The Colonels Dream | Page 6

at noon.
It was an auspicious moment for visiting the town. It is true that the
grass grew in the street here and there, but the sidewalks were separated
from the roadway by rows of oaks and elms and china-trees in early
leaf. The travellers had left New York in the midst of a snowstorm, but
here the scent of lilac and of jonquil, the song of birds, the breath of
spring, were all about them. The occasional stretches of brick sidewalk
under their green canopy looked cool and inviting; for while the chill of
winter had fled and the sultry heat of summer was not yet at hand, the
railroad coach had been close and dusty, and the noonday sun gave
some slight foretaste of his coming reign.
The colonel looked about him eagerly. It was all so like, and yet so
different--shrunken somewhat, and faded, but yet, like a woman one
loves, carried into old age something of the charm of youth. The old
town, whose ripeness was almost decay, whose quietness was scarcely
distinguishable from lethargy, had been the home of his youth, and he
saw it, strange to say, less with the eyes of the lad of sixteen who had
gone to the war, than with those of the little boy to whom it had been,
in his tenderest years, the great wide world, the only world he knew in
the years when, with his black boy Peter, whom his father had given to

him as a personal attendant, he had gone forth to field and garden,
stream and forest, in search of childish adventure. Yonder was the old
academy, where he had attended school. The yellow brick of its walls
had scaled away in places, leaving the surface mottled with pale
splotches; the shingled roof was badly dilapidated, and overgrown here
and there with dark green moss. The cedar trees in the yard were in
need of pruning, and seemed, from their rusty trunks and scant leafage,
to have shared in the general decay. As they drove down the street,
cows were grazing in the vacant lot between the bank, which had been
built by the colonel's grandfather, and the old red brick building,
formerly a store, but now occupied, as could be seen by the row of
boxes visible through the open door, by the post-office.
The little boy, an unusually handsome lad of five or six, with blue eyes
and fair hair, dressed in knickerbockers and a sailor cap, was also
keenly interested in the surroundings. It was Saturday, and the little
two-wheeled carts, drawn by a steer or a mule; the pigs sleeping in the
shadow of the old wooden market-house; the lean and sallow
pinelanders and listless negroes dozing on the curbstone, were all
objects of novel interest to the boy, as was manifest by the light in his
eager eyes and an occasional exclamation, which in a clear childish
treble, came from his perfectly chiselled lips. Only a glance was needed
to see that the child, though still somewhat pale and delicate from his
recent illness, had inherited the characteristics attributed to good blood.
Features, expression, bearing, were marked by the signs of race; but a
closer scrutiny was required to discover, in the blue-eyed,
golden-haired lad, any close resemblance to the shrewd, dark man of
affairs who sat beside him, and to whom this little boy was, for the time
being, the sole object in life.
But for the child the colonel was alone in the world. Many years before,
when himself only a boy, he had served in the Southern army, in a
regiment which had fought with such desperate valour that the honour
of the colonelcy had come to him at nineteen, as the sole survivor of
the group of young men who had officered the regiment. His father
died during the last year of the Civil War, having lived long enough to
see the conflict work ruin to his fortunes. The son had been offered

employment in New York by a relative who had sympathised with the
South in her struggle; and he had gone away from Clarendon. The old
family "mansion"--it was not a very imposing structure, except by
comparison with even less pretentious houses--had been sold upon
foreclosure, and bought by an ambitious mulatto, who only a few years
before had himself been an object of barter and sale. Entering his
uncle's office as a clerk, and following his advice, reinforced by a sense
of the fitness of things, the youthful colonel had dropped his military
title and become plain Mr. French. Putting the past behind him, except
as a fading memory, he had thrown himself eagerly into the current of
affairs. Fortune favoured one both capable and energetic. In time he
won a partnership in