A hero's last days, or Nepenthe

CHAPTER I. “I am old and blind

Men point at me as smitten by God’s frown, Afflicted and deserted by my kind.”

[From a Poem on Milton’s Blindness.

If one to whom there belonged, by birthright, an inheritance of rulership over others may, in some sort, be styled a prince, then the second of the incongruities described in the saying “ I have seen servants riding upon liorses,

I and princes walking as servants on the earth,”

I was, about the year 1870, as frequently witnessed in the Southern States of the Union as the first.

Upon a certain day in the early part of September, during that year, such a prince, in the person of a fine-looking young man, engaged in the humble occupation of waggoning, was traversing one of the loneliest of the mountain roads of western North Carolina.

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This road had formerly been a considerable thoroughfare. It had been originally cut for the convenience of the families of gentlemen — most of whom were from the low-country of South Carolina — who were in the habit of passing the summers in the neighborhood ; but this habit had been generally abandoned, and, at the time referred to, the enjoyment of the scenery was almost monopolized by John Langdon, the gentleman just introduced to the reader. He frequently had occasion to carry his “ team ” over that portion of the road which lay between his home in the Sechoolah j

valley and the mountain town of A , whence ;

all the necessaries of life, except those derived from a small farm, had to be procured. It was, therefore, with an interest attached to an un- : usual circumstance that he this day remarked, here and there, the fresh footprints of some one, 1 the size and shape of whose boot argued him f no common mountaineer. It crossed his mind ♦ that the unknown might prove to be an ac- | quaintance ; for it appeared more likel}^ that one of the old frequenters of the neighborhood '[ — all of whom he had known well — should re- I turn to look after an abandoned home, than I that a stranger should take it into his head to 1 visit an out-of-the-way valley. Accordingly, I

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lie was desirous of overtaking the pedestrian, and, about the middle of the day, it appeared that his desire was to be gratified ; for he caught sight of a gray-suited figure, standing out against the sky, on a height in front of him. Whoever he might be, this person evidently perceived the waggon at the same moment, and, to judge by his immediately seating himself upon a rock, determined to wait for it.

Something in the attitude suggested weariness, and the outline of the figure struck Langdon as familiar. He sprang into the waggon, by the side of which he had been walking, and, gathering up the reins, which had been fastened to the seat, began to urge his mules forward, as if to a wished-for meeting. His shouts, as he approached nearer, were answered rather faintly, and he only became certain of the identity of the traveller when he was close enough to recognize his features ; but they were deadly pale.

“ Good heavens ! Godwyn ! ” he exclaimed.

“ So it is you, Johnny ! ” was the answer. “ Don’t be alarmed? I have had a- chill ; but it will pass off directly.” And, indeed, after he had been revived by the contents of a flask, produced from the waggon, the speaker recovered a more natural appearance, though a f painful change, since the time when they had last been together, was still apparent to John * Langdon ; yet his immediate anxiety about ^ his friend’s condition was partially relieved 1 his account of himself.

“I have only lately recovered from a severe f illness,” said he, “ and have been recruiting ’ myself with a walking tour. I took this route, remembering your old description of the beauties of the Sechoolah valley, and with some vague hopes of meeting you. Last night I heard that your father was still living in , the neighborhood, and the thought of seeing him, if not you, made me come on to-day, when I ought, perhaps, to have rested. About • an hour ago I felt this wretched chill creeping on me, and, I can tell you, was thankful enough to catch sight of this waggon just now, little as ' I dreamed you were in it. I was beginning to fear I could not hold out as far as Byrom’s, the .1 place I was told I could stop at. How far isvj that now?” ^

A mile or two ; but you are not to stop ■ ! there. What you have to<lo now, is to let me i help you at once into the waggon, for I don’t believe you can manage to get in by yourself .” ']

So saying, Langdon, after hastily making: things as comfortable as the nature of the casef

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permitted, by putting a box or two out of the way, and spreading a huge great-coat over an arrangement of bags and parcels, for his friend to lie on, gave him the offered assistance, which turned out, in spite of Godwyn’s protest, to be very necessary. He next placed his friend’s satchel under his head, by way of a pillow, and disposed the wagon cover in such a fashion as to give him both air and shade.

“Jump in too then, if you will,” he said to' a beautiful setter, which was Godwyn’s companion, and appeared unwilling to be separated from him at this crisis. “ And now,” added Langdon, addressing his friend, “ just imagine that this is an ambulance, and that I am taking you to be nursed by a nice family in Virginia, with lots of pretty girls in it, as I did once before — you remember ? ”

“ Where are you really going to take me ?”

“ Home, of course. You surely did not suppose I would let you pass us by ? Have you forgotten we are cousins ?” said Langdon, thinking to himself. “ It was silly, my making that allusion to pretty girls, yet he can’t be so ridiculous as to suppose it meant anything, though tliey are pretty, especially ”

“ The people I stopped with last night thouglit your father was living all the year round at

A Hero’s Lad Days, his old summer place,” said Godwyn, interrupting this train of thought.

“ So he is. I farm it. You have heard, I dare say, of his having lost his eye-sight during the last few years ?” Godwyn nodded assent.

“ He has also fallen into poor health,” Langdon went on. The rest of the family, after my two brothers were killed, you know, were all girls except myself.”

“ One of your sisters was married to your cousin, Major Langdon, was she not?”

“Yes. He was killed at second Manassas. She is living with us. Another married Arthur Creighton — you remember him? — a doctor, a red-headed follow. She lives in the low-country. But there are three more still, and, of course, I have had to manage for them all ; which is very different from managing them, by the way,” and Langdon smiled as he added,

“ the fact is, they all have me rather under hack than otherwise, you know the way of girls?”

“ I know very little of womankind,” said Godwyn, “ except my mother, and I fancy she was unlike other women.”

“ Bather, I should hope,” thought Langdon to himself. He had seen the lady in question, , who was a distant relative, once or twice, and'

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remembered a stern, awe-inspiring countenance and manner, which he, then a boyish undergraduate, had not regarded witli admiration.

He had the grace to ^eel ashamed of his reflection, and tried to put on a proper look of sympathy, when Godwyn added presently, “She died last winter.”

“ I — we never heard of it,” was all Langdon could think of saying, hoping no more was necessary. He then suggested that his friend should now try to “ sleep off the chill.”

Godwyn assented. It appeared that his attack had taken a favorable turn ; for he presently fell into a slumber so profound as not to be disturbed by such occasional jolts of the wagon as the utmost skill on the paid of its driver could not prevent.

Now it is one of the doctrines of the mystics — with whose philosophy Alfred Godwyn was, at one time, much taken — that men pass through a series of spiritual deaths before they actually die. If this is true, it may not be unnatural to suppose that the outward man, in highly sensitive organisms, may, in some way, reflect such crises in the inner life. Since, too, the period of his thus meeting with his friend was destined to form a turning-point in this young man’s existence, and, from the sleep into which he had fallen, he was to wake to an en- . tirely new set of personal interests, so that, during the three hours which it lasted, he might be said to have died to the past, and to his former self, if ever in his life he actually underwent one of those mystical deaths, he did so at this time. But, however it may be explained, certain it is that his body now, for a little while, seemed very strangely to put on, as it were, the figure of death — far more than is the case during an ordinary sleep.

His countenance was of a highly intellectual . cast ; its habitual expression was that of intense thoughtfulness, as if he were seeking after the clue to some problem. There now dawned upon it a look, as of satisfied repose in the attainment of that after which it had striven — a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the “ first, last look,” one day to rest upon it. John Langdon was neither an imaginative person nor a deep observer ; but, Godwyn’s countenance and figure being visible to him over the side of the waggon, he was struck with a sort of awe by the' strangeness of his appearance and its still grand- ' eur. Once, half impatient with himself for such fancifulness, he even stopped the course^ of his mules that he might assure himself that* his friend was actually alive, bv feeling his"*

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i pulse. It was so feeble — a peculiarity of his late illness, Godwyii afterwards explained, was that, at times, it was almost imperceptible — that it took some little while for Langdon to satisfy himself that it was actually beating; but it then began to go on regularly and more strongly. Langdon, convinced that it was only his own “ nervousness ” that had affected his judgment at first, felt half provoked both with himself, for having indulged such fears, and with Godwyn, who continued to sleep profoundly, for having unconsciously awakened ^them.

“ However,” thought he, as it were excusing i himself to himself, “ there can be no doubt, he looks awfully. I believe he is six months younger than I am and that makes hinT^let me ; see — nearly twenty-seven ; yet any one would take him for forty.”

In this he was mistaken ; a discriminating observer would have seen that Godwyn’s attenuation, and the thinness of his close-cut hair, ■ were signs of illness, not of age.

; Langdon did not fail to note the whiteness of his wrists, and the way the gloves hung on i his small hands; he made up his mind that ;his friend had never betaken himself to such [manual labors as had fallen to his own share.

“ It is almost a pity he did not. No doubt it was some kind of brain-work that brought him to this,” was his conclusion. “ He was just the sort of fellow to kill himself in that way, if he had half a chance. I declare, he looks more like Shakespeare’s bust than he ever did.”

Now “ Shakespeare,” from some fancied resemblance, had been Godwyn’s soubriquet in the college course, where the acquaintance of these two had begun, of which this may be an appropriate place to give some account.

Their student life had been interrupted in 1861 by the outbreak of the war ; for young men of their stamp naturally furnished the earliest class of volunteers in the Confederate service, in which the cavalry was their favorite branch. These two had — each with the rank of lieutenant — entered a regiment which was ' commanded by the father of Langdon, a gen- . tleman who had long been prominent among South Carolina secessionists, and who afterwards acquired some military distinction, once . declining a generalship.

Godwyn was only in active service one year. He was wounded in the first general engage- i ment in which his regiment took part, by afshot in the jaw-bone, which was the cause of a j defect in his utterance ever after, besides slightly!

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affecting the s^nnmetry of his face. While recovering from this wound, in the house of the Virginia family to which his friend had alluded — for a wonder, considering the locality, his joke had had no foundation in fact, since there were no pretty girls in it — Godwyn was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the years of the war in Fort Johnson, where John Langdon afterwards joined him for a time. Before that period, though cousins, they had not been specially intimate ; but thirteen months incarceration together made them close friends. Finally Langdon, after a severe illness, during which Godwyn had also been in the hospital I and allowed to assist in nursing him, was exj changed, along with a batch of prisoners, supi posed to be disabled for life. When they parted,

: it was with a mutual feeling that they would always feel to each other as brothers ; but cor- I respondence had been difficult — at first almost impossible; and they had drifted almost en- ' tirely out of each other’s knowledge until now.

; When Godwyn awoke at last, declaring himj self much better, he gave his friend some ac- 1 count of his life since they had parted. On ; his return from prison he had found his mother j — his only near relative — living as a refugee in I a small up-country village of South Carolina,

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where he had been keeping a school ever since until her death, which had occurred nearly a year before. He had had a severe attack of fever, the previous summer, like that from which he had lately recovered ; had given up school-keeping at that time, and had spent the winter before at the North, where lie had, as Langdon knew, connections through his father, who had been a Marylander. He told him that he had inherited a small property from one of these, though hardly enough to live upon, and that it w^as his intention to look out, wdien well enough to work, for “ something he was fit for ” — explaining that to mean some kind of literary w^ork ; he had occasionally, he stated, Qontributed to new^spapers and magazines, though it had not been a very profitable employment.

“ The fact is,” said he, “ I represent the minority, the apparently weak side — in point of numerical support — on almost every subject on wdiich it is possible to hold tw^o opinions, and . I still advocate the views wdiich even our owui people have decided ' don’t pay,’ and wdiich certainly do not pay, as far as money is concerned.”

John Langdon w^as no visionary ; he wais ; about to say : 1

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“ Why on earth not try your hand at some sort of work that does pay?” when, catching sight of the pale features, on which shone the light of an unconquered, unconquerable spirit, he was not so dull of soul as not to respond to it after his fashion.

“ Well, old fellow, I believe you are bound to succeed in the end, at whatever you really set yourself!” was what he said.

“Succeed! What is success, Johnny? To accomplish what ^mu undertake, or to have it acknowledged that you have done so ? I try never to think about anything but whether I j have the right on my side. I believe in the I final recognition and triumph of Truth, though ! it may not be given me to share in it ; meanf while I have nailed her colors to my little i mast, to float till it goes down.”

“ But who can bo certain ? Suppose they ! turned out not to be her colors.”

I “ If ever I find that out, I will tear them j down ; till then, one must go by the light he has.”

“ But meanwhile one must make enoiigdi to I live.”

I “ I know it ; indeed I am not altogether a I fool, Johnny ; all tlie same I mean to let the I bread and butter question rest until my head I is stronger to decide what I shall do.”

‘‘ Well ; I am glad I fell in with yon as I did,” Langdon said. The thing yon have to do at present is to stay quietly with us till you are your own man again, and let me return a little of the nursing you gave me at Fort Johnson.”

“Are 3^ou sure I shall not be in the way?”

“ Look here : I will tell you exactly how things are with us, so that you need not be afraid. The house was built before the war — luckily for us now, it Avas a sort of hobby of my father’s, who saw to everything about it himself — the seasoning of every bit of timber, and all arrangements. Of course they are in a style far beyond our present means, in most respects ; and as for beds and that sort of thing, we have more than we can use. We have precious little money now-a-da^^s coming in from what remains of our property below, — my father’s plantation on the sea islands was confiscated, you know ; still, I get from A all

that is really necessary, which the farm, the woods and the river cannot supply, and, on the whole, we are wonderfully comfortable. My sister from the low-country paid us a visit, last year, and she says we live luxuriously, compared with the people who have gone back there. We are as lonely, almost, as the Swiss Family Robinson, and the chief objection to

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our going on living as we do is, that it is a pity for the girls to be cut off, as they are, from all society, — even the little boys are getting old enough for it to be a disadvantage to them.’’

“ I thought you said there were no boys.”

“ Oh ! they are my nephews, my eldest sister’s children. I have been conducting their education on the old Persian plan, so far, — the riding being on mules instead of horses ; and for a pair of seven-year-olds, I think they do me credit. Now my father is taking them in hand, to ding the declensions into their heads. It is well he does not dislike that occupation as much as I should. The fact is, his blindness cuts him off from almost everything else that he would feel to be of use, and it is an excellent thing for him. If it were only on his account, Godwyn — giving him a fresh person to talk wdth, about the things he is most interested in, we should all be particularly glad of a visit from you. ”

“ Thank you ; I shall be glad of an opportunity of knowing him better,” said Godwyn, relieved from fears of finding himself de trop in a scene of poverty, and beginning to entertain pleasurable anticipations of what was before him.

“ We are just now entering the Sechoolah

4 Hero\s Last Bays, valley,” said Laiigdou, soon after. “ That ” — and he indicated a picturesque little building, only half visible from the road — “ is a chapel built by my father and his friends before the war; but no service has been held in it for several years.”

“ Do none of them live here now, then ? ”

“No; the rest of the broken-down aristocracy have absquatulated from these parts. We got stranded, as it Avere.”

Two or three other buildings presently became visible. The houses Avere of unpainted wood ; but from tlieir size, numerous out-buildings, and other evidences of luxurious usages, had seemingly been built for Avealthy persons, though noAV Avearing a look of forlorn desertion.

As the Avagon entered a pass where two precipitous banks only allowed enough space for a small stream to floAV, which had, evidently, once been turned aside, but had noAv resumed its former bed, tlius become the road, John Langdon got into the wagon, remarking that, though it was not visible, they Avere noAv Avithin a hundred Awards of liis home, and yet the waggon Avould have to go nearly a third of a mile still, to reach it by the road.

“ I ahvays give warning from this point that

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I am coming,” said he, taking a bugle from under the seat ; “ there is a fine echo here.”

With that he blew a long blast, and then struck into a gay reveille, an old Confederate cavalry call, perfectly familiar to Godwyn, which was caught up and repeated over and over by the spirit-voices of the woods. Godwyn felt the gaiety of the air as a sort of mockery of sad associations ; nor was his the only ear upon which the sounds fell jarringly. Langdon’s father, the blind ex -colonel, caught them, as he sat by an open window in his house, where one of his daughters was reading to him. For one moment he gave an eager start ; tlien a grave expression settled on his countenance ; he fell into a deep revery, but was roused by the inquiry: “Shall I go on, papa? You know it will be some time still before Johnny gets here.”

“Yes, little daughter,” he said.

Slie whom he addressed was a stately young woman; but it had never seemed to occur to liim that she had altered, in character or appearance, since he had last beheld her, nearly five years before. He treated her, in almost every respect, as still a child. Slie never dreamed of resenting tiiis ; but being his established reader, and living in complete in-

A llero^H Last Days, timacy with his habits of thouglit, she simply accepted liis views on this, as she did on all other subjects, — so much so, indeed, as to find it difficult to cheer him when he fell, as now, into fits of depression. She regretted her offer to read on ; for, as it happened, she came to a passage of strange applicabilit}" to the train of painful thought which the notes of the reveille had awakened ; yet, knowing the likelihood of his being acquainted with the context, she did not venture to skip the majestic lines :

“ God of our fatliers ! what is man,

Tlr-U Thou to him, with hand so various,

Or might Tsay contrarious,

Tem}3erest thy providence through his short course,

Not evenly, as Thou rul’st

Irrational and brute.

Nor do I name of common men the rout That, wandering loose about.

Grow up and perish as the summer fly ;

Heads without name, no more remembered,

But such as Thou hast solemnly adorned

To some great work, Thy glory

And people’s safety, which, in part, they effect.

Yet towards these, thus dignified. Thou oft.

Amidst their height of morn,

ChangestThy countenance and Thy hand with no regard To highest favoi-s past

Trom Thee to them, or them to Thee of service.

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Xor only dost degrade them, or remit To life obscured, which were a fair dismission,

But tlirow’st them lower than Thou did’st exalt them high,

Unseemly falls, in human eye,

Too grievous for the trespass or omission !

Oft leav’st them to the hostile sword Of heathen and profane, their carcasses To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captived,

Or to the unjust tribunals, under change of times,

And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude.

If these they have ’scaped, perhaps in poverty,

With sickness and disease Thou bow’st them down. Painful diseases and deformed,

In crude old age.

Though not disordinate, yet causeless suffering,

The punishment of dissolute days ; in fine.

Just or unjust alike seem miserable.

For oft alike both come to evil end.”

“ The thing which is, is that which has already been!’’ said the blind man. “Yet,” he added, raising his head, and speaking with emphasis, “ let us not take Milton for our prophet altogether ! How partial were the interpretations of providence of even his sublime mind, and how full of that presumption which was the error of his religious as well as his political creed ! Wliat are we, to dare to judge of such matters ? ”

A Herd’s Last Bays,

CHAPTER 11.

“ Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed With the clear-pointed tlaine of chastity,

Clear without heat, undying, tended by Pure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane Of her still spirit ; locks not wide-dispersed, Madonna-wise on either side her head ;

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign The suininer calm of golden charity.

Were fixed shadows of thy fixed mood,

Revered Isabel, the crown and head.

[Tennyson.

Tlie echoes of the horn had not 3"et died away when Godwyn perceived two little yellow-haired lads, exceedingly alike, and apparently about seven years old, climbing with what looked to an unaccnstomcd eye, dangerous rapidity, down one of the precipices at the side of the road.

“ My little nephews,” said Langdon. “ I always let them ride home postilion-fashion from this point when I am coming home from A — .”

“ They seem in a hnrry. Won’t they come to grief?”

“ Not they — they are as sure-footed as a pair of little goats,” observed Langdon, witli evident pride in their agility.

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The little fellows liung back for a moment at the bottom of the declivity, noticing the presence of a stranger, but at their uncle’s bidding, approached through the stream, not being encumbered with shoes — as it is indeed unusual for hoys of their age to be during the summer in the Carolinas — and were introduced by Langdon as Tom and Ted ; whereupon, after reaching up the side of the wagon to shake hands, and replying All right ” to John Langdon’s enquiries as to how everything had gone during his absence, each scrambled, without more words, to the back of that mule which he regarded as belonging peculiarly to himself.

There come the little girls. They think it very hard they are not allowed to climb down the banks too,” observed Langdon. “ Look ! they have made a note of you, and are disputing whether to come on or not.”

The smaller of the two new little personages who were to be seen approaching when Godwyn’s attention was thus called to them, apparently took the decision of this discussion upon herself, and, after a short pause, came on first, bounding along the narrow path with a free, agile grace, beautiful to behold ; the other one followed more slowly. They were dressed in i Hero's Lad Days, simple cotton print frocks, and their faces were almost hidden by those old-fashioned sun-bonnets, yclept crackers, but the make of these, and indeed of all the apparel of both the boys and girls, showed in some undefined way, in spite of coarse materials, that the little wearers belonged to the gentle class ; indeed this fact was unmistakable in the bearing of all four, in spite of the awkwardness of the little boys.

From that defect, the behavior of the little ladies was quite free ; their thorough-bred composure, the slight, courteous bows to the stranger, followed by clear-voiced how-do-youdos to their brother, and easy acceptance of his little-needed assistance in getting into the wagon, were almost amusing*, in the complete self-possession they displayed — the more so, as I the younger gave the cue to each action, as the natural leader. Langdon, whose brotherly in- ' stincts Avere half-delighted, half-provoked, at this exhibition of precocious ease, did not take the same pains as in the case of the boys, and left them to introduce themselves to his friend. .

They speedily divested their heads of the sun-bonnets, thereby displaying two most charming faces, shaded by the softest of curl- : ing locks. The elder one resembled her T brother in having squarely formed features, | fair hair and grey eyes, rather sleepy-lookiiig in general, but occasionally twinkling with an expression of shrewdness. The other had a unique, captivating style of beauty ; her hair was almost black, yet her complexion might have been termed snowy ; deep blue eyes, an intellectual brow, and a tender, variable little mouth, made up, altogether, the most bewitchj ing countenance, Godwyn thought, he had I ever beheld. There was something strangely I familar to him in it, too. Suddenly there [ flashed across his mind the image of a little sister of his own, lost in early childhood, and he inwardly accounted to himself for the resemblance by the distant relationship which existed between the families.