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

"She told us about it. And you needn't look so disturbed; she only
praised you."

Still I frowned. "How does it come that she's here, anyhow?"

"Why! she's got to be everywhere! She's a war-correspondent! She was at
the front yesterday nearly the whole time, near enough to see some of
the fighting, and to hear it all! she calls it 'only a skirmish'!"

"When did she get here?"

"About five in the morning. But we didn't see her then; she shut herself
up and wrote and wrote and wrote! They say she runs the most daring
risks! And they say she's so wise in finding out what the Yankees are
going to do and why they're going to do it, that they'd be nearly as
glad to catch her as to catch Lieutenant Ferry! Didn't you know? Ah, you
knew!" She attempted a reproachful glance, but exhaled happiness like a
fragrance. I asked how she had heard these things.

"How did I hear them? Let me see. Oh, yes! from--from Harry."

I flinched angrily. "From what?"

She looked into her basket and fingered its flowers. "That's what he
asked me to call him."

I stiffened up as though I heard a thief picking the lock of my lawful
treasure. She threw me, side wise, a bantering smile and then a more
winsome glance, but I refused to see either. I burned with so many
feelings at once that I could no more have told them than I could have
raised a tune. "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be
very arch.

"Like whom?"

"You know perfectly well," she replied.

"No, I do not like him. Do you?"

"Why,--yes,--I do. I--I thought everybody did." She averted her face and
toyed with the sweet-pea vines. Suddenly she gulped, faced me, blinked
rapidly, and said "If I oughtn't to call him--that,--then I oughtn't to
have called--" she dropped her eyes and bit her lip.

"_That_," I replied, "is a very different matter! At least I had hoped
it was!"

Her rejoinder came in a low, grieved monotone: "Did you say _had_
hoped?"

It was the sweetest question my ear had ever caught, and I asked her, I
scarce know how, if I might still say "do hope".

"Why, I--I didn't know you ever did say it. I don't see that I have any
right to forbid you saying things--to--to yourself."

So we played the game--oldest game on earth--and loveliest. Bungling
moves we made, as you see, and sometimes did not know whose move it was.
At length she admitted that this _is_ a very unsafe world in which to be
kind to soldiers. I told how _fickle_ some of them were. She would not
say she would--or wouldn't--make my case a permanent exception or a
solitary one; yet with me she blissfully pooh-poohed the idea that our
acquaintance was new, she being so wonderfully like my mother, and I
being so wonderfully ditto, ditto. And when I burst into a blazing
eulogy of my mother, my listener gave me kinder looks than I ever
deserved of any woman alive. On my trying to reciprocate, she asked me
for more flowers and hurried back to our earlier theme.

"And really, you know, they say she's almost as truly a scout as Ned
Fer'--as Lieutenant Ferry-Durand. She's from New Orleans, you know, and
she's like us, half-Creole; but her other half is Highland Scotch--isn't
that romantic! When she told us about it she laughed and said it
explained some things in her which nothing else could excuse! Wasn't
that funny!--oh, pshaw! it doesn't sound a bit funny as I tell it, but
she said it in such a droll way! She was so full of fun and frolic that
day! You can't conceive how full of them she is--sometimes; how soberly
she _can_ say the funniest things, and how _funnily_ she can say the
soberest things!"

[Illustration: "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be very
arch.]

"You say she was so full of fun that day; what day?"

The young thing gaped at me, gasped, and melted half to the ground:
"O--oh--I've let it out!"

"Yes, you may as well go right on, now."

She straightened to her toes, covered her open mouth an instant, and
then said "Yes, we knew her--at our house--in New Orleans--poor New
Orleans! Your mother--oh, your splendid, lovely little mother is such a
brave Confederate!"

"My mother brought her to your house?"

"Yes, oh, yes! and that's why it isn't wrong to tell _you_. Charlotte's
been three times through the lines, to and from the city; once by way of
Natchez and twice through Baton Rouge. And oh, the things she's brought
out to our poor boys in the hospitals!"

"Generals' uniforms, for example?"

"Oh, now you're real mean! No! what she's brought the most of is--guess!
You'll never guess it in the world!"

"Hindoo grammars!--No? Well, then,--perfumery!"

"Ah, you! No, I'll tell you." She spoke prudently; I had to bow my ear
so close that it tingled: "Dolls!"

My amazement was genuine. "For our sick soldiers!" I sighed.

Her eyes danced; she leaned away and nodded. Then she drew nearer than
before: "Dolls!" she murmured again;--"and pincushions!--and
emeries!--and 'rats'! you know, for ladies' hair--and chignon-cushions!"

"For our sick soldiers!"

"Yes!--stuffed with quinine!" She laughed in her handkerchief till the
smell of the sweet-peas was lost in the odor of frangipani, and she
staggered almost into my arms. But that sobered her. "And when we speak
of the risk she runs of being sent to Ship Island she laughs and says,
'Life is strife.' She says she'd like it long, but she's got to have
it broad."

"Life is strife indeed to her," I said.

"Oh! do you know that too?--and another reason she gives for taking
those awful risks is that 'it's the best use she can make of her silly
streak'--as if she had any such thing!"

"Why did my mother bring her to you?"

"Oh! she had letters from uncle to aunt Martha! He thinks she's
wonderful!"

"Does your father think so, too?"

"My father? no; but he's prejudiced! That's one of the things I can
never understand--why nearly all the girls I know have such
prejudiced fathers."

XXIX

A GNAWING IN THE DARK

On our return to the veranda, Camille and I, we found on its front the
house's entire company except only the children of the family. Mrs.
Sessions, Estelle and Cecile formed one group, Squire Sessions and
Charlotte Oliver made a pair, and Ferry and Miss Harper another. Our
posies created a lively demonstration; Camille yielded them to Estelle,
and Estelle took them into the house to arrange them in water. Gholson
went with her; it was painful to see her zest for his society.

Miss Harper "knocked me down," as we boys used to say, to Charlotte
Oliver; "Charlotte, my dear, you already know Mr. Smith, I believe?"

I had expected to see again, and to feel, as well, the starry charms of
Coralie Rothvelt; but what I confronted was far different. The charms
were here, unquenched by this stare of daylight, but from them shone a
lustre of womanliness wholly new. It seemed to grow on even when a
tricksy gleam shot through it as she replied, "Yes, our acquaintance
dates from Gallatin."

With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our
acquai'--hh--Gallatin--hh--" But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no,
it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the
accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been
solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt. At
the same her kind eyes sweetly granted me a stripling's acquittal--oh!
why did it have to be a stripling's?

Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in
spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to
blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the
outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of
thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent
meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said--at
the same time saying many other things but saying this always
plainest--"I see both out and in; I know myself--and thee." Never but in
one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.

"Don't you love to see Charlotte and him look at each other in that
steady way when they're talking together?" Camille asked me later. But
rather coldly I inquired why I should; I felt acutely enough without
admitting it to Camille, that Charlotte and Ferry were meeting on ground
far above me; and when Gholson, in his turn, called to my notice, in
Charlotte's case, this unique gaze, and contrasted it with her beautiful
yet strangely childish mouth, I asked a second time why she was
here, anyhow.

"She's here," murmured Gholson, "because she has to live! To live she
must have means, Smith, and to have means she must either get them
herself or she must--" and again he poised his hand horizontally across
his mouth and whispered--"live with her hus'--"

I jerked my head away--"Yes, yes." Scott Gholson was the only one of us
who could give that wretch that title. "Gholson," I said, for I kept him
plied with questions to prevent his questioning me, "how did that man
ever get her?"

The rest of the company were going into the house; he glanced furtively
after them and grabbed my arm; you would have thought he was about to
lay bare the whole tragedy in five words; "Smith,--nobody knows!"

"Do you believe she has told Ned Ferry anything?"

"Never! About herself? no, sir!" He bent and whispered: "She despises
him; she keeps in with him, but it's to get the news, that's all; that's
positively all." On our way to the stable to saddle up--for we were all
going to church--he told me what he knew of her story. I had heard it
all and more, but I listened with unfeigned interest, for he recited it
with flashes of heat and rancor that betrayed a cruel infatuation eating
into his very bone and brain, the guilt of which was only intensified by
the sour legality of his moral sense.

The church we went to was in Franklin, but the preacher was a man of
note, a Vicksburg refugee. On the way back Gholson and I rode for a time
near enough to Squire Sessions and Ned Ferry to know the sermon was
being discussed by them, and something they said gave my companion
occasion to murmur to me in a tone of eager censure that Ned Ferry's
morals were better than his religion.

I said I wished mine were.

"Ah, Smith, be not deceived! Whenever you see a man bringing forth the
fruits of the Spirit while he neglects the regularly appointed means of
grace, you _know_ there's something wrong, don't you? He went to church
this morning--_of course_; but how often does he go? What's wrong with
our dear friend--I don't like to say it, for I admire him so; I don't
like to say it, and I never have said it, but, Smith,--Ned Ferry's a
romanticist. We are relig'--what?"

"O--oh, nothing!"

At one point our way sloped down to a ramshackle wooden bridge that
spanned a narrow bit of running water at the edge of a wood. Beyond it
the road led out between two fields whose high worm-fences made it a
broad lane. The farther limit of this sea of sunlight was the grove that
hid the Sessions house on the left; on the right it was the
woods-pasture in which lay concealed a lily-pond. As Gholson and I
crossed the bridge we came upon a most enlivening view of our own
procession out in the noonday blaze before us; the Sessions buggy; then
Charlotte' little wagon; next the Sessions family carriage full of
youngsters; and lastly, on their horses, Squire Sessions--tall, fleshy,
clean-shaven, silver-haired--and Ned Ferry. Mrs. Sessions and Miss
Harper, in the buggy, were just going by a big white gate in the
right-hand fence, through which a private way led eastward to the
lily-pond. A happy sight they were, the children in the rear vehicle
waving handkerchiefs back at us, and nothing in the scene made the
faintest confession that my pet song, which I was again humming, was pat
to the hour:

"To the lairds o' Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the sun shall go down there are heads to be broke."

"Gholson, if it isn't Ned Ferry's religion that's worrying you just now
about him, what is it?"

My companion looked at me as if what he must say was too large for his
throat. He made a gesture of lament toward Ferry and broke out, "O--oh
Smith,"--nearly all Gholson's oh's were groans--"why is he here? The
scout is 'the eyes of the army'! a man whose perpetual vigilance at the
very foremost front--"

"Why, what do you mean? You know we're here to rejoin the company as it
comes down from Union Church to camp here to-night. _That's_ what we're
here for."

"Yes,--yes,--but, oh, don't you _see_, Smith? For you, yourself, that's
all right; you've got to stay with him, and I'm glad you have. But
he--oh why did he not go on hours ago, to meet them?"

"Why should he? Isn't it good to leave one's lieutenant sometimes in
command; isn't it bad not to?"

Gholson's eyes turned green. "Does Ned Ferry give that as his reason?"

"I haven't asked his reason; I've asked you a question."

"Well, I'll answer it. Do you think Jewett has run back into his own
lines?"

"Of course I do, and Ned Ferry does; don't you?"

"No! Smith, there ain't a braver man in Grant's army than that one
right now a-straddle of your horse. Why, just the way he got your horse
night before--"

"Oh, hang him and the horse! you've told me that three times; what of
it?"

"Smith, he's out here to make a new record for himself, at whatever
cost!"

"And do you imagine Ned Ferry hasn't thought of that?"

"Ah-h, there are times when a man hasn't got his thinking powers; you
ought to know that, Smith,--"

"Mr. Gholson, what do you mean by that?"

"Oh! I certainly didn't mean anything against you, Smith. Why is your
manner so strange to me to-day? Oh, Smith, if you knew what--if I could
speak to you in sacred confidence--I--I wouldn't injure Ned Ferry in
your eyes, nor in anybody's; I only tell you what I do tell so you may
help me to help him. But he's staying here, Smith, and keeping you here,
to be near one whose name--without her a-dreaming of it--is already
coupled with--why,--why, what made you start that a-way again, Smith?"

"Nothing; I didn't start. 'Coupled with somebody's name,' you say. With
whose? Go on."

"With his, Smith, and most injuriously. He's here to tempt her to forget
she's not--" He faltered.

"Free?" said I, and he nodded with tragic solemnity.

"You know who I mean, of course?"

"Certainly; you mean Mrs. Sessions."

He shook his head bitterly. "Oh, well, then, of course I know. How am I
to help you to help him; help him to do what?"

"O--oh! to tear himself away from her, Smith. I want you to appeal to
him. He's taken a great shine to you. You can appeal to his feeling for
romance--poetry--whatever he calls his hell-fired--I mean his
unfortunate impiety. You know how, and I don't. And there you reach the
foundations of his character, as far as it's got any; there's his
conscience if it's anywhere!"

I find myself giving but a faint impression of the spirit in which
Gholson spoke; it went away beyond a mere backbiting mood and became a
temper so vindictive and so venomously purposeful that I was startled;
his condition seemed so fearfully like that of the old paralytic when he
whined "That's not our way."

"Smith," my companion went on, "we ought to protect Ned Ferry from
himself!" The words came through his clenched teeth. "And even more we
ought to protect her. Who's to do it if we don't? Smith, I believe
Providence has been a-preparing you to do this, all through these last
three nights and days!"

He looked at me for an answer until I became frightened. Was my late
folly known to this crawling maligner after all? A sweet-scented
preparation I've had, thought I, but aloud I said only, "If Ned Ferry
clears out, I suppose we must clear out, too."

"Why, eh,--I--I don't know that my movements need have anything to do
with his. Yours, of course,--"

"Yes," I interrupted, beginning to boil.

"I know," he said, "that comes hard; you'll have to tear _yourself_
away--"

He stared at me and hushed. A panic was surging through me; must I be
brought to book by such as he? "Mr. Gholson," I cried, all scorn
without, all terror within; "Mr. Gholson, I--Mr. Gholson, sir!--" and
set my jaws and heaved for breath.

"Why, Smith,--" He extended a soothing hand.

"No explanation, sir, if you please! I can get away from here without
tearing myself, which is more than you can boast. Any fool can see why
_you_ are here. Stop, I take that back, sir! I don't play tit-for-tat
with my tongue."

Gholson turned red on the brow and ashen about the lips. "I don't call
that tit-for-tat, Mr. Smith. I remind you of an innocent attachment for
a young girl; you accuse me of harboring a guilty passion for--" All at
once he ceased with open lips, and then said as he drew a long breath of
relief, "Smith, I beg your pardon! We've each misunderstood the other; I
see, now, who you meant; you meant Miss Estelle Harper!"

"Whom else could I mean?" Disdain was in my voice, but he ought to have
seen the falsehood in my eye, for I could feel it there.

"_Of_ course!" he said; "of course! But, Smith, my mind was so
full--just for the moment, you know,--of her we were speaking of in
connection with Ned Ferry--Do you know? she's so unprotected and tagged
after and talked about that it seems to me sometimes, in this nervous
condition of mine, that if I could catch the entire gang of her
pursuers in one hole I'd--I'd _end 'em_ like so many rats. That sort of
feeling is mere impulse, of course," he went on, "and only shows how
near I am to that nervous breakdown. Yes, the Harper ladies are mighty
lovely and hard enough to leave, but that's all I meant to you, and I'm
sorry I touched your feelings. I'm _tchagrined_. Anyhow, all this is
between us, you know. I wouldn't ever have confessed such feelings as I
did just now except to a friend who knows as well as you do that if I
ever should do a man a mortal injury I wouldn't do it in a spirit of
resentment. You know that, don't you? No, that's not my way--Why,
Smith, what gives you those starts? That's the third time you've done
that this morning."

I said that entering the cool shade of the Sessions grove after the
blazing heat of that long lane gave any one the right to a little
shudder, and as we turned toward the house Gholson murmured "If you say
you'll speak to Ned as I've asked you, I'll sort o' toll Squire Sessions
off with me so's to give you the chance. It's for his own sake, you
know, and you're the only one can do it."

XXX

DIGNITY AND IMPUDENCE

I knew Ned Ferry was having that inner strife with which we ought always
to credit even Gholson's sort, and I had a loving ambition to help him
"take the upper fork." So doing, I might help Charlotte Oliver fulfil
the same principle, win the same victory. When, therefore, Gholson put
the question to me squarely, Would I speak to Ferry? I consented, and as
the four of us, horsemen, left our beasts in the stable munching corn,
Gholson began a surprisingly animated talk with our host, and Ferry,
with a quizzical smile, said to me "Talk with you?--shall be happy to;
we'll just make a slight _detour_ on this side the grove and
woods-pasture, eh?"

He meant the north side, opposite that one by which we had come from
church. Here the landscape was much the same as there; wide fields on
each side the fenced highway that still ran north and south, and woods
for the sky-line everywhere. We chose an easy footpath along the
northern fence of the grove, crossed the highway, and passed on a few
steps alongside the woods-pasture fence. We talked as we went, he giving
the kindest heed to my every word though I could see that, like any good
soldier, he was scanning all the ground for its fighting values, and,
not to be outdone, I, myself, pointed out, a short way up the public
road, a fence-gap on the left, made by our camping soldiers two nights
before. It was at another such gap, in the woods-pasture fence, that we
turned back by a path through it which led into the wood and so again
toward the highway and the house-grove. The evening General Austin sent
me to Wiggins it was at this gap that I saw old Dismukes sitting
cross-legged on the ground, playing poker; and here, now, I summoned the
desperation to speak directly to my point.

I had already tried hard to get something said, but had found myself at
every turn entangled in generalities. Now, stammering and gagging I
remarked that our experiences of the morning, both in church and out,
had in some way combined with an earlier word of his own to me, and
given me a valuable thought. "You remember, when I wanted to shoot that
Yankee off my horse?"

"Yes; and I said--what?"

"You said 'This isn't your private war.' Lieutenant, I hope those words
may last in my memory forever and come to me in every moral situation in
which I may find myself."

"Yes? Well, I think that's good."

"It seems to me, Lieutenant Ferry, that in every problem of moral
conduct we confront we really hold in trust an interest of all mankind.
To solve that problem bravely and faithfully is to make life just so
much easier for everybody; and to fail to do so is to make it just so
much harder to solve by whoever has next to face it." Whurroo! my blood
was up now, let him look to himself!

"Yes?" said Ferry, picking at the underbrush as we sauntered, and for
some time he said no more. Then he asked, "You want me to apply that to
myself, in--in the present case?" and to my tender amazement, while his
eyes seemed to count his slackening steps, he laid his arm across my
shoulders.

An hour of avowal could not have told me more; could not have filled me
half so full of sympathy, admiration and love, as did that one slight
motion. It befitted the day, a day outwardly so quiescent, yet in which
so much was going on. A realization of this quiet activity kept us
silent until we had come through the woods-pasture to its southern
border, and so through the big white field-gate into the public road;
now we turned up toward the grove-gate, and here I spoke again. "Do you
still think we ought to wait here for the command?"

That from a private soldier to his captain! Yet all my leader answered
was "You think there's cause to change our mind?"

"I don't know, Lieutenant; do you think Jewett has run back into his own
lines?"

"Yes, I think so; and you?"

"Why, eh,--Lieutenant, I don't believe there's a braver man in Grant's
army than that one a-straddle of my horse to-day! Why, just the way he
got him, night before last,--you've heard that, haven't you?"

"Yes, the General told me. And so you think--"

"Lieutenant, I can't help believing he's out here to make a new record
for himself, at whatever cost!"

We went on some steps in silence and entered the gate of the
house-grove; and just as Ferry would have replied we discovered before
us in the mottled shade of the driveway, with her arm on Cecile's
shoulders as his lay on mine, and with _her_ eyes counting _her_
slackening steps, Charlotte Oliver. They must have espied us already out
in the highway, for they also were turned toward the house, and as we
neared them Charlotte faced round with a cheery absence of surprise and
said "Mr. Smith, don't we owe each other a better acquaintance? Suppose
we settle up."

XXXI

THE RED STAR'S WARNING

It seemed quite as undeniable, as we stood there, that Ned Ferry owed
Cecile a better acquaintance. Every new hour enhanced her graces, and
were I, here, less engrossed with her companion, I could pitch the
praises of Cecile upon almost as high and brilliant a key--there may be
room for that yet. Ferry moved on at her side. Charlotte stayed a moment
to laugh at a squirrel, and then turned to walk, saying with eyes on
the earth--

"If I tell you something, will you never tell?"

I looked down too. "Suppose I should feel sure it ought to be told."

"If you wait till you do you may tell it; that will suit me well
enough."

"I will always suit you the best I can."

"I don't know why you should," she said.

"You risked your life to save mine; and you risked it when I did not
deserve so much as your respect."

"Oh!--we must never talk about that again, Richard; you saw me in the
evilest guise I ever wore, and that is saying much."

"But," I responded, "you put it on for a better reason than you could
tell me then or can tell me now, though now I know your story."

"Please don't forget," she murmured, "that you know too much." "No, no!
I don't know half enough; I know only what Miss Camilla
and--and--Gholson could tell me," was my tricky reply, and I tried to
look straight into her eyes, but they took that faint introspective
contraction of which I have spoken, and gazed through me like sunlight
through glass. Then again she bent her glance upon her steps, saying--

"Ah, Richard, you have found out all you could, and I am glad of it,
except of what I, myself, have had to betray to you; for _that_ was more
than one would want to tell her twin brother. But I had to create you
_my_ scout, and I had only two or three hours for my whole work of
creation."

"Well, you completed it." We went on some steps, and then she said--

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