False Gods Read Free Page A

didn't forget this when the family returned to Richmond. She had no greater loyalty to slave-holding Virginia than she did to the Faubourg St.-Germain. She laughed at the golden calves on both sides of the Atlantic, but she was always careful to laugh to herself.
    Roger's attitude to the great issue of the day struck her as just as senseless as everyone else's. He believed that the slaves should be freed, but he was quite willing to kill anyone but himself who proposed to free them. At least that was how it looked to her. He disguised his fierce ego, as she saw it, behind the mask of a Virginia patriot. And after the abortive John Brown raid onto his sacred state's soil, he became as hot a secessionist as the fiery South Carolinian whose brains he had blown out.
    In the first years of the fighting, during which she had to manage a crumbling plantation while he was off, all over the state, with Jeb Stuart's cavalry, she sometimes complained to her mother-in-law that the wives and mothers of warriors had the worst of their wars.
    "Let us call it our glory," the docile widow would invariably reply.
2
    Hate sustained Roger during the whole of the conflict, hate and, at least in the first two years, his hope that the Confederacy's choice of Richmond as its capital might restore Virginia to the leadership it had enjoyed in the golden days of Mr. Jefferson. No compromise, he always insisted grimly, was possible with the enemy that was ravaging his native state. Although he met some captive Union officers who he had to concede had shown at least the courage of gentlemen, he could only pity them as the tools of an unholy alliance between fanatical abolitionists and avaricious war profiteers. And when, after two years of constant campaigning, he was offered the relief of a staff job in Richmond, accompanied with a promotion, he turned both down to continue in the cavalry. Nothing else seemed to make any sense to him.
    The double defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg destroyed his last illusion of ultimate victory for secession. No matter how many battles or skirmishes his company won on mangled Virginia soil, no matter how horribly its rich beloved red clay seemed to ooze Yankee blood, there were always new waves of the boys in blue rising out of the very foam of their collapsed predecessors.
    He had no wish to survive the inevitable end. He was wounded three times but always slightly; he seemed to be proving the old adage that death avoids those who seek it in battle. The long days in the saddle riding through familiar countrysides, sinister now in their haunting beauty, the nights in the field where he would let his exhausted body drop to the earth after swinging the lead ends of his blanket around his shoulders, began to produce an odd consolation in their very monotony and dreariness. Once when he sat up till dawn couching in his lap the head of a boy whose lifeblood was slowly dripping away, he felt something like peace at his own acceptance of all that the loathed enemy had destroyed. But he could not bear the sight of Castledale; on one of his leaves he put up at a hotel in Richmond rather than go home. And when word reached him that his mother had died, he could only be thankful for what she had been spared.
    After Appomattox he had the privilege of a few words with General Lee, who had stood as godfather to his son seven years before. Like all the army he worshipped Lee, but he was ready to relegate him to the past. "Go home, my friend," the general said. "Now the real task awaits us. God helping, we shall not shirk it."
    Roger nodded and went home, but he stayed there only a year. He felt like an atheist who has died only to discover that there
is
an afterlife. It might not be a better one, but at least he would be free of the old.
    "I'm going up to New York to see whether I can make a living there practicing law," he informed his younger brother, Ned, a mild and gentle man, a bachelor, who deemed it entirely fitting that he