The Cavalier

G >> George Washington Cable >> The Cavalier

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

"We're going to get married, mamma, mamma;
We're going to get married, but don't tell pa--"

"Deserters, I don't doubt!" was my comment to the ladies. Tongue revenge
is poor, but it is something.

Except in such moments, however, the war seemed farther away than it had
for months and months. But about eleven o'clock we began to find the way
scored by the fresh ruts of heavy wheels and the dust deepened by
hundred of hoofs. The tops and faces of the roadside banks were newly
trampled and torn by clambering human feet. Here was a canteen, smashed
in a wheel-track; yonder a fragment of harness; here lay a broken hame,
there was the half of a russet brogan and yonder a ragged sock stained
and bloody.

"Why, what does all this mean?" asked Miss Harper amid her nieces'
cries.

I said it meant Fisher's battery hurrying to the front. Twenty miles
since five that morning was a marvel, horse artillery though they were,
for, as I pointed out by many signs, their animals were in ill
condition. "We shall have to go round them by neighborhood roads," I
said, and presently we were deeper than ever in woodland shades and
sources of girlish wonderment. The humid depths showed every sort of
green and gray, their trunks, bushes and boughs, bearded with hanging
moss, robed with tangled vines and chapleted with mistletoe. We seemed
to have got this earth quite to ourselves and very much to our liking.

One o'clock. Miss Harper suggested a halt to feed the horses. I, knowing
what it would cost me to dismount and go walking about, said no, thrice
no; let us first get back upon the main road in front of that battery.
On, therefore, we hurried, and soon the reality of the war was vivid to
us again. In a stretch of wet road where the team had mutely begged
leave to walk and the ladies had urged me to sing we had at length
paused in a pebbly rivulet to allow the weary animals to drink, and the
girls and the aunt and the greenwood and I were all in chorus
bidding somebody

"Unloose the west port and let us go free,"

when, just as our last note died among the trees one of us cried,
"Listen!" and through the stillness there came from far away on our
right the last three measures of a bugle sounding The March.

My eyes rested in Camille's and hers in mine. A musical license gave us
the courage. At the last note our gaze did not sink but took on more
glow, while out of the forest behind us a distant echo answered the last
measure of the strain. Then our eyes slowly fell; and however it may
have seemed to her, to me it was as if the vanished strains were not
only or chiefly of bugle and echo, but as though our two hearts had
called and answered in that melodious unison.

All that warm afternoon we paid the tiresome penalty of having pushed
our animals too smartly at the outset. We grew sedate; sedate were the
brows of the few strangers we met. We talked in pairs. When I spoke with
Miss Harper the four listened. She asked about the evils of camp life;
for she was one of that fine sort to whom righteousness seems every
man's and woman's daily business, one of the most practical items in the
world's affairs. And I said camp life was fearfully corrupting; that the
merest boys cursed and swore and stole, or else were scorned as
weaklings. Then I grew meekly silent and we talked in pairs again, and
because I yearned to talk most with Camille I talked most with Estelle.
Three times when I turned abruptly from her to Camille and called,
"Hark!" the fagged-out horses halted, and as we struck our listening
pose the bugle's faint sigh ever farther in our rear was but feebly
proportioned to the amount of our gazing into each other's eyes.

Once, when we were not halted or harkening, we heard overmuch; heard
that which brought us to an instant stand and caused even Miss Harper to
gaze on me with dismayed eyes and parted lips, and the blood to go
thumping through my veins. From a few hundred yards off in the
northwest, beyond the far corner of an old field and the woods at its
back, two gunshots together, then a third, with sharp, hot cries of
alarum and command, and then another and another shot, rang out and
spread wanderingly across the tender landscape.

X

THE SOLDIER'S HOUR

To regain the highroad we had turned into a northerly fork, and were in
as lovely a spot as we had seen all day. Before us and close on our
right were the dense woods of magnolia, water-oak, tupelo and a hundred
other affluent things that towered and spread or clambered and hung. On
the left lay the old field, tawny with bending sedge and teeming with
the yellow rays of the sun's last hour. This field we overlooked through
a fence-row of persimmon and wild plum. Among these bushes, half fallen
into a rain-gully, a catalpa, of belated bloom, was loaded with blossoms
and bees, and I was directing Camille's glance to it when the shots
came. Another outcry or two followed, and then a weird silence.

"Some of our boys attacked by a rabbit," I suggested, but still
hearkened.

"That was not play, Mr. Smith," Miss Harper had begun to respond, when a
voice across the sedge-field called with startling clearness,

"Hi! there goes one of them!--Halt!--Halt, you blue--" pop!--pop!--pop!

"Prisoners making a break!" I forgot all my tatters and stood on tiptoe
in the stirrups to overpeer the fence-row. The next instant--"Sh--sh!"
said I and slid to the ground. "Hold this bridle!" I gave it to Camille.
"Don't one of you make a sound or a motion; there's a Yankee coming
across this field in the little gully just behind us."

I bent low, ran a few steps, cocking my revolver as I went. Then I rose,
peeped, bent again, ran, rose, peeped, waited a few seconds behind the
catalpa, and without rising peeped once more. Here he came! He was an
officer. His uniform was torn and one whole side of him showed he had at
some earlier hour ridden through a hedge and fallen from his horse. On
he came! nearer--nearer--oh, what a giant! Quickly, warily, he crouched
under the fence where it hung low across the gully, and half through it
in that huddled posture he found my revolver between his astonished
eyes. I did not yell at him, for I did not want the men he had escaped
from to come and take him from me; yet when I said, "Halt, or you die!"
the four ladies heard me much too plainly. For, frankly, I said more and
worse. I felt my slenderness, my beardless youth, my rags, and his
daring, and to offset them all in a bunch, I--I cursed him. I let go
only one big damn and I've never spoken one since, though I've done many
a worse thing, of course. I protest it was my modesty prompted it then.

"I surrender," he said, with amiable ease. I stepped back a pace and he
drew out and straightened up--the tallest man I had ever seen. I laughed,
he smiled, laughed; my eyes filled with tears, I blazed with rage, and in
plain sight and hearing of those ladies he said, "That's all right, my
son, get as scared as you like; only, you don't need to cry about it."

"Hold your tongue!" I barked my wrath like a frightened puppy, drawing
back a stride and laying my eye closer along the pistol. "If you call me
your son again I'll send you to your fathers."

His smile darkened. "I am your prisoner," he said, with a sudden
splendid stateliness, and right then I guessed who he was.

"Yess, sir, you are!" I retorted. "Move to that wagon! And if you take
one step out of common time you'll never take another."

The aunt and her nieces were standing in the carry-all, she majestic,
they laughing and weeping in the one act. I waved them into their seats.

"Halt!" We halted. "About face!" As the prisoner eyed me both of us
listened. His equanimity was almost winsome, and I saw that friendliness
was going to be his tactics.

"Guess I'm the first Yankee y' ever caught, ain't I?" His smile was
superior, but congratulatory.

"You'll be the first prisoner I ever shot if you get any funnier!"

We listened again. "They've gone the wrong way," I said, still savage.

"No," he replied, "I came the wrong way."

The ladies smiled; I glowered. "Take those horses by their heads and
turn them to me!"

An instant his superb eye resented, but then he pleasantly did my
bidding. "Suits me well; rather chance it with you than with those I've
just left."

[Illustration: "I surrender," he said, with amiable ease.]

"Easier to get away, you think?" I asked, with a worse frown than ever,
as he stepped into the carry-all and took the lines.

"No, not so easy; but those fellows are Arkansans, and they're in a bad
humor with me."

I took the hint and grew less ferocious. "While you," I said, "are
Captain Jewett."

"I am," was his reply, and my heart leaped for joy. We hurried away. My
captive was the most daring Union scout between Vicksburg and New
Orleans; these very Harpers knew that. The thing unknown to us was that
already his fate was entangled with Ned Ferry's and Charlotte Oliver's,
as yet more it would be, with theirs and ours, in days close at hand.

XI

CAPTAIN JEWETT

Once more we were in the by-road which had brought us westward parallel
with the highway. The prisoner drove. Aunt Martha sat beside him, slim,
dark, black-eyed, stately, her silver-gray hair rolled high a la
Pompadour. With a magnanimity rare in those bitter days she incited him
to talk, first of New Orleans, where he had spent a month in camp on one
of the public squares, and then of his far northern home, and of loved
ones there, mother, wife and child. The nieces, too, gave a generous
attention. Only I, riding beside the hind wheels, held solemnly aloof.

"Front!" I once snapped out with a ring that made the trees reply and
the ladies catch their breath. "If you steal one more look back here
I'll put a ball into your leg."

He smiled, chirped the horses up and resumed his chat. I heard him
praise my horse and compare him not unfavorably with his own which he
had lost that morning'. He and a few picked men had been surprised in a
farmhouse at breakfast. They had made a leap and a dash, he said, but
one horse and rider falling dead, his horse, unhurt, had tumbled over
them, and here was his rider.

I prompted Camille to ask if he had ever encountered Ned Ferry, and he
laughed.

"No," he said, but Ned Ferry had lately restored to him, by proxy, some
lost letters, with an invitation to _come and see him_.

I laughed insolently. The young ladies sparkled, and so did Miss Harper,
as she asked him who had been the proxy.

He said the proxy was a young woman who had a knack of getting passes
through the lines, and the three girls exchanged looks as knowing as
they were delighted.

"I tell her as a friend," he said, "she'll get one into Fortress Monroe
yet!"

Miss Harper's keen eyes glittered. "You northerners hardly realize our
feelings concerning the imprisonment of women, I think."

"My dear madam, you don't realize ours. We don't want to imprison
women."

So there came a silence, and then a gay laugh as three of us at once
asked if he had ever heard of Lieutenant Durand. "Durand!" he cried, and
looked squarely around at me. I lifted the cocked revolver, but he kept
his fine eyes on mine and I rubbed my ear with my wrist. "What?" he
said, "an elegant, Creole-seeming young fellow, very handsome? Why, that
fellow saved my life this very afternoon."

The young ladies were in rapture. Miss Harper asked how he had done it.

"If I tell you that," said the Captain, "you won't like me the least
bit."

Whereat Cecile replied, "Ah--well! we cou'n' like you the leaz bit
any-'ow."

"I suppose that's so," laughed the officer. "I'll tell you how it was.
My guard were just about to hang me for saying I thought we had a right
to make soldiers of the darkies, when your friend came galloping along,
saw the thing, and rushed in and cut the halter with his sword. And when
they demanded to know who and what he was, he told them Durand, and that
they'd hear it again, for he should report them."

"Oh, sir," cried Estelle, whose eyes, brows, lashes and hair were all of
the same luminous red-brown, and in whose cheeks the rose seemed always
to burn through the olive, "how can you and your people seek to kill
such men as that?"

"Such as which?" asked the Yankee, with a twinkle. "There were two
kinds."

"But, o-oh! sir!" exclaimed the trio, when Miss Harper waved them to
forbear. There was yet some daylight left as we trundled into a broad
highroad and turned northward. We passed a picket guard and then a whole
regiment of cavalry going into camp. They scrambled to the sides of the
road and stormed us with questions, chaffing us cruelly when I remained
silent. "Lawd! look a' this-yeh Yank a-bringin' in ow desertehs!" "Hey,
you big Yank, you jest let that po' little conscrip' go!"

Headquarters, we heard from a courier who said he was the third sent out
to find us, were at the "Sessions house" two miles further on. We sent
him galloping back there, and after a while here came Major Harper and
three or four others of the staff, including Harry Helm. What a flood of
mirthful compliment there was at sight of us and our captive; Harry was
positively silly. In the series of introductions that followed he was
left paired with Camille, and I said things to myself. Major Harper rode
by the prisoner. "Well, Captain," he said, "you've had some experiences
since you left me this morning. Don't you want to give us your parole
this time, temporarily, for an hour or so, and be more comfortable?"

"Thank you, Major," the Federal affably replied, "that would be a great
relief to this most extraordinary youngster that I've brought with me."
He gave it and we turned into a lofty grove whitened with our
headquarters tents.

"Smith," said the Major, "your part is done, and well done. You needn't
report to me again to-night; the General wishes to see you a moment.
Captain, will you go with this young man to General Austin's tent?"

XII

IN THE GENERAL'S TENT

I went to Gholson. He told me I was relieved of my captive and bade me
go care for my horse and return in half an hour. In going I passed close
by the Sessions plantation house. Every door and window was thrown wide
to the night air, and preparations were in progress for a dance; and as
I returned, a slave boy ran across my path, toward the house, bearing a
flaming pine torch and followed by two ambulances filled with daughters
of the neighborhood in clouds of white gauze. I found the General in
fatigue dress. His new finery hung on the tent-pole at his back. Old
Dismukes, the bull-necked colonel of the Arkansans, lounged on a
camp-cot. Both smoked cigars.

The General asked me a number of idle questions and then said my
prisoner had called me a good soldier. Old Dismukes smiled so broadly
that I grew hot, believing the Yankee had told them of my tears.

"Smith," said the Colonel, and then smoked and smiled again till my brow
beaded,--"tired?"

"No, sir."

"That's a lie," he pleasantly remarked, and lay back, enjoying my silent
wrath. "Send him, General," he added, "he's your man."

The General looked at me between puffs of his cigar. "I hear you've
ridden over fifty miles to-day."

"Yes, General." "If I give you a good fresh horse can you go
twenty-three miles more by midnight?"

"Yes, General, if I don't have to save the horse."

"The horse may have to save you," drawled the Arkansan.

"I think you know Lieutenant Durand?" asked the General, with a
quizzical eye.

"Slightly."

"Well, Smith, on his suggestion approved by Major Harper, I have
detailed another clerk to the Major."

Rills of perspiration tickled my back like flies. "Can't one man do the
work?"

"Yes, the new man is detailed in your place."

I almost leaped from the ground in consternation. My whole frame
throbbed, my mouth fell open, my tongue was tied.

The man who had got me into this thing--this barrel--lifted the
tent-flap. "Mr. Gholson," said the General, "write an order assigning
Smith to Ferry's scouts."

The flap fell again and my panic was turned into a joy qualified only by
a reduced esteem for my general as a judge of character.

Old Dismukes rose. "Good-night. Shall I send this boy that Yankee's
horse?"

"Oh I was forgetting that; yes, do!"

At the door the Colonel gave me a last look. "Good-night, Legs."

I dared not retort, but I looked so hard at his paunch that the General
smiled. Then he asked me if I knew where we were then camped, and I said
we were on the Meadville and Fayette road, near Franklin, twenty miles
southeast of Fayette and--

"That will do. Now, beyond Fayette, about seven miles north, there's a
place--"

"Clifton?"

"Don't interrupt me, Smith. Yes, Clifton. You're not to reach there
to-night--"

"I can do it, General."

"You can do as you're told; understand?" I understood.

"The enemy are in Fayette to-night," he continued. "So when you get
half-way to Fayette, just across Morgan's Creek, you'll take a dim fork
on the right running north along the creek. Ever travel by the stars?"

I began to tell how well I knew the stars, but he stopped me. "Yes;
well, keep straight north till you strike the road running east and west
between Fayette and Union Church. You'll find there a little
polling-place called Wiggins. Turn west, toward Fayette, and on the
north side of the main road, opposite the blacksmith's shop, you'll come
to a small--"

"I see."

"What do you see?" His frown scared me to my finger-tips.

"Why, I suppose I'm to find there a road down Cole's Creek to Clifton."

"Smith, if you interrupt me again, sir, you'll find the road back to
your regiment. Opposite that blacksmith's shop you'll see a white
cottage. There's a young lady stopping there to-night, a stranger, a
traveller. The old lady who lives there has taken her in at my request.
See that the young lady gets this envelope. It's no great matter, merely
a pass through our lines; but it's your ostensible business till you get
there; understand?"

I thought I did until I glanced at the superscription: Miss Coralie
Rothvelt.

"Now, here is another matter of much more importance." He showed, but
retained, another envelope. "Behind the house where you're to find Miss
Rothvelt there's a road into Cole's Creek bottom. The house you're to
stop at to-night, say from twelve o'clock till three or half-past, is on
that road, about five miles from Wiggins, from Clifton and from Fayette.
I'm sending you there expecting the people in that house will rob you if
you give them half a chance."

"I understand, General; they'll not get it."

"Smith, I want them to get it. I want them to rob you of this." He
waggled the envelope. "I want this to fall into the hands of the enemy;
as it will if those people rob you of it."

I snapped my eyes. He smiled and then frowned. "I don't want a clumsy
job, now, mind! I don't want you to get captured if you can possibly
avoid it; but all the same they mustn't get this so easily as to suspect
it's a bait. So I want you to give those villains that half-chance to
rob you, but not the other half, or they may--oh, it's no play! You must
manage to have this despatch taken from you totally against your will!
Then you must reach Clifton shortly after daylight. Ferry's scouts are
there, and you'll say to Lieutenant Ferry the single word, Rodney.
Understand?" He pretended to be reconsidering. "I--don't know
but--after all--I'd better send one of my staff instead of you."

"Oh, General, if you send an officer they'll see the ruse! I can do it!
I'll do it all right!"

"I'm most afraid," he said, abstractedly, as he read my detail, which
Gholson brought in. "Here,"--he handed it to me--"and here, here's the
despatch too."

"What's the name, General, of the man whose house I'm to go to?"

"You'd best not know; I want you to seem to have stumbled upon the
place. You can't miss it; there's no other house within two miles of it.
Good-bye, my lad;"--he gave me his hand;--"good luck to you."

Gholson, in the Adjutant-general's tent, told me Ned Ferry had named me
to the General as a first-class horseman and the most insignificant-
looking person he knew of who was fit for this venture.

"Ned Ferry! What does Ned Ferry know about my fitness?"

"Read the address on your despatch," said Gholson, resuming his pen.

I snatched the document from my bosom, into which I had thrust it to
seize the General's hand "Oh, Gholson!" I said, in deep-toned grief, as
I looked up from the superscription, "is that honest!"

He admitted that by the true religionist's standard it was not honest,
but reminded me that Ned Ferry--in his blindness--was only a poor
romanticist. The despatch was addressed to Lieutenant Edgard
Ferry-Durand.

Major Harper's black boy brought me the Yankee's horse with my bridle
and saddle on him; an elegant animal as fresh as a dawn breeze. Also he
produced a parcel, my new uniform, and a wee note whose breath smelt of
lavender as it said,--

"Papa tells us you are being sent off on courier duty to-night. What a
heart-breaking thing is war! How full of cruel sepa'--"

That piece of a word was scored out and "dangers" written in its place.
The missive ended all too soon, with the statement that I was requested
to call, on my way out of camp, at the side gallery of the house--
Sessions's--and let the writer and her sister and her cousin and her
father and her aunt see me in my new uniform and bid me good-bye.

XIII

GOOD-BYE, DICK

I found but one white figure under the dim veranda eaves. "Miss
Camille?"

"Wh'--who is that?" responded a musical voice. "Why, is that Mr. Smith?"
as if I were the last person in the world one should have expected to
see there. The like of those moments I had never known. I saw her eyes
note the perfect fit of my uniform, though neither of us mentioned it. I
tried to tell her that Lieutenant Durand was Ned Ferry and that I was
now one of his scouts, but she had already heard both facts, and would
not tell me what her father had said about me, it was so good. Standing
at the veranda's edge a trifle above me, with her cheek against one of
the posts and her gaze on her slipper, she asked if I was glad I was
going with Ned Ferry, and I had no more sense than to say I was; but she
would neither say she was glad nor tell why she was not.

Through the open windows we could see the dancers. Now and then a pair
of fanning promenaders came down the veranda, but on descrying us turned
back. I said I was keeping her from the dance. To which she replied,
drooping her head again, that she shouldn't dance that night.

"Too tired?"

"No."

"Too warm?"

"Oh, no, not too warm."

"Why, then?"

"Oh--I--just don't feel as if I could, that's all."

My heart beat wildly and I wanted to ask if it was on my account; but I
was too pusillanimous a coward, and when I feebly tried to look into her
eyes she would not let me, which convinced me that she lacked candor. A
dance ended. Gold-laced fellows came and sat on the veranda rail wiping
wrists and brows with over-tasked handkerchiefs, and explaining the
small mishaps of the floor. Two promenaders mentioned the hour. I gasped
my amazement and extended my hand. "Good-bye."

"Wait a moment," she murmured, and watched the promenading pair turn
back. Then she asked if I had read my mother's letter. I said I had. And
then, very pensively, with head bent and eyes once more down, she
inquired if I liked to get letters. Which led, quite accidentally, to my
asking leave to write to her.

She replied that she did not mean that. Nevertheless, I insisted, would
she? She only bent lower still. I asked the third time; and with nothing
but the parting of her hair for me to look at, she nodded, and one of
her braids fell over in front, and I took the pink-ribboned live end of
it timorously between thumb and finger and felt as if I had hold of an
electric battery.

She backed half a step, and quite needlessly I let it go. Then she bade
me not forget I had promised her the words of a certain song. "Want
them? Indeed, yes! Did you not say it was an unpublished song written
by a messmate of yours?--oh, Mr. Smith! I see why you stammer! You said
'a member of your mess'! oh!--oh!--oh!--you wrote it, yourself! And you
wrote it to-day! That explains--" She drew an awesome breath, rose to
her toes and knit her knuckles under her throat.

I was in the sweetest consternation. With the end of her braid once more
in my fingers I made her promise to keep the dark secret, and so
recited them.

"Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes!
Turn away thine eyes ere my bosom burn,
Lit with foolish hope to hear thy fondling sighs,
Like yon twilight dove's, breathe, Return, return!
Turn away thine eyes, maiden passing fair.
O maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes!

"Maiden passing fair, turn again thine eyes!
Turn again thine eyes, love's true mercy learn.
Breathe, O! breathe to me, as these love-languid skies
To yon twilight star breathe, Return, return!
Turn again thine eyes, maiden passing fair.
O maiden passing fair, turn again thine eyes!"

"Mis-ter Smith! you wrote that?--to-day! Wh'--who is she?"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18