“I said we were playing a comedy here in Richmond, colonel,” he said, in tones so deep and solemn that they made me start; “I am playing my part with the rest; I play it in public, and even in private, as before you to-night. I sit here, indolently smoking and uttering my jests and platitudes, and, at the moment that I am speaking, my heart is breaking! I am a Virginian—I love this soil more than all the rest of the world—not a foot but is dear and sacred, and a vulgar horde are about to trample it under foot, and enslave its people. Every pulse of my being throbs with agony at the thought! I can not sleep. I have lost all taste for food. One thought alone haunts me—that the land of Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Henry, and Randolph, is to become the helpless prey of the scum of Europe and the North! My family has lived here for more than two hundred years. I have been, and am to-day, proud beyond words, of my birthright! I am a Virginian! a Virginian of Virginians! I have for forty years had no thought but the honor of Virginia. I have fought for her, and her only, in the senate and cabinet of the old government at Washington. I have dedicated all my powers to her—shrunk from nothing in my path—given my days and nights for years, and was willing to pour out my blood for Virginia; and now she is about to be trampled upon, her great statues hurled down, her escutcheon blotted, her altars overturned! And I, who have had no thought but her honor and glory, am to be driven, at the end of a long career, to a foreign land! I am to crouch yonder in Canada, with my bursting brow in my two hands—and every newspaper is to tell me ‘the negro and the bayonet rule Virginia!’ Can you wonder, then, that I am gloomy—that despair lies under all this jesting? You are happy. You go yonder, where a bullet may end you. Would to God that I had entered the army, old as I am, and that at least I could hope for a death of honor, in arms for Virginia!”
VII. — SECRET SERVICE.
The statesman leaned back in his great chair, and was silent. At the same moment a tap was heard at the door; it opened noiselessly, and Nighthawk glided into the apartment.
Under his cloak I saw the gray uniform of a Confederate soldier; in his hand he carried a letter.
Nighthawk saluted Mr. X——- and myself with benignant respect. His quick eye, however, had caught the gloomy and agitated expression of the statesman’s countenance, and he was silent.
“Well,” said Mr. X——-, raising his head, with a deep sigh. Then passing his hand over his face, he seemed to brush away all emotion. When he again looked up, his face was as calm and unmoved as at the commencement of our interview.
“You see I begin a new scene in this comedy,” he said to me in a low tone.
And turning to Nighthawk, he said:—