“He was born the very day I was wounded,” said Charley. “I remember how anxious I was to see him before I died.”
“I knew you wouldn’t die,” said Alice; “and you didn’t!”
“I am here,” said Charley.
So, fair reader, Charley, in the last week of September, 1864, was a father two months old. As for the baby (and I hereby set the fashion of introducing one or more into every romance[[1]]), his mother had already discovered whom he was like. He was a Carter, every inch of him, especially his nose. But he had his father’s sense of humor,—there was not the slightest doubt of that. For when Charley, who, in speaking to the infant, always alluded to himself in those words,—when Charley, chucking him gingerly under the chin, would ask him what he thought of his venerable p-p-p-p-pop, he could be seen to smile, with the naked eye. To smile that jerky, sudden-spreading, sudden-shrinking smile of babyhood. You see it,—’tis gone! Ah, can it be that even then we dimly discern how serious a world this is to be born into!
Major Frobisher’s battalion was in front of Richmond. The Don and I were under General Jubal Early, in the lower valley,—he a captain in command of the skirmishers of the Stonewall Division, I a staff-officer of the same rank.
I know nothing which makes one’s morning paper more interesting than the news of a great battle. It’s nice to read, between sips of coffee, how the grape and canister mowed ’em down; and the flashing of sabres is most picturesque, and bayonets glitter delightfully, in the columns of a well-printed journal. Taking a hand in it—that’s different. Then the bodily discomfort and mental inanition of camp-life. Thinking is impossible. This, perhaps, does not bear hard upon professionals, with whom, for the most part, abstention from all forms of thought is normal and persistent; but to a civilian, accustomed to give his faculties daily exercise, the routine-life of a soldier is an artesian bore. So, at least, I found it. No doubt, with us, the ever-present consciousness that we were enormously outnumbered made a difference. One boy, attacked by three or four, may be plucky. It is rather too much to expect him to be gay. I was not gay.
It was different with our friend, Captain Smith. He was one of the half-dozen men I knew in those days who actually rejoiced in war. He longed for death, my lovely and romantic reader is anxious to be told; but I am sorry I cannot give her any proofs of this. It was Attila’s gaudium certaminis that inspired him. He was never tired of talking of war, which, with Hobbes, he held to be the natural state of man. At any rate, said he, one day, drawing forth his Iliad and tapping it affectionately, they have been hard at it some time.
This little volume was on its last legs. He had read it to pieces, and could recite page after page of it in the original. How closely, he would say, we skirmishers resemble the forefighters of Homer. He never spoke of his own men save as Myrmidons.
He had become an ardent student, too, of the art of war, and had Dumont and Jomini at his fingers’ ends. Indeed, I am convinced that he would have risen to high rank had he not begun, and for two years remained, a private in the ranks. At the time of which we speak, his capacity and courage were beginning to attract attention; and more than one general officer looked upon Captain Smith as a man destined to rise high.
It remains for me to say that he and Mary have never met since that farewell letter. What his feelings are towards her I can only conjecture; for, although he frequently speaks of the old times, her name never passes his lips. An analytical writer could tell you every thought that had crossed his mind during all these years, and, in twenty pages of Insight, work him up, by slow degrees, from a state of tranquil bliss to one of tumultuous jimjams. But, if you wish to know what my characters feel and think, you must listen to what they say, and see what they do; which I find is the only way I have of judging of people in real life. I should say, therefore (for guessing is inexpensive), that the captain’s lips were sealed, either by deep, sorrowing love, or else by implacable resentment. Choose for yourself, fair reader. I told you, long ago, that this book is but the record of things seen or heard by Charley, or by Alice, supplemented occasionally by facts which chanced to fall under my own observation. Even where I seemed to play analytical, through those weary chapters touching Mary’s religious misgivings, I was not swerving from the line I had laid down. Every word therein written down is from the lips of Mary herself, as reported to me by Alice. Now, Charley tells me that never once did Captain Smith mention Mary’s name, even to him. How, then, am I to know what were his feelings towards her? I remember, indeed, that once a young lieutenant of his, returning from furlough, greeted him with warmth; adding, almost with his first breath, that he had met a friend of his—a lady—in Richmond,—Miss Rolfe—Leigh Street—I spent an evening there—we talked a great deal of you—