WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT

A Novel

BY

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

AUTHOR OF “IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS”

FIFTH EDITION.

BOSTON TICKNOR AND COMPANY 1886

Copyright, 1884, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY.

All Rights Reserved.

WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT.

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I.

IT is said that a certain old battlefield in Tennessee is haunted in these peaceful times. Often there comes out of the dark silence the sudden wild blare of the bugle, chilling the blood of distant fireside groups. Then the earth throbs with the roll of drums and the measured tread of martial hosts. A mysterious clangor, as of the clash of arms, fills the air. A flash—it is the glinting of bayonets above the grim earthworks which still loom up against the vague horizon.

And yet there are those who can hear, in the military music and the tumultuous voices of victory and defeat, only the rush of the wind across the vast historic plain; who can see, in the gleaming phantoms that hold the works, only the mist and the moon; who can feel, in the tremor of the earth beneath a charging column, only the near approach of the railway train thundering through the cavernous limestone country.

By wintry daylight the battlefield is still more ghastly. Gray with the pallid crab-grass, which so eagerly usurps the place of last summer’s crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and[Pg 2] bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty, yawning graves where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce the hardiest ploughman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent.

A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the plain. Despite the tragic aspect of this building, it offers a certain grotesque suggestion—it might seem in the mad ostentation of its proportions a vast caricature of succumbed prosperities. There is no embowering shrubbery about it, no inclosing fence. It is an integrant part of the surrounding ruin. Its cupola was riddled by a cannonade, and the remnants shake ominously with every gust of wind; there are black fissures in the stone steps and pavements, where shells exploded; many of the windows are shattered and boarded up. In others, however, the glass is intact, and through those nearest at hand John Estwicke, standing for the first time on the long, broad portico one afternoon in 1871, caught the genial flicker of fire-light and the glow of crimson curtains. The whole place was grimly incongruous with the idea of a home, and as he was ushered into a wide, bare hall, with glimpses of uninhabited, unfurnished rooms on

either hand, there was intimated something of those more potent terrors with which it was instinct—the pursuing influences of certain grisly deeds of trust, for the battlefield, the grewsome thickets, the house itself, all were mortgaged. The next moment he was in an atmosphere of goodly domestic cheerfulness, heightened by coloring so vivid and warm that it seemed to pulsate. A flaring, be-flowered, velvet[Pg 3] carpet covered the floor of a large, square room; the crimson curtains were long and expansive; the clumsy, old-fashioned, brass fender and andirons glittered with the reflection of the blazing logs; now and then a red gleam was evoked from the time-darkened mahogany chairs, upholstered with thread-bare black hair-cloth which showed here and there the canvas beneath, for all the furniture was well worn, being scanty relics of ante-bellum days, saved by some miracle in the general destruction of the great battle. He caught a bizarre glimpse of himself in a huge fractured mirror with a showy, gilded frame, which hung above

the mantel-piece, and of his host rising suddenly and turning to meet him.

“My dear sir,” exclaimed General Vayne, with a certain rotund emphasis, “I am happy to see you!”

As he crossed the room and offered his hand to his guest—his left hand, for his right sleeve was empty—there was something in his manner which, despite the impressiveness of his fine proportions, his soldierly gait, his kindling enthusiastic eyes, and the grave earnestness of his florid face, savored strongly of the ludicrous. He bore himself with a noble dignity which might well have befitted Julius Caesar, but which consorted absurdly enough with the uncouthness of the bare ruin where he lived; with his hunted condition, never out of sound of the hue and cry of his debts; with the well-worn seams of his coat—a suggestive contrast to his perfect and immaculate linen, that in making the most of its virtues only offered another annotation upon the history of his struggle between gentility and poverty. There was evident cordiality in his welcome, but it was accorded pre-eminently in his official character as host. After this the murmured civility with which the introduction of Estwicke was acknowledged by the General’s

slender young daughter,[Pg 4] and the beaming amiability of an old lady, his sister, who sat on the opposite side of the fireplace, seemed a trifle irresponsible.

“My brother has told me,” said Mrs. Kirby, her short gray-streaked curls waving with an animation that threatened to dislodge the little old-fashioned side-combs which held them from her plump, benignant, wrinkled face, “that you are a relative, a third cousin, of our good friend the Reverend Edward Estwicke—regret to hear of his neuralgia—so sad!”

“An admirable man,” said General Vayne. He fixed his dark earnest eyes upon the fire, and with his adroit left hand, he reflectively stroked his long, gray mustache.

“I have never known, sir,” he continued, weightily, “an intellect more powerful, acute, and analytic than that of that learned and eloquent divine.”

The relative of the “learned divine” looked at his host with a momentary touch of surprise, for he knew his cousin only as a dull and droning old preacher in an obscure little town in West Virginia. He had not the advantage of General Vayne’s moral magnifying-glass. Through this unique lens life loomed up as rather a large affair. In the rickety court-house in the village of Chattalla, five miles out there to the south, General Vayne beheld a temple of justice. He translated an office-holder as the sworn servant of the people. The State was this great commonwealth, and its seal a proud escutcheon. A fall in cotton struck him as a blow to the commerce of the world. From an adverse political fortune he augured the swift ruin of the country. Abstract ideas were to him as potent elements in human affairs as acts of the Legislature, and in the midst of the general collapse, his large ideals still retained their pristine proportions.

[Pg 5]

“I am afraid you have had a cold drive,” said Mrs. Kirby, beaming on the visitor. “Our climate has changed since the war. It is much more severe.”

“The loss of the trees, perhaps,” suggested the stranger.

“Perhaps,” said the old lady, with her gurgling laughter, “there may be something in the superstition that the Yankees forgot their weather and left it behind them. And now the malaria has gone—I wonder where! Probably we have to thank the Federal army and their cold weather for that also.”

General Vayne lifted his eyes. “I thank the Federal army for—nothing,” declared the unreconstructed, bitterly.

There was an unaccountable astonishment,—more—constraint in the visitor’s face. He remained stiffly silent, and one sufficiently observant might have caught in his manner an intimation that he held himself on the defensive.

Miss Vayne was not sufficiently observant. She laughed out suddenly with girlish effusion, and as she changed her position, the light was full upon her delicately fair complexion, her rich brown hair, and her shabby black silk dress. She turned her joyous eyes upon the pallid heartbreak of that blighted plain. “To make light of your obligations, papa,” she cried, “doesn’t make away with them.”

The gesture sharpened the frivolous satire, but the stranger’s attention had not detached itself from General Vayne, at whom he was looking with a fiery red spark in his challenging brown eyes. This was more in accord with an alert aggressiveness habitually expressed in his face than with his suave reserved manner and his smooth and punctilious observance of the behests of polite society. His polish was like that of steel—its pleasing lustre does[Pg 6] not deceive as to the stern possibilities of the weapon or the temper of the blade. He had a firmly moulded chin, a short upper lip, and excellent teeth. There was a dash of red in his close-clipped brown hair, and his whiskers and mustache were of a lighter tinge. His hands were smooth and white, but his face was darkened and roughened by sun and wind. He looked about thirty years of age; he was tall and heavily built, and, like all the men of this region, a military training was very marked in his bearing, despite his civilian dress.

“Ah well,” said General Vayne, waving the war, the Federal army, and the nation generally into a diminishing distance with his expressive left hand, “I have—a—dismissed them—from consideration. Let them go! Let them go! Nowadays I am no wrangler. I leave all questions of public policy as a bone of contention for the Political Dogs to gnaw.”

His method of enunciation might suggest to the literary mind the profuse use of capital letters.

“I am, and have always been, strictly tolerant,” continued General Vayne,—“conservative in my views. Conservatism, sir,” declared the tolerant man, with an extreme look in his eye, “is the moral centripetal force that curbs the flighty world.”

Mrs. Kirby’s interest in politics had diminished since the war, during which it had a phenomenal growth like Jonah’s gourd. Now an absorption in personal matters flourished in its stead.

“I hope you find your stay in the neighborhood pleasant, Captain Estwicke—so glad,” she said. “Of course you’ve been to Chattalla. Charming, charming town! I am a visitor here myself. I haven’t before seen my brother since the eve of Shiloh—yes, since Shiloh. I shall remain some months with him—so delightful to[Pg 7] come back! And is it business or pleasure that brings you to Tennessee?”

This old lady possessed an unbridled imagination. She fancied it possible that people came to Tennessee for pleasure.

Once more there was that peculiar look of surprise and constraint upon Estwicke’s face. He hesitated in doubt and embarrassment. It did not escape her attention this time, but she misinterpreted it as a look of inquiry, so she smilingly reiterated with great distinctness, “Did you come to Tennessee for business or pleasure?”

“I came to join my regiment,” he replied, tersely—evasively it may be considered.

This information exploded like a bomb, leaving a sulphurous silence behind it.

“Ah-h-h!” exclaimed General Vayne, in a tone intended to express assent, but which was like a prolonged note of surprised comprehension. He appreciated all at once how it was that he had mistaken this man for an ex-rebel captain. His letter of introduction from the Reverend Edward Estwicke had described him broadly as “Captain Estwicke of Virginia,” and when General Vayne had called upon him at the house of a mutual friend near Chattalla, where the officer was spending the last few days of his leave, no allusion as it chanced was made to the stubborn fact of his regiment, stationed at the city of Marston twenty miles away. He had subtly impressed General Vayne as a man of an inordinate personal pride and an extreme sensitiveness. To such a man the perception that he has accepted an invitation extended under a mistake can hardly be pleasant. General Vayne, versed in fine issues of internal dissension, realized how the annoyance must be aggravated by the stranger’s consciousness that he was secretly regarded as a

renegade, for he could[Pg 8] but know how slightly his host would esteem the replication that he was a representative of the loyal South which had borne martyrdom between two fires.

General Vayne, however, held hospitality as the first element of religion, and it was abhorrent to him that a guest should by any mischievous mischance be rendered uncomfortable in his house. But he was not helplessly dismayed; he thought himself possessed of tact equal to any emergency, and he demonstrated this claim by bolting incontinently from the subject. The old lady beamed upon the equivocal captain with smiling eagerness to make amends. The girl’s face was grave, but in her luminous eyes lurked a freakish delight in the whole misapprehension. Captain Estwicke was not in the habit of being considered amusing, but if he inwardly resented it he made no sign.

General Vayne had returned to the loss of the timber. “The aspect of the country would be almost prairie-like but for that elevation and those frowning redoubts,” he said, waving his hand toward the western windows through which the huge earthworks were visible. “There are very peculiar scenic effects here now and then—very peculiar, sir, indeed. A horseman there near Fort Despair, will loom up gigantic”—lowering his voice impressively—“mysterious, wonderful. He seems a bit of materialized poetry. He looks far more like a gallant knight pricking across the plain in quest of noble adventure, than”—effective diminuendo—“a ploughman going out to bed up land for cotton.”

“Is that the work we used to call Fort Despair?” exclaimed Estwicke, as if with sudden recognition. Something strained and unnatural in his voice struck the girl’s attention. She noted too the look in his eyes—at once eager and shrinking—as he leaned his elbow upon the[Pg 9] worn arm of the chair and bent forward to the window. Little as she knew of him she knew it was an uncharacteristic look. She did not understand it. She only apprehended the emotion that swayed him as one groping in the dark is conscious of the proximity of an unaccustomed, it may be a fearful presence.

“Fort Despair,” repeated General Vayne, absorbed in reminiscence—he had lost his right arm there. “Appropriately named, too, it seems, even at this late day.”

“Ah, I know!” cried the stranger passionately. “I feel its meaning! Every weed that stirs in the wind is voiced with a terrible suggestion.”

Then he seemed to check himself. He leaned back in his chair and said no more. He was panting slightly; his face was flushed; a sharp pain was expressed in his eyes.

“The man,” thought Marcia, watching him in a tumult of feeling, half sympathy, half inquisitive amaze, “has a morbid horror of that battlefield. And a reason for it!”

General Vayne was fighting the day over again. He saw his brigade in line of battle; he was canvassing once more the problematic strength of the opposing force; he was regretting again, as he had often regretted, that he had not disregarded his orders and pushed on through the timber; if his arm had been spared him one half hour longer! How could he notice the stranger now; he had no thought even of his guest!

And Mrs. Kirby was thoroughly tired of the war, and welcomed the opening of the door and the entrance of other visitors, a few middle-aged people of a decorously dull aspect, and, like their entertainers, so provincial that they were not even aware of it. This deplorable state of ignorance has, however, its compensations. With full faith they indorsed the old-fashioned customs that had always prevailed among them, and were free from that[Pg 10] subtle self-distrust which hampers many very worthy people, who pay this price for the knowledge that they do not know everything.

In the general change of position Estwicke found himself beside the young lady, and nearer the window than before. Through it he could see the sinking sun, a great red globe, resting a moment on the parapet of Fort Despair. Far away a vertical line of light was drawn sharply upon the sad purple of the distant hills. The tapering shaft pierced the pale saffron belt above the horizon, and at its summit was a bright flake of crimson. It was the flag-staff, and the flying flag above the National Cemetery across the river. Certainly this was a grewsome place.

And now the sun was gone. The shadows thronged the battlefield. The haunted thickets were all a-shiver, and the viewless wind marched over the plain. The cheerful room seemed a flout, a derisive mockery, to the woful scene without.

“How we forget!” he thought. “How we forget!”

For the interior was very cheerful; the flames roared up the chimney; the shattered mirror reflected the homelike group, seated in a wide semicircle before the fire; the flush of the western sky was still bright on the girl’s fair face, and there were golden glintings in her brown hair, as if belated sunbeams were entangled in its midst. A smile hovered about the curves of her delicate lips; her brilliant hazel eyes looked out from the tender shadows of long black lashes; even the genteel poverty expressed in her attire had its gracious, poetic aspects; her standing linen collar, turning slightly outward at the edges, might seem the calyx of some lovely flower as her white neck rose from it, and the plainness of her shabby black silk dress, of which the only ornament was a knot of black[Pg 11] lace at the throat, accented all the pliant graces of her figure.

He could not understand the tranquil joyousness of her expression. She was to him the most striking anomaly of the anomalous place—so manifestly happy, so dominantly contradicting its persistently reiterated doom of death and decay; so evidently untouched by any influence of the high tragedy of these surroundings. Clearly she must lack feeling, sensibility. He looked speculatively at her, as he sat leaning his elbow on the stiff, angular arm of the chair, and with his right hand laid meditatively upon his dark red whiskers. Presently he recognized the appropriateness of beginning a conversation, and said, at a venture,—

“You have no near neighbors here?”

“No,” she replied, “we have all the world to ourselves. Do you see that black line?” she added, turning her eyes toward the horizon, where the sombre hills, miles away, met the darkening sky, “that is the boundary of the world. You may think there’s something on the other side, because you don’t know the country; but there isn’t.”

For a moment he was silent. Then he laughed a little.

“I had no idea that I was to meet a distinguished astronomer, with a new planet,” he said. “It has an orbit of its own, of course, and is governed by its own laws.”

“That’s the way with everybody,” she declared. “People are always talking about ‘the world,’ and they only mean the few other people and the few places that they know.”

“I perceive,” said Estwicke, gravely, “that you are a close reasoner. The capacity for inductive ratiocination,[Pg 12] Miss Vayne, is the noblest faculty of the human mind. Let me congratulate you on its possession. Will you reason some more!”

He had been a trifle in doubt as to how she might receive this pleasantry at her expense, but she laughed gleefully.

“Oh, I will reason with pleasure if you will suggest a topic.”

“You seem pretty expert,” said Estwicke. “Do you spend much time at it?”

“At what?”

“At reasoning.”

“Oh no,” she cried; “I haven’t the leisure for such an elegant recreation.”