A Little Traitor to the South | Page 3

is--are the reflex of life. Such a combination
of manly beauty with unshakable courage and reckless audacity was
not often seen as Lacy exhibited. Sempland was homely. Lacy had
French and Irish blood in him, and he showed it. Sempland was a
mixture of sturdy Dutch and English stock.
Yet if women found Lacy charming they instinctively depended upon
Sempland. There was something thoroughly attractive in Sempland,
and Fanny Glen unconsciously fell under the spell of his strong
personality. The lasting impression which the gayety and passionate
abandon of Lacy could not make, Sempland had effected, and the girl
was already powerfully under his influence--stubbornly resistant
nevertheless.
She was fond of both men. She loved Lacy for the dangers he had
passed, and Sempland because she could not help it; which marks the
relative quality of her affections. Which one she loved the better until
the moment at which the story opens she could not have told.
Nobody knew anything about Fanny Glen. At least there were only two
facts concerning her in possession of the general public. These,
however, were sufficient. One was that she was good. The men in the
hospital called her an angel. The other was that she was beautiful. The
women of the city could not exactly see why the men thought so, which
was confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ!
She had come to Charleston at the outbreak of the war accompanied by
an elderly woman of unexceptional manner and appearance who called
herself Miss Lucy Glen, and described herself as Miss Fanny Glen's
aunt. They had taken a house in the fashionable quarter of the city--they
were not poor at any rate--and had installed themselves therein with
their slaves.
They made no attempt to enter into the social life of the town and only
became prominent when Charleston began to feel acutely the hardships
of the war which it had done more to promote than any other place in
the land.

Then Fanny Glen showed her quality. A vast hospital was established,
and the young women of the city volunteered their services.
The corps of nurses was in a state of constant fluxion. Individuals came
and went. Some of them married patients, some of them died with them,
but Fanny Glen neither married nor died--she abided!
Not merely because she stayed while others did not, but perhaps on
account of her innate capacity, as well as her tactful tenderness, she
became the chief of the women attached to the hospital. Many a sick
soldier lived to love her. Many another, more sorely stricken, died
blessing her.
In Charleston she was regarded as next in importance to the general
who commanded the troops and who, with his ships, his forts, his guns,
and his men, had been for two years fighting off the tremendous
assaults that were hurled upon the city from the Union ironclads and
ships far out to sea. It was a point of honor to take, or to hold,
Charleston, and the Confederates held it till 1865!
Fanny Glen was a privileged character, therefore, and could go
anywhere and do anything, within the lines.
Under other circumstances there would have been a thorough inquiry
by the careful inhabitants of the proud, strict Southern city into her
family relationships; but the war was a great leveller, people were taken
at their real value when trouble demonstrated it, and few questions
were asked. Those that were asked about Fanny Glen were not
answered. It made little difference, then.
Toward the close of 1863, however, there was an eclipse in the general
hospital, for Fanny Glen fell ill.
She was not completely recovered, early in 1864, when she had the
famous interview with Rhett Sempland, but there was not the slightest
evidence of invalidism about her as she confronted him that afternoon
in February.

Wounded pride, outraged dignity, burning indignation, supplied
strength and spirit enough for a regiment of convalescents.
The difference between the two culminated in a disturbance which
might aptly be called cyclonic, for Sempland on nearly the first
occasion that he had been permitted to leave the hospital had repaired
to Fanny Glen's house and there had repeated, standing erect and
looking down upon her bended head, what he had said so often with his
eyes and once at least with his lips, from his bed in the ward: that he
loved her and wanted her for his wife.
Pleasant thing it was for her to hear, too, she could not but admit.
Yet if Fanny Glen had not rejected him, neither had she accepted him.
She had pleaded for time, she had hesitated, and would have been lost,
had Sempland been as wise as he was brave. Perhaps he wasn't quite
master of himself on account of his experience in war,