Crittenden | Page 9

other war--the tragedy upon
which a bloody curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The
mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son

spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to
himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.
There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the
two Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the
garden.
And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant
Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his
father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old
Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion
that morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else
was left him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they
were alive, would have him do?
And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart,
faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had
left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the
moonlight and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white
tomb under which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle,
slept side by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their
footsteps, since the one part that he was fitted to play was the rôle they
and their ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American
among them, failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail
for Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the
Civil War, Crittenden would have played that rôle worthily and without
question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright
was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood,
he had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was
nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each
year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in
the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the
particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the realization
that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever gone. And
all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its name
Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a
white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its

slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still clung
rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and patriarchal--out there
Crittenden found himself one day alone. His friends--even the boy, his
brother--had caught the modern trend of things quicker than he, and
most of them had gone to work--some to law, some as clerks, railroad
men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining and speculating in the
State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had studied law--his type of
Southerner always studies law--and he tried the practice of it. He had
too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his own brilliant record as
a college orator, and he never got over the humiliation of losing his first
case, being handled like putty by a small, black-eyed youth of his own
age, who had come from nowhere and had passed up through a
philanthropical old judge's office to the dignity, by and by, of a license
of his own. Losing the suit, through some absurd little technical
mistake, Crittenden not only declined a fee, but paid the judgment
against his client out of his own pocket and went home with a wound to
his foolish, sensitive pride for which there was no quick cure. A little
later, he went to the mountains, when those wonderful hills first began
to give up their wealth to the world; but the pace was too swift,
competition was too undignified and greedy, and business was won on
too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life, which helped him
more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home. Politics he had
not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try. He made a
brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept in as a new
factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the wretched little
lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now, and the
weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The little touch
of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him at birth,
and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the deterioration that
comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong vent, from strong
passions that a