Category: Historical Novels
IT is said that a certain old battlefield in Tennessee is haunted in these peaceful times. Often there comes out of the dark silence the sudden wild blare of the bugle, chilling the blood of distant fireside groups. Then the earth throbs with the roll of drums and the measured...
IT is said that a certain old battlefield in Tennessee is haunted in these peaceful times. Often there comes out of the dark silence the sudden wild blare of the bugle, chilling...
2. CHAPTER II.ESTWICKE slept little that night. For long hours he lay gazing at the pallid wintry moonlight as it crept, barred with the shadow of the tiny window-panes, across the floor of h...
3. CHAPTER III.HIS image, however, remained importunately present with the man whom he had characterized as a “hawk.” In the days that ensued, it intruded between Maurice Brennett and many an...
4. CHAPTER IV.TRAVIS was a man incapable of temporizing with lower conditions than those of his ideal, and he was acutely conscious upon arriving at Chattalla that it was not the town it ough...
5. CHAPTER V.THE battle-field, the cannon-shattered house that rose like a monument in its midst, had so impressed Estwicke, that when he was here once more he had a strong sense of familiar...
6. CHAPTER VI.THE days that ensued were very anxious days, but with a stoicism inconsistent enough with the impulsiveness of both father and daughter, they sedulously repressed all manifestat...
7. CHAPTER VII.IT chanced that Maurice Brennett’s varied cotton ventures took him to New Orleans in February. He found the city ablaze with illuminations and wild with excitement, for it was t...
8. CHAPTER VIII.IN the darkness of the night the snow slipped down, and the morning broke on an unfamiliar world. Chattalla was idealized like a town in a dream. Pavements, smooth and unblemish...
9. CHAPTER IX.EVEN bores have their _raison d’être_. Maurice Brennett had long speculated on the purpose of Colonel Percy’s creation. One sunshiny afternoon in New Orleans he seemed to have s...
10. CHAPTER X.THE pulses of life throbbed languidly in Chattalla. Sometimes there was hardly a creature to be seen upon the Square--and then again the noontide sunshine would rest only on the...
11. CHAPTER XI.THE lawyer whom Miss St. Pierre was destined to consult had no prevision of his coming client. Such prevision might have induced some exhilaration of spirit, for after court was...
12. CHAPTER XII.THE sky looked down so tenderly, so tenderly. And the haunted thickets were all a-bloom. Gentle grasses had crept to the verge of the open, empty graves, and trailing through th...
13. CHAPTER XIII.THERE was a golden moon in the purple dusk, and the world was sweet one night. Delicate odors drifted along the imperceptible current of the air from the lilies that grew in the...
14. CHAPTER XIV.This was a wonderful day; the sky had withdrawn itself to an infinite altitude; a few fleecy white clouds raced with their shadows across the wide expanse of the battle-field; t...
15. CHAPTER XV.IT was fine “growing weather” for the cotton, and in these hot days the Midas-touch of the sun had turned the wheat-fields to gold. From their midst the verdure-crowned earthwor...
16. CHAPTER XVI.THERE was a flag flying over Chattalla; the “old flag,” thus called in contradistinction to another, that had once flashed across the clouds here and was gone like a meteor. The...
17. CHAPTER XVII.IN summer-time, always, Marcia and nature together did much to soften the traces of that terrible event in the history of the old house. Flowering vines curtained such of its wi...
18. CHAPTER XVIII.GRAFFY Beale had skulked back from the jail to his old burrow in the huge traverse. His sense of liberty expressed itself only in the fact that he was free to lie here in the de...
19. CHAPTER XIX.THE great sun that went down over the vast sweeps of the battle-field, and slipped into the dawning day lying in wait beyond the wide horizon, had a potent solemnity and majesti...
20. CHAPTER XX.A fervid Fourth-of-July sun was blazing in the sky, and Chattalla responded, for the first time since the war, with a celebration of the day. That favorite rural diversion, a ba...
21. CHAPTER XXI.Miss St. Pierre’s long-lost letter still lay, among the invitations to parties and weddings and other delicate and flimsy missives, in the darkness of his father’s desk in Marst...
22. CHAPTER XXII.MAURICE Brennett confided little to chance. He had found it a doubtful auxiliary. One lowering afternoon, however, it came to his aid in an unexpected emergency. It had moved hi...
23. CHAPTER XXIII.THE storm was over by the time he reached Chattalla. The wind and the breaking clouds were rioting through the deep blue sky. The moon had risen; wherever its rays fell they see...
24. CHAPTER XXIV.Only five minutes ago he had been assuring his fears of the caution of his intention. And yet he had wrested from Miss St. Pierre no promise of immunity. He had pulled down no t...