CHAPTER XV
ToArabella’s amazement the other officers looked nettled, even resentful, as if disparaged in some sort. Mervyn indeed wore an expression of blank dismay as if he hardly knew how he should interpret this setting aside of himself in favor of his subordinate. He could not altogether restrain himself, and with a cold smile and a stiff dignity he said presently, “We have all learned more or less of the Cherokee language.”
“Well,—well,—it is no great matter, for of course the official interpreter goes with the party.” Captain Howard, so to speak, shouldered the affair aside. He could well understand, however, the mortification of Mervyn and Jerrold that they should be passed over for a younger officer and only an ensign in rank. But he had had the evidence of his senses to Raymond’s knowledge of the Cherokee language, and this confirmed him in the selection which he had already considered. He was glad to discover this particular fitness in the man of his choice for this delicate and diplomatic mission, one who would be keenly alive to all he might hear or see on festive or informal occasions when no interpreter could be on duty.
Raymond now had not a word to say, and presentlyhe excused himself with a look of importance and the plea that he desired to glance over the roll and select the men for the expedition, to make sure that all were fit, and properly equipped for the march.
When he had quitted the group a silence ensued, heavy with the unspoken reproach of the captain-lieutenant. The commandant felt constrained to some casual comment: “The trouble with very young men is that they are too disposed to underestimate difficulties,—too cock-sure. Raymond would be as well pleased with the assignment if the march were five hundred miles instead of one hundred and fifty!”
“And so should I,” said Mervyn, suggestively.
“Tut! Tut! You young men shouldn’t be so grudging,” said Captain Howard, making the best of the untoward situation. “Give a man a chance to show that he holds his commission for some better reason than the purchase money. Gad, sir, don’t grudge him so!”
As he turned away Jerrold, recovering himself from his disappointment as best he might, thinking it a matter which he could more fittingly deplore in secret and seclusion at another time, sought to obviate the awkwardness of the discussion by inviting Captain Howard’s attention to his daughter’s fine shot, the arrow still sticking in the bull’s-eye. Captain Howard responded alertly, grateful indeed for the opportune digression, and walked briskly down to the target with the fair Arabella hanging on his arm, Jerrold at his side, and Mervyn still sullenly preoccupied, following slowly. But thepleasure of the day for Arabella was done and dead. Her father’s outcry of surprise and approbation and commotion of applause, she felt was fictitious and affected,—the kind of affectionate flattery which one offers a child for some infantile conceit. It was a matter of supreme inutility in his estimation whether she could shoot with a bow or not, and his mind was busied with more important details. Jerrold’s phrases of commendation as the group stood before the target and commented on the position of the arrow were of no value, for he knew naught of the difficulty of the achievement. Mervyn could really appreciate the exploit itself, but Raymond valued it adequately, more than all because it was hers, and he took pride and pleasure in her graceful proficiency. She had had a glow of satisfaction in a good thing in its way well done; she had been proud and pleased and well content with such honestly earned admiration, but now her satisfaction was all wilted; and when her father said, “There now, daughter, run away,—enough for this morning,—run into the house, dear,” she was quite ready to obey, and grateful for her dismissal and the breaking-up of the party. Mervyn, to her infinite relief, did not offer to follow her. His mind was all on the expedition to Choté, which Ensign Raymond was to command, and he walked off with Jerrold and the captain, thinking that even yet something might befall to induce the commandant to countermand his orders and make a change in the personnel of the force.
Arabella was sure she was not tired, for a littleexercise such as she had taken was hardly enough to tax her buoyant, youthful vigor, but she felt as she reached the stairs that she had scarcely strength to ascend the flight. She turned back to the room that served as parlor, rejoicing to find it vacant. She sank down in one of the great chairs before the fire, which was dull and slow this bland day; the wood was green, the sap had risen and was slowly oozing out at the ends of the logs and dripping down on the ash below. It had a dulcet sibilance in the heat; it was like some far-off singing, which she could hear but could not catch the melody. As she vaguely listened to this elfin minstrelsy she wondered if Raymond would go without a word of farewell,—she wondered if the expedition were of special danger. She pressed her hands against her eyes to darken her vivid imaginings. Oh, why should such risks be taken! She wondered if he would ever return,—and then she wondered if her heart had ceased to beat with the thought.
Never, never had she imagined she could be so unhappy,—and here, where she had so longed to come. She gazed about the room with its rude construction metamorphosed by its barbaric decorations of feathers, and strange weapons, and curious hangings of aboriginal weavings, and rugs, and draperies of fur, and thought how often she had pictured the place to her mind’s eye in England from her father’s letters, and how she had rejoiced when her aunt had declared that now that the war was over they would visit the commandant in his own fort. And what a tumultof anxiety, and fear, and doubt, and desolation had whelmed her here!—and would he go without a word?
It seemed just and fitting that the sky should be overcast as the day wore on,—that clouds should gather without as the light had failed within. The air continued mild; the fire dully drooled; and when she asked her father at the dinner-table if the expedition would set forth if it should rain, he laughed with great gayety and told her that frontier soldiers were very particular never to get their feet wet—a not altogether felicitous joke, and indeed he was no great wit, for Mrs. Annandale tartly demanded why if they were allowed to be so particular were they not furnished with pattens. This Captain Howard considered very funny indeed, seeing doubtless in his mental vision the garrison of Fort Prince George thus accoutred; he laughed until Arabella admonished him that he should not be so merry when perhaps he was sending a score of men to a dreadful death at the hands of savages, who were eager and thirsting for blood, in a wilderness so dense and sombre and drear that she thought that Milton, or Dante, or anybody who had sought to portray hell, might have found a new expression of desolation in such mysterious, impenetrable, trackless forests. Then truly he became grave.
“Raymond’s mission is not one of aggression,” he said. “I have thrown what safe-guards I could about him. I trust and I believe he will be safe if he conducts properly.”
“And what is his mission, sir?” asked Arabella.
“Do you expect me to tell you that when he does not know it himself?” said her father, laughing. “He is not to open his sealed instructions till he reaches Choté, Old Town.”
Arabella’s eyes were wide with dismayed wonder. To her this seemed all the more terrible. To thrust one’s head into the lion’s jaws, not knowing whether the beast is caged or free, ravenous or sated, trained or wild. She said as much to Ensign Raymond himself, when after candle-light he came in to pay his devoirs and take a formal farewell of the household. He was in great spirits, flushed and hilarious—very merry indeed when he found that Arabella was in much perturbation because he, himself, was in the dark as to the tenor of his mission, and would be one hundred and fifty miles distant in the heart of the Cherokee country ere he discovered the nature of his duty.
“Suppose it proves contrary to your own views and wishes,” Arabella argued.
“A soldier must have no views and wishes contrary to his duty,” he laughed.
“But suppose you find it is impossible!”
“I have too much confidence in the commandant to believe he would set me an impossible task.”
“Oh, don’t be too sure of that,” interpolated Mrs. Annandale, who was benign, almost affectionate in her manner toward him, now that she was about to be rid of this handsome marplot, who did as much damage to her darling scheme by the unholy influence his presence exerted on Mervyn’s temper as by hisown magnetic personality. “Poor dear Brother was always a visionary.”
Raymond burst out laughing at the idea of the commandant as a dreamer of dreams. “I have such faith in whatever visions he may entertain as to be certain they will materialize at Choté Great!”
“Will you be sure to come back?” Arabella asked, as they stood at the last moment near the table where the candles threw an upward glow on his red coat, his laughing eyes, his handsome, spirited face, and his powdered hair. He held his hat in his left hand and was extending his right hand toward her.
“Will you be sure to come back?”
“Oh, my dear, don’t be so solemn,—your tones might summon a man from the ends of the earth or a spirit from the confines of being!” cried Mrs. Annandale.
Once more Raymond’s joyous laughter rang through the room. “I shall come alive if I can conveniently, and all in one piece. If not I shall revisit the glimpses of the moon! I shall return—” and then in a more serious tone, seeing her seriousness, “I shall return, God willing.”
Mervyn himself entertained considerable doubt of this happy issue of the expedition. He thought Raymond far too young, too flighty, too inexperienced to be trusted at such a distance, unhampered by authority, subject to strange untried conditions which could not be foreseen and provided against. It was necessary that all the details should be confided to his own unaided judgment, and it would not havegreatly astonished the captain-lieutenant if none of the party should ever be seen again alive. In the dense jungles of the mountain wilderness, in the power of an implacable, aggrieved, and savage people, the fate of this handful of soldiers might ever remain a mystery and unavenged. The thought softened his heart toward his quondam friend. Mervyn was of the temperament rarely consciously at fault; so little did he admit dereliction in his relations with the outside world that he was often self-deceived. But in this instance his conscience stirred. He realized that for his offended vanity, for an unspoken fleer in a man’s eyes which his own coxcombry had provoked, he had in revenge caught at an immaterial matter in the guard report and contrived to wreak his displeasure on Raymond in a sort most calculated to wound him, subjecting him to a reprimand, unwilling though it was, from the commandant. After that event ensued an alienation as complete as their friendship had formerly been close. At the time he winced to discover that Raymond had the magnanimity to refrain from retorting in kind, and had not held him up to ridicule in the commandant’s eyes by gossiping on the expedition to Tamotlee of his unlucky absence from the scene of the conflagration. To be sure, Raymond knew that fact would be elicited in the regular channels of the reports, but he had not gone out of his way to further his false friend’s mortification. Mervyn wished now that he had been less morose, less intractable. He had, he thought, no reason to be jealous of Raymond’s station in Arabella’sesteem. He was a dashing, attractive, handsome man, well calculated to entertain and amuse a young lady who was not used to spend her time in so dull a place as a frontier fort. Mervyn had no serious fault to find with the encouragement which she had vouchsafed his own suit. Therefore why should he let the breach yawn and widen between himself and his former friend. He did not linger in the commandant’s parlor after Raymond had made his adieus, but followed him to his quarters, where he found the ensign with his servant busily packing his effects for the march.
“Just as I expected,” said Mervyn, ignoring Raymond’s stare of surprise, and perching himself on one end of the table as of old in the scarcity of chairs; he carelessly eyed the confused medley of articles spread over the bed, the chairs, the floor. “Making ready for the march, are you? I came to see if you wouldn’t like to borrow my otter fur great coat and my heavy lynx rug for the trip. There is a change in the temperature impending,—freezing weather,—and you might need them.”
Raymond hesitated. He would not wish to churlishly refuse an overture for renewed friendship or, as he rightly interpreted this, a covert apology. But he had that fibre of sensitiveness which winced from a favor bestowed—not from one he loved; a month ago he would have welcomed the offer, but more because of the feeling indicated than the utility of the proffered gear, although doubtless the furs would have stood him in good stead. Now, however,his estimate of Mervyn had changed and his heart had waxed cold toward him. He said to himself that he would be willing to risk the chance of freezing, if his own provision were insufficient, rather than be beholden to Mervyn for aught under the circumstances.
“I am already taking as much weight as I can afford to carry,” he replied. “And besides your furs are too costly and delicate to drag through such a march as this,—thank you, just as much.”
After some words of fruitless insistence Mervyn’s talk digressed to details of ways and means. He was graciously disposed to supplement the younger officer’s presumably inferior knowledge by his more mature advice, a senior in rank, years, and experience. Unrestrained by any subtle considerations of feeling on such a theme, Raymond did not scruple to flout this unsolicited counsel with a frank abandon which bespoke a self-confidence expanded to a prideful jubilance by the importance of the mission with which he had been intrusted. But this cavalier reception of the suggestions tendered him did not impair Mervyn’s urbanity nor hinder the ostensible renewal of pleasant relations, or rather the ignoring of the fact that such relations had ever been interrupted. He offered his hand at parting with many good wishes, and Raymond, whose quickened intuition had come to comprehend his mental processes, was glad to see the door close upon his well-bred dissimulation.
“He does not want to feel at all uncomfortable in his conscience if I should be unlucky enough to be scalped, or frozen, or devoured by wolves, or lostin the wilderness,” he thought, with a bitter insight.
And was this a seemly lover for Arabella Howard? He wondered how she could tolerate the dissembler who was not even frank with himself. He wondered how her father, an epitome of stout-hearted candor, her aunt, the cleverest of keen-sighted women, would permit this sacrifice of her. But there were inducements,—rank, fortune, station,—all powerful to embellish ugly traits, to obliterate unworthy actions, to place the most creditable construction on selfish sentiments. Raymond, however, had not time to rail at Fate according to her perverse deserts, for the hour was late, and his departure imminent.
He was gone on the morrow by the time the garrison was fairly astir, marching out of the gates as the bugle sounded the reveille. The day broke clouded and drear; the wind veered to the north; the temperature fell, and then ensued a long interval of suspense, of gray monotony. The air became still; it was perceptibly warmer; the dense clouds hung low and motionless; it was impossible to prognosticate the character of the change when it should terminate the indefinite uncertainty. Occasionally as the cheerless afternoon wore on, a vague brightening over the landscape gave a delusive promise of fairer skies, and then the sullen day lowered anew. The morrow brought no flattering augury. Now and then Captain Howard, looking at the heavy clouds, portending falling weather, meditated anxiously on the difficulties of the expedition. The temperaturewas unusually uncertain considering the season. He did not, however, expect a recurrence of cold weather, with spring already astir in the warm earth. But with the fickleness of the southern climate, on the third day after the departure of the little force, a freeze set in at dawn, and as the temperature moderated toward noon the threatened falling weather made good its menace in whirls of snow-flakes.
Captain Howard felt that he could not have been expected to foresee these climatic changes, and least of all he anticipated snow, which, most of all, he dreaded. The mission had already been unduly postponed, and time pressed sorely. The emergency was urgent and this he did not doubt, but with the complication of wintry storms in the wilderness he began to seriously question the wisdom of his selection of the officer to conduct the enterprise to a satisfactory conclusion. He wondered if Raymond would have the prudence to turn about should the route prove impracticable through the snowy tangled forests and across a score of precipitous high mountains and retrace his way to Fort Prince George.
He felt sure that at the first flurry betokening now in the trackless mountain defiles either Mervyn or Jerrold would have ordered an “About-face” movement. His heart misgave him as he reflected on Raymond’s pertinacity. He knew in his secret soul that if ever he saw the ensign again it would be after he had accomplished his mission to Choté Great.
“Will he really freeze himself and his twenty menfirst?” he asked petulantly,—“or lose his way in the storm?”
Mervyn, albeit somewhat anxious himself after the flakes had begun to whirl, could but experience a little relish of the discomforts of his superior, who had apparently passed him over without reason, and had conferred a duty of difficulty and danger on a very young officer, probably incapable of executing it with requisite discretion. He had no inclination to stay and condole with the commandant before the fire in the orderly room. Here Captain Howard sat and toasted his spurs half the morning, having a mind himself to ride out on the trail of the expedition, if its route could be ascertained. There was the usual routine,—the reports of the orderly room, guard-mounting, drill,—all the various tours of duty to be observed as rigorously as if the fort held ten thousand men, instead of its complement of a scant hundred. Mervyn went about these details with a military promptness and efficiency and apparent content which commended him much to the morose commandant, who wished a hundred times that day that he had Raymond here and that Mervyn were in Raymond’s place, thirty miles away,—nay, fifty by this time.
“He will have those men off their feet,” muttered Captain Howard. “He’ll race them through these drifts as if they were sunshine.”
He looked out drearily at the snow now lying trodden and criss-crossed in devious paths on the parade. It was untouched, unsullied on the ramparts,where it had lodged in the clefts between the sharp points of the stockade. It hung in massive drifts on the roofs of the barracks, the guard-house near the gate, the block-houses; icicles wrought by an arrested thaw depended from the tower, in which the sentinel was fain to walk briskly to and fro, beating his breast the while, although the relief came at close intervals. The flakes were altogether hiding the contiguous woods, and it seemed that noon had hardly passed before there were suggestions of dusk in the darkening atmosphere, and nightfall was early at hand.
“Wonder where he will bivouac, to-night?” the commandant suggested to the group of officers in the mess-hall before the great fireplace that half filled one side of the room, for they were all somewhat familiar with the topography of the region through which Raymond would have to pass and the names of the Cherokee towns.
It was a cheerful scene indeed. The aroma of a skilfully compounded punch pervaded it, and the great silver gilt bowl was genially disposed on the nearest end of the long table, within easy access of the group about the hearth. The fire roared joyously up the great cavernous chimney and was brilliantly reflected from the glimmering steel of the arms suspended on the walls,—trophies, curios, or merely decorations. The wide-spread wings of the white swan and the scarlet flamingo arranged above the wainscot in gorgeous alternations hardly now suggested a mere fiction of flight; they seemed to move, to flutterand flicker as the firelight fluctuated and the shadows danced. On a smaller table there was the steady, chaste white focus of candle-light, for the tapers were illumined in two tall candle-sticks, the cards were cut for Loo, and the expectant faces of the officers showed in the calm white gleam, with all the details of their red coats, their white belts, their powdered hair. Only one of the officers was smoking, an on-looker at the game, the quarter-master, but Captain Howard’s snuff-box was repeatedly in his hands.
They all noted his signs of anxiety and agitation, but there was not an immediate response to his remark, for there could be no freedom of speculation with a superior officer upon the untoward probabilities of an enterprise which he had chosen to set on foot. The silence was the less embarrassing because of the absorptions of the matter immediately in hand, for the pool was being formed during the deal. But when the trump was turned, and the players had “declared,” there was a momentary pause of expectation, each relying on some tactful comment of the other. Innis, the blond young ensign, looked demurely into the fire and said nothing. Lieutenant Jerrold, having already glanced through his hand and seeing “Pam” among the cards, thought it hard lines that the commandant should not betake himself to his own quarters and cease to interfere with the game. By way of promoting this consummation he suggested fatuously:—
“Raymond will pick a spot near good water.”
“Water!” screamed Captain Howard. “Gad, sir.Picka spot! Water! In this weather he has nothing to do but to hold his fool mouth open.Water!”
The lieutenant’s unhappy precipitancy suggested the ambush of the highest card, and his eagerness to utilize it, to the mind of another player, Ensign Lawrence, who held the lead. He held also the ace of trumps.
At his sudden cry, “Be civil,—Pam, be civil,” Captain Howard started from his preoccupation as if he had been shot, glancing from under his bushy eye-brows at the table on which the young officer was banging down the ace with great triumph.
The cabalistic phrase was of course only designed to secure the immunity of the ace from capture by “Pam,” but somehow its singular aptness of rebuke and Captain Howard’s attitude of sensitive expectation shook the poise of the board. Ensign Lawrence turned very red, and only clumsily made shift to gather in the trick he had taken, for “Pam,” of course, could not be played, his civility having been bespoken, according to the rules of the game, and the holder following suit. The other officers made an effort to conceal their embarrassment. Bolt, the fort-adjutant, cleared his throat uneasily. The onlooking quarter-master with the pipe began a sentence, paused, forgetting its purport midway, and silence continued till Ensign Innis came hastily to the rescue with a suggestion which he thought a masterly diversion.
“I suppose it was an important matter which took Raymond to Choté in such weather, sir?”
Captain Howard withered him with a glance.
“You have been long enough in the service, sir, to know better than to ask questions,” he replied sternly.
Then he rose and betook himself forth into the densely whirling snow, repenting of his irascibility, calling himself a condemned spoil-sport, and looking at the sky, which was all of a bleak blackness, as well as the buffeting flakes would permit. He noted the blur of orange light flaring out from barrack-windows and guard-house door, and guided his route to his own quarters by the situation of these oases in the surrounding desert of gloom.
His opening door gave him to view a great gush of firelight and gleam of candles; the room was perfumed with the sweet odors of the burning hickory and pine and cedar in the wide chimney and embellished by the presence of Arabella, whose grace made every place seem a parlor. Her golden-hued shawl hung in silken folds from the back of an arm-chair of the primitive frontier manufacture, and on the table lay her embroidery-frame, whereon roses seemed to bud at her magic touch and expand under the sunshine of her smiling hazel eyes. Her gown of canary sarcenet had a black velvet girdle and many black velvet rosettes for trimming, her golden hair gleamed in the rich glow of the fire, and in her hand was her lute, graced by long streamers of crimson ribbon.
Beside her was the captain-lieutenant, all bedight in the smartest of uniforms, his hair in a long queue of blond plaits, and with precise side-curls heavily powdered, a genteel fashion not always observed on the frontier.
She had been singing to him one of the songs that had become fashionable at Vauxhall during his long absence from London, and the air was still vibrant with the melody of voice and symphony.
And poor Raymond!—Captain Howard’s inconsistent heart rebelled at the sight of their comfort and mirth and security,—out in the snow, and the black night, and the illimitable trackless wilderness on the march to Choté.
With the thought his anxiety and distrust of the subaltern’s discretion were reasserted.
“He will reach Choté if he has a man left! I only hope he won’t harry the town!” he exclaimed in the extravagance of his disaffection.