The Master of Warlock Part 8

Agatha spoke glibly, but it was under manifest constraint. She forced and feigned a lightness of mood which she did not feel, and her manner deceived Baillie Pegram completely, as it was meant to do.

"What a fool I am," he thought, "to expect anything else. She was embarra.s.sed when I last saw her, and worried, but that was all on account of her aunts. She is her own mistress to-day, and--well, it is better so. There'll be a fight to-morrow, and that's fortunate."

At that point the girl interrupted his meditations by saying, in her a.s.sumed tone of lightness, which he so greatly misinterpreted:

"I know there is war between your house and mine, but I'm going to give aid and comfort to the enemy, if it comforts you to have your chevrons properly sewed on."

"There can surely be no war between me and thee," he answered, with earnestness in his tone. "At any rate, I do not make war upon a woman, and least of all--"

"You must not misunderstand, Mr. Pegram," the girl broke in, looking at him earnestly out of her great brown eyes. "I esteem you highly, and I am sorry there is trouble between your house and mine. But I am not disloyal to the memory of my father. You must never think that. It is only that you are a gentleman who has been kind to me, and a soldier whom I honour. But the war endures between your house and mine."

Had she slapped him in the face with her open palm, she could not have hurt his pride more deeply. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his jacket from her hand. Only one sleeve was finished, and the needle still hung from it by a thread.

"I'll wear it so," he said. "I, at any rate, have no house. I am the last of my race, and let me say to you now--for I shall never see you again of my own free will--that the war between our houses will completely end when I receive my discharge from life."

Then a new thought struck him.

"It is not for Baillie Pegram, the master of Warlock, that you have done this," touching the braided sleeve, "but for Baillie Pegram, the soldier on his way to battle. Let it be so."

Stung by his own words, and controlled by an impulse akin to that which had seized him at the gun two days before, he reached out and plucked from her headgear the red feather that she wore there, saying:

"Here! fasten that in my hat. I've a mind to wear it in battle to-morrow. Then I'll send it back to you."

What demon of the perverse had prompted him to this action, he did not know, but the girl in her turn seemed subject to its will. Instead of resenting what he had done, she took the feather and with some quickly plied st.i.tches fastened it securely to his already soiled and worn slouch hat. Then handing it back to him, she said:

"Good-bye. G.o.d grant that when the feather comes back to me, it be not stained to a deeper red than now."

At that moment the bugle blew. Baillie touched his hat, bowed low, and said:

"At least you are a courteous enemy."

"And a generous one?" she asked.

But he did not answer the implied question.

When he had gone, Agatha bent low over her work-basket, as if in search of something that she could not find. If two little tear-drops slipped from between her eyelids, n.o.body caught sight of them.

Presently another bugle blew, and as Baillie Pegram's battery took up the march, the guns and men of Captain Skinner took its place. But this time there was no mingling of the men with the spectators. Captain Skinner was too rigid a disciplinarian to permit that, and he knew his ruffians too well. The moment the battery halted, the sergeant of the guard posted his sentries, and the men remained within the battery lines.

Seeing this, Agatha tripped from her carriage, and, work-basket in hand, started to enter the battery. She was instantly halted by a sentry, whose appearance did not tempt her to dispute his authority. She therefore simply said to him, "Call your sergeant of the guard, please."

To the sergeant, when he came, she said, "Will you please report to Captain Skinner that Miss Agatha Ronald, of Willoughby, asks leave to enter the battery lines, in order to do such mending for the men as may be needed?"

But it was not necessary for the sergeant to deliver his message, for Captain Skinner, way-worn and dusty, at that moment presented himself, and greeted the visitor.

"It is very gracious of you," he said, "but, my dear young lady, my men do not belong to that cla.s.s with which alone you are acquainted. You had better not visit my camp."

"Your men are soldiers, sir," she said, "and their needs may be quite as great as those of any others. We are not living in drawing-rooms just now. I crave your permission to enter the battery."

The captain touched his hat again, signed to the sentry to let the young woman pa.s.s, and then, turning to the sergeant of the guard, said:

"Post ten extra sentinels among the guns, with orders to arrest instantly any man who utters an oath or in any other way offends this young lady's ears. See to it yourself that this order is obeyed to the letter."

IX

_THE BIRTH OF WOMANHOOD_

The captain's stern commands were not needed, and the extra sentinels had no work to do in restraining the men from offensive speech and conduct. They courteously saluted as Agatha pa.s.sed them by, and when they learned what her kindly mission was, they hurriedly brought armfuls of saddle-blankets and arranged them as a cus.h.i.+on for her on the top of a limber-chest. Perched up there, she called for their torn garments, and nimbly plied her needle and her scissors for the s.p.a.ce of half an hour before observing the sentry who had been posted nearest to her. His slouch hat, indeed, was drawn down over his eyes in such fas.h.i.+on that but little of his face could be seen. But looking up at last in search of further work to do, she recognised the form of Marshall Pollard.

Instantly a deep flush overspread her face, and, dismounting from the limber-chest, she approached and addressed him. He presented arms and said to her in French, so that those about them might not understand:

"Pardon me, mademoiselle, but it is forbidden to speak to a sentinel on duty." With that he recovered arms and resumed the monotonous pacing of his beat.

As the girl hurried out of the battery, flushed and agitated, she again encountered Captain Skinner.

"Has anybody been rude to you, Miss Ronald?" he asked, quickly.

"No, Captain Skinner, I have only praise for your men. They have been courteous in the extreme. I predict that they will acquit themselves right gallantly in to-morrow's battle."

"O, they're fighters, and will give a good account of themselves if this muddled railroad management lets us get to Mana.s.sas before the fighting is over."

With thanks to Agatha for her kindness, Captain Skinner bowed low in farewell.

Springing into her carriage she gave the command, "Home," and drove away without waiting to see the remainder of the Army of the Shenandoah as it moved, partly by train, and partly on march, toward the scene of the coming battle.

During the homeward ride the girl laughed and chatted with her companions with more than her usual vivacity, quite as if this had been the gladdest of all her gala-days. But the gaiety was forced, and the laughter had a nervous note in it which would have betrayed its impulse to her companions had they been of closely observant habit of mind.

But when she reached home Agatha excused herself to her friends, and shut herself in her room. Throwing off her hat, but making no other change in her costume, she stretched herself upon the polished floor, after a habit she had indulged since childhood whenever her spirit was perturbed. For an hour she lay there upon the hard ash boards, with her hands clasped under her head, thinking, thinking, thinking.

"G.o.d knows," she thought, "I have tried to do my duty, and it is bitterly hard for a woman. In loyalty to my dead father's memory, I have insulted and wounded the only man I could ever have loved, and sent him away from me in anger and wretchedness. And even in doing that--even in being cruel to him and to myself, I have fallen short of my duty as Agatha Ronald. I have weakly yielded something at least of that proud att.i.tude which it is my duty to my family traditions to maintain. I have recognised the state of war, but I have parleyed with the enemy. And Baillie Pegram is at this hour wearing a plume plucked from my hat and fastened into his by my own hands. G.o.d forgive me if I have been disloyal! But is it disloyalty?"

With that question echoing in her mind she sat up, staring at the wall, as if trying there to read her answer.

"Is it my duty to cherish a feud that is meaningless to me--to hate a man who has done no wrong to me or mine, simply because there was a quarrel between our ancestors before either of us was born? I do not know! I do not know! But I must be true to my family, true to my race, true to the traditions in which I have been bred. I have fallen short of that in this case. I must not err again. I must never again forget, even for a moment, that Baillie Pegram is my hereditary enemy."

Then she caught herself thinking and almost wis.h.i.+ng that a Federal bullet might end her perplexity--that Baillie Pegram might never live to see her again. "I wonder," she thought, "if that is what Christ meant when he said that one who hates his neighbour is a murderer in his heart. It is all a blind riddle to me. Here have I been brought up a Christian, taught from my infancy that hatred is murder, and taught at the same time that it is my highest duty, as a Ronald, to go on hating all the Pegrams on earth because my father and Baillie Pegram's grandfather quarrelled over something that I know absolutely nothing about!"

Presently the girl's mind reverted to the second meeting of that eventful day,--her encounter with Marshall Pollard. She wondered why he had enlisted in company with such men as those who const.i.tuted Captain Skinner's battery, for even thus early those men had become known as the worst gang of desperadoes imaginable,--a band that must be kept day and night under a discipline as rigid and as watchful as that of any State prison, lest they lapse into crimes of violence. She wondered if this meant that the peculiarly gentle-souled Marshall Pollard was trying to "throw himself away," as she had heard that men disappointed in love sometimes do,--that he wished to degrade himself by low a.s.sociations.

"And I am the cause of it all," she mourned. For she knew that Marshall Pollard had loved her with the love of an honest man, and that his life had been darkened, to say the least, by her inability to respond to his devotion. In this case she should have had the consolation of knowing that she had been guilty of no wilful, no conscious wrong, but, in her present mood, she was disposed to flagellate her soul for an imagined offence.

"He came to me," she reflected, "loving me from the first. Little idiot that I was, I did not understand. I liked him as a girl may like a boy,--for I was only a girl then,--and I did not dream that the affection he manifested toward me meant more than that sort of thing on his part. Those things which ought to have revealed to me his state of mind meant nothing more to me then than do the little gallantries and deferences which all men pay to all women. How bitterly he reproached me at the last for having deceived him and led him on with encouragements which I at least had not intended as such. Are all women born coquettes? Is it our cruel instinct to trifle with the souls of men, as little children love to torture their pets? Have we women no principles, no earnestness, no consciences--except afterward, when remorse awakens us? Are we blind, that we do not see, and deaf that we do not hear? Or is it our nature to be cruel, especially to those who love us and offer us the best that there is in their strong natures?

"I remember how we stood out there in the grounds, under the jessamine arbour, as the sun went down; and how at last, when I had made him understand, he plucked a sprig of the beautiful, golden flowers from the bunch that I held in my hand, and how I bade him beware, for that the jessamine is poisonous, and how he replied, 'Not more poisonous than it is to love a coquette.'