House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “I see only one chance,” Brett confessed. “I respect President Davis, but his stubbornness will ruin us, if we’re not already ruined.”

  Vesta said crisply: “Brett Dewain, Mr. Davis has had nothing but criticism and reproach for four years. I’ve never heard anyone say: ‘There’s a fine thing he did!’ Praise never hurt anyone. A little praise and approval might do wonders for him.”

  Brett smiled. “There you go again, talking like your mother.”

  “Well, I think so myself too, Papa,” she assured him. “Mr. Davis is blamed for everything that goes wrong; but when anything goes right, General Lee or someone gets the credit.”

  Trav said: “There’s a lot of talk in Congress and in the papers about making Lee General-in-chief; but he can’t command all our armies unless they’re concentrated.”

  “They never will be,” Brett reminded him. “Every state wants to call its own troops home. To read Governor Brown’s letters you’d think Georgia could have whipped Sherman if all her soldiers had been at home instead of in Lee’s army. And Mr. DeSaussure sent a petition from Columbia the other day, asking Lee to send a corps down there to defend South Carolina.” He added: “I almost wish he would, since Cinda’s there.”

  Trav said gravely: “Brett, we lost seventy thousand bushels of badly needed grain in that fire in Charlotte, and a lot of sugar, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mama’s in Charlotte,” Vesta suggested. “I think she’d bring Jenny and the children as far north as she could.”

  “Columbia won’t be defended,” Brett said surely. “So they’d be safe there. Sherman won’t have any excuse to loot the town, or harm anyone.”

  Brett went back to duty, and there was a rumor that Columbia had fallen and no one doubted it. When on Sunday he came home again, he said the city had been burned. “I hope Cinda and the others got away all right. I’d give a good deal to know where they are.”

  Vesta saw his desperate anxiety. Cinda sometimes made him forget his concerns by absurd questions or by pretended ignorance that made him storm at her; and Vesta tried the same device. Did he suppose Mama would go Charleston? He explained that to do that, Cinda would have to go through Sherman’s army. Besides, Charleston was already evacuated, no doubt of that; though of course Beauregard might somehow work a miracle. Vesta said brightly that four years ago, after Manassas, people thought General Beauregard could just do anything, but Brett did not comment, and she asked: “What do they mean, Papa, when they say gold is a hundred for one?”

  He laughed and told her not to pretend to be stupid. “You don’t fool me, you know.” He came and kissed her. “Trying to take my mind off Mama, Honey? I know your tricks.”

  “But what do they mean, Papa?” she persisted.

  “Why, a hundred Confederate dollars for one gold dollar.” His eyes shadowed. “Evans and Cogswell in Columbia printed most of our currency, but with Sherman there we can’t print any more. I hear we have several millions in specie in Charlotte, right in his path. Probably he’ll get that too.”

  “Would that be bad?” He made an angry gesture, and she said apologetically: “But Papa, I get so confused! People say so many things I just don’t know what to believe. They say Mr. Davis is going crazy, or that he already is, something about a pain in his head; and all this talk about evacuating Richmond. Surely they won’t, will they?”

  So she brought him to the point where he needed no more distraction. “Oh, we won’t till we must, of course. When we do, that will be the end of us, Vesta.” And he said thoughtfully: “This is all part of the end; the end of the whole madness of states’ rights.” He swung to face her. “We even make more states, as if there weren’t too many already! Western Virginia seceded and joined the North, and last fall some cowardly rascals organized the ‘State of Southwest Virginia’ and elected a governor and a full slate of officers. And the Yankees have organized their own Virginia state government up in Alexandria, to take control of the conquered counties. So what used to be one Virginia is three or four states now. And all the Confederate states are babbling about their rights! Georgia says she has a right to make a separate peace with the North, and North Carolina’s threatening to, and some Virginians talk about it.” And he said: “The Confederacy’s trying to dodge out of what’s coming, trying to bribe the North, offering Lincoln to become his allies against European powers if he’ll grant us independence. I’d rather see us fight and lose and take our whipping without so much whining.”

  He tramped across the room and back again. “The army knows we’re beaten,” he said. “The men are making their own separate peace, deserting to the Yankees or slipping away to their homes. Mr. Wigfall wanted General Lee to let the Texas brigade go home to recruit; but if they went, they’d never come back! There are only four hundred of them left, but even four hundred soldiers can’t be spared. Men whose homes are near-by go without permission. General Wilcox says he’s losing three hundred deserters a week. The army loses hundreds every night! I don’t blame them, the poor devils. Too many of the gentry—” He spat the word. “The big planters and their sons, the slave owners, have got out of the army, set the example.”

  He sat down, looking at her under lowered brows, and there was a profound sadness in his tones. “The best men in the South joined the army in ’sixty-one,” he said. “But most of them are dead. The best blood of the South is dead, Vesta. Your little Tommy, and other babies like him who never knew their fathers; they’ll have to carry on the fine old strains. They’ll have to breed a new race to take the place of the dead; your grandchildren and their grandchildren. Most of our best young men are dead, or will be, if this rotten business goes on.”

  She said in a low tone: “Like General Pegram, Papa. I went to their wedding. You know Hetty broke her mirror, two days before. She was showing Connie her bridal veil and dropped the mirror. Then they were to ride to the church in Mr. Davis’s carriage, but the horses reared up and acted so badly that General Pegram and Hetty had to come in an old broken-down hack. Then Hetty tore her veil, coming into the church. Everybody said they didn’t believe in signs; but he’s dead.”

  “How’s she standing it?”

  “She’s wonderful, Papa.”

  He kissed her gently. “No man was ever as valiant as you women.”

  She said with a faint smile: “But I cry pretty easily now. I cried awfully at General Pegram’s funeral.”

  It may have been long weariness—the weariness of waiting on the torturingly slow approach of the inevitable end—or it may have been the anxiety for her mother which she would not admit even to herself; but what she had said was true. She did cry easily. When fire broke out in a store on Main Street, and a family named Stebbins who lived on an upper floor, a father and mother and grown daughter and two youngsters and a Negro servant, all were burned to death, she wept for them as though her heart were bursting. It was somehow sweet and comforting to weep for strangers.

  There was a monotony about the sluggish days, and no spark of hope to lighten them. Wilmington and Charleston and Columbia, all were gone. The deep South cried that Virginia should be abandoned, that Lee should turn and crush Sherman and gather all the scattered Confederate forces and retreat to the mountains to fight on till the North was wearied of the struggle. People whispered that even General Lee was traitorously ready to agree to the emancipation of slaves, and recalled the damning fact that he had freed his own, long before the war began. If Lee could not be trusted, then who could? Colonel Northrop had been the target for criticism and abuse since the first summer of the war. Men said that a dyspeptic who lived on rice and milk and water could not be expected to understand that healthy soldiers needed food. Now he was at last removed, and Mr. St. John took up the task of supply which had long since become hopeless. Nine leading citizens of Richmond issued an appeal to everyone to give food out of his own pantry and cellar to feed the army; but everyone whispered that these nine men and their families were still well-fed. Suspicion
and envy and hatred walked the streets.

  February was on the ebb, and with spring and the drying of the roads Grant would strike. Terror came to dwell in every mind. Toward the end of February, Rollin and a squad of men went south to try to find recruits for his regiment; but Vesta forgot all else when on the last day of the month, a warm day with streaming rain, Cinda at last came home.

  18

  January-March, 1865

  FAUNT, seizing the hour when Nell left him briefly alone, rode out of Richmond like a fugitive. Since that December day when Cinda and Tilda tried to see him, he had felt himself debased and shamed. That they knew he was here made blacker his crime in being here. As long as they were ignorant of the truth he had found happy hours and days with Nell; but now that was no longer true. Still too weak and ill to move, he fretted for the day when he would be well enough, at any cost, to get away.

  When the Richmond papers reported that Mosby had died of wounds at Charlottesville, Nell tried to persuade him to surrender to inactivity. “I suppose there’s no one to take his place, is there?” she asked.

  “No,” Faunt agreed. “No, without him the Rangers will break up into guerrilla bands.” But one man alone could still accomplish much, and Faunt had as often as not worked alone; so Mosby’s death made him the more eager to go back into the field. When word came that Mosby instead of being dead was recovering, Faunt’s impatience increased; but he hid from Nell his returning strength, and seized secret opportunities to exercise his weak and shrunken muscles.

  From mid-January on, he was stronger than Nell suspected; and the day she went to appeal to Cinda and Tilda, and so brought Vesta to the house, he was ready to act. Milly tried to detain him; and he was still so weak that Rufus had to help him into the saddle; but once seated, though his horse after weeks of rest and good feed was lively, he knew himself secure.

  His own determination and the luck that kept him clear of roving Yankee troopers brought him after days and nights of wary riding into Mosby’s country. There he met Pete Madison, an old comrade in the Rangers, and heard the story of Mosby’s wound. While the Colonel was at supper at Lud Lake’s, a troop of Yankees crept near enough to see Mosby through a window. Knowing by his uniform that he was a Confederate officer, and without any challenge to surrender, they shot him.

  But before they broke into the house, Mosby got out of his coat and into another, stuffing under the bed his own coat and the plumed hat which they would surely have recognized. “Time they got to him,” Madison explained, “he was bleeding like a stuck pig, and he looked to be dying. They asked who he was and he said his name was Johnson or Wilson or something. The Yankee major was drunk, and he decided the Colonel was done for; so they took his boots, and stripped off the old coat and a hat he’d grabbed up, and left him there.”

  “Shot him without warning?” Faunt’s voice was mild.

  “Yup!” Pete went on: “They thought they’d killed him; but after they was gone, Lud Lake got him into an oxcart and hauled him off into the woods and hid him in a pile of leaves. The Yanks found out by’n’by who he was, and they come back and searched every hen coop in twenty miles. That was when they put out word that he was dead; but he’ll turn out to be about the liveliest dead man they ever did see. He’ll come back r’aring to go, head up and tail erect. Them Yankees better look out!”

  “Where is he?”

  “At McIvor, nigh Lynchburg, at his Pa’s place, and ready to ride again any day.”

  But at Glen Welby Faunt learned that Mosby, as soon as he could stand, had gone from his father’s place to Lynchburg and then to Richmond; and at Glen Welby he met Dr. Monteiro, who had seen the Colonel through the later stages of his convalescence. “He’ll be as good as ever,” the doctor said. “Any other man would be dead, but not John Mosby. I knew him when we were boys at the University. There was a town constable named George Slaughter who tried to arrest John for whistling on the streets, and John took his club away from him and made George yell for help. George was twice his size, too. No, the Yankees haven’t yet run the bullet that will kill John.”

  Mosby’s men, even in his absence, were active; but Faunt, tired from his journey, was glad to rest for a few days at Major Carter’s home. Willie Mosby was there, and Charlie Grogan, bed-bound from a recent wound; and a man named Lomas, a Marylander for whom Willie Mosby vouched. Faunt noticed that Lomas did more listening than talking; but Willie Mosby as usual talked enough for all of them. He was just then engaged in filling Dr. Monteiro’s ears with tales of Ranger exploits; and as silent listeners, Faunt and the man named Lomas insensibly drew together.

  “I take to you,” Lomas one day remarked. “You don’t talk as much as some.”

  “Willie fights as hard as he talks,” Faunt said guardedly.

  “There’s times,” Lomas suggested, “when not talking does more good than talking or fighting either.”

  Faunt thought the other’s tones invited questions, and when presently to be idle here began to fret him, he led Lomas to say more. The Marylander proved to be, under a little encouragement, as vocal as Willie Mosby. There were all sorts of ways of hurting the Yankees, he said. One good way was to make them think you were helping them. Thus he came to the point.

  “F’r instance, General Sheridan sent me to find out all I could about Mosby and his men,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Faunt stared at him, his lips tightening. “To spy on us?”

  Lomas nodded. “Least, that’s what Sheridan thinks. Secretary Stanton recommended me to him. But Colonel Mosby knows me, and Willie told you I’m all right. They give me what to tell Sheridan, things that won’t do any hurt for him to know; and I fetch them news about him and what he’s up to.”

  Faunt watched him narrowly. The man was a confessed double-dealer, and therefore not to be trusted. “Why confide in me?” he asked, in a neutral tone.

  “Well,” Lomas explained, “in my line of work, two men can do more than one.” He cleared his throat as though in apology for what he was about to say. “They tell me you’re one that likes to do the Yankees all the harm you can, and that you go off and run a one-man war a good part of the time. It looked to me you might want to hook up with me.” He added: “You’d get your bellyful of fun, and you wouldn’t be wasting your time.”

  “Just what is your idea?”

  “Well, I was thinking. Everybody knows how Colonel Mosby is about his men, sharing every haul they make, dividing everything up. Sheridan knows some of the men don’t like that. If you go along with me, I’ll tell him you and the Colonel had a falling out about dividing up some plunder, and that he threw you out of the Rangers, and that you’re looking for a chance to get even. General Sheridan’d be real glad to see you, I reckon.”

  The prospect of meeting General Sheridan face to face attracted Faunt. He knew he was not strong enough for the scurry and race of raid and battle. The first violent exertion would be his end; but this that Lomas suggested he could do. He agreed, and when their plans were made, they crossed into the Valley and rode toward Winchester to find Sheridan’s headquarters.

  “You’d better have a different name,” Lomas suggested on the way.

  Faunt hesitated at the thought of wearing false colors; but then he remembered that even princes travelled incognito. The Prince of Wales had been Mr. Renfrew in Richmond, on that visit before the war began. He smiled in a saturnine amusement at the thought.

  “Call me Renfrew,” he directed. If the name was good enough for a prince, it was good enough for him. Still weak, knowing he would never be strong again, he despised his own weakness and himself too. If on this enterprise he were caught and hanged as a spy, what did it matter? He was already the paramour of a notorious woman; there was no deeper shame.

  The enemy cavalry had gone into winter quarters near Winchester. Lomas left Faunt well outside the picket line to stay hidden in a thick bit of woodland till he returned. “I’ll want to make sure of your welcome first,” he explained. “
I don’t want to run you into a trap.”

  “Do you expect to take me to Sheridan himself?”

  “Of course.”

  Faunt nodded, and Lomas rode away, and Faunt was left with his thoughts. It was this Sheridan who had given the orders which last fall laid waste all Loudoun Valley. It was this man’s orders, passed on by him from Grant to Custer, which had directed the hanging, the murder of those men at Front Royal. Lomas was gone all day, and long before he returned, Faunt’s throat was dry with rage and abhorrence and with deadly hate of the man he was to see. Would it not be best service to the South, yes and to the world, to shoot Sheridan down like the dog he was, the moment they were first confronted? He longed to do so; but if Sheridan were dead another would instantly take his place. Better to speak softly, to watch and wait, to strike at last a more damaging blow than the death of just one man.

  Sc when Lomas came back to fetch him, he submitted completely to the other’s guidance. “The General likes mysteries,” Lomas assured him. “So we’ll dress you up a bit.” He swathed Faunt’s head in a handkerchief till none of his hair showed; he bound another handkerchief over Faunt’s nose and chin. “Take them off when he questions you,” he directed. “But be careful to put them on again before you leave him. Make a fuss about it. He’ll like that.”

  They waited till darkness fell, then rode together through the lines, Lomas satisfying every picket and sentry with the General’s pass, and went direct to headquarters. Faunt judged it to be near midnight; but Sheridan was waiting. When they faced him, Faunt saw a lean man with prominent cheekbones and narrowed eyes, at the outer corners of which drooping lids etched cruel lines. A mustache in need of trimming and a wisp of whisker almost concealed his mouth. Lomas said a word of introduction.