CHAPTER VION PAROLE
“But who can tell what cause had that fair maidTo use him so that loved her so well?”Spencer.
“But who can tell what cause had that fair maidTo use him so that loved her so well?”Spencer.
“But who can tell what cause had that fair maidTo use him so that loved her so well?”Spencer.
“But who can tell what cause had that fair maid
To use him so that loved her so well?”
Spencer.
A moment later the girl proved that her sensibility was less or her courage higher than my estimate, for just as I had pictured a little earlier, she surprised me. I found her at my elbow, and I rose to my feet. Unluckily as I did so, I struck my injured arm against the chair, and she—winced.
That might have disarmed me, but it did not. I remembered the nine men who had been murdered in cold blood, and I thought of my narrow escape; after all I was not a dog to be hung without ceremony and buried in a ditch! And now she was in my power, now, if ever, was the time to bring home to her what she had done. Still, she was a woman, I owed her courtesy, and I endeavored to speak with politeness. “I see that you are more merciful,” I said, bowing, “in fact than in intention, Miss Wilmer.”
Her agitation was such—she did not try to hideit—that for a moment she could not speak. Then “If you knew all,” she said in a low voice, “you would know that I had grounds for what I did, Sir.” “That you had good grounds, I cannot believe,” I answered. “And for knowing all, I think I do. I know that you have suffered. I know that you have lost your mother and your brother. I know that you have grievances, sad grievances it may be against us.”
“You don’t know all,” she repeated more firmly. “But I know enough,” I rejoined—I was not to be moved from my purpose now. “I know that I was your father’s prisoner and your guest; and that you stood aside, you did not raise a hand, not a finger to save me, Miss Wilmer. You did not speak, though a word might have availed, and I believe would have availed to preserve me! You let me go out to a cruel death, you turned your back on me—”
“Oh, don’t! don’t!” she cried.
“You quail at the picture,” I retorted. “I do not wonder that you do. I was your guest, I was wounded, I was in pain, alone. Has a man, when he is maimed and laid aside, no claim on a woman? No claim on her forbearance, on her pity, on her protection? For shame, Miss Wilmer!” I continued warmly, carried farther than I intended by myfeelings. “Men, when their blood is hot, will plan things, and do things, God knows, that are abominable. But for a woman to consent to such, and, when it is too late, to think that by a few tears she can make up for them—”
“Stop!” she cried—I suppose that I had gone too far, for she faced me now, hardily enough. “You understand nothing, sir! Nothing! So little that you will scarcely believe me when I say that if the thing were to do again—I would do it.”
“I cannot believe you,” I said coldly.
“It is true.”
I stared at her; and she returned my look with a strange mixture of shame and defiance. “Why?” I said at last. “In heaven’s name, why, Miss Wilmer? What have I done to you? Your mother I know. But had I a hand in it? God forbid! Was I within a hundred miles of it? No. Your brother—and there again, I find that hard to forgive. Your father had spared my life, sheltered me, brought me here; could you not believe that I was grateful? Could you not believe that I would do much to serve him and something to repay him? That all that it was in my power to do for your brother, by my exertions or my influence, I would do? But you did not tell me. You did not ask me?”
“No,” she said.
“Why?” I asked bluntly. She did not answer. “Why?” I repeated. I was at the end of my anger. I had said what was in my mind and said it with all the severity I could wish. And I was sure that I had made her suffer. Now I wanted to understand. I sought for light upon her. There was a puzzle here and I had not the clue.
But she stood mute. Pale, forbidding, not avoiding my eyes but rather challenging them, and very handsome in her sullenness, she confronted me. At last, as I still waited, and still kept silence, she spoke. “And after I had told you?” she said. “If you had offered help, would it then have been easier to—to stand aside?”
“And let me go to my death?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Good God!” I cried. I could not check the words, I was so deeply shocked. If she had deliberately considered that, she was indeed determined, she was indeed ruthless; and there was nothing more to be done. “I am sorry,” I said. “I had thought, Miss Wilmer, that I might say what was in my mind and then let the thing be as if it had never been. I wished to speak and then—to let there be peace between us. I thought that we might still come to be friends. But if we are so far apart as that, there can be nothing between us, not even forgiveness.”
“No,” she answered—but her head sank a little and I fancied that she spoke sadly. “There can be nothing between us. Nothing, sir. We are worlds apart.”
Before I could reply Mammy Jacks came to summon her. One of the blacks wanted her, and she broke off and went into the house.
She left me adrift on a full tide of wonder. What a woman, I thought! Nay, what a girl, for she was not more than twenty, if she were not still in her teens! If all the women on the Colonial side were like her, I thought, if but a tithe of her spirit and will were in them, the chances of poor old England in the strife which she had provoked were small indeed! I could compare the girl only to the tragic heroines of the Bible, to Judith, or to Jael, who set her hand to the nail and her right hand to the hammer. Very, very nearly had she driven the nail into my temple!
And yet she had, she must have a gentler side. She had broken down on that night, when she thought that the deed was done. I could not be mistaken in that; I had seen her fling herself in a passion of remorse on her father’s breast. And then how strong, how deep was the affection which she felt for that father! With what tenderness, with what tears and smiles and caresses had she flown to his arms on his return from the field!
She was a provoking, a puzzling, a perplexing creature; and alas, she began to fill far more of my thoughts than was her due. I was idle, and I could not thrust her from them. Because she did not come near me I dwelt on her the more. The chair at the other end of the veranda remained empty all that day and the next, and it was not until noon of the third day that I again had a word with her. Then, as she passed by me with her head high, she saw that something was lacking on the little table on which I took my meals, and she fetched it herself. I wished to bring on a discussion; and as she set the thing down, “Thank you,” I said politely. “But can I be sure that I am safe in eating this?”
She did not fire up as I expected. “You think that I may poison you?” she said, making no attempt to evade the point.
“Well, you told me,” I replied, somewhat taken back, “that you were prepared to do it again, you know?”
She sighed. “If I meant it then, I do not mean it now,” she said. “I have done all that I can. I leave the rest to God!”
Certainly she said the most singular things! However, what surprise I felt I hid, and I tried to meet her on her new ground. “That being so,” I said smoothly, “why should we not bury what ispast—for the time? I have to live for a month under your roof, Miss Wilmer. We must see one another, we must meet hourly and daily whether we will or not. Cannot you forget for a month that I am an enemy?”
“No,” she answered with the utmost directness, “You are an enemy. Why should I pretend that you are not? We are rebels and we are proud of the name. You are of those who are paid to reduce us, to make war on us”—her color rose, her eyes dilated as she spoke—“to burn our towns, to waste our fields, to render our old homeless and our children motherless! And why? Because you are false to your traditions, false to your liberties, false to that freedom for which your forefathers died, and for which we are dying to-day!”
The spirit, the tone, the brooding fire in her eyes filled me with admiration. But I was wise enough to let no trace of this escape me. “I cannot admit that,” I said, “naturally.”
“No,” she replied swiftly. “Because you are paid to see it otherwise.”
“At any rate you are frank, Miss Wilmer,” I said. “And you really do see in me the mercenary of a cruel tyrant?” I smiled as I said it, and I flattered myself that the jest pierced her armor. At any rate she lost countenance a little. “And Isuppose I ought to see in you a rebel,” I continued. “But it may be that I do not in my heart think much worse of you for being a rebel. And it is possible that you do not think so very badly of me for being—paid!”
“It does not sound well,” she said with disdain.
“No,” I replied. “Beside romance, duty sounds poorly, and makes a dull show.”
“The tea duty does!” she exclaimed viciously—and saw before the words were well said that her wit had betrayed her into familiarity. She colored with annoyance.
I seized the chance. “And what of it?” I said. “Tolls and taxes and the like! What are they to us here? If I admit that a tax, which has turned thirteen loyal colonies into what we see, was an unwise one, surely, if I admit that, you may admit that it is hard for a proud nation to retrace its steps.”
“I am not concerned to admit anything,” she answered haughtily.
“Still if that is all that is between us?”
“It is not!” she exclaimed. “It is not!” For a moment she stood a prey to strong agitation. Then she muttered again, “It is not all!” and she went deliberately away from me. But she went like one under a heavy burden or the weight of a distressing thought.
Still I was not ill-pleased with the result of our interview. She had stepped down from her pedestal. She had left for a while the tragic plane on which she had hitherto moved and from which she had stooped to me. I had climbed a step nearer to her. In future she would not find it so easy to keep me at the distance that suited her pleasure and that at the same time whetted my curiosity.
And perhaps something more than my curiosity. For I could not deny that, handsome and perplexing, cold, yet capable of ardor, she had taken a strong grip upon my thoughts. I could not keep her out of my mind for an hour together. A dozen times a day I caught myself looking for her, listening for the sound of her voice, watching for her appearance. The morning was long, the hour dragged that brought neither the one nor the other. Nay, there were times—I was idle, be it remembered, and crippled—when the desire to bridge the distance between us and to set myself right with her became a passion; when I would have given very much for a smile from the averted face, or a look from the eyes that passed coldly by me.
It was absurd, but I have said I was idle. And yet after all was it so absurd? I compared her with the women whom I had known at home; with the women of fashion with their red and white cheeks, theirpreposterous headdresses, their insipid talk of routs and the card table; or again with our country-bred hoydens, honest and noisy, with scarce an idea beyond the stillroom or the annual race meeting: and I found that she rivaled the former in dignity and the latter in simplicity. Adorable, inexorable creature, she was well named Constantia! I was glad—such a hold was she getting on my mind—when her father returned, two days later than he had said, and brought news that distracted my thoughts.
The check at King’s Mountain had stopped Lord Cornwallis in his advance on North Carolina. He had fallen back and established himself again at Winnsboro’, so that he was still not more than sixty or seventy miles from us. “If your bone were set, I should send you north, Major,” Wilmer said with a look more than commonly thoughtful. “But I fancy that your friend, Tarleton, has learned his lesson from Ferguson, and won’t stray far from Headquarters. And now Greene has taken over Gates’s command—”
“Is that so?”
“It is—he won’t leave your people so much time to look about them. I do not think that they will journey as far as this, but if I thought they would, you would have to travel, my friend, fare as you might.”
That with a little more, not to the purpose, was the only talk I had with him for some days. And presently I conceived the idea that this was no accident. I began to suspect that Madam Constantia, not content with sending me to Coventry herself, was bent on keeping him from me. I came even to think that I owed to this desire on her part the fact that I now saw something, though little more, of her. For she would interpose between us rather than let me talk to him. If her father, as he crossed the veranda or came in from the fields had the air of drifting towards me, she was sure to see it, and to draw him aside, sometimes by a word, more often by a look, rarely by speaking to me herself. More than once when he approached me—he was in his cynical way a good-natured man—she appeared so pat to the occasion that I gave her the credit of watching us, and believed that her eyes were upon me more often than I knew.
I fancied even that there was an understanding between them on this point. For when she surprised him in my neighborhood, though he might have stood only to say “Good morning!” or “Good fall weather!” he would wear an air half guilty and half humorous, as of a child caught transgressing. And once when this happened, I had a queer illusion. It seemed to me that the look of amusement thatWilmer shot at the girl, and which I was not meant to catch, transformed his face in the most curious way. It shortened it, vulgarized it, widened it. For a moment I saw him no longer as the shrewd, lean Southerner he was, but as a jovial, easy, smiling person, for all the world like an English yeoman or innkeeper. The fancy lasted for an instant only, and I set it down to the shadow cast by his hat or to a tricky cast of the sunshine as it shimmered through the leaves of the magnolia behind him. But later I thought of it more than once. The change in the man, though passing, was so great that I should not have known him for himself; and it haunted me.
I believe that it was about three days after this, when he was abroad upon the plantation, on which he spent most of his time, that Madam Constantia and I came again to blows. Time lay heavy on my hands—he may be thankful who has never known the aimless hours and long tedium of the prisoner—and though I had no prospect of forwarding letters, I thought that I would amuse myself by learning to write with my left hand. It was not a thing to be done in a moment, but Mammy Jacks provided the means and I fell to the task in the leisurely way of an invalid, now scrawling a few words in round hand, now looking away to the purple distances that reminded me of our Cheviots on a fine October day,and now lazily watching the blacks who were trooping past, bringing in the last of the cotton. It was sunny, it was warm, and the slaves in their scanty white clothes with baskets on their heads formed a picture new to me. I was gazing at it, pen in hand, when the girl came through the veranda, glanced my way, and in a twinkling descended on me like a whirlwind.
She snatched away the paper that lay under my hand and before, taken by surprise, I knew what she was about, she tore it across and across.
“Ungrateful!” she cried. “Have you forgotten your parole, sir? Were Colonel Marion here, you would not dare to do this!”
“To do what?” I retorted, rising to my feet. I was as angry as she was. “What should I not dare to do?”
“What you are doing!” she rejoined, her eyes sparkling and her breast heaving with excitement.
“I am learning to write with my left hand. Why not?”
“Why not?” she exclaimed. “And what did you promise Colonel Marion?” She pointed to the paper which she had flung on the ground. “What did you undertake on your honor?”
“That I would not communicate with my friends,” I answered sternly. “Nothing more!”
“And what are you writing?” she cried. But her tone sank by a note, and uncertainty fluttered in her eyes.
“That is my business!” I answered. “What is it to you, pray, what I write? Or see!” I stooped, and with difficulty owing to my stiff arm, I recovered one of the scraps of paper. “See! Satisfy yourself. It is but a tag from the book that you lent me.”
She took it. “‘Sure such a various creature ne’er was seen!’” she read mechanically, and with a falling face. “‘Sure—’” she stopped.
“Is it sufficiently harmless?” I asked ironically. “Is there dishonor in it? At least I can say this—I know of no one here, Miss Wilmer, to whom the words can be applied. From your father I have met with consistent kindness and attention. And from you equally consistent—but I will not define it. I leave you to judge of that.”
She was now as angry, I believe, with herself as with me; but she did not see how she could retract and for that reason, whatever the original cause of her attack, she would not own herself in the wrong. “I believe there is such a thing,” she said stubbornly, “as cipher writing.”
I stared at her with all the contempt I could throw into my gaze. “Cipher writing!” I said. “Certainly I have come into this wilderness to learnstrange things! Cipher writing! But enough—and too much!” I continued wrathfully. “I am not used to have my honor doubted. When your father returns I shall refer the matter to him and I shall ask him if I am to be assailed under his roof—assailed in a manner as insulting as it is outrageous!”
“I will ask him myself,” she said in a much lower tone. “If I am wrong I am sorry. But Colonel Marion told me—”
“That I was not to communicate with my friends? Am I doing it? But, no,” I concluded loftily, “I will not discuss it. I will refer the matter to your father.”
And I turned my back on her without much courtesy—the attack was so wanton, so silly! I heard her move away and go into the house.
She was crazy, positively crazy, I thought. What was it to her whether I wrote or did not write? What was it to her if I did communicate with my friends? She was not my keeper, she could not judge of the risk or the importance of the step which Marion had forbidden. Placed as we were within less than seventy miles of the British Headquarters and within the scope of a cavalry raid, he was doubtless right in making the stipulation. But what did she know of it? What was it to her? Why should she attach importance to the matter?
Confound her impudence! I might be one of the bare-footed slaves trudging through the heat, I might be a wretched Sambo fresh from Guinea, and she could scarcely treat me with greater contumely. She was a fury, a perfect fury, and as passionate as she was beautiful! But I would speak plainly to Wilmer. I would tell him that I was his prisoner, and owed something to him, but that I could not, and would not, be subject to his daughter’s whims and caprices. Write? Why should I not write? Sheets, quires, reams if I pleased, so long as I did not forward. And how in heaven’s name was I to forward? Through whom? Did she suppose that the postman called once a day as in Eastcheap and Change Alley? The whole thing was monstrous! Monstrous!
I waited, fuming, for Wilmer’s return from the fields, and meantime the delay brought to my mind another grievance, though one which I could not name. I had supposed that when he came back, after leaving Marion, I should be invited to make one at the common table. But no invitation had reached me, my meals were still served apart, and this seemed absurd in a house in which life was pleasantly primitive. Certainly this was a minor complaint. But he who has lived for months with men whom a common danger has rendered respectablebut could not render congenial, he to whom a woman’s voice has grown strange and the decencies of home a memory, will understand what I felt when scraps of Aunt Lyddy’s chatter, the girl’s grave voice, the cackle of Mammy Jack’s laughter came to me—outside.
A small grievance and one that I could not air, one that I must keep to myself. But it rose vividly before me. I was sure that it was not Wilmer, I was sure that it was the girl who shut me out and would have none of my company.
Noon came without bringing Wilmer, and soon I guessed that Madam had played a trick on me. She intended to keep us apart. At that the anger which time and thought were cooling, flamed up afresh, and I longed to thwart her.
Hitherto I had limited my exercise to a turn or two in front of the house. But I saw no reason why I should not go farther, and seek Wilmer in the fields where the blacks were picking. After dinner, accordingly, I chose my time and set out. She should not have it all her own way. If he would not come to me I would go to him.
I had to cross the horse-paddock and the rails were up. They were heavy, I had only one arm, and bandaged as I was I could neither stoop freely, nor use my strength such as it was; for now I movedI found to my disgust that I was only half a man. I tried to shift the upper rail, but a pang that brought the sweat to my brow shot down my arm, and I desisted. The sun beat down upon me, the flies swarmed about my head, the din of the crickets filled my ears. I leant upon the rail, enraged at my helplessness but unable for the moment to do more.
I was in that position when she found me.
“You must come in,” she said. “Let me help you.” I suppose I looked ill for there was a tone in her voice that I had not heard before.
“I wish to go on,” I said pettishly, turning from her that she might not see my face. “I am going to your father.”
“You must come in,” she replied firmly. “The sun is too hot for you. You have never been as far as this.”
“But I—”
“You must do as I say,” she insisted. “Lean on me, if you please. Don’t you know that if you fell you might hurt yourself seriously?”
“I am only a little—giddy,” I said, clinging to the rail. “Which—I don’t seem to see—the way?”
I went back to the house on her arm—there was nothing else for it—but the only incident of the journey that I could recall was that at a certainplace I stumbled, and she held me up. I tried to laugh. “A—a milksop! A weakling!” I said.
She did not answer.
When she reached the house she put me into my chair on the veranda, and disappeared. She returned with a glass of Madeira. “You must drink this,” she said, “you are not used to the sun”; and she stood over me until I had done so. Then when the giddiness had passed off and things were clear, “My father tells me,” she continued hurriedly, “that I must ask your pardon. He says that I ought to have taken it for granted that you would keep your word—that nine out of ten English officers—”
“Would do so?” I said stiffly. “We are much obliged to him.”
“And that men can tell very quickly when they can trust one another.”
“As a rule they can.”
“I will bring you some more paper,” she said meekly. “And I beg your pardon.”
“Please don’t say any more,” I replied. “Can you not believe, Miss Wilmer, that I am grateful—most grateful for what has been done for me? And that, enemy as I am, I would not willingly injure the meanest person in this house.”
“I do believe that,” she said in a low voice.
“You do?” I cried, pleased at the concession. “Then surely—”
“But you might have no choice in the matter,” she replied gravely. “Honor—” she paused, looking away from me, apparently in search of a word—“is a two-edged weapon. It protects us to-day, sir. It may wound us to-morrow.”
“If you mean,” I answered, “that after I am exchanged I shall fight against you, it is true. But we can fight without ill will and suffer without rancor. While we observe the rules of the game, we are brothers-in-arms though we are in opposite camps. That is the legacy, Miss Wilmer, that chivalry has left to us.”
She seemed to think this over. “And honor?” she resumed, her face averted. “It binds always, I suppose? It imposes rules which it is not possible to evade, no matter what the exigency may be? If you had to choose between your mother’s life—shall I say?—and your honor, what then, Major Craven?”
“I cannot conceive the situation,” I answered, smiling at the absurdity of the idea.
“You might be on parole as you are to-day,” she rejoined. “Suppose that your mother’s life depended, no matter how, on your presence, on your breach of your word? What would you do? Would you still put your honor first?”
“I do not know what I should do,” I answered. “The thing is apart from ordinary experience. But I know what my mother would say. She would say, ‘Keep your word!’”
She was silent for a moment. “And to betray your country even in a small matter, that too would be a breach of honor, I suppose?”
“I am afraid that it would be a very bad one,” I answered, smiling. “If you are thinking of bribing me to disclose our secrets, I had better tell you at once that I have no secrets, Miss Wilmer.”
“And if you had you would not sell them?”
“Neither sell them, nor tell them. I hope not.”
“No,” she replied. “I do not think you would.” I heard her sigh deeply. Then, “I will take your glass,” she said. And she took it and went into the house.
She left me puzzled, puzzled to the last degree; but at the same time I felt that the girl had come nearer to me. She left a picture of herself a little different from that which I had hitherto possessed. Perhaps it was the hat, the wide-brimmed shadowy hat that softened her features and by taking from her height, lowered the stately carriage of her head. Perhaps it was the vague elusive sadness of her tone. Perhaps something else. She had named my mother. I wondered what my mother would thinkof her, with her perplexing ways, her reserve, her aloofness, the hostility which she had not stooped to veil. Often my mother had said in jest that she did not know where I should find a wife, since I looked shyly on our country belles, and she would have none of our town ladies. To which my father had answered that such fastidiousness generally ended in a milkmaid—and that he believed that the next Lady Craven would be no better.
A milkmaid? Would they consider—I lost myself in wild and extravagant dreams. Blowsabella? Surely no one could be less like a Blowsabella. Or for the matter of that less like the Hartopps our neighbors, who talked of nothing but plaited bits, lived in riding coats, and romped through a country dance like so many Dulcineas del Toboso!
No, no one could say that she was a milkmaid. On the other hand I doubted if she had ever seen a Panache—the latest headdress—or held cards at Loo, or squalled a bar of Sacchini’s music, or chattered down players and pit at a tragedy. She belonged to no category. She was herself, and an odd, troubling, haunting self at that!