Part 19

I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon--Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.

At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched little chorus-singer of the Cafe Alcazar, who took their fancies both at once. The _mondes_ thought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know, but the audacity of a cavalry man's having potted a Very Serene High Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet, would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to plenty of "floating little bills," could not bid high enough to purchase his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of virtue, "Oblivion cannot be hired,--unless," adds Society, dropping to mellowest murmur her whisper, "unless you can give us a premium!" So Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from the Horse Guards--sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally, irretrievably, struck out.

Certainly the fellow was a bad fellow, and deserved his crash so far; he had no scruples, and no conscience; he spared neither woman nor man; of remorse he had never felt a twinge, and if you were in his path he would pick you off some way or other as indifferently as if you were one of the pigeons at Hornsey. And yet, he had been kind to me, though I was a young one; with his own variable Free Lance sort of liberality, the man would give his last sou to get you out of any difficulty, and would carry off your mistress, or beggar you at chicken-hazard, with the self-same pleasant air the next day: and I could not help being sorry that things had come to this pass with him. He shot so superbly! Put him where you would, in a warm corner while the bouquets of pheasants were told off; in a punt, while a square half-mile of wild-ducks whirred up from the marshes; in a dark forest alley in Transylvania, while the great boar rushed down through the twilight, foaming blood and roaring fury; in a still Indian night with the only target here and there a dusky head diving amidst the jhow jungle three hundred yards away: put him where you would, he was such a magnificent shot! The sins of a Frankenstein should not have lost such a marksman as Deadly Dash to the Service.

But the authorities thought otherwise; they were not open to the fact, that the man who had been out in more _barriere_ affairs, and had won more Grand Military stakes than any other, should, by all laws of war-policy, have had his blackest transgressions forgiven him, till he could have been turned to account against Ghoorkas, Maories, or Caffres. The authorities instead, made him send in his papers, not knowing the grand knack of turning a scamp into a hero--a process that requires some genius and some clairvoyance in the manipulator,--and Deadly Dash, with his lightest and airiest laugh, steamed down channel one late autumn night, marked, disgraced, and outlawed, for creditors by the score were after him, knowing very well that he and his old gay lawless life, and his own wild pleasant world, and his old lands yonder in the green heart of the grass countries that had gone rood by rood to the Hebrews, were all divorced for ever with a great gulf between them that could never close.

So he dropped out of the Service, out of the country, out of remembrance, out of regret; nobody said a De Profundis over him, and some men breathed the freer. We can rarely be sure of any who will be sorry to miss us; but we can always be certain of some to be glad we are gone. And in the Killer's case these last were legion. Here and there were one or two who owed him a wayward, inconstant bizarre fit of generosity; but there were on the other hand hundreds who owed him nothing less than entire ruin.

So Deadly Dash went with nobody to regret him and nobody to think of him for a second, after the nine hours' wonder in the clubs and the mess-rooms that his levanting "under a cloud" occasioned; and so the old sobriquet, that had used to have so signal a notoriety, dropped out of men's mouths and was forgotten. Where he was gone no one knew; and to be sure no one asked. Metaphorically, he was gone to the devil; and when a man takes that little tour, if he furnish talk for a day he has had very distinguished and lengthened obsequies as friendship goes in this world. Now and then in the course of half-a-dozen years I remembered him, when I looked up at the head of a Royal over my mantelpiece, with thirteen points, that he had stalked once in Ayrshire and given to me; but nobody else gave a thought to the Killer. Time passed, and whether he had been killed fighting in Chili or Bolivia, shot himself at Homburg, become Mussulman and entered the Sultan's army, gone to fight with the Kabyles and Bedouins, turned brigand for the Neapolitan Bourbons, or sunk downward by the old well-worn stage, so sadly and so often travelled, into an adventurer living by the skill of his ecarte and the dread surety of his shot, we did not know; we did not care. When society has given a man the sack, it matters uncommonly little whether he has given himself a shroud.

* * * * *

Seven or eight years after the name of Deadly Dash had ceased to be heard among cavalry men, and quoted on all things "horsey," whether of the flat or of the ridge and furrow, I was in the Confederate States, on leave for a six months' tour there. It was after Lee's raid across the border and the days of Gettysburgh. I had run the blockade in a fast-built clipper, and pushed on at once into the heart of Virginia, to be in the full heat of whatever should come on the cards; cutting the cities rather, and keeping as much as I could to the camps and the woods, for I wanted to see the real thing in the rough. In my relish for adventure, however, I was a trifle, as it proved, too foolhardy.

Starting alone one day to cross the thirty miles or so that parted me from the encampment of some Virginian Horse, with no other companions than a very weedy-looking steel gray, and a brace of revolvers, I fairly "lost tracks," and had not a notion of my way out of a wilderness of morass and forest, all glowing with the scarlet and the green of the Indian summer. Here and there were beautiful wild pools and lakes shut in by dense vegetation, so dense, that at noon it was dark as twilight, and great tablelands of rock jutted out black and rugged in places; but chiefly as far as was to be seen stretched the deep entangled woodland, with nothing else to break it, brooding quietly over square leagues of swamp. The orioles were singing their sweetest, wildest music overhead; sign of war there was none, save to be sure, now and then when I came on a black, arid circle, where a few charred timbers showed where a hut had been burnt down and deserted, or my horse shied and snorted uneasily, and half stumbled over some shapeless log on the ground--a log that when you looked closer was the swollen shattered body of a man who had died hard, with the grasses wrenched up in his fingers that the ants had eaten bare, and the hollows of his eyes staring open where the carrion birds had plucked the eyeballs out. And near him there were sure to be, half sunk in swamp, or cleaned to skeletons by the eagles and hawks, five, or ten, or twenty more, lying nameless and unburied there, where they had fallen in some scuffle with pickets, or some stray cavalry skirmish, to be told off as "missing," and to be thought of no more. These groups I came upon more than once rotting among the rich Virginian soil, while the scarlet and purple weight of blossoming boughs swayed above, and the bright insect life fluttered humming around them; they were the only highway marks through the wooded wilderness.

So lonely was it mile after mile, and so little notion had I of either the way in or the way out, that the _hallali!_ of a boar-hunt, or the sweet mellow tongues of the hounds when they have found in the coverts at home, were never brighter music to me than the sharp crack of rifles and the long sullen roll of musketry as they suddenly broke the silence, while I rode along, firing from the west that lay on my left. The gray, used to powder, pointed his ears and quickened his pace. Though a weedy, fiddle-headed beast, his speed was not bad, and I rattled him over the ground, crashing through undergrowth and wading through pools, with all my blood up at the tune of those ringing cheery shots; the roar growing louder and louder with every moment, and the sulphur scent of the smoke borne stronger and stronger down on the wind, till the horse broke _pele-mele_ through a network of parasites; dashed downward along a slope of dank herbage, slipping at every step, and with his hind legs tucked under him; and shot, like a run-in for a race, on to a green plateau, where the skirmish was going on in hot earnest.

A glance told me how the land lay. A handful of Southern troopers held their own with tremendous difficulty against three divisions of Federal infantry, whom they had unexpectedly encountered, as the latter were marching across the plateau with some batteries of foot artillery,--the odds were probably scarcely less than five to one. The Southerners were fighting magnificently, as firm in their close square of four hundred as the Consular Guard at Marengo, but so surrounded by the Northern host, that they looked like a little island circled round by raging breakers. Glancing down on the plain as my horse scoured and slid along the incline, the nucleus of Southerners looked hopelessly lost amidst the belching fire and pressing columns of the enemy. The whole was surrounded and hidden by the whirling clouds of dust and smoke that swirled above in a white heavy mist; but through this the sabres flashed, the horses' heads reared, maddened and foam-covered, like so many bas-reliefs of Bucephalus, the lean rifle-barrels glittered, and for a moment I saw the Southern leader, steady as a rock in the centre, hewing like a trooper right and left, and with a gray heron's feather floating from his sombrero, a signal that seemed as well known and as closely followed as the snowy plume of Murat.

To have looked on at this and not have taken a share in it, one would have been a stone, not a man, and much less a cavalry-man; I need not tell you that I smashed the gray across the plateau, hurled him into the thick of the melee, dashed _somehow_ through the Federal ranks, and was near the gray plume and fighting for the Old Dominion before you could have shouted a stave of "Dixie." I was a "non-combatant," I was a "neutral"--delicate Anglo-euphemism for coward, friend to neither and traitor to both!--I was on a tour of observation, and had no business to fire a shot for one or the other perhaps, but I forgot all that, and with the bridle in my teeth and a pistol in each hand, I rode down to give one blow the more for the weak side.

How superbly that Gray Feather fought!--keeping his men well up round him, though saddle after saddle was emptied, and horse after horse tore riderless out of the ranks, or reeled over on their heads, spurting blood, he sat like a statue, he fought like a Titan, his sabre seemed flashing unceasingly in the air, so often was it raised to come down again like lightning through a sword-arm, or lay open a skull to the brains; the shots ploughed up the earth round him, and rattled like hail through the air, a score of balls were aimed at him alone, a score of sabres crossed his own; but he was cool as St. Lawrence ice, and laid the men dead in struggling heaps under his charger's hoofs; only to fight near the man was a glorious intoxication; you seemed to "breathe blood" till you got drunk with it.

The four hundred had been mowed down to two; I did as good work as I could, having wrenched a sword out of some dead trooper's hand; but I was only one, and the Northerners counted by thousands. Come out of it alive I never expected to do; but I vow it was the happiest day of my life--the pace was so splendidly fast! The Gray Feather at last glanced anxiously around; his men stuck like death to him, ready to be hewed down one by one, and die game; his teeth were set tight, and his eyes had a flash in them like steel. "Charge! and cut through!" he shouted, his voice rolling out like a clarion, giving an order that it seemed could be followed by nothing short of supernatural aid. The Southrons thought otherwise; they only heard to obey; they closed up as steadily as though they were a squadron on parade, despite the great gaps between them of dying chargers, and of heaped-up killed and wounded, that broke their ranks like so much piled stones and timber; they halted a moment, the murderous fire raking them right and left, front and rear; then, with that dense mass of troops round them, they charged; shivered the first line that wedged them in; pierced by sheer force of impetus the columns that opened fire in their path; wrenched themselves through as through the steel jaws of a trap, and swept out on to the green level of the open plateau, with a wild rallying Virginian shout that rings in my ears now!

I have been in a good many hot things in my time; but I never knew anything that for pace and long odds could be anything near to that.

I had kept with them through the charge with no other scratch than a shoulder cut; and I had been close to their chief through it all. When we were clean out on the plains beyond pursuit--for the Union-men had not a squadron of cavalry, though their guns at long range belched a storm in our wake--he turned in his saddle without checking his mare's thundering gallop, and levelled his rifle that was slung at his aide. "I'll have the General, anyhow," he said, quietly taking aim--still without checking his speed--at the knot of staff-officers that now were scarce more than specks in a blurred mass of mist. He fired; and the centre figure in that indistinct and fast-vanishing group fell from the saddle, while the yell of fury that the wind faintly floated nearer told us that the shot had been deadly. The Gray Feather laughed, a careless airy laugh of triumph, while he swept on at topmost pace; a little more, and we should dive down into the dark aisles of grand forest-trees and cavernous ravines of timber roads, safe from all pursuit; a second, and we should reach the green core of the safe and silent woods, the cool shelter of mountain-backed lakes, the sure refuge of tangled coverts. It was a guinea to a shilling that we gained it; it was all but won; a moment's straight run-in, and we should have it! But that moment was not to be ours.

Out of the narrow cleft of a valley on the left, all screened with hanging tumbled foliage, and dark as death, there poured suddenly across our front a dense body of Federal troopers and Horse Artillery, two thousand strong at the least, full gallop, to join the main army. We were surrounded in a second, in a second overpowered by sheer strength of numbers; only two hundred of us, many sorely wounded, and on mounts that were jaded and ridden out of all pace, let us fight as we would, what could we do against fresh and picked soldiers, swarming down on us like a swarm of hornets, while in our rear was the main body through which we had just cut our way? That the little desperate band "died hard," I need not say; but the vast weight of the fresh squadrons pressed our little knot in as if between the jaws of a trap, crushing it like grain between two iron weights. The Gray Feather fought like all the Knights of the Round Table merged in one, till he streamed with blood from head to foot, and his sabre was hacked and bent like an ash-stick, as did a man near him, a tall superb Virginian, handsome as any Vandyke or Velasquez picture. At last both the Gray Feather and he went down, not by death--it would not come to them--but literally hurled out of their stirrup-leathers by crowding scores who poured on them, hamstrung or shot their horses, and made them themselves prisoners--not, however, till the assailants lay heaped ten deep about their slaughtered chargers. For myself, a blow from a sabre, a second afterwards, felled me like so much wood. I saw a whirling blaze of sun, a confused circling eddy of dizzy color, forked flames, and flashes of light, and I knew no more, till I opened my eyes in a dark, square, unhealthy wooden chamber, with a dreamy but settled conviction that I was dead, and in the family vault, far away under the green old elms of Warwickshire, with the rooks cawing above my head.

As the delusion dissipated and the mists cleared, I saw through the uncertain light a face that was strangely but vaguely familiar to me, connected somehow with incoherent memories of life at home, and yet unknown to me. It was bronzed deeply, bearded, with flakes of gray among the fairness of the hair, much aged, much worn, scarred and stained just now with the blood of undressed wounds and the dust of the combat, for there was no one merciful enough there to bring a stoup of water; it was rougher, darker, sterner, and yet, with it all, nobler, too, than the face that I had known. I lay and stared blankly at it: it was the face of the Southern Leader of the morning, who sat now, on a pile of straw, looking wearily out to the dying sun, one amongst a group of twenty, prisoners all, like myself. I moved, and he turned his eyes on me; they had laid me down there as a "gone 'coon," and were amazed to see me come to life again. As our eyes met I knew him--he was Deadly Dash.

The old name left my lips with a shout as strong as a half-killed man can give. It seemed so strange to meet him there, captives together in the Unionists' hands! It struck him with a sharp shock. England and he had been divorced so long. I saw the blood leap to his forehead, and the light into his glance; then, with a single stride, he reached the straw I lay on, holding my hands in his, looking on me with the kindly eyes that had used to make me like the Killer, and greeting me with a warmth that was only damped and darkened by regret that my battle done for fair Virginia had laid me low, a prisoner with himself, and that we should meet thus, in so sharp an hour of adversity, with nothing before us but the Capitol, the Carroll prison, or worse. Yet thus we did meet once more and I knew at last what had been the fate of Deadly Dash, whom England had outlawed as a scoundrel, and the New World had found a hero.

Though suffering almost equally himself, he tended me with the kindliest sympathy; he came out of his own care to ponder how possible it might be to get me eventual freedom as a tourist and a mere accidental sharer in the fray; he was interested to hear all that I would tell him of my own affairs and of his old friends in England, but of himself he would not speak; he simply said he had been fighting for the Confederacy ever since the war had begun; and I saw that he strove in vain to shake off a deep heart-broken gloom that seemed to have settled on him, doubtless, as I thought, from the cruel defeat of the noon, and the hopeless captivity into which he, the most restless and the most daring soldier that oversaw service, was now flung.

I noticed, too, that every now and then while he sat beside me, talking low--for there were sentinels both in and out the rude outhouse of the farm that had been turned into our temporary prison--his eyes wandered to the gallant Virginian who had been felled down with himself, and who, covered like himself with blood and dust, and with his broken left arm hanging shattered, lay on the bare earth in a far-off corner motionless and silent, with his lips pressed tight under their long black moustaches, and such a mute unutterable agony in his eyes as I never saw in any human face, though I have seen deaths enough in the field and the sick-ward. The rest of the Confederate captives were more ordinary men (although from none was a single word of lament ever wrenched); but this superb Virginian excited my interest, and I asked his name, in that sort of languid curiosity at passing things which comes with weakness, of the Killer, whose glance so incessantly wandered towards him.

"Stuart Lane," he answered, curtly, and added no more; but if I ever saw in this world hatred, passionate, ungovernable, and intense, I saw it in the Killer's look as his glance flashed once more on to the motionless form of the handsomest, bravest, and most dauntless officer of his gallant regiment that he had seen cut to pieces there on that accursed plateau.

"A major of yours?" I asked him. "Ah, I thought so; he fought magnificently. How wretched he looks, though he is too proud to show it!"

"He is thinking of--of his bride. He married three weeks ago."

The words were simple enough, and spoken very quietly; but there was an unsteadiness, as of great effort, over them; and the heel of his heavy spurred jack-boot crashed into the dry mud with a grinding crush, as though it trod terrible memories down. Was it a woman who was between these two comrades in arms and companions in adversity? I wondered if it were so, even in that moment of keen and heavy anxiety for us all, as I looked at the face that bent very kindly over the straw to which a shot in the knee and a deep though not dangerous shoulder-wound bound me. It was very different to the face of eight or nine years before--browner, harder, graver far; and yet there was a look as if "sorrow had passed by there," and swept the old heartlessness and gay callousness away, burning them out in its fires.