MADAM CONSTANTIA
_I see how she doth wry,
When I begin to moan;
I see when I come nigh,
How fain she would be gone._
_I see—what will ye more?
She will me gladly kill:
And you shall see therefore
That she shall have her will._
ANON.
When I came to myself I was, by comparison, in a haven of comfort. I was
in a clean bed, in a clean room, I was wearing a shirt that was also
clean and was certainly not my own. A negro woman with a yellow kerchief
bound about her head was holding a lamp, while a colored man who was
bending over me, contrived a cage to lift the coverlet clear of my
shoulder and arm. The room was small, with boarded walls, and the
furniture was of plain wood and roughly made, of the kind that is found
in the smaller plantations of this upper country. But my eye alighted on
a framed sampler hung between two prints above the bedhead; and this and
one or two handsome mahogany pieces told a story of changes and
journeys, which these, the cherished relics of an older house, perhaps
in the Tidewater, had survived.
I noted these things dreamily, blissfully, resting in a haven of ease.
Presently the man stood back to admire his work, and the woman, turning
to glance at my face, saw that my eyes were open. She set down the lamp
and fetching a cup held it to my lips. I have reason to believe that it
held milk-punch; but for me it held nectar, and I drank greedily and as
long as she would let me. Whatever it was, the draught cleared my mind;
and when the man turned to the table and began to occupy himself with
rolling up a monstrous length of bandage, I saw the woman sign to him.
They looked towards the door, and I became aware of the voices of two
people who were talking in an outer room. The speakers were the two who
had debated my fate before, while I hung, worn out, over my horse’s
neck; and the question between them was apparently the same.
“But I can’t see it, father!” the girl was saying, repeating it as if
she had said it half a dozen times before. “I can’t see it. What is he
to us? Why should we do it? Think of my mother! Think of Dick! Haven’t I
heard you say a hundred times—”
“And a hundred to that! I admit it, Con,” the man answered, “I have. But
there was something about this fellow if you’ll believe me—”
“About him!” she retorted, blazing up. “A weakling! A milksop! A poor
thing who swoons under a minute’s pain!”
“But if you had seen him pick the man up?” he pleaded. “It was that that
took me, honey. It ran right athwart of all that I had heard of his
like, and had seen of some of them! It was the devil of a mellay I can
tell you! Of five who made off together after Ferguson was down he was
the only one who fought his way through; and we were after him whip and
spur. He was all but clear of us, when there came the other man running
through the bush and calling to him, calling to him to take him up for
God’s sake! For God’s sake! He stopped, Con! And I can tell you that to
stop with the muzzles of our Deckhards between his shoulderblades and
not forty yards off—”
“Who wouldn’t have?” she retorted scornfully. “Is there a man that
wouldn’t have stopped? Is there a man who calls himself a man who could
ride away—”
“Well, I fancy,” he replied dryly, “I could put my hand on one or two,
Con. I fancy I could.”
“And because he did that,” she continued stubbornly, “because he
remembered, for just that one moment, that he and the men whom he hires
to fight his battles were of the same flesh and blood as himself, you do
this foolish, this mad, mad thing! To bring him here, father! To bring
him to the Bluff of all places! Why, if it were only that I am
alone—alone here—”
“There’s Aunt Lyddy.”
“And what is she?—it would be reason enough against it! But to be left
here,” the girl continued angrily—and it seemed to me that she was
pacing the room—“alone for days together with this insolent Englishman
who looks down on us, who calls us colonials and mohairs, and thinks us
honored if he doesn’t plunder us—and if he plunders us, what are we but
rebels? Who will hardly stoop to be civil even to the men who are
risking their all and betraying Carolina in his cause! Oh! it is too
much!”
“He’s not the worst of them at any rate,” Wilmer replied with good
humor. “Sit down, girl. And as to your being left with him, I don’t know
any one more able to take care of herself! If that be all—”
“But it’s not all!” she cried. “It’s not a quarter! If that were all I’d
not say a word! But it’s not that, you know it is not that!”
“I know it’s not, honey!” he said in a different tone—and I wondered to
hear him, so gentle was his voice. “I know it’s not.”
“If you were away altogether it would be different! If you kept away—”
“But I can’t keep away,” he answered mildly. “I must come and go. I
can’t let the plantation go to ruin. Times are bad enough and hard
enough—we may be burnt out any night. But until the worst comes I must
keep things together, Con, you know that. It’s fortunate that we’re
above King’s Mountain. After this Tarleton and his Greens—d—n the
fellow, I wish he had been there to-day—will spread over the south side
like a swarm of wasps flocking to the honey-pot. But they’ll be shy of
pushing as far north of Winsboro’ as this—we’re too strong hereabouts.
For the Englishman I’d send him to the cabins at once, but he wouldn’t
be safe from our folks outside the house.”
She spoke up suddenly. “If they come for him,” she cried, “I warn you,
father, I shall not raise a finger to save him!”
“Pooh! pooh!”
“I vow I will not! So now you know!”
“Well, I don’t think that they’ll come,” he replied lightly. “They know
me, and—”
“To shelter a Britisher!”
“I’ve sheltered worse men,” he responded reasonably.
“At least you’ve had warning!” she retorted—and I heard the legs of a
chair grate on the floor of the outer room. “If I have to choose, your
little finger is more to me than the lives of twenty such as he!”
“Unfortunately,” he answered dryly, “it’s not my little finger, my dear,
that’s in peril! It’s my—”
“Father!” she cried, pain in her voice. “How can you! How can you!”
“There, there,” he said, soothing her, “a man can but die once, and how
he dies does not matter much! Courage, Con, courage, girl! Many is the
awkward corner I have been in, as you know, and I’ve got out of it. You
may be sure I shall take all the care I can.”
“But you don’t!” she retorted. “You don’t! Or you would never let this
man—” I lost the rest in the movement of a second chair.
For some minutes the two blacks had made hardly a pretence of attending
to me. They had listened with all their ears. Once or twice when what
was said had touched me nearly they had goggled their eyes at me between
wonder and amazement. And I, too, wondered. I, too, saw that here was
something that needed explanation. Why should this girl, scarcely out of
her teens—I judged her to be no more that twenty—feel so strongly, so
cruelly, so inhumanly? Why should she show herself so hard, so
unnatural, where even her father betrayed the touch of nature that makes
us all akin? This was a question, but it was one that I must consider
to-morrow. For the present I was too comfortable, too drowsy, too weary.
Sleep pressed on me irresistibly—the blessed sleep of the exhausted, of
the wounded, of the broken, who are at last at rest! The room grew hazy,
the light a dim halo. And yet before I slept I had a last impression of
the things about me.
The girl came to the open door and stood on the threshold, gazing down
at me. She was tall, slender, dark, and very handsome. She looked at me
in silence for a long time, and with such a look and such a curiosity as
one might turn on a crushed thing lying beside the road. It hurt me, but
not for long.
For I slept, and dreamt of the Border and of home. I was in the small
oak parlor at Osgodby. There was no fire on the hearth, it was summer
and the bow-pots were full of roses. The windows were open, the garden,
viewed through them, simmered in the sunshine.
My mother was sitting on the other side of the empty hearth, fanning
herself with a great yellow fan, and we were both looking at the picture
of Henrietta Craven that is set in the overmantel. “Ill will come of it,
ill will come of it,” my mother was repeating over and over again. And
then I found that it was not my mother who was saying it but the
portrait over the fireplace; and—which did not seem to surprise me at
the time—it was no longer the portrait of Henrietta Craven in her yellow
sacque that spoke, but a woman in white, tall and slender and dark and
very handsome.
* * * * *
It was noon when I awoke; not the sultry noon of Charles Town, for the
rains had come and the day was grey and cool. I was alone, in the
pleasant stillness, but the door into the living-room was ajar, perhaps
that I might be heard if I called. Pigeons were cooing without, and not
far away, probably on the veranda, some one was crooning in tune to the
pleasant hum of a spinning-wheel. Sleep had made another man of me. My
head was clear, I was free from fever, I was hungry; such pain as I felt
was confined to the shoulder and arm. Yesterday I had come near to
envying those who had fallen in the fight. To-day I was myself again,
glad to be alive, free to hope, ready to look forward. After all, things
might be worse; our Headquarters were at Charlotte, barely thirty-five
miles away, and if my Lord Cornwallis moved towards King’s Mountain, to
avenge Ferguson, I might be rescued. If he did not, I must contrive to
be sent, as soon as I was well enough to travel, to the rebel
Headquarters in the northern colony, whence I might be exchanged. I
should be safe there—I was not safe here. I must see this man Wilmer by
and by and talk to him about it. He had shown a measure of humanity and
some generosity, mingled with his dry and saturnine humor. And he had
saved my life, I had no doubt of that. In the meantime I was famished,
positively famished!
I called, “Hi! hi!”
The low crooning stopped, the hum of the spinning-wheel ceased. The
negro woman who had held the lamp appeared in the doorway. “How you find
yo’self dis mawning?” she asked. And then in a lingo which at this
distance of time I do not pretend to reproduce correctly, she asked me
what I would take to eat.
“There’s nothing I could not eat,” I said.
She showed her teeth in a wide smile. “Marse mighty big man, dis
mawning,” she answered. “He sorter lam-like yistiddy. He mo’ like one er
de chilluns yistiddy. W’at you gwine ter eat?”
“Breakfast first!” I said. “Some tea, please—”
She shook her head violently. “Hole on dar,” she said. “I ’ear Ma’am
Constantia say der ain’t no tea fer Britishers! De last drap er dat tea
bin gone sunk in Cooper River!”
“Oh!” I replied, a good deal taken aback. Confound Madam Constantia’s
impudence! “Then I will have what you will give me. Only let me have it
soon.”
“Marse mighty big man dis mawning,” the woman said mischievously.
“He’low he’ll eat de last mossel der is. Yis’dy he mo’ like one er de
chilluns.”
Well, I had the last morsel—without tea; while Mammy Jacks stood over me
with her yellow kerchief and her good-natured grinning black face.
“Who’s Madam Constantia?” I asked after a time.
“W’at I tole you,” the woman replied with dignity, “She, Ma’am
Constantia ter cullud folks. She, missie ter me.”
“The young lady I saw yesterday, is she?”
“Tooby sho’.”
“She is Captain Wilmer’s daughter, I suppose?”
“Dat’s w’at I laid out fer to tell you.”
I did not want to seem curious or I should have asked if “Madam” was
married. I refrained out of prudence. I went on eating and Mammy Jacks
went on looking at me, and presently, “I speck you monst’ous bad, cruel
man,” she said with unction. “I hear Ma’am Constantia say you make smart
heap uv trubble fer cullud folks, en tote em to ’Badoes en Antigo! She
say you drefful ar’ogant insolent Englishman! You too bad ter live, I’
low.”
“And Madam Constantia told you to tell me that?”
The woman’s start and her look of alarm answered me. Before she could
put in a protest, however, the negro who had been with her the previous
evening appeared and relieved her from the difficulty. He came to attend
to my arm, and did his work with a skill that would not have disgraced a
passed surgeon. While he was going about the business, I was aware of a
slender shadow on the threshold, the shadow of some one who listened,
yet did not wish to be seen. “Confound her!” I thought. “The jade! I
believe that she is there to hear me whimper!” And I set my teeth—she
had called me a milksop, had she?—well, she should not hear me cry
again. The shadow lay on the threshold a short minute, then it vanished.
But more than once on that day and the two following days I was aware of
it. It was all I saw of the girl; and though I knew, and had the best of
grounds for knowing her sentiments respecting me, I confess that this
steady avoidance of me—lonely and in pain as I was, and her guest—hurt
me more than was reasonable.
As for Wilmer he was gone, without beat of drum, and without seeing me;
and save Mammy Jacks and the nigger, Tom, no one came near me except
Aunt Lyddy, and she came only once. She was a little old lady, deaf and
smiling, who labored under the belief that I had met with my injuries in
fighting against the French. She was quite unable to distinguish this
war from the old French war; when she thought of the fighting at all,
she thought of it as in progress in Canada or Louisiana, under the
leadership of Braddock and Forbes and Wolfe. The taking of Quebec was to
her an event of yesterday, and I might have drunk all the tea in the
world, and she would not have objected. Such was Aunt Lyddy; and even,
such as she was, I wondered with bitterness, that she was allowed to
visit me.
Yet when I came to think more calmly, the position surprised me less. It
was in the nature of this war to create a rancour which bred cruel
deeds, and these again produced reprisals. After the capture of Charles
Town in May and the subsequent defeat of Gates, the country had
apparently returned to its allegiance. The King’s friends had raised
their heads. The waverers had declared themselves, opposition in the
field had ceased. If one thing had seemed more certain than another it
was that my Lord Cornwallis’s base in the southern province was secure,
and that he might now devote himself, without a backward glance, to the
conquest of North Carolina and Virginia.
Then in a month, in a week, almost in a day had come a change. God knows
whether it was the result of mismanagement on our part, or of some
ill-judged severity; or, as many now think, of the lack of civil
government, a lack ill-borne by a people of our race. At any rate the
change came. In a week secret midnight war flamed up everywhere. In a
month the whole province was on fire. Partisans came together and
attacked their neighbors, rebels took loyalists by the throat, burned
their houses, harried their plantations, and in turn suffered the same
things. By day the King’s writ ran; at first it was the exception for
these irregulars to meet us in the field. But by night attacks, by
ambuscades, by besetting every ford and every ferry, they cut our
communications, starved our posts and killed our messengers. For a time
the royalists showed themselves as active. They, too, came together,
formed bands, burned and harried. Presently the father was in one camp,
the son in the other; neighbor fought with neighbor, old feuds were
revived, old friendships were broken; and this it was that gave to this
blind, bloody warfare, in the woods, in the morasses, in the
cane-brakes, its savage character.
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 to-morrow. 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 soldier 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.