The Fanatics/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
SONS AND FATHERS
The scenes that were taking place in Dorbury were not different from those that were being enacted over the whole country. While the North was thunderstruck at the turn matters had taken, there had yet been gathering there a political force which only needed this last act of effrontery to galvanize its intention into action. Everywhere, men were gathering themselves into companies, or like Dorbury, already had their Light Guards. Then like the sound of a deep bell in the midst of potential silence came the president's proclamation and the waiting hosts heard gladly. Lincoln's call for troops could hardly do more than was already done. Volunteering was but a word. In effect, thousands of men were ready, and the call meant only marching orders. The enthusiasm of the time was infectious. Old men were vying with youths in their haste and eagerness to offer their services to the country. As Bradford Waters had said, it was a time for sharp divisions, and men who had been lukewarm in behalf of the Northern cause before, now threw themselves heart and soul into it.
This state of affairs effected Southern sympathizers in the North in two ways. It reduced the less robust of spirit to silence and evasion. The bolder and more decided ones were still also, but between the silence of one and that of the other was a vast difference of motive. One was the conceding silence of fear; the other was a sullen repression that brooded and bided its time.
Among those who came out strongly on the side of the South, was old Colonel Stewart, one of the oldest citizens of the town. He had served with distinction throughout the Mexican war, and was the close friend of Vallandigham. He had come of good old Virginia blood, and could not and would not try to control his utterances. So when the crisis came, his family, fearing the heat and violence of the time, urged him to go South, where his words and feelings would be more in accordance with the views of his neighbors. But he angrily refused.
"No," said he, "I will not run from them a single step. I will stay here, and thrust the truth of what I believe down their throats."
"But it will do no good," said his old wife plaintively. "These people are as set in their beliefs as you are in yours, and you have no more chance of turning them than of stemming the Ohio River."
"I am not here to stem the current. Let them go on with it and be swept to destruction by their own madness, but they shall not move me."
"All of your friends are keeping silent, colonel, although they feel as deeply as you do."
"All the more reason for him who feels and dares speak to speak."
"Then, too, you owe it to your family to leave this place. Your views make it hard for us, and they will make it worse as the trouble grows."
"I hope I have a family heroic enough to bear with me some of the burdens of the South."
His wife sighed hopelessly. It seemed a throwing of her words into empty air to talk to her husband. But Emily Stewart took up the cause. She had the subtlety of the newer generation, which in argument she substituted for her mother's simple directness.
"It seems to me, father," she said, "that you owe the most not to your family, but to your self."
"What do you mean?" he said, turning upon her.
"That if you are going to bear the burdens of the South, you should bear them not half-heartedly, but in full."
"Well, am I not?"
"Let me explain. If trouble should come to the South, if disaster or defeat, it would be easy for you, for any man, to raise his voice in her behalf, while he, himself, rides out and beyond the stress of the storm. If you are on the side of the South, she has a right to demand your presence there; the strength of your personality thrown in with her strength."
The old man thought deeply, and then he said, "I believe you are right. Body as well as soul should be with the South now. Yes, we will go South. But I am sorry about Walter. He has been so bound up in his work. It will be a great disappointment for him to go away and leave it all. But then he may, in fact, I hope he will find consolation for whatever he loses in defending the birthplace of his father against the invasion of vandals."
The two women were silent. They were keener than the man. Women always are; and these knew or felt with a vividness that bordered on knowledge that Walter would not think as his father thought or go his father's way, and here the breach would come. But the colonel never once thought but that his son would enter heartily into all his plans and he prided himself upon the step he was about to take. His wife and daughter went out and left him anxiously awaiting Walter's coming.
They were apprehensive when they heard the young man's step in the hall, and afterwards heard him enter the library where the colonel always insisted that any matter of importance should be discussed.
Heroism, real or fancied, is its own reward, its own audience and its own applause. With continued thought upon the matter, Colonel Stewart's enthusiasm had reached the fever pitch from which he could admit but one view of it. He had bade the servant send his son to him as soon as he came in, and he was walking back and forth across the floor when he heard the young man's step. The old man paused and threw back his head with the spirited motion that was reminiscent of the days when he was a famous orator.
The boy, he was the colonel's only son, was not yet twenty-four—a handsome fellow, tall, well-made and as straight as an arrow. As they stood there facing each other, there was something very much alike in them. Age, experience, and contact with the world had hardened the lines about the old man's mouth, which as yet in the boy's, only indicated firmness.
"Sit down, Walter," said the colonel impressively, "I have something of importance to say to you; something that will probably change your whole life." His son had dropped into a chair opposite to the one which his father had taken. His face was white with the apprehension that would tug at his heart, but his eye was steady and his lips firm.
Alexander Stewart could never quite forget that for two sessions he had been a speaking member of the Ohio legislature, and whenever he had anything of importance to say, he returned involuntarily to his forensic manner.
"Walter, my son," he began, "we have come upon startling times. I have known all along that this crisis would come, but I had not expected to see it in my day. It was inevitable that the proud spirit of the South and the blind arrogance of the North should some day clash. The clash has now come, and with it, the time for all strong men to take a decided stand. We of the South"—the boy winced at the words—"hold to our allegiance, though we have changed our homes, and this is the time for us to show our loyalty. The South has been insulted, her oldest institutions derided, and her proudest names dragged in the dust by men who might have been their owners' overseers. But she does not bear malice. She is not going to wage a war of vengeance, but a holy war for truth, justice and right. I am going back home to help her." The old man's own eloquence had brought him to his feet in the middle of the floor, where he stood, with eyes blazing. "Back home," he repeated, "and you, my son—" he held out his hand.
"Father," Walter also arose; his face was deadly pale. He did not take the proffered hand. His father gazed at him, first in amazement, then as the truth began to reach his mind, a livid flush overspread his face. His hand dropped at his side, and his fingers clenched.
"You," he half groaned, half growled between his teeth.
"Father, listen to me."
"There is but one thing I can listen to from you."
"You can never hear that. The North is my home. I was born here. I was brought up to revere the flag. You taught me that."
"But there is a reverence greater than that for any flag. There is a time when a flag loses its right to respect."
"You never talked to me of any such reverence or told me of any such time, and now I choose to stand by the home I know."
"This is not your home. Your home is the home of your family, and the blood in your veins is drawn from the best in the South."
"My blood was made by the streams and in the meadows; on the hills and in the valleys of Ohio, here, where I have played from babyhood, and father, I can't— I can't. May we not think differently and be friends?"
"No, if you had the blood of a single Yankee ancestor in you, I would impute it to that and forgive the defection; I could understand your weakening at this time, but———"
"It is not weakening," Walter flashed back, "if anything, it is strengthening when a man stands up for his flag, for the only flag he has ever known, when it is attacked by traitors."
"Traitors!" the old man almost shouted the word as he made a step towards the boy.
"Traitors, yes, traitors," said the son, unflinchingly.
"You cur, you mongrel cur, neither Northern nor Southern!"
"Father———"
"Silence! I wish the North joy of your acquisition. The South is well shed of you. You would have been like to turn tail and skulked in her direst extremity. It is well to know what you are from the start."
"Let me say a word, father."
"Don't father me. I'll father no such weak-kneed renegade as you are. From to-day, you are no son of mine. I curse you—curse you!"
The door opened softly and Mrs. Stewart stood there, transfixed, gazing at the two men. She was very pale for she had heard the last words.
"Husband, Walter—" she said tremulously, "I have intruded, but I could not help it."
Neither man spoke.
"Alexander," she went on, "take back those words. I felt all along it would be so, but you and Walter can disagree with each other and yet be father and son. Walter, come and shake hands with your father." The boy took a reluctant step forward, without raising his head, but his father drew himself up and folded his arms.
"Alexander!"
"I have no son," he said simply. Walter raised his eyes and answered, "And I no father," and seizing his mother in his arms, he covered her face with kisses, and rushed from the room. Presently they heard the front door close behind him.
"Call him back, husband, call him back, for God's sake. He is our son, the only one left— call him back!"
The colonel stood like a statue. Not a muscle of his face quivered, and his folded arms were like iron in their tenseness. "He has chosen his faith," he said. He relaxed then to receive his wife's fainting form in his arms. He laid her gently on a couch and calling his daughter and the servants, went to his own room.
It is an awful thing to have to answer to a mother for her boy. To see her eyes searching your soul with the question in them, "Where is my child?" But it is a more terrible thing to a father's conscience when he himself is questioner, accuser and culprit in one. Colonel Stewart walked his room alone and thought with agony over his position. He knew Walter's disposition. It was very like his own, and this was not a matter in which to say, "I have been hasty," and then allow it to pass over. How could he meet his wife's accusing eves? How could he do without Walter? The old man sat down and buried his face in his hands. The fire and enthusiasm of indignation which had held him up during his interview with his son had left him, and he was only a sad, broken old man. If he could but stay in his room forever, away from everybody.
As soon as his wife recovered from her swoon she sent for him. He went tremblingly and reluctantly to her, fearful of what he should see in her eyes. The room, though, was sympathetically darkened when he went in. He groped his way to the bed. A hand reached out and took his and a voice said, "Let us hurry, lot us go away from here, Alexander." There was no anger, no reproach in the tone, only a deep, lingering sadness that tore at his heartstrings.
"Margaret, Margaret!" he cried, and flinging his arms about her, held her close while sobs shook his frame.
His wife patted his grey hair. "Don't cry, beloved," she said, "this is war. But let us go away from here. Let us go away."
"Yes, Margaret," he sobbed, "we will go away."
Preparations for the departure of the Stewarts began immediately. Mrs. Stewart busied herself feverishly as one who works to drive out bitter thoughts. But the colonel kept to his room away from the scenes of activity. His trouble weighed heavily upon him. His enthusiasm for the war seemed suddenly to have turned its beat malignantly upon him to consume him. Except when circumstances demanded his presence, he kept away from the rest of the family, no longer through the mere dread of meeting them, for it, was the spirit of his conscience to press the iron into his soul; but because he felt that this was a trouble to be borne alone. No one could share it, no one could understand it.
For several days no one outside of the house knew of the breach that had occurred in the Stewart family, nor of their intention to go South. Then they made the mistake of hiring the negro, Ed, to help them finish their packing.
The servant is always curious; the negro servant particularly so, and to the negro the very atmosphere of this silent house, the constrained attitude of the family were pregnant with mystery. Then he did not see the son about. It took but a little time for his curiosity to lead to the discovery that the son was boarding in the town. This, with scraps of information got from the other servants, he put together, and his imagination did the rest. Ed had a picturesque knack for lying, and the tale that resulted from his speculations was a fabric worthy of its weaver.
According to the negro's version, the colonel, though long past the age for service, was going down South to be a general, and wanted to take his son, Walter, along with him to be a captain. Walter had refused, and he and his father had come to fisticuffs in which the young man was worsted, for Ed added admiringly by way of embellishment, "Do ol' cunnel is a mighty good man yit." After this the young man had left his father's house because he thought he was too old to be whipped.
This was the tale with which Ed regaled the people for whom he worked about Dorbury; but be it said in vindication of their common sense that few, if any, believed it. That there was some color of fact in the matter they could not doubt when it was plainly shown that Walter Stewart was not living at his father's house. There must have been a breach of some kind, they admitted, but Ed's picture must be reduced about one-half.
The story, however, threw young Stewart into an unenviable prominence. As modest as it is natural for a young man of twenty-three to be, it gave him no pleasure to have people turn around to look after him with an audible, "There he goes!"
At first, his feeling towards his father had been one, not so much of anger as of grief. But he bad no confidant, and the grief that could not find an outlet hardened into a grief that sticks in the throat, that cannot be floated off by tears or blown away by curses that will not melt, that will not move, that becomes rebellion. It was all unjust. He thought of the ideas of independence that his father had inculcated in him; how he had held up to him the very strength of manhood which he now repudiated. How he had set before him the very example upon which he now modeled his conduct, and then abased it. He had built and broken his own idol, and the ruins lay not only about his feet, but about his son's. It was a hard thought in the boy's mind, and for a time he felt as if he wanted to hold his way in the world, asking of nothing, is it right or wrong? leaning to no beliefs, following no principles. This was the first mad rebellion of his flowering youth against the fading ideals, against the revelation of things as they are. But with the rebound, which marks the dividing line between youth and manhood, he came back to a saner view of the affair.
It came to him for the first time that now was a period of general madness in which no rule of sane action held good. And yet, he could not wholly forgive his father his unnecessary harshness. The understanding of his unmerited cruelty came to him, but his condemnation of it did not leave. Only once did he ask himself whether the cause for which he stood was worthy of all that he had sacrificed for it; home, mother, comfort and a father's love. Then there came back to him the words his father had uttered on a memorable occasion, "Walter, principle is too dear to be sacrificed at any price," and his lips closed in a line of determination. Resolutely he turned his face away from that path of soft delight. He was no longer his father's son; but he was enough of a Stewart to believe strongly.
He felt sorely hurt, though, when he found that Ed's story, while failing to find a resting place in the ears of the sensible, had percolated the minds of the lower classes of the town. He heard ominous threats hurled at the old copperhead, which he knew to be directed at his father. All that lay in his power to do, he did to stem the tide of popular anger, but he felt it rising steadily, and knew that at any moment it might take the form of open violence or insult to his family. This must be avoided, he determined, and night after night, after he had left home, he patrolled the sidewalk in front of his father's house, and the grief-stricken mother, reaching out her arms and moaning for her son in her sleep, did not know that he was there, watching the low flicker of the night lamp in her room.
It was nearly a week after the memorable evening interview between Walter and his father that the young man received by the hands of the gossiping Ed a note from his mother. It ran, "We expect to go to-morrow evening at seven. Will you not come and tell me good-bye?" Walter was brave, and he gulped hard. This was from his mother, and neither principle nor anything else separated him from her. He would go. He wrote, "I will come in by the side gate, and wait for you in the arbor."
The evening found him there a half hour before the time set, but a mother's fond eagerness had outrun the hours and Mrs. Stewart was already there awaiting him. She embraced her son with tears in her eyes, and they talked long together. From the window of his room, Colonel Stewart watched them. His eyes lingered over every outline of his son's figure. Once, he placed his hand on the sash as if to raise it. Then he checked himself and took a turn round the dismantled room. When he came back to the window, Walter was taking his leave. The old man saw his wife clinging about the boy's neck. He saw the young fellow brush his hand hastily across his eyes. Again, his hand went out involuntarily to the window, but he drew it back and ground it in the other while a groan struggled up from under the weight of his pride and tore itself from his pale lips. Gone, gone, Walter was gone, and with him, his chance of reconciliation. He saw his wife return, but he locked his door and sat down to battle with his pride and grief until it was time to go.
It was a worn-looking old man that came down to step into the carriage an hour later. But Colonel Stewart never looked more the soldier. Walter was at a safe point of vantage, watching to get a last glimpse of his family. He was heavy of heart in spite of his bravery. But suddenly, his sadness flamed into anger. A crowd bad been gathering about his father's house, but be thought it only the usual throng attracted by curiosity. As his father stepped into the carriage, he heard a sudden huzza. The people had surrounded the vehicle. A band appeared, and there floated to his ears the strains of the Rogues' march. A red mist came before his eyes, but through it he could not help seeing that they were taking the horses from the shafts. He waited to see no more, but dashed down the street. He forgot his sorrow, he forgot the breach, he forgot everything but his fury. It was his father; his father.
They were drawing the carriage toward him now, and the band was crashing out the hateful music. He reached the crowd and dashed into it like a young bull, knocking the surprised rioters and musicians right and left. He was cursing; he was pale, and his lip was bleeding where he had bitten it. The music stopped. Those who held the shafts dropped them. They were too astonished by the sudden onslaught to move. Then a growl rose like the noise of wild beasts and the crowd began to surge upon the young man. Forward and back they swept him, struggling and fighting. Then the carriage door opened and Colonel Stewart stepped out. His face was the face of an angel in anger, or perhaps of a very noble devil.
"Stop," he thundered, and at his voice, the uproar ceased. "Take up the shafts, my fellow-citizens," he said sneeringly, "this act is what I might have expected of you, but go on. It is meet that I should be drawn by such cattle." Then turning to his son, he said, "Sir, I need no defence from you." There was a joyous cry at this, though it was the young man's salvation. Some one hurled a stone, which grazed the old man's head. Walter was at the coward's side in an instant, and had felled him to the ground. For an instant, something that was not contempt gleamed in the old man's eye, but Walter turned, and lifting his hat to his father, backed from the crowd. They took up the shafts again. The musicians gathered their courage, and with a shout they bore the colonel away to the station.
Walter stood looking after the carriage. He had caught a glimpse of his mother's face from the window for a moment, and to the day of his death he never forgot the look she gave him. It was to be a help to him in the time of his trouble, and strength when the fight was hottest. His anger at his father had melted away in the flash of action. But he could not help wonder if the colonel's insult to him had been sincere, or only for the purpose of accomplishing what it did, the diversion of the crowd. He know that he had been saved rough handling, and that his father had saved him, and he went home with a calmer spirit than he had known for many days.
Despite the intolerance which kept Stephen Van Doren always at loggerheads with Bradford Waters, he was in reality a fairly reasonable man. He was as deep and ardent a partisan of the South as Colonel Stewart, and if he was not less anxious that his son should espouse her cause, at least he had more patience, and more faith to wait for his boy to turn to the right path.
From the time that Robert Van Doren was driven from his sweetheart's gate, there had been a silence between father and son as to the latter's intentions. But as the feverish preparations went on, Stephen Van Doren grew more and more uneasy and excited. It was hard not to speak to his son and find out from him where he stood in regard to the questions which were agitating his fellows. But a stalwart pride held the old man back. There were times when he told himself that the boy only waited for a word from him. But that word he determined never to say. The South did not need the arm of any one who had to be urged to fight for her.
The struggle and anxiety which possessed his father's mind was not lost on the young man, and he sympathized with the trouble, while he respected the fine courtly breeding which compelled silence under it. As for himself, he must have more time to think. This was no light question which he was now called upon to decide. The times were asking of every American in his position, "Are you an American or a Southerner first? The answer did not hang ready upon his lips. Where foes from without assailed, it was the country, the whole country. Could there arise any internal conditions that would make it different?
Finally, he could not stand the pained question in his father's eyes any longer. A word would let him know that, at least, his son was thinking of the matter which agitated him.
"Father," he said, "you are worrying about me."
The old man looked up proudly, "You are mistaken," was the reply, "I have no need to worry about my son. He is a man."
Robert gave his father a grateful glance, and went on, "You are right, you need not worry. I am looking for the right. When I find it, you may depend upon me to go that way."
"I am sure of it, Bob!" exclaimed the old man, grasping his son's hand, "I am sure you will. You are a man and must judge for yourself. I have confidence in you, Bob."
"Thank you, father."
They pressed each other's hands warmly, the cloud cleared from Van Doren's brow and the subject was dropped between the two.
Between Tom Waters and his father from the very first, there had been only harmony. There was a brief period of silence between them when Bradford Waters first fully realized that his age put him hopelessly beyond the chance of being beside his son in the ranks. At the first intimation that he was too old, he had scouted the idea, and said that it often took a grey head to manage a strong arm rightly. But when he saw the full quota of militia made up and his application denied, it filled him with poignant grief.
"I had so hoped to be by your side, Tom, in this fight," he said.
"It's best, father, as it is, though, for there's Mary to be taken care of."
"Yes, the fever in our blood makes us forget the nearest and dearest nowadays, but I'm glad that you will be there to represent me anyway."
From that time all the enthusiasm which Waters had felt in the Northern cause was centred upon his son. He watched him on the parade ground with undisguised pride, and when Tom came home in the glory of his new uniform, with the straps upon his square shoulders, Bradford Waters voice was husky, and there was a moisture in his eyes as he said, "I'm glad now that it's you who are going, Tom, for I understand what a poor figure I must have made among you young fellows."
The son was too joyous to be much affected by the sadness in his father's tone, and he only laughed as he replied, "I tell you, father, those steel muscles of yours would have put many a young fellow to the blush when it came to endurance."
"Well, it isn't my chance. You're the soldier."
The young fellow would have felt a pardonable pride could he have known that his father was saying over and over again, "Lieutenant Thomas Waters, Lieutenant Thomas Waters, why not captain or colonel?" And his pride would have been tempered could he have known also that back of this exclamation was the question, "Will he come back to me?"
For so long a time had Bradford Waters been both father and mother to his son that he had come to have some of the qualities of both parents. And if it were true, as Mary said, that in this war the women's hearts would suffer most, then must he suffer doubly. With the woman's heart of the mother and the man's heart of the father, the ache had already begun for the struggle was on between the tenderness of the one and the pride of the other; between the mother's love and the father's ambition. At the barracks, or on the parade ground, in the blare of the trumpets where Lieutenant Waters strode. back and forth, ambition conquered. But in the long still nights when his boy Tom was in his thoughts and dreams, only love and tenderness held him.