Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

true? Ask yourselves calmly. The time has now come when you ought, in justice to yourselves, to try to satisfy yourselves wherein your old system was wrong and unjustifiable, as well as wherein it was right. One who loves you wrote this story; one who was your comrade in the fight we lost; one who has no word of blame for you, but, on the contrary, believes that we had every provocation to fight; one who, as long as he lives, will glory in the way we fought, and is proud of his own scars, and teaches his children to believe that the record of Confederate valor is a priceless heritage.

It is not written when the truth can do you harm. It is not written by an alien in feeling, or an enthusiast for an abstract idea. It is written to make you think, — to make you ask yourselves whether you can, before God, claim that all was as it should be when we had slavery. It is written to reconcile you to your loss by showing you from what your children were delivered.

It is penned in the firm belief that some day, while brooding upon the happiness, the wealth, the culture, the refinement then possessed by the South, and to so large an extent lost to her now, you may realize that all these, delightful as they were, did not justify the curse and misery of human slavery. I seek to make you realize, if not admit, that its abolition was a greater blessing to us even than to the slaves, and that emancipation was worth all we surrendered, and all the precious lives that were destroyed; to bring you to confess, the brave and generous men I know you to be, that the time has come at last when, through our tears, and without disloyalty to the dead, in the possession of freedom and union and liberty, true Confederates, viewing it all in the clearer light and calmer atmosphere of to-day, ought to thank God that slavery died at Appomattox.

CHAPTER VII

MY BROTHER

In the last chapter I spoke of the return of my brother Jennings from France. After graduating at Bloomington, Ind., and studying law at William and Mary College, and before he attained his majority, he had received from President Pierce an appointment in the diplomatic service, and was sent to Berlin as attaché of the American Legation. He spent three years in Berlin and Heidelberg, and was thence transferred to Paris as Secretary of Legation, where he further improved himself by study, and by contact with the most polished society in Europe. When he returned to Virginia in 1857, at the age of twenty-five, he was well equipped for a brilliant career. His homecoming after a long absence was the occasion of great rejoicing in our family. It was as if a new light had sprung up in the household. My brother was so modest and unaffected that his acute intellect and varied information were not always revealed to strangers. His disposition was so amiable that in all his life he never had a boyish quarrel with any one. Of singularly mature and sedate nature, he had been his father's loved and trusted companion before his departure for foreign parts; and now that he had returned and was about to assume life's serious responsibilities, they became inseparable companions. He at first entered upon the practice of law; but although he secured reasonable employment, and was thoroughly trained in common, civil, and international law, he found the practice irksome, and lacking in excitement. His

ambition was for political distinction, and very soon he quit the law, and became editor of the "Richmond Enquirer," the Democratic organ of Virginia. The touch of a master hand was quickly revealed in that journal. His familiarity with foreign politics, and the new lights shed upon them by his knowledge and criticisms, attracted widespread interest on the part of his fellow-journalists, as well as the public. In domestic politics, his ardent nature was soon made manifest upon every page. Since the death of Father Ritchie, its once famous editor, the Enquirer" had lost ground, and descended to the level of a staid and humdrum commonplace newspaper.

66

Within a short time the paper again stood foremost among Southern journals, and my brother's name became as well known as that of his father. His social successes were not less marked than his professional triumphs. Women and children idolized him. And well they might, for he preferred their society to that of men. Passionately fond of music and of dancing, it was his delight to steal away from the sombre circle of his own sex, or leave the after-dinner cigar and wine, to join the ladies in the drawing-room. There he would linger with unsatisfied delight, listening to the music, or dancing until all others were exhausted. An accomplished linguist, with all sorts of interesting knowledge of the world, delightful in conversation, he possessed an indescribable charm for women. Yet, although he was brought into daily contact with exquisite creatures, whom it was almost impossible not to love, his fondness for the other sex seemed altogether platonic.

If a child saw him once, it never forgot him. Children flocked about him as if he had been the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He rejoiced in this sovereignty, and ever went prepared with trifles to surprise and delight them.

One of the most remarkable things about him was his unaffected piety. He never made a profession of religion, yet he was as punctilious in church attendance as an elder; and in the silence of his chamber, where no one saw him, he prayed every night before retiring. Unlike the many blasé youths who are spoiled by residence in France, a long life in Paris had produced no visible effect upon his purity of life or childlike faith. Whoever was thrown with him, young or old, superior or inferior, first wondered at his sweet simplicity, and then loved him for his unaffected naturalness, sincerity, and gentleness. This charming young brother, returning after so long an absence as if from the dead, was a revelation and a source of wonderment from the time I awoke in the morning until I closed my eyes at night. This was literally true, for until his coming, I had never seen anybody open the day, winter and summer, with a plunge into an ice-cold bath; likewise, until his arrival with his Parisian love of the theatre, I had never closed the day at the playhouse with a companion always glad to go, be it ever so bad a show.

My brother Richard, near my own age, had been sent off to boarding-school, leaving me sole occupant of our sleeping apartment. The chambers of the Government House were large and lonesome, and it was with unspeakable pleasure that I obtained consent of the newcomer that my little bed should be placed in his chamber. From this association sprung pleasures innumerable. The marvelous things from Paris and Berlin were sources of unending interest and information. There were the great German Schlagers, or dueling-swords, used by the Heidelberg students in the contests among their fighting corps, and in time I was fully informed about the habits of the German universities. How it tickled me to hear the

story of young Sidney Legare, of South Carolina, who joined the Saxon Corps, and, armed with one of these selfsame Schlagers, fought and won his battle with a German baron! The inscriptions on the hilt bore the names of the young Americans who maintained the pluck of the United States among the Continental youth.

There also were fencing-foils and masks, with which he had become so expert in beautiful Paris that he was known in every salle d'armes. With these we had many a friendly bout, until I considered myself quite a rattling blade with the foils. Then at times our conversation was in French; especially when I required cash, or proposed some amusement, I plunged away at him with all the French I could command, until I really improved in speaking. From him also I learned much of Parisian court life in the time of Louis Napoleon, and many a day laughed at the stories of the intimacy between Napoleon III. and the Hon. John Y. Mason, of Virginia, the American Minister to France, in whose house my brother had been regarded almost as one of the family.

My bright and joyous room-mate, bustling about o' mornings, making his toilet after his exhilarating bath, often sang snatches of Parisian operas, or repeated long passages from Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott, for he was full of romance. Thus I became familiar with operatic airs, and could repeat many of the striking poetical quotations. And there were the Parisian clothes and toilet articles and preparations, wonderful French waistcoats and cravats and neckerchiefs, and boots and shoes, and eau de quinine for those curly locks, and pomade for that downy mustache; every one of them strange and new and very captivating to me. I would rub my own frowsy mop of hair, hitherto only half brushed, with that eau de quinine, until my scalp was as

« AnteriorContinuar »