A Little Traitor to the South | Page 2

permeating the smaller figure
that there seemed to be no great disparity, from the standpoint of
combatants, between them after all.
Rhett Sempland was deeply in love with Miss Fanny Glen. His full
consciousness of that fact shaded his attempted mastery by ever so
little.

He was sure of the state of his affections and by that knowledge the
weaker, for Fanny Glen was not at all sure that she was in love with
Rhett Sempland. That is to say, she had not yet realized it; perhaps
better, she had not yet admitted the existence of a reciprocal passion in
her own breast to that she had long since learned had sprung up in his.
By just that lack of admission she was stronger than he for the moment.
When she discovered the undoubted fact that she did love Rhett
Sempland her views on the mastery of man would probably alter--at
least for a time! Love, in its freshness, would make her a willing slave;
for how long, events only could determine. For some women a lifetime,
for others but an hour, can elapse before the chains turn from
adornments to shackles.
The anger that Miss Fanny Glen felt at this particular moment gave her
a temporary reassurance as to some questions which had agitated
her--how much she cared, after all, for Lieutenant Rhett Sempland, and
did she like him better than Major Harry Lacy? Both questions were
instantly decided in the negative--for the time being. She hated Rhett
Sempland; per contra, at that moment, she loved Harry Lacy. For
Harry Lacy was he about whom the difference began. Rhett Sempland,
confident of his own affection and hopeful as to hers, had attempted,
with masculine futility and obtuseness, to prohibit the further attentions
of Harry Lacy.
Just as good blood, au fond, ran in Harry Lacy's veins as in Rhett
Sempland's, but Lacy, following in the footsteps of his ancestors, had
mixed his with the water that is not water because it is fire.
He "crooked the pregnant hinges" of the elbow without cessation, many
a time and oft, and all the vices--as they usually do--followed en train.
One of the oldest names in the Carolinas had been dragged in the dust
by this latest and most degenerate scion thereof. Nay, in that dust Lacy
had wallowed--shameless, persistent, beast-like.
To Lacy, therefore, the Civil War came as a godsend, as it had to many
another man in like circumstances, for it afforded another and more
congenial outlet for the wild passion beating out from his heart. The

war sang to him of arms and men--ay, as war has sung since Troia's day,
of women, too.
He did not give over the habits of a lifetime, which, though short, had
been hard, but he leavened them, temporarily obliterated them even, by
splendid feats of arms. Fortune was kind to him. Opportunity smiled
upon him. Was it running the blockade off Charleston, or passing
through the enemy's lines with despatches in Virginia, or heading a
desperate attack on Little Round Top in Pennsylvania, he always won
the plaudits of men, often the love of women. And in it all he seemed to
bear a charmed life.
When the people saw him intoxicated on the streets of Charleston that
winter of '63 they remembered that he was a hero. When some of his
more flagrant transgressions came to light, they recalled some splendid
feat of arms, and condoned what before they had censured.
He happened to be in Charleston because he had been shot to pieces at
Gettysburg and had been sent down there to die. But die he would not,
at least not then. Ordinarily he would not have cared much about living,
for he realized that, when the war was over, he would speedily sink
back to that level to which he habitually descended when there was
nothing to engage his energies; but his acquaintance with Miss Fanny
Glen had altered him.
Lacy met her in the hospital and there he loved her. Rhett Sempland
met her in a hospital, also. Poor Sempland had been captured in an
obscure skirmish late in 1861. Through some hitch in the matter he had
been held prisoner in the North until the close of 1863, when he had
been exchanged and, wretchedly ill, he had come back to Charleston,
like Lacy, to die.
He had found no opportunity for distinction of any sort. There was no
glory about his situation, but prison life and fretting had made him
show what he had suffered. At the hospital, then, like Lacy, he too had
fallen in love with Miss Fanny Glen.
By rights the hero--not of this story, perhaps, but the real hero--was

much the handsomer of the two. It is always so in romances; and
romances--good ones, that