To Arabella’s amazement the other officers looked nettled, even
resentful, as if disparaged in some sort. Mervyn indeed wore an
expression of blank dismay as if he hardly knew how he should interpret
this setting aside of himself in favor of his subordinate. He could not
altogether restrain himself, and with a cold smile and a stiff dignity
he said presently, “We have all learned more or less of the Cherokee
language.”
“Well,--well,--it is no great matter, for of course the official
interpreter goes with the party.” Captain Howard, so to speak,
shouldered the affair aside. He could well understand, however, the
mortification of Mervyn and Jerrold that they should be passed over
for a younger officer and only an ensign in rank. But he had had
the evidence of his senses to Raymond’s knowledge of the Cherokee
language, and this confirmed him in the selection which he had already
considered. He was glad to discover this particular fitness in the man
of his choice for this delicate and diplomatic mission, one who would
be keenly alive to all he might hear or see on festive or informal
occasions when no interpreter could be on duty.
Raymond now had not a word to say, and presently he excused himself
with a look of importance and the plea that he desired to glance over
the roll and select the men for the expedition, to make sure that all
were fit, and properly equipped for the march.
When he had quitted the group a silence ensued, heavy with the unspoken
reproach of the captain-lieutenant. The commandant felt constrained to
some casual comment: “The trouble with very young men is that they are
too disposed to underestimate difficulties,--too cock-sure. Raymond
would be as well pleased with the assignment if the march were five
hundred miles instead of one hundred and fifty!”
“And so should I,” said Mervyn, suggestively.
“Tut! Tut! You young men shouldn’t be so grudging,” said Captain
Howard, making the best of the untoward situation. “Give a man a chance
to show that he holds his commission for some better reason than the
purchase money. Gad, sir, don’t grudge him so!”
As he turned away Jerrold, recovering himself from his disappointment
as best he might, thinking it a matter which he could more fittingly
deplore in secret and seclusion at another time, sought to obviate the
awkwardness of the discussion by inviting Captain Howard’s attention to
his daughter’s fine shot, the arrow still sticking in the bull’s-eye.
Captain Howard responded alertly, grateful indeed for the opportune
digression, and walked briskly down to the target with the fair
Arabella hanging on his arm, Jerrold at his side, and Mervyn still
sullenly preoccupied, following slowly. But the pleasure of the day
for Arabella was done and dead. Her father’s outcry of surprise and
approbation and commotion of applause, she felt was fictitious and
affected,--the kind of affectionate flattery which one offers a child
for some infantile conceit. It was a matter of supreme inutility in his
estimation whether she could shoot with a bow or not, and his mind was
busied with more important details. Jerrold’s phrases of commendation
as the group stood before the target and commented on the position of
the arrow were of no value, for he knew naught of the difficulty of
the achievement. Mervyn could really appreciate the exploit itself,
but Raymond valued it adequately, more than all because it was hers,
and he took pride and pleasure in her graceful proficiency. She had
had a glow of satisfaction in a good thing in its way well done;
she had been proud and pleased and well content with such honestly
earned admiration, but now her satisfaction was all wilted; and when
her father said, “There now, daughter, run away,--enough for this
morning,--run into the house, dear,” she was quite ready to obey, and
grateful for her dismissal and the breaking-up of the party. Mervyn,
to her infinite relief, did not offer to follow her. His mind was all
on the expedition to Choté, which Ensign Raymond was to command, and
he walked off with Jerrold and the captain, thinking that even yet
something might befall to induce the commandant to countermand his
orders and make a change in the personnel of the force.
Arabella was sure she was not tired, for a little exercise such as
she had taken was hardly enough to tax her buoyant, youthful vigor,
but she felt as she reached the stairs that she had scarcely strength
to ascend the flight. She turned back to the room that served as
parlor, rejoicing to find it vacant. She sank down in one of the great
chairs before the fire, which was dull and slow this bland day; the
wood was green, the sap had risen and was slowly oozing out at the
ends of the logs and dripping down on the ash below. It had a dulcet
sibilance in the heat; it was like some far-off singing, which she
could hear but could not catch the melody. As she vaguely listened to
this elfin minstrelsy she wondered if Raymond would go without a word
of farewell,--she wondered if the expedition were of special danger.
She pressed her hands against her eyes to darken her vivid imaginings.
Oh, why should such risks be taken! She wondered if he would ever
return,--and then she wondered if her heart had ceased to beat with the
thought.
Never, never had she imagined she could be so unhappy,--and here, where
she had so longed to come. She gazed about the room with its rude
construction metamorphosed by its barbaric decorations of feathers, and
strange weapons, and curious hangings of aboriginal weavings, and rugs,
and draperies of fur, and thought how often she had pictured the place
to her mind’s eye in England from her father’s letters, and how she
had rejoiced when her aunt had declared that now that the war was over
they would visit the commandant in his own fort. And what a tumult of
anxiety, and fear, and doubt, and desolation had whelmed her here!--and
would he go without a word?
It seemed just and fitting that the sky should be overcast as the day
wore on,--that clouds should gather without as the light had failed
within. The air continued mild; the fire dully drooled; and when she
asked her father at the dinner-table if the expedition would set
forth if it should rain, he laughed with great gayety and told her
that frontier soldiers were very particular never to get their feet
wet--a not altogether felicitous joke, and indeed he was no great wit,
for Mrs. Annandale tartly demanded why if they were allowed to be so
particular were they not furnished with pattens. This Captain Howard
considered very funny indeed, seeing doubtless in his mental vision
the garrison of Fort Prince George thus accoutred; he laughed until
Arabella admonished him that he should not be so merry when perhaps he
was sending a score of men to a dreadful death at the hands of savages,
who were eager and thirsting for blood, in a wilderness so dense and
sombre and drear that she thought that Milton, or Dante, or anybody
who had sought to portray hell, might have found a new expression of
desolation in such mysterious, impenetrable, trackless forests. Then
truly he became grave.
“Raymond’s mission is not one of aggression,” he said. “I have thrown
what safe-guards I could about him. I trust and I believe he will be
safe if he conducts properly.”
“And what is his mission, sir?” asked Arabella.
“Do you expect me to tell you that when he does not know it himself?”
said her father, laughing. “He is not to open his sealed instructions
till he reaches Choté, Old Town.”
Arabella’s eyes were wide with dismayed wonder. To her this seemed
all the more terrible. To thrust one’s head into the lion’s jaws,
not knowing whether the beast is caged or free, ravenous or sated,
trained or wild. She said as much to Ensign Raymond himself, when after
candle-light he came in to pay his devoirs and take a formal farewell
of the household. He was in great spirits, flushed and hilarious--very
merry indeed when he found that Arabella was in much perturbation
because he, himself, was in the dark as to the tenor of his mission,
and would be one hundred and fifty miles distant in the heart of the
Cherokee country ere he discovered the nature of his duty.
“Suppose it proves contrary to your own views and wishes,” Arabella
argued.
“A soldier must have no views and wishes contrary to his duty,” he
laughed.
“But suppose you find it is impossible!”
“I have too much confidence in the commandant to believe he would set
me an impossible task.”
“Oh, don’t be too sure of that,” interpolated Mrs. Annandale, who was
benign, almost affectionate in her manner toward him, now that she was
about to be rid of this handsome marplot, who did as much damage to her
darling scheme by the unholy influence his presence exerted on Mervyn’s
temper as by his own magnetic personality. “Poor dear Brother was
always a visionary.”
Raymond burst out laughing at the idea of the commandant as a dreamer
of dreams. “I have such faith in whatever visions he may entertain as
to be certain they will materialize at Choté Great!”
“Will you be sure to come back?” Arabella asked, as they stood at the
last moment near the table where the candles threw an upward glow on
his red coat, his laughing eyes, his handsome, spirited face, and his
powdered hair. He held his hat in his left hand and was extending his
right hand toward her.
“Will you be sure to come back?”
“Oh, my dear, don’t be so solemn,--your tones might summon a man from
the ends of the earth or a spirit from the confines of being!” cried
Mrs. Annandale.
Once more Raymond’s joyous laughter rang through the room. “I shall
come alive if I can conveniently, and all in one piece. If not I shall
revisit the glimpses of the moon! I shall return--” and then in a more
serious tone, seeing her seriousness, “I shall return, God willing.”
Mervyn himself entertained considerable doubt of this happy issue
of the expedition. He thought Raymond far too young, too flighty,
too inexperienced to be trusted at such a distance, unhampered by
authority, subject to strange untried conditions which could not
be foreseen and provided against. It was necessary that all the
details should be confided to his own unaided judgment, and it would
not have greatly astonished the captain-lieutenant if none of the
party should ever be seen again alive. In the dense jungles of the
mountain wilderness, in the power of an implacable, aggrieved, and
savage people, the fate of this handful of soldiers might ever remain
a mystery and unavenged. The thought softened his heart toward his
quondam friend. Mervyn was of the temperament rarely consciously at
fault; so little did he admit dereliction in his relations with the
outside world that he was often self-deceived. But in this instance his
conscience stirred. He realized that for his offended vanity, for an
unspoken fleer in a man’s eyes which his own coxcombry had provoked, he
had in revenge caught at an immaterial matter in the guard report and
contrived to wreak his displeasure on Raymond in a sort most calculated
to wound him, subjecting him to a reprimand, unwilling though it was,
from the commandant. After that event ensued an alienation as complete
as their friendship had formerly been close. At the time he winced to
discover that Raymond had the magnanimity to refrain from retorting in
kind, and had not held him up to ridicule in the commandant’s eyes by
gossiping on the expedition to Tamotlee of his unlucky absence from the
scene of the conflagration. To be sure, Raymond knew that fact would be
elicited in the regular channels of the reports, but he had not gone
out of his way to further his false friend’s mortification. Mervyn
wished now that he had been less morose, less intractable. He had, he
thought, no reason to be jealous of Raymond’s station in Arabella’s
esteem. He was a dashing, attractive, handsome man, well calculated to
entertain and amuse a young lady who was not used to spend her time in
so dull a place as a frontier fort. Mervyn had no serious fault to find
with the encouragement which she had vouchsafed his own suit. Therefore
why should he let the breach yawn and widen between himself and his
former friend. He did not linger in the commandant’s parlor after
Raymond had made his adieus, but followed him to his quarters, where he
found the ensign with his servant busily packing his effects for the
march.
“Just as I expected,” said Mervyn, ignoring Raymond’s stare of
surprise, and perching himself on one end of the table as of old in the
scarcity of chairs; he carelessly eyed the confused medley of articles
spread over the bed, the chairs, the floor. “Making ready for the
march, are you? I came to see if you wouldn’t like to borrow my otter
fur great coat and my heavy lynx rug for the trip. There is a change in
the temperature impending,--freezing weather,--and you might need them.”
Raymond hesitated. He would not wish to churlishly refuse an overture
for renewed friendship or, as he rightly interpreted this, a covert
apology. But he had that fibre of sensitiveness which winced from
a favor bestowed--not from one he loved; a month ago he would have
welcomed the offer, but more because of the feeling indicated than the
utility of the proffered gear, although doubtless the furs would have
stood him in good stead. Now, however, his estimate of Mervyn had
changed and his heart had waxed cold toward him. He said to himself
that he would be willing to risk the chance of freezing, if his own
provision were insufficient, rather than be beholden to Mervyn for
aught under the circumstances.
“I am already taking as much weight as I can afford to carry,” he
replied. “And besides your furs are too costly and delicate to drag
through such a march as this,--thank you, just as much.”
After some words of fruitless insistence Mervyn’s talk digressed to
details of ways and means. He was graciously disposed to supplement
the younger officer’s presumably inferior knowledge by his more
mature advice, a senior in rank, years, and experience. Unrestrained
by any subtle considerations of feeling on such a theme, Raymond did
not scruple to flout this unsolicited counsel with a frank abandon
which bespoke a self-confidence expanded to a prideful jubilance
by the importance of the mission with which he had been intrusted.
But this cavalier reception of the suggestions tendered him did not
impair Mervyn’s urbanity nor hinder the ostensible renewal of pleasant
relations, or rather the ignoring of the fact that such relations had
ever been interrupted. He offered his hand at parting with many good
wishes, and Raymond, whose quickened intuition had come to comprehend
his mental processes, was glad to see the door close upon his well-bred
dissimulation.
“He does not want to feel at all uncomfortable in his conscience if
I should be unlucky enough to be scalped, or frozen, or devoured by
wolves, or lost in the wilderness,” he thought, with a bitter insight.
And was this a seemly lover for Arabella Howard? He wondered how she
could tolerate the dissembler who was not even frank with himself. He
wondered how her father, an epitome of stout-hearted candor, her aunt,
the cleverest of keen-sighted women, would permit this sacrifice of
her. But there were inducements,--rank, fortune, station,--all powerful
to embellish ugly traits, to obliterate unworthy actions, to place the
most creditable construction on selfish sentiments. Raymond, however,
had not time to rail at Fate according to her perverse deserts, for the
hour was late, and his departure imminent.
He was gone on the morrow by the time the garrison was fairly astir,
marching out of the gates as the bugle sounded the reveille. The day
broke clouded and drear; the wind veered to the north; the temperature
fell, and then ensued a long interval of suspense, of gray monotony.
The air became still; it was perceptibly warmer; the dense clouds hung
low and motionless; it was impossible to prognosticate the character
of the change when it should terminate the indefinite uncertainty.
Occasionally as the cheerless afternoon wore on, a vague brightening
over the landscape gave a delusive promise of fairer skies, and then
the sullen day lowered anew. The morrow brought no flattering augury.
Now and then Captain Howard, looking at the heavy clouds, portending
falling weather, meditated anxiously on the difficulties of the
expedition. The temperature was unusually uncertain considering the
season. He did not, however, expect a recurrence of cold weather, with
spring already astir in the warm earth. But with the fickleness of the
southern climate, on the third day after the departure of the little
force, a freeze set in at dawn, and as the temperature moderated toward
noon the threatened falling weather made good its menace in whirls of
snow-flakes.
Captain Howard felt that he could not have been expected to foresee
these climatic changes, and least of all he anticipated snow, which,
most of all, he dreaded. The mission had already been unduly postponed,
and time pressed sorely. The emergency was urgent and this he did not
doubt, but with the complication of wintry storms in the wilderness he
began to seriously question the wisdom of his selection of the officer
to conduct the enterprise to a satisfactory conclusion. He wondered if
Raymond would have the prudence to turn about should the route prove
impracticable through the snowy tangled forests and across a score of
precipitous high mountains and retrace his way to Fort Prince George.
He felt sure that at the first flurry betokening now in the trackless
mountain defiles either Mervyn or Jerrold would have ordered an
“About-face” movement. His heart misgave him as he reflected on
Raymond’s pertinacity. He knew in his secret soul that if ever he saw
the ensign again it would be after he had accomplished his mission to
Choté Great.
“Will he really freeze himself and his twenty men first?” he asked
petulantly,--“or lose his way in the storm?”
Mervyn, albeit somewhat anxious himself after the flakes had begun
to whirl, could but experience a little relish of the discomforts
of his superior, who had apparently passed him over without reason,
and had conferred a duty of difficulty and danger on a very young
officer, probably incapable of executing it with requisite discretion.
He had no inclination to stay and condole with the commandant before
the fire in the orderly room. Here Captain Howard sat and toasted
his spurs half the morning, having a mind himself to ride out on the
trail of the expedition, if its route could be ascertained. There was
the usual routine,--the reports of the orderly room, guard-mounting,
drill,--all the various tours of duty to be observed as rigorously as
if the fort held ten thousand men, instead of its complement of a scant
hundred. Mervyn went about these details with a military promptness and
efficiency and apparent content which commended him much to the morose
commandant, who wished a hundred times that day that he had Raymond
here and that Mervyn were in Raymond’s place, thirty miles away,--nay,
fifty by this time.
“He will have those men off their feet,” muttered Captain Howard.
“He’ll race them through these drifts as if they were sunshine.”
He looked out drearily at the snow now lying trodden and criss-crossed
in devious paths on the parade. It was untouched, unsullied on the
ramparts, where it had lodged in the clefts between the sharp points
of the stockade. It hung in massive drifts on the roofs of the
barracks, the guard-house near the gate, the block-houses; icicles
wrought by an arrested thaw depended from the tower, in which the
sentinel was fain to walk briskly to and fro, beating his breast the
while, although the relief came at close intervals. The flakes were
altogether hiding the contiguous woods, and it seemed that noon had
hardly passed before there were suggestions of dusk in the darkening
atmosphere, and nightfall was early at hand.
“Wonder where he will bivouac, to-night?” the commandant suggested to
the group of officers in the mess-hall before the great fireplace that
half filled one side of the room, for they were all somewhat familiar
with the topography of the region through which Raymond would have to
pass and the names of the Cherokee towns.
It was a cheerful scene indeed. The aroma of a skilfully compounded
punch pervaded it, and the great silver gilt bowl was genially disposed
on the nearest end of the long table, within easy access of the group
about the hearth. The fire roared joyously up the great cavernous
chimney and was brilliantly reflected from the glimmering steel of the
arms suspended on the walls,--trophies, curios, or merely decorations.
The wide-spread wings of the white swan and the scarlet flamingo
arranged above the wainscot in gorgeous alternations hardly now
suggested a mere fiction of flight; they seemed to move, to flutter
and flicker as the firelight fluctuated and the shadows danced. On a
smaller table there was the steady, chaste white focus of candle-light,
for the tapers were illumined in two tall candle-sticks, the cards
were cut for Loo, and the expectant faces of the officers showed in
the calm white gleam, with all the details of their red coats, their
white belts, their powdered hair. Only one of the officers was smoking,
an on-looker at the game, the quarter-master, but Captain Howard’s
snuff-box was repeatedly in his hands.
They all noted his signs of anxiety and agitation, but there was not
an immediate response to his remark, for there could be no freedom of
speculation with a superior officer upon the untoward probabilities of
an enterprise which he had chosen to set on foot. The silence was the
less embarrassing because of the absorptions of the matter immediately
in hand, for the pool was being formed during the deal. But when the
trump was turned, and the players had “declared,” there was a momentary
pause of expectation, each relying on some tactful comment of the
other. Innis, the blond young ensign, looked demurely into the fire
and said nothing. Lieutenant Jerrold, having already glanced through
his hand and seeing “Pam” among the cards, thought it hard lines that
the commandant should not betake himself to his own quarters and cease
to interfere with the game. By way of promoting this consummation he
suggested fatuously:--
“Raymond will pick a spot near good water.”
“Water!” screamed Captain Howard. “Gad, sir. _Pick_ a spot! Water! In
this weather he has nothing to do but to hold his fool mouth open.
_Water!_”
The lieutenant’s unhappy precipitancy suggested the ambush of the
highest card, and his eagerness to utilize it, to the mind of another
player, Ensign Lawrence, who held the lead. He held also the ace of
trumps.
At his sudden cry, “Be civil,--Pam, be civil,” Captain Howard started
from his preoccupation as if he had been shot, glancing from under his
bushy eye-brows at the table on which the young officer was banging
down the ace with great triumph.
The cabalistic phrase was of course only designed to secure the
immunity of the ace from capture by “Pam,” but somehow its singular
aptness of rebuke and Captain Howard’s attitude of sensitive
expectation shook the poise of the board. Ensign Lawrence turned very
red, and only clumsily made shift to gather in the trick he had taken,
for “Pam,” of course, could not be played, his civility having been
bespoken, according to the rules of the game, and the holder following
suit. The other officers made an effort to conceal their embarrassment.
Bolt, the fort-adjutant, cleared his throat uneasily. The onlooking
quarter-master with the pipe began a sentence, paused, forgetting its
purport midway, and silence continued till Ensign Innis came hastily to
the rescue with a suggestion which he thought a masterly diversion.
“I suppose it was an important matter which took Raymond to Choté in
such weather, sir?”
Captain Howard withered him with a glance.
“You have been long enough in the service, sir, to know better than to
ask questions,” he replied sternly.
Then he rose and betook himself forth into the densely whirling snow,
repenting of his irascibility, calling himself a condemned spoil-sport,
and looking at the sky, which was all of a bleak blackness, as well as
the buffeting flakes would permit. He noted the blur of orange light
flaring out from barrack-windows and guard-house door, and guided
his route to his own quarters by the situation of these oases in the
surrounding desert of gloom.
His opening door gave him to view a great gush of firelight and gleam
of candles; the room was perfumed with the sweet odors of the burning
hickory and pine and cedar in the wide chimney and embellished by the
presence of Arabella, whose grace made every place seem a parlor. Her
golden-hued shawl hung in silken folds from the back of an arm-chair
of the primitive frontier manufacture, and on the table lay her
embroidery-frame, whereon roses seemed to bud at her magic touch and
expand under the sunshine of her smiling hazel eyes. Her gown of canary
sarcenet had a black velvet girdle and many black velvet rosettes for
trimming, her golden hair gleamed in the rich glow of the fire, and in
her hand was her lute, graced by long streamers of crimson ribbon.
Beside her was the captain-lieutenant, all bedight in the smartest of
uniforms, his hair in a long queue of blond plaits, and with precise
side-curls heavily powdered, a genteel fashion not always observed on
the frontier.
She had been singing to him one of the songs that had become
fashionable at Vauxhall during his long absence from London, and the
air was still vibrant with the melody of voice and symphony.
And poor Raymond!--Captain Howard’s inconsistent heart rebelled at the
sight of their comfort and mirth and security,--out in the snow, and
the black night, and the illimitable trackless wilderness on the march
to Choté.
With the thought his anxiety and distrust of the subaltern’s discretion
were reasserted.
“He will reach Choté if he has a man left! I only hope he won’t harry
the town!” he exclaimed in the extravagance of his disaffection.