A Little Traitor to the South, Cyrus Townsend Brady [book club reads txt] 📗

To "Patty"

Most Faithful and Efficient of Coadjutors

PREFACE


"The tragic interlude" in this little war-time comedy of the affections really happened as I have described it. The men who went to their death beside the _Housatonic_ in Charleston harbor were Lieutenant George F. Dixon of the Twenty-first Alabama Infantry, in command; Captain J. F. Carlson of Wagoner's Battery; and Seamen Becker, Simpkins, Wicks, Collins, and Ridgway of the Confederate Navy, all volunteers. These names should be written in letters of gold on the roll of heroes. No more gallant exploit was ever performed. The qualities and characteristics of that death trap, the _David_, were well known to everybody. The history of former attempts to work her is accurately set down in the text of the story. Dixon and his men should be remembered with Decatur, Cushing, Nields, and Hobson.

The torpedo boat was found after the war lying on the bottom of the harbor, about one hundred feet from the wreck of the _Housatonic_, with her bow pointing toward the sloop of war and with every man of her crew dead at his post,--just as they all expected.

I shall be happy if this novel serves to call renewed attention to this splendid exhibition of American heroism. Had they not fought for a cause which was lost they would still be remembered, as, in any event, they ought to be.

For the rest, here is a love story in which the beautiful Southern girl does not espouse the brave Union soldier, or the beautiful Northern girl the brave Southern soldier. They were all Southern, all true to the South, and they all stayed so except Admiral Vernon, and he does not count.

CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY.

BROOKLYN, N.Y., February, 1904.


CONTENTS


I. Hero _versus_ Gentleman

II. She Hates them Both

III. A Strife in Magnanimity

IV. Opportunities Embraced

V. What happened in the Strong Room

VI. An Engine of Destruction

VII. The Hour and the Man

VIII. Death out of the Deep

IX. Miserable Pair and Miserable Night

X. A Stubborn Proposition

XI. The Confession that Cleared

XII. The Culprit is Arrested

XIII. Companions in Misery

XIV. The Woman Explains

XV. The General's Little Comedy



CHAPTER I


HERO VERSUS GENTLEMAN

Miss Fanny Glen's especial detestation was an assumption of authority on the part of the other sex. If there was a being on earth to whom she would not submit, it was to a masterful man; such a man as, if appearances were a criterion, Rhett Sempland at that moment assumed to be.

The contrast between the two was amusing, or would have been had not the atmosphere been so surcharged with passionate feeling, for Rhett Sempland was six feet high if he was an inch, while Fanny Glen by a Procrustean extension of herself could just manage to cover the five-foot mark; yet such was the spirit permeating the smaller figure that there seemed to be no great disparity, from the standpoint of combatants, between them after all.

Rhett Sempland was deeply in love with Miss Fanny Glen. His full consciousness of that fact shaded his attempted mastery by ever so little.

He was sure of the state of his affections and by that knowledge the weaker, for Fanny Glen was not at all sure that she was in love with Rhett Sempland. That is to say, she had not yet realized it; perhaps better, she had not yet admitted the existence of a reciprocal passion in her own breast to that she had long since learned had sprung up in his. By just that lack of admission she was stronger than he for the moment.

When she discovered the undoubted fact that she did love Rhett Sempland her views on the mastery of man would probably alter--at least for a time! Love, in its freshness, would make her a willing slave; for how long, events only could determine. For some women a lifetime, for others but an hour, can elapse before the chains turn from adornments to shackles.

The anger that Miss Fanny Glen felt at this particular moment gave her a temporary reassurance as to some questions which had agitated her--how much she cared, after all, for Lieutenant Rhett Sempland, and did she like him better than Major Harry Lacy? Both questions were instantly decided in the negative--for the time being. She hated Rhett Sempland; _per contra_, at that moment, she loved Harry Lacy. For Harry Lacy was he about whom the difference began. Rhett Sempland, confident of his own affection and hopeful as to hers, had attempted, with masculine futility and obtuseness, to prohibit the further attentions of Harry Lacy.

Just as good blood, _au fond_, ran in Harry Lacy's veins as in Rhett Sempland's, but Lacy, following in the footsteps of his ancestors, had mixed his with the water that is not water because it is fire.

He "crooked the pregnant hinges" of the elbow without cessation, many a time and oft, and all the vices--as they usually do--followed _en train_. One of the oldest names in the Carolinas had been dragged in the dust by this latest and most degenerate scion thereof. Nay, in that dust Lacy had wallowed--shameless, persistent, beast-like.

To Lacy, therefore, the Civil War came as a godsend, as it had to many another man in like circumstances, for it afforded another and more congenial outlet for the wild passion beating out from his heart. The war sang to him of arms and men--ay, as war has sung since Troia's day, of women, too.

He did not give over the habits of a lifetime, which, though short, had been hard, but he leavened them, temporarily obliterated them even, by splendid feats of arms. Fortune was kind to him. Opportunity smiled upon him. Was it running the blockade off Charleston, or passing through the enemy's lines with despatches in Virginia, or heading a desperate attack on Little Round Top in Pennsylvania, he always won the plaudits of men, often the love of women. And in it all he seemed to bear a charmed life.

When the people saw him intoxicated on the streets of Charleston that winter of '63 they remembered that he was a hero. When some of his more flagrant transgressions came to light, they recalled some splendid feat of arms, and condoned what before they had censured.

He happened to be in Charleston because he had been shot to pieces at Gettysburg and had been sent down there to die. But die he would not, at least not then. Ordinarily he would not have cared much about living, for he realized that, when the war was over, he would speedily sink back to that level to which he habitually descended when there was nothing to engage his energies; but his acquaintance with Miss Fanny Glen had altered him.

Lacy met her in the hospital and there he loved her. Rhett Sempland met her in a hospital, also. Poor Sempland had been captured in an obscure skirmish late in 1861. Through some hitch in the matter he had been held prisoner in the North until the close of 1863, when he had been exchanged and, wretchedly ill, he had come back to Charleston, like Lacy, to die.

He had found no opportunity for distinction of any sort. There was no glory about his situation, but prison life and fretting had made him show what he had suffered. At the hospital, then, like Lacy, he too had fallen in love with Miss Fanny Glen.

By rights the hero--not of this story, perhaps, but the real hero--was much the handsomer of the two. It is always so in romances; and romances--good ones, that is--are the reflex of life. Such a combination of manly beauty with unshakable courage and reckless audacity was not often seen as Lacy exhibited. Sempland was homely. Lacy had French and Irish blood in him, and he showed it. Sempland was a mixture of sturdy Dutch and English stock.

Yet if women found Lacy charming they instinctively depended upon Sempland. There was something thoroughly attractive in Sempland, and Fanny Glen unconsciously fell under the spell of his strong personality. The lasting impression which the gayety and passionate abandon of Lacy could not make, Sempland had effected, and the girl was already powerfully under his influence--stubbornly resistant nevertheless.

She was fond of both men. She loved Lacy for the dangers he had passed, and Sempland because she could not help it; which marks the relative quality of her affections. Which one she loved the better until the moment at which the story opens she could not have told.

Nobody knew anything about Fanny Glen. At least there were only two facts concerning her in possession of the general public. These, however, were sufficient. One was that she was good. The men in the hospital called her an angel. The other was that she was beautiful. The women of the city could not exactly see why the men thought so, which was confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ!

She had come to Charleston at the outbreak of the war accompanied by an elderly woman of unexceptional manner and appearance who called herself Miss Lucy Glen, and described herself as Miss Fanny Glen's aunt. They had taken a house in the fashionable quarter of the city--they were not poor at any rate--and had installed themselves therein with their slaves.

They made no attempt to enter into the social life of the town and only became prominent when Charleston began to feel acutely the hardships of the war which it had done more to promote than any other place in the land.

Then Fanny Glen showed her quality. A vast hospital was established, and the young women of the city volunteered their services.

The corps of nurses was in a state of constant fluxion. Individuals came and went. Some of them married patients, some of them died with them, but Fanny Glen neither married nor died--she abided!

Not merely because she stayed while others did not, but perhaps on account of her innate capacity, as well as her tactful tenderness, she became the chief of the women attached to the hospital. Many a sick soldier lived to love her. Many another, more sorely stricken, died blessing her.

In Charleston she was regarded as next in importance to the general who commanded the troops and who, with his ships, his forts, his guns, and his men, had been for two years fighting off the tremendous assaults that were hurled upon the city from the Union ironclads and ships far out to sea. It was a point of honor to take, or to hold, Charleston, and the Confederates held it till 1865!

Fanny Glen was a privileged character, therefore, and could go anywhere and do anything, within the lines.

Under other circumstances there would have been a thorough inquiry by the careful inhabitants of the proud, strict Southern city into her family relationships; but the war was a great leveller, people were taken at their real value when trouble demonstrated it, and few questions were asked. Those that were asked about Fanny Glen were not answered. It made little difference, then.

Toward the close of 1863, however, there was an eclipse in the general hospital, for Fanny Glen fell ill.

She was not completely recovered, early in 1864, when she had the famous interview with Rhett Sempland,