now, might be risky, when Old Glory and I may be ordered out before
morning to waltz to fife-music!"
"A battle? Do you truly think it likely?"
"I half believe it. I don't mind telling you I have a premonition of
it, involving another premonition regarding myself. But what of it? Our
old friend Cicero, I think it was, used to say that we are born not
for ourselves, but for the Republic." He laughed, as if he had said a
jocund thing. He had not meant then to test her feeling for him; but he
had allies in the hour and its emotion. Cecily rejoiced in his cheerful
acceptances, and remembered her impersonal pride in the circumstances
of his enlistment, of which she had heard on all sides at home.
Her voice fell, unawares, into its shy inflections, its little wild
spontaneous minors, as she said, seeing the horses rear their heads:
"Will you please tell me, Sergeant Blanchard, how you came to join the
army? All that I know is that you were abroad, and that you gave up
your pleasure, and came back."
He began quietly, as they passed the stream and made for higher ground:
"It is quite a story. I was off on a tour through India and Egypt,
with my college chum, my dear old Arthur Hughes. Neither of us had any
notion of returning home, and we were in the middle of the best time
two fellows ever had on this earth, when I had a queer sort of warning.
We were both curled up on the window-sill of my room, in our hotel
at Cairo, one hot night, sleepless, and enjoying a smoke. Suddenly,
above the street, among the shadows and spangled points of all those
near domes and pinnacles, I saw what I thought was our national flag,
hanging, hardly stirring. It seemed to spring up out of nothing, in
its familiar, varied colors, to startle my eye. Then, in a moment,
I perceived that it was no flag, but a living spirit, a genius, a
guardian angel, whatever you like to call it, which bore the oddest
resemblance to one. There before me was the dreamiest figure; a tall
beautiful young woman in a helmet, the moon shining on the little
spike of it. A long blue veil, bluer than the atmosphere, covered her
face, and was blown about her shoulders, not so heavy of texture but
that the jewels in her flowing hair flashed through it with wonderful
lustres; and her garment fell away in long alternate whites and reds,
like the liquid bars we sometimes see flushing and paling in our own
sky in the north, when the aurora borealis comes in the March evenings.
There she floated many minutes before fading away; and once she raised
her veil and beckoned, and her eyes dwelt on me so imploringly that
they have become more real to me than anything else in my life. I tell
you it shook my heart.... Miss Carter, if you will allow me, I must
say that the vision was like, was very like,"--the Sergeant choked a
little,--"like you. When I first saw you, I was so startled, it gave
me, well, almost a swoon. That is a novel word, and ludicrous, perhaps,
but I can use no other. At any rate, the resemblance has drawn me
towards you, I can't say how strongly or how much. Please forgive me."
For Cecily's wild-rose face was warm.
"I had forgotten all about Arthur. But when I turned to clutch him
in my excitement, my first glance told me that he had not seen the
phantom, and that he would deride my faith in it. So I tried to laugh
off my sudden attack of second-sight; but it was of no use. I dropped
into silence when it was my turn to speak, and abandoning presently the
effort to seem indifferent, I parted from him, and went to bed.
"It was the only ghostly thing that had ever happened to me, and it
impressed me tremendously. For my part, I could get no rest by day or
night; that influence was over me like a bad star. I racked my brain to
explain it by natural agencies, and it only set me thinking the more
of our blessed country being in some terrible trouble. When I came to
that, I jumped up and started for the bath, to cool off, and then
changed my mind, and struck first for the ticket-office. Whom should
I knock into on the way but old Arthur in his fez, fierce as a lion.
'Bob,' he said, dragging me into a booth, 'it's war, war! President
Lincoln is calling for men, and I'm going home to spite the devil.'
'There's no choice. I am going home anyhow,' I said. 'What news is
there?'
"The little which had travelled that far, I heard from him. Sumter was
being fired upon, on the 11th of April, 1861, when I saw Our Lady of
the Union. I call her that; but I never spoke of her to Arthur, or to
any one. Before June set in we arrived in New York, and we volunteered.
Arthur has distinguished himself right and left. He is in Andersonville
now, dear fellow. I should hate to end there."
"A martyr is a martyr; the place matters nothing," the girl replied.
"I know," he said; "I did not mean to speak lightly; but I am one of
those who cannot always avoid it when they feel much."
The Sergeant's cheeks were burning too, and he quickened his pace.
Cecily did not speak, following the bounding bay. But a loneliness
which she could not define came upon her; a resentment of the sacred
ideal which could yet be to her friend his divinity, his beauty, his
bride, in a world from which she was shut out as an irrelevance. And
almost as soon, she questioned herself whether because of a tie dearer
than the human, this golden-hearted Robert must lose, she in him must
lose--what? For answer, the noble and foolish tears welled up from the
depths, and fell into the folds across her knee. Her companion drew his
own rein, and laid his hand upon Molly's.
"Oh, why do you cry? I can't bear it. What have I done?"
"Nothing."
"I did not intend to disturb you, to make you care about it, or pity
me; I am much happier since that happened. Could it be--oh, could it
be--" He gazed a moment upon her, absorbedly and absorbingly, and she
turned away. For who can make conscious preparation for the imminent?
Sudden ever is the finger of Death, to the watchers; sudden also is
Love.
They were under the shade of some giant pines. The young man vaulted
lightly to the ground, close to Molly's satin stirrupless flank,
his hands clasped, his head thrown back, fired with adoring hope.
When Cecily inclined towards him again, he saw in her (or was it his
bewitched fancy?) the remote, incredible radiance of his old day-dream.
The great flush rolled responsive to his own clear brow. He shook
himself free, and found his voice. "Cecily," he said simply, "I love
you; you must know that I love you. Such a love has no beginning and no
end. You understand that and me. Of myself I have nothing to say. You
have seen me only among Willoughby's recruits; but I never wished to be
elsewhere. Judge of me, as we two are, now and here. Can you, do you
think you could be my wife, by and by? Tell me. Tell me!" Then Cecily,
simple too, in the same tremor of exaltation, put out her right hand.
He caught at it with both his own, and buried his face there. His
wide hat had fallen; the warm light was on his clustering hair. With a
sweet instinct like motherliness, his maid, bending over, kissed it in
benediction.
It was two o'clock when they crossed the ford, and the late afternoon
found them still pacing on their roadless way, like the lost enchanted
knight and lady of the Black Forest. They were less than a mile from
Braleton, on the rocks, in sight of the tents, when they unsaddled and
tethered the horses, and made the last halt. "Dearest," the Sergeant
had said, lying at her feet, his elbow in the grass, "dedicate my
sword." Raising himself, he made a motion as if drawing it, and held
it towards her and the sunset; Cecily, in the same pretty pantomime,
touched her lips to the viewless blade, priestess of a new investiture.
"One thing we both love better than ourselves; is it not so?" She was
not jealous now. "These United States, right or wrong!"
"Oh, no!" The soldier sheathed his sacred weapon. "Say justice,
liberty, the rights of man; the things our United States ought to
stand for." Then the light heart in him laughed; and Concrete and
Abstract blessed each other. Happy and silent, they lingered on
the brow of the pine copse; a breeze sprang up; vast and gorgeous
sky-colors spread and deepened. The Sergeant's uplifted face was fixed
upon his betrothed. She seemed to dissolve away before him, or before
him, rather, to be vivified and set free. Slowly between her and him,
transubstantiating her touching beauty, gathered a solemn, changeful,
wavering cloud-splendor of ivory, rose, and sapphire, gathered out of
the land of myths into recognized and unforgotten fact. For a quarter
of an hour he endured that mystical glory; then his head dropped
forward on her knees. A thing seen was yet upon him: once more Our
Lady of the Union, but with a smile as if of one assured at last of
ransom, and ineffably content. When Cecily touched him, wondering, he
shuddered, and brushed an imagined film from his eyes. She sat there,
innocent of any magic, unaware in what potter's hand her spirit was so
much fine clay.
From the depths of the vale the croak of frogs arose, faint here and
shriller there, then long-drawn and general: ever a most mournful,
homesick, and foreboding sound to our armies in the South. The
distant camp seemed ominously quiet; but on the outskirts of it was a
dissolving shadow, a moving dark clot, there, a moment back, between
them and the scarce-fluttering flag, and still there, now that the
flag was hauled down, its bright hues effaced against the more vivid
evening air. Presently the group of men, for such it was, scattered.
Cecily's keen sight read what was written afar; the familiar figure of
the one-armed brisk Lieutenant-Colonel in the saddle coming towards the
hill, with others following on the gallop behind.
"You are needed," she said without preamble; "you must go to them."
With emphasis and authority, slight and quick, yet irrevocable, she
spoke. He turned about, and sprang to his feet from his enchantment
at her side; for the divine day, the Sergeant's field-day, was over.
"Is this the way of women, or only your way? You send me from you on a
supposition, a scruple," he answered, plaintively.
"Go." She repeated it softly, and with closed eyes, lest she should
look upon her own heart-break. "It is unnecessary, as you know," he
replied; "but if you make it a point of honor, I am glad to obey." He
held out his hands, and she took them, cherishing, steadfast, as in
a pact. Her voice and step were strangely unsteady; they held up the
mirror, as it were, to his. What was there in a commonplace incident to
move them so to the depth? In a passionate presentiment, he drew her
closer to him. "Are we to be given to each other only that we may be
severed, and suffer the more? What if the end should be now? Cecily!"
But the young heroic mettle rose to meet his. "Beloved, you are mine
and not mine. You are consecrated for the term of the war; so am I. I
will always give you up to your task. Perhaps you may measure by that
whether I love you." He looked down with a grateful sigh on her who so
mysteriously held him to his sacrifice, and shared it, and through her
and in her, on the old, old fate which he knew now was driving him to
the cliff.
"If there is to be a fight, I want your flag, the flag you made!" he
whispered, grasping at anything to hide this rending in him of the
spirit from the flesh. "However, whenever I fall, I want to be buried
in it. Is it done? May I take it for mine, before it is presented to
the regiment?"
"Yes. You shall carry my colors here and in heaven. I will pray for my
knight."
He kissed her once, twice, for the betrothal, and yet again for the
farewell.
He took Molly, the fresher animal of the two, and spurred to the open
ground below, breaking out from the wood-path, ready for any duty, on
time. He looked illumined, detached, transfigured: a Saint Michael to
be remembered after by his companions in the moral crises of their
lives. The Lieutenant-Colonel drew rein, relieved. "I was wishing for
you, of all people," he said; "I feared you were far away. There has
been an alarm; we must sleep under arms. The Colonel and most of the
officers have not returned. I will go back now. Take these six with
you, and cross the railway tracks to Palmer's. It is a rough road, and
a long journey; but report as soon as you can." The Sergeant started
with his bayoneted cavalcade in a dash westward. Cecily, apprehensive
of something unusual, saw the slow-rising dust, and, ahead of it, the
erect leader, scaling the horizon, and vanishing into the yet glowing
sky. A pang unutterable tore her; but, uttered, it would have been none
other than _Amen_.
Poor Saladin was tired enough, having been out all day long; and Cecily
led him carefully to the plain. Every clapping leaf, every crackling
twig underfoot, struck a chill into her bosom, on the over-shadowing
hill-slopes. She had played too brave a part under her mental turmoil,
and in the presence of her lover, himself too easily enamoured of
death. A spell greater than any he had felt was over her, breathing a
blackness between her and the light. Now her ample courage was fast
giving out. She saw a face in the thicket, and was barely able to
nerve herself not to scream. A man, in a military dress she did not
know, came forward, and raised his cap. It was Major Julian Brale,
free at last to do some scouting over his ancestral acres, alone,
and with hot revenges in his heart. He was sorry for her, and angry
at her discovery. He apologized briefly, and helped her to mount, not
without concern, but with a scornful coldness of manner which he could
not help. When she had gone, he returned to the bushes, cursing the
Eleventh; for he had recognized the saddle on the bay. The two forces
were on the brink of battle; but he was not an expert sharp-shooter for
nothing, and if he could but get sight of that thief, that coward, that
hell-born villain who had taken his old father's precious Molly from
him-- A moonbeam straggled in where he bent over, priming his rifle,
and he moved from it into the dark.
Dinnerless, supperless, much too overwrought to go to bed, Cecily
Carter sat in the Colonel's empty tent. For company, she had shaken out
her great silken banner over the lounge, where the firelight, falling
on it, seemed to praise its divine destroying loveliness with a poet's
Pentecostal tongue. Once she murmured prayerfully: "Dear Robert, dear
Robert." Something not herself had bade him go, and he was gone;
there was all of herself now in these fears. The little parting from
him which she was enduring became magnified and abiding, so that she
looked upon him slain, and thought with a sort of joyous satisfaction
how under the buttons of his old blue jacket, where nobody, not even
his mother, knew of them, were rose-leaves all about the open wound
next his heart; rose-leaves pressed most fervently, one by one, to her
lips, and laid there. Other caress she could not give him; though she
was his, he was the Republic's, for ever and ever. Again, she saw him
carried on a howitzer to a green lonely place. A stone reared itself
before her, and she read upon it an odd inscription: _If ye seek
the summit of true honor, hasten with all speed into that heavenly
country._ She started up. Was her brain indeed giving way? Who had
spoken? Where had she heard those words? How piercing a beauty they
had! Were they in the Church ritual? What did they mean? Why should
they hound her from her rest?
The Colonel's little ormolu clock struck eleven. Almost on the stroke,
the delayed revellers entered. Adela could not fail to notice her
sister's nervousness, but attributed it to anxiety for herself. The
Sultana of the Surgeon's christening had been prodigally feasted and
flattered; she had come home with an armful of hothouse flowers,
effulgent with gratification, and in a talking mood. The Colonel's boy
brought in the lamps. When the Colonel himself followed, grown grim
with the sudden tension and commotion about, his remark was to the
point. "I'm afraid you women will have to get out of camp, quick. I
smell powder. It is likely to be damned disagreeable." His handsome,
worldly wife, coming, butterfly-like, in yellow, out of her dark
wrappings, fixed him with her censorious eye. "James Willoughby! You
have been drinking." He was wont, on such occasions, to cast a comical
appealing glance at Cecily, of whom he was fond. She did not smile in
return, and her pallor touched him; so that he went over to her at
once. "What's the matter, child?" he asked, with affectionate anxiety.
But an approaching clang and clatter, and the challenge of the sentry
without, took from him what he meant to say; he left Cecily to her
sister, and hurried into the air. His going added to her trouble; and
yet she would have had no solace in keeping a friend near. Oh, the
stress and strain of dull daily incident upon that inner universe,
frangible as a bubble, where she and Robert had begun to live!--she
and Robert, and the Love of Country alone, for between this and them
must be union everlasting. Oh, the tyranny of all that is, laid upon
him, faithful in his place; upon her, faithful in hers; the speechless
dealings of lonely lovers with the Lone!
Private Cobbe, being foremost, saluted breathlessly: "Colonel, the
pickets are being driven in; the enemy is advancing." The gallant
fellow pressed his hand to his thigh; he was wounded, and he was
soldier enough to feel that wound an ignominy which had been received
obscurely, and elsewhere than on the field. Immediately, all along the
tents, arose the multitudinous yet unconfused cries of "Form!" and
"Fall in!" from the captains; the flapping guidons were borne hither
and thither to their places, and the thousand horses, wheeling on their
dancing hoofs by the gleam of lantern and torch under the watery moon,
began to make huge, fantastic shadows along the old parade-ground. The
Colonel, drawing on his gauntlets, and still afoot, noticed for the
first time that Cobbe and McGrath held between them, each with an arm
around him, an officer. For an instant, in the imperfect light, he
thought him some prisoner, until he recognized, in a flash, Molly with
her great liquid, excited eyes, Molly with her even mane hanging wet
and limp, confronting him. Private McGrath had held in until now. He
blurted: "I'm afraid he's gone, sir." The Colonel took a step forward,
as if it were into eternity. The Surgeon, standing by, echoed after
him: "My God!"
They lifted their friend down together, and carried him in, and laid
him with extreme gentleness where by chance the new flag, a kingly
winding-sheet, was above him and under. The Surgeon bent very low for
a while over the lounge. The many in the tent, used to calamity less
great than the loss of their best, held their breath; the Adjutant's
dog, close to his master's legs, lifted his long gray throat and
crooned softly and mournfully, as the band outside, far down the
disparting columns, broke into a loud, thrilling strain, impatient for
victory. The Sergeant was dead, with a ball in his breast. No one moved
until Cecily groaned and dropped.
AN EVENT ON THE RIVER.
MORNING lay over Portsmouth and her great stretches of opaline sea. The
little islands, north to the Maine shore, and east to the harbor-buoys,
were ablaze with red and yellow bushes to the water-brink; the
low-masted gunlows were beating out like a flock of dingy gulls; and
from afar, pleasantly, musically, sounded the bugle at the Navy Yard.
The Honorable Langdon Openshaw, standing among ruinous warehouses and
wharves, built by the Sheafes in the hour of their commercial glory
under the second George, looked down upon the clear Piscataqua at
full flood, breathing between its day-long, Samson-like tugs at the
yet enduring piers. It was a lonely spot; the wind had a way there,
sometimes, of waking momentary, half-imagined odors, the ghosts of the
cargoes of wines and spices in the prodigal past. His own solitude,
the washing tide, the one towering linden yonder, the gambrel roofs
and ancient gardens, the felt neighborhood of the dear wild little
graveyard where his forbears slept, steeped his heart in overwhelming
melancholy. He had already passed a week at the Rockingham. It was a
strange date to choose, out of all his free and prosperous life, for a
first visit since childhood to the fair old New England borough where
he was born. A sort of morbid home-sickness had driven him back now,
in his distresses, to her knee. For the Honorable Langdon Openshaw,
innocent of the astounding crime with which he was charged, was out on
bail.
The accusation was the most inexplicable of things. His chief
characteristic had been an endearing gentleness, which brought him the
popular favor he cared nothing for. He was the captain citizen of his
town; he had held, in turn, every office public esteem could give him;
he was president of a wealthy corporation which controlled a bank. It
was this treasury which he was said to have rifled, and its cashier
whom he was said to have murdered. No living creature was there in
all Connecticut but laughed aloud when the report began to spread;
but time and circumstantial proof sobered them, and increased the
breed of cynics and sceptics the country over. The philanthropist, the
good man, the Sunday-school paragon, forsooth, once again exposed in
all his gangrened sanctity! Two sickening circumstances, in the dark
designs of Providence, pointed at him with deadly finger. One was,
that at the time of the robbery, there was an impending crash in his
vested finances, since wholly and finally averted by his foresight and
skill; the other, that sometime before, in the discharge of duty, he
had incurred the enmity of the victim. Was it not possible, during Mr.
Openshaw's interval of anxiety, he, that is, any other than he, might
have dared retrieve his fortune, and silence the witness of his crime,
George Wheeling, found unexpectedly at his desk at midnight over his
accounts, and thrown down the stair into the vaults? But there was a
more certain and horrible evidence. He had been seen escaping; he had
been recognized. The scuffle had roused the occupants of houses near;
and these, looking forth by the city lamplight, saw the flying figures,
one of them, alas, inconceivably, yet unmistakably, so help us God! the
Honorable Langdon Openshaw. Had they not a perfect unanimous knowledge,
for many years, of his face, his unique gait, his uncommon stature?
Where was there another such odd and definite physical personality? As
to the confederates, well, there were reasons, no doubt, why bravos
should be hired.
Wearily, wearily, he parted his gaze from the alluring eternity in the
river, and strolled a little distance to the warm wall, and sat down
in the late September grasses against it, like the broken man he was.
He took off his hat, a characteristic dark soft felt such as he always
wore, and the air was good upon his brow. His thoughts reverted to
old times. He had no kindred except a sister living in Santa Barbara
with her family of daughters, and between them there had never been
any marked natural affection. The distant cousin of his own whom he
had married, had borne him no children, and she was dead: a gentle,
negative soul, to whom he confided little of what touched him most. He
had formed no intimate companionships. No one save his mother, whom he
lost in his boyhood, and whose maiden name he bore, had ever possessed
much influence over him. He was a man's man, as the saying is, hitherto
of any age he chose, and rich in all resources. But he had strong
dormant affections, shamefacedly expended on public orphanages and
hospitals, and on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals;
and he felt rightly that he could have been fatherly, brotherly, even
filial, with a son. Ah, if he but had a son! Bulwarked about with
modern conveniences, that, his one necessary, he had missed. And here,
in strange opprobrium, was the end of his career and of his name.
"Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me!" he breathed to himself,
feeling, for the first time since his calamity, a profound submission
of the soul.
He heard voices in the windless air. He did not rise, for they were not
approaching him. He could not help distinguishing the animated words.
"This is as far as I ought to go. I guess I'll say good-bye."