ON PAROLE
“_But who can tell what cause had that fair maid
To use him so that loved her so well?_”
SPENCER.
A moment later the girl proved that her sensibility was less or her
courage higher than my estimate, for just as I had pictured a little
earlier, she surprised me. I found her at my elbow, and I rose to my
feet. Unluckily as I did so, I struck my injured arm against the chair,
and she—winced.
That might have disarmed me, but it did not. I remembered the nine men
who had been murdered in cold blood, and I thought of my narrow escape;
after all I was not a dog to be hung without ceremony and buried in a
ditch! And now she was in my power, now, if ever, was the time to bring
home to her what she had done. Still, she was a woman, I owed her
courtesy, and I endeavored to speak with politeness. “I see that you are
more merciful,” I said, bowing, “in fact than in intention, Miss
Wilmer.”
Her agitation was such—she did not try to hide it—that for a moment she
could not speak. Then “If you knew all,” she said in a low voice, “you
would know that I had grounds for what I did, Sir.” “That you had good
grounds, I cannot believe,” I answered. “And for knowing all, I think I
do. I know that you have suffered. I know that you have lost your mother
and your brother. I know that you have grievances, sad grievances it may
be against us.”
“You don’t know all,” she repeated more firmly. “But I know enough,” I
rejoined—I was not to be moved from my purpose now. “I know that I was
your father’s prisoner and your guest; and that you stood aside, you did
not raise a hand, not a finger to save me, Miss Wilmer. You did not
speak, though a word might have availed, and I believe would have
availed to preserve me! You let me go out to a cruel death, you turned
your back on me—”
“Oh, don’t! don’t!” she cried.
“You quail at the picture,” I retorted. “I do not wonder that you do. I
was your guest, I was wounded, I was in pain, alone. Has a man, when he
is maimed and laid aside, no claim on a woman? No claim on her
forbearance, on her pity, on her protection? For shame, Miss Wilmer!” I
continued warmly, carried farther than I intended by my feelings. “Men,
when their blood is hot, will plan things, and do things, God knows,
that are abominable. But for a woman to consent to such, and, when it is
too late, to think that by a few tears she can make up for them—”
“Stop!” she cried—I suppose that I had gone too far, for she faced me
now, hardily enough. “You understand nothing, sir! Nothing! So little
that you will scarcely believe me when I say that if the thing were to
do again—I would do it.”
“I cannot believe you,” I said coldly.
“It is true.”
I stared at her; and she returned my look with a strange mixture of
shame and defiance. “Why?” I said at last. “In heaven’s name, why, Miss
Wilmer? What have I done to you? Your mother I know. But had I a hand in
it? God forbid! Was I within a hundred miles of it? No. Your brother—and
there again, I find that hard to forgive. Your father had spared my
life, sheltered me, brought me here; could you not believe that I was
grateful? Could you not believe that I would do much to serve him and
something to repay him? That all that it was in my power to do for your
brother, by my exertions or my influence, I would do? But you did not
tell me. You did not ask me?”
“No,” she said.
“Why?” I asked bluntly. She did not answer. “Why?” I repeated. I was at
the end of my anger. I had said what was in my mind and said it with all
the severity I could wish. And I was sure that I had made her suffer.
Now I wanted to understand. I sought for light upon her. There was a
puzzle here and I had not the clue.
But she stood mute. Pale, forbidding, not avoiding my eyes but rather
challenging them, and very handsome in her sullenness, she confronted
me. At last, as I still waited, and still kept silence, she spoke. “And
after I had told you?” she said. “If you had offered help, would it then
have been easier to—to stand aside?”
“And let me go to my death?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Good God!” I cried. I could not check the words, I was so deeply
shocked. If she had deliberately considered that, she was indeed
determined, she was indeed ruthless; and there was nothing more to be
done. “I am sorry,” I said. “I had thought, Miss Wilmer, that I might
say what was in my mind and then let the thing be as if it had never
been. I wished to speak and then—to let there be peace between us. I
thought that we might still come to be friends. But if we are so far
apart as that, there can be nothing between us, not even forgiveness.”
“No,” she answered—but her head sank a little and I fancied that she
spoke sadly. “There can be nothing between us. Nothing, sir. We are
worlds apart.”
Before I could reply Mammy Jacks came to summon her. One of the blacks
wanted her, and she broke off and went into the house.
She left me adrift on a full tide of wonder. What a woman, I thought!
Nay, what a girl, for she was not more than twenty, if she were not
still in her teens! If all the women on the Colonial side were like her,
I thought, if but a tithe of her spirit and will were in them, the
chances of poor old England in the strife which she had provoked were
small indeed! I could compare the girl only to the tragic heroines of
the Bible, to Judith, or to Jael, who set her hand to the nail and her
right hand to the hammer. Very, very nearly had she driven the nail into
my temple!
And yet she had, she must have a gentler side. She had broken down on
that night, when she thought that the deed was done. I could not be
mistaken in that; I had seen her fling herself in a passion of remorse
on her father’s breast. And then how strong, how deep was the affection
which she felt for that father! With what tenderness, with what tears
and smiles and caresses had she flown to his arms on his return from the
field!
She was a provoking, a puzzling, a perplexing creature; and alas, she
began to fill far more of my thoughts than was her due. I was idle, and
I could not thrust her from them. Because she did not come near me I
dwelt on her the more. The chair at the other end of the veranda
remained empty all that day and the next, and it was not until noon of
the third day that I again had a word with her. Then, as she passed by
me with her head high, she saw that something was lacking on the little
table on which I took my meals, and she fetched it herself. I wished to
bring on a discussion; and as she set the thing down, “Thank you,” I
said politely. “But can I be sure that I am safe in eating this?”
She did not fire up as I expected. “You think that I may poison you?”
she said, making no attempt to evade the point.
“Well, you told me,” I replied, somewhat taken back, “that you were
prepared to do it again, you know?”
She sighed. “If I meant it then, I do not mean it now,” she said. “I
have done all that I can. I leave the rest to God!”
Certainly she said the most singular things! However, what surprise I
felt I hid, and I tried to meet her on her new ground. “That being so,”
I said smoothly, “why should we not bury what is past—for the time? I
have to live for a month under your roof, Miss Wilmer. We must see one
another, we must meet hourly and daily whether we will or not. Cannot
you forget for a month that I am an enemy?”
“No,” she answered with the utmost directness, “You are an enemy. Why
should I pretend that you are not? We are rebels and we are proud of the
name. You are of those who are paid to reduce us, to make war on us”—her
color rose, her eyes dilated as she spoke—“to burn our towns, to waste
our fields, to render our old homeless and our children motherless! And
why? Because you are false to your traditions, false to your liberties,
false to that freedom for which your forefathers died, and for which we
are dying to-day!”
The spirit, the tone, the brooding fire in her eyes filled me with
admiration. But I was wise enough to let no trace of this escape me. “I
cannot admit that,” I said, “naturally.”
“No,” she replied swiftly. “Because you are paid to see it otherwise.”
“At any rate you are frank, Miss Wilmer,” I said. “And you really do see
in me the mercenary of a cruel tyrant?” I smiled as I said it, and I
flattered myself that the jest pierced her armor. At any rate she lost
countenance a little. “And I suppose I ought to see in you a rebel,” I
continued. “But it may be that I do not in my heart think much worse of
you for being a rebel. And it is possible that you do not think so very
badly of me for being—paid!”
“It does not sound well,” she said with disdain.
“No,” I replied. “Beside romance, duty sounds poorly, and makes a dull
show.”
“The tea duty does!” she exclaimed viciously—and saw before the words
were well said that her wit had betrayed her into familiarity. She
colored with annoyance.
I seized the chance. “And what of it?” I said. “Tolls and taxes and the
like! What are they to us here? If I admit that a tax, which has turned
thirteen loyal colonies into what we see, was an unwise one, surely, if
I admit that, you may admit that it is hard for a proud nation to
retrace its steps.”
“I am not concerned to admit anything,” she answered haughtily.
“Still if that is all that is between us?”
“It is not!” she exclaimed. “It is not!” For a moment she stood a prey
to strong agitation. Then she muttered again, “It is not all!” and she
went deliberately away from me. But she went like one under a heavy
burden or the weight of a distressing thought.
Still I was not ill-pleased with the result of our interview. She had
stepped down from her pedestal. She had left for a while the tragic
plane on which she had hitherto moved and from which she had stooped to
me. I had climbed a step nearer to her. In future she would not find it
so easy to keep me at the distance that suited her pleasure and that at
the same time whetted my curiosity.
And perhaps something more than my curiosity. For I could not deny that,
handsome and perplexing, cold, yet capable of ardor, she had taken a
strong grip upon my thoughts. I could not keep her out of my mind for an
hour together. A dozen times a day I caught myself looking for her,
listening for the sound of her voice, watching for her appearance. The
morning was long, the hour dragged that brought neither the one nor the
other. Nay, there were times—I was idle, be it remembered, and
crippled—when the desire to bridge the distance between us and to set
myself right with her became a passion; when I would have given very
much for a smile from the averted face, or a look from the eyes that
passed coldly by me.
It was absurd, but I have said I was idle. And yet after all was it so
absurd? I compared her with the women whom I had known at home; with the
women of fashion with their red and white cheeks, their preposterous
headdresses, their insipid talk of routs and the card table; or again
with our country-bred hoydens, honest and noisy, with scarce an idea
beyond the stillroom or the annual race meeting: and I found that she
rivaled the former in dignity and the latter in simplicity. Adorable,
inexorable creature, she was well named Constantia! I was glad—such a
hold was she getting on my mind—when her father returned, two days later
than he had said, and brought news that distracted my thoughts.
The check at King’s Mountain had stopped Lord Cornwallis in his advance
on North Carolina. He had fallen back and established himself again at
Winnsboro’, so that he was still not more than sixty or seventy miles
from us. “If your bone were set, I should send you north, Major,” Wilmer
said with a look more than commonly thoughtful. “But I fancy that your
friend, Tarleton, has learned his lesson from Ferguson, and won’t stray
far from Headquarters. And now Greene has taken over Gates’s command—”
“Is that so?”
“It is—he won’t leave your people so much time to look about them. I do
not think that they will journey as far as this, but if I thought they
would, you would have to travel, my friend, fare as you might.”
That with a little more, not to the purpose, was the only talk I had
with him for some days. And presently I conceived the idea that this was
no accident. I began to suspect that Madam Constantia, not content with
sending me to Coventry herself, was bent on keeping him from me. I came
even to think that I owed to this desire on her part the fact that I now
saw something, though little more, of her. For she would interpose
between us rather than let me talk to him. If her father, as he crossed
the veranda or came in from the fields had the air of drifting towards
me, she was sure to see it, and to draw him aside, sometimes by a word,
more often by a look, rarely by speaking to me herself. More than once
when he approached me—he was in his cynical way a good-natured man—she
appeared so pat to the occasion that I gave her the credit of watching
us, and believed that her eyes were upon me more often than I knew.
I fancied even that there was an understanding between them on this
point. For when she surprised him in my neighborhood, though he might
have stood only to say “Good morning!” or “Good fall weather!” he would
wear an air half guilty and half humorous, as of a child caught
transgressing. And once when this happened, I had a queer illusion. It
seemed to me that the look of amusement that Wilmer shot at the girl,
and which I was not meant to catch, transformed his face in the most
curious way. It shortened it, vulgarized it, widened it. For a moment I
saw him no longer as the shrewd, lean Southerner he was, but as a
jovial, easy, smiling person, for all the world like an English yeoman
or innkeeper. The fancy lasted for an instant only, and I set it down to
the shadow cast by his hat or to a tricky cast of the sunshine as it
shimmered through the leaves of the magnolia behind him. But later I
thought of it more than once. The change in the man, though passing, was
so great that I should not have known him for himself; and it haunted
me.
I believe that it was about three days after this, when he was abroad
upon the plantation, on which he spent most of his time, that Madam
Constantia and I came again to blows. Time lay heavy on my hands—he may
be thankful who has never known the aimless hours and long tedium of the
prisoner—and though I had no prospect of forwarding letters, I thought
that I would amuse myself by learning to write with my left hand. It was
not a thing to be done in a moment, but Mammy Jacks provided the means
and I fell to the task in the leisurely way of an invalid, now scrawling
a few words in round hand, now looking away to the purple distances that
reminded me of our Cheviots on a fine October day, and now lazily
watching the blacks who were trooping past, bringing in the last of the
cotton. It was sunny, it was warm, and the slaves in their scanty white
clothes with baskets on their heads formed a picture new to me. I was
gazing at it, pen in hand, when the girl came through the veranda,
glanced my way, and in a twinkling descended on me like a whirlwind.
She snatched away the paper that lay under my hand and before, taken by
surprise, I knew what she was about, she tore it across and across.
“Ungrateful!” she cried. “Have you forgotten your parole, sir? Were
Colonel Marion here, you would not dare to do this!”
“To do what?” I retorted, rising to my feet. I was as angry as she was.
“What should I not dare to do?”
“What you are doing!” she rejoined, her eyes sparkling and her breast
heaving with excitement.
“I am learning to write with my left hand. Why not?”
“Why not?” she exclaimed. “And what did you promise Colonel Marion?” She
pointed to the paper which she had flung on the ground. “What did you
undertake on your honor?”
“That I would not communicate with my friends,” I answered sternly.
“Nothing more!”
“And what are you writing?” she cried. But her tone sank by a note, and
uncertainty fluttered in her eyes.
“That is my business!” I answered. “What is it to you, pray, what I
write? Or see!” I stooped, and with difficulty owing to my stiff arm, I
recovered one of the scraps of paper. “See! Satisfy yourself. It is but
a tag from the book that you lent me.”
She took it. “‘Sure such a various creature ne’er was seen!’” she read
mechanically, and with a falling face. “‘Sure—’” she stopped.
“Is it sufficiently harmless?” I asked ironically. “Is there dishonor in
it? At least I can say this—I know of no one here, Miss Wilmer, to whom
the words can be applied. From your father I have met with consistent
kindness and attention. And from you equally consistent—but I will not
define it. I leave you to judge of that.”
She was now as angry, I believe, with herself as with me; but she did
not see how she could retract and for that reason, whatever the original
cause of her attack, she would not own herself in the wrong. “I believe
there is such a thing,” she said stubbornly, “as cipher writing.”
I stared at her with all the contempt I could throw into my gaze.
“Cipher writing!” I said. “Certainly I have come into this wilderness to
learn strange things! Cipher writing! But enough—and too much!” I
continued wrathfully. “I am not used to have my honor doubted. When your
father returns I shall refer the matter to him and I shall ask him if I
am to be assailed under his roof—assailed in a manner as insulting as it
is outrageous!”
“I will ask him myself,” she said in a much lower tone. “If I am wrong I
am sorry. But Colonel Marion told me—”
“That I was not to communicate with my friends? Am I doing it? But, no,”
I concluded loftily, “I will not discuss it. I will refer the matter to
your father.”
And I turned my back on her without much courtesy—the attack was so
wanton, so silly! I heard her move away and go into the house.
She was crazy, positively crazy, I thought. What was it to her whether I
wrote or did not write? What was it to her if I did communicate with my
friends? She was not my keeper, she could not judge of the risk or the
importance of the step which Marion had forbidden. Placed as we were
within less than seventy miles of the British Headquarters and within
the scope of a cavalry raid, he was doubtless right in making the
stipulation. But what did she know of it? What was it to her? Why should
she attach importance to the matter?
Confound her impudence! I might be one of the bare-footed slaves
trudging through the heat, I might be a wretched Sambo fresh from
Guinea, and she could scarcely treat me with greater contumely. She was
a fury, a perfect fury, and as passionate as she was beautiful! But I
would speak plainly to Wilmer. I would tell him that I was his prisoner,
and owed something to him, but that I could not, and would not, be
subject to his daughter’s whims and caprices. Write? Why should I not
write? Sheets, quires, reams if I pleased, so long as I did not forward.
And how in heaven’s name was I to forward? Through whom? Did she suppose
that the postman called once a day as in Eastcheap and Change Alley? The
whole thing was monstrous! Monstrous!
I waited, fuming, for Wilmer’s return from the fields, and meantime the
delay brought to my mind another grievance, though one which I could not
name. I had supposed that when he came back, after leaving Marion, I
should be invited to make one at the common table. But no invitation had
reached me, my meals were still served apart, and this seemed absurd in
a house in which life was pleasantly primitive. Certainly this was a
minor complaint. But he who has lived for months with men whom a common
danger has rendered respectable but could not render congenial, he to
whom a woman’s voice has grown strange and the decencies of home a
memory, will understand what I felt when scraps of Aunt Lyddy’s chatter,
the girl’s grave voice, the cackle of Mammy Jack’s laughter came to
me—outside.
A small grievance and one that I could not air, one that I must keep to
myself. But it rose vividly before me. I was sure that it was not
Wilmer, I was sure that it was the girl who shut me out and would have
none of my company.
Noon came without bringing Wilmer, and soon I guessed that Madam had
played a trick on me. She intended to keep us apart. At that the anger
which time and thought were cooling, flamed up afresh, and I longed to
thwart her.
Hitherto I had limited my exercise to a turn or two in front of the
house. But I saw no reason why I should not go farther, and seek Wilmer
in the fields where the blacks were picking. After dinner, accordingly,
I chose my time and set out. She should not have it all her own way. If
he would not come to me I would go to him.
I had to cross the horse-paddock and the rails were up. They were heavy,
I had only one arm, and bandaged as I was I could neither stoop freely,
nor use my strength such as it was; for now I moved I found to my
disgust that I was only half a man. I tried to shift the upper rail, but
a pang that brought the sweat to my brow shot down my arm, and I
desisted. The sun beat down upon me, the flies swarmed about my head,
the din of the crickets filled my ears. I leant upon the rail, enraged
at my helplessness but unable for the moment to do more.
I was in that position when she found me.
“You must come in,” she said. “Let me help you.” I suppose I looked ill
for there was a tone in her voice that I had not heard before.
“I wish to go on,” I said pettishly, turning from her that she might not
see my face. “I am going to your father.”
“You must come in,” she replied firmly. “The sun is too hot for you. You
have never been as far as this.”
“But I—”
“You must do as I say,” she insisted. “Lean on me, if you please. Don’t
you know that if you fell you might hurt yourself seriously?”
“I am only a little—giddy,” I said, clinging to the rail. “Which—I don’t
seem to see—the way?”
I went back to the house on her arm—there was nothing else for it—but
the only incident of the journey that I could recall was that at a
certain place I stumbled, and she held me up. I tried to laugh. “A—a
milksop! A weakling!” I said.
She did not answer.
When she reached the house she put me into my chair on the veranda, and
disappeared. She returned with a glass of Madeira. “You must drink
this,” she said, “you are not used to the sun”; and she stood over me
until I had done so. Then when the giddiness had passed off and things
were clear, “My father tells me,” she continued hurriedly, “that I must
ask your pardon. He says that I ought to have taken it for granted that
you would keep your word—that nine out of ten English officers—”
“Would do so?” I said stiffly. “We are much obliged to him.”
“And that men can tell very quickly when they can trust one another.”
“As a rule they can.”
“I will bring you some more paper,” she said meekly. “And I beg your
pardon.”
“Please don’t say any more,” I replied. “Can you not believe, Miss
Wilmer, that I am grateful—most grateful for what has been done for me?
And that, enemy as I am, I would not willingly injure the meanest person
in this house.”
“I do believe that,” she said in a low voice.
“You do?” I cried, pleased at the concession. “Then surely—”
“But you might have no choice in the matter,” she replied gravely.
“Honor—” she paused, looking away from me, apparently in search of a
word—“is a two-edged weapon. It protects us to-day, sir. It may wound us
to-morrow.”
“If you mean,” I answered, “that after I am exchanged I shall fight
against you, it is true. But we can fight without ill will and suffer
without rancor. While we observe the rules of the game, we are
brothers-in-arms though we are in opposite camps. That is the legacy,
Miss Wilmer, that chivalry has left to us.”
She seemed to think this over. “And honor?” she resumed, her face
averted. “It binds always, I suppose? It imposes rules which it is not
possible to evade, no matter what the exigency may be? If you had to
choose between your mother’s life—shall I say?—and your honor, what
then, Major Craven?”
“I cannot conceive the situation,” I answered, smiling at the absurdity
of the idea.
“You might be on parole as you are to-day,” she rejoined. “Suppose that
your mother’s life depended, no matter how, on your presence, on your
breach of your word? What would you do? Would you still put your honor
first?”
“I do not know what I should do,” I answered. “The thing is apart from
ordinary experience. But I know what my mother would say. She would say,
‘Keep your word!’”
She was silent for a moment. “And to betray your country even in a small
matter, that too would be a breach of honor, I suppose?”
“I am afraid that it would be a very bad one,” I answered, smiling. “If
you are thinking of bribing me to disclose our secrets, I had better
tell you at once that I have no secrets, Miss Wilmer.”
“And if you had you would not sell them?”
“Neither sell them, nor tell them. I hope not.”
“No,” she replied. “I do not think you would.” I heard her sigh deeply.
Then, “I will take your glass,” she said. And she took it and went into
the house.
She left me puzzled, puzzled to the last degree; but at the same time I
felt that the girl had come nearer to me. She left a picture of herself
a little different from that which I had hitherto possessed. Perhaps it
was the hat, the wide-brimmed shadowy hat that softened her features and
by taking from her height, lowered the stately carriage of her head.
Perhaps it was the vague elusive sadness of her tone. Perhaps something
else. She had named my mother. I wondered what my mother would think of
her, with her perplexing ways, her reserve, her aloofness, the hostility
which she had not stooped to veil. Often my mother had said in jest that
she did not know where I should find a wife, since I looked shyly on our
country belles, and she would have none of our town ladies. To which my
father had answered that such fastidiousness generally ended in a
milkmaid—and that he believed that the next Lady Craven would be no
better.
A milkmaid? Would they consider—I lost myself in wild and extravagant
dreams. Blowsabella? Surely no one could be less like a Blowsabella. Or
for the matter of that less like the Hartopps our neighbors, who talked
of nothing but plaited bits, lived in riding coats, and romped through a
country dance like so many Dulcineas del Toboso!
No, no one could say that she was a milkmaid. On the other hand I
doubted if she had ever seen a Panache—the latest headdress—or held
cards at Loo, or squalled a bar of Sacchini’s music, or chattered down
players and pit at a tragedy. She belonged to no category. She was
herself, and an odd, troubling, haunting self at that!