The Cavalier
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George Washington Cable >> The Cavalier
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The surgeon cackled again. "If that man," I dispassionately resumed,
"was not perfectly sure that I am too honorable a gentleman to give Miss
Camille the faintest hint of what he has said, sooner than say it he
would go out and cut his throat from ear to ear."
"Well! you oughtn't to get mad at him for thinking you a gentleman."
"He sha'n't take a low advantage of my being one. You think he's open
and blunt--he's as sly as a mink. He praises the older sister at the
younger's expense, when it's the younger one that he's so everlastingly
stuck on that he can't behave _like_ a gentleman to any man to whom she
shows the slightest preference." We heard a coming step, but I talked
on: "Sense! poor simpleton! he knows he hasn't got"--the door opened and
Harry stepped partly in, but I only raised my voice,--"hasn't got as
much brains in his whole head as there is in one of her tracks."
With something between a sob, a sputter and a shriek he shut himself out
again. Harry was never deep but in a shallow way, and never shallow
without a certain treacherous depth. When Ned Ferry the next day
summoned me to his bedside I went with a choking throat, not doubting I
was to give account of this matter,--until I saw the kindness of his
pallid face. Then my silly heart rose as much too high as it had just
been too low and I thought "Charlotte has surrendered!" All he wanted
was to make me his scribe. But when we were done he softly asked, "That
business of yours we talked about on the Plank-road--it looks
any better?"
I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said,
"I am told there is nobody in your way."
I faced him sharply--"Who told you that?" and felt sure he would name
the tricky aide-de-camp. But he pointed to the room overhead, which
again, as in the other house, was Charlotte's. I blushed consciously
with gratitude. "Well," I said, "it makes me happy to see you beginning
again to get well."
Within the same hour I met unexpectedly two other persons. First, Harry
Helm; who, before I could speak, was deluging me with words, telling me
for the twentieth time how, on that evening of the indoor fight, coming
with a platoon of Mississippians which he had procured merely as a
guard, he was within a hundred yards of the house before our shots in
the bedroom told him he was riding to a rescue. Then suddenly he began
to assure me that in what he had said about the two sisters he had
sought only to mislead the surgeon, who, he declared, was more utterly
dead-gone on Camille than both of us put together. We parted, and
within the next five minutes I confronted the maiden herself.
She came from upstairs with a mixed armful of papers, books and sewing,
said she had been with Charlotte, and said no more, only made a
mysterious mouth. I inquired how Charlotte was. She shrugged, sank into
a seat on the gallery, let her arm-load into her lap, and replied, "Ah!
she lies up there and smiles and smiles, and calls us pet names, and
says she's perfectly contented, and then cannot drop half asleep without
looking as though she were pressing a knife into her own heart. Oh,
Dick, what is the matter with her?"
"What do you think,--Camille?"
"Oh--I--I'm afraid to say it--even to Estelle, or aunt Martha, or--"
"Say it to me," I murmured.
"Oh, if I could only trust you!" she said, shaking her head sadly and
trying to lift her arm's burden again without taking her eyes from mine.
It went to her feet in a landslide, and out of one of the books
fluttered three stems of sweet-pea each bearing two mated blossoms. I
knew them in an instant, and in the next I had them. She would not let
me pile the fallen freight anywhere but into her arm again, nor recover
her eye before she was fully re-laden. Then she set her lips freezingly
and said "Now give me back my flowers."
I meekly gave them and she turned to go into the house; her head
gradually sank forward as she went, and her unparagoned ear and neck
flushed to a burning red. On the threshold, by some miscalculation, her
burdened arm struck the jamb, and the whole load fell again. I sprang
and began to gather the stuff into a chair, but she walked straight on
as though nothing had occurred, and shut the nearest door behind her.
In those days used to come out to see us Gregory, in his long-skirted
black coat and full civilian dress; of whom I have told a separate
history elsewhere. Very pointed was Camille's neglect of both Harry and
me, to make herself lovely to the dark and diffident new-comer, while
Estelle positively pursued me with compensatory sweetness; and Gregory,
whenever he and I were alone together, labored to reassure me of his
harmlessness by expatiating exclusively upon the charms of Cecile. She
seemed to him like a guardian angel of Ferry and Charlotte, while yet
everything she said or did was wholly free from that quality of
other-worldliness which was beautiful in Estelle, but which would not
have endured repetition in the sister or the cousin. There Harry and I,
also, once more agreed. Cecile never allowed herself to reflect a spirit
of saintliness, or even of sacrifice, but only of maidenly wisdom and
sweet philosophy.
"If it weren't for Charlotte," whispered the Lieutenant, "I could swear
she was created for Ned Ferry!" and when I shook my head he, too,
declared "No, no! if ever a match was made on high Charlotte was made
for him and he for Charlotte; but, oh, Lord, Lord! Reach-hard Thorndyke
Smith, how is this thing going to end?"
That was the problem in the mind of every looker on, and the lookers-on
were legion; the whole wide neighborhood came to see us. Gregory and
others outstayed their furloughs; the surgeon lingered shamelessly. Of
course, there were three girls besides Charlotte, and it was pure
lying--as I told Helm--for some of those fellows to pretend that Captain
Ferry's problem was all they stayed for; and yet it was the one
heart-problem which was everybody's, and we were all in one fever to see
forthwith a conclusion which "a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind" required should not come for months.
"Pooh!" said Harry, "'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind'
requires just the reverse!" and the surgeon avowed that it was required
by a decent respect to her powers of endurance; he was every day afraid
her slow improvement would stop and she would begin to sink. He admitted
the event could wait, but he wished to gracious we could have
her decision.
I said suppose it should be negative. "Oh, it won't!" exclaimed both he
and Harry. "When it comes to the very point--"
Gregory's approach interrupted us, but I remembered a trait in Charlotte
of which I have spoken, and gave myself the hope that their prediction
might prove well founded.
LVII
A YES AND A NO
But now Charlotte's recovery took on new speed. Maybe her new brightness
meant only that her heart was learning to bear its load; but we hoped
that was just what it was unlearning, as she and Ferry sat at chess on
the gallery in the afternoons.
One night the fellows gave a dance in Brookhaven. We went in two wagons
and by the light of mounted torch-bearers, and Charlotte and Ferry stood
at the dooryard gate and sent after us their mirthful warnings and
good-byes. It set some of us a-hoping--to see them there--a dooryard
gate means so much. We fairly prayed he might compel her decision before
she should turn to re-enter the house. But the following morning it was
evident we had prayed in vain.
On the next afternoon but one we heard that a great column of our
soldiers was approaching on the nearest highway, bound up the railroad
to Joe Johnston's army from the region about Port Hudson, and Charlotte
instantly proposed that our ladies deal out food and drink from some
shady spot on the roadside. It was one of those southern summer days
when it verily seems hotter in the shade than in the sun--unless you are
in the sun. The force was wholly artillery and infantry, the last
Confederate infantry that region ever saw in column under arms; poor,
limping, brown-faced, bloody-footed boys! their weapons were the only
clean things, the only whole things, about them except their unbroken
spirit; and when the very foremost command chanced to be one which the
Harpers had seen in New Orleans the day it left there marching in
faultless platoons and spotless equipments through the crowds that
roared acclaim and farewell, our dear ladies, for one weak moment, wept.
"Here come the real heroes, Harry," said my crippled leader; "we are
dandies and toy-soldiers, by the side of those infantry boys, Doctor, we
cavalry fellows;" and we cavalry fellows would have hid if we honorably
could. Yet hardly had he spoken when he and a passing field-officer
cried out in mutual recognition, and from that time until the rear-guard
was clear gone by we received what the newspapers call "a continuous
ovation." A group of brigade officers went back with us to Squire
Wall's, to supper, and you could see by the worship they paid Charlotte
that they knew her story. Her strength was far overtaxed, and the moment
the last fond straggler had gone we came in out of the splendid
moonlight.
"Now, Charlotte, my dear," began Miss Harper, "you are too terribly
tired to--why, where is Charlotte; did she not come in with us from
the--gate?"
Ferry, too, was missing. Mrs. Wall made eyes at the inquirer, Estelle
and Cecile began to speak but deferred to each other, and Camille,
putting on a deadly exhaustion, whined as she tottered to her smiling
guardian, "Kiss your sweet baby good-night, auntie dear, and"--with a
hand reached out to Estelle--"make Naughty come, too." She turned to say
good-night to Cecile but spoiled her kiss with an unintended laugh. The
surgeon, Harry and I bowed from the room and stepped out to the
water-bucket and gourd. From there we could see the missing two,
lingering at the dooryard gate, in the bright moonlight. As we finished
drinking, "Gentlemen," murmured Harry, "I fear our position is too
exposed to be tenable."
The surgeon started upstairs. "I'll join you directly, Doctor," Harry
said, and in a lower voice added "Smith and I will just lounge in and
out of the hall here to sort o' show nobody needn't be in any hurry,
don't you see?"
But the other jerked his thumb toward the half-closed parlor, where
Miss Harper and Cecile sat close, to each other absorbed in some matter
of the tenderest privacy. "They'll attend to that," he muttered; "come
on to bed and mind your own business."
Harry huffed absurdly. "You go mind yours," he retorted, and then more
generously added, "we'll be with you in a minute." The surgeon went, and
the aide-de-camp, as we began to pace the hall, fairly took my breath by
remarking without a hint of self-censure, "Damn a frivolous man!" Then
irrelatively he added, "Those two out at that gate--this is a matter of
life and death with them;" and when I would have qualified the
declaration, he broke in upon me--"Right, Dick, you're right, it _is_
worse; it's a choice between true life and death-in-life; whether
they'll make life's long march in sunshine together or in
darkness apart."
Well, of course, it was no such simple question, and never could be
while life held so many values more splendid than any wilfulness could
win. There lay the whole of Charlotte's real difficulty--for she had
made it all hers. But when I tried in some awkward way to say this Harry
cut me short. "Oh, Dick, I--eh--you bother me! I want to tell you
something and if I don't hurry I can't. Something's happened to me, old
fellow, something that's sobered me more than I ever would 'a' thought
anything could. I want to tell you because I can trust you with a
secr'--wh'--what's the matter, did I hurt your wound? Honestly, I want
to tell you because--well--because I've been deceiving you all along:
I've deceived you shamefully, letting on to like this girl more than
that, and so on and so on."
"Yes, you thought you were deceiving me."
"Oh, well, maybe I wasn't, but I want to tell you to-night because I'm
going to camp in the morning. Oh, yes,"--he named the deepest place
known--"the sight of those webfoot boys to-day was too much for me; I'm
going; and Dick, when I told her I was going--"
"_Told whom_?"
"Aw, come, now, Dick, you know every bit as well as I know. Well, when I
told her I was going I didn't dream I was going to tell her anything
else; I give you my word! Where in the"--same place again--"I ever got
the courage I'll never tell you, but all of a sudden thinks I, 'I'm
never going to get anything but no, anyhow, and so, Dick, I've been and
gone and done it!"
I leaned on the stair-newel, sorry for the poor fool, but glad of this
chance. "Why, Lieutenant, not many men would have done as well. You felt
honor-bound not to slip away uncommitted, so you took your dose like a
hero and licked the spoon." I felt that I was salting his wound, but we
were soldiers and--I had the salt.
He drew a sigh. "Yes, I took my dose--of astonishment. Dick, she said
yes! Oh, good Lord, Dick, do you reckon they'll ever be such full-blown
idiots as to let me have her?"
I sank upon the steps; every pore in my body was a fountain of cold
sweat: "Have whom?"
"Cecile." He was going on to declare himself no more fit for her than
for the presidency of the Confederate States, which was perfectly true;
but I sprang up, caught him (on my well side) by one good hand, and had
begun my enthusiastic congratulations, when Charlotte appeared and we
swerved against the rail to let her pass upstairs. In some way as she
went by it was made plain to us that she had said no. "Good-night,"
ventured both of us, timorously.
"Good-night," she responded, very musically, but as if from a great
distance.
LVIII
THE UPPER FORK OF THE ROAD
Ferry, as he passed us, called my name, and I started after him. At
Charlotte's door we heard the greeting of her black maid. The maid's
father, who of late had been nightly dressing Ferry's wound and mine,
came to us in Ferry's room; and there my Captain turned to greet me, his
face white with calamity. He took me caressingly by a button of my
jacket. "Can you have your wound washed to-night before mine?"
"Why, certainly, if it's the least--"
"Yes, thank you. And down here in this room instead of upstairs?"
"Captain Ferry! if you knew how horribly it smells, you--"
"Ah! don't I know?" he said, and as I sat naked from throat to waist
with the old negro laving the sores, Ferry scanned them narrowly. "They
are not so bad, Dick; you think a few hours in the saddle will not make
them worse?"
"Not if they're spent for you, Captain."
"Yes, for me; also for much better. We shall ride for--"
"You ride? Oh, Captain, you are in no condition--"
"Tst!" he laid a finger on my lips; "'twill not be hard; we are not
going on a scout--to jump fences." He began to make actual preparations,
and presently helped me draw my shirt into place again over the clean
bandages, while the old man went out after fresh water. "I am a hundred
times more fit to go than to stay," he suddenly resumed. "I must go. Ah,
idleness, there is nothing like idleness to drive a man mad; I must have
something to do--to-night--at once." I wish I knew how to give the words
with his quiet intensity.
I began to unclothe his wound. "May I ask one thing?"
"Ah! I know you; you want to ask am I taking that upper fork of the
road. I am; 'tis for that I want you; so go you now to the stable,
saddle our horses and bring them."
When I reached the front steps with them Ferry was at the gallery's
edge, Miss Harper, Cecile and Harry were on three sides of him, and he
was explaining away our astonishing departure. We were going to
Hazlehurst, to issue clothing and shoes to those ragged and barefoot
fellows we had seen that afternoon, and the light of whose tentless camp
was yonder in the sky, now, toward Brookhaven. We were to go that way,
confer with their officers, telegraph from town for authorizations to be
sent to us at Hazlehurst, and then to push on to that place and be ready
to issue the stuff when the trains should come up from Brookhaven
bringing the brigade. While he spoke Camille and Estelle joined us.
"No," he said, "to start any later, 'twould be too late."
To Harry's imploring protest that he, Ferry, was not fit to go to
Hazlehurst horseback, he replied "Well! what we going to do? Those boys
can't go to Big Black swamp bare-foot."
Our dear friends were too well aware of the untold trouble to say a word
about his coming back, but Miss Harper's parting injunction to me was to
write them.
The whole night and the following day were a toilsome time for us, but
by fall of the next night the brigade had come in rags and passed newly
clothed and shod, and in a room of the town tavern we dressed each
other's hurts and sank to sleep on one bed. The night was hot, the pain
of my wounds was like a great stone lying on them, and at the tragic
moment of a frightful dream I awoke. "Captain," I murmured.
"Yes?"
"Did she give no reason?"
"No." A silence followed; then he said, "You know the reason, I think."
"Yes, I think I do; I think--"
"Well? don't be afraid to say it."
I got the words out in some form, that I believed Charlotte loved him
deeply, as deeply, passionately, exaltedly, as ever a true woman loved
a man--
"Ah, me!" he lifted his arms wide and knitted his fingers on his brow.
"And there is the whole trouble," I added. "She will not let you marry
the woman whose--"
"Whose husband I have killed.... Ah, God!... Ah, my God! why was I
chosen to do that?... And you think, Dick, it was not a question of
time; that I did not ask, maybe a little too soon?"
"No, not as between sooner and later; and yet, in another way, possibly,
yes." Without either of us stirring from the pillow I tried to explain.
I pointed out that trait in Charlotte which I called an impulse suddenly
to surrender the key of her situation, the vital point in her
fortunes and fate.
"Yes.... Yes," Ferry kept putting in.
I went on to say that she seemed now to have learned, herself, that it
was on this shoal she grounded at every low water of her physical and
mental powers; as when over-fatigued, for instance; and that I should
not wonder if she had bound herself never again at such a time to let
her judgment follow her impulses. He laid his hand on me: "Stop; stop;
you stab too deep. I thought to take her by surprise at that very point,
and right there she has countermined. My God! can it be that I am served
only right?"
"No," I replied, although it was a thing I would have said Ned Ferry
would not do, "no, no, it is she who has served both you and herself
cruelly wrong. Captain, I believe that when Miss Harper has talked it
over with her she will see her mistake as we all see it, and will call
you back."
"Ah, me! Ah, me! Do you believe that, Dick?"
"I do, Captain; but at the same time--"
"What, what? Speak out, Dick. You blame me some other way?"
"Oh, no, indeed! I am the one to blame, the only one. If you had not,
both of you, been so blameless--so splendidly blameless--I should hardly
have let myself sink so deep into blame; but I knew you would never take
the last glad step until you had seen the last sad proof that you might
take it. Oh, Captain, to-night is the third time that in my dreams I
have seen _that man_ alive."
I do not know how long after that we lay silent, but it seemed an
endless time before he exclaimed at last "My God! Dick, you should
have told me."
"I know it; I know I should! But it was only a dream, and--"
"Ah! 'twas your doubt first and the dream after! But let us think no
more of blame, we must settle the doubt. We shall begin that to-morrow."
On my venturing to say more he interrupted. "Well, we can do nothing
now; at the present, sleep is our first business." However, after a
little, he spoke again, and, I believe, purely in order to soothe me to
slumber, speculated and counselled with me for the better part of an
hour concerning my own poor little love affair.
At breakfast he told me the first step in his further plans would be for
us to take the train for Tangipahoa, with our horses, on our way to our
own camp; but just before the train came the telegraph brought General
Austin's request--which, of course, carried all the weight of an
order--for Ferry to remain here and make ready for further issues of
quartermaster's stores. He turned on his heel and twisted his small
mustache: "That means we are kept here to be kept here, Richard."
It was a mistaken kindness, from our point of view, but it had the merit
that it kept us busy. In two days the post-quartermaster's affairs and
supplies were reduced to perfect order for the first time in their
history. For two days more we ran a construction train and with a swarm
of conscripts repaired two or three miles of road-bed and some
trestle-work in a swamp; and at every respite in our strenuous
activities we discoursed of the girls we'd left behind us; their minds,
their manners, their features, figures, tastes and talents, and their
walk and talk. So came the end of the week, and while the sun was still
above the trees we went on down, inspecting the road beyond our repairs,
on our own hand-car to Brookhaven. With heads bare, jackets in our laps,
and muddy boots dangling over the car's front edge, and with six big
negroes at the levers behind us, we watched the miles glide under our
wheels and grow fewer and fewer between us and the shrine of our hearts.
"Sing, Dick," said Ferry, and we chanted together, as we had done at
every sunset these three days, "O my love is like a red, red rose." We
could not have done it had we known that yonder glorious sun was setting
forever upon the fortunes of our Southern Confederacy. It was the fourth
of July; Lee was in full retreat from Gettysburg, Vicksburg was gone,
Port Hudson was doomed, and all that was left for us now was to
die hard.
LIX
UNDER CHARLOTTE'S WINDOW
At the tavern, where we went to smarten up and to eat, we chanced upon
Gregory. He was very shy of Ferry, because Ferry was a captain, but told
me the latest news from the Wall place, where he had spent the previous
evening. Harry and the surgeon were gone to camp, the Harpers were well,
Charlotte was--better, after a bad turn of several days. We felt in duty
bound to stay within hail of the telegraph office until it should close
for the night; and when the operator was detained in it much beyond the
usual time, Ferry, as we hovered near, said at length, "Well, I'm sorry
for you, Dick; 'tis now too late for you to go yonder--this evening."
"Didn't you intend to call, too?" "No," he said; yet the moment the
operator turned the key in his door we sauntered away from the station,
tavern, town, and out into the rain-famished country. We chose a road on
high ground, under pines; the fact that a few miles of it would bring us
to Squire Wall's was not sufficient reason for us to shun it, and we
loitered on and on, discoursing philosophically on man and woman and the
duties of each to other. Through habit we went softly, and so, in time,
came up past a small garden under the house's southern side. Here
silence was only decorum, for every window in the dark upper rooms was
thrown open to the sultry air. The house's front was away from the
direction of the town, and at a corner of this garden, where the road
entered the open grove, the garden fence turned north at a right angle,
while the road went on through the grove into wide cornfields beyond.
We kept to the garden fence till it brought us along the dooryard front,
facing the house. Thus far the whole place seemed fast asleep. Along the
farthest, the northern, side a line of planted trees ran close to a
narrow wing of but one room on each of its two stories, and the upper of
these two rooms was Charlotte's. Where we paused, at the dooryard gate,
we could not see this wing, but we knew its exterior perfectly; it had a
narrow window in front, looking into the grove, and a broader one at the
rear, that overlooked an open stretch of the Wall plantation. The place
seemed fast asleep, I say, but we had not a doubt we were being
watched--by the two terrible dogs that guarded the house but never
barked. By this time they should have recognized us and ought to be
coming forward and wagging faintly, as who should say "Yes, that's all
right, but we have our orders."
"Ah!"--Ferry guardedly pointed to the ground at the corner of the house
nearest Charlotte's room; there were both the dogs, dim as phantoms and
as silent, standing and peering not toward us but around to the wing
side in a way to make one's blood stop. We drew deeper into the grove
and made a short circuit that brought us in line with Charlotte's two
windows, and there, at the farther one, with her back to us, sat
Charlotte, looking toward Hazlehurst. The bloodthirsty beasts at the
corner of the house were so intently waiting to spring upon something,
somebody, between them and the nearer window, that we were secure from
their notice. We had hardly more than become aware of these things when,
in the line of planted trees, out of the depths of the one nearest the
nearer window, sounded a note that brought Charlotte instantly to her
feet; the same feeble, smothered cry she had heard the night she was
wounded. She crossed to the front window and listened, first standing
erect, and then stooping and leaning out. When we saw her do that we
knew how little she cared for her life; Ferry beckoned me up from behind
him; neither of us needed to say he feared the signal was from Oliver.
"Watch here," he whispered, and keeping the deepest shade, started
eagerly, with drawn revolver, toward the particular tree. I saw the dogs
discover and recognize him and welcome his aid, yet I kept my closest
watch on that tree's boughs and on Charlotte. She was wondering, I
guessed, whether the call was from some messenger of Ferry, or was only
a bird's cry. As if she decided it was the latter, she moved away, and
had nearly re-crossed the room, when the same sad tremolo came searching
the air again. Nevertheless she went on to the farther window and stood
gazing out for the better part of a minute, while in my heart I besought
her not to look behind. For Ferry and the dogs had vanished in shadow,
and outside her nearer window, wavering now above and now below the
sill, I could just descry a small pale object that reminded me of that
missive Coralie Rothvelt had passed up to me outside the window-sill at
old Lucius Oliver's house exactly a month before. From the upper depths
of the nearest tree this small thing was being proffered on the end of a
fishing-rod. Presently the rod must have tapped the sill, with such a
start did she face about. Silently she ran, snatched the dumb messenger,
and drew down the window-shade. A moment later the room glowed with a
candle, while her shadow, falling upon the shade, revealed her scanning
a letter, lifting her arms with emotion, and so passing out of the
line of view.
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