False Gods Read Free

returned to college after a brief suspension, he found that he was very differently regarded by his classmates. Whereas he had been formerly treated as a man of reserve, whose formal good manners were justified by his lineage and whose romantic concern with the history of his state tinged his sobriety with idealism, he was now seen as a faintly sinister figure, possessed of a cold will power that repelled intimacy. He was respected, however; courage was always admired in Virginia. Some of his old friends insisted that he had been motivated by a high principle, although they did not agree on what that principle was.
    Roger himself felt no guilt at what he had done. Drayton had certainly assumed the risk, and the South was the better for the elimination of such a firebrand. But he had to face the fact that the episode had changed him, unless it had simply brought out something that had all along been concealed. He felt that he was now a man with a mission. The nature of the mission he did not yet see, but he was confident that time would bring it out. He did not for a minute believe that he had killed a man for nothing.
    Girls were especially awed by his new reputation; his good looks were now described as Byronic. His reticence and solitary habits added to his fascination, and to Kitty Cabell, the prettiest debutante of her Richmond season, he seemed the Corsair himself. Roger had known Kitty since childhood; they were even, like so many of the first families, related, and he had long been perfectly clear that she had the characteristics, both good and bad, of the renowned Southern belle. She was superficial and affected, and she posed as being a good deal sillier and less worldly than she was, but she was also enchanting. She now turned her full lights upon him and soon aroused his lust to the point where he was reluctantly willing to pay society's price to sleep with her. They were married in 1855, shortly after his father's death from a stroke, and settled in Castledale.
    Kitty proved one of those rare persons who become perfectly amiable when their ambition is satisfied. As chatelaine of Castledale and mother of a small son, she happily took the lead in the local society and got on splendidly with her docile mother-in-law, who continued to live in the house. That Roger, engaged in his law practice and the supervision of the beloved plantation, should be little concerned with her she accepted as the conventional attitude of a husband. So long as his manners were correct—and they invariably were—she was content with her bargain. But no more children came, and in time he requested his own bedroom. If he ever had an affair, she never learned of it, and that was all she cared about. As for herself, there was never any idea of a lover. She was afraid that Roger might have killed him.
    Everything would have been well enough, in Kitty's opinion, had the Yankees only seen fit to leave them alone. She had spent much of her youth in Paris, where her father had represented a syndicate of tobacco planters, and she had viewed with a detachment imbued in her by her older brother Lemuel, a satirical dilettante, the semiludicrous efforts of their Francophile parents to be included in the
gratin
of the old faubourg. Lemuel had taken a perverse delight in establishing his dominance over his pretty younger sibling by exposing the silliness of a father who spent an hour every morning practicing his French
r
and of his mother, who thought she would ingratiate herself in legitimist circles by dressing as closely as she could to the Empress Eugénie. He made Kitty understand that Vielle France, however polite, however
amicale,
was never going to clasp to its bosom or allow to marry one of its sons an American girl who wasn't a Catholic and who hadn't a fortune, the plantation at home being morally entailed to the firstborn, a brother older than her and Lemuel. Kitty learned that in a foolish world one had to rely on oneself, and she