Celia bent and bit off her thread, then passing the needle into the hem, laid her work aside.
“Honey-bud,” she said, “you are ve’y tired. If you’ll undress I’ll give you a hot bath and rub you and brush your hair.”
“Oh, Celia, will you? I’d feel so much better.” She gave a dainty little shudder and made a wry face, adding:
“I’ve had so many dirty, sick men to cleanse — oh, incredibly dirty and horrid! — poor boys — it doesn’t seem to be their fault, either; and they are so ashamed and so utterly miserable when I am obliged to know about the horror of their condition. . . . Dear, it will be angelic of you to give me a good, hot scrubbing. I could go to sleep if you would.”
“Of co’se I will,” said Celia simply. And, when Ailsa was ready to call her in she lifted the jugs of water which a negro had brought — one cold, one boiling hot — entered Ailsa’s room, filled the fiat tin tub; and, when Ailsa stepped into it, proceeded to scrub her as though she had been two instead of twenty odd.
Then, her glowing body enveloped in a fresh, cool sheet, she lay back and closed her eyes while Celia brushed the dull gold masses of her hair.
“Honey-bee, they say that all the soldiers are in love with you, even my po’ Confederate boys in Ward C. Don’t you dare corrupt their loyalty!”
“They are the dearest things — all of them,” smiled Ailsa sleepily, soothed by the skilful brushing. “I have never had one cross word, one impatient look from Union or Confederate.” She added: “They say in Washington that we women are not needed — that we are in the way — that the sick don’t want us. . . . Some very important personage from Washington came down to the General Hospital and announced that the Government was going to get rid of all women nurses. And such a dreadful row those poor sick soldiers made! Dr. West told us; he was there at the time. And it seems that the personage went back to Washington with a very different story to tell the powers that be. So I suppose they’ve concluded to let us alone.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that a Yankee gove’nment has no use fo’ women,” observed Celia.
“Hush, dear. That kind of comment won’t do. Besides, some horrid stories were afloat about some of the nurses not being all they ought to be.”
“That sounds ve’y Yankee, too!”
“Celia! And perhaps it was true that one or two among thousands might not have been everything they should have been,” admitted Ailsa, loyal to her government in everything. “And perhaps one or two soldiers were insolent; but neither Letty Lynden nor I have ever heard one unseemly word from the hundreds and hundreds of soldiers we have attended, never have had the slightest hint of disrespect from them.”
“They certainly do behave ve’y well,” conceded Celia, brushing away vigorously. “They behave like our Virginians.”
Ailsa laughed, then, smiling reflectively, glanced at her hand which still bore the traces of a healed scar. Celia noticed her examining the slender, uplifted hand, and said:
“You promised to tell me how you got that scar, Honey-bud.”
“I will, now — because the man who caused it has gone North.”
“A — man!”
“Yes, poor fellow. When the dressings were changed the agony crazed him and he sometimes bit me. I used to be so annoyed,” she added mildly, “and I used to shake my forefinger at him and say, ‘Now it’s got to be done, Jones; will you promise not to bite me.’ And the poor fellow would promise with tears in his eyes — and then he’d forget — poor boy — —”
“I’d have slapped him,” said Celia, indignantly. “What a darling you are, Ailsa! . . . Now bundle into bed,” she added, “because you haven’t any too much time to sleep, and poor little Letty Lynden will be half dead when she comes off duty.”
Letty really appeared to be half dead when she arrived, and bent wearily over the bed where Ailsa now lay in calm-breathing, rosy slumber.
“Oh, you sweet thing!” she murmured to herself, “you can sleep for two hours yet, but you don’t know it.” And, dropping her garments from her, one by one, she bathed and did up her hair and crept in beside Ailsa very softly, careful not to arouse her.
But Ailsa, who slept lightly, awoke, turned on her pillow, passed one arm around Letty’s dark curls.
“I’ll get up,” she said drowsily. “Why didn’t Flannery call me?”
“You can sleep for an hour or two yet, darling,” cooed Letty, nestling close to her. “Mrs. Craig has taken old Bill Symonds, and they’ll be on duty for two hours more.”
“How generous of Celia — and of old Symonds, too. Everybody seems to be so good to me here.”
“Everybody adores you, dear,” whispered Letty, her lips against
Ailsa’s flushed cheek. “Don’t you know it?”
Ailsa laughed; and the laugh completed her awakening past all hope of further slumber.
“You quaint little thing,” she said, looking at Letty. “You certainly are the most engaging girl I ever knew.”
Letty merely lay and looked her adoration, her soft cheek pillowed on Ailsa’s arm. Presently she said:
“Do you remember the first word you ever spoke to me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And — you asked me to come and see you.”
“Who wouldn’t ask you — little rosebud?”
But Letty only sighed and closed her eyes; nor did she awaken when
Ailsa cautiously withdrew her arm and slipped out of bed.
She still had an hour and more; she decided to dress and go out for a breath of fresh, sweet air to fortify her against the heavy atmosphere of the sick wards.
It was not yet perfectly dark; the thin edge of the new moon traced a pale curve in the western sky; frogs were trilling; a night-bird sang in a laurel thicket unceasingly.
The evening was still, but the quiet was only comparative because, always, all around her, the stirring and murmur of the vast army never entirely ended.
But the drums and bugles, answering one another from hill to hill, from valley to valley, had ceased; she saw the reddening embers of thousands of camp fires through the dusk; every hill was jewelled, every valley gemmed.
In the darkness she could hear the ground vibrate under the steady tread of a column of infantry passing, but she could not see them — could distinguish no motion against the black background of the woods.
Standing there on the veranda, she listened to them marching by. From the duration of the sound she judged it to be only one regiment, probably a new one arriving from the North.
A little while afterward she heard on some neighbouring hillside the far outbreak of hammering, the distant rattle of waggons, the clash of stacked muskets. Then, in sudden little groups, scattered starlike over the darkness, camp fires twinkled into flame. The new regiment had pitched its tents.
It was a pretty sight; she walked out along the fence to see more clearly, stepping aside to avoid collision with a man in the dark, who was in a great hurry — a soldier, who halted to make his excuses, and, instead, took her into his arms with a breathless exclamation.
“Philip!” she faltered, trembling all over.
“Darling! I forgot I was not to touch you!” He crushed her hands swiftly to his lips and let them drop.
“My little Ailsa! My — little — Ailsa!” he repeated under his breath — and caught her to him again.
“Oh — darling — we mustn’t,” she protested faintly. “Don’t you remember, Philip? Don’t you remember, dear, what we are to be to one another?”
He stood, face pressed against her burning cheeks; then his arm encircling her waist fell away.
“You’re right, dear,” he said with a sigh so naively robust, so remarkably hearty, that she laughed outright — a very tremulous and uncertain laugh.
“What a tragically inclined boy! I never before heard a ‘thunderous sigh’; but I had read of them in poetry. Philip, tell me instantly how you came here!”
“Ran the guard,” he admitted.
“Now you know very well I don’t,” he said, laughing. “I spend every minute trying not to. . . . And, Ailsa, what do you think? A little while ago when I was skulking along fences and lurking in ditches — all for your sake, ungrateful fair one! — tramp — tramp — tramp comes a column out of the darkness! ‘Lord help us,’ said I, ‘it’s the police guard, or some horrible misfortune, and I’ll never see my Ailsa any more!’ Then I took a squint at ‘em, and I saw officers riding, with about a thousand yards of gold lace on their sleeves, and I saw their music trudging along with that set of silver chimes aloft between two scarlet yaks’ tails; and I saw the tasselled fezzes and the white gaiters and— ‘Aha!’ said I— ‘the Zou-Zous! But which?’
“And, by golly, I made out the number painted white on their knapsacks; and, Ailsa, it was the 3d Zouaves, Colonel Craig! — just arrived! And there — on that hill — are their fires!”
“Oh, Phil!” she exclaimed in rapture, “how heavenly for Celia! I’m perfectly crazy to see Curt and Steve — —”
“Please transfer a little of that sweet madness to me.”
“Dear — I can’t, can I?”
But she let him have her hands; and, resting beside him on the rail fence, bent her fair head as he kissed her joined hands, let it droop lower, lower, till her cheek brushed his. Then, turning very slowly, their lips encountered, rested, till the faint fragrance of hers threatened his self-control.
She opened her blue eyes as he raised his head, looking at him vaguely in the dusk, then very gently shook her head and rested one cheek on her open palm.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I — don’t — know—” and closed her lids once more.
“Know what, dearest of women?”
“What is going to happen to us, Phil. . . . It seems incredible — after our vows — after the lofty ideals we — —”
“The ideals are there,” he said in a low voice. And, in his tone there was a buoyancy, a hint of something new to her — something almost decisive, something of protection which began vaguely to thrill her, as though that guard which she had so long mounted over herself might be relieved — the strain relaxed — the duty left to him.
She laid one hand on his arm, looked up, searching his face, hesitated. A longing to relax the tension of self-discipline came over her — to let him guard them both — to leave all to him — let him fight for them both. It was a longing to find security in the certainty of his self-control, a desire to drift, and let him be responsible, to let him control the irresponsibility within her, the unwisdom, the delicate audacity, latent, mischievous, that needed a reversal of the role of protector and protected to blossom deliciously into the coquetry that she had never dared.
“Are you to be trusted?” she asked innocently.
“Yes, at last. You know it. Even if I — —”
“Yes, dear.”
She considered him with a new and burning curiosity. It was the feminine in her, wondering, not yet certain, whether it might safely dare.
“I suppose I’ve made an anchorite out of you,” she ventured.
“You can judge,” he said, laughing; and had her in his arms again, and kissed her consenting lips and palms, and looked down into the sweet eyes; and she smiled back at him, confident, at rest.
“What has wrought this celestial change in you, Phil?” she whispered, listlessly humourous.
“What change?”
“The spiritual.”
“Is there one? I seem to kiss you just as ardently.”
“I know. . . . But — for the first time since I ever saw you — I feel that I am safe in the world. . . . It may annoy me.”
He laughed.
“I may grow tired of it,” she insisted, watching him. “I may behave like a naughty, perverse, ungrateful urchin, and kick and scream and bite. . . . But you won’t let me be hurt, will you?”
“No, child.” His voice was laughing at her, but his eyes were curiously grave.
She put both arms up around his neck with a quick catch of her breath.
“I do love you — I do love you. I know it now, Phil — I know it as I never dreamed of knowing it. . . . You will never let me be hurt, will you? Nothing can harm me now, can it?”
“Nothing, Ailsa.”
She regarded him dreamily. Sometimes her blue eyes wandered toward the stars, sometimes toward the camp fires on the hill.
“Perfect — perfect belief in — your goodness — to me,” she murmured vaguely. “Now I shall — repay you — by perversity — misbehaviour — I don’t know what — I don’t know — what — —”
Her lids closed; she yielded to his embrace; one slim, detaining hand on his shoulder held her closer, closer.
“You must — never — go away,” her lips formed.
But already he was releasing her, pale but coolly master of the situation. Acquiescent, inert, she lay in his arms, then straightened and rested against the rail beside her.
Presently she smiled to herself, looked at him, still smiling.
“Shall we go into Dr. West’s office and have supper, Phil? I’m on duty in half an hour and my supper must be ready by this time; and I’m simply dying to have you make up for the indignity of the kitchen.”
“You ridiculous little thing!”
“No, I’m not. I could weep with rage when I think of you in the kitchen and — and — Oh, never mind. Come, will you?” And she held out her hand.
Her supper was ready, as she had predicted, and she delightedly made room for him beside her on the bench, and helped him to freshly baked bread and ancient tinned vegetables, and some doubtful boiled meat, all of which he ate with an appetite and a reckless and appreciative abandon that fascinated her.
“Darling!” she whispered in consternation, “don’t they give you anything in camp?”
“Sometimes,” he enunciated, chewing vigorously on the bread. “We don’t get much of this, darling. And the onions have all sprouted, and the potatoes are rotten.”
She regarded him for a moment, then laughed hysterically.
“I beg your pardon, Phil, but somehow this reminds me of our cook feeding her policeman: — just for one tiny second, darling — —”
They abandoned any effort to control their laughter. Ailsa had become transfigured into a deliciously mischievous and bewildering creature, brilliant of lip and cheek and eye, irresponsible, provoking, utterly without dignity or discipline.
She taunted him with his appetite, jeered at him for his recent and marvellous conversion to respectability, dared him to make love to her, provoked him at last to abandon his plate and rise and start toward her. And, of course, she fled, crying in consternation: “Hush, Philip! You mustn’t make such a racket or they’ll put us both out!” — keeping the table carefully between them, dodging every strategy of his, every endeavour to make her prisoner, quick, graceful, demoralising in her beauty and abandon. They behaved like a pair of very badly brought up children, until she was in real terror of discovery.
“Dearest,” she pleaded, “if you will sit down and resume your gnawing on that crust, I’ll promise not to torment you. . . . I will, really. Besides, it’s within a few minutes of my tour of duty — —”
She stopped, petrified, as a volley of hoof-beats echoed outside, the clash of arms and accoutrements rang close by the porch.
“Phil!” she gasped.
And the door opened and Colonel Arran walked in.
There was a dreadful silence. Arran stood face to face with Berkley, looked him squarely in the eye where he stood at salute. Then, as though he had never before set eyes on him, Arran lifted two fingers to his visor mechanically, turned to Ailsa, uncovered, and held out both his hands.
“I had a few moments, Ailsa,” he said quietly. “I hadn’t seen you for so long. Are you well?”
She was almost too frightened to answer; Berkley stood like a s
tatue, awaiting dismissal, and later the certain consequences of guard running.
And, aware of her fright, Arran turned quietly to Berkley:
“Private Ormond,” he said, “there is a led-horse in my escort, in charge of Private Burgess. It is the easier and — safer route to camp. You may retire.”
Berkley’s expression was undecipherable as he saluted, shot a glance at Ailsa, turned sharply, and departed.
“Colonel Arran,” she said miserably, “it was all my fault. I am too ashamed to look at you.”
“Let me do what worrying is necessary,” he said quietly. “I am — not unaccustomed to it. . . . I suppose he ran the guard.”
She did not answer.
The ghost of a smile — a grim one — altered the Colonel’s expression for a second, then faded. He looked at Ailsa curiously. Then:
“Have you anything to tell me that — perhaps I may be entitled to know about, Ailsa?”
“No.”
“I see. I beg your pardon. If you ever are — perplexed — in doubt — I shall always — —”
“Thank you,” she said faintly. . . . “And — I am so sorry — —”
“So am I. I’m sorrier than you know — about more matters than you know, Ailsa—” He softly smote his buckskin-gloved hands together, gazing at vacancy. Then lifted his head and squared his heavy shoulders.
“I thought I’d come when I could. The chances are that the army will move if this weather continues. The cavalry will march out anyway. So I thought I’d come over for a few moments, Ailsa. . . . Are you sure you are quite well? And not overdoing it? You certainly look well; you appear to be in perfect health. . . . I am very much relieved. . . . And — don’t worry. Don’t cherish apprehension about — anybody.” He added, more to himself than to her: “Discipline will be maintained — must be maintained. There are more ways to do it than by military punishments, I know that now.”
He looked up, held out his hand, retained hers, and patted it gently.
“Don’t worry, child,” he said, “don’t worry.” And went out to the porch thoughtfully, gazing straight ahead of him as his horse was brought up. Then, gathering curb and snaffle, he set toe to stirrup and swung up into his saddle.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 500