As quickly as General Gates’s reputation had been lost, reputations were won. Marion, issuing from the swamps of the Pee Dee carried alarm to the gates of Charles Town. Sumter made his name a terror through all the country between the Broad and the Catawba Rivers. Colonel Campbell on the Watauga, Davy on the North Carolina border flung the fiery torch far and wide. It was all that Tarleton and his British Legion, the best force for this light work that we possessed, and Ferguson and his Provincials, now a shattered body — it was all that these could do to make head against the rebels or maintain the spirits of our party.
There were humane men, thank God, in both camps. But there were also men whom the memory of old wrongs wrought to madness. Cruel things were done. Quarter was refused, men were hung after capture, houses were burnt, women were made homeless. Therefore, no bitterness of feeling, no animosity, on one side or the other, was much of a surprise to me; rather I was prepared for it. But as the soldier by profession is the last, I hope, to resort to these practices, so is he the most sorely hurt by them. And we, as I have said, had another grievance. Not only were we at a loss in this irregular fighting, but we had held our heads too high in the last war. We had looked down — the worst of us — on the Colonial officers. And now this was remembered against us. We were at once blamed and derided; our drill, our discipline, our service were turned to ridicule. Nor was this shrew of a girl the first who had scoffed at our courage and made us the subject of her scorn.
Yet, though I understood her feelings, I was hurt. When a man is laid aside by illness or by an injury, something of the woman awakes in him, and he is wounded by trifles which would not touch him at another time. With Wilmer gone, with none but black faces about me, with no certainty of safety, I had only this girl to whom I could open my views or impart my wishes. And enemy as she was, she was a woman — in that lay much of my grievance. She was a woman, and the notion of the woman as his companion and comforter in sickness and pain is so deeply inbred in a man, that when she stands away from him at that time, it seems to him a thing monstrous and unnatural.
I think I felt her aloofness more keenly because, though I had barely seen her face, I was beginning to know her. The living-room, as in many of these remote plantations, occupied the middle of the house, running through from front to rear. There was no second story and all the other chambers opened on this side or that of this middle room which served also for a passage. The business of the day was done in it, or on the veranda, according to the season. It followed that, though my door was now kept shut, I heard her voice a dozen, nay, a score of times a-day. In the morning I heard its full grave tones, mingling with the hurly-burly of business, giving orders, setting tasks, issuing laws to the plantation; later in the day I heard it lowered to the pitch of the afternoon stillness and the cooing of the innumerable pigeons that made the veranda their home.
I heard her most clearly when she raised her voice to speak to Aunt Lyddy; and aware that there is hardly a call upon the patience more trying than that made by deafness, I was surprised by the kindness and self-control of one who in my case had shown herself so hard and so inhuman.
“Confound her!” I thought more than once — the hours were long and dull, and I was often restless and in pain. “I wish I could see her, if it were only to rid myself of my impression of her. I don’t suppose she is good-looking. I had only a glimpse of her, and I was light-headed. When a man is in that state every nurse is a Venus.”
And then, on the fourth day, I did see her. I heard some one approach my door and knock. I thought that it was Mammy Jacks and I cried “Come in!” But it was not Mammy Jacks. It was Madam Constantia at last. She came in, and stood a little within the doorway, looking down — not at me but at my feet. And if she had not been all that I had fancied her, and more, I might have had eyes to read something of shame in her face, and in the stiffness that did not deign to leave the threshold. She closed the door behind her. She closed it with care it seemed to me.
“I cannot rise,” I said, taking careful stock of her, “honored as I am by your visit. Can I offer you a chair, Miss Wilmer?”
“I do not need one,” she replied. She was laboring, I could see, under strong emotion, and was in no mood for compliments. She was in white as I had first seen her; and the quiet tones which I had learned to associate with her, agreed perfectly with the small head set on the neck as gracefully as a lily on the stem, with the wide low brow, the serious mouth, the firm chin. “I prefer to stand,” she continued — and still she did not raise her eyes — I wondered if they were black and hoped but could hardly believe that they were blue. “I shall not keep you long, sir.”
“You are not keeping me,” I answered with irony. “I shall be here when you are gone, I fear, Miss Wilmer.”
If I thought to work upon her feelings by that, and to force her to think of my loneliness, I failed wofully. “Not for long,” she replied. “We are arranging to send you to Salisbury, sir. You will doubtless be sufficiently recovered to travel by tomorrow. You will be safer there than here, and will have better attendance in the hospital.”
I was thunderstruck. “To-morrow!” I echoed. “Travel? But — but I could not!” I cried. “I could not, Miss Wilmer. The bones of my arm have not knit! You know what your roads are, and my shoulder is still painful, horribly painful.”
“I am sorry, sir, that circumstances render it necessary.”
“But, good heavens!” I cried, “You don’t, you cannot mean it!”
“The man who put your arm in splints,” she replied, averting her eyes from me, “will see that you are taken in a litter as far as the cross-roads. I have arranged for a cart to meet you there — a pallet and a—” her voice tailed off, I could not catch the last word. “They will see you carefully as far as—” again she muttered a name so low that I did not catch it— “on the way to Salisbury. Or to Hillsborough if that be necessary.”
“Hillsborough?” I cried, aghast. “But have you reflected? It is eighty or ninety miles to Hillsborough! Ninety miles of rough roads — where there are roads, Madam!”
“It’s not a matter of choice,” she replied firmly — but I fancied that she turned a shade paler. “And it may not be necessary to go beyond Salisbury. At any rate the matter is settled, sir. Circumstances render it necessary.”
“But it is impossible!” I urged. “It is out of the question!” The memory of my ride from King’s Mountain, of the stream I had had to cross, was too sharp, too recent to permit me to entertain delusions. “The pain I suffered coming here—”
“Pain!” she cried, letting herself go at that. “What is a little pain, sir, in these days, when things so much worse, things unspeakable are being suffered — are being done and suffered every day? Our men whom you delivered to the Indians at Augusta, did they not suffer pain?”
“It was an abominable thing!” I said, aghast at her attitude. “But I did not do it, God forbid! I detest the thought of it, Miss Wilmer! And you, you do not mean that you would be as cruel as those—” I stopped. I let her imagine the rest. I held her with indignant eyes.
“I am doing the best I can,” she said sullenly. But I saw that she was ashamed of her proposal even while she persisted in it; and I grew stronger in my resolve.
“I am helpless,” I said. “Your father can do what he pleases, I am in his hands. But even he is bound by the laws of humanity, which he obeyed when he spared me. I cannot think that he did that, I cannot think that he behaved to me as one soldier to another in order to put me to torture! If he tells me I must go, I must go, I have no remedy. But until he does, I will never believe that it is his wish!”
“You will force yourself on us?” she cried, her voice quivering. “On us, two women as we are, and alone?”
I pointed to my shoulder. “I am not very dangerous,” I said.
“I do not think you are, sir, or ever were,” she retorted with venom. And now for the first time she met my look, her eyes sparkling with anger. “As one soldi
er to another!” she said. “It is marvellous that you should recognize him as a soldier! But I suppose that the habit of surrender is an education in many ways.”
“Any one may insult a prisoner,” I said. And I had the satisfaction of seeing the blood burn in her face. “But you did not come here to tell me that, Miss Wilmer.”
“No,” she answered. “I came here to tell you that you must go. You must go, sir.”
“When your father sends me away,” I said, “I must needs go. Until he does—”
“You will not?”
“No, Miss Wilmer, by your leave, I will not,” I said with all the firmness of which I was capable. “Unless I am taken by force. And you are a woman. You will not be so untrue to yourself and to your sex as to use force to one, crippled as I am, and helpless as I am. Think! If your dogs broke a raccoon’s leg, would you drag it a mile — two miles?”
The color ebbed from her face, and she shuddered — she who was proposing this! She shuddered at the picture of a brute’s broken leg! And yet, strange to say, she clung to her purpose. She looked at me between anger and vexation, and “If I do not, others will,” she said. “Do you understand that, sir? Is not that enough for you? Cannot you believe, cannot you do me the justice to believe that I am doing what I think to be right? That I am acting for the best? If you stay here after this your blood be upon your own head!” she added solemnly.
“So be it,” I said. “It would be a very great danger that would draw me from where I am, Miss Wilmer. I am like the King of France, or whoever it was, who said ‘J’y suis, J’y reste.’”
“Stubborn! Foolish!” I heard her mutter.
“I hate pain,” I said complacently.
“Do you hate pain more than you fear death?” she asked, gazing at me with sombre eyes.
“I am afraid I do,” I replied. “I am a milksop.” And I looked at her.
I was beginning to enjoy the discussion. But if I hoped for a farther exchange of badinage with her I was mistaken. She did not deign to reply. She did that to which I could make no answer. She went out and closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE SMITHY
Hinc Constantia, illinc Furor.
CATULLUS.
The way in which the girl broke off the discussion and went out did more than surprise me. It left me anxious and, in a degree, apprehensive. Her proposal would have been a cruel and a heartless one if nothing lay behind it. If something lay behind it, some risk serious enough to justify the step on which she insisted, then I could think better of her but very much worse of my own plight.
Yet Wilmer had thought that I was safe in his house, if not in the huts. And if I were not secure here, what risks must I not run on the slow, painful, helpless journey to Gates’s Head-Quarters, through a district ill-affected to the British! Once there, it is true, my life would be safe, and the Colonial Surgeons enjoyed a high reputation for skill. But the appliances of a rebel hospital were sure to be few, the fare rough and scanty; it was unlikely that I should be better off there than where I was. In the end, doubtless, I should have to go thither; it was the only road to exchange and freedom, unless a happy chance rescued me. But a life which would be bearable when I could use my arm and had recovered my strength would be no bed of roses at present.
And to be quite honest I had found an interest where I was. I had enjoyed my tussle with this strange girl, and I looked forward to a repetition of it. Her beauty, her disdain, her desire to be rid of me piqued me — as whom would it not have piqued? — and whetted that appetite for conquest which is of the man, manly. Madam Constantia! The name suited her. I could fancy that she governed the plantation with a firm hand and a high courage.
On the whole I was determined, whatever the risk, to stay where I was; and yet as the day waned I felt less happy. My shoulder was painful, I was restless. I told myself that I had some fever. I was tired, too, of my own company and the house seemed more still than usual. I hoped that the girl would pay me another visit, would resume the argument, and make a second effort to persuade me; but she did not, and when my supper came Mammy Jacks dispensed it with an air, absurdly tragic. She heaved sighs from a capacious bosom, and looked at me as if I were already doomed.
“Marse, you’r runnin’ up wid trubble,” she said.
“Ma’am’Stantia, she look like der wuz sump’n wrong. She look like she whip all de han’s on de plantation.”
“I dare say she is pretty severe,” I said carelessly.
“I des’low you know nothin”bout it,” the woman replied in great scorn. “She sholy not whip one ha’f, t’ree quarters, ten times ‘nough! When Marse Wilmer come home, sez he, whip all dis black trash! Make up fer lost time. De last man better fer it! Begin wid Mammy Jacks! Dat’s w’at he say, but I des hanker ter see him tech ole Mammy! I speck sumpin’ wud happen bimeby ter ‘sprise ‘im. Ef Missie got win’ uv it, she up en tell ‘im!”
“Is he coming back soon?” I asked.
“Day atter tomorrow. Clar to goodness, when he mounts dem steps, Missie’ll not mope round no mo’! She not make like she whip de han’s den.”
“She’s very fond of him, is she?”
“Der ain’t nobody in Car’lina fer ‘er ceppin er dad! Seem like she idol — idol—”
“Idolizes him,” I suggested.
“Mout be dat,” Mammy Jacks assented. She repeated the word to herself with much satisfaction. It was a long one.
The little vixen, I thought. So she would be rid of me before her father returned! She knew that he would not send me away, and so — well, she was a spit-fire!
“Look here, Mammy Jacks,” I said. “I don’t think that I shall sleep to-night. I am restless. I should like something to read. Will you ask Miss Wilmer if she can lend me a book. Any book will do, old or new.”
“Tooby sho,’” she said, and she went to do my bidding.
I thought that this might re-open relations. It might bring the girl herself to learn what kind of book I would choose to have. There was not likely to be much choice on this up-country plantation, where I need not expect to find the “ Fool of Quality” or “The Female Quixote” For any of the fashionable productions of the circulating libraries. But a Pope, a Richardson, or possibly a Fielding I might hope to have.
Alas, my reckoning was at fault. I had none, of these. It was Mammy Jacks who presently brought back the answer and the book. “Missie, she up ‘n say dat monst’ous good book fer you,” the negress explained, as she set down the volume with a grin. “Missie say it wuz ole en new, but she specks new ter you. She tuck’n say she ‘ope you read it ter night — you in monst’ous big need uv it.”
Puzzled by the message, and a little curious, I took the book and opened it. It was the Bible!
For a moment I was very angry; it seemed to be a poor jest, and in bad taste. Then I saw, or thought that I saw, that it was not a jest at all. This queer girl had sent the Bible, thinking to impress me, to frighten me, to bend me at the last moment to her will!
Certainly she should not persuade me now! Go? Never!
After all I had a quiet night. I slept well and awoke with a keen desire to turn the tables on her. I counted on her coming to learn the result of her last step, perhaps to try the effect of a last persuasion. But she did not come near me, and the day passed very slowly. I thanked heaven that Wilmer would return on the morrow. I should have some one to speak to then, some one to look at, I should no longer be cut off from my kind. And he might bring news, news of Tarleton, news of Lord Cornwallis, news of our movements in the field. Out of pure ennui I dozed through most of the afternoon. The sun set and the short twilight passed unnoticed. It was dark when I awoke. I wondered for a moment where I was. Then I remembered, and fancied that I must have slept some hours, for I was hungry.
And then, “Wilmer has come,” I thought; I heard the voice of a man in the living-room. Presently I heard another voice, nay, more than one. “Yes, Wilmer has come,” I thought, “and not alon
e. I shall have some one to speak to at last, and news perhaps. Doubtless they are occupied with him, but they need not forget me altogether. They might bring me a light and my supper.”
And then — strange how swiftly, in a flash, in a heartbeat, the mind seizes and accepts a new state of things! — then I knew why Mammy Jacks had brought no light and no supper. I heard her voice, excited, tearful, protesting, raised in the unrestrained vehemence of the black; and a man’s voice that silenced her harshly, silenced her with an oath. And therewith I needed no more to explain the position. I grasped it.
When a few seconds later the door was flung open, and the light broke in upon me, and with the light three or four rough burly figures, who crowded one after the other over the threshold, I was prepared. I had had that moment of warning, and I was ready. There were scared black faces behind them, filling the doorway, and peeping athwart them, and murmurs, and a stir of panic proceeding from the room without.
“You come without much ceremony, gentlemen,”
I said, speaking as coolly as I could. For the moment I had only one thought, one aim, one anxiety — that what I felt should not appear.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 616