Crittenden: A Kentucky Story of Love and War

by Jr. John Fox

And the Crittenden—of whom he had spoken that morning—the gallant Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that morning—words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left him to do—when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive, would have him do?

And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart, faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the moonlight and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white tomb under which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle, slept side by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their footsteps, since the one part that he was fitted to play was the rôle they and their ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them, failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil War, Crittenden would have played that rôle worthily and without question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright was gone—even before he was born—and yet, as he grew to manhood, he had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father—there was nothing else he could do—playing the gentleman still, though with each year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the realization that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still clung rigidly to old traditions—social, agricultural, and patriarchal—out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His friends—even the boy, his brother—had caught the modern trend of things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work—some to law, some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had studied law—his type of Southerner always studies law—and he tried the practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and had passed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but the pace was too swift, competition was too undignified and greedy, and business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life, which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home. Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try. He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now, and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in—the deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept under control—and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom, was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will take possession of an abandoned field.

But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a woman that would have made this life worth while—in the eyes of his own people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by—that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his mother's pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little, and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in private. So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so freely down upon him. And so without suffering greatly in public estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were changing fast, he passed into the old-young period that is the critical time in the lives of men like him—when he thought he had drunk his cup to the dregs; had run the gamut of human experience; that nothing was left to his future but the dull repetition of his past. Only those who knew him best had not given up hope of him, nor had he really given up hope of himself as fully as he thought. The truth was, he never fell far, nor for long, and he always rose with the old purpose the same, even if it stirred him each time with less and less enthusiasm—and always with the beacon-light of one star shining from his past, even though each time it shone a little more dimly. For usually, of course, there is the hand of a woman on the lever that prizes such a man's life upward, and when Judith Page's clasp loosened on Crittenden, the castle that the lightest touch of her finger raised in his imagination—that he, doubtless, would have reared for her and for him, in fact, fell in quite hopeless ruins, and no similar shape was ever framed for him above its ashes.

It was the simplest and oldest of stories between the two—a story that began, doubtless, with the beginning, and will never end as long as two men and one woman, or two women and one man are left on earth—the story of the love of one who loves another. Only, to the sufferers the tragedy is always as fresh as a knife-cut, and forever new.

Judith cared for nobody. Crittenden laughed and pleaded, stormed, sulked, and upbraided, and was devoted and indifferent for years—like the wilful, passionate youngster that he was—until Judith did love another—what other, Crittenden never knew. And then he really believed that he must, as she had told him so often, conquer his love for her. And he did, at a fearful cost to the best that was in him—foolishly, but consciously, deliberately. When the reaction came, he tried to reëstablish his relations to a world that held no Judith Page. Her absence gave him help, and he had done very well, in spite of an occasional relapse. It was a relapse that had sent him to the mountains, six weeks before, and he had emerged with a clear eye, a clear head, steady nerves, and with the one thing that he had always lacked, waiting for him—a purpose. It was little wonder, then, that the first ruddy flash across a sky that had been sunny with peace for thirty years and more thrilled him like an electric charge from the very clouds. The next best thing to a noble life was a death that was noble, and that was possible to any man in war. One war had taken away—another might give back again; and his chance was come at last.

It was midnight now, and far across the fields came the swift faint beat of a horse's hoofs on the turnpike. A moment later he could hear the hum of wheels—it was his little brother coming home; nobody had a horse that could go like that, and nobody else would drive that way if he had. Since the death of their father, thirteen years after the war, he had been father to the boy, and time and again he had wondered now why he could not have been like that youngster. Life was an open book to the boy—to be read as he ran. He took it as he took his daily bread, without thought, without question. If left alone, he and the little girl whom he had gone that night to see would marry, settle down, and go hand in hand into old age without questioning love, life, or happiness. And that was as it should be; and would to Heaven he had been born to tread the self-same way. There was a day when he was near it; when he turned the same fresh, frank face fearlessly to the world, when his nature was as unspoiled and as clean, his hopes as high, and his faith as child-like; and once when he ran across a passage in Stevenson in which that gentle student spoke of his earlier and better self as his "little brother" whom he loved and longed for and sought persistently, but who dropped farther and farther behind at times, until, in moments of darkness, he sometimes feared that he might lose him forever—Crittenden had clung to the phrase, and he had let his fancy lead him to regard this boy as his early and better self—better far than he had ever been—his little brother, in a double sense, who drew from him, besides the love of brother for brother and father for son, a tenderness that was almost maternal.

The pike-gate slammed now and the swift rush of wheels over the bluegrass turf followed; the barn-gate cracked sharply on the night air and Crittenden heard him singing, in the boyish, untrained tenor that is so common in the South, one of the old-fashioned love-songs that are still sung with perfect sincerity and without shame by his people:

"You'll never find another love like mine,
"You'll never find a heart that's half so true."

And then the voice was muffled suddenly. A little while later he entered the yard-gate and stopped in the moonlight and, from his window, Crittenden looked down and watched him. The boy was going through the manual of arms with his buggy-whip, at the command of an imaginary officer, whom, erect and martial, he was apparently looking straight in the eye. Plainly he was a private now. Suddenly he sprang forward and saluted; he was volunteering for some dangerous duty; and then he walked on toward the house. Again he stopped. Apparently he had been promoted now for gallant conduct, for he waved his whip and called out with low, sharp sternness;

"Steady, now! Ready; fire!" And then swinging his hat over his head: