Palmer, unhitching his horse from the fence, mounted and rode briskly down the hill. He would lose the girl: saw the loss, faced it. Besides the love he bore her, she had made God a truth to him. He was jaded, defeated, as if some power outside of himself had taken him unexpectedly at advantage to-night, and wrung this thing from him. Life was not much to look forward to,—the stretch it had been before: study, and the war, and hard common sense,—the theatre,—card-playing. Not being a man, I cannot tell you how much his loss amounted to. I know, going down the rutted wagon-road, his mild face fell slowly into a haggard vacancy foreign to it: one or two people at the tavern where he stopped asked him if he were ill: I think, too, that he prayed once or twice to whatever God he had, looking up with dry eye and shut lips,—dumb prayers, wrung out of some depth within, such as Christian sent out of the slough, when he was like to die. But he did stop at the tavern, and there drank some brandy to steady his nerves; and he did not forget that there was an ambuscade of Rebels at Blue's Gap, and that he was to share in the attack on them at daylight: he spurred his horse, as he drew nearer Romney. Dode, being a woman, thinking love lost, sat by the fire, looking vacantly at nothing. Yet the loss was as costly to him as to her, and would be remembered as long.
He came up to the church where the meeting had been held. It was just over; the crowded room was stifling with the smoke of tobacco and tallow-candles; there was an American flag hanging over the pulpit, a man pounding on a drum at the door, and a swarm of loafers on the steps, cheering for the Union, for Jeff Davis, etc. Palmer dismounted, and made his way to the pulpit, where Dyke, a lieutenant in his company, was.
"All ready, Dyke?"
"All right, Capt'n."
Palmer lingered, listening to the talk of the men. Dyke had been an Ohio-River pilot; after the troubles began, had taken a pork-contract under Government; but was lieutenant now, as I said. It paid better than pork, he told Palmer,—a commission, especially in damp weather. Palmer did not sneer. Dykes, North and South, had quit the hog-killing for the man-killing business, with no other motive than the percentage, he knew; but he thought the rottenness lay lower than their hearts. Palmer stood looking down at the crowd: the poorer class of laborers,—their limbs cased in shaggy blouses and green baize leggings,—their faces dogged, anxious as their own oxen.
"'Bout half on 'em Secesh," whispered Jim Dyke. "'T depends on who burned their barns fust."
Jim was recruiting to fill up some vacancies in Palmer's company. He had been tolerably successful that day; as he said, with a wink, to the Captain,—
"The twenty dollars a month on one side, an' the test-oath on t' other, brought loyalty up to the scratch."
He presented some of the recruits to Palmer: pluming himself, adjusting the bogus chains over his pink shirt.
"Hyur's Squire Pratt. Got two sons in th' army,—goin' hisself. That's the talk! Charley Orr, show yerself! This boy's father was shot in his bed by the Bushwhackers."
A mere boy, thin, consumptive, hollow-chested: a mother's-boy, Palmer saw, with fair hair and dreamy eyes. He held out his hand to him.
"Charley will fight for something better than revenge. I see it in his face."
The little fellow's eyes flashed.
"Yes, Captain."
He watched Palmer after that with the look one of the Cavaliers might have turned to a Stuart. But he began to cough presently, and slipped back to the benches where the women were. Palmer heard one of them in rusty black sob out,—"Oh, Charley! Charley!"
There was not much enthusiasm among the women; Palmer looked at them with a dreary trail of thought in his brain. They were of the raw, unclarified American type: thick-blooded, shrewish, with dish-shaped faces, inelastic limbs. They had taken the war into their whole strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart, or animal fervor they may have, over what is needed for wifehood or maternity. Theodora, he thought, angrily, looked at the war as these women did, had no poetic enthusiasm about it, did not grasp the grand abstract theory on either side. She would not accept it as a fiery, chivalric cause, as the Abolitionist did, nor as a stern necessity, like the Union-saver. The sickly Louisianian, following her son from Pickens to Richmond, besieging God for vengeance with the mad impatience of her blood, or the Puritan mother praying beside her dead hero-boy, would have called Dode cowardly and dull. So would those blue-eyed, gushing girls who lift the cup of blood to their lips with as fervid an abandon as ever did French bacchante. Palmer despised them. Their sleazy lives had wanted color and substance, and they found it in a cant of patriotism, in illuminating their windows after slaughter, in dressing their tables with helmets of sugar, (after the fashion of the White House,)—delicate souvenirs de la guerre!
But Theodora and these women had seen their door-posts slopped with blood,—that made a difference. This woman in front had found her boy's half-charred body left tied to a tree by Rebel scouts: this girl was the grandchild of Naylor, a man of seventy,—the Federal soldiers were fired at from his house one day,—the next, the old man stood dumb upon its threshold; in this world, he never would call to God for vengeance. Palmer knew these things were true. Yet Dode should not for this sink to low notions about the war. She did: she talked plain Saxon of it, and what it made of men; said no cause could sanctify a deed so vile,—nothing could be holy which turned honest men into thieves and assassins. Her notions were low to degradation, Palmer thought, with the quickening cause at his heart; they had talked of it the last time he was here. She thought they struck bottom on some eternal truth, a humanity broader than patriotism. Pah! he sickened at such whining cant! The little Captain was common-sensed to the backbone,—intolerant. He was an American, with the native taint of American conceit, but he was a man whose look was as true as his oath; therefore, talking of the war, he never glossed it over,—showed its worst phases, in Virginia and Missouri; but he accepted it, in all its horror, as a savage necessity. It was a thing that must be, while men were men, and not angels.
While he stood looking at the crowd, Nabbes, a reporter for one of the New-York papers, who was lounging in the pulpit, began to laugh at him.
"I say, Captain, you Virginia Loyalists don't go into this war with vim. It's a bitter job to you."
Palmer's face reddened.
"What you say is true, thank God,"—quietly.
Nabbes stuck his hands into his pockets, whistling. He shrewdly suspected Palmer wasn't "sound." No patriot would go into the war with such a miserable phiz as that. Yet he fought like a tiger up in the mountains. Of course, the war was a bad business,—and the taxes—whew! Last summer things were smashed generally, and when Will (his brother) sailed in Sherman's expedition, it was a blue day enough: how his mother and the girls did carry on! (Nabbes and Will supported the family, by the way; and Nabbes, inside of his slang, billiards, etc., was a good, soft-hearted fellow.) However, the country was looking up now. There were our victories,—and his own salary was raised. Will was snug down at Port Royal,—sent the girls home some confoundedly pretty jewelry; they were as busy as bees, knitting socks, and—What, the Devil! were we to be ridden over rough-shod by Davis and his crew? Northern brain and muscle were toughest, and let water find its own level. So he tore out a fly-leaf from the big Bible, and jotted down notes of the meeting,—"An outpouring of the loyal heart of West Virginia,"—and yawned, ready for bed, contented with the world, himself, and God.
Dyke touched Palmer's arm.
"Lor', Capt'n," he whispered, "ef thar a'n't old Scofield! 'n the back o' th' house, watchin' you. Son killed at Manassas,—George,—d' ye know?"
"I know."
"Danged ef I don't respect Secesh like them," broke out Dyke. "Ye'll not sin his soul with a test-oath. Thar's grit thar. Well, God help us!"
Palmer stepped down from the pulpit; but the old man, seeing him coming, turned and shouldered his way out of the crowd, his haggard face blood-red.
"What'll the old chap say to Gaunt's enlistin'?" said Dyke.
"Gaunt in? Bully for the parson!" said Squire Pratt.
"Parson 'listed?" said the reporter. "They and the women led off in this war. I'm