In a few days he received orders from the General commanding, directing him to report to the headquarters of the army in the field. He signed his last quartermaster papers gaily, kissed his wife and child sadly, shook hands with Ravenel and Mrs. Larue, and took the first boat up the river.
Lillie was amazed and shocked at discovering how little she missed him. She accused herself of being wicked and heartless; she would not accept the explanation that she was a mother. It was all the more hateful in her to forget him, she said, now that he was the father of her child. Still, she could not be miserable; she was almost always happy with her baby. Such a lovely baby he was; charming because he was heavy, because he ate, because he slept, because he cried! His wailing troubled her because it denoted that he was ill at ease, and not because the sound was in itself disagreeable to her ear. If she heard it at a little distance from the house, for instance when returning from a walk, she quickened her step and smiled gaily, saying, "He is alive. You will see how he will stop when I take him."
People who feel so strongly are rarely interesting except to those who share their feelings, or who have learned to love them under any circumstances, and through all the metamorphoses of which a single character is capable. She would have been perfectly tedious at this period to any ordinary acquaintance who had not been initiated into the sweet mystery of love for children. Her character and conversation seemed to be all solved in the great alembic of maternity. She was a mother as passionately as she had been a betrothed and a wife; and indeed it appeared as if this culminating condition of her womanhood was the most absorbing of all. This exquisite life, delicious in spite of her occasional anxieties and self-reproaches concerning her husband, flowed on without much mixture of trouble until one day she picked up a letter on the floor of her father's study which opened to her a hitherto inconceivable fountain of bitterness. Let us see how this unfortunate manuscript found its way into the house.
Doctor Ravenel, deprived for the last two years of his accustomed summer trip to Europe, or the north, or other countries blessed with a mineralogy, sought health and amusement in long walks about New Orleans and its flat, ugly vicinity. Lillie, who used to be his comrade in these exercises, now took constitutionals in the pony carriage or in company with the wicker wagon of Master Ravvie. These strolls of the Doctor were therefore somewhat dull business. A country destitute of stones was to him much like a language destitute of a literature. He fell into a way of walking without paying much attention to his surroundings, revolving the while new systems of mineralogy, crystallizing his knowledge into novel classifications, recalling to memory the characteristics of his specimens, as Lillie recollected the giggles and cunning ways of her baby. In one of these absent-minded moods he was surprised by a heavy shower, three or four miles from home. The only shelter was a deserted shanty, once probably the dwelling of a free negro. A minute or two after the Doctor found himself in its single room, and before he had discovered the soundest part of its leaky roof, a man in the undress uniform of a United States officer, dripping wet, reeled into the doorway, with the observation, "By Jove! this is watering my rum."
The Doctor immediately recognized in the herculean form, bronzed face, black eyes and twisted nose, the personality of Lieutenant Van Zandt. He had not seen him for nearly two years, but the man's appearance and voice were unforgettable. The Doctor was charitable in philosophising concerning coarse and vicious people, but he abominated their society and always avoided it if possible. He looked about him for a means of escape and found none; the man filled up the only door-way, and the rain was descending in torrents. Accordingly the Doctor turned his back on the Lieutenant and ruminated mineralogy.
"I prefer plain whisky," continued Van Zandt, staring at the rain with a contemptuous grin. "I don't want, by Jove! so much water in my grog. None of your mixed drinks, by Jove! Plain whisky!"
After a minute more of glaring and smiling, he remarked, "Dam slow business, by Jove! Van Zandt, my bully boy, we won't wait to see this thing out. We'll turn in."
Facing about with a lurch he beheld the other inmate of the shanty.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. Then recollecting the breeding of his youth, he added, "I beg pardon, sir. Am I intruding?"
"Not at all; of course not," replied Ravenel. "Our rights here are the same."