The Cavalier
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George Washington Cable >> The Cavalier
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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 Cecile 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 preeminence; 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 Cecile! 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."
LIII.
"CAPTAIN, THEY'VE GOT US"
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 Cecile, "'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.
LIV
THE FIGHT IN THE DOORWAY
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!"
LV
RESCUE AND RETREAT
I sprang for the door, but the fire-log sent me sprawling with my
shoulder on the threshold. As I went down I heard in the same breath the
wounded officer wailing "Go back! go in! there are only four of them!
don't leave one alive!" and Miss Harper all but screaming "Our men! our
men! God be praised, our men are coming, they are here! Fly spoilers,
for your lives, fly!"
And it was true. Their hoofs rumbled, their carbines banged, and their
charge struck three sides of the house at once. Rising only to my
elbows,--and how I did that much, stiffened with my wound, the doctors
will have to explain,--I laid my cheek to my rifle, and the light of two
windows fell upon my gunsights. Every blue-coat in the hall was between
me and its rear window, but one besides the officer was wounded, and
with these two three others were busy; only the one remaining man saw
me. Twice he levelled his revolver, and twice I had almost lined my
sights on him, but twice Miss Harper unaware came between us. A third
time he aimed, fired and missed. I am glad he fired first, for our two
shots almost made one report, and-he plunged forward exactly as I had
done over the fire-log, except that he reached the floor dead.
[Illustration: Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the
arms of his followers.]
Thereupon came more things at once than can be told: Miss Harper's
outcry of horror and pity; Charlotte's cry from the bedside--"Richard!
Richard!" a rush of feet and shouts of rage in the hall below; and my
leap to the head of the stairs, shouting to half a dozen gray-jackets
"Two men, no more! two men to guard prisoners, no more! go back, all but
you two! go back!"
A sabreless officer with a bandaged hand flew up the stair and into my
face. It was Helm. "The ladies! Smith, good God! Smith, where are
the girls?"
"In the smokehouse," cried Miss Harper from her knees beside the
prostrate Federal officer; "go bring them!--Richard, Charlotte is
calling you!"
I ran to Ferry's door; Charlotte was leaning busily over his bared
chest, while he, still holding a revolver in his right hand, caressed
her arm with his left. "Dick, his wound has opened again, but we must
get him away at once anyhow. Isn't my wagon still here?--oh, thank God!
there it comes now, I hear it in the back yard!"
A Confederate waiting on Miss Harper with basin and towels barely dodged
me as I sprang to the far end of the hall and shouted down into the yard
for Harry. The little mules, true enough, were just rattling round a
half turn at the lower hall's back door, having been in hiding behind
the stables. A score or so of cavalry were boisterously hurrying off
across the yard with a few captured horses and prisoners, and I had to
call the Lieutenant angrily a second time, to make him hear me amid
their din and a happy confusion which he was helping to keep up in a
fairer group. For here were all the missing feminine members of the
household, white and colored, and Harry was clamorous with joy,
compassion and applause, while Camille and Cecile, pink with weeping,
stepped out across the high doorsill of the smokehouse, leading Ned
Ferry's horse and mine.
However, there was not the urgency for instant flight that Charlotte had
thought there was; night fell; a whole regiment of our mounted infantry
came silently up from the rear of the plantation and bivouacked without
lights behind a quarter of a mile of worm-fence; our two wounded and
three unharmed prisoners, or Miss Harper's, I should say, for it was in
response to her entreaties that the latter had thrown down their arms,
were taken away; the dead man was borne out; lights glowed in every
room, the servants returned to their tasks, a maddening fragrance came
from the kitchen, and the three nieces flitted everywhere in their
benign activities, never discovering the hurt on my shoulder until
everything else on earth had been discovered, and then--"Oh, Richard,
Richard!" from Estelle, with "Reach-hard, Reach-hard!" from Cecile, and
"Mr. Smith!" from Camille, as they bathed and bound it. At length a
surgeon arrived, gave a cheering opinion of Ferry and of Charlotte, and
scolded Harry savagely for the really bad condition of his hand. Then
sounds grew few and faint, our lights went out, we lay down fully
dressed, and nearly all of us, for a while, slept.
But about two in the morning Harry awakened me, murmuring "Reach-hard!
Reach-hard! come! our sick-train's moving. Ssh! General Austin's asleep
in the next room!" I asked where Ferry was. "Already started," he
whispered, "--in the General's own ambulance, with Charlotte Oliver in
hers, on a mattress, like Ned, and the four Harpers in theirs." While we
stole downstairs he murmured on "Our brigade's come up and General
Austin will attack at daylight with this house as his headquarters."
As we mounted I asked whither we were bound. "Tangipahoa," he said;
"then by railroad to Brookhaven, and then out to Squire Wall's."
At the first streak of dawn our slow caravan caught the distant notes of
the battle opening behind us. "That's Fisher's battery!" joyously cried
the aide-de-camp as we paused and hearkened back. "Well, thank the Lord,
this time nobody's got to go back for her doll; she's got it with her; I
saw her, just now, combing its hair." We descended into a woody hollow,
the sounds of human strife died away, and field and forest offered us
only beauty, fragrance, peace, and the love-songs of birds.
LVI
HOTEL DES INVALIDES
A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we
reached our goal. Harry's hand was giving him less trouble, but both my
small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would
allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my
shoulder hot. Miss Harper was "really ill," said the surgeon, but for
whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number
through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition.
"Take you in!" said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; "why, we'd take yo'
whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse'v's!...
Oh, Mr. Smith, you po' _chi--ild!_... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant
Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh's gone on now jess
long enough!"
In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. "You
po' dears, yo're hero-ines, now, and hencefo'th fo'evehmo'!" Harry and I
agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought
alike. We even agreed that Estelle's grasp of earthly realities was not
so feeble as we had thought it.
"Fact is," I said to him, on our first day at the Walls', as he was
leaving the soldiers' room, where I sat under the surgeon's inspection,
"you were totally mistaken about her."
"Yes, I was," he replied; "she's got more sense in a minute than
Camille's got in a week," and shut the door between us.
My blood leaped with rage, yet I sat perfectly calm, while the surgeon
laughed like a hyena. "As soon as you can let me go, Doctor," I frigidly
said, "I shall look up the Lieutenant. I consider that remark
ungentlemanly, and his method of making it as worthy only of a coward."
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