Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty

by John William De Forest

"Good night, dear papa," she murmured, with the sigh of a tired child. "Forgive me."

It was near morning before either of them slept; and both came to the breakfast table with pale, wearied faces. There were dark circles around Lillie's eyes, and her head ached so that she could hardly hold it up, but still she put on a piteous, propitiating smile. She hoped and feared unreasonable things every time that her father spoke or seemed to her to be about to speak. She thought he might say that he had given up all his opposition; and in the same breath she dreaded lest he might declare that it must be all over forever. But the conversation of the evening was not resumed, and the meal passed in absorbed, anxious, embarrassing silence, neither being able to talk on any subject but the one which filled their thoughts. An hour later Lillie suddenly fled from the parlor to her own room. She had seen Carter approaching the house; she felt certain that he came to demand her of her father; and at such an interview she could not have been present, she thought, without dying. The mere thought of it as she sat by her window, looking out without seeing anything, made her breath come so painfully that she wondered whether her lungs were not affected, and whether she were not destined to die early. Her fatigue, and still more her troubles, made her babyish, like an invalid. After half an hour had passed she heard the outer door close upon the visitor, and could not resist the temptation of peeping out to see him, if it were only his back. He was looking, with those handsome and audacious eyes of his straight at her window. With a sudden throb of alarm, or shame, or some other womanish emotion, she hid herself behind the curtain, only to look out again when he had disappeared, and to grieve lest she had given him offence. After a while her father called her, and she went down trembling to the parlor.

"I have seen him," said the Doctor. "I told him what I told you. I told him that I must wait,—that I wanted time for reflection. I gave him to understand that it must not be considered an engagement. At the same time I allowed him to write to you. God forgive me if I have done wrong. God pity us both."

Lillie did not think of asking if he had been civil to the Colonel; she knew that he would not and could not be discourteous to any human being. She made no answer to what he said except by going gently to him and kissing him.

"Come, you must dress yourself," he added. "The regiment goes on board the transport at twelve o'clock. I promised the Colonel that we would be there to bid him—and Captain Colburne good-bye."

Dressing for the street was usually a long operation with Lillie, but not this morning. Although she reached the station of the Carrollton railroad in a breathless condition, it seemed to her that her father had never walked so slowly; and on board the cars she really fatigued herself with the nervous tension of an involuntary mental effort to push forward the wheezy engine.

Carrollton is one the suburban offshoots of New Orleans, and contains some two thousand inhabitants, mostly of the poorer classes, and of Germanic lineage. Around it stretches the tame, rich, dead level which constitutes southern Louisiana. The only raised ground is the levee; the only grand feature of the landscape is the Mississippi; all the rest is greenery, cypress groves, orange thickets, flowers, or bare flatness. As Lillie emerged from the brick and plaster railroad-station she saw the Tenth and its companion regiments along the levee, the men sitting down in their ranks and waiting patiently, after the manner of soldiers. The narrow open place between the river and the dusty little suburb was thronged with citizens;—German shopkeepers, silversmiths, &c., who were out of custom, and Irish laborers who were out of work;—poor women, (whose husbands were in the rebel army) selling miserable cakes and beer to the enlisted men; all, white as well as black, ragged, dirty, lounging, listless hopeless; none of them hostile, at least not in manner; a discouraged, subduced, stricken population. Against the bank were moored six steamboats, their smoke-stacks, and even their upper decks, overlooking the low landscape. They were not the famous floating palaces of the Mississippi, those had all been carried away by Lovell, or burnt at the wharves, or sunk in battle near the forts; these were smaller craft, such as formerly brought cotton down the Red River, or threaded the shallows between Lake Pontchartrain and Mobile. They looked more fragile even than northern steamboats; their boilers and machinery were unenclosed, visible, neglected, ugly; the superstructure was a card-house of stanchions and clapboards.

The Doctor led Lillie through the crowd to a pile of lumber which promised a view of the scene. As she mounted the humble lookout she caught sight of a manly equestrian figure, and heard a powerful bass voice thunder out a sentence of command. It was so guttural as to be incomprehensible to her; but in obedience to it the lounging soldiers sprang to their feet and resumed their ranks; the shining muskets rose straight from the shoulder, and then took a uniform slope; there was a bustle, a momentary mingling, and she saw knapsacks instead of faces.

"Battalion!" the Colonel had commanded. "Shoulder arms. Right shoulder shift arms. Right face."

He now spoke a few words to the adjutant, who repeated the orders to the captains, and then signalled to the drum-major. To the sound of drum and fife the right company, followed successively by the others from right to left, filed down the little slope with a regular, resounding tramp, and rapidly crowded one of the transports with blue uniforms and shining rifles. How superb in Lillie's eyes was the Colonel, though his face was grim and his voice harsh with arbitrary power. She liked him for his bronzed color, his monstrous mustache, his air of matured manhood; yes, how much better she liked him for being thirty-five years old than if he had been only twenty-five! How much prouder of him was she because she was a little afraid of him, than if he had seemed one whom she might govern! Presently a brilliant blush rose like a sunrise upon her countenance. Carter had caught sight of them, and was approaching. A wave of his hand and a stare of his imperious eyes drove away the flock of negroes who had crowded their lookout. The interview was short, and to a listener would have been uninteresting, unless he had known the sentimental relations of the parties. The Doctor did nearly all of that part of the talking which was done in words; and his observations, if they were noted at all, probably seemed to the other two mere flatness and irrelevancy. He prophecied success to the expedition; he wished the Colonel success for the sake of the good cause; finally he warmed so far as to wish him personal success and safety. But what was even this to that other question of union or separation for life?