Chapter 17

A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we reached our goal. Harry's hand was giving him less trouble, but both my small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my shoulder hot. Miss Harper was "really ill," said the surgeon, but for whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition. "Take you in!" said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; "why, we'd take yo' whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse'v's!... Oh, Mr. Smith, you po' _chi--ild!_... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh's gone on now jess long enough!"

In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. "You po' dears, yo're hero-ines, now, and hencefo'th fo'evehmo'!" Harry and I agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought alike. We even agreed that Estelle's grasp of earthly realities was not so feeble as we had thought it.

"Fact is," I said to him, on our first day at the Walls', as he was leaving the soldiers' room, where I sat under the surgeon's inspection, "you were totally mistaken about her."

"Yes, I was," he replied; "she's got more sense in a minute than Camille's got in a week," and shut the door between us.

My blood leaped with rage, yet I sat perfectly calm, while the surgeon laughed like a hyena. "As soon as you can let me go, Doctor," I frigidly said, "I shall look up the Lieutenant. I consider that remark ungentlemanly, and his method of making it as worthy only of a coward."

The surgeon cackled again. "If that man," I dispassionately resumed, "was not perfectly sure that I am too honorable a gentleman to give Miss Camille the faintest hint of what he has said, sooner than say it he would go out and cut his throat from ear to ear."

"Well! you oughtn't to get mad at him for thinking you a gentleman."

"He sha'n't take a low advantage of my being one. You think he's open and blunt--he's as sly as a mink. He praises the older sister at the younger's expense, when it's the younger one that he's so everlastingly stuck on that he can't behave _like_ a gentleman to any man to whom she shows the slightest preference." We heard a coming step, but I talked on: "Sense! poor simpleton! he knows he hasn't got"--the door opened and Harry stepped partly in, but I only raised my voice,--"hasn't got as much brains in his whole head as there is in one of her tracks."

With something between a sob, a sputter and a shriek he shut himself out again. Harry was never deep but in a shallow way, and never shallow without a certain treacherous depth. When Ned Ferry the next day summoned me to his bedside I went with a choking throat, not doubting I was to give account of this matter,--until I saw the kindness of his pallid face. Then my silly heart rose as much too high as it had just been too low and I thought "Charlotte has surrendered!" All he wanted was to make me his scribe. But when we were done he softly asked, "That business of yours we talked about on the Plank-road--it looks any better?"

I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said, "I am told there is nobody in your way."

I faced him sharply--"Who told you that?" and felt sure he would name the tricky aide-de-camp. But he pointed to the room overhead, which again, as in the other house, was Charlotte's. I blushed consciously with gratitude. "Well," I said, "it makes me happy to see you beginning again to get well."

Within the same hour I met unexpectedly two other persons. First, Harry Helm; who, before I could speak, was deluging me with words, telling me for the twentieth time how, on that evening of the indoor fight, coming with a platoon of Mississippians which he had procured merely as a guard, he was within a hundred yards of the house before our shots in the bedroom told him he was riding to a rescue. Then suddenly he began to assure me that in what he had said about the two sisters he had sought only to mislead the surgeon, who, he declared, was more utterly dead-gone on Camille than both of us put together. We parted, and within the next five minutes I confronted the maiden herself.

She came from upstairs with a mixed armful of papers, books and sewing, said she had been with Charlotte, and said no more, only made a mysterious mouth. I inquired how Charlotte was. She shrugged, sank into a seat on the gallery, let her arm-load into her lap, and replied, "Ah! she lies up there and smiles and smiles, and calls us pet names, and says she's perfectly contented, and then cannot drop half asleep without looking as though she were pressing a knife into her own heart. Oh, Dick, what is the matter with her?"

"What do you think,--Camille?"

"Oh--I--I'm afraid to say it--even to Estelle, or aunt Martha, or--"

"Say it to me," I murmured.

"Oh, if I could only trust you!" she said, shaking her head sadly and trying to lift her arm's burden again without taking her eyes from mine. It went to her feet in a landslide, and out of one of the books fluttered three stems of sweet-pea each bearing two mated blossoms. I knew them in an instant, and in the next I had them. She would not let me pile the fallen freight anywhere but into her arm again, nor recover her eye before she was fully re-laden. Then she set her lips freezingly and said "Now give me back my flowers."

I meekly gave them and she turned to go into the house; her head gradually sank forward as she went, and her unparagoned ear and neck flushed to a burning red. On the threshold, by some miscalculation, her burdened arm struck the jamb, and the whole load fell again. I sprang and began to gather the stuff into a chair, but she walked straight on as though nothing had occurred, and shut the nearest door behind her.

In those days used to come out to see us Gregory, in his long-skirted black coat and full civilian dress; of whom I have told a separate history elsewhere. Very pointed was Camille's neglect of both Harry and me, to make herself lovely to the dark and diffident new-comer, while Estelle positively pursued me with compensatory sweetness; and Gregory, whenever he and I were alone together, labored to reassure me of his harmlessness by expatiating exclusively upon the charms of Cecile. She seemed to him like a guardian angel of Ferry and Charlotte, while yet everything she said or did was wholly free from that quality of other-worldliness which was beautiful in Estelle, but which would not have endured repetition in the sister or the cousin. There Harry and I, also, once more agreed. Cecile never allowed herself to reflect a spirit of saintliness, or even of sacrifice, but only of maidenly wisdom and sweet philosophy.

"If it weren't for Charlotte," whispered the Lieutenant, "I could swear she was created for Ned Ferry!" and when I shook my head he, too, declared "No, no! if ever a match was made on high Charlotte was made for him and he for Charlotte; but, oh, Lord, Lord! Reach-hard Thorndyke Smith, how is this thing going to end?"

That was the problem in the mind of every looker on, and the lookers-on were legion; the whole wide neighborhood came to see us. Gregory and others outstayed their furloughs; the surgeon lingered shamelessly. Of course, there were three girls besides Charlotte, and it was pure lying--as I told Helm--for some of those fellows to pretend that Captain Ferry's problem was all they stayed for; and yet it was the one heart-problem which was everybody's, and we were all in one fever to see forthwith a conclusion which "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" required should not come for months.

"Pooh!" said Harry, "'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind' requires just the reverse!" and the surgeon avowed that it was required by a decent respect to her powers of endurance; he was every day afraid her slow improvement would stop and she would begin to sink. He admitted the event could wait, but he wished to gracious we could have her decision.

I said suppose it should be negative. "Oh, it won't!" exclaimed both he and Harry. "When it comes to the very point--"

Gregory's approach interrupted us, but I remembered a trait in Charlotte of which I have spoken, and gave myself the hope that their prediction might prove well founded.

LVII

A YES AND A NO

But now Charlotte's recovery took on new speed. Maybe her new brightness meant only that her heart was learning to bear its load; but we hoped that was just what it was unlearning, as she and Ferry sat at chess on the gallery in the afternoons.

One night the fellows gave a dance in Brookhaven. We went in two wagons and by the light of mounted torch-bearers, and Charlotte and Ferry stood at the dooryard gate and sent after us their mirthful warnings and good-byes. It set some of us a-hoping--to see them there--a dooryard gate means so much. We fairly prayed he might compel her decision before she should turn to re-enter the house. But the following morning it was evident we had prayed in vain.

On the next afternoon but one we heard that a great column of our soldiers was approaching on the nearest highway, bound up the railroad to Joe Johnston's army from the region about Port Hudson, and Charlotte instantly proposed that our ladies deal out food and drink from some shady spot on the roadside. It was one of those southern summer days when it verily seems hotter in the shade than in the sun--unless you are in the sun. The force was wholly artillery and infantry, the last Confederate infantry that region ever saw in column under arms; poor, limping, brown-faced, bloody-footed boys! their weapons were the only clean things, the only whole things, about them except their unbroken spirit; and when the very foremost command chanced to be one which the Harpers had seen in New Orleans the day it left there marching in faultless platoons and spotless equipments through the crowds that roared acclaim and farewell, our dear ladies, for one weak moment, wept.

"Here come the real heroes, Harry," said my crippled leader; "we are dandies and toy-soldiers, by the side of those infantry boys, Doctor, we cavalry fellows;" and we cavalry fellows would have hid if we honorably could. Yet hardly had he spoken when he and a passing field-officer cried out in mutual recognition, and from that time until the rear-guard was clear gone by we received what the newspapers call "a continuous ovation." A group of brigade officers went back with us to Squire Wall's, to supper, and you could see by the worship they paid Charlotte that they knew her story. Her strength was far overtaxed, and the moment the last fond straggler had gone we came in out of the splendid moonlight.

"Now, Charlotte, my dear," began Miss Harper, "you are too terribly tired to--why, where is Charlotte; did she not come in with us from the--gate?"

Ferry, too, was missing. Mrs. Wall made eyes at the inquirer, Estelle and Cecile began to speak but deferred to each other, and Camille, putting on a deadly exhaustion, whined as she tottered to her smiling guardian, "Kiss your sweet baby good-night, auntie dear, and"--with a hand reached out to Estelle--"make Naughty come, too." She turned to say good-night to Cecile but spoiled her kiss with an unintended laugh. The surgeon, Harry and I bowed from the room and stepped out to the water-bucket and gourd. From there we could see the missing two, lingering at the dooryard gate, in the bright moonlight. As we finished drinking, "Gentlemen," murmured Harry, "I fear our position is too exposed to be tenable."

The surgeon started upstairs. "I'll join you directly, Doctor," Harry said, and in a lower voice added "Smith and I will just lounge in and out of the hall here to sort o' show nobody needn't be in any hurry, don't you see?"

But the other jerked his thumb toward the half-closed parlor, where Miss Harper and Cecile sat close, to each other absorbed in some matter of the tenderest privacy. "They'll attend to that," he muttered; "come on to bed and mind your own business."

Harry huffed absurdly. "You go mind yours," he retorted, and then more generously added, "we'll be with you in a minute." The surgeon went, and the aide-de-camp, as we began to pace the hall, fairly took my breath by remarking without a hint of self-censure, "Damn a frivolous man!" Then irrelatively he added, "Those two out at that gate--this is a matter of life and death with them;" and when I would have qualified the declaration, he broke in upon me--"Right, Dick, you're right, it _is_ worse; it's a choice between true life and death-in-life; whether they'll make life's long march in sunshine together or in darkness apart."

Well, of course, it was no such simple question, and never could be while life held so many values more splendid than any wilfulness could win. There lay the whole of Charlotte's real difficulty--for she had made it all hers. But when I tried in some awkward way to say this Harry cut me short. "Oh, Dick, I--eh--you bother me! I want to tell you something and if I don't hurry I can't. Something's happened to me, old fellow, something that's sobered me more than I ever would 'a' thought anything could. I want to tell you because I can trust you with a secr'--wh'--what's the matter, did I hurt your wound? Honestly, I want to tell you because--well--because I've been deceiving you all along: I've deceived you shamefully, letting on to like this girl more than that, and so on and so on."

"Yes, you thought you were deceiving me."

"Oh, well, maybe I wasn't, but I want to tell you to-night because I'm going to camp in the morning. Oh, yes,"--he named the deepest place known--"the sight of those webfoot boys to-day was too much for me; I'm going; and Dick, when I told her I was going--"

"_Told whom_?"

"Aw, come, now, Dick, you know every bit as well as I know. Well, when I told her I was going I didn't dream I was going to tell her anything else; I give you my word! Where in the"--same place again--"I ever got the courage I'll never tell you, but all of a sudden thinks I, 'I'm never going to get anything but no, anyhow, and so, Dick, I've been and gone and done it!"

I leaned on the stair-newel, sorry for the poor fool, but glad of this chance. "Why, Lieutenant, not many men would have done as well. You felt honor-bound not to slip away uncommitted, so you took your dose like a hero and licked the spoon." I felt that I was salting his wound, but we were soldiers and--I had the salt.

He drew a sigh. "Yes, I took my dose--of astonishment. Dick, she said yes! Oh, good Lord, Dick, do you reckon they'll ever be such full-blown idiots as to let me have her?"

I sank upon the steps; every pore in my body was a fountain of cold sweat: "Have whom?"

"Cecile." He was going on to declare himself no more fit for her than for the presidency of the Confederate States, which was perfectly true; but I sprang up, caught him (on my well side) by one good hand, and had begun my enthusiastic congratulations, when Charlotte appeared and we swerved against the rail to let her pass upstairs. In some way as she went by it was made plain to us that she had said no. "Good-night," ventured both of us, timorously.

"Good-night," she responded, very musically, but as if from a great distance.

LVIII

THE UPPER FORK OF THE ROAD

Ferry, as he passed us, called my name, and I started after him. At Charlotte's door we heard the greeting of her black maid. The maid's father, who of late had been nightly dressing Ferry's wound and mine, came to us in Ferry's room; and there my Captain turned to greet me, his face white with calamity. He took me caressingly by a button of my jacket. "Can you have your wound washed to-night before mine?"

"Why, certainly, if it's the least--"

"Yes, thank you. And down here in this room instead of upstairs?"

"Captain Ferry! if you knew how horribly it smells, you--"

"Ah! don't I know?" he said, and as I sat naked from throat to waist with the old negro laving the sores, Ferry scanned them narrowly. "They are not so bad, Dick; you think a few hours in the saddle will not make them worse?"

"Not if they're spent for you, Captain."

"Yes, for me; also for much better. We shall ride for--"

"You ride? Oh, Captain, you are in no condition--"

"Tst!" he laid a finger on my lips; "'twill not be hard; we are not going on a scout--to jump fences." He began to make actual preparations, and presently helped me draw my shirt into place again over the clean bandages, while the old man went out after fresh water. "I am a hundred times more fit to go than to stay," he suddenly resumed. "I must go. Ah, idleness, there is nothing like idleness to drive a man mad; I must have something to do--to-night--at once." I wish I knew how to give the words with his quiet intensity.

I began to unclothe his wound. "May I ask one thing?"

"Ah! I know you; you want to ask am I taking that upper fork of the road. I am; 'tis for that I want you; so go you now to the stable, saddle our horses and bring them."

When I reached the front steps with them Ferry was at the gallery's edge, Miss Harper, Cecile and Harry were on three sides of him, and he was explaining away our astonishing departure. We were going to Hazlehurst, to issue clothing and shoes to those ragged and barefoot fellows we had seen that afternoon, and the light of whose tentless camp was yonder in the sky, now, toward Brookhaven. We were to go that way, confer with their officers, telegraph from town for authorizations to be sent to us at Hazlehurst, and then to push on to that place and be ready to issue the stuff when the trains should come up from Brookhaven bringing the brigade. While he spoke Camille and Estelle joined us. "No," he said, "to start any later, 'twould be too late."

To Harry's imploring protest that he, Ferry, was not fit to go to Hazlehurst horseback, he replied "Well! what we going to do? Those boys can't go to Big Black swamp bare-foot."

Our dear friends were too well aware of the untold trouble to say a word about his coming back, but Miss Harper's parting injunction to me was to write them.

The whole night and the following day were a toilsome time for us, but by fall of the next night the brigade had come in rags and passed newly clothed and shod, and in a room of the town tavern we dressed each other's hurts and sank to sleep on one bed. The night was hot, the pain of my wounds was like a great stone lying on them, and at the tragic moment of a frightful dream I awoke. "Captain," I murmured.

"Yes?"

"Did she give no reason?"

"No." A silence followed; then he said, "You know the reason, I think."

"Yes, I think I do; I think--"

"Well? don't be afraid to say it."

I got the words out in some form, that I believed Charlotte loved him deeply, as deeply, passionately, exaltedly, as ever a true woman loved a man--

"Ah, me!" he lifted his arms wide and knitted his fingers on his brow.

"And there is the whole trouble," I added. "She will not let you marry the woman whose--"

"Whose husband I have killed.... Ah, God!... Ah, my God! why was I chosen to do that?... And you think, Dick, it was not a question of time; that I did not ask, maybe a little too soon?"

"No, not as between sooner and later; and yet, in another way, possibly, yes." Without either of us stirring from the pillow I tried to explain. I pointed out that trait in Charlotte which I called an impulse suddenly to surrender the key of her situation, the vital point in her fortunes and fate.

"Yes.... Yes," Ferry kept putting in.

I went on to say that she seemed now to have learned, herself, that it was on this shoal she grounded at every low water of her physical and mental powers; as when over-fatigued, for instance; and that I should not wonder if she had bound herself never again at such a time to let her judgment follow her impulses. He laid his hand on me: "Stop; stop; you stab too deep. I thought to take her by surprise at that very point, and right there she has countermined. My God! can it be that I am served only right?"

"No," I replied, although it was a thing I would have said Ned Ferry would not do, "no, no, it is she who has served both you and herself cruelly wrong. Captain, I believe that when Miss Harper has talked it over with her she will see her mistake as we all see it, and will call you back."

"Ah, me! Ah, me! Do you believe that, Dick?"

"I do, Captain; but at the same time--"

"What, what? Speak out, Dick. You blame me some other way?"

"Oh, no, indeed! I am the one to blame, the only one. If you had not, both of you, been so blameless--so splendidly blameless--I should hardly have let myself sink so deep into blame; but I knew you would never take the last glad step until you had seen the last sad proof that you might take it. Oh, Captain, to-night is the third time that in my dreams I have seen _that man_ alive."

I do not know how long after that we lay silent, but it seemed an endless time before he exclaimed at last "My God! Dick, you should have told me."

"I know it; I know I should! But it was only a dream, and--"

"Ah! 'twas your doubt first and the dream after! But let us think no more of blame, we must settle the doubt. We shall begin that to-morrow." On my venturing to say more he interrupted. "Well, we can do nothing now; at the present, sleep is our first business." However, after a little, he spoke again, and, I believe, purely in order to soothe me to slumber, speculated and counselled with me for the better part of an hour concerning my own poor little love affair.

At breakfast he told me the first step in his further plans would be for us to take the train for Tangipahoa, with our horses, on our way to our own camp; but just before the train came the telegraph brought General Austin's request--which, of course, carried all the weight of an order--for Ferry to remain here and make ready for further issues of quartermaster's stores. He turned on his heel and twisted his small mustache: "That means we are kept here to be kept here, Richard."

It was a mistaken kindness, from our point of view, but it had the merit that it kept us busy. In two days the post-quartermaster's affairs and supplies were reduced to perfect order for the first time in their history. For two days more we ran a construction train and with a swarm of conscripts repaired two or three miles of road-bed and some trestle-work in a swamp; and at every respite in our strenuous activities we discoursed of the girls we'd left behind us; their minds, their manners, their features, figures, tastes and talents, and their walk and talk. So came the end of the week, and while the sun was still above the trees we went on down, inspecting the road beyond our repairs, on our own hand-car to Brookhaven. With heads bare, jackets in our laps, and muddy boots dangling over the car's front edge, and with six big negroes at the levers behind us, we watched the miles glide under our wheels and grow fewer and fewer between us and the shrine of our hearts. "Sing, Dick," said Ferry, and we chanted together, as we had done at every sunset these three days, "O my love is like a red, red rose." We could not have done it had we known that yonder glorious sun was setting forever upon the fortunes of our Southern Confederacy. It was the fourth of July; Lee was in full retreat from Gettysburg, Vicksburg was gone, Port Hudson was doomed, and all that was left for us now was to die hard.

LIX

UNDER CHARLOTTE'S WINDOW