CHAPTER XIX
SOCOLA'S PROBLEM
Socola found his conquest of Jennie beset with unforeseen difficulties. His vanity received a shock. His success with girls at home had slightly turned his head.
His mother was largely responsible for his conceit. She honestly believed that he was the handsomest man in America. For more than six years--in fact, since his eighteenth birthday--his mother's favorite pet name was "Handsome." He had heard this repeated so often he had finally accepted it philosophically as one of the fixed phenomena of nature.
From the moment he made up his mind to win Jennie he considered the work done--until he had set seriously about it.
The first difficulty he encountered was the discovery that a large number of Southern boys apparently considered the chief business of life going to see the girls--this girl in particular.
The first day he called he found five young men who had lingered beyond their appointed hours and were encroaching on his time without the slightest desire to apologize. He could see that she was trying to get rid of them but they hung on with a dogged, quiet persistence that was annoying beyond measure.
War seemed to have precipitated an epidemic of furious love-making. He watched Jennie twist these enterprising young Southerners around her slender fingers with an ease that was alarming. They were fine-looking, wholesome fellows, too--a little given to boyish boasting of military prowess, but for all that genuine, serious, big-hearted boys.
The matter-of-fact way in which she ruled them, as if she were a queen born to the royal purple and they were so many lackeys, was something new under the sun.
For a moment the thought was cheering. Perhaps it was her way of serving notice on his rivals that her real interests lay in another direction. But the disconcerting thing about it was that it seemed to be a habit of mind.
For the life of him he couldn't make out her real attitude. The one encouraging feature was that she certainly treated him with more seriousness than these home boys. It might be, of course, because she thought him a foreigner. And yet he didn't believe it. She had a way of looking frankly and inquiringly into his eyes with a deep, serious expression. Such a look could not mean idle curiosity.
And yet the problem he could not solve was how far he dared as yet to presume on that interest. A single false step might imperil his enterprise. His plan was of double importance since the break between her impulsive father and the President of the Confederacy. Barton was now the spokesman for the Opposition. His tongue was one that knew no restraint. An engagement with his daughter might mean the possession of invaluable secrets of the Richmond Government. Barton's championship of the quarrelsome commanders, who, in the first flood tide of their popularity as the heroes of Manassas, gave them the position of military dictators, would also place in his hands information of the army which would be priceless. The Confederate Congress sat behind closed doors. On the right footing in the Barton household he could put himself in possession of every scheme of the Southern law-makers from the moment of its conception.
The trait of the girl's character which astounded him was the sudden merging of every thought in the cause of the South. Even the time she spent laughing and flirting with those soldier boys was a sort of holy service she was rendering to her country. The devotion of these Southern women to the Confederacy was remarkable.
It had already become an obsession.
From the moment blood had begun to flow, the soul and body of every Southern woman was laid a living offering on the altar of her country. He watched this development with awe and admiration. It was an ominous sign. It meant a reserve power in the South on which statesmen had not counted. It might set at nought the weight of armies.
The moment he began to carefully approach the inner citadel of the girl's heart he found the figure of a gray soldier clad in steel on guard. What he said didn't interest her. He was a foreigner. She listened politely and attentively but her real thoughts were not there. He had not believed it possible that patriotism could so obsess the soul of a beautiful girl of nineteen. The devotion of the Southern women, young and old, to the cause of the South was fast developing into a mania.
They were displaying a wisdom, too, which Southern men apparently did not possess. While the hot-headed, fiery masters of men were busy quarreling with one another, criticising and crippling the administration of their Government, the women were supporting the President with a unanimity and enthusiasm that was amazing.
Jennie Barton refused to listen to her father's abuse.
Socola found them in the middle of a family quarrel on the subject so intense he could not help hearing the conversation from the adjoining room before Jennie entered.
"The President hates Johnston, I tell you," stormed the Senator. "He doesn't like Beauregard either. He's jealous of him!"
"Father dear, how can you be so absurd!" the girl protested. "A few months ago Beauregard was a captain of artillery. The President has made him a general of equal rank with Lee and Johnston--"
"He's doing all he can now to spite him!"
"So General Beauregard says--the conceit of it! This little general but yesterday a captain to dare to say that the President who had honored him with such high command would sacrifice the country and injure himself just to spite the man he has promoted!"
"That will do, Jennie," the Senator commanded. "Women don't understand politics!"
"Thank God I don't understand that kind. I just know enough to be loyal to my Chief, when our life and his may depend on it--"
With a stamp of his heavy foot the Senator ended the discussion by leaving the room.
Jennie smiled sweetly as she extended her hand to Socola.
"I hope you were not alarmed, Signor. We never fight--"
"The President of the Confederacy is a very fortunate leader, Miss Jennie--"
"Why?"
"He has invincible champions--"
The girl blushed.
"I'm afraid we don't know much. We just feel things."
"I think sometimes we only _know_ that way--"
He paused and looked at her hat with a gesture of dismay.
"You're not going out?"
"I must," she said apologetically. "I've bought a whole carriage load of peaches and grapes. I went to the Alabama hospital yesterday with a little basket full and made some poor fellows glad. They gave out too quickly. Those who got none looked so wistfully at me as I passed out. I couldn't sleep last night. For hours and hours their deep-sunken eyes followed and haunted me with their pleading. And so I've got a whole load to take to-day. You'll go with me--won't you?"
He had come to declare his love and make this beautiful girl his conquest. She was ending the day by making him her lackey and errand boy.
It couldn't be helped. There was no mistaking the tones of her voice. She would certainly go. The only way to be with her was to dance attendance on wounded Confederate soldiers.
It was all in the day's work. Many a scout engulfed in the ranks of his enemy must charge his own men to save his life. He would not only make the best of it, he would take advantage of it to press his way a step closer to her heart.
"Are all of the girls of the South like you, Miss Jennie?" he asked with a quizzical smile.
"You mean insulting to their fathers?" she laughed. "If you care to put it so--I mean, is their loyalty to the Confederacy a mania?"
"Is mine a mania?"
"Perhaps I should say a divine passion--are all your Southern women thus inspired?"
"Yes."
"In the far South and the West?"
"Everywhere!"
"It's wonderful."
"Perhaps because we can't fight we try to make up for it."
He watched her keenly.
"It's something bigger than that. Somehow it's a prophecy to me of a new future--a new world. Maybe after all political wisdom shall not begin and end with man."
Jennie blushed again under the admiring gaze with which Socola held her.
The carriage stopped at the door of the Alabama hospital. Socola leaped to the ground and extended his hand for Jennie's. He allowed himself the slightest pressure of the slender fingers as he lifted her out. It was his right in just that moment to press her hand. He put the slightest bit more than was needed to firmly grasp it, and the blood flamed hotly in her cheeks.
He hastened to carry her baskets and boxes of peaches and grapes inside.
For an hour he followed her with faithful dog step in her ministry of love. His orderly Northern mind shuddered at the sight of the confusion incident to the sudden organization of this hospital work. He had heard it was equally bad in the North. Two armed mobs had rushed into battle with scarcely a thought of what might be done with the mangled men who would be borne from the field.
Jennie bent low over the cot of a dying boy from her home county. He clung to her hand piteously. The waters were too swift and deep for speech. Before she could slip her hand from his and pass on the man on the next cot died in convulsions.
Socola watched his agonized face with a strange sense of exaltation. It was the law of progress--this way of death and suffering. The voice within kept repeating the one big faith of his life: "Not one drop of human blood shed in defense of truth and right is ever spilled in vain!"
Through all the scenes of death and suffering beautiful Southern women moved with soft tread and eager hands.
A pretty girl of sixteen, with wistful blue eyes, approached a rough, wounded soldier. She carried a towel and tin basin of water.
"Can't I do something for you?" she asked the man in gray.
He smiled through his black beard into her sweet young face:
"No'm, I reckon not--"
"Can't I wash your face?" the girl pleaded.
The wounded man softly laughed.
"Waal, hit's been washed fourteen times to-day, but I'll stand it again, if you say so!"
The girl laughed and blushed and passed quickly on.
When all the grapes and peaches had been distributed save in one basket Socola looked at these enquiringly.
"And these, Miss Jennie--they're the finest of the lot?"
The girl smiled tenderly.
"They're for revenge--"
"Revenge?"
"Yes. The next ward is full of Yankees. I'm going to heap coals of fire on their heads--come--"
The last luscious peach and bunch of grapes had been distributed and the last soldier in blue had murmured:
"God bless you, Miss!"
Jennie paused at the door and waved her hand in friendly adieu to the hungry, homesick eyes that still followed her.
She brushed a tear from her cheek and whispered: "That's for my Big Brother. I'll tell him about it some day. He's still in the Union--but he's mine!"
She drew her lace handkerchief from her belt, dried her tears and looked up with a laugh.
"I'm not so loyal after all--am I?"
"No. But I've seen something bigger than loyalty," he breathed softly, "something divine--"
"Come," said the girl lightly. "I wish you to meet the most wonderful woman in Richmond. She's in charge of this hospital--"
Socola laughed skeptically.
"I've already seen the most wonderful woman in Richmond, Miss Jennie--"
"But she _is_--really--the most wonderful woman in all the South--I think in the world--Mrs. Arthur Hopkins--"
"Really?"
"She has done what no man ever has anyhow--sold all her property for two hundred thousand dollars and given it to the Confederacy. And not satisfied with giving all she had--she gave herself."
Socola followed the girl in silence into the little office of the hospital and found himself gasping with astonishment at the sight of the delicate woman who extended her hand in friendly greeting.
She was so perfect an image of his own mother it was uncanny--the same straight, firm mouth, the strong, intellectual forehead with the heavy, straight-lined eyebrows, the waving rich brown hair, with a strand of silver here and there--the somber dress of black, the white lace collar and the dainty white lace cap on the back of her beautiful hair--it took his breath.
The more he saw of these Southern people, men and women, the more absurd became the stuff he had read so often about the Puritan of New England and the Cavalier of the South. He was more and more overwhelmed with the conviction that the Americans were _one_ people racially and temperamentally. The only difference on earth between them was that some settled in the bleak hills and rock-bound coast of the North and others in the sunlit fields and along the shining shores of the South.
He returned with Jennie Barton to her home with the deepening conviction that he was making no progress. He must use this girl's passionate devotion to her country as the lever by which to break into her heart or he would fail.
He paused on the doorstep and spoke with quick decision:
"Miss Jennie, your Southern women have fired my imagination. I'm going to resign my commission with the Sardinian Ministry and enter the service of the South--"
"You mean it?"
"I was never in more deadly earnest."
He looked straight into her brown eyes until she lowered them.
"I need not tell you that you have been my inspiration. You understand that without my saying it."
Before Jennie could answer he had turned and gone with quick, firm step.
She watched his slender, graceful figure with a new sense of exhilaration and tenderness.