第72章 Doing the Handsome Thing(2)

"When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola)to admire Kings Port good-breeding,I did not send you to forget your country.Remember that those people were its mortal enemies;that besides their treatment of our prisoners in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander)they displayed in their dealings,both social and political,an arrogance in success and a childish petulance at opposition,which we who saw and suffered can never forget,any more than we can forget our loved ones who laid down their lives for this cause."These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she termed my "disloyalty,"but they will serve to indicate her feeling about the Civil War.It was--on her side--precisely the feeling of all the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side.But why should it be mine?And so,after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to Aunt Carola what my feeling was,I sat down upstairs at my window,and,after some preliminary sentences,wrote:--"There are dead brothers here also,who,like your brother,laid down their lives for what they believed was their country,and whom their sisters never can forget as you can never forget him.I read their names upon sad church tablets,and their boy faces look out at me from cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes.Upon their graves the women who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your young soldier.You will tell me,perhaps,that since the bereavement is equal,I have not justified my sympathy for these people.But the bereavement was not equal.More homes here were robbed by death of their light and promise than with us;and to this you must add the material desolation of the homes themselves.Our roofs were not laid in ashes,and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation.You will say to this,perhaps,that they brought it upon themselves.But even granting that they did so,surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter than to suffer and to win.My dear aunt,you could not see what I have seen here,and write to me as you do;and if those years have left upon your heart a scar which will not vanish,do not ask me,who came afterward,to wear the scar also.I should then resemble certain of the younger ones here,with less excuse than is theirs.As for the negro,forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation for a creature who does not exist,or whose existence is an ineffectual drop in the bucket,a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes to one who has struck off his chains of slavery,whereas the creature who does exist is--"I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola,and sought for some fitting expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity the new type of deliberately worthless negro;and as I sought,my eyes wandered to the garden next door,the garden of the Cornerlys.On a bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe.She was alone,and,from her attitude,scemed to be thinking deeply.The high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near the shady vines still more increased.It was evident that she had come here for the sake of being alone,and I regretted that she was so turned from me that I could not see her face.But her solitude did not long continue;there came into view a gentleman of would-be venerable appearance,who approached her with a walk carefully constructed for public admiration,and who,upon reaching her,bent over with the same sort of footlight elaboration and gave her a paternal kiss.I did not need to hear her call him father;he was so obviously General Rieppe,the prudent hero of Chattanooga,that words would have been perfectly superfluous in his identification.

I was destined upon another day to hear the tones of his voice,and thereupon may as well state now that they belonged altogether with the rest of him.There is a familiar type of Northern fraud,and a Southern type,equally familiar,but totally different in appearance.The Northern type has the straight,flat,earnest hair,the shaven upper lip,the chin-beard,and the benevolent religious expression.He will be the president of several charities,and the head of one great business.He plays no cards,drinks no wine,and warns young men to beware of temptation.He is as genial as a hair-sofa;and he is seldom found out by the public unless some financial crash in general affairs uncovers his cheating,which lies most often beyond the law's reach;and because he cannot be put in jail,he quite honestly believes heaven is his destination.We see less of him since we have ceased to be a religious country,religion no longer being an essential disguise for him.The Southern type,with his unction and his juleps,is better company,unless he is the hero of too many of his own anecdotes.He is commonly the possessor of a poetic gaze,a mane of silvery hair,and a noble neck.As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and more filmed over with romance,he too grows rare among us,and I regret it,for he was in truth a picturesque figure.General Rieppe was perfect.

At first I was sorry that the distance they were from me rendered hearing what they were saying impossible;very soon,however,the frame of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent pantomime.