battle. Jasmine and rose, unstained by the sulphur of gunpowder,
twined around its ruined columns and half hid the recessed windows;
the careless flower garden was still in its unkempt and unplucked
luxuriance; the courtyard before the stables alone showed marks of the
late military occupancy, and was pulverized by the uneasy horse-hoofs of
the waiting staff. But the mingled impress of barbaric prodigality with
patriarchal simplicity was still there in the domestic arrangements of
a race who lived on half equal familiarity with strangers and their own
servants.
The negro servants still remained, with a certain cat-like fidelity
to the place, and adapted themselves to the Northern invaders with
a childlike enjoyment of the novelty of change. Brant, nevertheless,
looked them over with an experienced eye, and satisfied himself of their
trustworthiness; there was the usual number of "boys," gray-haired and
grizzled in body service, and the "mammys" and "aunties" of the kitchen.
There were two or three rooms in the wing which still contained private
articles, pictures and souvenirs of the family, and a "young lady's"
boudoir, which Brant, with characteristic delicacy, kept carefully
isolated and intact from his military household, and accessible only to
the family servants. The room he had selected for himself was nearest
it,--a small, plainly furnished apartment, with an almost conventual
simplicity in its cold, white walls and draperies, and the narrow,
nun-like bed. It struck him that it might have belonged to some prim
elder daughter or maiden aunt, who had acted as housekeeper, as it
commanded the wing and servants' offices, with easy access to the
central hall.
There followed a week of inactivity in which Brant felt a singular
resemblance in this Southern mansion to the old casa at Robles. The
afternoon shadows of the deep verandas recalled the old monastic gloom
of the Spanish house, which even the presence of a lounging officer or
waiting orderly could not entirely dissipate, and the scent of the rose
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