380
PARTISAN REVIEW
older than Cass, who lifted the family from the log cabin. Gilbert,
who had run away from home when a boy ·and gone West to Mis–
sllisippi, was well on-the way to being "a cotton-snob" by the time
he was twenty-seven or eight, that is, by 1850. The penniless and no
doubt hungry boy walking barefoot onto the black soil of Mississippi
was to become, ten or twelve years later, the master sitting the spirited
roan stallion (its name was Powhatan-that from the journal) in
front of the white veranda. How did Gilbert make his first dollar?
Did he cut the throat of a traveller in the cane-brake? Did he black
boots at an inn? It is not recorded. But he made his fortune, and
sat on the white veranda and voted Whig. After the war when the
white veranda was a pile of ashes and the fortune was gone, it was
not surprising that Gilbert, who had made one fortune with
his
bare
hands, out of the very air, could now, with all his experience a.'ld
cunning and hardness (the hardness harder now for the four years
of riding and short rations and disappointment), snatch another one,
much greater than the first.
If
in later years he ever remembered his
brother Cass and took out the last letter, the one dictated in the hos–
pital in Atlanta, he must have mused over it with
a
tolerant irony.
For it said: "Remember me, but without grief.
If
one of us is lucky,
it is
I.
I shall have rest and I hope in the mercy of the Everlasting
and in His blessed election. But you, my dear brother, are condemned
to eat bread in bitterness and build on the place where the charred
embers and ashes are and to make bricks without straw and to suffer
in the ruin and guilt of our dear land and in the common guilt of
man. In the next bed to me there is a young man from Ohio. He is
dying. His moans and curses and prayers are not different from any
others to be heard in this tabernacle of pain. He marched hither in
his guilt as I in mine. And in the guilt of his land. May a common
Salvation lift us both from the dust. And dear brother, I pray God
to give you strength for what is to come." Gilbert must have smiled,
looking back, for he had eaten little bread in bitterness. He had had
his
own kind of strength. By 1870 he was again well off. By 1875
he was rich. By 1880 he had a fortune, was living in New York, was
a name, a thick, burly man, slow of movement, with a head like a
block of bare granite. He had lived out of one world into another.
Perhaps he was even more at home in the new than in the old. Or
perhaps the Gilbert Masterns are always at home in any world.
As
the Cass Masterns are never at home in any world.
But to return: Jack Burden came into possession of the papers
from the grandson of Gilbert Mastern. When the time came for
hini
