On our return to the veranda, Camille and I, we found on its front the house's entire company except only the children of the family. Mrs. Sessions, Estelle and Cécile formed one group, Squire Sessions and Charlotte Oliver made a pair, and Ferry and Miss Harper another. Our posies created a lively demonstration; Camille yielded them to Estelle, and Estelle took them into the house to arrange them in water. Gholson went with her; it was painful to see her zest for his society.
Miss Harper "knocked me down," as we boys used to say, to Charlotte
Oliver; "Charlotte, my dear, you already know Mr. Smith, I believe?"
I had expected to see again, and to feel, as well, the starry charms of Coralie Rothvelt; but what I confronted was far different. The charms were here, unquenched by this stare of daylight, but from them shone a lustre of womanliness wholly new. It seemed to grow on even when a tricksy gleam shot through it as she replied, "Yes, our acquaintance dates from Gallatin."
With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our acquai'—hh—Gallatin—hh—" But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no, it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt. At the same her kind eyes sweetly granted me a stripling's acquittal—oh! why did it have to be a stripling's?
Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said—at the same time saying many other things but saying this always plainest—"I see both out and in; I know myself—and thee." Never but in one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.
"Don't you love to see Charlotte and him look at each other in that steady way when they're talking together?" Camille asked me later. But rather coldly I inquired why I should; I felt acutely enough without admitting it to Camille, that Charlotte and Ferry were meeting on ground far above me; and when Gholson, in his turn, called to my notice, in Charlotte's case, this unique gaze, and contrasted it with her beautiful yet strangely childish mouth, I asked a second time why she was here, anyhow.
"She's here," murmured Gholson, "because she has to live! To live she must have means, Smith, and to have means she must either get them herself or she must—" and again he poised his hand horizontally across his mouth and whispered—"live with her hus'—"
I jerked my head away—"Yes, yes." Scott Gholson was the only one of us who could give that wretch that title. "Gholson," I said, for I kept him plied with questions to prevent his questioning me, "how did that man ever get her?"
The rest of the company were going into the house; he glanced furtively after them and grabbed my arm; you would have thought he was about to lay bare the whole tragedy in five words; "Smith,—nobody knows!"
"Do you believe she has told Ned Ferry anything?"
"Never! About herself? no, sir!" He bent and whispered: "She despises him; she keeps in with him, but it's to get the news, that's all; that's positively all." On our way to the stable to saddle up—for we were all going to church—he told me what he knew of her story. I had heard it all and more, but I listened with unfeigned interest, for he recited it with flashes of heat and rancor that betrayed a cruel infatuation eating into his very bone and brain, the guilt of which was only intensified by the sour legality of his moral sense.
The church we went to was in Franklin, but the preacher was a man of note, a Vicksburg refugee. On the way back Gholson and I rode for a time near enough to Squire Sessions and Ned Ferry to know the sermon was being discussed by them, and something they said gave my companion occasion to murmur to me in a tone of eager censure that Ned Ferry's morals were better than his religion.
I said I wished mine were.
"Ah, Smith, be not deceived! Whenever you see a man bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit while he neglects the regularly appointed means of grace, you know there's something wrong, don't you? He went to church this morning—of course; but how often does he go? What's wrong with our dear friend—I don't like to say it, for I admire him so; I don't like to say it, and I never have said it, but, Smith,—Ned Ferry's a romanticist. We are relig'—what?"
"O—oh, nothing!"
At one point our way sloped down to a ramshackle wooden bridge that spanned a narrow bit of running water at the edge of a wood. Beyond it the road led out between two fields whose high worm-fences made it a broad lane. The farther limit of this sea of sunlight was the grove that hid the Sessions house on the left; on the right it was the woods-pasture in which lay concealed a lily-pond. As Gholson and I crossed the bridge we came upon a most enlivening view of our own procession out in the noonday blaze before us; the Sessions buggy; then Charlotte' little wagon; next the Sessions family carriage full of youngsters; and lastly, on their horses, Squire Sessions—tall, fleshy, clean-shaven, silver-haired—and Ned Ferry. Mrs. Sessions and Miss Harper, in the buggy, were just going by a big white gate in the right-hand fence, through which a private way led eastward to the lily-pond. A happy sight they were, the children in the rear vehicle waving handkerchiefs back at us, and nothing in the scene made the faintest confession that my pet song, which I was again humming, was pat to the hour:
"To the lairds o' Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the sun shall go down there are heads to be broke."
"Gholson, if it isn't Ned Ferry's religion that's worrying you just now about him, what is it?"
My companion looked at me as if what he must say was too large for his throat. He made a gesture of lament toward Ferry and broke out, "O—oh Smith,"—nearly all Gholson's oh's were groans—"why is he here? The scout is 'the eyes of the army'! a man whose perpetual vigilance at the very foremost front—"
"Why, what do you mean? You know we're here to rejoin the company as it comes down from Union Church to camp here to-night. That's what we're here for."
"Yes,—yes,—but, oh, don't you see, Smith? For you, yourself, that's all right; you've got to stay with him, and I'm glad you have. But he—oh why did he not go on hours ago, to meet them?"
"Why should he? Isn't it good to leave one's lieutenant sometimes in command; isn't it bad not to?"
Gholson's eyes turned green. "Does Ned Ferry give that as his reason?"
"I haven't asked his reason; I've asked you a question."
"Well, I'll answer it. Do you think Jewett has run back into his own lines?"
"Of course I do, and Ned Ferry does; don't you?"
"No! Smith, there ain't a braver man in Grant's army than that one right now a-straddle of your horse. Why, just the way he got your horse night before—"
"Oh, hang him and the horse! you've told me that three times; what of it?"
"Smith, he's out here to make a new record for himself, at whatever cost!"
"And do you imagine Ned Ferry hasn't thought of that?"
"Ah-h, there are times when a man hasn't got his thinking powers; you ought to know that, Smith,—"
"Mr. Gholson, what do you mean by that?"
"Oh! I certainly didn't mean anything against you, Smith. Why is your manner so strange to me to-day? Oh, Smith, if you knew what—if I could speak to you in sacred confidence—I—I wouldn't injure Ned Ferry in your eyes, nor in anybody's; I only tell you what I do tell so you may help me to help him. But he's staying here, Smith, and keeping you here, to be near one whose name—without her a-dreaming of it—is already coupled with—why,—why, what made you start that a-way again, Smith?"
"Nothing; I didn't start. 'Coupled with somebody's name,' you say. With whose? Go on."
"With his, Smith, and most injuriously. He's here to tempt her to forget she's not—" He faltered.
"Free?" said I, and he nodded with tragic solemnity.
"You know who I mean, of course?"
"Certainly; you mean Mrs. Sessions."
He shook his head bitterly. "Oh, well, then, of course I know. How am I to help you to help him; help him to do what?"
"O—oh! to tear himself away from her, Smith. I want you to appeal to him. He's taken a great shine to you. You can appeal to his feeling for romance—poetry—whatever he calls his hell-fired—I mean his unfortunate impiety. You know how, and I don't. And there you reach the foundations of his character, as far as it's got any; there's his conscience if it's anywhere!"
I find myself giving but a faint impression of the spirit in which Gholson spoke; it went away beyond a mere backbiting mood and became a temper so vindictive and so venomously purposeful that I was startled; his condition seemed so fearfully like that of the old paralytic when he whined "That's not our way."
"Smith," my companion went on, "we ought to protect Ned Ferry from himself!" The words came through his clenched teeth. "And even more we ought to protect her. Who's to do it if we don't? Smith, I believe Providence has been a-preparing you to do this, all through these last three nights and days!"
He looked at me for an answer until I became frightened. Was my late folly known to this crawling maligner after all? A sweet-scented preparation I've had, thought I, but aloud I said only, "If Ned Ferry clears out, I suppose we must clear out, too."
"Why, eh,—I—I don't know that my movements need have anything to do with his. Yours, of course,—"
"Yes," I interrupted, beginning to boil.
"I know," he said, "that comes hard; you'll have to tear yourself away—"
He stared at me and hushed. A panic was surging through me; must I be brought to book by such as he? "Mr. Gholson," I cried, all scorn without, all terror within; "Mr. Gholson, I—Mr. Gholson, sir!—" and set my jaws and heaved for breath.
"Why, Smith,—" He extended a soothing hand.
"No explanation, sir, if you please! I can get away from here without tearing myself, which is more than you can boast. Any fool can see why you are here. Stop, I take that back, sir! I don't play tit-for-tat with my tongue."
Gholson turned red on the brow and ashen about the lips. "I don't call that tit-for-tat, Mr. Smith. I remind you of an innocent attachment for a young girl; you accuse me of harboring a guilty passion for—" All at once he ceased with open lips, and then said as he drew a long breath of relief, "Smith, I beg your pardon! We've each misunderstood the other; I see, now, who you meant; you meant Miss Estelle Harper!"
"Whom else could I mean?" Disdain was in my voice, but he ought to have seen the falsehood in my eye, for I could feel it there.
"Of course!" he said; "of course! But, Smith, my mind was so full—just for the moment, you know,—of her we were speaking of in connection with Ned Ferry—Do you know? she's so unprotected and tagged after and talked about that it seems to me sometimes, in this nervous condition of mine, that if I could catch the entire gang of her pursuers in one hole I'd—I'd end 'em like so many rats. That sort of feeling is mere impulse, of course," he went on, "and only shows how near I am to that nervous breakdown. Yes, the Harper ladies are mighty lovely and hard enough to leave, but that's all I meant to you, and I'm sorry I touched your feelings. I'm tchagrined. Anyhow, all this is between us, you know. I wouldn't ever have confessed such feelings as I did just now except to a friend who knows as well as you do that if I ever should do a man a mortal injury I wouldn't do it in a spirit of resentment. You know that, don't you? No, that's not my way—Why, Smith, what gives you those starts? That's the third time you've done that this morning."
I said that entering the cool shade of the Sessions grove after the blazing heat of that long lane gave any one the right to a little shudder, and as we turned toward the house Gholson murmured "If you say you'll speak to Ned as I've asked you, I'll sort o' toll Squire Sessions off with me so's to give you the chance. It's for his own sake, you know, and you're the only one can do it."
I knew Ned Ferry was having that inner strife with which we ought always to credit even Gholson's sort, and I had a loving ambition to help him "take the upper fork." So doing, I might help Charlotte Oliver fulfil the same principle, win the same victory. When, therefore, Gholson put the question to me squarely, Would I speak to Ferry? I consented, and as the four of us, horsemen, left our beasts in the stable munching corn, Gholson began a surprisingly animated talk with our host, and Ferry, with a quizzical smile, said to me "Talk with you?—shall be happy to; we'll just make a slight détour on this side the grove and woods-pasture, eh?"
He meant the north side, opposite that one by which we had come from church. Here the landscape was much the same as there; wide fields on each side the fenced highway that still ran north and south, and woods for the sky-line everywhere. We chose an easy footpath along the northern fence of the grove, crossed the highway, and passed on a few steps alongside the woods-pasture fence. We talked as we went, he giving the kindest heed to my every word though I could see that, like any good soldier, he was scanning all the ground for its fighting values, and, not to be outdone, I, myself, pointed out, a short way up the public road, a fence-gap on the left, made by our camping soldiers two nights before. It was at another such gap, in the woods-pasture fence, that we turned back by a path through it which led into the wood and so again toward the highway and the house-grove. The evening General Austin sent me to Wiggins it was at this gap that I saw old Dismukes sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing poker; and here, now, I summoned the desperation to speak directly to my point.
I had already tried hard to get something said, but had found myself at every turn entangled in generalities. Now, stammering and gagging I remarked that our experiences of the morning, both in church and out, had in some way combined with an earlier word of his own to me, and given me a valuable thought. "You remember, when I wanted to shoot that Yankee off my horse?"
"Yes; and I said—what?"
"You said 'This isn't your private war.' Lieutenant, I hope those words may last in my memory forever and come to me in every moral situation in which I may find myself."
"Yes? Well, I think that's good."
"It seems to me, Lieutenant Ferry, that in every problem of moral conduct we confront we really hold in trust an interest of all mankind. To solve that problem bravely and faithfully is to make life just so much easier for everybody; and to fail to do so is to make it just so much harder to solve by whoever has next to face it." Whurroo! my blood was up now, let him look to himself!
"Yes?" said Ferry, picking at the underbrush as we sauntered, and for some time he said no more. Then he asked, "You want me to apply that to myself, in—in the present case?" and to my tender amazement, while his eyes seemed to count his slackening steps, he laid his arm across my shoulders.
An hour of avowal could not have told me more; could not have filled me half so full of sympathy, admiration and love, as did that one slight motion. It befitted the day, a day outwardly so quiescent, yet in which so much was going on. A realization of this quiet activity kept us silent until we had come through the woods-pasture to its southern border, and so through the big white field-gate into the public road; now we turned up toward the grove-gate, and here I spoke again. "Do you still think we ought to wait here for the command?"
That from a private soldier to his captain! Yet all my leader answered was "You think there's cause to change our mind?"
"I don't know, Lieutenant; do you think Jewett has run back into his own lines?"
"Yes, I think so; and you?"
"Why, eh,—Lieutenant, I don't believe there's a braver man in Grant's army than that one a-straddle of my horse to-day! Why, just the way he got him, night before last,—you've heard that, haven't you?"
"Yes, the General told me. And so you think—"
"Lieutenant, I can't help believing he's out here to make a new record for himself, at whatever cost!"
We went on some steps in silence and entered the gate of the house-grove; and just as Ferry would have replied we discovered before us in the mottled shade of the driveway, with her arm on Cécile's shoulders as his lay on mine, and with her eyes counting her slackening steps, Charlotte Oliver. They must have espied us already out in the highway, for they also were turned toward the house, and as we neared them Charlotte faced round with a cheery absence of surprise and said "Mr. Smith, don't we owe each other a better acquaintance? Suppose we settle up."
It seemed quite as undeniable, as we stood there, that Ned Ferry owed Cécile a better acquaintance. Every new hour enhanced her graces, and were I, here, less engrossed with her companion, I could pitch the praises of Cécile upon almost as high and brilliant a key—there may be room for that yet. Ferry moved on at her side. Charlotte stayed a moment to laugh at a squirrel, and then turned to walk, saying with eyes on the earth—
"If I tell you something, will you never tell?"
I looked down too. "Suppose I should feel sure it ought to be told."
"If you wait till you do you may tell it; that will suit me well enough."
"I will always suit you the best I can."
"I don't know why you should," she said.
"You risked your life to save mine; and you risked it when I did not deserve so much as your respect."
"Oh!—we must never talk about that again, Richard; you saw me in the evilest guise I ever wore, and that is saying much."
"But," I responded, "you put it on for a better reason than you could tell me then or can tell me now, though now I know your story."
"Please don't forget," she murmured, "that you know too much." "No, no! I don't know half enough; I know only what Miss Camilla and—and—Gholson could tell me," was my tricky reply, and I tried to look straight into her eyes, but they took that faint introspective contraction of which I have spoken, and gazed through me like sunlight through glass. Then again she bent her glance upon her steps, saying—
"Ah, Richard, you have found out all you could, and I am glad of it, except of what I, myself, have had to betray to you; for that was more than one would want to tell her twin brother. But I had to create you my scout, and I had only two or three hours for my whole work of creation."
"Well, you completed it." We went on some steps, and then she said—
"You tell me I risked my life to save yours; I risked more than life, and I risked it for more than to save yours. Yet I did not save your life; you saved it, yourself, and—" here her low tone thrilled like a harp-string—"you risked it—frightfully—at that bridge—merely to save the promise you made me that you need not have made at all—oh, you needn't shake your head; I know."
"Ah, how you gild my base metal!"
"No, no, I have the story exactly, and from one who has no mind to praise you."
"From Gholson?"
"Gholson! no! I have it from Lucius Oliver, who had it from his son. He told me carefully, quietly and entirely, in pure spleen, so that I might know that they know—think they know, that is,—why you and—he in front of us yonder—would not shoot his son when—"
"When as soldiers it was our simple du'—"
"Yes; and also that I may understand that he—the son—has sworn by that right hand you mutilated that the 'pair of you' shall die before he does."
"I ought not to have shown him that envelope addressed to you."
"Ah, but if it saved your life!"
"And this is what you don't want me to tell? Ah, I see; for me to know it is enough; I can put it to him as a theory. I can say Oliver is not a man to be put upon the defensive, and that he is more than likely to be hunting 'the pair of us'—" All at once I thought of something.
"What made you give that sudden start?" she asked as we faced about in the driveway to make our walk a moment longer; "that's a bad habit you've got; why do you do it?"
I fancied the thrilling freshness of the question I was about to put would be explanation enough. "Do you believe Jewett has gone back into his own lines?"
"I don't know; hasn't he?"
"Oh, I don't know, either, but—well, I don't believe there's a braver man in Grant's army than that one a-straddle of my horse to-day! Why, just the way he got him, night before last,—you've heard that, have you not?"
"Yes, I've heard it; he is a very daring man; what of it?"
"Why, I can't help thinking he's out here to make a new record for himself, at whatever cost!"
A note of distress hung on my hearer's stifled voice; her head went lower and she laid her fingers pensively to her lips. "It would be like him," I heard her murmur, and when I asked if she meant Jewett she shook her head.
"No," I said, "you mean it would be like Oliver to join him," and with that the sudden start was hers. "He wouldn't have to touch Ned Ferry or me," I went on, heartlessly, "nor to come near us, to make us rue the hour we let ourselves forget this wasn't our private war."
She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll—I'll dance at your wedding; yours and—somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith.
A light footfall sounded behind us, and Camille gave both her hands to my companion. "I was in the hall," she said, "telling Cécile she was like a white star that had come out by day, when I saw you here looking like a great red one; and you're still more like a red, red rose, and I've come to get some of your fragrance."
"I'd exchange for yours any day, and thank you, dear," responded
Charlotte; "you're a bunch of sweet-peas. Isn't she, Mr. Smith?"
The bunch beamed an ecstatic bliss. What was the explanation; had her father arrived, or—or somebody else? The question went through me like an arrow. Was the cause of this heavenly radiance somebody else?—that was the barb; or was it I?—that was the soothing feather.
In gratitude for Charlotte's word she sank backward in a long obeisance. "May it please your ladyship, dinner is served. Oh, Mr. Smith, I've been listening to Mr. Gholson talking with aunt Martha and Estelle; I don't wonder you and he are friends; I think his ideas of religion are perfectly beautiful!"
At our two-o'clock dinner I found that our company had been reinforced.
On one side of Camille sat I; but on the other side sat "Harry."
Great news the aide-de-camp brought us; from Lee, from Longstreet, Bragg and Johnston. Johnston was about to fall upon Grant's rear. Across the Mississippi Dick Taylor was expected this very day to deal the same adversary a crippling blow, and it was partly to mask this movement that we had made our feint upon the Federals near Natchez. Now these had fallen back, and our force had cunningly slipped away southward. Only General Austin and his staff had not gone when Lieutenant Helm left the front, and they were about to go.
Toward the end of the meal Mrs. Sessions, in her amiable plantation drawl, said she hoped the bearer of so much good tidings had not come to take away Lieutenant Ferry; and when Harry, flushing, asked what had given her such a thought, the simple soul replied that Mr. Gholson had told her he "suspicioned as much."
At once there arose the prettiest clamor all round the board, in which Charlotte and Cécile joined for the obvious purpose of making confusion. Gholson turned yellow and spoke things nobody heard, and Ferry tried to drown Harry's loud declarations that the word he had brought to Ferry was for him to stay, and that he had found him saddling up to go in search of his company. "Isn't that so, Ned?—Now,—now,—isn't that so?"
We left the table all laughing but Gholson. He tried to say something to Harry, which the latter waved away with mock gaiety until on the side veranda we got beyond view of the ladies, when the aide-de-camp reddened angrily and turned his back. As the two lieutenants were lighting cigarettes together, Harry, thinking Gholson had left us, blurted out, "Oh, that's all very well for you to say, Ned, but, damn him, he's not the sort of man that has the right to 'suspicion' me of anything; slang-whanging, backbiting sneak, I know what he's here for."
On that the blood surged to Ferry's brow, but he set his mouth firmly, locked arms with the speaker and led him down the veranda. Gholson took on an uglier pallor than before and went back into the house. I followed him. He moved slowly up the two flights of hall stairs and into a room close under the roof, called the "soldiers' room". It had three double beds, one of them ours. Without a fault in the dreary rhythm of his motions he went to the bedpost where hung his revolver, and turning to me buckled the weapon at his waist with hands that kept the same unbroken measure though they trembled and were as pallid as his face. In the same slow beat he shook his head.
"Smith, I rejoice! O—oh! I rejoice and am glad when I'm reviled and persecuted by the hounds of hell, and spoken evil against falsely for my religion's sake."
"Now, Gholson, that's nonsense!"
"O—oh! that's what it's for! that's what he meant by 'slang-whanging.' That's what it's for from first to last, no matter what it's for in between; and I know what it's for in between, too, and Ned Ferry knows. Did you see Ned Ferry take him under his protection? O—oh! they're two of one hell-scorched kind!" My companion stood gripping the bedpost and fumbling at his holster. I sank to the bed, facing him, expecting his rage to burn itself out in words, but when he began again his teeth were clenched. "You heard him tell Ned Ferry he knows why I'm here. It's true! he does know! he knows I'm here to protect a certain person from him and—"
"From whom? from Harry Helm? Oh, Gholson, that's too fantastical!"
"From him and the likes of him! Not that he loves her; that's the difference between them two cotton-mouth moccasins; Ned Ferry, hell grind him! does—or thinks he does; that other whelp don't, and knows he don't; he's only enam'—"
"HUSH!" He ceased. "I swear, Scott Gholson, you must choose your words better when you allude—Lieutenant Helm is the last man in the brigade to be under my protection, but—oh, you're crazy, man, and blind besides. Harry Helm is not in love, but he thinks he is, though with quite another person!"
"O—oh! whether he loves or not, or whoever he loves, I know who he hates; he hates me and my religion; our religion, Smith, mine and yours; because it's put me between him and her. What was that the preacher said this morning? 'The carnal mind, being enmity against God, is enmity against them that serve God.' O—oh, I accept his enmity! it proves my religion isn't vain! I'm glad to get it!"
All this from his oscillating head, through his set teeth, in one malign monotone. As he quoted the preacher he mechanically drew his revolver. There was no bravado in this; he might lie, but he did not know how to sham; did not know, now, that his face was drawn with pain. Holding the weapon in one hand, under his absent gaze he turned it from side to side on the palm of the other. I put out my hand for it, but he dropped it into the holster and tried to return my smile.
"Do you propose to call him out?" I asked. "You can't call out an officer; you'll be sent to the water-batteries at Mobile."
"I've thought of all that," he droned.
"Then why do you put that thing on?"
"Why do I put it on? Why, I—you know what I told you about that
Yankee—"
"Gholson," I exclaimed, for I saw that murder, even double murder, was hatching in his heart, with Charlotte Oliver for its cause, and looked hard into his evil eyes until they overmatched mine; whereupon I made as if suddenly convinced. "You're right!" I turned, whipped on my own belt with its two "persuaders," and blandly smoothing my ribs, added "Now! here are two ready, Yankees or no Yankees."
I never saw a face so unconsciously marked with misery as Gholson's was when we started downstairs. I stopped him on a landing. "Understand, you and I are friends,—hmm? I think Lieutenant Helm owes you an apology, and if you'll keep away from him I'll try to bring it to you."
The reply began with a vindictive gleam. "You needn't; I ain't got any more use for it than for him. I never apologized to a man in my life, Smith, nor I never accepted an apology from one; that's not my way."
Near the bottom of the second flight we met Charlotte, who, to make bad worse, would have passed with no more than a smile, but the look of Gholson startled her and she noticed our arms. With an arresting eye I offered a sprightly comment on the heat of the day, and while she was replying with the same gaiety I whispered "Take him with you."
How nimbly her mind moved! "Oh Mr. Gholson!" she said, and laughed to gain an instant for invention.
"Mr. Gholson, can you tell me the first line of the last hymn we sang this morning?" Her beam was irresistible, and they went to the large parlor. I turned into the smaller one, opposite, where Squire Sessions started from a stolen doze and, having heard of my feeling for books, thrust into my hands, and left me with, the "Bible Defense of Slavery."
As I moved to a window which let out upon the side veranda the two lieutenants came around from the front and stood almost against it, outside; and as I intended to begin upon Harry as soon as Squire Sessions was safely upstairs, this suited me well enough. But the moment they came to the spot I heard Ned Ferry doing precisely what I had planned to do. At the same time, from across the hall came the sound of the piano and of Charlotte's voice, now a few bars, then an interval of lively speech, again a few bars, then more speech, and then a sustained melody as she lent herself to the kind flattery of Gholson's songless soul.
"But he is!" I overheard the aide-de-camp say; "he is a backbiting sneak, and I tell you again he's backbitten nobody more than he has you!"
"And I tell you again, Harry, that is my business."
"If he wants to fight me he can; I'll waive my rank."
"No, you will not, you have no right; our poor little rank, it doesn't belong to us, Harry, 'tis we belong to it. 'If he wants to fight!'—Do you take him for a rabbit? He is a brave man, you know that, old fellow. Of course he wants to fight. But he cannot! For the court-martial he would not care so much; I would not, you would not; 'tis his religion forbids him."
"O—oh!" groaned Harry in Gholson's exact tone, "'Hark from the tombs'!"
"Ah!" said Ferry, "he does not live up to it? Well, of course! who does? But we will pass that; the main question is, Will you express the regret, and so forth, as I have suggested, and do yourself credit, Harry, as an officer and a gentleman, or—will you fight?"
"But you say his religion, so called, won't let him fight!"
"That's what I think; but if it forbids him, and if consequently he will not, well,—Harry,—I will."
"You will what!"
"I will have to fight you in his place."
"Why, Ned!—Ned!—you—you astound me! Wha'—what do you mean?"
"That is what I mean, Harry. You know—many times you have heard me say—I don't believe in that kind of thing; I find that worse than the religion of Gholson; yet still,—what shall I say?—we are but soldiers anyhow—this time I make an exception in your favor. And of course this is confidential, on both sides; but you must make peace with Gholson, or you must fight with me."
"Oh, good Lord!—Ned!—Good Lord A'mighty! but this is too absurd. Why,
Ned, don't you see that the bottom cause of this trouble isn't—"
"I know what is the bottom cause of this trouble very well, Harry; you can hear her in yonder, now, singing. Wherever Gholson is he hears her, too, like-wise. Perchance 'tis to him she is singing. If she can sing to him, are you too good to apologise?"
"Oh, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, Ned, damned if I don't! George! I'll apologize! Rather than lose your friendship I'd apologize to the devil!"
Ferry's thanks came eagerly. "Well, anyhow, old boy," he added, "in such a case to back down is braver than to fight; but to apologize to the devil—that is not hard; on the contrary, to keep from apologizing to the devil—ah! I wish I could always do that!—I wonder where is Dick Smith."
I stealthily laid down the "Bible Defense of Slavery" and was going upstairs three steps at a stride, when I came upon Camille and Estelle. My aim was to get Harry's revolver to him before he should have the exasperating surprise of finding Gholson armed, and to contrive a pretext for so doing; and happily a word from the two sisters gave me my cue. With the fire-arms of both officers I came downstairs and out upon the veranda loud-footed, humming—
"'To the lairds o' Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the sun shall go down there are heads to be—'
"Gentlemen, I hope I'm not too officious; they say we're all going for a walk in the lily-pond woods, and I reckon you'd rather not leave these things behind."
Both thanked me and buckled on their belongings, but Ferry's look was peculiarly intelligent; "I was in the small parlor, looking for you," he said; "I thought you would be near the music." And so he had seen Gholson with his revolver on him, and must have understood it!
"Smith," said Harry, "will you be so kind as to say to Gholson—oh,
Lord! Ned, this is heavy drags on a sandy road! I—"
"That's all right, Harry, I withdraw the request."
"Well, you needn't; I was in the wrong. Smith, will you say to
Gholson—" His voice dropped to a strictly private rumble.
"Yes, Lieutenant, I'll do so with pleasure, and I'm sure what you say will have the proper—here are the ladies."
"Now give me your hand, Miss Camille; now jump!" So twice and once again the rivulet was passed which ran from the lily-pond, she and I leading all the others on the return from the woodland afternoon walk. We turned and faced away from the declining sun and across the clear pool to where its upper end, dotted with lily-pads, lay in a deep recess of the woods. There were green and purple garlands of wild passion-flower around her hat and about the white and blue fabrics at her waist. At the head of the pond, with Ferry beside her, stood black-haired Cécile canopied by overhanging boughs, her hat bedecked with the red spikes of the Indian-shot and wound with orange masses of love-vine. Nearer to us around the shore was Estelle of the red-brown hair and red-brown eyes and brows and lashes, whose cheek seemed always to glow with ever rising but never confessed emotion; and with her walked Gholson. Near the waterside also, but farthest up the path, came Miss Harper and Charlotte Oliver.
Harry was not with us. The settlement of his trouble with Gholson awaited his return out of the region north of us, whither Ferry had suggested his riding on an easy reconnaissance. Camille and I were just turning again, when there came abruptly into our scene the last gallant show of martial finery any of us ever saw until the war was over and there was nothing for our side to make itself fine for. On the road from the house we heard a sound of galloping, and the next moment General Austin and his entire staff (less only Harry) reined up at the edge of the pond, ablaze with all the good clothes they could muster and betraying just enough hard usage to give a stirring show of the war's heroic reality. The General, on a beautiful cream-colored horse, wore long yellow gauntlets and a yellow sash; from throat to waist the sunlight glistened upon the over-abundant gold lace of his new uniform, his legs were knee-deep in shining boots, and his soft gray hat was looped up on one side and plumed according to Regulations with one drooping ostrich feather. Behind halted in pleasing confusion captains and captains, flashing with braids, bars, buckles, buttons, bands, sword-knots, swords and brave eyes, and gaily lifting hats and caps, twice, and twice again, and once more, to the ladies—God bless them! Major Harper, the oldest, most refined and most soldierly of them all, was also the handsomest. Old Dismukes was with them; burly, bushy, dingy, on a huge roan charger. Camille asked me who he was, and I was about to reply that he was a bloodthirsty brute without a redeeming trait, when he lifted his shaggy brows at me and smiled, and as I smiled back I told her he was our senior colonel, rough at times, but the bravest of the brave. Meantime the General rode forward over a stretch of shallow water, Ned Ferry ran back along the margin to meet him, and at the saddlebow they spoke a moment together privately, while at more distance but openly to us all Major Harper informed his sister that with one night's camp and another day's dust the brigade would be down in Louisiana. Camille turned upon me and hurrahed, the Arkansas colonel smiled upon her approvingly, the ladies all waved, the General lifted his plumed hat, faced about, passed through his turning cavalcade and drew it after him at a gallop.
Our promenaders hurried into close order and with quick step and eager converse we moved toward the house. In raptures scintillant with their own beauty the three Harper girls inflated each item of the day's news and the morrow's outlook, and it was almost as pretty to see Miss Harper's keen black eyes and loving-tolerant smile go back and forth from Camille to Estelle, from Estelle to Cécile, and round again, as each maiden added some new extravagance to the glad vaunting of the last, and looked, for confirmation, to the gallant who toiled to keep her under her parasol. Suddenly the three girls broke into song with an adaptation of "Oh, carry me back" which substituted "Louisiana" for "Virginia," but whose absurd quaverings I will not betray in words to a generation that never knew the frantic times to which they belonged. I felt a shamefacedness for them even then, yet when I glanced behind, Miss Harper was singing with us in the most exalted earnest. We had nearly reached the field-gate, the big white one on the highway, and were noting that the dust of the General and his retinue had barely vanished from the southern stretch of the road, when one feminine voice said "What's that?" another exclaimed "See yonder!" and Miss Harper cried "Why, gentlemen, somebody's house is burning!"
Beyond the grove and the fields north of it, and beyond their farther bound of trees, in the northwest, was rising and unfolding into the peaceful Sabbath heavens a massive black column of the peculiar heavy smoke made by the burning of baled and stored cotton. We ran, two and two, into the road and up toward the grove-gate. "Don't stumble," I warned Camille as she looked back to see if any one besides me was holding his partner's hand. Inside the gate we paused, we two, still hand in hand. Her brown hair had shaken low upon her temples in two voluptuous masses between which she lifted her eyes to mine, my hand tightened on hers, and hers gave a little spasm of its own.
"Oh, Dick!" she whispered; but before I could rally from the blissful shock of it to reply, her face changed distressfully, and pointing beyond me, she drank a great breath, and cried, "Look!"
Sure enough, out there on the sky-line, in the north-east this time, another column of smoke was lifting its first billow over the tree-tops. "Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed, in beautiful alarm, "what does it mean?"
"It means the Yankees,—love," I said, and when she gasped her dismay without letting on to have heard the last word, I felt that fires were cheap at any price.
"There are others there besides Yankees," said Gholson to the general company as they joined us; "Yankees have got more sense than to start fires ahead of their march." On the same instant with Ned Ferry I sprang half-way to the top of the grove fence and peered out across road and fields upon the farthest point in line with the second fire. There we saw two horsemen reconnoitring, one a very commanding figure, the other mean enough. Ferry used his glass, but no glass was needed to tell either of us that Gholson's reckoning was true; those two were not Federals.
The ladies flew to the house and the rest of us to the stable. In its door Ferry stopped to look back upon the road while Gholson and I darted in, but now he, too, sprang to his horse's side. "How many, Lieutenant?" I cried, as the three of us saddled up.
"About a hundred; same we saw yesterday; captain at the rear; that means our fellows are close behind them."
For a moment more I could hear the thunder of their speeding column; then the grove seemed to swallow it up, and the stillness was grim. "Come on!" cried Ferry, swinging up, and after him we sprang. "They've dismounted on the far edge of the grove," said Gholson to me as we rode abreast, with Ferry a length ahead; "they'll form line on each side the road at right angles to it!" and again he was right. Ferry led northeastward, but hardly had we made half a dozen leaps when he waved me to a near corner of the flower-garden palings and I saw Miss Harper beckoning and Charlotte holding up my carbine and his sword. Miss Harper was drawn up as straight as a dart, her black eyes flashing and her lips charged with practical information that began to flow the moment I was near enough to hear her guarded voice. "They've all put their horses in the locks of the road fence, just beyond the big white gate—"
"We know," I interrupted, leaning and snatching the weapons from
Charlotte's hands. She kissed them good-bye.
"Ah, yes, yes!" she said, "they know all we can tell them and all we can't!"
The only response I could give was the shower of loose earth thrown upon both women by my horse's heels as I whirled and sped after my leader. He and Gholson were half a broad field ahead of me, but I followed only at their speed, designing to hand over the sword so nearly at the moment of going into action that I might stay by its owner's side unrebuked; and my plan was not in vain. Up the highway our Louisianians burst into view in column at full speed; I knew them by their captain, a man noted throughout the brigade for the showiness of his dress; and the next instant, away across the fields beyond the highroad, Quinn and his scouts broke out of the woods, heading for the gap in the woods-pasture fence. As each friendly column caught sight of the other, long cheers rang across the narrowing interval between them. Through that other gap which I had noted in my walk with Ferry he and Gholson reached the road, sped forward on it to a rise that overlooked the fields, and halted. Ferry rose on tiptoe in the stirrups, lifted his cap in air, pointed triumphantly backward to the grove, and was recognized by both columns at once. Again they cheered; at a full run I reached his side and threw his sword into his hand. Both columns saw him belt it on and flash it out, their cheers swelled again, the Louisianians hurtled down upon us, and we turned and were at the front of the onset.
The instant Ferry wheeled at the flaming captain's side you could see he was unwelcome. I heard him tell what we knew of the foe and the ground; I saw him glance back at the blown condition of the speeding column and then say "You've got them anyhow, Captain; you'll get every man of them without a scratch, only if you will take your time."
But the Captain answered headily; "No, sir! I've tried that twice already; this time I'll cut them in two and be in their rear at one dash! Bring in your company behind mine, if you choose."
Ferry drew back a few ranks but stayed with the column; Quinn had had the toil of the chase, he should have also the glory of the fight. So Ferry sent Gholson—whose horsemanship won a cheer from the passing Louisianians as he cleared the roadside fence—across to Quinn, bidding the Lieutenant slacken speed and count himself a reserve. And then into the broad lane between grove and woods-pasture, with the charging yell, the Louisianians thundered. Ah! but my Creole gentleman was a sight, with his straight blade lifted in air and his face turned back on us aglow with the joy of battle! I was huzzaing back at him and we were passing the front gate of the grove avenue, when down through it came from the house, with a tremor of echoes, the first shot; a shot and then a woman's scream, and his blazing eyes said to me, "He is there! That was Oliver!"
There was no time for speech. The shot was not a signal, yet on the instant and in our very teeth, on our right and our left, the cross-fire of the hidden and waiting foe flashed and pealed, and left and right, a life for a life, our carbines answered from the saddle. For a moment the odds against us were awful. In an instant the road was so full of fallen horses and dismounted men that the jaded column faltered in confusion. Our cunning enemy, seeing us charge in column, had swung the two extremes of their line forward and inward. So, crouching and firing upon us mounted, each half could fire toward the other with impunity, and what bullets missed their mark buzzed and whined about our ears and pecked the top rails of either fence like hail on a window. A wounded horse drove mine back upon his haunches and caused him to plant a hoof full on the breast of one of our Louisianians stretched dead on his back as though he had lain there for an hour. Another man, pale, dazed, unhurt, stood on the ground, unaware that he was under point-blank fire, holding by the bits his beautiful horse, that pawed the earth majestically and at every second or third breath blew from his flapping nostrils a cloud of scarlet spray. They blocked up half the road. As we swerved round them the horse of the company's first lieutenant slid forward and downward with knees and nose in the dust, hurling his rider into a lock of the fence, and the rider rose and rushed to the road again barely in time to catch a glittering form that dropped rein and sword and reeled backward from the saddle. It was his captain, shot through the breast. An instant later our tangled column parted to right and left, dashed into the locks of the two fences, sprang to the ground, and began to repay the enemy in the coin of their own issue. Only a dozen or so did otherwise, and it was my luck to be one of these. Espying Ned Ferry at the very front, in the road, standing in his stirrups and shouting back for followers to carry the charge on through, we spurred toward him and he turned and led. Then what was my next fortune but to see, astride of my stolen horse, the towering leader of the foe, Captain Jewett.
He came into the road a few rods ahead of us through a gap his men had earlier made opposite the big white gate. He answered our fierce halloo, as he crossed, by a pistol-shot at Ferry, but Ferry only glanced around at me and pointed after him with his sword. A number of blue-coats afoot followed him to the gap but at our onset scattered backward, sturdily returning our fire. Into the gap and into the enemy's left rear went Ferry and his horsemen, but I turned the other way and spurred through the woods-pasture gate after the Federal leader, he on my horse and I on his. Down the highway, on either side, stood his brave men's horses in the angles of the worm-fence, and two or three horse-holders took a shot at me as I sped in after the man who was bent on reaching the right of his divided force before Quinn should strike it, as I was bent on foiling him. Twice I fired at his shapely back, and twice, while he kept his speed among the tree-trunks, he looked back at me as coolly as at an odd passer-by and sent me a ball from his revolver. A few more bounds carried him near enough to his force to shout his commands, but half a hundred cheers suddenly resounded in the depth of the woods-pasture, and Quinn and his men charged upon the foe's right and rear. I joined the shout and the shouters; in a moment the enemy were throwing down their arms, and I turned to regain the road to the pond. For I had marked Jewett burst through Quinn's line and with a score of shots ringing after him make one last brave dash—for escape. Others, pursuing him, bent northward, but my instinct was right, his last hope was for his horse-holders, and at a sharp angle of the by-road, where it reached the pond, exactly where Camille and I had stood not an hour before, I came abruptly upon Cricket—riderless. I seized his rein, and as I bent and snapped the halter of one horse on the snaffle of the other I saw the missing horseman. Leaping from the saddle I ran to him. He was lying on his face in the shallow water where General Austin and his staff had so gaily halted a short while before, and as I caught sight of him he rolled upon his back and tried to lift his bemired head.
I dropped to my knee in the reddening pool and passed my arm under his head.
"Thank you," he said, and repeated the word as I wet my handkerchief and wiped the mire from his face; "thank you;—no, no,"—I was opening his shirt—"that's useless; get me where you can turn me over; you've hit me in the back, my lad."
"I?—I hit you? Oh, Captain Jewett, thank God, I didn't hit you at all!"
"What's the difference, boy; you didn't aim to miss, did you? I didn't. It's not my only hurt; I think I broke something inside when I fell from the sad'—ah! that's your bugle, isn't it? It's my last fight—oh, the devil! my good boy, don't begin to cry again; war's war; give me some water…. Thank you! And now, if you don't want me to bleed to death get me out of this slop, and—yes,—easy!—that's it—easy—oh, God! oh, let me down, boy, let me down, you're killing me! Oh!—" he fainted away.
With his unconscious head still on my arm I faced toward the hundred after-sounds of the fray and hallooed for help. To my surprise it promptly came. Three blundering boys we were who lifted him into the saddle and bore him to the house reeling and moaning astride of Cricket, the poor beast half dead with hard going. The sinking sun was as red as October when we issued into the highroad and moved up it to the grove gate through the bloody wreckage of the fray. The Louisianians were camping in the woods-pasture, Ferry's scouts in the grove, and the captive Federals were in the road between, shut in by heavy guards. At our appearance they crowded around us, greeting their undone commander with proud words of sympathy and love, and he thanked them as proudly and lovingly, though he could scarcely speak, more than to ask every moment for water. A number of our Sessions house group crowded out to meet us at the veranda steps; Camille; Harry Helm with his right hand bandaged; Cécile, attended by two or three Sessions children; and behind all Miss Harper exclaiming "Ah, my boy, you're a welcome sight—Oh! is that Captain Jewett!"
Two or three bystanders helped us bear him upstairs, where, turning from the bedside, I pressed Camille with eager questions.
"Lieutenant Ferry? he's unhurt—and so is Mr. Gholson! Mr. Gholson's gone to Franklin for doctors; Lieutenant Ferry sent him; he's been sending everybody everywhere faster than anybody else could think of anything!"
I asked where Ferry was now. Her eyes refilled—they were red from earlier distresses—and she motioned across the hall: "The captain of the Louisianians, you know, has sent for him!"
"Yes," I said, "the Captain's hit hard. I saw him when he was struck."
"Oh, Dick! then you were at the very front!"
"Did you think I was at the rear?"
She looked down. "I couldn't help hoping it."
"Then you were thinking of me."
"I prayed for you."
Such news seemed but ill-gotten gains, to come before I had gathered courage to inquire after Charlotte Oliver. "Wh'—where is—where are the others?"
"They're all about the house, tending the wounded; Mrs. Sessions is with the Squire, of course,—dear, brave old gentleman! we thought he was killed, but Charlotte found the ball had glanced."
I asked if it was Oliver who shot him, and she nodded. "It was down at the front door; the Squire said he'd shoot him if he shot Charlotte, and Charlotte declared she'd shoot him if he shot the Squire, and all at once he shot at her and struck him."
"Who was it that screamed; was it she?"
My informant's head drooped low and she murmured, "It was I."
"Then you were at the front."
"Did you think I was at the rear?"
I fear I answered evasively. I added that I must go to Lieutenant Ferry, and started toward the door, but she touched my arm. "Oh, Dick, you should have heard him praise you to her!—and when he said you had chased Captain Jewett and was missing, she cried; but now I'll tell her you're here." She started away but returned. "Oh, Dick, isn't it wonderful how we're always victorious! why don't those poor Yankees give up the struggle? they must see that God is on our side!"
As she left me, Ned Ferry came out with a sad face, but smiled gladly on me and caught me fondly by the arm. On hearing my brief report he saddened more than ever, and when I said I had promised Jewett he should hand his sword to none but him, "Oh!"—he smiled tenderly—"I don't want to refuse it; go in and hang it at the head of his bed as he would do in his own tent; I'll wait here."
I pointed to the door he had softly closed behind him: "How is it in there?"
"Ah, Richard, in there the war is all over."
"Dead?"
"So called."
Lieutenant Helm came out as I went in, and I paused an instant to ask him in fierce suspicion if he had bandaged his hand himself. "No," he whispered, "Miss Camille." It was a lie, but I did not learn that until months after. "Come downstairs as soon as you can," he added, "there's a hot supper down there; first come first served." We parted.
I found Miss Harper fanning the wounded giant and bathing his brows, and my smiles were ample explanation of my act as I hung the sword up. Then I brought in my leader. "Captain Jewett," he said after a nearly silent exchange of greetings, "I wish we had you uninjured."
"Ah, no, Lieutenant, this is bad enough. Lieutenant, there is one matter—"
"Yes, Captain, what is that?"
"The villain who set those fires—you know who he is, I hope."
"Yes, Captain, I know."
"He didn't begin that until after he left me. I had some private reasons for not killing him when I might have done it."
"Yes, Captain, I know that, too."
"Yet if I had caught him again I would have strung him up to the first limb."
"I have sent some picked men to catch him if they can," said Ferry, and the racked sufferer lifted a hand in approval. Camille came to her aunt and whispered "Mr. Gholson with two doctors." The wounded captive heard her.
"Lieutenant," he panted, "I hope you'll—do me the favor—to let my turn with those gentlemen—come last,—after my boys,—will you?"
"Ah! Captain, even our boys wouldn't allow that; no, here's a doctor, now."
I went down to the supper-table. Camille was there, dispensing its promiscuous hospitality to men who ate like pigs. I would as leave have found her behind a French-market coffee-stand. Harry Helm, nursing his bandaged hand, was lolling back from the board and quizzing her with compliments while she cut up his food. A fellow in the chair next mine said he had seen me with Ferry when we joined the Louisianians' charge. "Your aide-de-camp friend over yonder's a-gitt'n' lots o' sweetenin' with his grub; well, he deserves it."
I asked how he deserved it. "Why, we wouldn't 'a' got here in time if he hadn't 'a' met-up with us. That man Gholson, he's another good one."
The latter remark seemed to me a feeler, and I ignored it, and inquired how Lieutenant Helm had got that furlough. (Furlough was our slang for a light wound.) "Oh, he got it mighty fair! Did you see that Yankee lieutenant with the big sabre-cut on his shoulder? Well, your friend yonder gave him that—and got the Yankee's pistol-shot in his hand. But that saved Gholson's life, for that shot was aimed to give Gholson a furlough to kingdom-come. Are they kinfolks?"
I mumbled that they were not even friends. "Well, now, I suspicioned that,—when I first see 'em meet at the head of our column! But the aide-de-camp he took it so good-natured that, thinks I,—"
Another of Ferry's men, seated opposite, swallowed hurriedly, and covertly put in—"Y' ought to hear what Quinn said to Gholson just now as they met-up out here in the hall. Quinn thought they were alone. Says Quinn, as cold as a fish, s's'e 'Mr. Gholson,' s'e, 'you're not a coward, sir, and that's why I'm curious to ask you a question,' s'e. And says Gholson, just as cold, s'e 'I'm prepared, Lieutenant Quinn, to answer it.' And says Quinn, s'e 'Why was it, that when Harry Helm struck that blow which saved your life, and which you knew was meant to save it, and you seen his sword shot out of his hand and three or four Yankees makin' a dead set to kill him, and nothin' else in any particular danger at all, why was it, Mr. Gholson, that you never turned a hand nor an eye to save him?'"
"Great Scott! wha'd Gholson say?"
"Gholson, s'e, 'I done as I done, sir, from my highest sense o' duty. This ain't Lieutenant Helm's own little private war, Lieutenant Quinn, nor mine, nor yours.'"
"Jo'! that to Quinn! wha'd Quinn answer?"
"Why, with that Quinn popped them big glass eyes o' his'n till the whites showed clear round the blue, and s'e 'I know it better than you do; that's just what it suited you to forget. Oh! I'd already seen through you in one flash, you sneak. It's good for you you're not in my command; I'd lift you to a higher sense of whose war this is, damn you, if I had to hang you up by the thumbs.' With that he started right on by, Gholson a-keepin' his face to him as he passed, when Ned Ferry and—her—came out o' the parlor, and Ned turned out on the rear gallery with Quinn while she sort o' smiled at Gholson to come to her and sent him off on some business or other. George! I never seen her so beautiful."
Thereupon occurred a brief exchange of comments which seemed to me to carry by implication as fine a praise as could possibly come from two rough fellows of the camp. Speaking the names of Ferry and Charlotte in undertone, of course, but with the unrestraint of soldiers, they said their say without a shadow of inuendo in word or smile. Her presence, they agreed, always made them feel as though something out of the common "was bound to happen pretty quick," while his, they said, assured them that "whatever did happen would happen right." I turned with a frown as Harry laughed irrelevantly, and saw Camille and him smiling at me with childish playfulness. Then suddenly their smile changed and went beyond me, two or three men softly said "Smith!" and I was out of my chair and standing when Charlotte Oliver, in a low voice, tenderly accosted me.
"Oh, Richard Thorndyke Smith!—alive and well! Lieutenant Ferry wants you; he has just gone to his camp-fire."
Night had fully come. A few bivouac fires burned low in the grove, and at one of them near the grove gate I found our young commander. On a bench made of a fence-rail and two forked stakes he sat between Quinn and the first-lieutenant of the Louisianians. The doctor whom I had seen before sat humped on his horse, facing the three young men and making clumsy excuses to Ferry for leaving. The other physician would stay for some time yet, he said, and he, himself, was leaving his instruments, such as they were, and would return in the morning. "Fact is, my son's a surgeon, and he taken all my best instruments with him."
"When; where is he?" eagerly asked Quinn, seeing Ferry was not going to ask.
"My son? Oh, he's in Virginia, with General Lee."
"Hell!" grunted Quinn, but the doctor pretended to listen to Ferry.
"Ah, but we move south at day-light; the prisoners and wounded we send east, to Hazlehurst," said our leader, with a restraining hand on Quinn's knee. The other lieutenant made some inquiry of him, and the doctor was ignored, but stayed on, and as I stood waiting to be noticed I gathered a number of facts. The lightly injured would go in a plantation wagon; for the few gravely hurt there was the Harpers' ambulance, which had just arrived to take the ladies back to Squire Wall's, near Brookhaven, alas! instead of to Louisiana. For the ladies Charlotte's spring-wagon was to be appropriated, one of them riding beside it on horseback, and there was to be sent with them, besides Charlotte's old black driver, "a reliable man well mounted." Whoever that was to be it was not Harry, for he was to go south with a small guard, bearing the body of the Louisiana captain to his home between the hostile lines behind Port Hudson.
"Good-night, gentlemen," said the doctor at last. As he passed into the darkness Quinn bent a mock frown upon his young superior.
"Lieutenant Ferry, the next time I have to express my disgust please to keep your hand off my knee, will you?"
Ferry's response was to lay it back again and there ensued a puerile tussle that put me in a precious pout, that I should be kept waiting by such things. But presently the three parted to resume their several cares, and the moment Ferry touched my arm to turn me back toward the house I was once more his worshipper. "Well!" he began, "you have now two fine horses, eh?"
"Oh, by Regulations, I suppose, I ought to turn one of them over to Major Harper. I wish it were to you, Lieutenant; I'd keep my own—he'll be all right in a day or two—and give you Captain Jewett's."
"Well,—just for a day or two,—do that, while I lend my horse to a friend."
I had already asked myself what was to become of Charlotte Oliver while the Harpers were preempting her little wagon, and now I took keen alarm. "Why, Lieutenant, I shall be glad! But why not lend Captain Jewett's horse and keep yours? Yours is right now the finest and freshest mount in the command."
"Yes, 'tis for that I lend him."
We went on in silence. Startled and distressed, I pondered. What was her new purpose, that she should ask, or even accept, such a favor as this from Ned Ferry; a favor which, within an hour, the whole command would know he had granted? Was this a trifle, which only the Gholson-like smallness of my soul made spectral? The first time I had ever seen Ferry with any of his followers about him, was he not on Charlotte's gray, now, unluckily, beyond reach, at Wiggins? Ah, yes; but Beauty lending a horse to speed Valor was one thing; Valor unhorsing himself to speed Beauty—oh, how different! What was the all-subordinating need?
As we entered the hall I came to a conviction which lightened my heart; the all-subordinating need was—Oliver. I thought I could see why. The spring of all his devilish behavior lay in those relations to her for which I knew she counted herself chargeable through her past mistakes. Unless I guessed wrong her motives had risen. I believed her aim was now, at whatever self-hazard, to stop this hideous one-woman's war, and to speed her unfinished story to the fairest possible outcome for all God's creatures, however splendidly or miserably the "fool in it" should win or lose. We stopped and waited for Cécile and the remaining doctor, she with a lighted candle, to come down the stairs. From two rooms below, where most of the wounded lay, there came women's voices softly singing, and Charlotte's was among them. Their song was one listening to which many a boy in blue, many a lad in gray, has died: "Rock me to sleep, mother."
Cécile and the doctor had come from the bedside of the Union captain, where Miss Harper remained. "I've done all I can," he said to Ferry; "we old chill-and-fever doctors wa'n't made for war-times; he may get well and he may not."
"Smith," said Ferry, "go up and stay with him till further orders."
Late in the night Gholson came to the Union captain's bedside for Miss Harper. Charlotte had sent him; the doctor had left word what to do if a certain patient's wound should re-open, and this had happened. The three had succeeded in stanching it, but Charlotte had prevailed upon Miss Harper to lie down, and the weary lady had, against all her intentions, fallen asleep. I was alone with the wounded captain. He did not really sleep, but under the weight of his narcotics drowsed, muttered, stirred, moaned, and now and then spoke out.
Sitting in the open window, I marked the few red points of dying firelight grow fewer in the bivouac under the grove. Out there by the gate Ned Ferry slept. Fireflies blinked, and beyond the hazy fields rose the wasted moon, by the regal slowness of whose march I measured the passage of time as I had done two nights before. My vigil was a sad one, but, in health, in love, in the last of my teens and in the silent company of such a moon, my straying thoughts lingered most about the maiden who had "prayed for me." My hopes grew mightily. Yet with them grew my sense of need to redouble a lover's diligence. I resolved never again to leave great gaps in my line of circumvallation about the city of my siege, as I had done in the past—two days. I should move to the final assault, now, at the earliest favorable moment, and the next should see the rose-red flag of surrender rise on her temples; in war it is white, but in love it is red.
First favorable moment; ah! but when would that be? Who was to convey the Harpers to Hazlehurst? Well, thank Heaven! not Harry. Scott Gholson? Gholson was due at headquarters. Poor Gholson! much rest for racked nerves had he found here; what with Ferry, and Harry, and the fight, and Quinn, I wondered he did not lie down and die under the pure suffocation of his "tchagrin." Even a crocodile, I believed, could suffer from chagrin, give him as many good causes as Gholson had accumulated. But no, the heaven of "Charlie Tolliver's" presence and commands—she seemed to have taken entire possession of him—lifted and sustained him above the clouds of all unkinder things.
A faint stir at the threshold caught my ear and I discerned in the hall a young negro woman. The light of an unseen candle made her known at a glance; she had been here since the previous evening, as I knew, though it chanced that I had not seen her; Oliver's best wedding-gift, the slave maid whom I had seen with Charlotte in the curtained wagon at Gallatin. I stole out to her; she courtesied. "Miss Charlotte say ef you want he'p you fine me a-sett'n' on de step o' de stairs hafe-ways down."
I inquired if she was leaving us. "She a-gitt'n' ready, suh; Misteh Goshen done gone to de sta-able to git de hosses." The girl suddenly seemed pleased with herself. "Mis' Charlotte would 'a' been done gone when de yethehs went—dem-ah two scouts what was sent ayfteh him—ef I hadn' spoke' up when I did."
"Indeed! how was that?"
"Why, I says, s' I, 'Mis' Charlotte, how we know he ain' gwine fo' to double on his huntehs? Betteh wait a spell, and den ef no word come back dat he a-doublin', you kin be sho' he done lit out fo' to jine de Yankees roun' Pote Hudsom.'"
"Why did you tell her that? You want him caught; so do I; but you know she doesn't want to catch him, and you don't want her to. Neither do I. Nor neither do we want Lieutenant Ferry to catch him."
"No, suh, dass so. But same time, while she no notion o' gitt'n' him cotch, she believe she dess djuty-bound to head-off his devilment. 'Tis dess like I heah' Mr. Goshen say to Miss Hahpeh, 'Dis ain't ow own li'l pri'—'"
I waved her away and went back into the room; the Captain had called. He asked the time of night; I said it was well after two; he murmured, was quiet, and after a moment spoke my name. I answered, and he whispered "Coralie Rothvelt—she's here; I—recognized her voice—when they were singing. Did you know I knew her?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Daring game that was you fellows let her put up on us night before last, my boy,—and it hung by a thread. If our officers had only asked the old man his name—it would have been—a flash of light. If I had dreamed, when I saw—you and Ned Ferry—yesterday,—that Coralie Rothvelt was—Charlotte Oliver,—and could have known her then—as I've—learned to know her—to-day—from her—worst enemy,—you know,—"
"Yes, Captain."
"I should—have turned back, my boy." After a silence the hero said more to himself than to me "Ah, if my brother were here to-night—I might live!"
Many days afterward I thought myself dull not to have guessed what that speech meant, but now I was too distressed by the change I saw coming over him to do any surmising. He began to say things entirely to himself. "Home!" he murmured; "sweet, sweet home!—my home! my country!—My God, my country, my home!—Smith,—you know what that is you're—wiping off my brow,—don't you?"
"Yes, Captain."
"I—I didn't want you to be—taken too unpleasantly by surprise—just at the—end. You know what's—happening,—don't you?"
"Yes, Captain." As I wiped the brow again I heard the tread of two horses down in front of the house; they were Gholson's, and Ned Ferry's for Charlotte. "Captain, may I go and bring her—tell her what you say, and bring her?"
"Do you think she'd come? She'd have gone to Ship Island if I had caught her."
"I know she'll come."
"I wish she would; she could 'bear a message and a token,' as the song says."
She came. I met her outside the door, and for a moment I feared she would come no farther. "How can I, Richard! Oh, how can I?" she whispered; "this is my doing!" But presently she stood at the bedside calm and compassionate, in the dark dress and limp hat of two nights before. The dying man's eyes were lustrous with gratitude.
"I have one or two things," he said, after a few words of greeting, "that I'd like to send home—to my mother—and my wife; some trifles—and a message or two; if I—if—if I—"
"Will you let me take them?" Charlotte asked. I did not see or hear what they were; Gholson beckoned me into the hall. He did not whisper; there are some people, you know, who can never exercise enough self-suppression to whisper; he mumbled. He admitted the dying had some rights, but—he feared the delay might result unfortunately; wanted me to tell Charlotte so, and was sure I was ever so wrong to ask to have Ned Ferry awakened for the common incident of a prisoner's death; he would let him know the moment he awoke.
When I came back into the room the captive had asked Charlotte to pray.
"Tisn't that I'm—the least bit afraid," he was saying.
"Oh, no," she responded, wiping his brow, "why should you be? Dying isn't nearly so fearful a thing as living. I'd rather, now, you'd pray for me; I'm such an unbeliever—in the beliefs, I mean, the beliefs the church people think we can't get on without. My religion is scarcely anything but longings and strivings"—she sadly smiled—"longings and strivings and hopes."
"Yet you wouldn't—"
"Part with it? Oh, not for the world beside!"
"Neither would I—with mine." The soldier folded his hands in supplication. "Neither would I—though mine, O Lord—is only the—old-fashioned sort—for whose beliefs our fathers—used to kill one another; God have mercy—on them—and us."
There was a great stillness. Against the bedside Charlotte had sunk to her knees, and under the broad brim of her Leghorn hat leaned her brow upon her folded hands. Thus, presently, she spoke again.
"I know, Captain," she said, "that we can't have longings, strivings, or hopes, without beliefs; beliefs are what they live on. I believe in being strong and sweet and true for the pure sake of being so; and yet more for the world's sake; and as much more again for God's sake as God is greater than his works. I believe in beauty and in joy. I believe they are the goal of all goodness and of all God's work and wish. As to resurrection, punishment, and reward, I can't see what my noblest choice has to do with them; they seem to me to be God's part of the matter; mine is to love perfect beauty and perfect joy, both in and infinitely beyond myself, with the desiring love with which I rejoice to believe God loves them, and to pity the lack of them with the loving pity with which God pities it. And above all I believe that no beauty and no joy can be perfect apart from a love that loves the whole world's joy better than any separate joy of any separate soul."
"Thank you," was murmured from the pillow. Then, as Charlotte once more wiped the damp brow, the captive said, with much labor, "After that—war seems—an awful thing. I suppose it isn't half so much a crime—as it is a—penalty—for the crimes that bring it on. But anyhow—you know—being—" The bugle rang out the reveillé.
"Being a soldier," said Charlotte, "you want to die like one?"
"Yes, oh, yes!—the best I can. I'd like to sit half up—and hold my sword—if there's—no objection. I've loved it so! It would almost be like holding—the hand that's far away. Of course, it isn't really necessary, but—it would be more like—dying—for my country."
He would not have it in the scabbard, and when I laid it naked in his hand he kissed the hilt. Charlotte sent Gholson for Ned Ferry. Glancing from the window, I noticed that for some better convenience our scouts had left the grove, and the prisoners had been marched in and huddled close to the veranda-steps, under their heavy marching-guard of Louisianians. One of the blue-coats called up to me softly: "Dying—really?" He turned to his fellows—"Boys, Captain's dying."
Every Northern eye was lifted to the window and I turned away. "Richard!" gently called Charlotte, and I saw the end was at hand; a new anguish was on the brow; yet the soldier was asking for a song; "a soldier's song, will you?"
"Why, Captain," she replied, "you know, we don't sing the same words to our soldier-songs that you do—except in the hymns. Shall I sing 'Am I a soldier of the cross?'"
He did not answer promptly; but when he did he said "Yes—sing that."
She sang it. As the second stanza was begun we heard a responsive swell grow softly to fuller and fuller volume beneath the windows; the prisoners were singing. I heard an austere voice forbid it, but it rose straight on from strength to strength:
"Sure I must fight if I would win,
Increase my courage, Lord.
I'll bear the toil, endure the pain,
Supported by thy word."
The dying man lifted a hand and Charlotte ceased. He had not heard the muffled chorus of his followers below; or it may be that he had, and that the degree of liberty they seemed to be enjoying prompted him to seek the new favor he now asked. I did not catch his words, but Charlotte heard, and answered tenderly, yet with a thrill of pain so keen she could not conceal it even from him.
"Oh! you wouldn't ask a rebel to sing that," she sighed, "would you?"
He made no rejoinder except that his eyes were insistent. She wiped his temples. "I hate to refuse you."
His gaze was grateful. She spoke again: "I suppose I oughtn't to mind it."
Miss Harper came in, and Charlotte, taking her hand without a glance, told the Captain's hard request under her voice. Miss Harper, too, in her turn, gave a start of pain, but when the dying eyes and smile turned pleadingly to her she said, "Why, if you can, Charlotte, dear, but oh! how can you?"
Charlotte addressed the wounded man: "Just a little bit of it, will that do?" and as he eagerly assented she added, to Miss Harper, "You know, dear, in its history it's no more theirs than ours."
"No, not so much," said Miss Harper, with a gleam of pride; and thereupon it was my amazement to hear Charlotte begin guardedly to sing:
"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?"
But guardedly as she began, the effect on the huddled crowd below was instant and electrical. They heard almost the first note; looking down anxiously, I saw the wonder and enthusiasm pass from man to man. They heard the first two lines in awed, ecstatic silence; but at the third, warily, first one, then three, then a dozen, then a score, bereft of arms, standard, and leader, little counting ever again to see freedom, flag, or home, they raised their voices, by the dawn's early light, in their song of songs.
Our main body were out in the highway, just facing into column, and the effect on them I could not see. The prisoners' guards, though instantly ablaze with indignation, were so taken by surprise that for two or three seconds, with carbines at a ready, they—and even their sergeant in command—only darted fierce looks here and there and up at me. The prisoners must have been used to singing in ordered chorus, for one of them strode into their middle, and smiling sturdily at the maddened guard and me, led the song evenly. "No, sir!" he cried, as I made an angry sign for them to desist, "one verse through, if every damned fool of us dies for it—let the Captain hear it boys—sing!
"'The rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air—'"
Charlotte had ceased, in consternation not for the conditions without more than for those within. With the first strong swell of the song from below, the dying leader strove to sit upright and to lift his blade, but failed and would have slammed back upon the pillows had not she and Miss Harper saved him. He lay in their arms gasping his last, yet clutching his sabre with a quivering hand and listening on with rapt face untroubled by the fiery tumult of cries that broke into and over the strain.
"Club that man over the head!" cried the sergeant of the guard, and one of his men swung a gun; but the Yankee sprang inside of its sweep, crying, "Sing her through, boys!" grappled his opponent, and hurled him back. In the same instant the sergeant called steadily, "Guard, ready—aim—"
There sounded a clean slap of levelled carbines, yet from the prisoners came the continued song in its closing couplet:
"The star-spangled banner! O, long may it wave!—"
and out of the midst of its swell the oaths and curses and defiant laughter of a dozen men crying, with tears in their eyes, "Shoot! shoot! why don't you shoot?"
But the command to fire did not come; suddenly there was a drumming of hoofs, then their abrupt stoppage, and the voice of a vigilant commander called, "Attention!"
With a few words to the sergeant, more brief than harsh, and while the indomitable singers pressed on to the very close of the stanza without a sign from him to desist, Ferry bade the subaltern resume his command, and turned toward me at the window. He lifted his sword and spoke in a lowered tone, the sullen guard stood to their arms, and every captive looked up for my reply.
"Shall I come?" he inquired; but I shook my head.
"What!—gone?" he asked again, and I nodded. He turned and trotted lightly after the departing column. I remember his pensive mien as he moved down the grove, and how a soft gleam flashed from his sword, above his head, as with the hand that held it he fingered his slender mustache, and how another gleam followed it as he reversed the blade and let it into its sheath. Then my eyes lost him; for Gholson had taken his place under the window and was beckoning for my attention.
"Is she coming?" he called up, and Charlotte, at my side, spoke downward:
"I shall be with you in a moment."
While he waited the second lieutenant of the Louisianians came, and as guard and prisoners started away she came out upon the veranda steps. Across her knee, as she and Gholson galloped off by a road across fields, lay in a wrapping of corn-husks the huge sabre of the dead northerner.
The first hush of the deserted camp-ground was lost in the songs of returning birds. Captain Jewett, his majestic length blanket-bound from brow to heel as trimly as a bale, had been laid under ground, and the Harpers stood in prayer at the grave's head and foot with hats on for their journey. The burial squad, turned guard of honor to the dead captain of the Louisianians, were riding away on either side of a light wagon that bore his mortal part. I, after all, was to be the Harpers' guardian on their way.
Day widened into its first perfection as we moved down the highroad toward a near fork whose right was to lead Harry and his solemn cortége southward, while the left should be our eastward course. Camille and I rode horseback, side by side, with no one near enough to smile at my sentimental laudations of the morning's splendors, or at her for repaying my eloquence with looks so full of tender worship, personal acceptance and self-bestowal, that to tell of them here would make as poor a show as to lift a sea-flower out of the sea; they call for piccolo notes and I am no musician.
The familiar little leather-curtained wagon was just ahead of us, bearing the other three Harpers, the old negro driver and—to complete its overloading—his daughter, Charlotte's dark maid. Beside the wheels ambled and babbled Harry Helm. At the bridge he fell back to us and found us talking of Charlotte. Camille was telling me how well Charlotte knew the region south of us, and how her plan was to dine at mid-day with such a friend and to pass the night with such another; but the moment Harry came up she began to upbraid him in her mellowest flute-notes for not telling us that he had got his wound in saving—
"Now, you ladies—" cried the teased aide-de-camp, "I—I didn't save Gholson's life! I didn't try to save it! I only tried to split a Yankee's head and didn't even do that! Dick Smith, if you tell anybody else that I saved—Well, who did, then? Good Lordy! if I'd known that to save a man's life would make all this fuss I wouldn't 'a' done it! Why, Quinn and I had to sit and listen to Ned Ferry a solid half-hour last night, telling us the decent things he'd known Gholson to do, and the allowances we'd ought to make for a man with Gholson's sort of a conscience! And then, to cap—to clap—to clap the ki'—to cap—the climax—consound that word, I never did know what it meant—to clap the climax, Ned sends for Gholson and gets Quinn to speak to him civilly—aw, haw, haw!—Quinn showing all the time how he hated the job, like a cat when you make him jump over a stick! And then he led us on, with just a word here and there, until we all agreed as smooth as glass, that all Quinn had said was my fault, and all I had done was Gholson's fault, and all Gholson had said or done or left undone was our fault, and the rest was partly Ned's fault, but mostly accident."
Camille declared she did not and would not believe there had been any fault with any one, anywhere, and especially with Mr. Gholson, and I liked Lieutenant Helm less than ever, noticing anew the unaccountable freedom with which Camille seemed to think herself entitled to rebuke him. "Oh, I'm in your power," he cried to her, "and I'll call him a spotless giraffe if you want me to! that's what he is; I've always thought so!" The spring-wagon was taking the left fork and he cantered ahead to begin his good-byes there and save her for the last. When he made his adieu to her he said, "Won't you let Mr. Smith halt here with me a few moments? I want to speak of one or two matters that—"
She resigned me almost with scorn; which privately amused me, and, I felt sure, hoodwinked the aide-de-camp.
"Say, Dick!" he began, as she moved away, "look here, I'm going to tell you something; Ned Ferry's in love with Charlotte Oliver!"
"You don't mean it!"
"Yes, I do, mean it! Smith, Ned's a grand fellow. I'm glad I came here yesterday."
"Yes, you've secured a furlough."
"Oh, this thing, yes; don't you wish you had it! No, I'm glad I came, for what I've learned. I'm glad for what Ned Ferry has taught me a man can do, and keep from doing, when he's got the upper hold of himself. And I'm glad for what she—you know who—by George! any man would know who ever saw her, for she draws every man who comes within her range, as naturally as a rose draws a bee. I'm glad for what she has taught me a woman can be, and can keep from being, so long as she knows there's one real man to live up to! just up to, mind you, I don't even say to live for."
I stared with surprise. Was this the trivial Harry talking? Fact is, the pair we were talking about had by some psychical magic rarified the atmosphere for all of us until half our notes were above our normal pitch.
"Do you mean she loves him; what sign of such a thing did she show yesterday or last evening?"
"Not a sign of a sign! And yet I'll swear it! Do you know where she's gone?"
"To-day? I think I do."
"Where?"
"Well, Lieutenant, if I were she, I should go straight into the Yankee lines behind Port Hudson. She's got Jewett's messages and his sword, and the Yank's won't know her as a Confederate any better than they ever did; for it's only these men whom we've captured who have found out she's Charlotte Oliver, or that she had any knowing part in General Austin's ruse."
"If Oliver doesn't tell," said Harry, lifting his bad hand in pain.
"He will not dare! If she can only get her word in first and tell them, herself, that he's Charlotte Oliver's husband and has just led the finest company of Federal scouts in the two States to destruction—"
"Hi! that ought to cook his dough!—with her face—and her voice!"
"Yes," I responded, "—and his breath."
"And why do you think she wants to do this?" asked Harry.
"She doesn't want to do it; but she feels she must, knowing that every blow he strikes from now on is struck on her account. I believe she's gone to warn the Yankees that his whole animus is personal revenge and that he will sacrifice anything or anybody, any principle or pledge or cause, at any moment, to wreak that private vengeance, in whole or in part."
"Dick Smith, yes! But don't you see, besides, what she does want? Why, she wants to keep Oliver and Ferry apart until somebody else for whom she doesn't care as she cares for Ned, say you, or I, or—or—"
"Gholson?"
"Gholson, no! she can't trust Gholson, Gholson's conscience is too vindictive; that's why she's keeping him with her as long as she can. No, but until some of us, I say, can give Oliver a thousand times better than he ought ever to get—except for her sake—"
"Yes, you mean a soldier's clean death; and what you want of me is for me to say that I, for one, will lose no honest chance to give it to him, isn't it?"
"What I want of you, Smith, is to tell you that I shall lose no such chance."
"Well, neither shall I."
"Bully for you, Dick; bully boy with the glass eye! You see, you're one of only half a dozen or so that know Oliver when they see him; so Ned will soon be sending you after him. Ned's got a conscience, too, you know, as squirmy as Gholson's. Oh, Lord! yes, you don't often see it, but it's as big and hard as a conscript's ague-cake." The Lieutenant gathered his rein; "Smith, I want Ned and her to get one another; that's me!"
I was tempted to say it was me, too, but I forbore and only said it was
I.
"All the same," said Harry, "I'm sorry for the little girl!"
"Little girl?"
"Oh, come, now, you know!" He leaned to me and whispered, "Miss Cécile!"
"Lieutenant," I replied, with a flush, realizing what I owed to the family as a prospective member of it, "you're mistaking a little patriotic ardor—"
"Pat who—oh? I tell you, my covey,—and of course, you understand, I wouldn't breathe it any further—"
"I'd rather you would not."
"Phew-ew! I don't know why in the devil you'd rather I would not, but—Smith,—she's so dead-gone in love with Ned Ferry, that if she doesn't get him—I George! it'll e'en a'most kill her!"
I guffawed in derision. "And she didn't even have to tell you so! She can't even hide its deadly intensity from the casual bystander! haw! haw! haw! And it's all the outcome of a three-days acquaintance! It beats Doctor Swiftgrow's Mustache Invigor'—aw, haw! haw!" "Oh, you think so? Pity you couldn't get a few barrels of it—aw, haw! haw!" said Harry, and my laughter left off where his began. But, some way hurting his hand, he, too, stopped short. I drew my horse back.
"Is that all you've noticed?" I smilingly inquired. "Isn't anybody else mortally in love with anybody else? You can't make me believe that's all you know!"
"Well, then, I sha'n't try. I do know one thing more; heard it yesterday. Like to hear it?"
"Like! Why, I'm just that dead-gone with curiosity that if I don't hear it it'll e'en a'most kill me—aw, haw! haw! haw!"
"Well, I'm tired saving people's lives, but we won't count this one; you say you want to hear it—I can't give you all of it but it begins:
"'Turn away thine eyes, maiden passing fair!
O maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes!'—
"Haw! haw! haw! Good-bye, Smith,—aw, haw! haw! haw!—and it's all the outcome of a three-days acquaintance!—haw! haw! haw!—Oh, say!—Smith!"—I was leaving him—"that's right, go back and begin over!—'Return! return!'—aw, haw! haw! haw!"
On the second night after that morning of frantic mortification I was riding at Ned Ferry's side, in Louisiana. The camp of the brigade was a few miles behind us. Somewhere in front of us, fireless and close hid, lay our company of scouts, ahead of whose march he had pushed the day before to confer with the General, and we were now on our way to rejoin them. Under our horses' feet was that old Plank-road which every "buttermilk ranger" must remember—whether dead or not, I am tempted to say,—who rode under either flag in the Felicianas in '63 and '64.
Late in the evening of the day on which I had conducted the Harpers to Squire Wall's I had received a despatch ordering me to board the next morning's train at Brookhaven with my horse. On it I should find a number of cases of those shoes I had seen at Hazlehurst. At Tangipahoa I was to transfer them to one or two army-wagons which would by that time have reached there, and bring them across to Clinton, where a guard would meet and join me to conduct the wagons to camp. And thus I had done, bearing with me a sad vision of dear dark Miss Harper fluttering her handkerchief above her three nieces' heads, one of whom refrained until the opportunity had all but gone, to wave good-bye to the visibly wretched author of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes." My lucky Cricket had gone three nights and two whole days with no harness but his halter, and to-night, beside the Yankee's horse, that still bore Ned Ferry, he was as good as new. My leader and I talked of Charlotte. In the middle of this day's forenoon Gholson had come into camp reporting at the General's tent the long ride she had made on Monday; as good a fifty miles as Ferry's own. We called it, now, Ferry and I, a most clever achievement for a woman. "Many women," he said, "know how to ride, but she knows how to march."
"I think you must have taught her," I responded, and he enjoyed his inability to deny it. So I ventured farther and said she seemed to me actually to have reached, in the few days since I had first seen her, a finer spiritual stature.
"She?" he asked; "ah! she is of the kind that must grow or die. Yes, you may be right; but in that time she has kept me so occupied growing, myself, that I did not notice she was doing the same. But also, I think, the eyes with which we look at her have grown."
"She has outgrown this work," I insisted.
"Those letters—to the newspapers?"
"No, this other; this work which she has to do by craft and wiles and disguises. Lieutenant, I don't believe she can go on doing that now with her past skill, since life has become to her a nobler story than it promised to be."
My companion lifted higher in the saddle with delight. Then soberly he said, "We have got to lose her." I turned inquiringly and he continued: "She has done me the honor to tell me—Miss Harper and me—that if she succeeds in what she is now trying to do—you know?—"
"I think I do. It's to prevent Oliver from making himself useful to the enemy, isn't it?"
"Well—like that; and she says if she comes out all right she will leave us; yes, for the hospital service."
"Hosp'—Oh—oh! gangrene, typhoid, lock-jaw, itch, small-pox! Isn't she deep enough in the hospital service already, with her quinine dolls?"
"Ah! but she cannot continue to play dolls that way; she must find something else. I see you have my temptation; yes, the desire to see her always doing something splendid. That is not 'real life,' as you call it. And besides, was not that you said one time to me 'No splendor shines at last so far as a hidden splendor'?"
"No, sir! I suppose it's true, but I never want to see her splendor shining through pock-marks." The reply won from him a gesture of approval, and this gave me a reckless tongue. "Why, if I were you, Lieutenant, she simply shouldn't go! Good Heaven! isn't she far enough away at the nearest? How can you tamely—no, I don't mean tamely, but—how can you endure to let this matter drift—how can you endure it?"
At the beginning of my question he straightened exactly as I had seen him do in the middle of the lane when our recoiled column was staggering; but as my extravagance flamed up he quieted rebukingly, and with a quieter smile than ever asked "Is that a soldier's question? Smith, is there not something wrong with you to-night?"
"There always is," I replied.
"No, but to-night I think you are taking that 'lower fork' you talk sometimes about. Of course, if you don't want to tell—"
"May I tell you?"
"Ah, certainly! Is it that little Harper girl?"
I nodded, all choked up. When I could speak I had to drop the words by ones and twos, and did not so much as say them as let them bleed from my lips; and never while I live shall I forget the sweet, grave, perfect sympathy with which my friend listened and led me on, and listened and led me on. I said I had never believed in love at first sight until now when it had come upon me to darken and embitter my life henceforth.
He replied that certainly love sometimes germinated at first sight, and I interrupted greedily that that was all I claimed—except that love could also, at times, grow to maturity with amazing speed, a speed I never could have credited previous to these last four days. And he admitted as much, but thought time only could prove such love; whereto I rejoined that that was what she had answered.
He glanced at me suddenly, then smoothed his horse's mane, and said, gently, "That means you have declared yourself to her?"
I confessed I had, and told him how, on our journey to Squire Wall's, being stung to desperation by the infantile way in which she had drooled out to others what my love had sacredly confided to her alone, I had abruptly confronted her with the fact, and in the ensuing debate, carried away by the torrent of my emotions, had offered her my love, for life and all.
"And she—ah, yes. I see; and I see, too, that in all she ever said or did or seemed, before, she never made herself such a treasure to be longed for and fought and lived for as in the way in which she—" He paused.
"Refused me! Oh, it's so; it's so! Ah! if you could have witnessed her dignity, her wisdom, her grace, her compassionate immovableness, you'd never think of her as the little Harper girl again. She said that if the unpremeditated, headlong way in which I had told my passion were my only mistake, and if it were only for my sake, she would not, if she could, answer favorably, and that I, myself, at last, would not have a girl who would have a man who would offer his love in that way, and that she would not have a man who would have a girl who would have a man who should offer his love in that way."
I call it one of the sweetest kindnesses ever done me, that Ned Ferry heard me to the end of that speech and did not smile. Instead he asked "Did she say that as if a'—as if—amused?"
"No, Lieutenant, she nearly cried. Oh, I wish we were on some dangerous errand to-night, instead of just camp and bed!"
"Well, that's all right, Richard; we are."
After a few minutes we quitted the public way by an obscure path in the woods on our right. When we had followed this for two or three miles we turned to the left again and pressed as softly as we could into a low tangled ground where the air seemed stagnant and mosquitoes stung savagely. We wiped away the perspiration in streams. I pushed forward to Ferry's side and whispered my belief that at last we were to see rain.
"Yes," he said, "and with thunder and lightning; just what we want to-night."
I asked why. "Oh, they hate our thunder-storms, those Yankee patrols."
Presently we were in a very dark road, and at a point where it dropped suddenly between steep sides we halted in black shadow. A gleam of pale sand, a whisper of deep flowing waters, and a farther glimmer of more sands beyond them challenged our advance. We had come to a "grapevine ferry." The scow was on the other side, the water too shoal for the horses to swim, and the bottom, most likely, quicksand. Out of the blackness of the opposite shore came a soft, high-pitched, quavering, long-drawn, smothered moan of woe, the call of that snivelling little sinner the screech-owl. Ferry murmured to me to answer it and I sent the same faint horror-stricken tremolo back. Again it came to us, from not farther than one might toss his cap, and I followed Ferry down to the water's edge. The grapevine guy swayed at our side, we heard the scow slide from the sands, and in a few moments, moved by two videttes, it touched our shore. Soon we were across, the two videttes riding with us, and beyond a sharp rise, in an old opening made by the swoop of a hurricane, we entered the silent unlighted bivouac of Ferry's scouts. Ferry got down and sat on the earth talking with Quinn, while the sergeants quietly roused the sleepers to horse.
Now we marched, and when we had gone a mile or so Ned Ferry turned aside, taking with him only Sergeant Jim, Kendall, another private, and me. We went at an alert walk single-file for the better part of an hour and stopped at length in a narrow untilled "deadening." Beyond it at our left a faint redness shone just above the tree-tops. At our right, in the northwest, a similar glow was ruddier, the heavens being darker there except when once or twice they paled with silent lightnings. Sergeant Jim went forward alone and on foot, and presently was back again, whispering to Ferry and remounting.
Ferry led Kendall and me into the woods, the other two remaining. We found rising ground, and had ridden but a few minutes when from its crest we looked upon a startling sight. In front of us was a stretch of specially well farmed land. Our woods swept round it on both sides, crossed a highway, and gradually closed in again so as to terminate the opening about half a mile away. Always the same crops, bottom cause of the war: from us to the road an admirable planting of cotton, and from there to the farther woods as goodly a show of thick corn. The whole acreage swept downward to that terminus, at the same time sinking inward from the two sides. On the highway shone the lighted rear window of a roadside "store," and down the two sides of the whole tract stretched the hundred tent-fires of two brigade camps of the enemy's cavalry. Their new, white canvases were pitched in long, even alleys following the borders of the wood, from which the brush had been cut away far enough for half of them to stand under the trees. The men had quieted down to sleep, but at one tent very near us a group of regimental officers sat in the light of a torch-basket, and by them were planted their colors. A quartet of capital voices were singing, and one who joined the chorus, standing by the flag, absently yet caressingly spread it at such breadth that we easily read on it the name of the command. Let me leave that out.
As they sang, and as we sat in our saddles behind the low fence that ran quite round the opening, Ferry turned from looking across into the lighted window on the road and handed me his field-glass. "How many candles do you see in there?"
I saw two. "Yes," he said, dismounting and motioning me to do the same. Kendall took our bridles. Leaving him with the animals we went over the fence, through the cotton, across the road at a point terribly near the lighted and guarded shop, and on down the field of corn, to and over its farthest fence; stooping, gliding, halting, crouching, in the cotton-rows and corn-rows; taking every posture two upright gentlemen would rather not take; while nevertheless I swelled with pride, to be alone at the side—or even at the heels—of one who, for all this apparent skulking and grovelling, and in despite of all the hidden drawings of his passion for a fair woman at this hour somewhere in peril, kept his straight course in lion-hearted pursuit of his duty (as he saw it) to a whole world of loves and lovers, martyrs and fighters, hosts of whom had as good a right to their heart's desire as I to mine or he to his; and I remembered Charlotte Oliver saying, on her knees, "I believe no beauty and no joy can be perfect apart from a love that loves the whole world's joy better than any separate joy of any separate soul."
One matter of surprise to me was that this whole property had escaped molestation. I wondered who could be so favored by the enemy and yet be so devoted to our cause as to signal us from his window with their sentinels at his doors; and as we passed beyond the cornfield's farther fence I ventured to ask Ferry.
"Aaron Goldschmidt," he whispered, as we descended into a dry, tangled swamp. In the depths of this wild, beside a roofed pen of logs stored with half a dozen bales of cotton, we were presently in the company of a very small man who tossed a hand in token of great amusement.
"Hello, Ned!" he whispered in antic irony; "what an accident is dat, meeding so! Whoever is expecting someding like dis!"
"Well, I hope nobody, Isidore; I hardly expected it myself, your father set those candles so close the one behind the other."
Isidore doubled with mirth and as suddenly straightened. "Your horse is here since yesterday. She left him—by my father. She didn't t'ink t'e Yankees is going to push away out here to-night. But he is a pusher, t'at Grierson! You want him to-night, t'at horse? He is here by me, but I t'ink you best not take him, hmm? To cross t'e creek and go round t'e ot'er way take you more as all night; and to go back t'is same way you come, even if I wrap him up in piece paper you haven't got a lawch insite pocket you can carry him?" He laughed silently and the next instant was more in earnest than ever.
"She is in a tight place! She hires my mother's pony to ride in to headquarters." He called them hatekvartuss, but we need not. "I t'ink she is not a prisoner—unless—she wants to come back." He doubled again. "Anyhow, I wish you can see her to-night; she got another doll-baby for t'e gildren, and she give you waluable informations by de hatfull…. Find her? I tell you how you find her in finfty-nine minutes—vedder permitting, t'at is."
The last phrase was fitted to a listening pose, and the first mutter of the pending thunder-storm came out of the northwest. Then Isidore hastened through the practical details of his proposition. Ferry drew a breath of enthusiasm. "Can I have my horse, bridled and saddled, in three minutes?"
"I pring um in two!" said Isidore, and vanished. Ferry turned with an overmastering joy in every note of his whispered utterance. "After all!" he said, and I could have thrown my arms around him in pure delight to hear duty and heart's desire striking twelve together.
"Smith," he asked, "can you start back without me? Then go at once; I shall overtake you on my horse."
I stole through the cornfield safely; the frequent lightnings were still so well below the zenith as to hide me in a broad confusion of monstrous shadows. But when I came to cross the road no crouching or gliding would do. I must go erect and only at the speed of some ordinary official errand. So I did, at a point between two opposite fence-gaps, closely after an electric gleam, and I was rejoicing in the thick darkness that followed, when all at once the whole landscape shone like day and I stood in the middle of the road, in point-blank view of a small squad, a "visiting patrol". They were trotting toward me in the highway, hardly a hundred yards off. As the darkness came again and the thunder crashed like falling timbers, I started into the cotton-field at an easy double-quick. The hoofs of one horse quickened to a gallop. A strong wind swept over, big rain-drops tapped me on the shoulder and pattered on the cotton-plants, the sound of the horse's galloping ceased as he turned after me in the soft field, and presently came the quiet call "Halt, there, you on foot." I went faster. I knew by my pursuer's coming alone that he did not take me for a Confederate, and that the worst I should get, to begin with, would be the flat of his sabre. Shrewdly loading my tongue with that hard northern r which I hated more than all unrighteousness, I called back "Oh, I'm under orders! go halt some fool who's got time to halt!"
I obliqued as if bound for the headquarters fire where we had seen the singers, the lightning branched over the black sky like tree-roots, the thunder crashed and pounded again, the wind stopped in mid-career, and the rain came straight down in sheets. "Halt!" yelled the horseman. He lifted his blade, but I darted aside and doubled, and as he whirled around after me, another rider, meeting him and reining in at such close quarters that the mud flew over all three of us, lifted his hand and said—
"He is right, sergeant, he is carrying out my orders." Ferry's black silk handkerchief about his neck covered his Confederate bars of rank, and the Federal may or may not have noted the absence of shoulder-straps; our arms remained undrawn; and so the sergeant, catching a breath or two of disconcertion, caught nothing else. While Ferry spoke on for another instant I showed my heels; then he left the dripping Yankee mouthing an angry question and loped after me, and over the low fence went the two of us almost together.
Kendall was not there, the Federal camp-makers had tardily repaired their blunder by posting guards; but these were not looking for their enemies from the side of their own camp, and as we cleared the fence in the full blaze of a lightning flash, only two or three wild shots sang after us. In the black downpour Ferry reached me an invisible hand. I leapt astride his horse's croup, and trusting the good beast to pick his way among the trees himself, we sped away. Soon we came upon our three men waiting with the horses, and no great while afterward the five of us rejoined our command. The storm lulled to mild glimmerings and a gentle shower, and the whole company, in one long single file, began to sweep hurriedly, stealthily, and on a wide circuit of obscurest byways, deeper than ever into the enemy's lines.
From certain rank signs of bad management in the Federal camp one could easily guess that our circuit was designed to bring us around to its rear. That a colonel's tent—the one where the singers were—was not where the colonel's tent belonged was a trifle, but the slovenliness with which the forest borders of the camp were guarded was a graver matter. Evidently those troops were at least momentarily in unworthy hands, and I was so remarking to Kendall when a murmured command came back from Ferry, to tell Dick Smith to stop that whispering. I was sorry, for I wanted to add that I knew we were not going to attack the camp itself. That was on Wednesday night. Charlotte and Gholson had made their ride of fifty miles on Monday. The friends with whom she stopped at nightfall contrived to cram him into their crowded soldiers' room, and he had given the whole company of his room-mates, as they sat up in their beds, a full account of the fight at Sessions's, Charlotte's care of the sick and dying, and the singing, by her and the blue-coats, of their battle-song. Next morning Charlotte, without Gholson—who turned off to camp—rode on to Goldschmidt's store, just beyond which there was then still a Confederate picket. Here she hired Mrs. Goldschmidt's pony, rode to the picket, and presented the Coralie Rothvelt pass.
"Miss Coralie Rothvelt; yes, all right," said the officer, "the men that rode with you this morning told me all about you." He went with her as far as his videttes, and thence she rode alone to a picket of the Federal army and by her request was conducted under guard to the headquarters of a corps commander. To him and his chief-of-staff she told the fate of Jewett's scouts and delivered the messages of their dying leader; and then she tendered the hero's sword.
The staff-officer cut away its cornhusk wrapping and read aloud the owner's name on the hilt. The General laid the mighty weapon across his palm and sternly shut his lips. "How did you get through the enemy's pickets with this?"
"I had a Confederate general's pass."
"Ah! Is the Confederate general as nameless as yourself?"
"I am not nameless; I only ask leave to withhold my name until I have told one or two other things."
"But you don't mind confessing you're an out-and-out rebel sympathizer?"
Under the broad-brimmed hat her smile grew to a sparkle. "No, I enjoy it."
The chief-of-staff smiled, but the General darkened and pressed his questions. At length he summed up. "So, then, you wish me to believe that you did all you did, and now have come into our lines at a most extraordinary and exhausting speed and running the ugliest kinds of risks, in mere human sympathy for a dying stranger, he being a Union officer and you a secessionist of"—a courtly bow—"the very elect; that's your meaning, is it not?"
"No, General; in the first place, I am not one of any elect."
A flattering glimmer of amusement came into the two men's faces, but some change in Charlotte's manner arrested it and brought an enhanced deference.
"In the second place, I am not here merely on this errand."
"Oh!"
"No, General. And in the last place, my motive in this errand is no mere sympathy for any one person; I am here from a sense of public duty—" The speaker seemed suddenly overtaken by emotions, dropped her words with pained evenness, and fingered the lace handkerchief in her lap.
"Pardon," interrupted the General, "the sunlight annoys you. Major, will you drop that curtain?" "Thank you. One thing I am here for, General, is to tell you something, and I have to begin by asking that neither of you will ever say how you learned it."
The two men bowed.
"Thank you. Please understand, also, I have never uttered this but to one friend, a lady. There was no need; I have not wanted aid or counsel, even from friends. But I feel duty bound to tell it to you, now, because, for one thing, the brave soldier who wore that sword—" Her eyes rose to the weapon and fell again; she bit her lip.
"Yes—well—what of him?"
"He was lured to disaster and death by a man whose supreme purpose was, and is to-day, revenge upon me. That man drew him to his ruin purely in search of my life." Charlotte sat with her strange in-looking, out-looking gaze holding the gaze of her questioner until for relief he spoke.
"Why, young lady, it's hard to doubt anything you say, but really that sounds rather fanciful. Why should you think it?"
"I do not think it, I know it. He sends me his own assurance of it by his own father, so that his revenge may be fuller by my knowing daily and hourly that he is on my trail."
"And you appeal to me for protection?"
She smiled. "No. I am not seeking to divert his fury from myself, but to confine it to myself. Fancy yourself a human-hearted woman, General, and murder being done day by day because you are alive." "Oh, this is incredible! What is its occasion, its origin? How are you in any way responsible?"
"Why, largely I am not. Yet in degree I am, General, because of shortcomings of mine—faults—errors—that—oh—that have their bearing in the case, don't you see?"
"No, I don't; pray don't ask me to draw inferences; I might infer too much."
"Yes, you might, easily," said Charlotte; "for I only mean shortcomings of the kind we readily excuse in others though we never can or should pardon them in ourselves."
The General turned an arch smile of perplexity upon his chief-of-staff.
"I don't think we're quite up to that line of perpetual snow,
Walter, are we?"
The chief-of-staff "guessed they were not."
Charlotte resumed. "I have come to you in the common interest, to warn you against that man. I believe he is on his way here to offer his services as a guide. He is fearless, untiring, and knows all this region by heart."
"Union man, I take it, is he not?"
"No, he's Federal, Confederate or guerilla as it may suit his bloody ends."
"And you want me not to make use of him."
"Oh, more than that; I want him stopped!—stopped from killing and burning on his and my private account. But I want much more than that, too. I know how you commonly stop such men."
"We hang them to the first tree."
"Yes, our side does the same. If I wanted such a fate to overtake him I should only have to let him alone. At risks too hideous to name I have saved him from it twice. I am here to-day chiefly to circumvent his purposes; but if I may do so in the way I wish to propose to you, I shall also save him once more. I am willing to save him—in that way—although by so doing I shall lose—fearfully." She dropped her glance and turned aside.
"How do you propose to circumvent and yet save him?"
"By getting you to send him so far to your own army's rear that he cannot get back; to compel him to leave the country; to go into your country, where law and order reign as they cannot here between the lines."
"And you consider that a reasonable request?"
"Oh, sir, I must make it! I can ask no less!"
"But you say if this scheme works you lose by it. What will you lose?"
"I may lose track of him! If I lose track of him I may have to go through a long life not knowing whether he is dead or alive."
"And suppose—why,—young lady, I thought you were unmarried. I—oh, what do you mean; is he—?"
Charlotte's head drooped and her hands trembled. "Yes, by law and church decree he is my husband."
"Good Heaven!" murmured the General, drew a breath, and folded his arms.
"But, madam! if a man abandons his wife—"
"I abandoned him."
"Good for you!" "It was vital for me. But I did it on evidence which our laws ignore, the testimony of slaves. Oh, General, don't try to untangle me; only stop him!"
"Ah! madam, I'll do the little I can. How am I to know him?"
"By a pistol-wound in his right hand, got last week. He would have got it in his brain but for my pleading. His name is Oliver."
"Oliver; hmm! any relation to Charlotte Oliver, your so called newspaper correspondent? I'd like to stop her.—How?—I don't quite hear you."
"I am Charlotte Oliver."
The two officers glanced sharply at each other. When the General turned again he flushed resentfully. "Have you never resumed your maiden name?"
"Never."
"Then, madam, tell me this! With a whole world of other people's names to choose from, why have you borrowed Charlotte Oliver's? Have you come here determined to be sent to prison, Miss Coralie Rothvelt?"
Charlotte did not move an eyelash. Gradually a happy confidence lighted her face. "Freedom or prison is to me a secondary question. I came here determined to use only the truth. No wild creature loves to be free more than I do. I want to go back into our lines, and to go at once; but—I am Charlotte Oliver."
"Young lady, listen to me. I know your story is nearly all true. I know some good things about you which you have modestly left out; one of the rebels who stopped where you did last night and rode with you this morning was brought to me a prisoner half an hour ago. But he said your name was Rothvelt. How's that?"
"Unfortunately, General, my name is Charlotte Oliver. Two or three times I have had use for so much concealment as there was in the childish prank of turning my name wrong side out." The speaker made a sign to the chief-of-staff: "Write the two names side by side and see if they are not one."
He was already doing so, and nodded laughingly to his superior. Charlotte spoke on. "I tell you the truth only, gentlemen, though I tell you no more of it than I must. I have run many a risk to get the truth, and to get it early. If it is your suspicion that by so doing, or in any other way, I have forfeited a lady's liberty, let me hear and answer. If not—"
"Oh, I'll have to send you to the provost-martial at Baton Rouge and let you settle that with him."
"Ah, no, General! By the name of the lady you love best, I beg you to see my need and let me go. I promise you never henceforth to offend your cause except in that mere woman's sympathy with what you call rebellion, for which women are not so much as banished by you—or if they are, then banish me! Treat me no better, and no worse, than a 'registered enemy'!"
The General shook his head. "Your registration has been in the open field of military action; sometimes, I fear, between the lines. At least it has been with your pen."
"General, I have laid down the pen."
"Indeed! to take up what?"
"The spoon!" said Charlotte, with that smile which no man ever wholly resisted. "I leave the sword and its questions to my brother man, in the blue and in the gray—God save it!—and have pledged myself to the gray, to work from now on only under the yellow flag of mercy and healing."
"Yes, of course; mercy—and comfort—and every sort of unarmed aid—to rebels."
"To the men you call so, yes. Yet I pledge you, General, to deal as tenderly with every man in blue who comes within range of my care as I did with Captain Jewett."
"Oh, I know you did even better than you've told me, but I'd be a fool to send you back on the instant, so. Stay till to-morrow or next day." The captor smiled. "Major, I think we owe the lady that much hospitality."
The Major thought so, and that she must need a day's rest, more than she realized. She could be made in every way comfortable—under guard at "Mr. Gilmer's." The Gilmers were Unionists, whose fine character had been their only protection through two years of ostracism, yet he believed they would treat her well. "Oh! not there, please," said Charlotte; "I hear they are to give some of your officers a dance to-morrow evening!" and there followed a parley that called forth all her playfullest tact. "Oh, no," she said, at one critical point, "I'm not so narrow or sour but I could dance with a blue uniform; but suppose—why, suppose one's friends in gray should catch one dancing with one's enemies in blue. Such things have happened, you know."
"It sha'n't happen to-morrow night," laughed the General.
She offered to nurse the Federal sick, instead, in the command's field-hospital, but no, the General rose to end the interview. "My dear young lady, the saintliest thing we can let you do is to dance at that merrymaking."
She rose. "As a prisoner under guard, General, I can nurse the sick, but
I will not dance."
The General smiled. "I'll take your parole."
"Oh! exact a parole from a woman?"
"Good gracious, why shouldn't I! As for you,—ha!—I'd as soon turn a commissioned rebel officer loose in my camp unparoled as you."
"Then take my parole! I give it! you have it! I'll take the chances."
"And the dances?" asked the Major.
"Very good," said the General, "you are now on parole. See the lady conducted to Squire Gilmer's, Major. And now, Miss—eh,—day after to-morrow morning I shall either pass you beyond my lines or else send you to Baton Rouge. Good-day." When Charlotte found herself alone in a room of the Gilmer house she lay down upon the bed staring and sighing with dismay; she was bound by a parole! If within its limit of time Oliver should appear, "It will mean Baton Rouge for me!" she cried under her breath, starting up and falling back again; "Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Ship Island!" She was in as feminine a fright as though she had never braved a danger. Suddenly a new distress overwhelmed her: if—if—someone to deliver her should come—"Oh Heaven! I am paroled!—bound hand and foot by my insane parole!"
Softly she sprang from the bed, paced the floor, went to the window, seemed to look out upon the landscape; but in truth she was looking in upon herself. There she saw a most unaccountable tendency for her judgment—after some long overstrain—momentarily, but all at once, to swoon, collapse, turn upside down like a boy's kite and dart to earth; an impulse—while fancying she was playing the supremely courageous or generous or clever part—suddenly to surrender the key of the situation, the vital point in whatever she might be striving for. "Ah me, ah me! why did I give my parole?"
At the close of the next day—"Walter," said the General as the chief-of-staff entered his tent glittering in blue and gold,—"oh, thud devil!—you going to that dance?"
All the while that I recount these scenes there come to me soft orchestrations of the old tunes that belonged with them. I am thinking of one just now; a mere potsherd of plantation-fiddler's folk-music which I heard first—and last—in the dance at Gilmer's. Indeed no other so widely recalls to me those whole years of disaster and chaos; the daily shock of their news, crashing in upon the brain like a shell into a roof; wail and huzza, camp-fire, litter and grave; battlefield stench; fiddle and flame; and ever in the midst these impromptu merrymakings to keep us from going stark mad, one and all,—as so many literally did.
The Gilmer daughters were fair, but they were only three, and the Gilmers were the sole Unionists in their neighborhood. "Still, a few girls will come," said Charlotte, sparkling first blue and then black at a sparkling captain who said that, after all, the chief-of-staff had decided he couldn't attend. I know she sparkled first blue and then black, for she always did so when she told of it in later days.
"They say," responded the captain, "that in this handy little world there are always a few to whom policy is the best honesty; is that the few who will come?"
"You are cynical," said Charlotte, "this is only their unarmed way of saving house and home for the brothers to come back to when you are purged out of the land."
When the time came there were partners for eight gallants, and the gallants numbered sixteen. They counted off by twos; the evens waited while the odds danced the half of each set, and then the odds waited and cooled, tried to cool, out on the veranda. But when a reel was called the whole twenty-four danced together, while the fiddler (from the contraband camp) improvised exultant words to his electrifying tunes.
"O ladies ramble in,
Whilst de beaux ramble out,
For to guile[1] dat golden cha—ain.
My Lawdy! it's a sin
Fo' a fiddleh not to shout!
Miss Charlotte's a-comin' down de la—ane!"
[Footnote 1: Coil.]
Now the dance is off, but now it is on again, and again. The fiddler toils to finer and finer heights of enthusiasm; slippers twinkle, top-boots flash, the evens come in (to the waltz) and the odds, out on the veranda, tell one another confidentially how damp they are. Was ever an evening so smotheringly hot! Through the house-grove, where the darkness grows blacker and blacker and the tepid air more and more breathless, they peer toward the hitching-rail crowded with their horses. Shall they take their saddles in, or shall they let them get wet for fear the rebels may come with the shower, as toads do? [Laughter.] One or two, who grope out to the animals, report only a lovely picture: the glowing windows; the waltzers circling by them; in the dining-room, and across the yard in the kitchen, the house-servants darting to and fro as busy as cannoneers; on their elbows at every windowsill, and on their haunches at every door, the squalid field-hands making grotesque silhouettes against the yellow glow that streamed out into the trees.
Now the lightning seems nearer. Hark, that was thunder; soft, but real. At last the air moves; there is a breeze, and the girls come out on the gallants' arms to drink it in. As they lift their brows and sigh their comfort the lightning grows brighter, the thunder comes more promptly and louder, and the maidens flinch and half scream, yet linger for one more draft of the blessed coolness. Suddenly an inverted tree of blinding light branches down the sky, and the thunder crashes in one's very ears; the couples recoil into a group at the door, the lightning again fills heaven and earth, it shows the bending trees far afield, and the thunders peal at each other as if here were all Vicksburg and Port Hudson, with Porter and Farragut going by. So for a space; then the wind drops to a zephyr, and though the sky still blazes and crashes, and flames and roars, the house purrs with content under the sweet strokings of the rain.
Let it pour! the dining-room is the centre of all things; the ladies sip the custards and nibble the cake the gallants cram the cake and gulp the punch. The fiddler-improvisator disappears, reappears, and with crumbs on his breast and pan-gravy and punch on his breath remounts his seat; and the couples are again on the floor. The departing thunders grumble as they go, the rain falls more and more sparingly, and now it is a waltz, and now a quadrille, and now it's a reel again, with Miss Sallie or Louise or Laura or Lucille or Miss Flora "a-comin' down de lane!"
So come the stars again, one by one. In a pause between dances Charlotte and the staff captain go to the veranda's far end and stand against the rail. The night is still very dark, the air motionless. Charlotte is remarking how far they can hear the dripping of the grove, when she gives a start and the captain an amused grunt; a soft, heart-broken, ear-searching quaver comes from just over yonder by the horses. "One of those pesky little screech-owls," he says. "Don't know as I ever heard one before under just these condi'—humph! there's another, around on this side."
"I think I will go in," says Charlotte, with a pretence of languor. As they do so the same note sounds a third time; her pace quickens, and in passing a bright window, with a woman's protecting impulse she changes from his left arm to his right so as to be on the side next the owls. A moment later she is alone in the middle of her room, a lighted candle in one hand, a regally dressed doll in the other, and in her heart the cry, "Oh, Edgard, Edgard, my parole, my parole!"
Once more she is downstairs, in the lane which the dancers are making for their last reel. Two of the gallants have gone out to see the horses, and something keeps them, but there is no need to wait. The fiddle rings a chord! the merry double line straightens down the hall from front door to rear, bang! says the fiddler's foot—"hands round!"—and hands round it is! In the first of the evening they had been obliged to tell the fiddler the names of the dancers, but now he knows them all and throws off his flattering personalities and his overworked rhymes with an impartial rotation and unflagging ardor. Once in a while some one privately gives him a new nickname for the next man "a-comin' down de lane," and as he yawps it out the whole dance gathers new mirth and speed.
Now the third couple clasp hands, arch arms, and let the whole countermarching train sweep through; and a beautiful arch they make, for they are the aforesaid captain and Charlotte Oliver. "Hands round!"—hurrah for the whirling ellipse; and now it's "right and left" and two ellipses glide opposite ways, "to quile dat golden chain." In the midst of the whirl, when every hand is in some other and men and girls are tossing their heads to get their locks out of their eyes, at the windows come unnoticed changes and two men loiter in by the front hall door, close to the fiddler. One has his sword on, and each his pistols, and their boots and mud-splashed uniforms of dubious blue are wet and steamy. The one without the sword gives the fiddler a fresh name to sing out when the spinning ring shall straighten into its two gay ranks again, and bids him—commandingly—to yell it; and with never a suspicion of what it stands for, the stamping and scraping fiddler shouts the name of a man who "loves a good story with a positive passion."
"Come a-left, come a-right,
Come yo' lily-white hand,
Fo' to quile dat golden cha—ain.
O ladies caper light—
Sweetest ladies in de land—
NED FERRY's a-comin' down de la—ane!"
[Illustration: Musical Notation]
Cries of masculine anger and feminine affright filled the hall, but one ringing order for silence hushed all, and the dance stood still with Ned Ferry in its centre. In his right hand, shoulder high, he held not his sword, but Charlotte's fingers lightly poised for the turn in the arrested dance. "Stand, gentlemen, every man is covered by two; look at the doors; look at the windows." The staff captain daringly sprang for the front door, but Ferry's quick boot caught his instep and he struck the floor full length. Like lightning Ferry's sword was out, but he only gave it a deferential sweep. "Sir! better luck next time!—Lieutenant Quinn, put the Captain in your front rank."
Quinn hustled the captives "down a lane," as the fiddler might have said, of Ferry's scouts, mounted them on their own horses at the door, and hurried them away. Charlotte had vanished but was back again in hat and riding-skirt. Ferry caught her hand and they ran to the front veranda steps just as the prisoners and guard rode swiftly from them. Kendall and I had the stirrup ready for her; the saddle was a man's, but she made a horn of its pommel, and in a flash the four of us were mounted. Nevertheless before we could move the grove resounded with shots, and Ferry, bidding us ride on after the fleeing guard, wheeled and galloped to where half our troop were holding back their assailants in the dark. But then, to our distraction, Charlotte would not fly. "Richard, I'm paroled!"—"Charlotte Oliver, you're my prisoner!" I reached for her bridle, but she avoided me and with a cry of recollection wheeled and was on her way back. "I forgot something! I can get it, I left the room lighted!"
I remember vividly yet the high purpose and girlish propitiation that rang together in her voice. Kendall dashed after her while I went against a wet bough that all but threw me; but before he could reach her she flew up the steps, crying "Hold my horse!"
"Mine, too!" I cried, springing up after her. How queerly the inner house stood alight and silent, its guests and inmates hidden, while outside pistols and carbines flashed and cracked. I came upon Charlotte, just recrossing her chamber to leave it, with her doll in her arms. "Come!" I cried, "our line is falling back behind the house!" Her head flinched aside, a bit of her hat flew from it, and a pistol-ball buried itself in the ceiling straight over my head. We ran downstairs together, pulling, pushing and imploring each other in the name of honor, duty and heaven to let him—let her—go out first through the bright hall door. Kendall was not in sight, but in a dim half-light a few yards off we saw Oliver. He was afoot, bending low, and gliding toward us with his revolver in his left hand. He fired as I did; her clutch spoiled my aim; with eager eyes she straightened to her finest height, cried "Richard! tell Lieutenant Ferry he—" and with a long sigh sank into my arms. A rush of hoofs sounded behind Oliver, he glanced up, and Ferry's blade fell across his brow and launched him face upward to the ground. I saw a bunch of horses, with mine, at the foot of the steps, and a bunch of men at the top; Ferry snatched Charlotte's limp form from me and said over his shoulder as he went down the steps, "Go get him and bring him along, dead or alive!"
I called a man to my aid and was unlucky in not getting the cool-headed Kendall, for my own wits were gone. The next moment all had left us and I was down on the ground toiling frantically, with no help but one hand of my mounted companion, to heave the stalwart frame of Oliver up to my saddle.
"Why, he's dead!" cried the lad, letting him slide half-way down when we had all but got him up; "don't you see he's dead? His head's laid wide open! He's as dead as a mackerel! I'll swear we ain't got any right to get captured trying to save a dead Yankee."
I was in despair; our horses had caught our frenzy and were plunging to be after their fellows, and a fresh body of the enemy were hurtling into the grove. Dropping my burden I vaulted up, and we scurried away, saved only by the enemy's healthy fear of an ambush. The first man we came up with was Quinn, with the rear-guard. "Is he dead?" he growled.
"Dead as Adam!" said I, and my comrade put in "Head laid wide open!"
"Drop back into the ranks," said Quinn to him. "Smith, ride on to Lieutenant Ferry. Corporal,"—to a man near him—"you know the way so well, go with him."
The two of us sprang forward. How long or what way we went I have now no clear idea, but at length we neared again the grapevine ferry. The stream was swollen, we swam our horses, and on the farther side we found Kendall waiting. To the corporal's inquiry he replied that Ferry had just passed on. "You know Roy's; two miles off the Plank Road by the first right? He expects to stop there."
"Is she alive, Kendall?" I interrupted. "Is she alive?"
"No," said he, to some further question of the corporal; "I'm to wait here for the command."
"Is she alive, Kendall?" I asked again.
"Hello, Smith." He scanned my dripping horse. "Your saddle's slipped,
Smith. Yes, she's alive."
"There they are!" said the corporal and I at the same moment, when we had been but a few minutes on the Plank-road. Two men were ahead of us riding abreast, and a few rods in front of them was a third horseman, apparently alone. Two others had pushed on, one to the house, the other for surgical aid. The two in the rear knew us and let us come up unchallenged; the corporal stayed with them, and I rode on to my leader's side.
Charlotte lay in his double clasp balanced so lightly on the horse's crest as hardly to feel the jar of his motion, though her head lay as nearly level with it as Ferry's bending shoulders and the hollow of his lowered right arm would allow; from under his other arm her relaxed figure, in its long riding-skirt, trailed down over his knee and stirrup; her broad limp hat, as if it had been so placed in sport, hung at his back with its tie-ribbons round his throat, while the black masses of her hair spread in ravishing desolation over and under his supporting arm. Her face was fearfully pale, the brows glistened with the damp of nervous shock, and every few moments she feebly brought a handkerchief to her lips to wipe away the blood that rose to them with every sigh. Steadfastly, except when her eyes closed now and then in deathly exhaustion, her gaze melted into his like a suffering babe's into its mother's. From time to time a brief word passed between them, and with joy I noticed that it was always in French; I hoped with my whole heart and soul that they had already said things, and were saying things yet, which no one else ought to hear. I waited some time for his notice, and when he gave it it was only by saying to her in a full voice and in English "Dick Smith is here, alongside of us."
Her response was a question, which he repeated: "Is he hurt? no, Richard never gets hurt. Shall he tell us whatever he knows?"
He bent low for the faint reply, and when it came he sparkled with pride. "'It matters little,' she says, 'to either of us, now.' Give your report; but I tell you"—there came a tiger look in his eyes—"there is now no turning back; we shall go on." I answered with soft elation: "My news needn't turn you back: Oliver is dead."
He drew a long breath, murmured "My God!" and then suddenly asked "You found him so, or—?"
"We found him so; had to leave him so; head laid wide open; we were about to be captured—thought the news would be better than nothing—"
"Certainly, yes, certainly. Now I want you to ride to the brigade camp and telegraph Miss Harper this: 'She needs you. Come instantly. Durand.'"—I repeated it to him.—"Right," he said. "Send that first; and after that—here is a military secret for you to tell to General Austin; I think you like that kind, eh? Tell him I would not send it verbally if I had my hands free. You know that regiment at whose headquarters we saw them singing; well, tell him they are to make a move to-day, a bad mistake, and I think if he will stay right there where he is till they make it, we can catch the whole lot of them. As soon as they move I shall report to him."
Two gasping words from Charlotte brought his ear down, and with a worshipping light in his eyes he said to her "Yes,—yes!" and then to me, "Yes, I shall report to him in person. Now, Smith, the top of your speed!"
Reveillé was sounding as I entered the camp. In the middle of my story to the General—"Saddle my horse," he said to an attendant, "and send Mr. Gholson to me. Yes, Smith, well, what then?"—I resumed, but in a minute—"Mr. Gholson, good-morning. My compliments to Major Harper, Mr. Gholson, and ask him if he wouldn't like to take a ride with me; and let me have about four couriers; and send word to Colonel Dismukes that I shall call at his headquarters to see him a moment, on my way out of camp. Now, Smith, you've given me the gist of the matter, haven't you? Oh, I think you have; good-morning."
Gholson had helped me get the despatch off to Miss Harper, whose coming no one could be more eager to hasten. Before leaving camp I saw him again. He was strangely reticent; my news seemed to benumb and sicken him. But as I remounted he began without connection—"You see, she'll be absolutely alone until Miss Harper gets there; not a friend within call! He won't be there, she won't let him stay; she dislikes him too much; I know that, Smith. Why, Smith, she wouldn't ever 'a' let him carry her off the field if she'd been conscious; she'd sooner 'a' gone to Ship Island, or to death!" He looked as though he would rather she had. His tongue, now it had started, could not stop. "Ned Ferry can't stay by her; he mustn't! he hadn't ought to use around anywheres near her."
I gave a sort of assent—attended with nausea—and turned to my saddle, but he clung. "Why, how can he hang around that way, Smith, and he a suitor who's just killed her husband? Of course, now, he'd ought to know he can't ever be one henceforth. I'm sorry for him, but—"
"Good-morning," I interrupted, quite in the General's manner, and made a spirited exit, but it proved a false one; one thing had to be said, and I returned. "Gholson, if she should be worse hurt than—" "Ah! you're thinking of the chaplain; I've already sent him. Yonder he goes, now; you can show him the way."
"Understand," I said as I wheeled, "I fully expect her to recover."
"Yes, oh, yes!" replied my co-religionist, with feverish zest; "we must have faith—for her sake! But o—oh! Smith, what a chastening judgment this is against dancing!"
I moved away, looking back at him, and seeing by his starved look how he was racking his jaded brain for some excuse to go with me, I honestly believe I was sorry for him. The chaplain was a thick-set, clean-shaven, politic little fellow whose "Good-mawning, brothah?" had the heavy sweetness of perfumed lard. We conversed fluently on spiritual matters and also on Ned Ferry. He asked me if the Lieutenant was "a believer."
"Why," said I, "as to that, Lieutenant Ferry believes there's something right about everything that's beautiful, and something wrong about everything that isn't. Now, of course that's a very dangerous idea, and yet—" So I went on; ah me! the nightmare of it hangs over me yet, "religionist" though I am, after a fashion, unto this day. In Ferry's defence I maintained that only so much of any man's religion as fitted him, and fitted him not as his saddle or his clothes, but as his nervous system fitted him, was really his, or was really religion. I said I knew a man whose ready-made religion, small as it was, bagged all over him and made him as grotesque as a child in his father's trousers. The chaplain tittered so approvingly that I straightened to spout again, but just then we saw three distant figures that I knew at a glance.
"There he is, now!—Excuse me, sir—" I clapped in the spurs, but the chaplain clattered stoutly after me. The two horsemen moving from us were the General and Major Harper, and the one meeting them was Ned Ferry. Between the three and us rose out of a hollow the squad of couriers. And yonder came the sun.
I could see by Ferry's face that there was no worse news. He met me aside, and privately bade me go to Roy's (where Charlotte was). "Kendall is there," he said; "I leave you and him in charge. That will rest your horses. Kendall has your Yankee horse, his own is sick. You and Kendall get all the sleep you can, you may get none to-night."
"Lieutenant," I began eagerly as he was drawing away, "is—?"
"Yes! oh, yes, yes!" His eyes danced, and a soft laugh came, as happy as a child's. "The surgeon is yonder, he will tell you."
This person Kendall and I had the luck to meet at the Roy's breakfast-table. "Yes, left lung," he said. "No, hardly 'perforated,' but the top deeply grazed." The ball, he said, had passed on and out, and he went into particulars with me, while I wondered if Kendall knew, as I did, what parts of the body the pleura, the thorax, the clavicle and the pyemia were.
We lay down to sleep on some fodder in the Widow Roy's stable, while around three sides of the place, in a deep wooded hollow, Quinn and the company, well guarded by hidden videttes, drowsed in secret bivouac. I dreamed. I had feared I should, and it would have been a sort of bitter heart's-ease to tell Kendall of my own particular haunting trouble. For now, peril and darkness, storm, hard riding, the uproar and rage of man-killing, all past and gone, my special private wretchedness came back to me bigger than ever, like a neglected wound stiffened and swollen as it has grown cold. But Kendall would not talk, and when I dreamed, my dream was not of Camille. It seemed to me there was a hot fight on at the front, and that I, in a sweat of terror, was at the rear, hiding among the wagons and telling Gholson pale-faced lies as to why I was there. All at once Gholson became Oliver, alive, bloody-handed, glaring on me spectrally, cursing, threatening, and demanding his wife. His head seemed not "laid wide open," but to have only a streak of the skull bared by Ferry's glancing left-cut and a strip of the scalp turned inside out. Cécile drew his head down and showed it to me, in a transport of reproaches, as though my false report had wronged no one else so ruinously as her.
I awoke aghast. If Kendall had still been with me I might, in the first flush of my distress, have told my vision; but in the place where Kendall had lain lay Harry Helm. Kendall was gone; a long beam of afternoon sunlight shone across my lair through a chink in the log stable. I sprang half up with an exclamation, and Harry awoke with a luxurious yawn and smile. Kendall, he said, had left with the company, which had marched. Quinn was in command and had told Harry that he was only going to show the enemy that there was no other hostile force in their front, and get himself chased away southeastward.
"I don't know whether he was telling me the truth or not," said Helm, as we led our saddled horses toward the house; "I reckon he didn't want me alongside of him with this arm in a sling." The hand was bad; lines of pain were on the aide's face. He had taken the dead Louisianian home, got back to camp, and ridden down here to get the latest news concerning Charlotte. Kendall had already given him our story of the night; I had to answer only one inquiry. "Oh, yes," was my reply, "head laid wide open!" But to think of my next meeting with Ned Ferry almost made me sick.
Harry was delighted. "That lays their way wide open—Ned's and hers! Smith, some God-forsaken fool brought a chaplain here to talk religion to her! He hasn't seen her—Doctor wouldn't let him; but he's here yet, and—George! if I was them I'd put him to a better use than what he came here for, and I'd do it so quick it would make his head swim!" He went on into all the arguments for it; the awkwardnesses of Charlotte's new situation, her lack of means for even a hand-to-mouth daily existence, and so on. Seeing an ambulance coming in through the front gate, and in order not to lose the chance for my rejoinder, I interrupted. "Lieutenant, she will not allow it! She will make him wait a proper time before he may as much as begin a courtship, and then he will have to begin at the beginning. She's not going to let Ned Ferry narrow or lower her life or his—no, neither of them is going to let the other do it—because a piece of luck has laid the way wide open!" I ended with a pomp of prophecy, yet I could hear Ned Ferry saying again, with Charlotte's assenting eyes in his, "There is no turning back."
The driver of the ambulance did not know why he had been ordered to report here, but when the Widow Roy came to the door she brought explanation enough. A courier had come to her and gone again, and the chaplain and the surgeon and every one else of any "army sort" except us two had "put out," and she was in a sad flurry. "The Lieutenant," she said, "writes in this-yeh note that this-yeh place won't be safe f'om the Yankees much longer'n to-day, and fo' us to send the wounded lady in the avalanch. Which she says, her own self, it'd go rough with her to fall into they hands again. My married daughter she's a-goin' with her, and the'd ought to be a Mr. Sm'—oh, my Lawdy! you ain't reg-lahly in the ahmy, air you?"
With some slave men to help us, Harry and I bore Charlotte out and laid her in the ambulance, mattress and all, on an under bedding of fodder. She had begged off from opiates, and was as full of the old starlight as if the day, still strong, were gone. I helped the married daughter up beside the driver, Harry and I mounted, and we set forth for the brigade camp. Mrs. Roy's daughter had with her a new romance, which she had been reading to Charlotte. Now she was eager to resume it, and Charlotte consented. It was a work of some merit; I have the volume yet, inscribed to me on the fly-leaf "from C.O.," as I have once already stated, in my account of my friend "The Solitary." At the end of a mile we made a change; Harry rode a few yards ahead with an officer who happened to overtake us, I took the reins from the ambulance driver, and he followed on my horse; I thought I could drive more smoothly than he.
And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.
"Shut it," said Charlotte, with a sigh like that which had risen when the lead first struck her. "If I could be moved ever so little,—" she said.
I had the driver tie my horse behind the vehicle and resume the lines. Then the soldier's wife and I moved Charlotte, and when the reader began to handle the book again wishfully our patient said, with the kindest voice, "Read the rest of it to yourself; I know how it will end; it will end to please you, not as it ought; not as it ought."
For a while we went in silence, and she must have seen that my heart was in a rage, for with suffering on her brow, amusement on her lips, and a sweet desperation in her eyes, she murmured my name. "Richard:—what fun it must have been to live in those old Dark Ages—when all you had to do—was to turn any one passion into—one splendid virtue—at the expense—of all the rest."
I could answer pleadingly that it were far better not to talk now. But she would go on, until in my helplessness I remarked how beautiful the day had been. Her eyes changed; she looked into mine with her calm inward-outward ken, and once more with smiling lips and suffering brow murmured, "Yes." I marvelled she should betray such wealth of meaning to such as I; yet it was like her splendid bravery to do it.
At the brigade's picket, where I was angry that Ferry did not meet us, and had resumed the saddle and stretched all the curtains of the ambulance, who should appear but Scott Gholson. Harry and I were riding abreast in advance of the ambulance. Gholson and he barely said good-evening. I asked him where was Lieutenant Ferry, and scarcely noted his words, so promptly convinced was I by their mere tone that he had somehow contrived to get Ferry sent on a distant errand. "Is she better?" he inquired; "has the hemorrhage stopped?"
"It's begun again," growled Harry, who wanted both of us to suffer all we could. Gholson led us through the camp. A large proportion of the men were sleeping when as yet it was hardly night.
"Has the brigade got marching orders?" I asked, and he said the three regiments had, though not the battery. He passed over to me two pint bottles filled, corked, and dangling from his fingers by a stout double twine on the neck of each. "Every man has them," he said; "hang one on each side of your belt in front of your pistol."
I held them up and scowled from them to Harry, and we both laughed, so transparent was Gholson's purpose to get every one away from our patient who yearned to be near her. "One in front of each pistol," I said, so tying them; "but use the pistols first, I suppose."
"Yes," replied Gholson, "pistols first, and then the turpentine." Whereat Harry and I exchanged glances again, it came so pat that Scott Gholson should be a dispenser of inflammables. At a house a mile behind the camp the surgeon stood waiting for us. He frowned at me the instant he saw Charlotte, and I heard him swear. As we bore her in with Gholson and me next her head she murmured to him:
"Mr. Gholson, when does the command move?"
"At twelve," he replied, and I bent and softly added "That's why—"
"Yes," she said, with a quick, understanding look, and wiped her lips as daintily as if it were with wine they were crimsoned.
On my way back through camp with Gholson I saw old Dismukes. He called me to him, quit his cards, and led me into his tent. There, very beguilingly, he questioned me at much length, evidently seeking to draw from the web of my replies the thread of Ferry's and Charlotte's story; and as I saw that he believed in both of them with all his brutal might, I let him win a certain success. "Head laid wide open!" he said gleefully, and boiled over with happy blasphemings.
I left him, found supper, and had been long asleep tinder a tree, when I grabbed savagely at some one for silently shaking me, and found it was Ned Ferry. His horse's bridle was in his hand; his face was more filled with the old pain than I had ever seen it; he spoke low and hurriedly. "Come, tell me what this means."
In an envelope addressed to him in the handwriting I had first seen at Lucius Oliver's I found a scripture-text, a heading torn from a tract which the chaplain may have sent in to Charlotte in the morning. I turned it to the light of my fire. Under this printed line she had pencilled her name.
I asked if he had seen her. "Ah, no! the Doctor has drugged her to sleep; but that woman who came with you was still in the parlor, reading a book, and she gave me this. What does it mean?"
"Lieutenant," I replied, choking with dismay, "why mind her meanings now? Ought you not rather to ignore them? She is fevered, dejected, overwrought. Why, sir, she is the very woman to say and mean things now which she would never say or mean at any other time!" But my tone must have shown that I was only groping in desperation after anything plausible, and he waved my suggestions away.
"The Doctor says that woman has been reading her an exciting story."
"Yes, and that helps to account—"
"Richard, it helps the wrong way; I know that story. After hearing that story she is, yes! the one woman of all women to send me this."
I took it again. The signature was extended in full, with the surname blackly underlined. The first clause of the print, too, was so treated. "Keep thy heart," it read; "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.—Charlotte Oliver."
"Why, Lieutenant, that is just what you have done—"
"You think so? But I have done. I will keep it no longer! Ah, I never kept it; 'twas she! Without taking it from me she kept it—'with all diligence'; otherwise I should have lost it—and her, too—and all that is finest and hardest to keep—long ago. Give me that paper; come; saddle up; you may go with me if you want, as my courier." No bugle had sounded, yet the whole camp was softly and diligently astir. We rode toward the staff tents; the pulse of enterprise enlivened him once more, though he clung to the same theme. "I have her heart now, Smith, and I will keep that with all diligence, for out of that are the issues of my life—if I live. And if I do live I will have her if I have to steal her even from herself, as last night from the Yankees."
Three hours later the stars still gleamed down through the balmy night above the long westward-galloping column of our brigade, that for those three hours had not slackened from the one unmitigated speed. The Federal regiment of whose plans Charlotte had apprised Ferry had been camped well to southward of this course, but in the day just past they had marched to the north, intending a raid around our right and into our rear. To-night they were resting in a wide natural meadow through the middle of which ran this road we were on. Around the southern edge of this inviting camp-ground by a considerable stream of water; the northern side was on rising ground and skirted by woods, and in these woods as day began to break stood our brigade, its presence utterly unsuspected in all that beautiful meadow whitened over with lane upon lane of the tents of the regiment of Federal cavalry, whose pickets we had already silently surprised and captured. Now, as warily as quails, we moved along an unused, woodcutters' road and began to trot up a gentle slope beyond whose crest the forest sank to the meadow. We were within a few yards of this crest, when a small mounted patrol came up from the other side, stood an instant profiled against the sky, bent low, gazed, wheeled and vanished.
Over the crest we swept after them at a gallop and saw them half-way down an even incline, going at a mad run and yelling "Saddle up! saddle up! the rebels are coming! saddle up!" The bugles had begun the reveillé; it ceased, and the next instant they were sounding the call To Arms. It was only a call to death; already we were half across the short decline and coming like a tornado; in the white camp the bluecoats were running hither and yon deaf to the brave shoutings of their captains; above the swelling thunder of our hoofs rose the mad yell of the onset; and now carbines peal and pistols crack, and here are the tents so close you may touch them, and yonder is one already in a light blaze, and at every hand and under every horse's foot is the crouching, quailing, falling foe, the air is one crash of huzzas and groans, screams, shots and commands, horses with riders and horses without plunge through the flames and smoke of the burning tents, and again and again I see Ned Ferry with the flat of his unstained sword strike pistol or carbine from hands too brave to cast them tamely down, and hear him cry "Throw down your arms! For God's sake throw down your arms and run to the road! run to the public road!"
And still every moment men fell, and what could we do but smite while the foe's bugles still rang out from beside his unfurled standard. Thitherward sprang a swarm of us and found a brave group massed on foot around the colors, men and officers shoulder to shoulder in sudden equality. I saw Ned Ferry make straight for their commander, who alone had out his sabre; the rest stood with cocked revolvers, and at twenty yards fired low. Ferry's horse was hit; he reared, but the spur carried him on; his rider's sword flashed up and then down, the Federal's sabre turned it, the pistols cracked in our very faces, and down went my leader and his horse into the bottom of the whirlwind, right under the standard. I saw the standard-bearer bring down one of our men on top of Ferry, and as Ferry half regained his feet the Federal aimed point-blank against his breast. But it was I who fired and the Federal who fell. As he reeled I stretched out for the standard, and exactly together Ned Ferry and I seized it—the same standard we had seen the night before. But instantly, graciously, he thrust it from him. "Tis yours!" he cried in the midst of a general huzza, smiling up at it and me as I swung the trophy over my head. Then he turned ghastly pale, his smile faded to an unmeaning stare, two or three men leaped to his side, and he sank lifelessly into their arms beside his dying horse.
I was swinging from the saddle to my leader's relief, when a familiar voice forbade it, and old Dismukes came by at a long trot, pointing forward with the reddest sabre I ever saw, and bellowing to right and left with oaths and curses "Fall in, every man, on yon line! Ride to yon line and fall in, there's more Yankees coming! Ride down yonder and fa'—here, you, Legs, there! follow me, and shoot down every man that stops to plunder!"
Now I saw the new firing-line, out on our left, and as the rattle of it quickened, the Colonel galloped, still roaring out his rallying-cries and wiping his reeking blade across his charger's mane. Throngs gathered after him; the high-road swarmed with prisoners double-quicking to the rear under mounted guards; here, thinly stretched across the road at right-angles, were our horse-holders, steadily, coolly falling back; farther forward, yet vividly near, was our skirmish-line, crackling and smoking, and beyond it the enemy's, in the edge of a wood, not yet quite venturing to fling itself upon us. We passed General Austin standing, mounted, at the top of the rise, with a number of his staff about him. Minie balls had begun to sing about them and us, and some officer was telling me rudely I had no business bringing that standard—when something struck like a sledge high up on my side, almost in the arm-pit; I told one of our men I was wounded and gave him the trophy, our horse-holders suddenly came forward, every man afoot rose into his saddle, and my horse wheeled and hurried rearward at a speed I strove in vain to check. Then the old messmate to whom I had said good-bye at this very hour just a week before, came and held me by the right arm, while I begged him like a drunk-and-disorderly to let me go and find Ned Ferry.
But he said Lieutenant Ferry was in a captured ambulance ahead of us and of our hundreds of prisoners, that a full creek and a burning bridge were between us and the foe, and that the fight was over.
The fight was over only in degree. Our brigade was drawing away into the north and the enemy were pressing revengefully after them. Our hundreds of prisoners and our few wounded were being taken back eastward over the road by which we had come in the night, and even after we had turned into it I saw a Yankee shell kill a wounded man and his horse not thirty yards from me.
Before we had gone another mile I met Harry Helm. The General had left him in camp with flat orders to remain, but at daylight he had ridden out to find us. He was in two tremendous moods at once; lifted to heaven on the glory of our deeds, yet heart-broken over the fate of Ned Ferry. "Surgeon's told him he can't live, Dick! And all the effect that's had—'No opiates, then, Doctor,' s'e, 'till I get off these two or three despatches.' So there he lies in that ambulance cross-questioning prisoners and making everybody bring him every scrap of information, as if he were General Austin and Major Harper rolled into one and they were wounded instead of him—By George! Dick, he knows you're hit and just how you're hit, and has sent me to find you!"
I said I thought I could gallop if Harry could, and in a few minutes we were up with the ambulance. It had stopped. There were several men about it, including Sergeant Jim and Kendall, which two had come from Quinn, and having just been in the ambulance, at Ferry's side, were now remounting, both of them openly in tears. "Hello, Kendall."
"Hello, Smith." He turned sharply from me, horse and all.
"Good-morning, sergeant, is Lieutenant Ferry—worse?"
The sergeant only jabbed in the spurs, and leapt away with Kendall, bearing despatches to the brigade. Harry, looking back to me from the ambulance, called softly, "All right again; it was only a bad swoon!"
"Hello, Smith," said some one whom I was too sick and dizzy to recognize, "one of those prisoners says he saw Oliver dead."
They say two or three men sprang to catch me, but the first thing I knew was that the ambulance was under way and I in it on my back within elbow-touch of Ferry, looking up into a surgeon's face. "How's the Lieutenant?" I asked.
"Oh—getting on, getting on," he replied. Doctors think patients are fools.
In a parlor under the room where Charlotte lay they made a bed for Ferry and one for me, and here, lapped in luxury and distinction, I promptly fell asleep, and when I reopened my eyes it was again afternoon. In the other bed Ferry was slumbering, and quite across the room, beside a closed door, sat Cécile and Camille. The latter tiptoed to me. Her whispers were as soft as breathing, and when I answered or questioned, her ear sank as near as you would put a rose to smell it. "The Lieutenant, sleeping? yes, this hour past; surgeons surprised and more hopeful. Miss Estelle? in another room with other wounded. Her aunt? upstairs with Charlotte, who was—oh—getting on, getting on." That made me anxious.
"Does Charlotte," I asked, "know—everything?"
Camille allowed herself all the motions of a laugh, and said "No, not quite everything;" and then with solemn tenderness she added that Charlotte knew about Ferry. "And she knows about you," the whisperer went on; "they all know."
I thought she was alluding to the verses, and had an instant of terror and rage before I saw what she meant. She glided back to the door and the two opened it an inch or so to answer some inquirer without. I saw her no more until bedtime, when she stood at her aunt's elbow to hand and hold things, while Miss Harper, to my all but screaming embarrassment, bared the whole upper half of one side of me and washed and dressed my wound anew. Ferry it was imperative to let alone, but when I awoke the next morning there was a radiance of joy throughout all the house; for he had slept and improved. The next morning again he was ever so much stronger, and Harry Helm rode off in simulated disgust, not seeing "any fun in hanging round girls who were hanging round other fellows."
Another day arose. A courier brought passes for our three or four other wounded to go home as soon as they were fit to travel, and by night they were all gone. At early bedtime came two surgeons of high rank all the way from Johnston's army up in Mississippi. General Austin had asked this favor by telegraph. Harry had been gone thirty-six hours, and Ferry was just asking if he had not yet got back, when the surgeons came in to the room. A pleasantry or two consumed a few moments. Then the surgeon in charge of us told of a symptom or two, to which they responded only "hmm," and began the examination. Miss Harper sent her three nieces away. I lay and listened in the busy stillness. Presently one of the examiners murmured with a certain positiveness to the other, who after a moment's silence replied with conviction; Miss Harper touched our surgeon's arm inquiringly and he looked back in a glad way and nodded. Miss Harper nodded to me; they had located the ball! Now the conversation turned upon men and events of the day, while one of the visitors, with his back to the patient, opened a case of glittering knives. Presently the professional heads came so close together as quite to hide the patient; they spoke once or twice in a manly soothing tone. Miss Harper stroked my temples to keep me down, one of the busy ones spoke again, and lo! the thing was done, there was the ball in the basin. As the men of blood sped through their kind after-work the news flew to and fro; Camille wept,—since she could not hurrah,—Cécile told Charlotte, the heavenly-minded Estelle was confirmed in her faith, Miss Harper's black eyes, after a brief overflow, were keener and kindlier than ever, and as the surgeons spoke the word "done," Ferry asked again if Harry had not got back yet. Pretty soon Harry did arrive, with news of great feats by our cavalry against our old enemy Grierson, in which Austin's brigade had covered themselves with glory, and in which he had had his own share; his hand was swelled as big as his heart. In all the Confederacy no houseful went to sleep that night in sweeter content. I sank into perfect bliss planning a double wedding.
The next day found me so robustly happy that I was allowed to dress and walk out to the front door. Three days later the surgeons were gone, all three, and at the approach of dew-fall Cécile and Harry, Camille and I, walked in a field-path, gathered hedge roses, and debated the problem of Mrs. Roy's daughter's book, which all of us were reading and none had finished.
"A woman," I remarked, "who, for very love of a man, can say to him, 'Go on up the hill without me, I have a ball and chain on my foot and you shall not carry them and me, you have a race to run,'—a woman so wonderfully good as to say that—"
"Ah, no!" interrupted Cécile, with her killing Creole accent, "not a woman so good to say that, only with the so-good sanse to say it."
Harry was openly vexed. "Well, either way! would any true man leave that woman behind?" and I tried to put in that that was what I had been leading up to; but it makes me smile yet, to recall how jauntily she discomfited us both. She triumphed with the airy ease of a king-bird routing a crow in the upper blue. Camille had more than once told me that Cécile was wise beyond the hope of her two cousins to emulate her; which had only increased my admiration for Camille; yet now I began to see how the sisters came by their belief. In the present discussion she was easily first among the four of us. At the same time her sensuous graces also took unquestionable preëminence; city-bred though she was, she had the guise of belonging to the landscape, or, rather, of the landscape's belonging, by some fairy prerogative, to her. She seemed just let loose into the world, yet as ready and swift to make right use of it as any humming-bird let into a garden; as untimorous as any such, and as elusive. In this sultry June air she had all the animation both of mind and of frame that might have been expected of her on a keen, clear winter day. Her face never bore the same expression at the beginning and middle, or at either of these and the close, of any of her speeches, yet every change was lovely, the sign of a happy play of feeling, and proof of a mercurial intelligence. No report of them by this untrained pen would fully bear me out, and the best tribute I can offer is to avoid the task.
It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former loveliness had increased, and what new nobility it had taken on. That any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had ever conceived of a passion already conscious between Charlotte and Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art.
When we got back to the house Harry detained me on the veranda alone. Camille told me how long I might tarry. It was heaven to have her bit in my mouth, and I found it hard to be grum even when Harry beat with his good hand the rhythm of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes."
"Dick," he said, suddenly grave as he walked me down the veranda, "her cousin Cécile! isn't it awful? Now that poor girl's gone back to Ned's bedside; back to her torture! Why do they let her? My George! it's merciless! Has her aunt no eyes?"
"But, Lieutenant, you don't know she loves him; there are signs, I admit; but proofs, no. She's lost color, and her curves are more slender, but, my goodness! a dozen things might account for that."
"Dick Smith,"—my questioner worked himself up over the rail and sat out on the shelf that held the bucket of drinking-water and its gourd—"do you imagine she didn't know, when we were talking about that book, that she was arguing against the union of Ned Ferry and Charlotte Oliver? Didn't she do it bravely! Richard, my friend, she couldn't have done it if she had suspected us of suspecting her. It's a bleeding pity! And yet you can't side with her, for I just swear Ned's got to have Charlotte Ol'—what? No, he won't overhear a blank word; here's his window shut, right here. He's got to have her, I say, and he's got to have her just as soon as the two of 'em can stand up together to be sworn in! Don't you say so?"
I replied that I was not aware of any one who did not say so.
"Well, I can name several! I don't call Scott Gholson anybody, but there's Major Harper—No, I'm not talking too loud, Ned isn't hearing a word. Major Harper's so hot against this thing that he brought it up, with me, yesterday on the battlefield."
"Major Harper doesn't really know her," I softly remarked.
Harry swore with military energy. "I told him he didn't, and he fairly snorted. We don't know her, he says; you nor I nor his sister nor his niece nor his daughters, oh, we don't know her at all; and neither do we know Ned; Ned has graceful manners, and she's a born actress, and we're simply infatuated by their romantic situation. Good Lordy! he got up on his Charleston pride-of-family like a circus-girl on stilts, and 'Edgard Ferry-Durand has got a great public career before him,' s's he, 'and no true friend will let him think of taking a wife who is all history and no antecedents, a blockade-runner, a spy, and the brand-new widow of a blackguard and a jayhawker she had run away from practically on her wedding-night.' Hy Jo'! the way he went on, you'd 'a' thought he was already Ned's uncle-in-l'—" The speaker's face took a sudden distress—"Great Caesar!" He pointed up to the second-story front room and slipped down from the shelf just as Estelle came out to us with her aunt's message for me to come in.
"How's the fair patient?" I hurried to ask as the three of us went.
"Why, Mr. Smith, she's actually been sitting up—in the twilight—at the open window—while Aunt Martha and I smoothed up her bed." Harry groaned.
"She's still very weak," said Aunt Martha when we came to her; "the moment her bed was made up she asked to lie down again."
"Yes," softly exclaimed Camille, "but, oh, aunt Martha, with such courage in those eyes!"
"Smith," privately asked the agonized Harry, "what would you do if you were in my place; go and cut your throat from ear to ear?"
"No," I said, as black as an executioner, "but I wish you'd done it yesterday."
More days slipped by. Neighbors pressed sweet favors upon us; calls, joyful rumors, delicacies, flowers. One day Major Harper paid us a flying visit, got kisses galore, and had his coat sponged and his buttons reanimated. In the small town some three miles northwest of us he was accumulating a great lot of captured stuff. On another day came General Austin and stayed a whole hour. Ferry took healing delight in these visits, asking no end of questions about the movements afield, and about the personal fortunes of everyone he knew. When the General told him Ferry's scouts were doing better without him than with him—"I thought he would smile himself into three pieces," said the General at the supper-table.
On a second call from Major Harper, when handed a document to open and read, he went through it carefully twice, and then dropping it on the coverlet asked—"and Quinn?"
"Oh, Quinn's turn will come."
"Ah! Major, that is not fair to Quinn!" said Ferry. Yet when he took up the paper again he gazed on it with a happy gravity; it made him a captain. "By the by," he said, "that Yankee horse that Dick Smith captured at Sessions's; I'd like to buy that horse from you, Major." They made the sale. "And there's that captured ambulance still here, Major, with its team eating their heads off."
"Yes, I'm going to take that away with me to-day."
This meant that Charlotte's negro man and his daughter, her maid, had come with her spring-wagon, and Harry and I would have liked the Major better if he had smiled at this point, as he did not. Yet he was most lovable; sent so kind a message up to Charlotte that Harry and I wondered; and received back from her a reply so gracious that—since we could not wonder—we worshipped. In the evening of that day Ferry and Charlotte were transferred, she into the room behind her, and he upstairs into the one out of which she was taken. That night a slave and his wife, belonging to the place, ran away to the enemy. If they should tell the Yankees Ned Ferry was here—! "By Jo'!" said Harry Helm, "I'm glad I didn't cut my throat; I told that darkey, yesterday, Ned's name was O'Brien!"
Toward the close of that day came tidings of the brigade's splendid work at a steamboat-landing on the Mississippi River, how they had stolen in by night between two great bodies of the enemy, burned a vast store of military supplies, and then brilliantly cut their way out; yet we were told to be ready to withdraw into Mississippi again as soon as our newly made captain could safely be moved. Pooh! what of that? Lee was on his way into Pennsylvania; the war was nearly over, sang the Harper girls, and we were the winners! They cheerily saw Helm and me, next morning, ride southward in search of further good news. At a cross-roads I proposed that we separate, and meet there again near the end of the day. He turned west; I went an hour's ride farther south and then turned west myself.
When we met again I knew that he—while he did not know that I—had been to Gilmer's plantation. We wanted to see if the Federals had left a grave there. They had left three, and a young girl who had been one of the dancers told me she had seen Oliver's body carried off by two blue troopers who growled and cursed because they had been sent back to bury it. Neither Harry nor I mentioned the subject when we met at the cross-roads again, for we came on our horses' necks at a stretched out run; the Federals were rolling up from the south battalion after battalion, hoping to find Major Harper's store of supplies feebly guarded and even up with us for that steamboat-landing raid. Presently as we hurried northward we began to hear, off ahead of us on our left, the faint hot give-and-take of two skirmish lines. We came into the homestead grove at a constrained trot and found the ladies out on the veranda in liveliest suspense between scepticism and alarm.
"Yes, they're fighting, now, on the edge of town," we said, "but our boys will keep them there." Our host and hostess moaned their unbelief. "However," added Harry, "I'll go tell the old man to hitch up the little mules and—"
"You dawn't need," said Cécile, "'tis done!" and Camille confirmed her word, while the planter and his wife returned to the kitchen yard, where the servants were loading the smokehouse meat into a wagon to hide it in the woods; Miss Harper and Estelle went into the house, summoned by Charlotte's maid. On Ferry's chamber floor sounded three measured thumps of his scabbarded sword.
"Dick, you answer that," exclaimed Harry, reining in half wheeled; "but keep him on his back, if you have to hold him down!" He spurred away to learn whether we had better stay or fly. I threw my rein to Camille and flew up the hall stairs.
Ferry lay in bed with three pillows behind him and his sheathed sword across his lap. "Good-evening, Richard," he said, "you are returned just in time; will you please hand me my two pistol' from yonder?—thank you." He laid one beside each thigh. "Now please turn the head of my bed a little bit, to face the door—thank you; and now, good-bye. You hear those footstep' there in the room behind? she is dressing to go; the other ladies they are helping her. Richard, I place them in your charge; have them all ready to get into her wagon at a moment's notice, with you on your horse—and you better take that Jewett horse, too; he came to-day."
I hesitated, but a single flash of authority from his eye was enough and I had passed half-way to the door, when, through the window over the front veranda, I saw a small body of horsemen trotting up through the grove. The dusk of the room hid me, but there was no mistaking them. "Too late, Captain," I said, "they've got us."
"How many do you see?"
"About sixteen. Our two horses will be Yankees again to-morrow."
"Ah! not certainly. Where is your carbine?"
"Just outside this door. They know you're here, Captain, they're surrounding the house." As I reached toward the door I heard his sword crawl out, the doorknob clicked without my touching it, the door swung and closed again, and Charlotte Oliver was with us. The light of the western window shone full upon her; she was in the same dress, hat and all, in which I had seen her the night we rode together alone. Though wasted and pale, she betrayed a flush on either cheek and a smile that mated with the sweet earnest of her eyes. She tendered me my carbine, patted my hand caressingly, and glided onward to Ferry's bedside. With my back to them and my ear to the door I hearkened outward. In the front doorway below sounded the jingling tread of cavalry-boots and a clank of sabres.
Charlotte's whisper came to me: "Richard!" Standing by Ferry's pillow she spoke for him. "If they start upstairs come and stand like me, on the other side."
I nodded and slyly opened the door enough to pass half-way out. Some man was parleying with Miss Harper. "Now, madam, you know you haven't locked up your parlor to maintain an abstract right; you've locked it up because you've got the man in there that I've come for."
"Whom have you come for, sir?"
"Lieutenant O'Brien, of the rebel army. Shall I order this man to kick that door in? Answer quickly."
"Sir, there is no Lieutenant O'Brien in there, nor elsewhere in this house; there never has been."
"Stand aside, madam."
"Stop, sir! I command you! There is no Lieutenant of any name on this place!"
"Oh, yes there is; he goes by various names, but one of them is Ned
Ferry. Sergeant, we'll kick together; now!"—Bang!
I leaned back into the room to say "It's all right! Oh, but that sweet woman's a 'coon! Let them batter!" As I thrust my head out again Miss Harper was exclaiming "Oh, sirs, don't do that!"—Bang!—"For the honor of your calling and your flag—" Bang!
"There's no Lieutenant in there." Bang!
"Corporal, go find an axe or something."
"Oh, you need not, sirs, I'll unlock the door."
"Well, be quick about it, and then stand clear; we don't want any woman hurt." The key rattled at the keyhole and then dropped to the floor. "You did that by intention! Give me that key!" He tried the lock. "We've jammed it, corporal, but another good kick will fetch it; now!"—Bang!—crash!—open flew the door.
"Well, I will be damned!" said the officer.
"Sir," said Miss Harper, "you give me no occasion to doubt it." She followed the men upstairs. "Estelle, go back to your sister and cousin; and if you, my dear,"—to our hostess—"will kindly go also, and stay with them—"
I closed the door. It had no key, but there was a small catch to the knob and I turned it on while the men were looking into the adjacent rooms. When they reached ours Miss Harper was again at their front. Inside, the three of us silently noted our strategic advantages: we were in the darkest part of the room, the bed's covering was a dull red, Ferry had on his shirt of black silk, the white pillows were hidden at his back, Charlotte and I were darkly clad, the light from our west window would be in our assailants' faces as they entered, and they would be silhouetted against a similar light from the hall's front. We noiselessly cocked our weapons and Charlotte and I each sank to one knee. "The door is very thin," murmured Ferry, "we can fire before they enter; they will get, anyhow, our smoke, and if they fire as they rush in we can aim under their flash."
It was only then that I observed that Charlotte was armed. But the fact made her seem only the more a true woman, since I knew that only for her honor or his life would she ever take deadly aim. Her weapon was the slender revolver she had carried ever since the day which had made her Charlotte Oliver, the thing without which she never could have reached this hour of blissful extremity.
"In here there is a lady, ill," we heard Miss Harper say.
"Is she alone?"
Ferry prompted in a whisper, the three of us cried "Yes!" and he added "Pass one side from the door, Miss Harper, we are going to shoot through it."
"Hello, in there! Lieutenant Ferry, of Ferry's scouts,"—
"Captain Ferry," retorted Miss Harper, and I echoed the amendment.
"Damn the difference; I give you one half-minute, Captain Ferry, to say you surrender! If you weren't wounded I wouldn't give you that. Corporal, go get a log out of that fireplace downstairs."
"Oh, shame!" wailed Miss Harper, half-way down the hall.
"Captain," called Ferry, "I give you one quarter-minute to get away from that door." He whispered to Charlotte, pointing to a panel of it higher than any one's head.
"Oh, sirs," we again heard Miss Harper cry, "withhold! Captain Ferry, they have called in four more men!" We heard the four downstairs coming at a run. "Oh, sir—"
"Go away, madam!" bellowed the officer as his men thundered into the upper hall. "Now, Captain Ferry, there are six of us here and three under each of your windows. Do you—?"
"Oh, sir, the lady! the sick lady!"
"That's his look-out, madam. If the sick lady isn't Charlotte Oli'—"
"And if she is?" called Ferry, depressing Charlotte's weapon to an aim barely breast high.
"Then throwing away your life won't save hers! Do you surren'—?"
Ferry made a quick gesture for her to shoot low, but she solemnly shook her head and fired through the top of the uppermost panel, and the assault came.
The log burst the door in at a blow, Ferry and I fired, and our foes sprang in. Certainly they were brave; the doorway let them in only by twos, and the fire-log, falling under foot, became a stumbling-block; yet in an instant the room was ringing and roaring with the fray and benighted with its smoke. Their first ball bit the top of my shoulder and buried itself in the wall—no, not their first, but the first save one; for the bureau mirror stood in dim shade, and the Federal leader made the easy mistake of firing right into it. The error sealed his fate; Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the arms of his followers. They replied hotly but blindly, and in a moment the room was void of assailants. Ferry started to spring from the bed, but Charlotte threw her arms about him, and as she pressed her head hard down on his breast I could not help but hear "No, my treasure, my heart's whole treasure, no!"