The genial hubbub in the parlors below was resumed after the decorous service of salad and sherbet, and became even more animated when Colonel Ashley chanced to call to see Baynell on a matter affecting their respective commands. He had of course no idea that he would find Baynell engaged with the Sewing-Society, but he met Miss Fisher on her own ground, as it were, and there ensued an encounter of wits, a gay joust, neither being more sincere than the other, nor with anyarrière penséeof irritable feeling to treat a feint as a threat or to cause a thrust to rankle.
Seymour did not welcome him. The prig, Baynell, as he regarded the captain, was so null, so stiffly inexpressive, that his presence had sunk out of account, and the young lieutenant felt that he could rely to a degree on the quiet kindness of the mature dames at work. They did not laugh at his sewing over much, although they noted with secret amusement that, being of the ambitious temper which cannot endure to be found lacking, he had bent his whole energies to the endeavor, and had sewed, indeed, as well as it was possible for a lieutenant of infantry to do on a first lesson. He had a sort of pride in his performance as he handed it up to Miss Fisher, and she showed it to Ashley with an air of pronounced amaze.
"A well-conducted Rebel," she said at last, solemnly, "grounded in the proper convictionas to the ordinance of secession and the doctrine of States' Rights, would go into strong convulsions if he should have to bathe with that towel in a hospital. That wavering hem is an epitome of all the Yankee crooks, and quirks, and skips, and evasions, and concealments of the straight path that typifies right and justice, and Mason and Dixon's line! Therefore out it comes!"
As Ashley's joyous laughter rang out with its crisp, genial intonations, the listening exile in the attic again involuntarily smiled in sympathy, albeit the next moment he was frowning in jealous discomfort, with a poignant sense of supersedure. Here, under his own roof-tree—his father's home!
Lieutenant Seymour protested with ardor, and in truth he was aghast at the prospect. He had taken so much pains. He had wrought with his whole soul. He had imagined that he had hemmed so well. Although he had lost all thought of Baynell in his interest in the exercises of the afternoon, now that Ashley was at hand to witness his discomfiture he became resentfully conscious of the presence of the other officer. He was suddenly mindful that he could not appear to distinguished advantage as the butt of a joke, however mirthful and merry, and this pointed the fact that he was not gracing the introduction here which he had earlier sought through Baynell's kind offices, and had been, as hethought, most impertinently refused. He forgot the grounds of the declination and took no heed of the circumstance that they included Ashley's request as well as his own. He did not realize that had it fallen to Ashley's lot to hem the towel and thread the needle and wear the brass thimble in a genuine sewing-circle, his genial gay adaptability would have accorded so well with the humor of the company that the jest itself would have been blunted. Its edge was whetted by Lieutenant Seymour's serious disfavor, the red embarrassment of his countenance, even the stiff lock of hair, at the apex of the back of the skull, that stood out and quivered with his eager insistence, as he rose erect and held on to the towel and looked both angrily and pleadingly at Miss Fisher.
"I hope you will not be mutinous and disobedient," she said gravely. "I should be sorry to discipline you with the weapons of the society."
She threatened to pierce his fingers with a very sharp needle, and as he hastily withdrew one hand, shifting the towel to the other, she opened a very keen pair of shears; as he evaded this she brought up the needle, enfilading his retreat.
As he stood among a crowd of ladies, insisting that his work should be spared with a vehemence which most of them thought was only a humorous affectation and a part of the fun, he noted that Baynell was laughing too, slightly,languidly. Baynell was standing beside the low, marble mantelpiece, with one elbow upon it, the light from the flaming west full on his trim blond beard and hair, his handsome, distinguished face, the manly grace of the attitude. Seymour resented with an infinite rancor at that moment the contrast with his own flushed, fatigued, tousled, agitated, persistent, querulous personality. He could not have given up to save his life, and yet he could but despise himself for holding on.
"You had better stop pushing me to the wall," he said, and this was literal, for he gave back step by step at each feint of the needle; "you had better be looking out for Captain Baynell. He might have an attack of conscience at any moment, and have all the fruits of your industry seized and confiscated as contraband of war. You must remember he had Mrs. Gwynn's horse impressed."
Baynell was rigid with an intense displeasure. Twice he was about to speak—twice, mindful of the presence of ladies, he hesitated. Then he said, quite casually, though visibly with a heedful self-control:—
"That was because of an order, calling for all citizens' horses in this district for cavalry."
"With whichyouhad as much to do as last year's snow. Just see, Miss Fisher,"—Seymour waved his hand toward the piles of clothing,—"'all the coats and garments that Dorcas made';for Captain Baynell might report that they are intended to give aid and comfort to the enemy!—to be smuggled out of the lines! He has a dangerous conscience!"
There was a sudden agitated flutter in the coterie. The beautiful aged countenance of Mrs. Clinton was overcast with a sort of tremor of fright. A sense of discovery, as of a moral paralysis, pervaded the atmosphere. A long significant pause ensued. Then with the intimations of a stanch reserve of resolution,—a sort of "die in the last ditch" spirit,—those more efficient members of the association, middle-aged, competent, experienced matrons, recovered their dignified equanimity and went on with the examining and counting of the results of the day's work and the contributions from without,—Mrs. Fisher, the acting secretary, receiving the reports of the conferring squads and jotting the enumeration down during the sorting and folding of the completed product.
Baynell, apparently losing self-control, had started angrily forward. Ashley, grave, perturbed, had changed color—even he was at a loss. One might not say what a moment so charged with angry potentialities might bring forth. But nothing, no collocation of invented circumstances seemed capable of baffling Miss Fisher. She was equal to any emergency. She had snatched the towel from the lieutenant's hand, and, flying to meet Baynell, her smilingface incongruous with a serious, steady light in her eyes, she stopped him midway the room.
"Now do me the favor to look at that," she cried gayly, presenting the hem for inspection; "wouldn't you despise an enemy who could take aid and comfort from such a hem as that?"
"A good soldier should never despise the enemy," replied Baynell, seeking to adopt her mood and repeating the truism with an air of banter.
"Well, then, to fit the phrase to your precision, such an enemy would deserve to be despised! What—going—Mrs. Clinton? Itisgetting late."
It was not the usual hour of their separation, but to a very old woman the turmoils of war were overwhelming. As long as the idea of conflict was expressed in the satisfaction of being able to aid in her little way the needy with the work of her own hands,—to knit as she sat by her desolate fireside and wrought for the unknown comrades of her dead sons; to join friends in furnishing blankets and making stout clothes for the soldiers; to bottle her famous blackberry cordial, and to pick lint for the hospitals,—it seemed to have some gentle phase, to bear a human heart. But when the heady tumult, the secret inquisitions, the bitter rancors, the cruelty of bloodshed, and the savagery of death that constitute the incorporate entity of the great monster, War, were reassertedwith menace, her gentle, wrinkled hands fell, her hope fled. The grave was kind in those days to the aged.
Ashley had contrived to give Seymour a glance so significant that he heeded its meaning, though he was already repentant and cowed by the fear of Miss Fisher's displeasure. His heart beat fast as she turned her face all rippling with smiles toward him, albeit he told himself in the same breath that she would have smiled exactly so sweetly had she been as angry as he deserved. For Miss Fisher was not in the business of philanthropy. She had no call to play missionary to any petulant young man's rôle of heathen.
"Are you going to take mamma and me home?" she asked, "or are you going to leave us to be eaten up by the cows homeward bound?"
Now and again might be heard the fitful clanking of a bell as the cows, wending their way along the river bank, paused to graze and once more took up their leisurely progress toward the town. The sunlight was reddening through the rooms. It had painted on the walls arabesques of the lace curtains of the western windows; the glow touched with a sort of revivifying effect the family portraits. Groups of the members of the society having resumed their bonnets and swaying crape veils were going from one to another and commenting on the likeness to the subject and the resemblance to other members of the family, and one or two of artistic bent discussedthe relative merits of the artists, for several canvases were painted by eminent brushes. All were going home, though in the grove the mocking-birds were singing with might and main, but there indeed in the moonlight they would sing the night through with a romantic jubilance impossible to describe.
Ashley, with the ready tact and good breeding which caused him so much to be admired, and so much to admire himself, passed by the more attractive of the younger members of the Circle, and did not even heed the half-veiled challenge of Miss Fisher to join her party homeward, for she had become exceedingly exasperated with Lieutenant Seymour, and had Colonel Ashley been attainable, she would have made the younger man rabid with jealousy on the walk to the town.
But no! He offered his services as escort to Mrs. Clinton, who looked suspiciously and helplessly at him like some tender old baby.
"There is no necessity, but I thank you very much," she said; "I came alone."
The engaging Ashley would not be denied. He had noticed, he said, that to-day some droves of mules were being driven into town, and the heedless soldiers raced along perfectly regardless of what was in the roads before them. They should have some order taken with them, really.
"Oh,don'treport them," said the old lady. "The—the discipline of the army is so—sopainful."
"But there are no painless methods yet discovered of making men obey," said Ashley, laughing.
She still looked at him, doubtfully, as a mouse might contemplate the graces of a very suave cat. But when Julius gazed out from the garret window at the departing group, he was duly impressed with the handsome colonel of cavalry conducting the aged lady on one arm and bearing her delicate little extra shawl on the other, while Mrs. Fisher with Mildred and her "dancing bear," who had taken some clumsy steps that day, made off toward Roanoke City, and the other ladies variously dispersed, Captain Baynell attending the party only to the end of the drive.
Ashley's graceful persistence was justified by the meeting of some of the reckless muleteers in full run down the road, with furious cries and snapping whips and turbulent clatter of animals and men. As his tremulous charge shrunk back aghast, he simply lifted his sword "like a wand of authority," as she always described it, and the noisy rout was turned aside, as if by magic, into a byway, leaving the whole stretch of the turnpike for the passage of the gallant cavalier and one aged lady.
When Baynell came back through the grove and into the house, the parlor doors still stood open. The western radiance was yet red on the walls, albeit the moon was in the sky. The crumb-cloth that had protected the carpet fromlint was gone, the sewing-machines had vanished, all traces of the work were removed, and wonted order was restored among chairs and tables. The rear apartment was as he had seen it hitherto, save that the windows on the western balcony were open, and Mrs. Gwynn, in her white dress, was standing at the vanishing point of the perspective, glimpsed through the swaying curtains and a delicate climbing vine. He hardly hesitated, but passed through the rooms and stepped out, meeting her surprised eyes as she leaned one hand on the iron railing of the balcony.
"I want to speak to you," he said. "I want to know if you think I should have made it plain to those ladies this afternoon that they need fear no interference from me?"
"Oh, I think they understood," she said listlessly, as if it was no great matter.
Her eyes were fixed on the purple western hills. The last vermilion segment of the great solar sphere was slipping beyond them, the sunset gun boomed from the fort, and the flag fluttered down the staff.
"I felt very keenly the position in which I was placed."
She merely glanced at him and then gazed at the outline of the fort against the red sky, all flecked and barred with dazzling flakes of amber. The rampart remained massive and heavy, but the sentry-boxes, giving their queer little castellated effect, were growing indistinct in the distance.
"I was tempted to express my resentment, but I was afraid of going too far—of getting into a wrangle with that fellow—"
"Oh,thatwould have been unpardonable; in the presence of Mrs. Clinton and the rest of the Circle!" she said definitely.
"I amsoglad you approve my course," he rejoined with an air of relief.
Once more she looked at him as he stood beside her. A white jessamine clambered up the stone pillar at the outer corner of the grille work. Its blossoms wavered about her; a hummingbird flickered in and out and was still for a moment, the light showing the jewelled effect of the emblazonment of red and gold and green of his minute plumage, then was distinguishable only as a gauzy suggestion of wings. The moon was in her face, ethereal, delicate, seeming to him entrancingly beautiful. He stipulated to himself that it was not this that swayed him. He loved her beauty, but only because it was hers. He did not love her for her beauty. They were close distinctions, but they made an appreciable difference to him. She did not hold his conscience. She did not dictate his sense of right. This was apart from her, a sanction too sacred for any woman, any human soul to control. Yet he sighed with relief to feel the coincidence of his thought and hers.
"You know, about your horse—it was a matter of conscience with me—a sense ofduty—a matter of conformity to my oath as a soldier and my knowledge of the needs of the service. I would not for any consideration evade or fail to forward in letter and spirit any detail even of a special order that merely chanced to come to my notice, and with which I was not otherwise concerned. Not for your sake—not even to win your approval, precious as that must always be to me, nor to avoid your displeasure, and I believe that is the strongest coercion that could be exerted upon me. But the destination of the work done by the Sewing-Circle—that is different. I have no information that it is other than is claimed. I am not bound to nourish suspicions, nor to investigate mysteries, nor to take action on details of circumstantial evidence."
He paused. There was something in her face that he did not understand;—something stunned, blankly silent, and inexpressive. He went on eagerly, the enforced repression of the afternoon finding outlet in a flood of words.
"Lieutenant Seymour understands my position thoroughly well, as Colonel Ashley does. They take a different view—their construction of their duty is more lenient. I don't know why—perhaps because they are volunteers, and the whole war to them is a temporary occupation. But orders are to be obeyed else they would not be issued. If any exceptions were intended, a permit would be granted."
He paused again, looking straight at her with such confident, lucid, trusting eyes,—and she felt that she must say something to divert their gaze.
"Exceptions, such as Miss Fisher's favorite mount, Madcap? How pretty Mildred was to-day! Really beautiful; don't you think so?"
"No." His expression was so tender, so wistful, yet so confident, that, amazed, embarrassed, she felt her color begin to flame in her cheeks. "How could she seem beautiful where you are,—the loveliest woman in all the world and the best beloved."
"Captain Baynell!" she exclaimed, hardly believing that she heard him aright. "I do not understand the manner in which you have seen fit to speak to me this evening." She paused abruptly, for he was looking at her with a palpable surprise.
"You must know—you must have seen—that I love you!" he said hastily. "Almost from the moment that I first saw you I have loved you—but more and more, hour by hour, and day by day, as I have learned to know you, to appreciate you—so perfect and so peerless!"
"You surprise me beyond measure. I must beg—I insist that you do not continue to speak to me in this strain."
"Do you mean to say that you did not know it—that you did not perceive it?"
"I did not dream it for one moment," she replied.
It seemed as if he could not accept her meaning. He pondered on the words as if they might develop some difference.
"You afflict me beyond expression!" he exclaimed with a sort of desperate breathlessness. "You destroy my dearest hopes. How could you fail—how could I fancy! I—I would not suggest the subject as long as your mourning attire repelled it, but—but—since—since—I—I thought you knew all my heart and I might speak!"
"You thought I laid aside a widow's weeds to challenge your avowal!" exclaimed Mrs. Gwynn, in her icy, curt, soft tones.
"Oh, Leonora—for God's sake—put on it no interpretation except that I love you—I adore you; and I thought such hearty, whole-souled affection must awaken some interest, some response. I could hardly be silent except I so feared precipitancy. I spoke as soon as I might without rank offence."
Even then, in the presence of an agitation, a humiliation peculiarly keen to a man of his type, he was not first in Mrs. Gwynn's thoughts. She was reviewing the day and wondering if this connection between the lack of the widow's weeds and the presence of the Yankee officer was suggested to any of the sewing contingent. A vague gesture, a pause, a remembered facialexpression, sudden, involuntary, at the sight of him and her,—all had a new interpretation in the sequence of this disclosure. They had thought it the equivalent of the acceptance of a new suitor, and the supposed favored lover had thought so himself!
The recollection of her woful married life, with its train of barbarities, and rancors, and terrors, both grotesque and horrible, that still tortured her present—the leisure moments of her laborious days—was bitterly brought to mind for a moment. That she, of all the women in the world—thatsheshould be contemplating matrimony anew! She gave a light laugh that had in it so little mirth, was so little apposite to ridicule, that he did not feel it a fleer.
"You did not mean it, then?"
"Not for one moment."
"You did not have me in mind?"
"No—no—never at all!"
"Leonora—Mrs. Gwynn—this is like death to me—I—I—"
"I am very sorry—"
"I do not reproach you," he interrupted. "It is my own folly, my own fault! But I have lived on this hope; it is all the life I have. You do not withdraw it utterly? May I not think that in time—"
"No—no—I have no intention of ever marrying again. I—I—was not—not—happy."
"But I am different—" he hesitated. He could not exactly find words to protest his conviction of his superiority to her husband, a man she had loved once. "I mean—we are congenial. I am very considerably older; I am nearly thirty-one. My views in life are fixed, definite; my occupation is settled. Might not—"
"I am sorry, Captain Baynell; I would not willingly add to the unhappiness, real or imaginary, of any one—but all this is worse than useless. I must ask you not to recur to the subject. And now I must leave you, for the 'ladies' are going to bed, and I must hear them say their prayers."
He seemed about to detain her with further protestations, then desisted, evidently with a hopeless realization of futility.
"Ask them to remember me in their petitions," he only said with a dreary sort of smile.
He had always seemed to love the "ladies" fraternally, with lenient admiration, and she liked this tender little domestic trait in the midst of his unyielding gravity and inexorable stiffness. She hesitated in the moonlight with some stir of genuine sympathy, and held out her hand as she passed. He caught it and covered it with kisses. She drew it hastily from him, and Baynell was left alone on the balcony; the scene before him, the vernal glamours of the moon, the umbrageous trees, the sweet springflowers, the sheen of the river, the bivouacs of the hills, the fort on the height,—these things seemed unrealities and mere shadows as he faced the fragments of that nullity, his broken dream, the only positive actuality in all his life.
That night, so long his step went to and fro in his room as he paced the floor, for he could not sleep and he could not be still, that the Rebel, hidden in the attic, was visited by grave monitions concerning his neighbor and did not venture out to roam the stairways and halls and the unoccupied precincts of the ground floor as he was wont to do.
"'The son of Belial' has something on his mind, to a certainty, and I hope to the powers 'tisn't me," Julius said now and again, as he listened. He had sat long in his rickety arm-chair in the broad slant of the moonlight, that fell athwart the dim furniture and the gray shadows, for the night continued fair and the moon was specially brilliant. Once in the clear glow he saw distinctly in the further spaces the figure of a man, watchful-eyed, eager, springing toward him as he moved, and he experienced the cold chill of despair before he realized that it was his own reflection in a dull mirror at the opposite side of the great room that had elicited this apparition of terror. He took himself quickly out of the range of its reflection.
"Two Johnny Rebs are a crowd in this garret!I have just about room enough for myself. I'm not recruiting."
He crept silently to the bed and lay down at full length, all dressed and booted as he was, his hands clasped under his head, with the moonlight in his eyes and illuminating his sleepless pillow, still listening to the regular step marching to and fro in the room below.
Julius did not court slumber.
"I must keep the watch with you, my fine fellow," he said resolutely.
Though there was a strong coercion to wakefulness in the propinquity of that spirit of unrest which possessed his enemy so close at hand, his eyes once grew heavy-lidded and opened with a sudden start as, half dreaming, he fancied a stealthy approach. He sprang from the recumbent posture, and the floor creaked under the abrupt movement. This gave him pause, and he slowly collected his faculties. Surely the stranger would hardly venture, even under the relentless scourge of his own wakeful thoughts, to roam about the house in search of peace or the surcease of mental tyranny that change might effect. This might savor of disrespect to his host, yet Julius canvassed the suggestion. These were untoward times, and strange people were queerly mannered. The officer must have learned in the length of his residence here that the great vacant attic was untenanted wholly, and of course he knew that the ground floor wasaltogether unoccupied by night. He might descend and light the library lamp and read. He might indeed roam the deserted rooms with the same sort of satisfaction that Julius himself had already felt in the great spaces, the absolute quiet, the still moonlight, the long abeyance of day with its procrastination of the sordid problems and the toilsome business of life. If he had chanced to meet the Rebel on the stairs, he would scarcely have thought the apparition a spectral manifestation, as the poor little twins had construed the encounter in the library, for old Janus, trembling and terrified, had detailed the significance of the scene in the dining room afterward, and the eagerness of Julius to get away, to be off, had been redoubled. Daily he had hoped for news of the approach of the picket-lines, and daily the old servant wrung his hands and made his report, of which the burden was, "Wuss an' wuss!"—or detailed a "scrimmage" in which "dem scand'lous Rebs had run like tuckies, an' deir line is furder off dan it eber was afore!"
The Confederate officer, nevertheless, had hitherto felt a degree of safety in the attic and had the resources of a manly patience to await the event. This nocturnal eccentricity on the part of the guest of the house, however, roused new forebodings. It bore in its own conditions the inception of added danger. It was unprecedented. It marked a turbulent restlessness and the element of change. In the evidently agitatedstate of the stranger's nerves, some trifle, the scamper of a rat, the dislodgment of the rickety old cornice of this bedstead, the fall of one of the girandoles, teetering over there on a chest of drawers, might rouse him with its clamor and justify the ascent of the attic stairs to investigate its source. These were troublous times. There were stories forever afloat of lawless marauders. Smoke-houses were broken into and pillaged. Mansions were robbed and fired, and their tenants, chiefly women and children, fleeing into the cornfields to hide, watched the roof-tree flare. It was hard for the authorities to find and fix the responsibility for these dread deeds in remote inaccessible spots, and it would be culpable neglect for this Federal officer to tolerate the suggestion of an ill-omened noise or an unaccustomed presence without seeking out its cause. Evidently any accident would bring him upstairs. It was equally obvious that the garret was no place to sleep to-night! Julius, as he lay on the pillow, could hardly rid himself of the idea of approach. Ever and anon he looked for the stealthy shadow of which he had dreamed, climbing in the moonbeams along the balusters of the stairway. Finally he stole silently out of the reach of the moonlight to a darker corner of the room,—the deep recess of one of the windows which the shadow of a great branch of the white pine made duskier still. The tall tree, with its full, sempervirent boughs, showed the varyingnocturnal tints that color may compass, uninformed by the sun,—the cool suggestion of a fair dull green where the moonbeams glistered, the fibrous leaves tipped with a dim sparkle; the deep umbrageous verdure where the darkness lurked and yet did not annul the vestige of tone. As he reclined on the window-seat, he discerned farther down a faint flare of artificial light. It described a regularly barred square amidst the pine needles, and he presently recognized it as the light from the window of Captain Baynell's room. Now and again it flickered in a way that told how the disregarded candle was beginning to gutter in the socket. Still to and fro the regular footfalls went, muffled on the heavy carpet, but in the dead hush of night perceptible enough to the watching listener. At last with a final flare the taper burned out, but the moon was in the windows along the western side of the house, and still to and fro went the steps, betokening the turmoil of unquiet thoughts. Julius watched how the moonbeams shifted from bough to bough as the slow night lingered. He heard the bells from the city towers mark the hour and the recurrent echo from the rocky banks of the river: then one far away, belated, faint, scarcely perceived, beat out the tally of the time on some remote cliff. Once more the air fell silent save for the jubilee of the mocking-birds, for spring had come, and skies were fair, and the gossamer moon was a-swing in the night, and love, andlife, and home were dear, and the incredibly sweet, brilliant delight of song arose in pæans of joy and faith. Even this waned after a time. A wind with the thrills of dawn in its wings sprang up, and Julius shivered with the chill. The dew was cold and thick in the pines, and the sward glittered like a sheet of water.
At last all was quiet and silent in the room below. Julius listened intently. No creak of opening door; no footfall on the stair. Now, he told himself, was the moment of danger, when he could no longer be assured of the man's movements, and could not even guess at his intentions. He listened—still—still to silence. Silence absolute, null.
A bird stirred with a half-awakened chirp. The sky showed a clearer tone, a vague blue, growing ever more definite. In the stillness, with an elastic, leaping sound, strong and sweet, the call of a bugle rang out suddenly from the fort on the heights, and, behold, with a flash of red on the water, and a flare of gold in the sky, the sweet spring day was early here.
It came glowing on with all the graces and soft splendors of the season as if it bore, too, none of the prosaic recall to the labors and sordid routine and unavailing troubles and vexations of the workaday world. The camps were alive, the drums were beating, and all the echoes of the hills gave voice to martial summons. The flag was floating anew from the heights of the fort in thefresh and fragrant sunshine, and now and again a bar or two of the music of a military band in the distance came on the wind. The clatter of wagon wheels was audible from the stony streets of the little city. The shriek of a locomotive split the air as an incoming train whizzed across the bridge. The river craft steamed and puffed, and blockaded the landing, now backing water and now forging forward, remonstrating with bells and whistles in strenuous dialogue.
It was a day like yesterday, yet to Baynell all the world had changed. No day could ever be the same. Life itself was made up of depreciated values. The blow had fallen so heavily, so suddenly, so conclusively. All, all was dead! It was much with a sense of decorous observance, of reverential respect, that he made haste to bury his slain hopes, his foolish dream, his ardent expectations out of sight, never to rise again. It was unwise to linger here, but not because of his own interest, he said to himself. It would not unfit him for his duty. This was all that was left to him. His feeling for this had never swerved. It was unaffected—all apart from what had come and gone. But his presence could but be distasteful to her. And any moment might reveal his state of feeling to others—to Judge Roscoe, who would resent it if it should suggest an unwelcome urgency. And the neighbors—he had not been unnoting of the glances of surprise that had already greeted that radiant figure in white andred yesterday. While he winced a little from the realization that his sudden departure would illustrate the sad plight of a love-lorn suitor, disregarded and cast aside,—for he had a thousand keen susceptibilities to pride,—and he would fain the tongues of gossips should forbear this sacred theme, it were best that he should go, and that shortly.
When he appeared at the breakfast-table, pale and a trifle haggard, he gave no other token of his long vigil and the radical change that he had suffered in his life and prospects. He was a man of theory. He valued his self-respect. He insisted on his self-control. He had exerted all his capacities, summoned all the resources of his courage; and this was the more needed because of the unconventional, informal footing on which he stood with the family. To say farewell and ride away might seem easy enough, but this was like quitting a home with affectionate domestic claims. When he said that he thought he must return to camp to-day, the twin "ladies" laid down knife and fork to enter their protest. They lifted their voices in plaintive entreaty, and the deaf-mute looked at Baynell with limpid eyes and a quivering lip. But Uncle Ephraim, bringing in the waffles, had a vague suggestion of "It's time, too," in the wag of his head. Judge Roscoe doubtless experienced a vivid realization of the advantage to accrue to the young soldier in the attic, whose security in his hiding-place wasso endangered by the presence of the Federal officer, for he was very guarded even in his first cordial phrases, and thenceforward said no more than policy required. The twin "ladies," however, continued to loudly urge that the captain might find lizards in his cot; and asked if his tent had a floor; and warned him that frogs were everywhere now. "Tree-toads, o-o-oh! with injer-rubber feet," cried Geraldine, shudderingly, "that blow out and climb!"
"And you'll havenolittle girl to put a lump of sugar in your after-dinner coffee, Captain," said Adelaide, impressing the merits of her methods.
"And no little girl to bring you a lighted taper for your cigar," chimed in Geraldine.
"It'smyturn to-day, Ger'ldine," cried the enterprising Adelaide, springing from her chair to monopolize the precious privilege.
"No—no! mine—mine! You had it yesterday!" cried Geraldine, racing after her out of the room.
"'Twas day before!" protested Adelaide's voice far up the hallway.
"You had better get your cigar-case ready, to bestow the boon on the first comer," suggested Mrs. Gwynn. She had entirely recovered her equanimity, as he perceived. The state of his unsought affections was naught to her. The wreck of his heart—she had known wrecked hearts for a more bitter cause! Doubtless she thought the pain transitory in his case; alreadyits contemplation seemed to have passed from her mind like a tale that is told. She was sedately suave as always, barely attentive, preoccupied, her usual manner, so incongruous with her youth and beauty, so at variance with her attire from the old wardrobe of by-gone days,—the fresh white lawn, flecked with light blue, the ruffles finished with "footing," and with a bobinet scarf about her throat, wherein was thrust a pin of a single rose carved in coral. She was like some dainty maiden, no refugee from the world, sad and widowed.
She led the way to the library, partly to see that the "ladies" did not set themselves aflame as their short skirts flickered about the small dully burning fire, still lighted night and morning against the chill of the crisp vernal air. They were, indeed, leaping back and forth over the fender with some temerity, and Baynell, seating himself by the table, his cigar between his teeth, thought it best to dispose of both the lighted spills by not drawing at all till both were alternately offered and the extinction of each secured. Then, as the "ladies" flew back to the dining room and out to the parterre, having volunteered to gather the rest of the flowers for the vases, Leonora and Baynell were left for the time together.
It gratified him to perceive that she did not fear the introduction of the subject anew. She experienced not even a momentary embarrassment.She understood him so well, and the plane of his emotion.
The early morning sunshine was in the cheerful library windows; a mocking-bird on a vine outside swayed so close, as he sang, that his shadow continually flickered over the sill; the flowers were all freshly abloom, and Mrs. Gwynn was standing on the opposite side of the table, her hands full of the spring blossoms that lay already on a tray, preparing to fill the great blue and white Wedgwood bowl.
Baynell, commenting on the splendor of the tulips as he smoked his cigar, spoke of the craze for speculation in the bulb that had existed in Holland, and said he had once seen an old book of illustrations of famous prize-takers, with fabulous prices; he had always wondered how they compared with the results of modern culture and the infinite variety to which the bloom had been brought, and he had often wished to see the book again.
"Why, we have that!" exclaimed Mrs. Gwynn, pausing with her hands full of the gold variety "flamed" with scarlet. She glanced uncertainly toward the bookshelves, then suddenly remembering—"Oh, I know now where it is;—in the old bookcase upstairs, at the head of the third flight. I will call one of the ladies to go for it."
Baynell rose, his lighted cigar between his lips. "Don't trouble them; let me go!"
Julius heard the swift step of a young man on the stair. He knew that the crucial moment had come. And yet for the sake of the safety of his father, who had concealed him here, he dared not defend himself with his pistols. He had not a moment for flight or to seek a hiding-place. He could only nerve his powers to meet the crisis as best he might.
Baynell, taken wholly by surprise, felt his senses reel when, like the grotesque inconsequence of a dream, a man in the uniform of a Confederate officer in the quiet, peaceful house confronted him at the head of the flight.
"You are my prisoner!" Baynell mechanically gasped, clutching Julius with one hand and drawing his pistol with the other. "You are my prisoner!"
"In a horn!" retorted Julius, delivering his enemy a blow between the eyes which flung Baynell, stunned and bleeding, down the flight to the landing, while the boy went by him like a flash.
That swift fiery figure, with its gray regimentals and its brass and steel glitter, covered with blood, passed Leonora like some gory apparition as she stood in the library door, amazed, pallid, breathless, summoned by the sound of loud voices and the reverberating clamors of the collision on the stairs. Julius dashed through the drawing-rooms, opened the window on the western balcony, sprang over the rail, and disappeared swiftly among thelow boughs of the row of evergreen shrubs planted there in old times as a wind-break, and stretching along the crest of the hill.
And placidly in the sunshine the sentry paced his beat before the south portico, the reaches of the drive in sight, the appropriate entrance of the place, all unconscious of aught amiss, seeing nothing, hearing nothing,—till suddenly, with an effect of confusion, like the distortions of a delirium, he was aware that the grove was full of Federal soldiers, chiefly from the infantry regiment camped in the orchard to the west,—soldiers in wild disorder, hatless, shoeless, coatless, many of them,—all armed, all howling with an unexplained excitement, racing frantically hither and thither, bushwhacking with their rifles every bough in their reach. And now they came at full run, still howling and wild, toward the house.
"Halt!" cried the sentry. "Halt!"
The advance came surging on, regardless.
"Halt, or I fire!" once more the guard warned the onset. And he levelled his weapon.
They clamored out words at him, all madly intermingled, all unintelligible, approaching still at full run.
Perhaps the sentinel had some excusable regard for his own safety, for in the unexplained excitement that possessed them, they were less soldiery than a frantic mob. He had warrant enough to fire into the midst of the crowd. But it seemedthat he might in a moment have been torn limb from limb. He interpreted his duty on the side of caution. He cocked his weapon, fired into the air, and called lustily upon the "Corporal of the guard." The mass surged into the house, some by the front door, some by the open library window, others scaled the balcony and pressed through the drawing-rooms and into the hall.
The terrified children clung to the skirt of Mrs. Gwynn's dress, as amazed and bewildered she stood in the wide long hall, by the great carved newel of the stairs, while with frantic interrogatories—"Where is he? Where is he? Who is he?"—the intruders searched every nook and cranny of the lower floor. Destruction, the inadvertent incident of haste, or the concomitant of clumsy accoutrements, seemed to attend their steps. Now sounded the shiver of glass as a soldier burst through one of the long French windows of the dining room. A trooper caught his huge cavalry spurs in the meshes of a lace curtain in one of the parlors and brought down cornice, lambrequin, and all with a crash. The crystal shades of the hall chandelier were not proof against a bayonet, held unduly aloft at the posture of Shoulder Arms. A tussle for precedence knocked a weighty marble statue, half life-size, out of the niche at the turn of the staircase. These casualties and the attendant noise, the heavy tramp of booted feet, the raucous sonority of their voices as they called suggestions to eachother, all intensified the terror, the tumult of their uncontrolled and turbulent presence.
As a score raced up the stairs a sudden hush fell upon the rout. Those still below apprehended developments of moment and pressed to the scene. The foremost had encountered Judge Roscoe and old Ephraim bearing down to the second story the prostrate body of Captain Baynell, all dripping with blood, while the floor of the stairs to the attic showed the stains of the fall.
The unexpected spectacle stayed the tumult for a moment. Then as a hoarse murmur rose, Judge Roscoe turned toward the foremost standing at the foot of the attic flight.
"Lend a hand here," he said with a calm, steady voice. Then, looking over the balustrade to those below, "Has the surgeon come?"
The question went from one to another—"Has the surgeon come?" to those that filled the halls and made sudden excursions to and fro in the adjoining rooms as suspicion of hiding-places occurred to them; to others that gorged the main staircase, packed close at its head, with necks craning forward, and ears and eyes intent to hear and see what had chanced.
By this time officers were in the house and the unwelcome voice of command curtailed the activities of the mob and reduced it speedily to the aspect of soldiery. The voice of command had irate intonations, and one or two of the youngerofficers showed a disposition to lay about with the flat of their swords, as a "wand of authority" indeed, but, apparently inadvertently, dealing blows that had tingling intimations. They cleared the mansion quickly, the unruly manifestation serving to minimize its provocation.
To Judge Roscoe's infinite relief the officers were disposed to regard the disturbance as one of those inexplicable attacks of folly which sometimes lay hold on a mass of men, but which would be incapable of affecting them as individuals. For a search-party organized on a strict military principle had carefully ransacked every portion of the house and cellar and also the attic,—where no traces betrayed recent habitation,—examined all the vineyard, hedges, shrubbery, and even the boughs of the great trees, and invaded the stable, barn, crib, ice-house, poultry yards, dairy, kennel, dove-cote, the miscellaneous outbuildings, sties and byres, all empty, devoid even of the usual domestic animals—absolutely with no result. No Confederate fugitive, covered with blood or in any other plight, was found, and in the thrice-guarded camps that surrounded the place escape seemed impossible. The ranking officer who ordered the search naturally believed that the sudden conviction of the presence of a Confederate soldier in the house was a sheer delusion, promulgated and distorted by rumor. Some story of Captain Baynell's fall and wound, caught possibly from the messenger sentto fetch the surgeon, had been misunderstood. This he considered was the only reasonable explanation. No one, he argued, could have escaped under the circumstances. No Rebel was in the house or in the grounds. It was impossible for a man to have fled except into the midst of the camps.
Notwithstanding the conviction thus reached, special precautionary measures were taken. New sentries were stationed on the rear and west of the house as well as in front. These posts were to be visited by a sergeant with a patrol, twice during the night. If any Rebel had contrived to escape from the place, he would find it difficult indeed to reënter it. These duties concluded, the officer dismissed the whole matter as a canard or one of the inexplicable manifestations of human folly, and departed, leaving quiet descending upon the distracted scene.
It was the cook, Aunt Chaney, who had been sent at full speed for the surgeon. She had vaguely understood from old Ephraim's aspect and frantic mandate that something terrifying had befallen the household, and she did not realize until afterward the sacrifice of dignity her aspect must have presented as she ran, fatly waddling, over the hill, across the commons, and then up a path to a hospital on an eminence overlooking the town, formerly a Medical College. She was bonnetless, limping actively, for one of her large, loose slippers had gone, and gone forever.Its loss destroyed the equipoise of her gait; her unshod foot was pierced with stones and chilled with the damp ground; her sleeves were rolled up, her arms held out at a bandy angle, for her fingers were dripping with cake-batter, and she did not have sufficient composure to wring them free till she was following the surgeon home.
The condition of the messenger intimated the seriousness of the call, and the surgeon hardly waited to hear more than the wild appeal—"Come at once! Captain Baynell has killed his-self—Heabenly Friend! I wish he could hev' tuk enny other premises ter hev' c'mitted the deed." As she toiled along behind the surgeon, "Oh, my Lawd an' King!" she panted at intervals.
Baynell remained unconscious for some time. When at length he came to himself he was lying quietly in the great, commodious bedroom that he had of late occupied in the storm centre, the green Venetian blinds half closed, the afternoon sunlight softly flecking the carpet, the air of high decorum and gentle nurture which so characterized the place peculiarly in evidence, and old Ephraim noiselessly flitting about with a palm-leaf fan in his hand, ready to annihilate any vagrant fly with enough temerity to appear.
"Ye los' yer balance, sah, an' fell down de steers," he unctuously explained.
"I know—I remember that—but who—where is that Rebel officer?"
"I reckon ye mus' hev' drempt about him, Cap'n," the "double-faced Janus" responded casually, with the superior air of humoring a delusion. "Ye been talkin' 'bout him afore whenst ye wuz deelerious. But dar ain't none ob dem miser'ble slave-drivers round dese diggin's now'-days, praise de Lawd! Freedom come wid de Union army."
This assurance convinced the Federal officer. The old servant's interest was so obviously with the invading force that his motive was not open to question. Moreover, it was not the first time that Baynell had dreamed of the Confederate officer, the erstwhile lover of Leonora Gwynn, whose splendid portrait hung on the wall, and whom she often mentioned with interest.
When the surgeon next called he expressed to his patient great surprise: "It is very natural that in your state of convalescence you should grow dizzy and fall; but I can't for my life understand how you contrived to get such a blow from the edge of a step. It has all the style about it of a hit straight from the shoulder of an expert boxer. Uncle Ephraim doesn't happen to be something of a pugilist, now?" he added jocosely, smiling and glancing at the old negro.
"I don't happen to be nuffin, sah, dat ain't perlite," grinned the amenable "Janus."
"Your friends downstairs seemed frightened out of their wits, Baynell,—lest your wound should be imputed to them, I suppose," the surgeonsaid openly, for he did not consider the presence of the ex-slave.
"Yes, sah!" put in Uncle Ephraim, "eider me or Marster, or de widder 'oman, or de ladies air sure bound ter hev' knocked him up dat way, kase 'twould take a puffick reel-foot man ter fall downstairs dat fashion. Yah! Yah!"
It did not occur to Baynell to doubt this statement, and not one word did he say to the surgeon of his dream of the presence of the Confederate officer. He made no effort to account for the disaster, merely lending himself to the surgeon's view that he had grown suddenly dizzy and the stairs were steep in the third flight.
This gave the surgeon a disquieting sense of suspicion some time afterward. When returning from his tour of duty at the hospital he was again in the camp, he heard there the amazing rumor among the soldiers that a Confederate officer, covered with blood, had been seen to issue from the Roscoe house and with lightning-like speed disappear among the shrubbery. He wondered that Baynell should not have mentioned the commotion, forgetting that as he was unconscious he might be still unaware of the fact.
Dr. Grindley was not of a designing nature; but he was consciously experimenting when he said, rather banteringly, on his next visit, "How about the notion that there was a Confederate officer concealed in this house?"
Baynell looked annoyed. He had heard asyet not an allusion to the raid upon the house during the period of his insensibility, and he did not know that the presence of a Confederate officer had even been rumored. He supposed that the doctor referred to the chance question he had asked Uncle Ephraim, and he deprecated the fact that the old man should have heedlessly repeated this. The dream of the altercation, as he fancied the recollection, was still vague in his mind, and with that quality of unreality and so blended with other visions of his delirium and fever that he in naught doubted its tenuous state as a figment of a disordered brain.
"There was no Rebel," he said somewhat gruffly.
"That was all merely the love of sensation?" asked the surgeon.
"Of course," Baynell assented, and fell silent.
This had been the conclusion among the officers of the surrounding camp, and it was not surprising to the surgeon that Baynell should share it, but there was a consciousness, a mortification, in his manner, that implied a personal interest and forced the question to be dropped. The surgeon had no wish to press it, and moreover he was anxious to avoid exciting the patient. He had some doubt as to the result of the fall; he was meditating seriously on symptoms which indicated that the skull had sustained a fracture. But when he remarked that all might be well if Captain Baynell remained quiet and stirred as little as possible, he was surprised and dismayedby the vehemence with which the patient declared that he must move; he must leave the house; he could not, he would not stay under this roof another night, not even an hour longer. He requested the surgeon to make arrangements to attend him elsewhere, and rang the bell to send a message to camp directing his servant to come and get his personal effects. Only a sleeping-potion could restrain this determination at the time, and the next day a return of the fever and delirium solved the surgeon's problem how to bend the will of the refractory patient to the demands of his own best interests.
Uncle Ephraim found some difficulty in sustaining with composure the disasters and excitement and fears that crowded in upon him. He must play his part with requisite spirit when in presence of the public, and he must suffer in silence and alone. He dared not seek to confer apart with his master as to the next step, lest he rouse suspicion that they had some secret understanding, and had indeed harbored the enemy. He dared not confide his troubles even to his wife, Aunt Chaney, although he yearned for sympathy, for reassurance. The old cook, however, had not been admitted to any detail of the secret presence of Julius in the house. For aught she knew, even now, he was five hundred miles away.
The perversity of the falling out of events dismayed and daunted old Ephraim. Only thatmorning—the morning of that momentous day—Captain Baynell had announced at the table the termination of his visit.
"An' it wuz time, too. 'Fore de Lawd, it wuz surely time," the old servant grumbled, in surly retrospect. For had the officer but taken his leave and his cigar together, how different it might all have been! "Marse Julius mought hev' seen Miss Leonora, an' mebbe de ladies, an' come down inter de house an' smoked aseegar wid his Pa. Lawdy, massy! wid de curtains drawed, an' de blinds down. Dat's whut he honed for! Oh, 'fore Gawd, I dunno whar dat baby-chile—dat pore leetle Julius—is now!"
His face caught a fleeting grimace to remember the height of the "baby-chile,"—but as helpless, as forlorn, as some tiny waif, and oh, so terribly threatened in this beleaguered, in this thrice-guarded, town!
When at last he was dismissed from his station in the sick room by the sinking of Baynell into slumber under the influence of the sedative administered by the surgeon, old Ephraim, succumbing both in physique and in spirit, even in gait, stumbled downstairs and took his way into the kitchen to find some talk of trifles, some stir of the familiar duties, that might enable him to be rid of his unquiet thoughts, of his dread prognostications, of his sheer terror of the future. He sunk into a wooden chair beside the stove, for the cooking of supper was already under way.He was feeling very old and weary. His countenance seemed to have collapsed in some sort, so did his usual expression of brisk satisfaction and dapper respectfulness and reserve of intelligence prop and sustain its contours. Its bony structure now seemed withdrawn. It was a sort of dilapidated mask of desolation. He drew a long sigh. And then he said:—
"Dis is a tur'ble, tur'ble world, mon!"
"Dis world is a long sight better dan de nex' world foryou!" said his wife, rancorously prophetic. "You hearme!"
The imperious Chaney had not collapsed. Her "head-handkercher" was bestowed in a turban that had two high standing ends like tufts of feathers above her black, resolute face. Her black eyes snapped as she looked beyond him, not at him. She was stepping about, stoutly, firmly, audibly, in her Sunday shoes, for no amount of mourning materialized the lost slip-shodchaussure—pressed deep in the mud of the highway by wagon-wheels and the uninformed hoof of an unimaginative army mule.
Uncle Ephraim gazed up in growing anxiety, not to say fright, for Aunt Chaney's mood was not suave. She suddenly paused on the other side of the stove, and, gesticulating across it with a long spoon, demanded: "You—ole—deestracted—cawnfield—hand! What fur did you sendmefur de doctor-man?"
"Whut you go fur, den?"
Aunt Chaney reflected on her appearance on the highway, in her old homespun dress, "coat," as she called it, one slipper, no bonnet, the cake-dough dripping from her hands. She remembered that some wagoners of a forage train, struck by her agitated aspect, had looked back to laugh from their high perches among the hay and fodder; she remembered that some little imp-like boys had twitted her, calling after her in their high, callow chirp, and sorry was she that she had not left all to chase them—to chase them till they died of fright! She—shewho was accustomed to flaunt in a "changeable" silk, and her bonnet had an ostrich plume! She wore a bracelet, too, on grand occasions, and this was gold, solid and heavy, fine and engraved, for "Miss Leonora" herself had it bought in New Orleans expressly for her, after she had discovered and unaided extinguished a midnight fire. Not that old Chaney would have wasted all this splendor on the errand for the doctor. If she had thought but for a moment, she would have garbed herself as now, as she did instantly on her return home, to save her self-respect,—in a purple calico and a clean, white, domestic apron, with her respected and respectable green-and-white checked sun-bonnet, all laundered, as ever, to absolute perfection. Her haste had destroyed her judgment.
"Whyn't ye tole me dat de man hed jes' fell downsteers,—when ye come out yere, howlin'lak a painter wid a misery in his jaw. I 'lowed de Yankee had deestroyed his-self on dese yere premises."
"So did I! So did I! He bled—andbled!" Old Ephraim paused, his face fallen. The association of ideas brought by the mention of blood was uncanny.
"What ailed de man dat he hatter fall downsteers?"
"I dunno." The denial was pat.
"Whut's he come down here fightin' in the War without he's able ter keep from fallin' downsteers? De Roscoes kin stan' up! I'll say dat fur 'em."
"Dey kin dat," replied the "double-faced Janus" admiringly, thinking of Julius.
"How long he gwine stay?"
"'Twell he git well, I reckon."
"DenIsay dis ain't no house nor home. Dis is horspital Number Forty—dat's whut. Marse Gerald Roscoe ain't got no more sense 'n a good-sized chicken, dough heisa jedge, ter hev' dat man yere fur Miss Leonora ter keer fur, an' take ter marryin' agin 'fore her old sweetheart, Julius Roscoe, kin git home. 'Fore de Lawd, I stood it ez long ez dere seemed enny end to it, but now—" she banged her pots, and pans, and kettles about with virulence.
"Marse Julius," she continued, "he'sde man fur Leonora Roscoe,—Iain't gwine call her 'Gwynn,'—Marse Julius is good-hearted andfree-handed; I knowed him from a baby, an' he wuz a big one! I always knowed he war in love wid her ever since dat Christmas up at the Devrett place, when he an' some o' dem limber-jack Devrett boys got inter de wall or inter de groun'—I dunno whar—an' sung right inter de company's ear, powerful mysterious,—skeered 'em all! Marse Julius, he tuk his guitar an' sung,—'Oh, my love's like a red, red rose!' An' she looked lak one while she listened, fur she knowed his voice. I wuz peekin' in at de company at de winder—Lawd—Lawd! I 'loweddatwould be a match—but yere come along dat Gwynn feller!"
A sudden white flare of burning lard spread over the red-hot stove, for Uncle Ephraim had sprung up so abruptly as to strike the long handle of the skillet and overturn the utensil.
"Ain't ye got no mo' use of yer haid 'n ter go buttin' 'roun' de kitchen, lak a ole deestracted Billy-goat, lak you is!" Aunt Chaney demanded.
As the smoke circled about she snatched up the skillet with its flaming contents.
"Git out my kitchen, else I'll scald de grizzled woolly soul out'n you!"
"Bress de Lawd, 'oman,Iain't wantin' ter stay in yer kitchen," said Uncle Ephraim, suddenly spry and saucy and brisk,—a trifle more brisk, indeed, accelerating his pace toward thedoor, as she took two or three long, agile, elastic steps toward him.
"I got other feesh ter fry!" he chuckled to himself.
For the blazing lard but typified a certain illumination in old Ephraim's mind.