She was womanish about it, and not heroic, like her Amazonian sisters on the Rebel side. Nevertheless she did not feel the separation so bitterly as she would have done, had they been married a few months or years, instead of only a few hours. Intimate relations with her husband had not yet become a habit, and consequently a necessity of her existence; the mere fact that they had exchanged the nuptial vows was to her a realization of all that she had ever anticipated in marriage; when they left the altar, and his ring was upon her finger, their wedded life was as complete as it ever would be. And thus, in her ignorance of what love might become, she was spared something of the anguish of separation.
She was thinking of her absent husband when Mrs. Larue addressed her for the first time as Mrs. Carter; and yet in her dreaminess she did not at the moment recognize the name as her own: not until Madame laughed and said, "Lillie, I am talking to you." Then she colored crimson and throbbed at the heart as if her husband himself had laid his hand upon her shoulder.
Very shortly she began to demand the patient encouragements of her father. All day, when she could get at him, she pursued him with questions which no man in these unprophetic days could answer. It was, "Papa, do you think there will be an active campaign this summer? Papa, don't you suppose that Mr. Carter will be allowed to keep his brigade at Thibodeaux?"
She rarely spoke of her husband except as Mr. Carter. She did not like his name John—it sounded too common-place for such a superb creature; and the title of Colonel was too official to satisfy her affection. But "Mr. Carter" seemed to express her respect for this man, her husband, her master, who was so much older, and, as she thought, morally greater than herself.
Sometimes the Doctor, out of sheer pity and paternal sympathy, answered her questions just as she wished them to be answered, telling her that he saw no prospect of an active campaign, that the brigade could not possibly be spared from the important post of Thibodeaux, etc. etc. But then the exactingness of anxious love made her want to know why he thought so; and her persevering inquiries generally ended by forcing him from all his hastily constructed works of consolation. In mere self-defence, therefore, he occasionally urged upon her the unpleasant but ennobling duties of patience and self-control.
"My dear," he would say, "we cannot increase our means of happiness without increasing our possibilities of misery. A woman who marries is like a man who goes into business. The end may be greatly increased wealth, or it may be bankruptcy. It is cowardly to groan over the fact. You must learn to accept the sorrows of your present life as well as the joys; you must try to strike a rational balance between the two, and be contented if you can say, 'On the whole, I am happier than I was.' I beg you, for your own sake, to overcome this habit of looking at only the darker chances of life. If you go on fretting, you will not last the war out. No constitution—no woman's constitution, at any rate—can stand it. You positively must cease to be a child, and become a woman."
Lillie tried to obey, but could only succeed by spasms.
CHAPTER XVIII. DOCTOR RAVENEL COMMENCES THE ORGANIZATION OF SOUTHERN LABOR.
For some time previous to the marriage Doctor Ravenel had been plotting the benefit of the human race. He was one of those philanthropic conspirators, those humanitarian Catilines, who, for the last thirty years have been rotten-egged and vilified at the North, tarred and feathered and murdered at the South, under the name of abolitionists. It is true that until lately he has been a silent one, as you may infer from the fact that he was still in the land of the living. If the hundred-headed hydra had preached abolition in New Orleans previous to the advent of Farragut and Butler, he would have had every one of his skulls fractured within twenty-four hours after he had commenced his ministry. Nobody could have met the demands of such a mission except that gentleman of miraculous vitality mentioned by Ariosto, who, as fast as he was cut in pieces, picked himself up and grew together as good as new.