The Cavalier
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George Washington Cable >> The Cavalier
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"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."
XLII
"CAN I GET THERE BY CANDLE-LIGHT?"
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."
XLIII
"YES, AND BACK AGAIN"
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.
XLIV
CHARLOTTE IN THE TENTS OF THE FOE
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?"
XLV
STAY TILL TO-MORROW
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."
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