He was still talking to himself when Basil came out to the stiles after
supper to get into his buggy.
"Young Cap'n, dat gal Molly mighty nigh pesterin' de life out o' me. I
done tol' her I'se gwine to de wah."
"What did she say?"
"De fool nigger--she jes laughed--she jes laughed."
The boy, too, laughed, as he gathered the reins and the mare sprang
forward.
"We'll see--we'll see."
And Bob with a triumphant snort turned toward Molly's cabin.
The locust-trees were quiet now and the barn was still except for the
occasional stamp of a horse in his stall or the squeak of a pig that was
pushed out of his warm place by a stronger brother. The night noises
were strong and clear--the cricket in the grass, the croaking frogs from
the pool, the whir of a night-hawk's wings along the edge of the yard,
the persistent wail of a whip-poor-will sitting lengthwise of a willow
limb over the meadow-branch, the occasional sleepy caw of crows from
their roost in the woods beyond, the bark of a house-dog at a
neighbour's home across the fields, and, further still, the fine high
yell of a fox-hunter and the faint answering yelp of a hound.
And inside, in the mother's room, the curtain was rising on a tragedy
that was tearing open the wounds of that other war--the tragedy upon
which a bloody curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The
mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son
spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to
himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.
There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the two
Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the
garden.
And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant
Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his
father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old
Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that
morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left
him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive,
would have him do?
And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart,
faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had
left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the moonlight
and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white tomb under
which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle, slept side
by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their footsteps, since
the one part that he was fitted to play was the rôle they and their
ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them,
failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for
Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil
War, Crittenden would have played that rôle worthily and without
question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright
was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood, he
had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was
nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each
year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in
the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the
particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the
realization that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever
gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its
name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a
white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its
slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still
clung rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and
patriarchal--out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His
friends--even the boy, his brother--had caught the modern trend of
things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work--some to law,
some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining
and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had
studied law--his type of Southerner always studies law--and he tried the
practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his
own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the
humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a
small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and
had passed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the
dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through
some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a
fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and
went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there
was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those
wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but
the pace was too swift, competition was too undignified and greedy, and
business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life,
which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.
Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.
He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept
in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the
wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now,
and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The
little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him
at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the
deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong
vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept
under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom,
was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will
take possession of an abandoned field.