House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “You can’t stop me!” She twisted, frantic to be free; but with a violence of which she had not supposed even his strength capable, he thrust her toward the bed; he forced her down, held her there. When she would have screamed, his hand crushed her mouth, held her lips, muffled her cry; she felt her teeth cut her lips, tasted her own blood. Still holding her helpless, his face near hers seeming to her terrified eyes tremendous, he spoke hoarse words like blows.

  “I’ve let you go your way too long,” he said. “I won’t allow that now. For myself I don’t much care.” In a scrupulous honesty he added: “I suppose I loved you, still do. Probably, if you choose, you can make me love you again.

  “But I won’t let you hinder me again, nor humiliate me. And I won’t let you spoil the lives of our children, and I won’t let you bring any new sorrow to my mother or to those in this house who have too much sorrow now. From now on you’re going to do—to behave exactly as I bid you.”

  Because she lay quiet, his hand relaxed its pressure on her mouth. Through his fingers she spoke. “You can’t make me——”

  She had been about to say he could not make her love him; but he said: “Be still. I’m not discussing what you will do. I’m giving you orders, Enid.”

  “Suppose I——”

  “Suppose nothing! You will do what I tell you to do.”

  “You shan’t talk to me so!” She tried to pretend the anger she should feel, tried to hide even from herself her deep triumphant repossession. “I’ll do what I——”

  “What you do is for me to decide. If I choose, I can turn you into the street in the clothes you wear. Or without them! If I choose I can take a whip and strip the skin from your back as though you were a negro wench! If I choose——”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Dare?” He repeated the word. “Dare? Why, Enid—” His voice changed. It took on the hollow tone of a man muttering in delirium. “I have seen men walk with high heads into the mouths of cannon ready to fire. Saturday I saw three men, side by side, go forward toward levelled guns; and the head of one of them was blown away and the clothes of another were set on fire by the blast of the guns. But the man whose clothes were burning and the other man went on, and leaped upon the Yankees who served the guns, and killed them any way they could. Don’t talk to me about daring. I know now what men dare to do.”

  “Not to ladies!”

  He laughed, almost mirthfully. “To ladies? Why, a woman’s flesh can be ripped to shreds as easily as a man’s. Listen to me, Enid. From now on—oh you can be as you like when we’re alone—but from now on when others are with us, you are my wife, and you will remember it in every look and word and act.” His tone softened almost wistfully. “I have great need of you. Perhaps, if you wish we may still be happy together. But whether you wish it or not, you’ll do what I tell you. I will not let you leave me. We’re married, and we’ll stay married.”

  He released her and stood looking down at her; and she had never loved him as much as now. “You can’t want to keep me when you know I just hate and despise you.”

  “I’ll keep you, no matter what you want!”

  She remembered something she had heard Cinda say. “You’re as bad as the North, trying to hold onto the South.”

  Something swept across his face and for a moment he did not speak; then as though her word helped him understand himself he said gravely: “I suppose I am. I suppose I’m like Mr. Lincoln. If I’d been President when the South seceded, I would not have let the Southern states go.” He nodded, almost peacefully. “Yes, Enid. I will not let you go.”

  And as though the matter were settled for good and all, he began to make ready for sleep. He said to her: “Undress. Get to bed.”

  She obeyed him, trembling with what she told herself was hatred; and when they were abed and without further word or act, without any move to seize the fruits of victory, he fell heavily asleep beside her, she was sure of it. She lay long awake, nursing her hatred, planning treacherous betrayals. He had beaten her; she was his. Yet now he did not want her! Well, even the defeated may in small ways take their long revenge. Today was his, but the future was hers! Because he did not take what in this hour she longed to yield, she would never forgive him. She wept herself to sleep with lonely tears.

  10

  May—July, 1862

  NELL ALBION in these weeks of late spring and early summer felt youth in her renewed: its passions, its delights like wine, its frantic disappointments, its heights and its valleys, its alternations between ebullient hours when all the world was fair and other shadowed intervals when it seemed the sun would never shine again. When Faunt was absent, she dreamed of his return; when he came she lost herself completely in the rapture of delighting him, of devising every means for his content. It was just after his departures that her spirits reached their lowest ebb, when she remembered or thought she remembered ways in which she had failed him and groaned with vain regrets; but as each passing day brought nearer the hope of his return her heart rose again, and her life reached its peak when he did at last appear.

  From the first she had told him: “Send me a note when you are coming, Faunt, so that I will be alone.” When he smiled and accused her of wishing to conceal their friendship she said: “Yes; yes I do, my dear. I don’t want anyone to share even the knowledge that we know each other, and certainly I want none to share our hours together. But there’s another reason, a practical reason. I’ve always had many callers. So send me word. Then if gentlemen are here when you wish to come to me, I can get rid of them.” So Enid’s proposal that she come for a visit seemed to Nell only amusing; but when her daughter spoke Faunt’s name she was no longer amused. Even after Enid’s panic-stricken flight, she paced to and fro for a long time, struggling for composure, fighting down a thousand jealous imaginings. At first she thought she and Faunt would laugh together at Enid’s folly; but then she decided he must never know. Men were so easily susceptible to flattering admiration, and Enid was lovely, and above all, Enid was young! If Faunt suspected Enid’s devotion, his curiosity would be aroused; he would look upon Enid thereafter with a more acute attention, thinking always: “She is in love with me. This charming young woman adores me.” Against such a thought no man would shut his mind.

  Nell remembered that Faunt would see Enid whenever he went to the house on Fifth Street, and she wished he need never go there; and when she knew he had been there before he came to her she watched him with a searching eye, wondering if he and Enid had had any moment alone, wondering what word might have passed between them, wondering whether there was any change in him. Once or twice she led him to speak of Enid. When his word was kindly Nell ached with jealous anguish, and when he laughed at Enid’s follies Nell feared this was pretense to hide an emotion he was unwilling to avow. The thought of Enid forever shadowed, as far as anything could shadow, their hours together.

  But she let nothing else interfere with these hours. Since McClellan’s army was at the city’s gates, every crumb of information she could collect was at least potentially important, and she kept in touch with her regular sources and maintained her contacts with the invading army; but she was always prepared to put these matters aside if a note from Faunt announced his prospective arrival.

  He came to her not so often as she wished; but after the two days of fighting at the end of May, when General Johnston’s wound brought Lee to the command of the army, he was with her from late at night till dawn. During that battle Stuart’s men had been used chiefly as couriers.

  “And after the fighting, we were busy protecting the booty the army captured,” Faunt explained. “A mob of authorized looters with passports from the Provost Marshal came to steal everything they could use or sell. Even Sunday night they were on hand, and again Monday morning. There were so many of them that the Yankees thought they were our regiments and opened fire. That scattered them finally; but as soon as they dared they were back like so many turkey buzzards around a carcass.”
<
br />   She nodded. “The things they stole are already for sale in the stores on Main Street: the oranges and lemons and all the supplies from General Casey’s headquarters. And blankets and uniforms . . .”

  “They were like a plague of locusts.” Faunt’s voice was hard with angry contempt. “I felt like laying a riding crop across their backs. Their pillaging cleaned out almost everything before the day was over.” He added, in a different tone: “But General Lee commands now. He will teach this army to be an army.”

  “I hear the men don’t like the work he makes them do.”

  “They’ll come to it. He knows how to handle men. General Johnston could never get along with President Davis; but Lee will be able to. The army’s a division stronger, with him in command.”

  She had no scruple against using even Faunt as a source of information. “Some gentlemen who called yesterday say General Lee knows more about the use of a spade than a gun,” she suggested. “They believe he’ll be even more cautious than General Johnston.”

  Faunt disagreed. “I know him only slightly; but men who do know him say that for plain cold-blooded courage he can’t be beat. Tact and intelligence and the calculating brain of the engineer, that and the readiness to strike hard and daringly, that’s Lee. They tell me McClellan is always deliberate. He will make a mistake if he waits too long to attack Lee.”

  A few days later Nell reported this opinion to a man who came late one night for a secret hour with her. This man was expected. Milly had long since gone to bed, and Nell locked the door from dining room to kitchen so that Milly could not by any chance come into the front part of the house. She herself at the appointed hour waited in the darkened hall, the front door ajar. When her visitor arrived, she led him upstairs to her small sitting room, where opaque curtains would prevent the escape of any beam of light, and they sat with a single candle between them.

  This was a lean man with a mustache like a black wire across his upper lip. He wore beneath his military cape a blue uniform, and when she saw this Nell asked scornfully:

  “Still cautious, Captain Mason?”

  He smiled. “Why, I value my neck, Mrs. Albion. There is a distinction, you know, between a scout and a spy.” He spoke with the accent of a Southerner.

  “You might pass freely anywhere,” she reminded him. “Your tongue would never betray you; but that uniform risks compromising me.”

  Captain Mason said with a twinkle in his eye: “As between you and me, I prefer you should be the one to be compromised. The Rebs would not hang a lady.” He leaned forward and placed quietly on the table between them a little pile of gold pieces that gleamed in the candlelight. “You put me off last week,” he remarked.

  “I was engaged.” Faunt had been here.

  “You have something tonight?”

  “Several things.” She spoke in an even tone, as though quoting a memorized lesson. “General Lee’s headquarters, in case you have some bold men to go seize him, are at——”

  He shook his head. “We will do nothing to—remove General Lee. General McClellan was glad to see him succeed Johnston, welcomes the notion of fighting a battle of spades. With Lee in command, everything will now be done in an orderly manner, by the book.”

  “He is mistaken in his estimate of General Lee.” Nell’s tones were precise. “Lee will know how to manage President Davis, and he is winning the generals. When he called them in council he listened to them, but he told them nothing. When the earthworks he is building are strong enough to protect Richmond, he will man them with a part of his army and thus release the rest for a movement against your flank.”

  Captain Mason smiled. “Do you pretend to read his mind? Or does he confide in you?”

  “Make no mistake about General Lee, Captain,” she urged. “He will take his time, capture the imagination of the soldiers, then act. One of them, slightly wounded at Seven Pines, heard that others hurt no worse than he had applied for furloughs and received them, and he decided that he should have one. He went to General Lee; and Lee said: ‘You fought on after your wound. We can’t spare such men as you, my friend.’ The man told the story delightedly. The soldiers see him every day among them; they’re learning to trust him. I assure you he is a firm and a daring man.”

  “We’re more interested in information than in opinions, Mrs. Albion.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes opinions shed more light than information. For instance, Lee has asked Davis to reinforce Jackson with troops from Georgia and South Carolina, so that Jackson can march down the Valley and threaten Washington. That is ‘information.’ But my ‘opinion’ is that the Southern states will refuse to send those troops. They will stand on their sovereign rights as independent states, will insist that they are not subject to command by the President.”

  “I know,” he assented, and smiled. “Your sovereign states will ruin your Confederacy. General Lee will never be able to make an army as long as each state insists her troops be allowed to serve together.”

  She asked: “Did you know that even with the men he had, Jackson has shattered your armies in the Valley?”

  Captain Mason was startled. “That’s impossible!”

  “News reached here this morning. Jackson is in pursuit. Tonight’s rain will mire your army in front of Richmond. I believe—but to be sure, this again is ‘opinion,’ Captain—that Lee will himself send Jackson reinforcements, send them direct from here to sweep the Valley clean.”

  “Will you know if this is done?”

  “Of course.”

  After a moment he rose. “Any further information?”

  Nell smiled. “Not even an opinion, Captain.”

  He said: “I’ll come again, probably on Thursday, to see if any move to the Valley has begun.”

  Nell said: “If you see light in these windows, come again the night after, and the next, as usual.” If Faunt were here Thursday night, or any other night, her door would be barred against the world.

  “I may come in the daytime.”

  “Not in that uniform, I hope.”

  “Hardly.”

  “If you do,” she suggested, “call yourself—” She hesitated, smiling. “Mr. Overcautious would not do, would it? Call yourself Mr. Overgood.”

  Nell had predicted that Lee would send men to the Valley, and Wednesday she watched eight regiments entrain and knew her guess had been a good one. Early Thursday morning she had a breathless moment with Faunt, who flung from his horse at her gate and came for a swift embrace. Stuart and a thousand men were riding out the Brooke Turnpike; he stayed only an instant, hurried to take his place in the ranks. Watching from the window to see him mount, she saw another horseman pass; and her heart turned cold, for she recognized Captain Mason. The two men saluted, Captain Mason rode on, Faunt galloped away. But Nell was not surprised when an hour later, while she was at breakfast, the door bell rang and Milly said Mr. Overgood was calling.

  Faunt was gone, the coast clear; so Nell received him. Captain Mason did not speak of the man he had seen leaving her door at dawn, so neither did she. She was eager to be rid of him. “You will want to get out of Richmond at once,” she said. “I have the information you need. This time it is information; not just opinion. Yesterday eight regiments went by train, bound for Lynchburg and the Valley.” Stuart’s movement, which Faunt had confided to her, might be a part of the same design. “And Stuart left by the Brooke Turnpike with a thousand men. Probably he will join Jackson too.” She added in a dry tone: “And if you want another of my opinions, I believe that when Jackson has struck his blow, he will bring his whole force back here to attack McClellan.”

  He was as anxious to be gone as she to have him go. When she was alone, her thoughts could follow Faunt. It might be weeks before she saw him; she disciplined herself to endless waiting. But Sunday morning at first light she heard a horse moving at a walk through the street in front of the house, and when the hoof beats stopped she sped through the sitting room to look out the front window. Faunt, dus
ty and worn, moving as stiffly as an old and weary man, was already coming up the walk toward the door. Still in her night garments, her feet bare, her heavy hair in a braid between her shoulders, she darted down the stair to fling the door wide, to sweep him into her arms.

  He laughed in a shaky happiness. “Careful, Nell. I’m filthy.”

  “I don’t care! Oh, I don’t care! Darling, darling, are you all right?”

  “Dead tired. Dirty. Sleepy. But I’m all right, yes. Nothing that a day or two here won’t mend.”

  A day or two? Her heart leaped with delight because she was to have him for that day or two. “Wherever have you been?”

  He chuckled. “Riding around McClellan’s whole army.” So her guess had been mistaken. Stuart had not gone to the Valley after all. Captain Mason would damn her for that misinformation. But no matter. Nothing mattered, since Faunt was here. “My horse is done,” he said. “Can Rufus——”

  “Oh yes, yes. Come, my dear. I’m so glad to get you home.”

  He was too near exhaustion to climb the stairs. Nell and Milly helped him; Nell bathed him clean, and bade him sleep and sleep, and he slept the day away. But he woke rested, and so full of conversation that she thought he was still half drunk with the excitement of his ride with Stuart. He talked for hours, while she listened, and watched him with proud shining eyes. She thought he should forget, rest, think of other things; but he laughed.

  “I don’t need any more rest,” he assured her. “I’m not tired now. We were thirty-six hours in the saddle Friday and Saturday, and I rode all night last night to get back to you; but I’m all right now.” He added with a quick, happy chuckle: “And I never want to forget it as long as I live. Oh Nell, we made fools of them! Scattered every Yankee squadron we saw! Killed I don’t know how many, and lost just one man ourselves. You remember Mr. Mosby? He was here the night I met you.” She nodded, and Faunt said: “The whole thing was his idea. He came back from a scout and told General Stuart the Yankees had nothing but pickets all the way from their army back to their base at White House. That was enough for Stuart.” He described the attack on Tunstall Station. “Some of us went ahead with Mosby to cut the railroad there, and Stuart and the rest followed. We hit one of their wagon trains and burned it, and captured a lot of sutler’s wagons and had a feast.” There was a constant chuckling mirth in his tones that made her heart warm. “Oh it was a lark, Nell! A regular picnic!”