CHAPTER XXXI.MAUDE AND TOM.
It was then that Maude left him and went back to the house, where, standing in the door, she scanned the face and person of the man for whose safety in part she had pledged her heart and hand.
Tom’stout ensemblewas good, and there was about him a certain air of grace and culture which showed itself in every movement. A stranger would have trusted him in a moment, and recognized the true manhood in his expressive face. And Maude recognized it, as she neverhad before, and the contrast between him and Arthur struck her painfully.
“If Arthur were more like him, I could love him better,” she thought, just as the Judge asked the abrupt question:
“You have a wife, hey?”
“Of course he has,” Maude thought, and still she listened for the answer.
“My wife died some years ago, before the war broke out. She was a Mary Williams, a near relative of the Williamses of Charleston. Perhaps you know them?”
“Know ’em! I’ll bet I do!—the finest family in the State. And you married one of them?” the old Judge said, his manner indicating an increased respect for the man who had married a Williams of Charleston.
Maude knew the family, too, or rather knew of them, and remembered how, some years before, when she was at St. Mary’s, she had heard a Charleston young lady speaking of a Mrs. Carleton from Boston, who had recently died, and whose husband had been so kind and patient and tender, and was “the most perfectly splendid looking man she ever saw.”
Maude remembered this last distinctly, because it had called forth a reproof from the teacher who had overheard it, and who asked what kind of a man “the most perfectly splendid looking” one could be. Maude had not thought of that incident in years, but it came back to her now as she stood close to the man who had been so kind and tender to his sick, dying wife. He would be all that, she knew, for his manner was so quiet and grave and gentle, and then a great throb of pain swept over Maude De Vere as she thought of Arthur and the pledge she had given him. Maude could not analyze her feelings, or understand why the knowing who Tom Carleton was, andthat he was also free, should make the world so desolate all on a sudden, and blot out the brightness of the summer day which had seemed so pleasant at its beginning.
“I did it in part for him,” she said, feeling that in spite of her pain there was something sweet even in such a sacrifice.
She was still standing in the door, when Tom, turning a little more toward his host, saw her, his face lighting up at once, and the smile, which made him so handsome, breaking out about his mouth and showing his fine teeth.
“Ah, Miss De Vere, take this seat,” and with that well-bred politeness so much a part of his family, he arose and offered her his chair.
But Maude declined it, and took a seat instead upon a little camp stool near to the vine-wreathed columns of the piazza.
It was very pleasant there that morning, and Maude, sitting against that back-ground of green leaves, made a very pretty picture in her pink cambric wrapper, trimmed with white, white pendants in her ears, and a bunch of the sweet scented heliotrope in her hair, and at her throat where the smooth linen collar came together. And Tom enjoyed the picture very much, from the crown of satin hair, to the high-heeled slipper, with its bright ribbon rosette. It was not a little slipper, like those which used to be in Tom’s dressing-room in Boston, when Mary was alive, nor yet like the fairy things which Rose Mather wore. Nothing about Maude De Vere was small, but everything was admirably proportioned. She wore asevenglove and she wore afourboot. She measured just twenty-five inches around the waist, and five feet six from her head to her feet, and weighed one hundred and forty. A perfect Amazon, she called herself; but Tom Carletondid not think so. He knew she was a large type of womanhood, but she was perfect in form and feature, and he would not have had her one whit smaller than she was, neither did he contrast her with any one he had ever known. She was so wholly unlike Mary and Rose and Annie, that comparison between them was impossible. She was Miss De Vere,—Maude he called her to himself, and the name was beginning to sound sweetly to him, as he daily grew more and more intimate with the queenly creature who bore it. He had buried his pale, proud-faced, but loving Mary; he had given up the gentle Annie, and surely he might think of Maude De Vere if he chose; and the sight of her sitting there before him with the rich color in her cheek, and the Southern fire in her eyes, stirred strange feelings in his heart, and made him so forgetful of what the Judge was saying to him, that the old man at last rose and walked away, leaving the two young people alone together. Tom had never talked much to Maude except upon sick-room topics, and he felt anxious to know if her mind corresponded with her face and form. Here was a good opportunity for testing her mental powers, and in the long, earnest conversation which ensued concerning men, and books, and politics, Tom sifted her thoroughly, experiencing that pleasure which men of cultivation always experience when thrown in contact with a woman whose intelligence and endowments are equal to their own. Maude’s education had not been a superficial one, nor had it ceased with her leaving school. In her room at home there was a small library of choice books, which she read and studied each day together with her brother Charlie, whose education she superintended. Few persons North or South were better acquainted with the incidents and progress of the war, than she was. She had watched it from its beginning,and with her father, from whom she had inherited her superior mind, she had held many earnest argumentative discussions concerning the right and wrong of secession. Maude had opposed it from the first, but her father had thought differently, and carrying out his principles, had lost his life in the first battle of Bull Run. Maude spoke of him to Tom, and her fine eyes were full of tears as she told of the dark, terrible days which preceded and followed the news of his death.
“The ball which struck him down went further than that; it killed mother, too, and made us orphans,” Maude said, and something in the tone of her voice, and the expression of her face, puzzled Tom just as it had many times before, and carried him back to Bull Run, where it seemed to him he had seen a face like Maude De Vere’s.
“Was your father killed in battle?” Tom asked, and Maude replied:
“No, sir; that is, he did not die on the battle-field. He was wounded, and crawled away into the woods, where they found him dead, sitting against a tree, with a little Union drummer boy lying right beside him, and father’s handkerchief bound round the poor bleeding stumps, for the little hands were both shot away. I’ve thought of that boy so often,” Maude said, “and cried for him so much. I know father was kind to him, for the little fellow was nestled close to him, Arthur said. He was there, and found my father, though he did not at first recognize him, as it was a number of years since he had seen him.”
Tom was growing both interested and excited. He was beginning to find the key to that familiar look in Maude De Vere’s face, and, coming close to her he said:
“Were any prisoners taken near your father, Miss De Vere? Union prisoners, I mean?”
“Yes,” Maude replied. “Arthur was a private, then,and, with another soldier, was prowling through the woods when they came upon father, and two Union soldiers near him,—one a boy, Arthur said, and one an officer, whose ankle had been sprained. In their eagerness to capture somebody they forgot my father, and carried off the man and boy. Then they went back, and Arthur found, by some papers in the dead soldier’s pocket, that it was father, and he had him decently buried at Manassas, with the little boy. I liked Arthur for that. I would never have forgiven him if he left that child in the woods. When the war is over, I am going to find the graves.”
She was not weeping now, but her eyes had in them a strange glitter as they looked far off in the distance, as if in quest of those two graves.
“Maude De Vere,” Tom Carleton said, and at the sound, Maude started and blushed scarlet, “you must forgive me if I call you Maude this once. It’s for the sake of your noble father, by whose sideIstood when the spirit left his body, and went after that of the little drummer boy, whose bleeding stumps were bound in your father’s handkerchief. I remember it well. I had sprained my ankle, and, with a lad of my company was trying to escape, when I heard the sound of some one singing that glorious chant of our church, ‘Peace on earth, good will toward men.’ It sounded strangely there, amid the dead and dying, who had killed each other; but there was peace between the Confederate captain and the Federal boy, as they sang the familiar words. As well as we could, we cared for him. I wiped the blood from your father’s wound, and the boy brought him water from the brook, while he talked of his home in North Carolina; of his children who would never see him again; and of Nellie, his wife. It comes back to me with perfect distinctness, and it is your father’s look in your eyesand face which has puzzled me so much. Two soldiers wearing the Southern grey came up and captured us, and we were taken to Richmond. Surely, Miss De Vere, it is a special providence which has brought me at last to you, the daughter of that man, and made you the guardian angel, who has stood between me and recapture. There is a meaning in it, if we could only find it.”
Tom’s fine eyes were bent upon Maude, and in his excitement he had grasped her hand, which did not lie as cold and pulseless in his as an hour before it had lain in Arthur’s. It throbbed and quivered now, but clung to Tom’s with a firm hold, which was not relaxed even when Arthur came up, his face growing dark and threatening as he saw the position of the two.
Maude did not care for Arthur then, or think what that look in Tom’s kindling eyes might mean. She only remembered that the man whose hand held hers so firmly, had ministered to her dying father, had held the cup of water to his parched lip, had wiped the flowing blood from his face, and spoken to him kindly words of sympathy.
Here was the answer to her prayer, that God would send her somebody who could tell her of her father’s last minutes. The somebody had come, and, in her gratitude to him, she could almost have knelt and worshiped him.
“Oh, Arthur!” she cried, “Captain Carleton is the very man you and Joe Newell captured at Bull Run. He was with father when he died; he took care of him, and was so kind until you came and took him.”
And Maude’s eyes flashed with anything but affection upon her lover, who for a moment could not speak for his surprise.
Curiously he looked at Tom, seeking for something on which to fasten a doubt, for he did not wish Maudeto have a cause for gratitude to the Northern officer. But the longer he gazed the less he doubted. The face of the lame officer in the Virginia woods came up distinctly before him, and was too much like the face confronting him to admit of a mistake, especially after Maude repeated the substance of what she had heard from Captain Carleton. Arthur was convinced, and as Maude dropped Tom’s hand, he took it in his, and said:
“It is very strange that my first prize, over whose capture I felt so proud, should fall again into my power. But this time you are safe, I reckon. I am older than I was three years ago, and not quite so thirsty for a Yankee’s blood. You did Maude’s father good service, it seems, and to prove that werebelscan be grateful and generous even to our foes, I will take you under my protection as one of my party, when I escort Maude home to Tennessee, as I intend doing in a few days.”
Maude’s face was white with passion as she listened to this patronizing speech, which had in it so much of assumed superiority over the man who smiled a very peculiar kind of smile, as he bowed his acknowledgment of Arthur’s kind attentions. Not a hint was there that Maude was head and front of the arrangement,—that for Tom’s sake she had pledged herself to one whose inferiority never struck her so painfully as now, when she saw him side by side with Captain Carleton. Arthur did not care to have Captain Carleton know how much he was indebted to Maude for his present pleasant quarters, and his prospect of a safe transfer to the hills of Tennessee. But Tom, though never suspecting the whole truth, did know that his gratitude for past and present kindness received from that Southern family was mainly due to Maude, whom he admired more and more, as the days wore on, and he learned to know her intimately. Theshy reserve which since his convalescence she had manifested toward him, passed with the knowledge that he had stood by her dying father, and she treated him as a friend with whom she had been acquainted all her life long. Occasionally, as something in Tom’s manner made her think that but for Arthur she might perhaps in time bear that relation toward him, which Mary Williams had borne, she felt a fierce throb of pain and a sense of such utter desolation, that she involuntarily rebelled against the life before her. But Maude was a brave, sensible girl. She had chosen her lot, she reasoned, and she would abide by it, and make Arthur as happy as she could. He was fulfilling his part of the contract well, as was proven by the terror-stricken creature, whom he had found hiding on the plantation, and had brought to Hetty’s cabin, where he now lay so weak, that it was impossible to take him along on that journey to Tennessee.
“His time will come by and by,” Arthur said, when Maude expressed anxiety for him. “I’ll land him safely at your Uncle Paul’s some night when you least expect it. My business now is with you and your Yankee captain.”
Maude had asked that for the present nothing should be said with regard to their engagement. And so, though the Judge suspected that some definite arrangement had been made between his son and Maude, he did not know for certain, even when she stood before him attired for the journey.
The Judge was sorry to part with Maude, and he was sorry to part with Tom. He liked him because he was a gentleman if hewasa Yankee, and because his father had sentSethback, (poor Seth, with his free papers in his coffin,) and because he had been kind to Maude’s father, and married Mary Williams, of the Charleston Williamses,and could smoke a cob-pipe, and enjoy it. These were the things which recommended Tom to the old man, who shook his hand warmly at parting, saying to him:
“I hate Northern dogs mostly, but hanged if I don’t like you. May you get safely home, and if you do, my advice is to stay there, and tell the rest of ’em to do the same. They can’t whip us,—no, by George, they can’t, even if they have got some advantage. The papers say it was all a strategical trap, and we’d rather you’d have the places than not. You can’t take Richmond,—no, sir! We will die in the last ditch, every mother’s son of us; and what is left will set the town on fire, and let it go to thunder!”
The old Judge was waxing very eloquent for a man who had one Union soldier recruiting in Hetty’s cabin, and was bidding good-bye to another; but consistency was no part of war politics, and he rambled on, until Arthur cut him short by saying they could wait no longer. With Arthur as a safeguard in case of an attack from Confederates, and Tom Carleton in case of an assault from the Unionists, Maude felt perfectly secure, and in quiet and safety she accomplished her journey, and was welcomed with open arms by Paul Haverill and Charlie. Arthur could only stop for a day among the hills. He might be ordered back to his regiment at any time, and if he got thatother chapthrough he must be bestir himself, he said; and so he bade good-bye to Maude, in whom he had implicit faith, and whose sober, quiet demeanor he tried to attribute to her sorrow at parting with him.
“She does like me some, and by and by she will like me better,” he said, as he went his way, leaving her standing in the doorway of her uncle’s house, her face very pale, and her hands pressed closely together, as if forcing back some bitter thought or silent pain.
Turning once ere the winding road hid her from view Arthur kissed his hand to her gayly, while with a wave of her handkerchief she re-entered the house, and neither guessed nor dreamed how or when they would meet again.