LITMIR.BIZ

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immediately stepped out through the door and on to the snow, standing close up against him as she whispered to him, “I don’t think Frank would betray you,” she said. “I don’t think he would.”

      “I doubt him, doubt him hugely. But I suppose I must trust him. I got through the pickets close to Cumberland Gap, and I left my horse at Stoneley’s, halfway between this and Lexington. I cannot go back tonight, now that I have come so far!”

      “Wait, Tom; wait a minute, and I will go in and tell your mother. But you must be hungry. Shall I bring you food?”

      “Hungry enough, but I will not eat my father’s victuals out here in the snow.”

      “Wait a moment, dearest, till I speak to my aunt.”

      Then Ada slipped back into the house, and soon managed to get Mrs Reckenthorpe away from the room, in which the Major and his second son were sitting.

      “Tom is here,” she said, “in the garden. He has encountered all this danger to pay us a visit because it is Christmas. Oh, aunt, what are we to do? He says that Frank would certainly give him up!”

      Mrs Reckenthorpe was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, but even with this advantage on her side, Ada’s tidings were almost too much for her. She, however, at last managed to consult the Major, and he resolved upon appealing to the generosity of his younger son. By this time, the Confederate general was warming himself in the kitchen, having declared that his brother might do as he pleased; he would not skulk away from his father’s house in the night.

      “Frank,” said the father, as his younger son sat silently thinking of what had been told him, “it cannot be your duty to be false to your father in his own house.”

      “It is not always easy, sir, for a man to see what is his duty. I wish that either he or I had not come here.”

      “But he is here; and you, his brother, would not take advantage of his coming to his father’s house?” said the old man.

      “Do you remember, sir, how he told me last year that, if ever he met me on the field, he would shoot me like a dog?”

      “But, Frank, you know that he is the last man in the world to carry out such a threat. Now he has come here with great danger.”

      “And I have come with none; but I do not see that that makes any difference.”

      “He has put up with it all that he may see the girl he loves.”

      “Pshaw!” said Frank, rising up from his chair. “When a man has work to do he is a fool to give way to play. The girl he loves! Does he not know that it is impossible that she should ever marry him? Father, I ought to insist that he should leave this house as a prisoner. I know that that would be my duty.”

      “You would have, sir, to bear my curse.”

      “I should not the less have done my duty. But, Father, independently of your threat, I will neglect that duty. I cannot bring myself to break your heart and my mother’s. I will go up to the hotel, and will leave the place before daybreak tomorrow.”

      After some few further words, Frank Reckenthorpe left the house without encountering his brother. He also had not seen Ada Forster since that former Christmas when they had all been together, and he had now left his camp and come across from the army much more with the view of inducing her to acknowledge the hopelessness of her engagement with his brother, than from any domestic idea of passing his Christmas at home. He was a man who would not have interfered with his brother’s prospects, as he regarded either love or money, if he had thought that in doing so he would in truth have injured his brother. He was a hard man, but one not wilfully unjust. He had satisfied himself that a marriage between Ada and his brother must, if it were practicable, be ruinous to both of them. If this were so, would not it be better for all parties that there should be another arrangement made? North and South were as far divided now as the two poles. All Ada’s hopes and feelings were with the North. Could he allow her to be taken as a bride among perishing slaves and ruined whites?

      But when the moment for his sudden departure came, he knew that it would be better that he should go without seeing her. His brother Tom had made his way to her through cold, and wet, and hunger, and through infinite perils of a kind sterner even than these. Her heart now would be full of softness towards him. So Frank Reckenthorpe left the house without seeing anyone but his mother. Ada, as the front door closed behind him, was still standing close by her lover over the kitchen fire, while the slaves of the family, with whom Master Tom had always been the favourite, were administering to his little comforts.

      Of course General Tom was a hero in the house for the few days that he remained there, and of course the step he had taken was the very one to strengthen for him the affection of the girl whom he had come to see.

      North and South were even more bitterly divided now than they had been when the former parting had taken place. There were fewer hopes of reconciliation; more positive certainty of war to the knife; and they who adhered strongly to either side and those who did not adhere strongly to either side were very few held their opinions now with more acrimony than they had then done. The peculiar bitterness of civil war, which adds personal hatred to national enmity, had come upon the minds of the people. And here, in Kentucky, on the borders of the contest, members of the same household were, in many cases, at war with each other.

      Ada Forster and her aunt were passionately Northern, while the feelings of the old man had gradually turned themselves to that division in the nation to which he naturally belonged. For months past the matter on which they were all thinking the subject which filled their minds morning, noon, and night was banished from their lips because it could not be discussed without the bitterness of hostility. But, nevertheless, there was no word of bitterness between Tom Reckenthorpe and Ada Forster. While these few short days lasted it was all love. Where is the woman whom one touch of romance will not soften, though she be ever so impervious to argument? Tom could sit upstairs with his mother and his betrothed, and tell them stories of the gallantry of the South, of the sacrifices women were making, and of the deeds men were doing, and they would listen and smile and caress his hand, and all for a while would be pleasant; while the old Major did not dare to speak before them of his Southern hopes. But down in the parlour, during the two or three long nights which General Tom passed in Frankfort, open secession was discussed between the two men. The old man now had given away altogether. The Yankees, he said, were too bitter for him.

      “I wish I had died first; that is all,” he said. “I wish I had died first. Life is wretched now to a man who can do nothing.”

      His son tried to comfort him, saying that secession would certainly be accomplished in twelve months, and that every Slave State would certainly be included in the Southern Confederacy. But the Major shook his head. Though he hated the political bitterness of the men whom he called Puritans and Yankees, he knew their strength and acknowledged their power.

      “Nothing good can come in my time,” he said; “not in my time, not in my time.”

      In the middle of the fourth night General Tom took his departure. An old slave arrived with his horse a little before midnight, and he started on his journey.

      “Whatever turns up, Ada,” he said, “you will be true to me.”

      “I will; though you are a rebel all the same for that.”

      “So was Washington.”

      “Washington made a nation; you are destroying one.”

      “We are making another, dear; that’s all. But I won’t talk secesh to you out here in the cold. Go in, and be good to my father; and remember this, Ada, I’ll be here again next Christmas Eve, if I’m alive.”

      So he went, and made his journey back to his own camp in safety. He slept at a friend’s house during the following day, and on the next night again made his way through the Northern lines back into Virginia. Even at that time there was considerable danger in doing this, although the frontier to be guarded was so extensive. This arose chiefly from the paucity of roads, and the impossibility

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