The last words were said jokingly, but Asher’s mother saw a sudden hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening landscape.
There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.
“You stayed at home and grew rich, Father.”
“Well?”
The father’s voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.
“Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of the compensation. Once, when 10 our regiment was captured and starving, the Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I ever tasted. And a Rebel girl—” he broke off suddenly.
“Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?” queried the older man.
“I’m trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House and play mine host any more than I could—” hesitatingly—“marry a Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I’ve seen too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid at home do the little jobs.”
He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio settlement seem only a boy’s pastime, to be put away with other childish things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand dunes—everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And withal, he resented dictation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before him had done.
“What do you propose to do?” his father asked.