MAUDE AND TOM.
It was then that Maude left him and went back to the house, where,
standing in the door, she scanned the face and person of the man for
whose safety in part she had pledged her heart and hand.
Tom’s _tout ensemble_ was good, and there was about him a certain air of
grace and culture which showed itself in every movement. A stranger
would have trusted him in a moment, and recognized the true manhood in
his expressive face. And Maude recognized it, as she never had before,
and the contrast between him and Arthur struck her painfully.
“If Arthur were more like him, I could love him better,” she thought,
just as the Judge asked the abrupt question:
“You have a wife, hey?”
“Of course he has,” Maude thought, and still she listened for the
answer.
“My wife died some years ago, before the war broke out. She was a Mary
Williams, a near relative of the Williamses of Charleston. Perhaps you
know them?”
“Know ’em! I’ll bet I do!—the finest family in the State. And you
married one of them?” the old Judge said, his manner indicating an
increased respect for the man who had married a Williams of Charleston.
Maude knew the family, too, or rather knew of them, and remembered how,
some years before, when she was at St. Mary’s, she had heard a
Charleston young lady speaking of a Mrs. Carleton from Boston, who had
recently died, and whose husband had been so kind and patient and
tender, and was “the most perfectly splendid looking man she ever saw.”
Maude remembered this last distinctly, because it had called forth a
reproof from the teacher who had overheard it, and who asked what kind
of a man “the most perfectly splendid looking” one could be. Maude had
not thought of that incident in years, but it came back to her now as
she stood close to the man who had been so kind and tender to his sick,
dying wife. He would be all that, she knew, for his manner was so quiet
and grave and gentle, and then a great throb of pain swept over Maude De
Vere as she thought of Arthur and the pledge she had given him. Maude
could not analyze her feelings, or understand why the knowing who Tom
Carleton was, and that he was also free, should make the world so
desolate all on a sudden, and blot out the brightness of the summer day
which had seemed so pleasant at its beginning.
“I did it in part for him,” she said, feeling that in spite of her pain
there was something sweet even in such a sacrifice.
She was still standing in the door, when Tom, turning a little more
toward his host, saw her, his face lighting up at once, and the smile,
which made him so handsome, breaking out about his mouth and showing his
fine teeth.
“Ah, Miss De Vere, take this seat,” and with that well-bred politeness
so much a part of his family, he arose and offered her his chair.
But Maude declined it, and took a seat instead upon a little camp stool
near to the vine-wreathed columns of the piazza.
It was very pleasant there that morning, and Maude, sitting against that
back-ground of green leaves, made a very pretty picture in her pink
cambric wrapper, trimmed with white, white pendants in her ears, and a
bunch of the sweet scented heliotrope in her hair, and at her throat
where the smooth linen collar came together. And Tom enjoyed the picture
very much, from the crown of satin hair, to the high-heeled slipper,
with its bright ribbon rosette. It was not a little slipper, like those
which used to be in Tom’s dressing-room in Boston, when Mary was alive,
nor yet like the fairy things which Rose Mather wore. Nothing about
Maude De Vere was small, but everything was admirably proportioned. She
wore a _seven_ glove and she wore a _four_ boot. She measured just
twenty-five inches around the waist, and five feet six from her head to
her feet, and weighed one hundred and forty. A perfect Amazon, she
called herself; but Tom Carleton did not think so. He knew she was a
large type of womanhood, but she was perfect in form and feature, and he
would not have had her one whit smaller than she was, neither did he
contrast her with any one he had ever known. She was so wholly unlike
Mary and Rose and Annie, that comparison between them was impossible.
She was Miss De Vere,—Maude he called her to himself, and the name was
beginning to sound sweetly to him, as he daily grew more and more
intimate with the queenly creature who bore it. He had buried his pale,
proud-faced, but loving Mary; he had given up the gentle Annie, and
surely he might think of Maude De Vere if he chose; and the sight of her
sitting there before him with the rich color in her cheek, and the
Southern fire in her eyes, stirred strange feelings in his heart, and
made him so forgetful of what the Judge was saying to him, that the old
man at last rose and walked away, leaving the two young people alone
together. Tom had never talked much to Maude except upon sick-room
topics, and he felt anxious to know if her mind corresponded with her
face and form. Here was a good opportunity for testing her mental
powers, and in the long, earnest conversation which ensued concerning
men, and books, and politics, Tom sifted her thoroughly, experiencing
that pleasure which men of cultivation always experience when thrown in
contact with a woman whose intelligence and endowments are equal to
their own. Maude’s education had not been a superficial one, nor had it
ceased with her leaving school. In her room at home there was a small
library of choice books, which she read and studied each day together
with her brother Charlie, whose education she superintended. Few persons
North or South were better acquainted with the incidents and progress of
the war, than she was. She had watched it from its beginning, and with
her father, from whom she had inherited her superior mind, she had held
many earnest argumentative discussions concerning the right and wrong of
secession. Maude had opposed it from the first, but her father had
thought differently, and carrying out his principles, had lost his life
in the first battle of Bull Run. Maude spoke of him to Tom, and her fine
eyes were full of tears as she told of the dark, terrible days which
preceded and followed the news of his death.
“The ball which struck him down went further than that; it killed
mother, too, and made us orphans,” Maude said, and something in the tone
of her voice, and the expression of her face, puzzled Tom just as it had
many times before, and carried him back to Bull Run, where it seemed to
him he had seen a face like Maude De Vere’s.
“Was your father killed in battle?” Tom asked, and Maude replied:
“No, sir; that is, he did not die on the battle-field. He was wounded,
and crawled away into the woods, where they found him dead, sitting
against a tree, with a little Union drummer boy lying right beside him,
and father’s handkerchief bound round the poor bleeding stumps, for the
little hands were both shot away. I’ve thought of that boy so often,”
Maude said, “and cried for him so much. I know father was kind to him,
for the little fellow was nestled close to him, Arthur said. He was
there, and found my father, though he did not at first recognize him, as
it was a number of years since he had seen him.”
Tom was growing both interested and excited. He was beginning to find
the key to that familiar look in Maude De Vere’s face, and, coming close
to her he said:
“Were any prisoners taken near your father, Miss De Vere? Union
prisoners, I mean?”
“Yes,” Maude replied. “Arthur was a private, then, and, with another
soldier, was prowling through the woods when they came upon father, and
two Union soldiers near him,—one a boy, Arthur said, and one an officer,
whose ankle had been sprained. In their eagerness to capture somebody
they forgot my father, and carried off the man and boy. Then they went
back, and Arthur found, by some papers in the dead soldier’s pocket,
that it was father, and he had him decently buried at Manassas, with the
little boy. I liked Arthur for that. I would never have forgiven him if
he left that child in the woods. When the war is over, I am going to
find the graves.”
She was not weeping now, but her eyes had in them a strange glitter as
they looked far off in the distance, as if in quest of those two graves.
“Maude De Vere,” Tom Carleton said, and at the sound, Maude started and
blushed scarlet, “you must forgive me if I call you Maude this once.
It’s for the sake of your noble father, by whose side _I_ stood when the
spirit left his body, and went after that of the little drummer boy,
whose bleeding stumps were bound in your father’s handkerchief. I
remember it well. I had sprained my ankle, and, with a lad of my company
was trying to escape, when I heard the sound of some one singing that
glorious chant of our church, ‘Peace on earth, good will toward men.’ It
sounded strangely there, amid the dead and dying, who had killed each
other; but there was peace between the Confederate captain and the
Federal boy, as they sang the familiar words. As well as we could, we
cared for him. I wiped the blood from your father’s wound, and the boy
brought him water from the brook, while he talked of his home in North
Carolina; of his children who would never see him again; and of Nellie,
his wife. It comes back to me with perfect distinctness, and it is your
father’s look in your eyes and face which has puzzled me so much. Two
soldiers wearing the Southern grey came up and captured us, and we were
taken to Richmond. Surely, Miss De Vere, it is a special providence
which has brought me at last to you, the daughter of that man, and made
you the guardian angel, who has stood between me and recapture. There is
a meaning in it, if we could only find it.”
Tom’s fine eyes were bent upon Maude, and in his excitement he had
grasped her hand, which did not lie as cold and pulseless in his as an
hour before it had lain in Arthur’s. It throbbed and quivered now, but
clung to Tom’s with a firm hold, which was not relaxed even when Arthur
came up, his face growing dark and threatening as he saw the position of
the two.
Maude did not care for Arthur then, or think what that look in Tom’s
kindling eyes might mean. She only remembered that the man whose hand
held hers so firmly, had ministered to her dying father, had held the
cup of water to his parched lip, had wiped the flowing blood from his
face, and spoken to him kindly words of sympathy.
Here was the answer to her prayer, that God would send her somebody who
could tell her of her father’s last minutes. The somebody had come, and,
in her gratitude to him, she could almost have knelt and worshiped him.
“Oh, Arthur!” she cried, “Captain Carleton is the very man you and Joe
Newell captured at Bull Run. He was with father when he died; he took
care of him, and was so kind until you came and took him.”
And Maude’s eyes flashed with anything but affection upon her lover, who
for a moment could not speak for his surprise.
Curiously he looked at Tom, seeking for something on which to fasten a
doubt, for he did not wish Maude to have a cause for gratitude to the
Northern officer. But the longer he gazed the less he doubted. The face
of the lame officer in the Virginia woods came up distinctly before him,
and was too much like the face confronting him to admit of a mistake,
especially after Maude repeated the substance of what she had heard from
Captain Carleton. Arthur was convinced, and as Maude dropped Tom’s hand,
he took it in his, and said:
“It is very strange that my first prize, over whose capture I felt so
proud, should fall again into my power. But this time you are safe, I
reckon. I am older than I was three years ago, and not quite so thirsty
for a Yankee’s blood. You did Maude’s father good service, it seems, and
to prove that we _rebels_ can be grateful and generous even to our foes,
I will take you under my protection as one of my party, when I escort
Maude home to Tennessee, as I intend doing in a few days.”
Maude’s face was white with passion as she listened to this patronizing
speech, which had in it so much of assumed superiority over the man who
smiled a very peculiar kind of smile, as he bowed his acknowledgment of
Arthur’s kind attentions. Not a hint was there that Maude was head and
front of the arrangement,—that for Tom’s sake she had pledged herself to
one whose inferiority never struck her so painfully as now, when she saw
him side by side with Captain Carleton. Arthur did not care to have
Captain Carleton know how much he was indebted to Maude for his present
pleasant quarters, and his prospect of a safe transfer to the hills of
Tennessee. But Tom, though never suspecting the whole truth, did know
that his gratitude for past and present kindness received from that
Southern family was mainly due to Maude, whom he admired more and more,
as the days wore on, and he learned to know her intimately. The shy
reserve which since his convalescence she had manifested toward him,
passed with the knowledge that he had stood by her dying father, and she
treated him as a friend with whom she had been acquainted all her life
long. Occasionally, as something in Tom’s manner made her think that but
for Arthur she might perhaps in time bear that relation toward him,
which Mary Williams had borne, she felt a fierce throb of pain and a
sense of such utter desolation, that she involuntarily rebelled against
the life before her. But Maude was a brave, sensible girl. She had
chosen her lot, she reasoned, and she would abide by it, and make Arthur
as happy as she could. He was fulfilling his part of the contract well,
as was proven by the terror-stricken creature, whom he had found hiding
on the plantation, and had brought to Hetty’s cabin, where he now lay so
weak, that it was impossible to take him along on that journey to
Tennessee.
“His time will come by and by,” Arthur said, when Maude expressed
anxiety for him. “I’ll land him safely at your Uncle Paul’s some night
when you least expect it. My business now is with you and your Yankee
captain.”
Maude had asked that for the present nothing should be said with regard
to their engagement. And so, though the Judge suspected that some
definite arrangement had been made between his son and Maude, he did not
know for certain, even when she stood before him attired for the
journey.
The Judge was sorry to part with Maude, and he was sorry to part with
Tom. He liked him because he was a gentleman if he _was_ a Yankee, and
because his father had sent _Seth_ back, (poor Seth, with his free
papers in his coffin,) and because he had been kind to Maude’s father,
and married Mary Williams, of the Charleston Williamses, and could smoke
a cob-pipe, and enjoy it. These were the things which recommended Tom to
the old man, who shook his hand warmly at parting, saying to him:
“I hate Northern dogs mostly, but hanged if I don’t like you. May you
get safely home, and if you do, my advice is to stay there, and tell the
rest of ’em to do the same. They can’t whip us,—no, by George, they
can’t, even if they have got some advantage. The papers say it was all a
strategical trap, and we’d rather you’d have the places than not. You
can’t take Richmond,—no, sir! We will die in the last ditch, every
mother’s son of us; and what is left will set the town on fire, and let
it go to thunder!”
The old Judge was waxing very eloquent for a man who had one Union
soldier recruiting in Hetty’s cabin, and was bidding good-bye to
another; but consistency was no part of war politics, and he rambled on,
until Arthur cut him short by saying they could wait no longer. With
Arthur as a safeguard in case of an attack from Confederates, and Tom
Carleton in case of an assault from the Unionists, Maude felt perfectly
secure, and in quiet and safety she accomplished her journey, and was
welcomed with open arms by Paul Haverill and Charlie. Arthur could only
stop for a day among the hills. He might be ordered back to his regiment
at any time, and if he got that _other chap_ through he must be bestir
himself, he said; and so he bade good-bye to Maude, in whom he had
implicit faith, and whose sober, quiet demeanor he tried to attribute to
her sorrow at parting with him.
“She does like me some, and by and by she will like me better,” he said,
as he went his way, leaving her standing in the doorway of her uncle’s
house, her face very pale, and her hands pressed closely together, as if
forcing back some bitter thought or silent pain.
Turning once ere the winding road hid her from view Arthur kissed his
hand to her gayly, while with a wave of her handkerchief she re-entered
the house, and neither guessed nor dreamed how or when they would meet
again.