I must not stop to ask more, for these war-days are short, and the story might be cold before you heard it.
* * * * *
A brick house, burrowed into the side of a hill, with red gleams of light winking out of the windows in a jolly way into the winter's night: wishing, one might fancy, to cheer up the hearts of the freezing stables and barn and hen-house that snuggled about the square yard, trying to keep warm. The broad-backed old hill (Scofield's Hill, a famous place for papaws in summer) guards them tolerably well; but then, house and barn and hill lie up among the snowy peaks of the Virginian Alleghanies, and you know how they would chill and awe the air. People away down yonder in the river-bottoms see these peaks dim and far-shining, as though they cut through thick night; but we, up among them here, find the night wide, filled with a pale starlight that has softened for itself out of the darkness overhead a great space up towards heaven.
The snow lay deep, on this night of which I tell you,—a night somewhere near the first of January in this year. Two old men, a white and a black, who were rooting about the farm-yard from stable to fodder-rack, waded through deep drifts of it.
"Tell yer, Mars' Joe," said the negro, banging the stable-door, "dat hoss ort n't ter risk um's bones dis night. Ef yer go ter de Yankee meetin', Coly kern't tote yer."
"Well, well, Uncle Bone, that's enough," said old Scofield testily, looking through the stall-window at the horse, with a face anxious enough to show that the dangers of foundering for Coly and for the Union were of about equal importance in his mind.
A heavily built old fellow, big-jointed, dull-eyed, with a short, black pipe in his mouth, going about peering into sheds and out-houses,—the same routine he and Bone had gone through every night for thirty years,—joking, snarling, cursing, alternately. The cramped old routine, dogged, if you choose to call it so, was enough for him: you could tell that by a glance at his earnest, stolid face; you could see that it need not take Prospero's Ariel forty minutes to put a girdle about this man's world: ten would do it, tie up the farm, and the dead and live Scofields, and the Democratic party, with an ideal reverence for "Firginya" under all. As for the Otherwhere, outside of Virginia, he heeded it as much as a Hindoo does the turtle on which the earth rests. For which you shall not sneer at Joe Scofield, or the Pagan. How wide is your own "sacred soil"?—the creed, government, bit of truth, other human heart, self, perhaps, to which your soul roots itself vitally,—like a cuttle-fish sucking to an inch of rock,—and drifts out palsied feelers of recognition into the ocean of God's universe, just as languid as the aforesaid Hindoo's hold upon the Kalpas of emptiness underneath the turtle?
Joe Scofield sowed the fields and truck-patch,—sold the crops down in Wheeling; every year he got some little, hardly earned snugness for the house (he and Bone had been born in it, their grandfathers had lived there together). Bone was his slave; of course, they thought, how should it be otherwise? The old man's daughter was Dode Scofield; his negro was Bone Scofield, in degree. Joe went to the Methodist church on Sundays; he hurrahed for the Democratic candidate: it was a necessity for Whigs to be defeated; it was a necessity for Papists to go to hell. He had a tight grip on these truths, which were born, one might say, with his blood; his life grew out of them. So much of the world was certain,—but outside? It was rather vague there: Yankeedom was a mean-soiled country, whence came clocks, teachers, peddlers, and infidelity; and the English,—it was an American's birthright to jeer at the English.
We call this a narrow life, prate in the North of our sympathy with the universal man, don't we? And so we extend a stomachic greeting to our Spanish brother that sends us wine, and a bow from our organ of ideality to Italy for beauty incarnate in Art,—see the Georgian slaveholder only through the eyes of the cowed negro at his feet, and give a dime on Sunday to send the gospel to the heathen, who will burn forever, we think, if it never is preached to them. What of your sympathy with the universal man, when I tell you Scofield was a Rebel?
His syllogisms on this point were clear, to himself. For slavery to exist in a country where free government was put on trial was a tangible lie, that had worked a moral divorce between North and South. Slavery was the vital breath of the South; if she chose to go out and keep it, had not freemen the right to choose their own government? To bring her back by carnage was simply the old game of regal tyranny on republican cards. So his head settled it: as for his heart,—his neighbors' houses were in ashes, burned by the Yankees; his son lay dead at Manassas. He died to keep them back, didn't he? "Geordy boy," he used to call him,—worth a dozen puling girls: since he died, the old man had never named his name. Scofield was a Rebel in every bitter drop of his heart's blood.