The Cavalier

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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.

L

THE BOTTOM OF THE WHIRLWIND

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
reveille; 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.

LI

UNDER THE ROOM WHERE CHARLOTTE LAY

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 Cecile 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,--Cecile 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.

LII

SAME BOOK AND LIGHT-HEAD HARRY

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 Cecile 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 Cecile, with her killing Creole accent, "not a
woman so _good_ to say that, only with the so-good _sanse_ to say it."

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