Crittenden | Page 9

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 r?le 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 r?le 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 definite purpose would have kept under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom, was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will take possession of an abandoned field.
But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a