All the glad difference between hope stark drowned and hope sighing back
into life lightened Ferry's heart; he gripped my shoulder--the sound
one, by good luck,--and drew me into the dining-room, where the whole
company were gathered to see Gholson eat. Our entry was a fresh
surprise. As we drank the flatteries of seven lovely welcomes, from
behind Gholson I reconnoitred Charlotte, and the fullest confirmation of
our guess was in the peaceful resolve of her eyes. I noted the Harpers,
all, and dear Mrs. Wall's sweet freckled face, take new gladness of the
happy change, while unable to define its cause.
But now came raptures and rhapsodies over the opened letters. Ferry's
orders had not been expected to reach him to-night, Gholson said, and so
we insisted they and my letter should remain in the saddle-pockets while
Gholson ate, and while the good news, public and personal, of the
Harpers' letters went round.
"But I thought the' was fi-ive letters," said the Squire as we were
about to leave the board; at which Mrs. Wall mumbled to him to "hush
up;" for the fifth was to Cécile.
"Yes," guilefully said Charlotte, "Richard's letter!" and we all
followed Gholson to where his saddle lay on the gallery. There he handed
out Ferry's document and went on rummaging for mine.
"The two were right here together," he said, "and Mr. Smith's was marked
'valuable' and had something hard in one corner of it." Camille brought a
candle, Estelle another; Gholson rose from his knee: "Smith, it's gone!
I've lost it! And yet"--he slapped his breast-pockets--"no, it's
somewhere in the grove; it's between here and that cornfield gate! I
counted all the papers just this side of that gate, and I must 'a'
dropped yours then!" Cécile brought a third light and we sallied forth
into the motionless air, Estelle with a candle and Gholson, Camille
with a candle and me, Cécile with a candle and Mrs. Wall, Miss Harper
and the Squire, and Charlotte and Ferry. In the heart of the grove
Estelle gave a soft cry, sprang, stooped, straightened, and handed me
the letter.
"Yes," exclaimed Camille as the three candle-bearers gathered close,
"that's your mother's writing," and as we fell into marching order
again, with the lights still in the front files, I opened it. It was
thick and soft with sheet after sheet of thinnest paper. With these was
a sealed letter, unaddressed, containing in one corner what seemed to be
a ring. Around all was a sheet of writing of later date than any other.
Wonderful, my mother's lines declared, was the Providence that had
brought her wounded boy among such priceless friends; and wonderful that
same Providence that now gave her the chance to send three weeks' daily
letters in one, and to send them by a hand so sure that she ventured to
add this other note, a matter so secret that it must be delivered only
by my own hands, or hands which I could trust as my own, to Charlotte
Oliver. We glanced back in search of Charlotte. She and Ferry were well
in the rear of the procession, moving with laggard steps, she lighting
his page with a borrowed candle, and he evidently reading not his
orders, but the Federal surgeon's letter. "Oh, don't speak yet,"
murmured Camille, "let them alone!"
At the garden gate the most of the company passed on into the house,
Gholson among them. His face, as for an instant he turned aside to me,
betrayed a frozen rage; for Ferry and Charlotte tarried just at our
backs, she seated on the "horse-block" and he leaning against it. A stir
of air brought by the rising moon had blown out their light. Gholson
left me, and Camille waited at my side while I tried to read by the
flare of her guttering candle. "Come, my dear," said Miss Harper from
half-way up the walk, but Charlotte called Miss Harper.
"You'd better go in, Camille," insisted the aunt as she passed us, but
Charlotte had just asked for our candle to relight her own, and she said
to Miss Harper, "Let them stay, won't you?" and then to Ferry, "They
might as well, mightn't they? Oh, now,"--as Camille handed her my
mother's letter--"they must!" She toyed with the envelope's thinner edge
without noticing the ring in the corner. "My dears," she said, looking
frail and distressed, yet resolute, "I have positive intelligence--not
through Captain, nor Richard, nor Mr. Gholson,--I'll tell you how some
day--positive intelligence that--the dead--is not dead; the blow,
Richard, glanced. I was foolish never to think of that possibility, it
occurs so often. He was profoundly stunned, so that he didn't come-to
until he was brought to a surgeon. It's from that surgeon I have the
news; here's his letter."
"Charlotte, my dear," interrupted Miss Harper, "tell us the remainder
to-morrow, but now--"
"No, sweetest friend, there will never be another chance like this;
Captain Ferry's orders carry him to Jackson at daylight to-morrow,
and--and we may not meet again for years; let me go on. When the gash
was sewed up, the hand was really the worse hurt of the two, and after
a few days he was sent down on a steamer to New Orleans with a great lot
of other sick and wounded, and with the commanding general's warning not
to come back on peril of his life. 'Tisn't easy to tell this, but you
four have a particular right to know it from me and at once. So let me
say"--she handed Ferry my mother's letter as if it were a burdensome
distraction--"I'm not sorry for the mistake, Richard, which we all so
innocently made; and you mustn't be sorry for me and be saying to
yourselves that my captivity is on me again; for I'm happier tonight
than I've been since the night the mistake was made."
She dropped a hand to Ferry's to receive again the neglected letter, and
chanced to take it by the corner that held the ring. With that she
stared at us, fingered it, rended the envelope, gave one glance to her
own name engraved inside a plain gold ring of the sort New Orleans girls
bestow upon those to whom they are betrothed, and springing to the
ground between our two candles, bent over the open page and cried
through a flood of tears, "Oh, God, have mercy on him, he is gone! He is
gone, Edgard! Oh, Edgard, he is gone at last; gone beyond all doubt, and
our hands--our hands and our hearts are clean!"
Ferry tossed away his candle and turned upon her, but she retreated into
Miss Harper's arms laughing through her tears. "Oh, no, no! we've never
hurried yet, never yet, my master in patience, and we'll not hurry now!
Go and come again. Go, wait, hide your eyes till I cry 'whoop,' and
come again and find me, and, I pledge you before these dear witnesses,
I'll be 'it' for the rest of my life!"
With the letter again held open, and bidding Miss Harper and Camille
read with her, she swept a fleet glance along the close lines that told
how Oliver, half cured of his wounds, had died in a congestive chill, of
swamp-fever, the day he landed in New Orleans. "See, see, Richard, here
your mother has copied the hospital's certificate."
She read on aloud how two private Federal soldiers, hospital
convalescents, had come to my mother telling her of his death, and how
he had named my mother over and over in his delirium, desiring that she
should be given charge of the small effects on his person and that she
would return them to his father in the Confederacy. My mother wrote how
she had been obliged secretly to buy back from the hospital steward a
carte-de-visite photograph of Charlotte, and this ring; how, Oliver not
being a Federal soldier, she had been allowed to assume the expense and
task of his burial; how she had found the body already wrapped and
bound, in the military way, when she first saw it, but heard the two
convalescents praising to each other the strong, hard-used beauty of the
hidden face, and was shown the suit of brown plantation jeans we all
knew so well; and how, lastly, when her overbearing conscience compelled
her to tell them she might find it easier to send the relics to the wife
rather than the father, they had furtively advised her to do as
she pleased.
[Illustration: Springing to the ground between our two candles, she
bent over the open page]
"Charlotte," said Miss Harper, "the thing is an absolute certainty!
Even without your likeness or--"
"Ah, no, no, not without this! the ring, the ring! But with it, yes!
This is the crowning proof! my ring to him! Oh, see my name inside it,
Camille; this little signet is Heaven's own testimony and acquittal!
Look, Richard, look at it now, for no living soul, no light of day,
shall ever see it again--"
"Sweet heart," replied Miss Harper, "very good! very good! but now say
no more of that sort. God bless you, dear, just let yourself be happy.
Good-night--no, no, sit still; stay where you are, love, while Camille
and I go in and Richard steps around to the stable and puts our team
into the road-wagon; for, Captain Ferry, neither you nor he is fit to
walk into Brookhaven; we can bring the rig back when we come from church
to-morrow."
"No, Richard," said Charlotte, "get my wagon and the little Mexicans."
Then to Miss Harper and Camille, "Good-night, dears; I'll wait here that
long, if Captain Ferry will allow me." She turned to him with the
moonlight in her eyes, that danced riotously as she said in her softest,
deepest note, "You're afraid!" and I thanked Heaven that Coralie
Rothvelt was still a pulsing reality in the bosom of Charlotte
Oliver.