Rosa, Rosa, I can't go! I do feel like a traitor. I am a traitor."
Jack, luckily, was sitting beside him, and brought his heel down on the lad's toes with such emphasis that he uttered a cry of pain. Rosa was all solicitude at this.
"What is it, Richard; have I wounded you? Don't mind my chatter; I only do it to tease you. He shall be a Yankee; he shall make nutmegs; he shall abuse the chivalrous South; he shall be what he likes; he sha'n't be teased—" and she wound her bare arms about his neck, quite indifferent to the reproving nudges of mamma and the sad mirthfulness of Jack.
Dick found means in the noise of the chariot, and the crush they presently came into, for saying something that seemed to lessen the self-reproachful tone of the penitent, and, when they entered the modest portals of the presidency, Rosa was radiant and Dick equable, but not in his usual chattering volubility.