Just as good blood, _au fond_, ran in Harry Lacy's veins as in Rhett Sempland's, but Lacy, following in the footsteps of his ancestors, had mixed his with the water that is not water because it is fire.
He "crooked the pregnant hinges" of the elbow without cessation, many a time and oft, and all the vices--as they usually do--followed _en train_. One of the oldest names in the Carolinas had been dragged in the dust by this latest and most degenerate scion thereof. Nay, in that dust Lacy had wallowed--shameless, persistent, beast-like.
To Lacy, therefore, the Civil War came as a godsend, as it had to many another man in like circumstances, for it afforded another and more congenial outlet for the wild passion beating out from his heart. The war sang to him of arms and men--ay, as war has sung since Troia's day, of women, too.
He did not give over the habits of a lifetime, which, though short, had been hard, but he leavened them, temporarily obliterated them even, by splendid feats of arms. Fortune was kind to him. Opportunity smiled upon him. Was it running the blockade off Charleston, or passing through the enemy's lines with despatches in Virginia, or heading a desperate attack on Little Round Top in Pennsylvania, he always won the plaudits of men, often the love of women. And in it all he seemed to bear a charmed life.
When the people saw him intoxicated on the streets of Charleston that winter of '63 they remembered that he was a hero. When some of his more flagrant transgressions came to light, they recalled some splendid feat of arms, and condoned what before they had censured.
He happened to be in Charleston because he had been shot to pieces at Gettysburg and had been sent down there to die. But die he would not, at least not then. Ordinarily he would not have cared much about living, for he realized that, when the war was over, he would speedily sink back to that level to which he habitually descended when there was nothing to engage his energies; but his acquaintance with Miss Fanny Glen had altered him.
Lacy met her in the hospital and there he loved her. Rhett Sempland met her in a hospital, also. Poor Sempland had been captured in an obscure skirmish late in 1861. Through some hitch in the matter he had been held prisoner in the North until the close of 1863, when he had been exchanged and, wretchedly ill, he had come back to Charleston, like Lacy, to die.