The Cavalier Part 28

"Good-morning," I interrupted, quite in the General's manner, and made a spirited exit, but it proved a false one; one thing had to be said, and I returned. "Gholson, if she should be worse hurt than--" "Ah! you're thinking of the chaplain; I've already sent him. Yonder he goes, now; you can show him the way."

"Understand," I said as I wheeled, "I fully expect her to recover."

"Yes, oh, yes!" replied my co-religionist, with feverish zest; "we must have faith--for her sake! But o--oh! Smith, what a chastening judgment this is against dancing!"

I moved away, looking back at him, and seeing by his starved look how he was racking his jaded brain for some excuse to go with me, I honestly believe I was sorry for him. The chaplain was a thick-set, clean-shaven, politic little fellow whose "Good-mawning, brothah?" had the heavy sweetness of perfumed lard. We conversed fluently on spiritual matters and also on Ned Ferry. He asked me if the Lieutenant was "a believer."

"Why," said I, "as to that, Lieutenant Ferry believes there's something right about everything that's beautiful, and something wrong about everything that isn't. Now, of course that's a very dangerous idea, and yet--" So I went on; ah me! the nightmare of it hangs over me yet, "religionist" though I am, after a fas.h.i.+on, unto this day. In Ferry's defence I maintained that only so much of any man's religion as fitted him, and fitted him not as his saddle or his clothes, but as his nervous system fitted him, was really his, or was really religion. I said I knew a man whose ready-made religion, small as it was, bagged all over him and made him as grotesque as a child in his father's trousers. The chaplain t.i.ttered so approvingly that I straightened to spout again, but just then we saw three distant figures that I knew at a glance.

"There he is, now!--Excuse me, sir--" I clapped in the spurs, but the chaplain clattered stoutly after me. The two hors.e.m.e.n moving from us were the General and Major Harper, and the one meeting them was Ned Ferry. Between the three and us rose out of a hollow the squad of couriers. And yonder came the sun.

XLIX

A CRUEL BOOK AND A FOOL OR TWO

I could see by Ferry's face that there was no worse news. He met me aside, and privately bade me go to Roy's (where Charlotte was). "Kendall is there," he said; "I leave you and him in charge. That will rest your horses. Kendall has your Yankee horse, his own is sick. You and Kendall get all the sleep you can, you may get none to-night."

"Lieutenant," I began eagerly as he was drawing away, "is--?"

"Yes! oh, yes, yes!" His eyes danced, and a soft laugh came, as happy as a child's. "The surgeon is yonder, he will tell you."

This person Kendall and I had the luck to meet at the Roy's breakfast-table. "Yes, left lung," he said. "No, hardly 'perforated,' but the top deeply grazed." The ball, he said, had pa.s.sed on and out, and he went into particulars with me, while I wondered if Kendall knew, as I did, what parts of the body the pleura, the thorax, the clavicle and the pyemia were.

We lay down to sleep on some fodder in the Widow Roy's stable, while around three sides of the place, in a deep wooded hollow, Quinn and the company, well guarded by hidden videttes, drowsed in secret bivouac. I dreamed. I had feared I should, and it would have been a sort of bitter heart's-ease to tell Kendall of my own particular haunting trouble. For now, peril and darkness, storm, hard riding, the uproar and rage of man-killing, all past and gone, my special private wretchedness came back to me bigger than ever, like a neglected wound stiffened and swollen as it has grown cold. But Kendall would not talk, and when I dreamed, my dream was not of Camille. It seemed to me there was a hot fight on at the front, and that I, in a sweat of terror, was at the rear, hiding among the wagons and telling Gholson pale-faced lies as to why I was there. All at once Gholson became Oliver, alive, b.l.o.o.d.y-handed, glaring on me spectrally, cursing, threatening, and demanding his wife. His head seemed not "laid wide open," but to have only a streak of the skull bared by Ferry's glancing left-cut and a strip of the scalp turned inside out. Cecile drew his head down and showed it to me, in a transport of reproaches, as though my false report had wronged no one else so ruinously as her.

I awoke aghast. If Kendall had still been with me I might, in the first flush of my distress, have told my vision; but in the place where Kendall had lain lay Harry Helm. Kendall was gone; a long beam of afternoon sunlight shone across my lair through a c.h.i.n.k in the log stable. I sprang half up with an exclamation, and Harry awoke with a luxurious yawn and smile. Kendall, he said, had left with the company, which had marched. Quinn was in command and had told Harry that he was only going to show the enemy that there was no other hostile force in their front, and get himself chased away southeastward.

"I don't know whether he was telling me the truth or not," said Helm, as we led our saddled horses toward the house; "I reckon he didn't want me alongside of him with this arm in a sling." The hand was bad; lines of pain were on the aide's face. He had taken the dead Louisianian home, got back to camp, and ridden down here to get the latest news concerning Charlotte. Kendall had already given him our story of the night; I had to answer only one inquiry. "Oh, yes," was my reply, "head laid wide open!" But to think of my next meeting with Ned Ferry almost made me sick.

Harry was delighted. "That lays their way wide open--Ned's and hers! Smith, some G.o.d-forsaken fool brought a chaplain here to talk religion to her! He hasn't seen her--Doctor wouldn't let him; but he's here yet, and--George! if I was them I'd put him to a better use than what he came here for, and I'd do it so quick it would make his head swim!" He went on into all the arguments for it; the awkwardnesses of Charlotte's new situation, her lack of means for even a hand-to-mouth daily existence, and so on. Seeing an ambulance coming in through the front gate, and in order not to lose the chance for my rejoinder, I interrupted. "Lieutenant, she will not allow it! She will make him wait a proper time before he may as much as begin a courts.h.i.+p, and then he will have to begin at the beginning. She's not going to let Ned Ferry narrow or lower her life or his--no, neither of them is going to let the other do it--because a piece of luck has laid the way wide open!" I ended with a pomp of prophecy, yet I could hear Ned Ferry saying again, with Charlotte's a.s.senting eyes in his, "There is no turning back."

The driver of the ambulance did not know why he had been ordered to report here, but when the Widow Roy came to the door she brought explanation enough. A courier had come to her and gone again, and the chaplain and the surgeon and every one else of any "army sort" except us two had "put out," and she was in a sad flurry. "The Lieutenant," she said, "writes in this-yeh note that this-yeh place won't be safe f'om the Yankees much longer'n to-day, and fo' us to send the wounded lady in the avalanch. Which she says, her own self, it'd go rough with her to fall into they hands again. My married daughter she's a-goin' with her, and the'd ought to be a Mr. Sm'--oh, my Lawdy! you ain't reg-lahly in the ahmy, air you?"

With some slave men to help us, Harry and I bore Charlotte out and laid her in the ambulance, mattress and all, on an under bedding of fodder. She had begged off from opiates, and was as full of the old starlight as if the day, still strong, were gone. I helped the married daughter up beside the driver, Harry and I mounted, and we set forth for the brigade camp. Mrs. Roy's daughter had with her a new romance, which she had been reading to Charlotte. Now she was eager to resume it, and Charlotte consented. It was a work of some merit; I have the volume yet, inscribed to me on the fly-leaf "from C.O.," as I have once already stated, in my account of my friend "The Solitary." At the end of a mile we made a change; Harry rode a few yards ahead with an officer who happened to overtake us, I took the reins from the ambulance driver, and he followed on my horse; I thought I could drive more smoothly than he.

And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.

"Shut it," said Charlotte, with a sigh like that which had risen when the lead first struck her. "If I could be moved ever so little,--" she said.

I had the driver tie my horse behind the vehicle and resume the lines. Then the soldier's wife and I moved Charlotte, and when the reader began to handle the book again wishfully our patient said, with the kindest voice, "Read the rest of it to yourself; I know how it will end; it will end to please you, not as it ought; not as it ought."

For a while we went in silence, and she must have seen that my heart was in a rage, for with suffering on her brow, amus.e.m.e.nt on her lips, and a sweet desperation in her eyes, she murmured my name. "Richard:--what fun it must have been to live in those old Dark Ages--when all you had to do--was to turn any one pa.s.sion into--one splendid virtue--at the expense--of all the rest."

I could answer pleadingly that it were far better not to talk now. But she would go on, until in my helplessness I remarked how beautiful the day had been. Her eyes changed; she looked into mine with her calm inward-outward ken, and once more with smiling lips and suffering brow murmured, "Yes." I marvelled she should betray such wealth of meaning to such as I; yet it was like her splendid bravery to do it.

At the brigade's picket, where I was angry that Ferry did not meet us, and had resumed the saddle and stretched all the curtains of the ambulance, who should appear but Scott Gholson. Harry and I were riding abreast in advance of the ambulance. Gholson and he barely said good-evening. I asked him where was Lieutenant Ferry, and scarcely noted his words, so promptly convinced was I by their mere tone that he had somehow contrived to get Ferry sent on a distant errand. "Is she better?" he inquired; "has the hemorrhage stopped?"

"It's begun again," growled Harry, who wanted both of us to suffer all we could. Gholson led us through the camp. A large proportion of the men were sleeping when as yet it was hardly night.

"Has the brigade got marching orders?" I asked, and he said the three regiments had, though not the battery. He pa.s.sed over to me two pint bottles filled, corked, and dangling from his fingers by a stout double twine on the neck of each. "Every man has them," he said; "hang one on each side of your belt in front of your pistol."

I held them up and scowled from them to Harry, and we both laughed, so transparent was Gholson's purpose to get every one away from our patient who yearned to be near her. "One in front of each pistol," I said, so tying them; "but use the pistols first, I suppose."

"Yes," replied Gholson, "pistols first, and then the turpentine." Whereat Harry and I exchanged glances again, it came so pat that Scott Gholson should be a dispenser of inflammables. At a house a mile behind the camp the surgeon stood waiting for us. He frowned at me the instant he saw Charlotte, and I heard him swear. As we bore her in with Gholson and me next her head she murmured to him:

"Mr. Gholson, when does the command move?"

"At twelve," he replied, and I bent and softly added "That's why--"

"Yes," she said, with a quick, understanding look, and wiped her lips as daintily as if it were with wine they were crimsoned.

L

THE BOTTOM OF THE WHIRLWIND

On my way back through camp with Gholson I saw old Dismukes. He called me to him, quit his cards, and led me into his tent. There, very beguilingly, he questioned me at much length, evidently seeking to draw from the web of my replies the thread of Ferry's and Charlotte's story; and as I saw that he believed in both of them with all his brutal might, I let him win a certain success. "Head laid wide open!" he said gleefully, and boiled over with happy blasphemings.

I left him, found supper, and had been long asleep tinder a tree, when I grabbed savagely at some one for silently shaking me, and found it was Ned Ferry. His horse's bridle was in his hand; his face was more filled with the old pain than I had ever seen it; he spoke low and hurriedly. "Come, tell me what this means."

In an envelope addressed to him in the handwriting I had first seen at Lucius Oliver's I found a scripture-text, a heading torn from a tract which the chaplain may have sent in to Charlotte in the morning. I turned it to the light of my fire. Under this printed line she had pencilled her name.

I asked if he had seen her. "Ah, no! the Doctor has drugged her to sleep; but that woman who came with you was still in the parlor, reading a book, and she gave me this. What does it mean?"

"Lieutenant," I replied, choking with dismay, "why mind her meanings now? Ought you not rather to ignore them? She is fevered, dejected, overwrought. Why, sir, she is the very woman to say and mean things now which she would never say or mean at any other time!" But my tone must have shown that I was only groping in desperation after anything plausible, and he waved my suggestions away.

"The Doctor says that woman has been reading her an exciting story."

"Yes, and that helps to account--"

"Richard, it helps the wrong way; I know that story. After hearing that story she is, yes! the one woman of all women to send me this."

I took it again. The signature was extended in full, with the surname blackly underlined. The first clause of the print, too, was so treated. "Keep thy heart," it read; "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.--Charlotte Oliver."

"Why, Lieutenant, that is just what you have done--"

"You think so? But I have done. I will keep it no longer! Ah, I never kept it; 'twas she! Without taking it from me she kept it--'with all diligence'; otherwise I should have lost it--and her, too--and all that is finest and hardest to keep--long ago. Give me that paper; come; saddle up; you may go with me if you want, as my courier." No bugle had sounded, yet the whole camp was softly and diligently astir. We rode toward the staff tents; the pulse of enterprise enlivened him once more, though he clung to the same theme. "I have her heart now, Smith, and I will keep that with all diligence, for out of that are the issues of my life--if I live. And if I do live I will have her if I have to steal her even from herself, as last night from the Yankees."

Three hours later the stars still gleamed down through the balmy night above the long westward-galloping column of our brigade, that for those three hours had not slackened from the one unmitigated speed. The Federal regiment of whose plans Charlotte had apprised Ferry had been camped well to southward of this course, but in the day just past they had marched to the north, intending a raid around our right and into our rear. To-night they were resting in a wide natural meadow through the middle of which ran this road we were on. Around the southern edge of this inviting camp-ground by a considerable stream of water; the northern side was on rising ground and skirted by woods, and in these woods as day began to break stood our brigade, its presence utterly unsuspected in all that beautiful meadow whitened over with lane upon lane of the tents of the regiment of Federal cavalry, whose pickets we had already silently surprised and captured. Now, as warily as quails, we moved along an unused, woodcutters' road and began to trot up a gentle slope beyond whose crest the forest sank to the meadow. We were within a few yards of this crest, when a small mounted patrol came up from the other side, stood an instant profiled against the sky, bent low, gazed, wheeled and vanished.

Over the crest we swept after them at a gallop and saw them half-way down an even incline, going at a mad run and yelling "Saddle up! saddle up! the rebels are coming! saddle up!" The bugles had begun the reveille; it ceased, and the next instant they were sounding the call To Arms. It was only a call to death; already we were half across the short decline and coming like a tornado; in the white camp the bluecoats were running hither and yon deaf to the brave shoutings of their captains; above the swelling thunder of our hoofs rose the mad yell of the onset; and now carbines peal and pistols crack, and here are the tents so close you may touch them, and yonder is one already in a light blaze, and at every hand and under every horse's foot is the crouching, quailing, falling foe, the air is one crash of huzzas and groans, screams, shots and commands, horses with riders and horses without plunge through the flames and smoke of the burning tents, and again and again I see Ned Ferry with the flat of his unstained sword strike pistol or carbine from hands too brave to cast them tamely down, and hear him cry "Throw down your arms! For G.o.d's sake throw down your arms and run to the road! run to the public road!"