Every Sunday Mr. Minnegerode cried aloud in anguish his litany, “from pestilence and famine, battle, murder, and sudden death,” and we wailed on our knees, “Good Lord deliver us,” and on Monday, and all the week long, we go on as before, hearing of nothing but battle, murder, and sudden death, which are daily events. Now I have a new book; that is the unlooked-for thing, a pleasing incident in this life of monotonous misery. We live in a huge barrack. We are shut in, guarded from light without.
At breakfast to-day came a card, and without an instant’s interlude, perhaps the neatest, most fastidious man in South Carolina walked in. I was uncombed, unkempt, tattered, and torn, in my most comfortable, worst worn, wadded green silk dressing-gown, with a white woolen shawl over my head to keep off draughts. He has not been in the war yet, and now he wants to be captain of an engineer corps. I wish he may get it! He has always been my friend; so he shall lack no aid that I can give. If he can stand the shock of my appearance to-day, we may reasonably expect to continue friends until death. Of all men, the fastidious Barny Heywood to come in. He faced the situation gallantly.
January 18th.—Invited to Dr. Haxall’s last night to meet the Lawtons. Mr. Benjamin[111] dropped in. He is a friend of the house. Mrs. Haxall is a Richmond leader of society, a ci-devant beauty and belle, a charming person still, and her hospitality is of the genuine Virginia type. Everything Mr. Benjamin said we listened to, bore in mind, and gave heed to it diligently. He is a Delphic oracle, of the innermost shrine, and is supposed to enjoy the honor of Mr. Davis’s unreserved confidence.
Lamar was asked to dinner here yesterday; so he came to-day. We had our wild turkey cooked for him yesterday, and I dressed myself within an inch of my life with the best of my four-year-old finery. Two of us, my husband and I, did not damage the wild turkey seriously. So Lamar enjoyed the réchauffé, and commended the art with which Molly had hid the slight loss we had inflicted upon its mighty breast. She had piled fried oysters over the turkey so skilfully, that unless we had told about it, no one would ever have known that the huge bird was making his second appearance on the board.
Lamar was more absent-minded and distrait than ever. My husband behaved like a trump—a well-bred man, with all his wits about him; so things went off smoothly enough. Lamar had just read Romola. Across the water he said it was the rage. I am sure it is not as good as Adam Bede or Silas Marner. It is not worthy of the woman who was to “rival all but Shakespeare’s name below.” “What is the matter with Romola?” he asked. “Tito is so mean, and he is mean in such a very mean way, and the end is so repulsive. Petting the husband’s illegitimate children and left-handed wives may be magnanimity, but human nature revolts at it.” “Woman’s nature, you mean!” “Yes, and now another test. Two weeks ago I read this thing with intense interest, and already her Savonarola has faded from my mind. I have forgotten her way of showing Savonarola as completely as I always do forget Bulwer’s Rienzi.”
“Oh, I understand you now! It is like Milton’s devil—he has obliterated all other devils. You can’t fix your mind upon any other. The devil always must be of Miltonic proportions or you do not believe in him; Goethe’s Mephistopheles disputes the crown of the causeway with Lucifer. But soon you begin to feel that Mephistopheles to be a lesser devil, an emissary of the devil only. Is there any Cardinal Wolsey but Shakespeare’s? any Mirabeau but Carlyle’s Mirabeau? But the list is too long of those who have been stamped into your brain by genius. The saintly preacher, the woman who stands by Hetty and saves her soul; those heavenly minded sermons preached by the author of Adam Bede, bear them well in mind while I tell you how this writer, who so well imagines and depicts female purity and piety, was a governess, or something of that sort, and perhaps wrote for a living; at any rate, she had an elective affinity, which was responded to, by George Lewes, and so she lives with Lewes. I do not know that she caused the separation between Lewes and his legal wife. They are living in a villa on some Swiss lake, and Mrs. Lewes, of the hour, is a charitable, estimable, agreeable, sympathetic woman of genius.”
Lamar seemed without prejudices on the subject; at least, he expressed neither surprise nor disapprobation. He said something of “genius being above law,” but I was not very clear as to what he said on that point. As for me I said nothing for fear of saying too much. “You know that Lewes is a writer,” said he. “Some people say the man she lives with is a noble man.” “They say she is kind and good if—a fallen woman.” Here the conversation ended.
January 20th.—And now comes a grand announcement made by the Yankee Congress. They vote one million of men to be sent down here to free the prisoners whom they will not take in exchange. I actually thought they left all these Yankees here on our hands as part of their plan to starve us out. All Congressmen under fifty years of age are to leave politics and report for military duty or be conscripted. What enthusiasm there is in their councils! Confusion, rather, it seems to me! Mrs. Ould says “the men who frequent her house are more despondent now than ever since this thing began.”
Our Congress is so demoralized, so confused, so depressed. They have asked the President, whom they have so hated, so insulted, so crossed and opposed and thwarted in every way, to speak to them, and advise them what to do.