In the hearts of the black people of the nation, Lincoln had changed from a man to a god by means of his own pen stroke. But in one way, George reflected, the man had never changed at all. He remembered Executive Mansion aides gossiping that Lincoln often lost his patience and sometimes his good humor and on rare occasions his compassion for the enemy. But it seemed to George that the man had never lost sight of his own North Star. He loved humanity, Southern as well as Northern, with a great heart. But he loved the Union more.
To preserve it, he had sorrowfully led a people to war. He had suffered mental depression and haunted sleep, fought the demons of ineptitude and incompetence and innuendo, hectored and joked, preached and cajoled, dreamed and wept for it. And then he had been chosen as the last sacrifice at the site where its continuity had been assured: the blood altar.
At least Abraham Lincoln had known for five days that his North Star still shone bright and pure, above the cooling embers of fires first kindled in that long-lost spring George remembered vividly, frighteningly, to this hour. The Union stood — profoundly altered but fundamentally unchanged.
George recognized but couldn't fully understand the paradox. It was simply there, mighty, majestic, and mysterious, like the murdered President himself. It was there — Lincoln was there — and would be forever, George suspected.
Closing his eyes, he rested a moment. Then he drew a circle of thought of much smaller diameter and meditated on the changes within that.
Orry dead — and his widow making no secret that she was, at least in the strictest view of Southerners, a Negress. He had heard it first from his brother Billy, but Madeline had candidly discussed it before the Hazards left Mont Royal.
And Charles. Everyone agreed Charles had been burned out by the war. Become a sullen, angry man. Brett, by contrast, was eagerly anticipating motherhood and, amazingly, often sounded more like Virgilia than a Southerner.
Cooper occasionally displayed a new, almost reactionary streak, as if he had turned about and finally accepted the Southern inheritance his father had always wanted to bequeath to him, and he had scorned for such a long time. In Cooper's case, anyway, George could identify the causes of the transformation. Cooper had lost his son, and he was growing older. Age brought a man more conservative thoughts and opinions. As George well knew.
Billy's views about blacks had changed, too, although his plan for his life was one of the few things that hadn't. Saying good-bye to George in South Carolina — he had two more weeks of leave and planned to spend it working for and with the Mains — he had stated his intention to remain with the Army Engineers. Unless, of course, something impeded his advancement, in which case there was always that railroad construction he and George had discussed. Trains were the coming thing. People had a nickname to certify it. The iron horse.
How intimately the process of change accelerated by the war had touched all of them, and the country. How deeply it had affected them and the country. No one was spared, neither those who accepted it nor those who denied it. Witness the pair on whom he had eavesdropped. The hardening of attitudes was in itself a change, in response to change.
Why did so many deny the universal constancy of the process, he wondered. Through some quirk of temperament or upbringing, George had embraced it early, within the framework of the family business. He had been open to innovation and had fought Stanley, who was not. Gradually, his perceptions had widened until he saw the benefit — or at least the inevitability — of change outside the gates of Hazard's as well.
Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn't know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men — sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagara with a teacup.
But he doubted anyone could change people of that stamp They were the curse and burden of a race laboring forward up a mountain in half-darkness. They were — it brought a weary smile — constant as the very change they hated.
Which reminded him of a certain small but important change he wanted to make at Belvedere. Ever since finding the fragment of iron-rich meteorite in the hills above West Point, he had kept it on the library table as a symbol of the power and potency of the metal that had created the Hazard fortune, For many years he had been seduced by iron's wide application in weaponry, and thus by its potential to change the fate of nations, the globe itself.
But in Virginia, he had begun to think that a certain adjustment or balance was required. During the last four years, Americans had fallen on other Americans like ravening animals. The full impact of the blood-letting — the ultimate shock when all the casualties, tangible and otherwise, were at last enumerated — lay in the future. When the shock set in, it would not soon pass, he was convinced. So it was wise to prepare, identify a balancing force.
When they reached Belvedere, he surprised Constance by what he did immediately after he spent a half hour hugging and talking with his son and daughter. He went out through the kitchen and up the hill, bringing back a green sprig of laurel, which he laid beside the piece of star-iron in the library.
"I should like a fresh sprig to be kept there at all times," he said. "Where all of us can see it."
That same night, on the 6:00 p.m. train bound for the transfer point at Baltimore, Brigadier Duncan and Charles sat opposite each other in a first-class car. Charles hardly looked as though he belonged there, smoking cigars and wearing that disreputable rag robe. Duncan insisted they take time on the trip west to obtain a decent suit until he was issued a new uniform.
Several times since Charles's return from the cemetery, Duncan had tried to draw him out on the subject of his vigil, particularly the thoughts and emotions that had led to his decision. But it was impossible for Charles to describe or even be open about the various alternatives that had flowed through his mind during that long night of rain, uncertainty, guilt, despair.
There was the possibility of sailing for Egypt to serve in the khedive's army, as he had heard in a Washington barroom that some Confederate officers were doing. There was the possibility of taking to the hills to continue guerrilla action against the Yankees. There was going home and wasting away in drink and idleness.
There was suicide.
There was also the West, where Duncan was bound. He had always loved the West, and Duncan reiterated the need for cavalrymen out there. Charles was trained for nothing else.
But all of that was peripheral to the central issue he confronted during the vigiclass="underline" Gus's death and his son's life. They were not separate but one, inextricably interlocked.
It was Gus who had shown him the way. At the grave he had remembered their best times together. Remembered her strength, her will. No miraculous transformation had occurred while the rain fell on him in Georgetown and washed against his own flooding tears. He had never hurt so badly as he did then and now, and he knew the uncertainty and pain would persist for a long time. But he had learned, keeping vigil with the guilt and grief undammed at last, one truth above alclass="underline" he still loved Augusta Barclay beyond life itself. So he must love the boy. He must live for the boy as well as for her, because they were one.