In the meantime the days dragged slowly by at Fort Prince George. The
snow lay on the ground with that persistence which the weather-wise
interpret as a waiting for another fall. All out-of-door diversions
were interdicted. Sleighing was not to be essayed, for it was
considered unsafe to venture beyond the range of the guns. There was
no ice for curling. Save for the boisterous sport of the rank and file
hurling snow-balls at each other about the parade, when the fall was
fresh and the novelty an appeal to idleness, the storm had brought none
of its characteristic pastimes.
There was a rumor heard in Keowee Town of a blockade higher up in
the mountains, where the fall had been of unprecedented depth. It
became bruited abroad somehow,--not that aught had been disclosed
of the fact,--perhaps by subtle intuition, perhaps only because the
circumstances warranted the surmise, that Captain Howard was extremely
uneasy as to the progress and fate of Ensign Raymond and his soldiers.
Now and again an Indian straggling from some party out on “the winter
hunt” came in at Fort Prince George with a story of having met the
detachment in the wilderness. He would be eagerly welcomed by Captain
Howard, regaled with French brandy and roast beef to loosen his
tongue, the fraud discovered only when too late, the man’s description
of the personnel of the force, elicited under keen inquisition, failing
to tally with the facts in a single particular. It was impossible for
Captain Howard to set his mind at ease in the assurance that all were
well and progressing finely, when the commander was described as a
beautiful old man in buck-skin with a long white beard, or a squat
fat man with a big stomach, and a red face, and a splendid bag-wig.
The fumes of the brandy and the beef penetrated far beyond the gates
of Fort Prince George, for rumor diffused and extended the aroma, and
Indian idlers made their racial craft and tact serve the simple purpose
of refreshing their inner man at the government’s expense by the simple
expedient of professing to have seen Ensign Raymond in the mountains
commanding Captain Howard’s soldiers. So anxious for news did he become
that he seemed to have lost his normal suspicion, and on each occasion
he returned to his hope of trustworthy information with an eager
precipitancy that made him an easy prey.
Mervyn watched with cynical secret amusement this exhibition of
vacillating character, as he deemed it. Why had Captain Howard
despatched the detachment if he straightway wanted it back again,
he demanded of himself. He was fond of observing from an outside
standpoint the perplexity and the floundering mistakes of other men,
especially his superiors in military rank, with the inner conviction
how much more efficiently he could have discharged his obligations
and disposed of the matter were he in their position. It was perhaps
because of mental exercitations of this nature that he did not respond
with the genial endorsement of the commandant’s course which Captain
Howard obviously expected and coveted, when he said one evening as they
sat in the parlor before the fire, after dinner, entirely apropos of
nothing:--
“This snow-storm, now--I couldn’t possibly have foreseen this.”
He lifted his eyes, his bushy brows bent, and fixed them on Mervyn’s
face interrogatively, yet with a certain challenge of denial.
“Well, sir,” Mervyn hesitated, primly, judicially, “_I_ have never
thought the backbone of the winter broken as yet.”
“Gad, sir--why didn’t you say so?” snapped Captain Howard. “If you
are such a weather-prophet as to have foreseen a fall of twenty-six
inches,--a thing never heard of before in this region,--why didn’t you
give me the benefit of your wisdom?”
“Oh, sir,” said Mervyn, and there was rebuke even in his temperate
voice, and his expression was calmly disclaiming, “I did not foresee
the depth of the fall, of course. And it would ill become me to offer
advice to an officer of your experience. I only thought the winter not
fairly ended.”
Despite the chill in the outer air, the flowers seemed blooming in
royal profusion in Arabella’s tambour-frame. She was constantly busy
with the particolored skeins in these dark days, scarcely ever lifting
her eyes as she listened. Now she sat close to the table for the sake
of the light from the candles in the two tall candle-sticks. She had
paused to thread her needle, and glanced up.
“The snow, papa, is out of all reasonable expectation--both as to
season and depth. You must know that. You couldn’t doubt it, except
for your over-anxious sense of responsibility for the safety of the
expedition. Lord, sir, nobody ever heard, as you say, of such a snow.”
“That’s no comfort to me,” said Captain Howard, visibly comforted,
nevertheless.
Mervyn, roused from the soft conceits of superiority, sought to follow
her lead.
“I think, since you permit me to express my opinion, sir, that the
detachment is in far less danger from the inclemency of the weather
than from Ensign Raymond’s inexperience. A judicious officer would
have faced about at once and returned to the fort before he could be
blockaded, with the drifts filling the mountain defiles. I should, I am
sure.”
“And a very damn fool you would have been!” exclaimed Captain Howard,
testily.
“Dear Brother! In _Arabella’s presence_!” Mrs. Annandale admonished
him, as she sat in her big arm-chair, busy with her knotting, which
she dextrously accomplished without other illumination than the light
of the fire, which was reflected from the jewels on her slender
twinkling fingers and flashed back from the glittering beads of her
gorgeous knotting-bag. She deprecated this caustic discourtesy to
Captain-Lieutenant Mervyn.
“I am not afraid Arabella will learn to swear, and I don’t see any
other harm that anything I say can do to her,” retorted Captain Howard.
He was even less pleased with the suggestion that the man to whom
he had entrusted the lives of twenty of his soldiers was an unwise
selection, than that, if he had had more prudential forethought, he
might have divined the coming of the obstructive tempest.
Mervyn was rather more stiffly erect than usual, and his long pale
face had flushed to the roots of his powdered hair. It was most
obvious, despite his calm, contained manner that he considered himself
needlessly affronted. “But like father, like daughter,” Mrs. Annandale
reflected, when Arabella, without the scantiest notice of his aspect,
once more joined in the discussion.
“Now that is just how I think you show your knowledge of men and
opportunities, papa,” she remarked. “A more experienced officer than
Mr. Raymond--Mr. Mervyn, for instance--would have turned back and lost
your opportunity, who knows for how long, and the men would have been
so demoralized by relinquishing the march for a snow-storm that they
might not have made their way back even to Fort Prince George--remember
how sudden it was, and how soon those nearest defiles were full of
drifts. A man can be snowed under in twenty miles of forest as easily
as in a hundred. But a young, ardent, dreadnaught like Mr. Raymond will
push the men through by the sheer impetus of his own character. His
buoyant spirit will make the march a lark for the whole command.”
Mervyn’s eyes widened as he listened in stultified surprise. He
was amazed at his lady-love’s temerity, to thus suggest Raymond’s
superiority to him in aught. He sought to meet her eye with a gaze of
dignified reproof. But she was evidently not thinking of him. In truth,
Arabella’s heart was soft with sympathy for the commandant, yearning
after his twenty odd hardened, harum-scarum young soldiers, as if they
were the babes in the wood. He was afraid he had unduly exposed them to
danger, and in the thought no woman could have been more troubled and
tender,--in fact, for such a cause his sister could never have been so
softened, so hysterically anxious.
“You are right, Arabella; Raymond has something better than caution or
judgment. He is pertinacious and insistent, carries things before him,
won’t take no for an answer--he is a very good fighting man, too.”
“But his lack of experience, sir,” Mervyn interpolated with lifted
eye-brows, “the very rank and file comment on it. They call him ‘the
hinfant,’ and ‘the babby ensign’!”
Captain Howard flushed scarlet.
“They are mighty careful that it doesn’t reach his ears,” he said,
sternly. “Ensign Raymond knows how to maintain his dignity as well as
any man twice his age I ever saw.”
“Oh, papa, he does!” cried Arabella, eagerly corroborative. “I often
notice when he is serious how noble and thoughtful he looks.”
Mrs. Annandale was not near enough to give her niece a warning pinch;
from such admonitions against girlish candor Miss Howard’s delicate arm
sometimes showed blue tokens. Like Mervyn, but with a different intent,
the schemer tried to catch the young lady’s eye. Now she felt she could
no longer contain her displeasure, and her anxiety lest the matter go
further than prudence might warrant impaired her judgment.
“Dear me, Arabella,” she said, with an icy inflection, “one would think
you are in love with the man.”
The obvious response for any girl was, in her opinion, a confused
denial, and this necessity would warn Arabella how far in the heat of
argument she was going.
To Mrs. Annandale’s astonishment Arabella softly laid the tambour-frame
on her knee as if better to contemplate the suggestion. She held the
needle motionless for an instant, her eyes on the fire, and suddenly
she said as if to herself:--
“Sometimes I, too, think I am in love with him.”
Mervyn shot a furious glance at her, but she had hardly looked at him
all the evening, and she now continued blandly unaware. If Captain
Howard marked what she had said it must have seemed a jest, for he went
on, magnifying Raymond’s capacity to take care of himself and to bring
his detachment safely home.
Despite these arguments Captain Howard continued ill at ease, watchful
of the weather, anticipating a renewal of snow or hopeful of tokens
of thaw; eager to confer with any stray Indian, who Mervyn believed
often came from no greater distance than the town of Keowee across
the river; comparing reminiscences of distances and the situation
of sundry notable Indian towns with veterans of the two campaigns
during the previous years in the Cherokee country. In addition to the
information of some of the garrison on this point, he was able to glean
items from the very intimate knowledge of all that region possessed
by the Reverend Mr. Morton, now contentedly installed at Fort Prince
George, and holding forth at close intervals for the soul’s health of
the soldiery. But even he had a thrust for the tender sensibilities of
Captain Howard’s military conscience.
“Ensign Raymond,” he said, apropos of the mooted safe return of the
expeditionary force, “is of a very impetuous and imperious nature. God
grant that he be not hurried into any untoward and reckless course. We
can but pray for him, sir.”
“Gad! I ought to have prayed beforehand,” exclaimed the commandant.
“And that is very true,” said the missionary.
But Captain Howard had not intended to be entrapped into confession,
and he found Mr. Morton cheerless company in these days of suspense.
For it was his faithful belief that a proper disposition of forces
and munitions of war is calculated to induce Providence to fight on
one’s side and an omission of these rules and precautions is wilful
neglect of means of grace. He saw little of the minister in these days,
but Mrs. Annandale professed herself vastly edified by the good man’s
discourse, and kept him in conversation on one side of the fireplace
while the two young people were ranged upon the other. Even the old
man, inattentive to such matters, fell under the impression that the
young lady and her cavalier seemed not a little disposed to bicker,
and one evening when their voices were raised in spirited retort and
counter-retort, Mrs. Annandale took occasion to say to him behind the
waving feathers of her fan, that they were betrothed, and that their
lovers’ quarrels wearied her out of all patience.
He inclined his head with its straggling wig, which Rolloweh, with
courteous compliments, had punctiliously sent down from Little
Tamotlee; in its shabby similitude to the furnishings of humanity it
had the look of being of low spirits and maltreated, and as if in its
natural estate it might have been the hair of some poor relation. Mr.
Morton observed that he hoped the young people were fully aware of the
transitory nature of earthly bliss.
“Oh, they know that fast enough--their snappings and snarlings are
a proof of its transitory nature, if they had no other,” said Mrs.
Annandale, sourly.
For Mervyn was not disposed to pass by, without an explanation,
Arabella’s statement that she sometimes thought she was in love with
Raymond.
“He is a presuming puppy!” declared Mervyn, angrily, breathlessly,
looking at her with indignant eyes.
“I can’t see in what respect he presumes,” she stipulated. “He has
never said a word of love to me.”
“But you said--”
“Only that I sometimes thought I was in love with him.”
“You want to tantalize me--to make me miserable. For my life I can’t
see why.”
He fared better when he appealed only to her generosity, for she
realized that in his way he loved her. She had begun to realize that
she did not, that she had never loved him, and was prone to remind him
that she had always stipulated that he must consider nothing settled.
“She only wants to feel her power,” Mrs. Annandale had reassured him.
“They tell me these Indians are cannibals on occasion,” she said to
herself, for there had come to be no one in whom she could really
confide. “I wish they would eat Raymond--he would doubtless prove a
spicy morsel--and I really don’t see any other means to dispose of him
out of harm’s way.”
Mervyn found a melancholy satisfaction in the enforced silence, when
he could not upbraid nor Arabella retort, as they sat side by side
on the dreary snowy Sundays in the mess-hall, where the garrison
attended divine service. A drum mounted upon the table reached the
proper height of a prayer desk, and all the benches and settees in
the barracks, guard-house, and officers’ quarters were laid under
requisition to furnish forth sittings for the force. Captain Howard
was duly wakeful during the long and labored homily, although he felt
in his secret soul that the most acceptable portion of the service
was concluded when Arabella’s voice, soaring high above the soldiers’
chorus, had ceased to resound, sweet and indescribably clear, and
sunk into silence. Mervyn found the psalms for the day for her, and
they read and sang from the same book. She wore, in deference to the
character of the occasion, her formal church attire, and he was reduced
to further abysses of subjection by the sight of her lovely face and
head, unfamiliar, and yet the same, in such a bonnet as should have
graced her attendance at the parish church at home. A white beaver of
the poke or coal-scuttle form framed her golden hair, and accented
the flush in her cheeks and the warm whiteness of brow and chin. Her
ermine muff and tippet were inconceivably reminiscent of home and
church-going. Her long black velvet pelisse gave her an air of rich
attire which enhanced her beauty and elegance with the idea of rank and
wealth which it was to be his good fortune to bestow on her. Never had
she been so beautiful as with that look of staid decorum, of solemnity
and reverence. Captain Howard might well have enjoyed his regular
Sabbatical nap--her attention was so sedulous it might have sufficed
for all the family. But he was noting the manners of the garrison,
and as they were conscious of the commandant’s eye naught could have
been more seemly. Jerrold, and Innis, and Lawrence, themselves, were
not more reverential than Robin Dorn, who raised the tune of psalm and
hymn to the correct pitch with a tuning fork, then piped away with a
high tenor, now and again essaying with good measure of success a clear
falsetto. The non-professional tenors held to the normal register, the
basses boomed after their kind, and above all, it might seem an echo
from heaven, the clear soprano voice. The big fire flashed, hardly so
red as the mass of red coats in the restricted limits of one room,
ample though its size, and its decorations of red and white feathers,
of grotesque paintings on buffalo hides, of flashing steel arms and
gaudy bows and quivers, all glimmered, and gleamed, and flickered, and
faded as the flames rose and fell.
And the homily--it was not likely that the congregation knew much about
the significance of the Pentateuchal types and analogies, but if the
idea of such crass ignorance could have occurred to Mr. Morton, he
would have said it was time they were finding out somewhat. Perhaps as
he drew near his sixthly division and began to illustrate a similarity
of the religious customs of the Jews and Indians, they may have pricked
up their ears, and still more when he deduced an analogy between the
cruelty of the temper of the ancient Hebrews toward their enemies and
the torture practised by the modern Indian. He cautioned his hearers on
the danger of prying into the religious ceremonies of the Cherokees as
if his audience shared the pious fervor which consumed him, but said he
did not despair of using these similarities as an introduction of the
Christian religion, of which they were a forerunner and type. Then he
talked of the legends of the lost tribes, till Captain Howard felt that
it would be a piety to fall on his own sword like the military heroes
of Scripture, world-weary. At last he ended with:--
“‘Woe--woe is me if I preach not the Gospel!’”
“And--woe--woe, surely, is thy hearer!” Mrs. Annandale mimicked below
her breath, as hanging on her brother’s arm she walked decorously
across the snowy parade to the commandant’s quarters. Mervyn and
Arabella followed in silence, the young man’s thoughts on the ivy-clad
church of Chesley Parish, and the walk thence through the lush greenth
of the park to Mervyn Hall, with this same fair hand laid lightly on
his arm.