He was sobered at leaving her, but he never thought of not going with the rest. He went, and all the rest. And Bessie found herself, just when nature had crowned her with womanhood, a princess without a kingdom. To be sure, living on the border gave her double opportunities, and for contrasting romances. There were episodes that comforted her with the reflection that she was not getting wholly out of practice in the arts. And there was real adventure in flying and secret visits from Guy and the rest—Guy, who was never again just the same with her; but, for that matter, neither was she just the same with him. But, on the whole, as she pouted to him afterward, she wouldn't call that four years' war exactly entertaining!
The Halls personally did not suffer so deeply as their neighbors except from property loss. All they could afford, and more, they gave to the South, and the Northern invader took what was left. When there was nothing left, he hacked the rosewood furniture and made targets of the family portraits, in the mere wantonness of loot that, as a recriminative compliment, cannot be laid to the charge of any one period or section. Most of the farm negroes crossed the river. Funds ran low.
There had been ease and luxury in the family always, and just when Bessie reached the time to profit by them she remarked that they failed.
Even if the Halls were not in mourning, no one lives through such a time without feeling the common humanity. But Bessie, though she lingered on the brink of love as of all the other deeps of life—curious, adventurous, at once willing and reluctant—was still, in the end, quite steady.
When the war was over, the Halls were poor, on a competence of land run to waste, with no labor to work it, and no market to sell it. And Mr. Hall, like so many of his generation, was too hampered by habit and crushed by reminiscence to meet the new day.
It was the contrast in Guy's spirit that won Bessie. His was indeed the immemorial spirit of youth—whether it be of the young world, or the young male, or the young South—to accept the issue of trial by combat and give loyalty to one proved equally worthy of sword or hand.
“We're whipped,” he told her, “and that settles it. Now there's other work for us than brooding over it. All the same, the South has a future, Bibi, and that means a future for you and me.”
“Not in the manufacture of poetry, I'm afraid,” she laughed. “You dropped a stitch.”
She did not seem to take his prowess, either past or to come, very seriously; and her eyebrows and her inflection went up at the assumption of the “we” in his plans. But—she listened.
His definiteness was itself effective. She herself did not know what she wanted. Something was wrong; or rather, everything was. She was finding life a great bore. But what would be right, she couldn't say, except that it must be different.