"May there not be some love, madame, that time only strengthens?"
"I never heard of it if there be. It would be a very dreary affair, I should fancy, smouldering, smouldering on and on like an ill-lit fire. Nobody would thank you for it, mon cher,here! Come, what is your secret? Tell it me."
Léon de Tallemont smiled; the smile of a man who has happy thoughts, and is indifferent to ridicule.
"Madame, one can refuse you nothing! My secret? It is a very simple one. The greatest pang of my enforced exile was the parting from one I loved; the greatest joy of my return is that I return to her."
"Bon Dieu! comme c'est drôle!Here is a man talking to me of love, and of a love not felt forme!" thought Madame la Comtesse, giving him a soft glance of herbeautiful blue eyes. "You are a very strange man. You have lived out of France till you have grown wretchedly serious and eccentric. Loved this woman for five years? Léon! Léon! you are telling me a fairy tale. Who is she, this enchantress? She must have some mysterious magic. Tell me—quick!"
"She is no enchantress, madame, and she has no magic save the simple one of having ever been very dear to me. We grew up together at Grande Charmille; she was the orphan niece of the Priest, a fond, innocent, laughing child, fresh and fair, and as untouched by a breath of impure air as any of the violets in the valley. She was scarcely out of the years of childhood when I left her, with beauty whose sweetest grace of all was its own unconsciousness. Through my five long years of exile I have remembered Favette as I saw her last under the elm-boughs in the summer light, her eyes dim with the tears of our parting, her young heart heaving with its first grief. I have loved her too well for others to have power to efface or to supplant her; of her only have I thought, of her only have I dreamed, holding her but the dearer as the years grew further from the hour of our separation, nearer to the hour of our reunion. I have heard no word of her since we parted; but of what value is love without trust and fidelity in trial? The beauty of her childhood may have merged into the beauty of womanhood, but I fear no other change in Favette. As we parted so we vowed to meet, and I believe in her love as in my own. I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than five years ago. Five years—five years—true! itisan eternity! Yet the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from menow, and I only see—the future!"
Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his words stirred in her chords long untouched, never heard amidstthe mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her lovely blue eyes.
"Hush, hush, Léon! you speak in a tongue unknown here. A word of the heart amongst us sounds a word of aGauloisout of fashion—forbidden!"
The Français was crowded. Thargélie Dumarsais, great inElectre,Chimène,Inès, as in "Ninette à la Cour," "Les Moissonneurs," or "Annette et Lubin," was playing in "Phèdre." Louis Quinze was present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the hour, and Louis le Bien-aimé (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his regalia. It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing envious of his favorite's favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long, supersede him.
The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, marquises, the élite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen crowded the passages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she passed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou—amongst them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—pressed forward to catch a glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habitparfilé d'orwere allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Français, after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, andwent to her carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargélie Dumarsais were renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpassed them for wit. All the world might flock to her fêtes where she undisguisedly sought to surpass the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to hersoupers à huis closonly a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped with the King at Choisy.
"What you have lost in not seeing her playPhèdre! Helvétius would have excused you; all the talk of his salons is not worth one glance at la Dumarsais. Mon ami! you will be converted to Paris when once you have seen her," said the Marquis de la Thorillière, as his carriage stopped in the Chaussée d'Antin.
Léon de Tallemont laughed, and thought of the eyes that would brighten at his glance, and the heart that would beat against his once more under the vine shadows of Lorraine. No new magic, however seductive, should have strength to shake his allegiance to that Memory, and, true to his violet in Lorraine, he defied the Queen of the Foyer.
"We are late, but that is always a more pardonable fault than to be too early," said the Marquis, as they were ushered across the vestibule, through several salons, into the supper-room, hung with rich tapestries of "Les Nymphes au Bain," "Diane Chasseresse," and "Apollon et Daphné;" with gilded consoles, and rosewood buffets, enamelled with medallion groups, and crowded with Sèvres and porcelaine de Saxe, while Venetian mirrors at each end of the salle reflected the table, with its wines, and fruits, and flowers, its gold dishes and Bohemian glass. The air was heavily perfumed, and vibrating with laughter. The guests were Richelieu, Bièvre, Saxe,D'Etissac, Montcrif, and lovely Marie Camargo, the queen of the coulisses who introduced the "short skirts" of the ballet, and upheld her innovation so stanchly amidst the outcries of scandalized Jansenists and journalists. But even Marie Camargo herself paled—and would have paled even had she been, what she was not, in the first flush of her youth—before the superb beauty, the languid voluptuousness, the sensuous grace, the southern eyes, the full lips, like the open leaves of a damask rose, melting yet mocking, of the most beautiful and most notorious woman of a day in which beauty and notoriety were rife, the woman with the diamond of Louis Quinze sparkling in the light upon her bosom, whom Versailles and Paris hailed as Thargélie Dumarsais.
The air, scented with amber, rang with the gay echoes of a stanza of Dorat's, chanted by Marie Camargo; the "Cupids and Bacchantes," painted in the panels of Sèvres, seemed to laugh in sympathy with the revel over which they presided; the light flashed on the King's diamond, to which Richelieu pointed, with a wicked whisper; for the Marshal was getting tired of his own reign, and his master might pay his court when he would. Thargélie Dumarsais, more beautiful still at herpetit souperthan at herpetit lever, with her hair crowned with roses, true flowers of Venus that might have crowned Aspasia, looked up laughingly as her lacqueys ushered in le Marquis de la Thorillière and le Chevalier de Tallemont.
"M. le Marquis," cried the actress, "you are late! It is an impertinence forbidden at my court. I shall sup in future with barred doors, like M. d'Orléans; then all you late-comers——"
Through the scented air, through the echoing laughter, stopping her own words, broke a startled bitter cry:
"Mon Dieu, c'est Favette!"
Thargélie Dumarsais shrank back in her rose velvet fauteuil as though the blow of a dagger had struck her;the color fled from her lips, and underneath the delicate rouge on her cheeks; her hand trembled as it grasped the King's aigrette.
"Favette—Favette! Who calls me that?"
It was a forgotten name, the name of a bygone life that fell on her ear with a strange familiar chime, breaking in on the wit, the license, the laughter of her midnight supper, as the subdued and mournful sound of vesper bells might fall upon the wild refrains and noisy drinking-songs of bacchanalian melody.
A surprised silence fell upon the group, the laughter hushed, the voices stopped; it was a strange interruption for a midnight supper. Thargélie Dumarsais involuntarily rose, her lips white, her eyes fixed, her hand clasped convulsively on the King's diamond. A vague, speechless terror held mastery over her, an awe she could not shake off had fastened upon her, as though the dead had risen from their graves, and come thither to rebuke her for the past forgotten, the innocence lost. The roses in her hair, the flowers of revel, touched a cheek blanched as though she beheld some unearthly thing, and the hand that lay on the royal jewel shook and trembled.
"Favette? Favette?" she echoed again. "It is so many years since I heard that name!"
Her guests sat silent still, comprehending nothing of this single name which had such power to move and startle her. Richelieu alone, leaning back in his chair, leisurely picked out one of his brandy-cherries, and waited as a man waits for the next scene at a theatre:
"Is it an unexpected tragedy, or an arranged comedy, ma chère? Ought one to cry or to laugh? Give me themot d'ordre!"
His words broke the spell, and called Thargélie Dumarsais back to the world about her. Actress by profession and by nature, she rallied with a laugh, putting out her jewelled hand with a languid glance from her long almond-shaped eyes.
"A friend of early years, my dear Duc, that is all. Ah, Monsieur de Tallemont what a strange rencontre! When did you come to Paris? I scarcely knew you at the first moment; you have so long been an exile, one may pardonably be startled by your apparition, and take you for a ghost! I suppose you never dreamed of meeting Favette Fontanie under mynom de théâtre? Ah! how we change, do we not, Léon? Time is so short, we have no time to stand still! Marie, ma chère, give Monsieur le Chevalier a seat beside you—he cannot be happier placed!"
Léon de Tallemont heard not a word that she spoke; he stood like a man stunned and paralyzed by a sudden and violent blow, his head bowed, a mortal pallor changing his face to the hues of death, the features that were a moment before bright, laughing, and careless, now set in mute and rigid anguish.
"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoarsely, in the vague dreamy agony with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come back to him from the silence and horror of the grave.
"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow! Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!—shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my sword will soon punish his impudence!"
The jeer fell unheeded on Léon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargélie Dumarsais's hands in his:
"This is how we meet!"
She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face.
Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea—memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.
One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on him her languid lustrous glance.
"You look like a somnambulist,mon ami! Did nobody ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrillière carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St. Laurent, her appearance at the Français as Thargélie Dumarsais?Allons donc!have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, 'On revient toujours à ses premiers amours!' Surely, Thargélie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Léon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And—who knows?—perhaps I will!"
She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductivesourire d'amourto which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken—gazeddown on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom—was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips:
"Would to God I had died before to-night!"
Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face—a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it—the smile of a breaking heart.
"I thank you for your proffered embraces, butIam faithful. I love but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of Thargélie Dumarsais, the Courtesan."
He bowed low to her and left her—never to see her face again.
A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this man's life; and—reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished from the gay salons of the Dix-huitième Siècle, that its intrusion awed them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant.
Thargélie Dumarsais sat silent—her thoughts had flown away once more from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille: she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds echo in the Lorrainewoods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not, Favette!—we shall meet as we part!"
Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst of laughter.
"Voilà un drôle!—this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles. Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma chérie, that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation by his impolite epithets!"
"When one has nothing, one can lose nothing—eh, ma chère?" laughed Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us——"
"No,l'infidèle!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!—is it not the truth?"
"Chut! nobody asks for truths in a polite age!" laughed Thargélie Dumarsais, shaking off unwelcome memories once for all, and looking down at the King's diamond gleaming in the light—the diamond that prophesied to her the triumph of the King's love.
"Naturally," added La Camargo. "My friend, I shall die with envy of your glorious jewel.Dieu! comme il brille!"
* * * * *
* * * * *
On the off-day after the Derby everybody, except the great winners, is, it will be generally admitted, the resigned prey to a certain gentle sadness, not to say melancholy, that will only dissipate itself under a prolonged regimen of S. and B., seidlitz well dashed with Amontillado, or certain heavenly West Indian decoctions;—this indisposition, I would suggest, we should call, delicately and dubiously, Epsomitis. It will serve to describe innumerable forms and degrees of the reactionary malady.
There is the severest shape of all, "dead money," that covers four figures, dropped irretrievably, and lost to the "milkers;" lost alwaysyousay because of a cough, or because of a close finish, or because of something dark, or because of a strain in the practising gallops, or because of a couple of brutes that cannoned just at the start; and never, of course, because the horse you had fancied was sheerly and simply only fit for a plater. There is the second severe form, when you awake with a cheerful expectation of a summons for driving "at twelve miles an hour" (as if that wasn't moderate and discreet!), and for thereby smashing a greengrocer's cart into the middle of next week, and running a waggonette into an omnibus, as you came back from the Downs, of which you have no more remembrance than that there was a crash, and asmash, and a woman's screams, and a man's "d—n the swells!" and atintamarreof roaring conductor and bellowing greengrocer, and infuriated females, through which you dashed somehow with a cheer—more shame for you—and a most inappropriatel'Africainechorus from the men on your drag. There is the milder form, which is only the rueful recollection of seeing, in a wild ecstasy, the chestnut with the white blaze sweep with his superb stride to the front, and of having, in your moment of rapturous gratitude to the red and blue, rushed, unintentionally, during the discussion of Fortnum and Mason's hamper, into a promise to take Euphrosyne Brown to Baden in August, where you know very well she will cost you more than all your sums netted through Gladiateur. There are the slenderer touches of the malady, which give you, over your breakfast coffee, a certain dolorous meditation as to how you could have been such a fool as to have placed all your trust in Danebury, or to have put in a hole through Spring Cottage just what your yacht costs for three months; which makes you wonder why on earth you took that lot of actresses on to the hill, and threw money enough away on them in those wages of idiotcy (or wages of sin, as your uncle the dean would translate it), of cashmeres, eau de Cologne, gloves, and bracelets, to have purchased those two weight-carriers offered you at £600 the pair, and dirt-cheap at that; or which makes you only dully and headachily conscious that you drank champagne up on the box-seat as if you were a young fellow from Eton, and now pay for the juvenile folly, as you know you deserve to do, when that beautiful white Burgundy at your club, or your own cool perfect claret at home, seems to stare you in the face and ask, "Why did you crack all those bottles of Dry on the Downs?"
There are symptoms and varieties innumerable of the malady that I propose shall be known henceforward as Epsomitis; therefore, the off-day finds everybody more orless slightly done-up and mournful. Twenty-four hours and the Oaks, if properly prepared for by a strictly medicinal course ofbrûles-gueules, as the Chasseurs say, smoked perseveringly, will bring all patients round on the Friday; but during the twenty-four hours a sense that all on and off the course is vanity and vexation of spirit will generally and somnolently predominate in the universal and fashionable disease of Epsomitis.
One off-day, after the magnificent victory of Monarque's unrivalled son, an acquaintance of mine, suffering considerably from these symptoms, sought my philosophy and my prescriptions. A very sharp irritant for Epsomitis may be administered in the form of "I told you so? It's all your own fault!" But this species of blister and douche bath combined is rarely given unless the patient be mad enough to let his wife, if he unluckily have one, learn what ails him. As far as I was concerned, I was much too sympathetic with the sufferer to be down upon him with the triumphant reminder that I had cautioned him all along not to place his trust in Russley. I, instead, prescribed him cool wines, and led him on to talk of other people's misfortunes, the very best way to get reconciled with your own. We talked of old times, of old memories, of old acquaintance, in the twilight, between Derby and Oaks. We got a little melancholy; too much champagne is always productive on the morrow of a gently sentimental tinge, and a man is always inclined to look on the world as a desert when he has the conviction that he himself has been made a fool in it. Among other names, that of Deadly Dash came up between us. What had become of him? I did not know; he did. He told me; and I will tell it here, for the story is of the past now.
"Deadly Dash! What a shot he was! Never missed," said my friend, whose own gun is known well enough at Hornsey-wood House; therewith falling into a reverie, tinged with the Jacques-like gloom of Epsomitis in itsseverest form, from which he awoke to tell me slowly, between long draughts of iced drinks, what I write now. I alter his tale in nothing, save in filling in with words the gaps and blanks that he made, all-eloquent in his halting oratory, by meditative, plaintive, moralizing puffs from his tonic, thebrûle gueule, and an occasional appeal to my imagination in the customary formula of "Oh, bother!—youunderstand—all the rest of it you know," which, though it tells everything over claret, is not so clear a mode of relation in type. For all else here the story is as he gave it to me.
"Deadly Dash!" It was a fatal sounding sobriquet, and had a fatal fascination for many, for me as well as the rest, when I was in my salad days and joined the old ——th, amongst whose Light Dragoons, it was so signally and ominously famous. The nickname had a wide significance; "he always kills," was said with twofold truth, in twofold meaning of Dash; in abarrièreduel he would wheel lightly, aim carelessly, and send the ball straight as any arrow through heart or lung, just as he fancied, in the neatest style anybody could dream of; and in an intrigue he took just the same measures, and hit as invariably with the self-same skill and the self-same indifference. "He always kills" applied equally to either kind of affair, and got him his sobriquet, which he received with as laughing an equanimity as a riding man gets the Gilt Vase, or a "lover of the leash" the Ravensworth Stakes, or the Puppy Cup and Goblet. He was proud of it, and had only one regret, that he lived in the dead days of the duel, and could only go out when he was on French soil. In dare-devilry of every sort he out-Heroded Herod, and distanced any who were mad enough to try the pace with him in that steeple-chase commonly called "going to the bad." It was a miracle how often he used to reach the stage of "completeruin" that the Prince de Soubise oncesighed for as an unattainable paradise; and picked himself up again, without a hair turned, as one may say, and started off with as fresh a pace as though nothing had knocked him over. Other men got his speed sometimes; but nobody could ever equal his stay. For an "out and out goer" there was nobody like Deadly Dash; and though only a Captain of Horse, with few "expectations," he did what Dukes daren't have done, and lived at a faster rate than all the elder sons in the kingdom put together. Dash had the best bow and the brightest wits, the lightest morals and the heaviest debts of anysabreurin the Service; very unscrupulous fellows were staggered athisdevil-me-care vices; and as for reputation,—"a deuced pleasant fellow, Dash," they used to say at the Curragh, in the Guards' Club, at Thatched House anniversary dinners, in North Indian cantonments, in Brighton barrack-rooms, or in any of the many places where Deadly Dash was a household word; "a very pleasant fellow; no end 'fit' always, best fun in life over the olives when you get him in humor; shoot you dead though next morning, if he want, and you be handy for him in a neat snug little Bad; make some devil of amoton you too afterwards, just as pleasantly as if he were offering you a Lopez to smoke!"
Now, that was just the sort of celebrity that made me mad to see the owner of it; there wasn't a living being, except that year's favorite out of the Whitewall establishment, that I was half so eager to look at, or so reverent when I thought of, as "the Killer." I was very young then. I had gone through a classic course of yellow covers from Jeffs' and Rolandi's, and I had a vague impression that a man who had had a dozenbarrièreaffairs abroad, and been "enfant" to every lovelylionneof his day, must of necessity be like the heroes of Delphine Demireps' novels, who had each of them always a "je ne sais quoi de farouche et de fier dans ses grands yeux noirs,et toute la révélation d'une ame usée, mais dominée par des passions encore inépuisables, écrite sur son sombre et pale visage," &c., &c., in the Demireps' most telling style.
I don't know quite what I expected to see in the Killer, but I think it was a sort of compound of Monte Christo, Mephistopheles, and Murat mixed in one; what I did see was a slight delicate man with a face as fair and soft as a girl's, the gentlest possible manners, and a laugh like music. Deadly Dash had led a life as bad as he could lead, had lit his cigar without a tremor in the wrist, on many gray mornings, while his adversary lay dying hard among the red rank grasses, had gamed so deep twenty-four hours at a stretch that the most recklessgalériein Europe held their breath to watch his play; had had a tongue of silver for his intrigues and a nerve of steel for hisvendetta; had lived in reckless rioting and drunk deep; but the Demirep would not have had him at any price in her romance; he looked so simply and quietly thorough-bred, he was so utterly guiltless of all her orthodox traits. The gentlest of mortals was Deadly Dash; when you first heard his sweet silvery voice, and his laughter as light and airy as a woman's, you would never believe how often abroad there a dead man had been left to get stiff and cold among the clotted herbage, while the Killer went out of the town by the early express, smoking and reading the "Charivari," and sipping some cold Curaçoa punch out of his flask.
"Of course!" growled a man to me once in the Guards' smoking-room, an order of the Scots Fusilleers to Montreal having turned him misanthrope. "Did Mephistopheles ever come out in full harness, with horns and tail complete, eh? Not such a fool. He looked like a gentleman, and talked like a wit. Would the most dunder-headed Cain in Christendom, I should be glad to know, be such an ass as to go about town with the brand on hisforehead, when he could turn down Bond Street any day and get a dash of the ladies' pearl powder? Who evershowsanything now, my good fellow? Not that Dash 'paints,' to give the deuce his due—except himself a little blacker even than he is; he don't cant; he couldn't cant; not to save his life, I believe. But as to his bewitching you, almost as bad as he does the women, I know all about that. I used to swear by him till——"
"Till what?"
"Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn't speak after that, you see. Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Curaçoa punch in Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed Charlie,—" and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn't humbug, and an uncalled-for sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Curaçoa brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail;—on the whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? "Keep clear of the Killer, though, young one," he added, as he sauntered out. "He's like that cheetah cub of Berkeley's; soft as silk, you know,patte de velours, and what d'ye call 'em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to deal with."
I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderousslander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon—Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.
At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched little chorus-singer of the Café Alcazar, who took their fancies both at once. Themondesthought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know, but the audacity of a cavalry man's having potted a Very Serene High Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet, would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to plenty of "floating little bills," could not bid high enough to purchase his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of virtue, "Oblivion cannot be hired,—unless," adds Society, dropping to mellowest murmur her whisper, "unless you can give us a premium!" So Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from the Horse Guards—sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally, irretrievably, struck out.
Certainly the fellow was a bad fellow, and deserved his crash so far; he had no scruples, and no conscience; he spared neither woman nor man; of remorse he had never felt a twinge, and if you were in his path he would pickyou off some way or other as indifferently as if you were one of the pigeons at Hornsey. And yet, he had been kind to me, though I was a young one; with his own variable Free Lance sort of liberality, the man would give his last sou to get you out of any difficulty, and would carry off your mistress, or beggar you at chicken-hazard, with the self-same pleasant air the next day: and I could not help being sorry that things had come to this pass with him. He shot so superbly! Put him where you would, in a warm corner while the bouquets of pheasants were told off; in a punt, while a square half-mile of wild-ducks whirred up from the marshes; in a dark forest alley in Transylvania, while the great boar rushed down through the twilight, foaming blood and roaring fury; in a still Indian night with the only target here and there a dusky head diving amidst the jhow jungle three hundred yards away: put him where you would, he was such a magnificent shot! The sins of a Frankenstein should not have lost such a marksman as Deadly Dash to the Service.
But the authorities thought otherwise; they were not open to the fact, that the man who had been out in morebarrièreaffairs, and had won more Grand Military stakes than any other, should, by all laws of war-policy, have had his blackest transgressions forgiven him, till he could have been turned to account against Ghoorkas, Maories, or Caffres. The authorities instead, made him send in his papers, not knowing the grand knack of turning a scamp into a hero—a process that requires some genius and some clairvoyance in the manipulator,—and Deadly Dash, with his lightest and airiest laugh, steamed down channel one late autumn night, marked, disgraced, and outlawed, for creditors by the score were after him, knowing very well that he and his old gay lawless life, and his own wild pleasant world, and his old lands yonder in the green heart of the grass countries that had gone rood byrood to the Hebrews, were all divorced for ever with a great gulf between them that could never close.
So he dropped out of the Service, out of the country, out of remembrance, out of regret; nobody said a De Profundis over him, and some men breathed the freer. We can rarely be sure of any who will be sorry to miss us; but we can always be certain of some to be glad we are gone. And in the Killer's case these last were legion. Here and there were one or two who owed him a wayward, inconstant bizarre fit of generosity; but there were on the other hand hundreds who owed him nothing less than entire ruin.
So Deadly Dash went with nobody to regret him and nobody to think of him for a second, after the nine hours' wonder in the clubs and the mess-rooms that his levanting "under a cloud" occasioned; and so the old sobriquet, that had used to have so signal a notoriety, dropped out of men's mouths and was forgotten. Where he was gone no one knew; and to be sure no one asked. Metaphorically, he was gone to the devil; and when a man takes that little tour, if he furnish talk for a day he has had very distinguished and lengthened obsequies as friendship goes in this world. Now and then in the course of half-a-dozen years I remembered him, when I looked up at the head of a Royal over my mantelpiece, with thirteen points, that he had stalked once in Ayrshire and given to me; but nobody else gave a thought to the Killer. Time passed, and whether he had been killed fighting in Chili or Bolivia, shot himself at Homburg, become Mussulman and entered the Sultan's army, gone to fight with the Kabyles and Bedouins, turned brigand for the Neapolitan Bourbons, or sunk downward by the old well-worn stage, so sadly and so often travelled, into an adventurer living by the skill of his écarté and the dread surety of his shot, we did not know; we did not care.When society has given a man the sack, it matters uncommonly little whether he has given himself a shroud.
Seven or eight years after the name of Deadly Dash had ceased to be heard among cavalry men, and quoted on all things "horsey," whether of the flat or of the ridge and furrow, I was in the Confederate States, on leave for a six months' tour there. It was after Lee's raid across the border and the days of Gettysburgh. I had run the blockade in a fast-built clipper, and pushed on at once into the heart of Virginia, to be in the full heat of whatever should come on the cards; cutting the cities rather, and keeping as much as I could to the camps and the woods, for I wanted to see the real thing in the rough. In my relish for adventure, however, I was a trifle, as it proved, too foolhardy.
Starting alone one day to cross the thirty miles or so that parted me from the encampment of some Virginian Horse, with no other companions than a very weedy-looking steel gray, and a brace of revolvers, I fairly "lost tracks," and had not a notion of my way out of a wilderness of morass and forest, all glowing with the scarlet and the green of the Indian summer. Here and there were beautiful wild pools and lakes shut in by dense vegetation, so dense, that at noon it was dark as twilight, and great tablelands of rock jutted out black and rugged in places; but chiefly as far as was to be seen stretched the deep entangled woodland, with nothing else to break it, brooding quietly over square leagues of swamp. The orioles were singing their sweetest, wildest music overhead; sign of war there was none, save to be sure, now and then when I came on a black, arid circle, where a few charred timbers showed where a hut had been burnt down and deserted, or my horse shied and snorted uneasily, and half stumbled over some shapeless log on the ground—a log that when you looked closer was the swollenshattered body of a man who had died hard, with the grasses wrenched up in his fingers that the ants had eaten bare, and the hollows of his eyes staring open where the carrion birds had plucked the eyeballs out. And near him there were sure to be, half sunk in swamp, or cleaned to skeletons by the eagles and hawks, five, or ten, or twenty more, lying nameless and unburied there, where they had fallen in some scuffle with pickets, or some stray cavalry skirmish, to be told off as "missing," and to be thought of no more. These groups I came upon more than once rotting among the rich Virginian soil, while the scarlet and purple weight of blossoming boughs swayed above, and the bright insect life fluttered humming around them; they were the only highway marks through the wooded wilderness.
So lonely was it mile after mile, and so little notion had I of either the way in or the way out, that thehallali!of a boar-hunt, or the sweet mellow tongues of the hounds when they have found in the coverts at home, were never brighter music to me than the sharp crack of rifles and the long sullen roll of musketry as they suddenly broke the silence, while I rode along, firing from the west that lay on my left. The gray, used to powder, pointed his ears and quickened his pace. Though a weedy, fiddle-headed beast, his speed was not bad, and I rattled him over the ground, crashing through undergrowth and wading through pools, with all my blood up at the tune of those ringing cheery shots; the roar growing louder and louder with every moment, and the sulphur scent of the smoke borne stronger and stronger down on the wind, till the horse brokepêle-mêlethrough a network of parasites; dashed downward along a slope of dank herbage, slipping at every step, and with his hind legs tucked under him; and shot, like a run-in for a race, on to a green plateau, where the skirmish was going on in hot earnest.
A glance told me how the land lay. A handful of Southern troopers held their own with tremendous difficulty against three divisions of Federal infantry, whom they had unexpectedly encountered, as the latter were marching across the plateau with some batteries of foot artillery,—the odds were probably scarcely less than five to one. The Southerners were fighting magnificently, as firm in their close square of four hundred as the Consular Guard at Marengo, but so surrounded by the Northern host, that they looked like a little island circled round by raging breakers. Glancing down on the plain as my horse scoured and slid along the incline, the nucleus of Southerners looked hopelessly lost amidst the belching fire and pressing columns of the enemy. The whole was surrounded and hidden by the whirling clouds of dust and smoke that swirled above in a white heavy mist; but through this the sabres flashed, the horses' heads reared, maddened and foam-covered, like so many bas-reliefs of Bucephalus, the lean rifle-barrels glittered, and for a moment I saw the Southern leader, steady as a rock in the centre, hewing like a trooper right and left, and with a gray heron's feather floating from his sombrero, a signal that seemed as well known and as closely followed as the snowy plume of Murat.
To have looked on at this and not have taken a share in it, one would have been a stone, not a man, and much less a cavalry-man; I need not tell you that I smashed the gray across the plateau, hurled him into the thick of the mêlée, dashedsomehowthrough the Federal ranks, and was near the gray plume and fighting for the Old Dominion before you could have shouted a stave of "Dixie." I was a "non-combatant," I was a "neutral"—delicate Anglo-euphemism for coward, friend to neither and traitor to both!—I was on a tour of observation, and had no business to fire a shot for one or the other perhaps, but I forgot all that, and with the bridle in my teeth anda pistol in each hand, I rode down to give one blow the more for the weak side.
How superbly that Gray Feather fought!—keeping his men well up round him, though saddle after saddle was emptied, and horse after horse tore riderless out of the ranks, or reeled over on their heads, spurting blood, he sat like a statue, he fought like a Titan, his sabre seemed flashing unceasingly in the air, so often was it raised to come down again like lightning through a sword-arm, or lay open a skull to the brains; the shots ploughed up the earth round him, and rattled like hail through the air, a score of balls were aimed at him alone, a score of sabres crossed his own; but he was cool as St. Lawrence ice, and laid the men dead in struggling heaps under his charger's hoofs; only to fight near the man was a glorious intoxication; you seemed to "breathe blood" till you got drunk with it.
The four hundred had been mowed down to two; I did as good work as I could, having wrenched a sword out of some dead trooper's hand; but I was only one, and the Northerners counted by thousands. Come out of it alive I never expected to do; but I vow it was the happiest day of my life—the pace was so splendidly fast! The Gray Feather at last glanced anxiously around; his men stuck like death to him, ready to be hewed down one by one, and die game; his teeth were set tight, and his eyes had a flash in them like steel. "Charge! and cut through!" he shouted, his voice rolling out like a clarion, giving an order that it seemed could be followed by nothing short of supernatural aid. The Southrons thought otherwise; they only heard to obey; they closed up as steadily as though they were a squadron on parade, despite the great gaps between them of dying chargers, and of heaped-up killed and wounded, that broke their ranks like so much piled stones and timber; they halted a moment, the murderous fire raking them right and left,front and rear; then, with that dense mass of troops round them, they charged; shivered the first line that wedged them in; pierced by sheer force of impetus the columns that opened fire in their path; wrenched themselves through as through the steel jaws of a trap, and swept out on to the green level of the open plateau, with a wild rallying Virginian shout that rings in my ears now!
I have been in a good many hot things in my time; but I never knew anything that for pace and long odds could be anything near to that.
I had kept with them through the charge with no other scratch than a shoulder cut; and I had been close to their chief through it all. When we were clean out on the plains beyond pursuit—for the Union-men had not a squadron of cavalry, though their guns at long range belched a storm in our wake—he turned in his saddle without checking his mare's thundering gallop, and levelled his rifle that was slung at his aide. "I'll have the General, anyhow," he said, quietly taking aim—still without checking his speed—at the knot of staff-officers that now were scarce more than specks in a blurred mass of mist. He fired; and the centre figure in that indistinct and fast-vanishing group fell from the saddle, while the yell of fury that the wind faintly floated nearer told us that the shot had been deadly. The Gray Feather laughed, a careless airy laugh of triumph, while he swept on at topmost pace; a little more, and we should dive down into the dark aisles of grand forest-trees and cavernous ravines of timber roads, safe from all pursuit; a second, and we should reach the green core of the safe and silent woods, the cool shelter of mountain-backed lakes, the sure refuge of tangled coverts. It was a guinea to a shilling that we gained it; it was all but won; a moment's straight run-in, and we should have it! But that moment was not to be ours.
Out of the narrow cleft of a valley on the left, all screened with hanging tumbled foliage, and dark as death, there poured suddenly across our front a dense body of Federal troopers and Horse Artillery, two thousand strong at the least, full gallop, to join the main army. We were surrounded in a second, in a second overpowered by sheer strength of numbers; only two hundred of us, many sorely wounded, and on mounts that were jaded and ridden out of all pace, let us fight as we would, what could we do against fresh and picked soldiers, swarming down on us like a swarm of hornets, while in our rear was the main body through which we had just cut our way? That the little desperate band "died hard," I need not say; but the vast weight of the fresh squadrons pressed our little knot in as if between the jaws of a trap, crushing it like grain between two iron weights. The Gray Feather fought like all the Knights of the Round Table merged in one, till he streamed with blood from head to foot, and his sabre was hacked and bent like an ash-stick, as did a man near him, a tall superb Virginian, handsome as any Vandyke or Velasquez picture. At last both the Gray Feather and he went down, not by death—it would not come to them—but literally hurled out of their stirrup-leathers by crowding scores who poured on them, hamstrung or shot their horses, and made them themselves prisoners—not, however, till the assailants lay heaped ten deep about their slaughtered chargers. For myself, a blow from a sabre, a second afterwards, felled me like so much wood. I saw a whirling blaze of sun, a confused circling eddy of dizzy color, forked flames, and flashes of light, and I knew no more, till I opened my eyes in a dark, square, unhealthy wooden chamber, with a dreamy but settled conviction that I was dead, and in the family vault, far away under the green old elms of Warwickshire, with the rooks cawing above my head.
As the delusion dissipated and the mists cleared, I sawthrough the uncertain light a face that was strangely but vaguely familiar to me, connected somehow with incoherent memories of life at home, and yet unknown to me. It was bronzed deeply, bearded, with flakes of gray among the fairness of the hair, much aged, much worn, scarred and stained just now with the blood of undressed wounds and the dust of the combat, for there was no one merciful enough there to bring a stoup of water; it was rougher, darker, sterner, and yet, with it all, nobler, too, than the face that I had known. I lay and stared blankly at it: it was the face of the Southern Leader of the morning, who sat now, on a pile of straw, looking wearily out to the dying sun, one amongst a group of twenty, prisoners all, like myself. I moved, and he turned his eyes on me; they had laid me down there as a "gone 'coon," and were amazed to see me come to life again. As our eyes met I knew him—he was Deadly Dash.
The old name left my lips with a shout as strong as a half-killed man can give. It seemed so strange to meet him there, captives together in the Unionists' hands! It struck him with a sharp shock. England and he had been divorced so long. I saw the blood leap to his forehead, and the light into his glance; then, with a single stride, he reached the straw I lay on, holding my hands in his, looking on me with the kindly eyes that had used to make me like the Killer, and greeting me with a warmth that was only damped and darkened by regret that my battle done for fair Virginia had laid me low, a prisoner with himself, and that we should meet thus, in so sharp an hour of adversity, with nothing before us but the Capitol, the Carroll prison, or worse. Yet thus we did meet once more and I knew at last what had been the fate of Deadly Dash, whom England had outlawed as a scoundrel, and the New World had found a hero.
Though suffering almost equally himself, he tended mewith the kindliest sympathy; he came out of his own care to ponder how possible it might be to get me eventual freedom as a tourist and a mere accidental sharer in the fray; he was interested to hear all that I would tell him of my own affairs and of his old friends in England, but of himself he would not speak; he simply said he had been fighting for the Confederacy ever since the war had begun; and I saw that he strove in vain to shake off a deep heart-broken gloom that seemed to have settled on him, doubtless, as I thought, from the cruel defeat of the noon, and the hopeless captivity into which he, the most restless and the most daring soldier that oversaw service, was now flung.
I noticed, too, that every now and then while he sat beside me, talking low—for there were sentinels both in and out the rude outhouse of the farm that had been turned into our temporary prison—his eyes wandered to the gallant Virginian who had been felled down with himself, and who, covered like himself with blood and dust, and with his broken left arm hanging shattered, lay on the bare earth in a far-off corner motionless and silent, with his lips pressed tight under their long black moustaches, and such a mute unutterable agony in his eyes as I never saw in any human face, though I have seen deaths enough in the field and the sick-ward. The rest of the Confederate captives were more ordinary men (although from none was a single word of lament ever wrenched); but this superb Virginian excited my interest, and I asked his name, in that sort of languid curiosity at passing things which comes with weakness, of the Killer, whose glance so incessantly wandered towards him.
"Stuart Lane," he answered, curtly, and added no more; but if I ever saw in this world hatred, passionate, ungovernable, and intense, I saw it in the Killer's look as his glance flashed once more on to the motionless form of the handsomest, bravest, and most dauntless officer ofhis gallant regiment that he had seen cut to pieces there on that accursed plateau.
"A major of yours?" I asked him. "Ah, I thought so; he fought magnificently. How wretched he looks, though he is too proud to show it!"
"He is thinking of—of his bride. He married three weeks ago."
The words were simple enough, and spoken very quietly; but there was an unsteadiness, as of great effort, over them; and the heel of his heavy spurred jack-boot crashed into the dry mud with a grinding crush, as though it trod terrible memories down. Was it a woman who was between these two comrades in arms and companions in adversity? I wondered if it were so, even in that moment of keen and heavy anxiety for us all, as I looked at the face that bent very kindly over the straw to which a shot in the knee and a deep though not dangerous shoulder-wound bound me. It was very different to the face of eight or nine years before—browner, harder, graver far; and yet there was a look as if "sorrow had passed by there," and swept the old heartlessness and gay callousness away, burning them out in its fires.
Silence fell over us in that wretched outshed where we were huddled together. I was hot with incipient fever, and growing light-headed enough, though I knew what passed before me, to speak to Dash once or twice in a dreamy idea that we were in the Shires watching the run-in for the "Soldiers' Blue Riband." The minutes dragged very drearily as the day wore itself away. There were the sullen monotonous tramp of the sentinels to and fro, and, from without, the neighing of horses, the bugle calls, the roll of the drums, the challenge of outposts—all the varied, endless sounds of a camp; for the farmhouse in whose shed we were thrown was the head-quarterspro tem. of the Federal General who commanded the Divisions that had cost the Killer's handful of Horse sofearfully dear. We were prisoners, and escape was impossible. All arms of course had been removed from us; most, like myself, were too disabled by wounds to have been able to avail ourselves of escape had it been possible; and the guard was doubled both in and out the shed; there was nothing before any of us but the certainty of imprisonment in all its horrors in some far-off fortress or obscure jail. There was the possible chance that, since certain officers on whom the Northerners set great store had lately fallen into Southern hands, an exchange might be effected; yet, on the other side, graver apprehensions still existed, since we knew that the General into whose camp we had been brought had proclaimed his deliberate purpose of shooting the three next Secessionist officers who fell into his power, in requital for three of his own officers who had been shot, or were said to have been shot, by a Southern raider. We knew very well that, the threat made, it would be executed; and each of us, as the sun sank gradually down through the hot skies that were purple and stormy after the burning day, knew, too, that it might never rise again to greet our sight. None of us would have heeded whether a ball would hit or miss us in the open, in a fair fight, in a man-to-man struggle; but the boldest and most careless amidst us felt it very bitter to die like dogs, to die as prisoners.
Even Deadly Dash, coolest, most hardened, most devil-may-care of soldiers and of sinners, sat with his gaze fastened on the slowly sinking light in the west with the shadow of a great pain upon his face, while every now and then his glance wandered to Stuart Lane, and a quick, irrepressible shudder shook him whenever it did so. The Virginian never moved; no sign of any sort escaped him; but the passionate misery that looked out of his eyes I never saw equalled, except, perhaps, in the eyes of a stag that I once shot in Wallachia, and that looked up with just such a look before it died. He wasthinking, no doubt, of the woman he loved—wooed amidst danger, won amidst calamity, scarcely possessed ere lost for ever;—thinking of her proud beauty, of her bridal caress, that would never again touch his lips, of her fair life that would perish with the destruction of his.
Exhaustion from the loss of blood made everything pass dreamily, and yet with extraordinary clearness, before me, I felt in a wakening dream, and had no sense whatever of actual existence, and yet the whole scene was so intensely vital and vivid to me, that it seemed burned into my very brain itself. It was like the phantasmagoria of delirium, utterly impalpable, but yet intensely real. I had no power to act or resist, but I seemed to have ten times redoubled power to see and hear and feel; I was aware of all that passed, with a hundredfold more susceptibility to it than I ever felt in health. I remember a total impossibility that came on me to decide whether I was dreaming or was actually awake. Twilight fell, night came; there was a change of sentries, and a light, set up in a bottle, shed a flickering, feeble, yellow gleam over the interior of the shed, on the dark Rembrandt faces of the Southerners and on the steel of the guards' bayonets. And I recollect that the Killer, who sat by the tossed straw on which they had flung me, laughed the old, low, sweet, half-insolent laugh that I had known so well in early days. "Il faut souffrir pour être beau!We are picturesque, at any rate, quite Salvatoresque! Little Dickey would make a good thing of us if he could paint us now. He is alive, I suppose?"
I answered him I believe in the affirmative; but the name of that little Bohemian of the Brush, who had used to be our butt andprotégéin England, added a haze the more to my senses. By this time I had difficulty to hold together the thread of how, and when, and why I had thus met again the face that looked out on me so strangely familiarly in the dull, sickly trembling of the feeble lightof this black, noisome shed in the heart of Federal Divisions.
Through that haze I heard the challenge of the sentries; I saw a soldier prod with his bayonet a young lad who had fainted from hæmorrhage, and whom he swore at for shamming. I was conscious of the entrance of a group of officers, whom I knew afterwards to be the Northern General and his staff, who came to look at their captives. I knew, but only dreamily still, that these men were the holders of our fate, and would decide on it then and there. I felt a listless indifference, utter and opium-like, as to what became of me, and I remember that Stuart Lane, and Dash himself, rose together, and stood looking with a serene and haughty disdain down on the conquerors who held their lives in the balance—without a trace of pain upon their faces now. I remember how like they looked to stags that turn at bay; like the stags, outnumbered, hunted down, with the blood of open wounds and the dust of the long chase on them; but, like the deer, too, uncowed, and game to the finish.
Very soon their doom was given. Seven were to be sent back with a flag of truce to be exchanged for the seven Federal officers they wanted out of the Southerners' hands, ten were to be transmitted to the prisons of the North,—three were to be shot at day-dawn in the reprisal before named. The chances of life and of death were to be drawn for by lottery, and at once.
Not a sound escaped the Virginians, and not a muscle of their English Leader's face moved: the prisoners, to a man, heard impassively, with a grave and silent dignity, that they were to throw the die in hazard, with death for the croupier and life for the stake.
The General and his staff waited to amuse themselves with personally watching the turns of this newRouge et Noir; gambling in lives was a little refreshing changethat sultry, dreary, dun-colored night, camped amongst burnt-out farms and wasted corn-lands.
Slips of paper, with "exchange," "death," and "imprisonment" written on them in the numbers needed, were made ready, rolled up, and tossed into an empty canteen; each man was required to come forward and draw, I alone excepted because I was an officer of the British Army. I remember passionately arguing that they had no right to exempt me, since I had been in the fray, and had killed three men on my own hook, and would have killed thirty more had I had the chance; but I was perhaps incoherent in the fever that was fast seizing all my limbs from the rack of undressed wounds; at any rate, the Northerners took no heed, save to force me into silence, and the drawing began. As long as I live I shall see that night in remembrance with hideous distinctness: the low blackened shed with its f[oe]tid odors from the cattle lately foddered there; the yellow light flaring dully here and there; the glisten of the cruel rifles; the heaps of straw and hay soaked with clotted blood; the group of Union Officers standing near the doorway; and the war-worn indomitable faces of the Southerners, with the fairer head and slighter form of their English chief standing out slightly in front of all.
The Conscription of Death commenced; a Federal private took the paper from each man as he drew it, and read the word of destiny aloud. Not one amongst them faltered or paused one moment; each went,—even those most exhausted, most in agony,—with a calm and steady step, as they would have marched up to take the Flag of the Stars and Bars from Lee or Longstreet. Not one waited a second's breath before he plunged his hand into the fatal lottery.
Deadly Dash was the first called: there was not one shadow of anxiety upon his face; it was calm without effort, careless without bravado, simply, entirely indifferent.They took his paper and read the words of safety and of life—"Exchange." Then, for one instant, a glory of hope flashed like the sun into his eyes—to die the next; die utterly.
Three followed him, and they all drew the fiat for detention; the fifth called was Stuart Lane.
Let him have suffered as he would, he gave no sign of it now; he approached with his firm, bold cavalry step, and his head haughtily lifted; the proud, fiery, dauntless Cavalier of ideal and of romance. Without a tremor in his wrist he drew his paper out and gave it.
One word alone fell distinct on the silence like the hiss of a shot through the night—"Death!"
He bowed his head slightly as if in assent, and stepped backward—still without a sign.
His English chief gave him one look,—it was that of merciless exultation, of brutal joy, of dark, Cain-like, murderous hate; but it passed, passed quickly: Dash's head sank on his chest, and on his face there was the shadow, I think, of a terrible struggle—the shadow, I know, of a great remorse. He strove with his longing greed for this man's destruction; he knew that he thirstedto see him die.
The Virginian stood erect and silent: a single night and the strong and gallant life, the ardent passions, the chivalrous courage to do and dare, and the love that was in its first fond hours would all be quenched in him as though they had never been; but he was a soldier, and he gave no sign that his death-warrant was not as dear to him as his bridal-night had been. Even his conquerors cast one glance of admiration on him; it was only his leader who felt for him no pang of reverence and pity.
The lottery continued; the hazard was played out; life and death were scattered at reckless chance amidst the twenty who were the playthings of that awful gaming; all had been done in perfect silence on the part of thecondemned; not one seemed to think or to feel for himself, and in those who were sent out to their grave not a grudge lingered against their comrades of happier fortune. Deadly Dash, whose fate was release, alone stood with his head sunk, thoughtful and weary.
The three condemned to execution were remanded to separate and solitary confinement, treated already as felons for that one short night which alone remained to them. As his guards removed him, Stuart Lane paused slightly, and signed to his chief to approach him; he held out his hand to Dash, and his voice was very low, though it came to my ear where they stood beside me: "We were rivals once, but we may be friendsnow. As you have loved her, be pitiful to her when you tell her of my death,—God knows it may be hers! As you have loved her, feel what it is to die without one last look on her face!"
Then, and then only, his bronze cheek grew white as a woman's, and his whole frame shook with one great silent sob; his guard forced him on, and his listener had made him no promise, no farewell; neither had he taken his hand. He had heard in silence, with a dark and evil gloom alone upon him.
The Federal General sharply summoned him from his musing, as the chief of those to be exchanged on the morrow under a white flag of parley; there were matters to be stated to and to be arranged with him.
"I will only see you alone, General," he answered curtly.
The Northerner stared startled, and casting a glance over the redoubtable leader of horse, whose gray feather had become known and dreaded, thought of possible assassination. Deadly Dash laughed his old light, ironic, contemptuous laugh.
"A wounded unarmed man can scarcely kill you!Have as many of your staff about you as you please, but let none of my Virginians be present at our interview."
The Northerners thought he intended to desert to them, or betray some movement of importance, and assented; and he went out with them from the cattle-shed into the hot, stormy night, and the Southerners who were condemned to death and detention looked after him with a long, wistful, dog-like look. They had been with him in so many spirit-stirring days and nights of peril, and they knew that never would they meet again. He had not given one of them a word of adieu; he had killed too many to be touched by his soldiers' loss. Who could expect pity from Deadly Dash?
An hour passed; I was removed under a guard to a somewhat better lodging in the granary, where a surgeon hastily dressed my wounds, and left me on a rough pallet with a jug of water at my side, and the sentinel for my only watcher, bidding me "sleep." Sleep! I could not have slept for my ransom. Though life had hardened me, and made me sometimes, as I fear, callous enough, I could not forget those who were to die when the sun rose; specially, I could not forget that gallant Virginian to whom life was so precious, yet who gave himself with so calm a fortitude to his fate. The rivalry, I thought, must be deep and cruel, to make the man from whom he had won what they both loved turn from him in hatred, even in such extremity as his. On the brink of a comrade's grave, feud might surely have been forgotten?
All that had just passed was reeling deliriously through my brain, and I was panting in the sheer irritation and exhaustion of gunshot wounds, when through the gloom Dash entered the granary, closely guarded, but allowed to be with me on account of our common country. Never was I more thankful to see a familiar face from home than to see his through the long watches of that burning, heavy, interminable night. He refused to rest; he satby me, tending me as gently as a woman, though he was suffering acutely himself from the injuries received in the course of the day; he watched me unweariedly, though often and often his gaze and his thoughts wandered far from me, as he looked out through the open granary door, past the form of the sentinel, out to the starry solemn skies, the deep woods, and the dark silent land over which the stars were brooding, large and clear.
Was he thinking of the Virginian whose life would die out for ever, with the fading of those stars, or of the woman whom he had lost, whose love was the doomed soldier's, and would never be his own, though the grave closed over his rival with the morrow's sun? Dreamily, half unconsciously, in the excitement of fever, I asked him of her of whom I knew nothing:
"Did you love that woman so well?"
His eyes were still fixed on the distant darkening skies, and he answered quietly, as though rather to his own thoughts than my words,—"Yes: I love her—as I never loved in that old life in England; as we never love but once, I think."
"And she?"
"And she—has but one thought in the world—him."
His voice, as he answered, now grated with dull, dragging misery over the words.
"Had she so much beauty that she touched you like this?"
He smiled slightly, a faint, mournful smile, unutterably sad.
"Yes; she is very lovely, but her beauty is the least rare charm. She is a woman for whom a man would live his greatest, and if he cannot live for her—may—die."
The utterance was very slow, and seemed to lie on me like a hand on my lips compelling me to silence; he had forgotten all, except his memory of her, and where he sat with his eyes fixed outward on the drifting clouds thatfloated across the stars, I saw his lips quiver once, and I heard him murmur half aloud: "My darling! My darling! You will know how I loved youthen——"
And the silence was never broken between us, but he sat motionless thus all the hours through, looking out at the deep still woods, and the serene and lustrous skies, till the first beams of the sun shone over the hills in the east, and I shuddered, where I lay, at its light;—for I knew it was the signal of death.
Then he arose, and bent towards me, and the kindly eyes of old looked down on mine.
"Dear old fellow, the General expects me at dawn. I must leave you just now; say good-bye."
His hand closed on mine, he looked on me one moment longer, a little lingeringly, a little wistfully, then he turned and went out with his guard; went out into the young day that was just breaking on the world.
I watched his shadow as it faded, and I saw that the sun had risen wholly; and I thought of those who were to die with the morning light.
All was very calm for a while; then the beat of a drum rolled through the quiet of the dawn, and the measured tramp of armed men sounded audibly; my heart stood still, my lips felt parched,—I knew the errand of that column marching so slowly across the parched turf. A little while longer yet, and I heard the sharp ring of the ramrods being withdrawn, and the dull echo of the charge being rammed down: with a single leap, as though the bullets were through me, I sprang, weak as I was, from my wretched pallet, and staggered to the open doorway, leaning there against the entrance powerless and spell-bound. I saw the file of soldiers loading; I saw the empty coffin-shells; I saw three men standing bound, their forms distinct against the clear, bright haze of morning, and the fresh foliage of the woods. Two of them were Virginians, but the third was not Stuart LaneWith a great cry I sprang forward, but the guards seized my arms and held me, helpless as a woman, in their gripe. He whom we had called Deadly Dash heard, and looked up and smiled. His face was tranquil and full of light, as though the pure peace of the day shone there.
The gripe of the sentinels held me as if in fetters of iron; the world seemed to rock and reel under me, a sea of blood seemed eddying before my eyes; the young day was dawning, and murder was done in its early hours, and I was held there to look on,—its witness, yet powerless to arrest it! I heard the formula—so hideous then!—"Make ready!"—"Present!"—"Fire!" I saw the long line of steel tubes belch out their smoke and flame. I heard the sullen echo of the report roll down from the mountains above. When the mist cleared away, the three figures stood no longer clear against the sunlight; they had fallen.
With the mad violence of desperation I wrenched myself from my guards, and staggered to him where he lay; he was not quite dead yet; the balls had passed through his lungs, but he breathed still; his eyes were unclosed, and the gleam of a last farewell came in them. He smiled slightly, faintly once more.