"He is alive, father—thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.
"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!
CHAPTER X.
Before and after Gettysburgh—The Apathy and Despair which preceded, and the Jubilation which followed—What Kitty Hood said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand—Brother and Sister—A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A fire-room Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe.
It was a dark day for the nation—perhaps none darker!—that day of late June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor, instead of demanding and enforcing victory,—that day they experienced such a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome—as it had been yelled into the ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise" when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.
A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the chance of after ridicule.
There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be submitted to with the best grace possible.
One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be impending.