again, and letting me know that I must not presume upon the service she
has done me. What a fool I am, to be sure! I have been reckoning upon
her devotion to me in my illness and captivity as proof that what I
brutally blurted out at Fairfax Court-house was not unwelcome to her
after all. With her quick feminine perceptions, she has discovered how I
have been misinterpreting her duty doing, and she wants now to show me
my error in the simplest way possible."
As he meditated, the soldier impulse in him asserted itself,--the
impulse to dare the worst in the hope of achieving the best.
Acting upon that impulse he immediately wrote a note to Agatha, and sent
it by Sam, with orders to deliver it to her in person, if possible, and
at all events to ask for an answer and fetch it.
In his note he told Agatha of his unanswered inquiries, and of the great
uneasiness he felt concerning her health. Finally he begged her to
relieve his anxiety by sending a line in reply.
XXXII
_IN RIGHTEOUS WRATH_
The grounds about The Oaks mansion were much more extensive than was
customary on Virginia plantations. The late owner, Agatha's father, had
cherished the forest growths jealously, permitting no tree to be cut
that could in any wise be preserved, and forbidding the encroachment of
the lawns immediately about the house upon the wild woodland growths
that bordered and surrounded them. It was Agatha's delight on windy
autumn days to wander in these woodlands, and on this morning Sam
encountered her quite half a mile from the house. She was hatless, and
the wind was taking what liberties it pleased with her thick-growing
hair, while she, having turned child again in her enjoyment of the
brilliant, gusty morning, was wading about in the depths of the fallen
leaves, delighting her soul with their rustling.
Sam delivered his note and she read it. Instantly the child spirit in
her took flight and she became the strong, resolute, self-contained
young woman that she had learned to be during the storm and stress
period of her recent life. Her sudden access of dignity did not spare
even Sam. Like an officer in battle issuing his orders, she turned to
the negro boy and said:
"Return to your master at once. Tell him you met me far from the house.
Say to him that I am almost as well as ever, and that I will answer his
note during the day. There. Go now, and deliver the message as I have
given it to you. Do you hear?"
Sam's face grew long, as he turned about, and Agatha caught sight of it.
She was in a mighty rage, but not with Sam. She bethought her that the
boy had misunderstood, to the injury of his feelings, so she called to
him, and added:
"I did not mean to speak sharply to you, Sam. You don't deserve any but
kindly words. I was thinking of something else. How are you since you
got back to Warlock, and tell me truly how your master is."
"Thank you, Mis' Agatha," answered the boy, his face all smiles again,
"Mas' Baillie he's a-gittin' as lively as a spring chicken what don't
mean to be ketched. He rides every day now, an' don't he jes' eat! He'll
be all right in a week or two, yo' may be sure. As fer Sam, he ain't
never nothin' else but well, specially now dat we done git away from dem
Yankees an' back to Warlock ag'in!"
Nevertheless Sam grew distinctly melancholy as he rode homeward,
repeating his message time and again in order that he might deliver it
correctly. The message seemed to him unduly curt, and certainly the note
he had delivered seemed somehow to have angered Agatha. Sam wondered how
and why, and he grieved over the circumstance, too, for Sam had taken
the liberty of making up his mind that Agatha would make an ideal
mistress at Warlock, and that the master of Warlock was planning some
such destiny for her. Her message and her manner suggested that she
resented all this, and that his master's hopes, which he took for
granted, were likely to be disappointed.
Baillie Pegram's interpretation of the message when it was delivered to
him did not materially differ from that which Sam had put upon it.
"She resents the liberty I have taken," he thought, "in writing to her
directly. She has forbidden her aunts to reply to my inquiries made
through them. She has sought in that way to tell me, by indirection,
that the old family war between herself and me still endures; that all
her suffering and sacrifice in ministering to me was inspired solely by
a sense of duty; that she wishes now to end our intimacy as she did two
years ago. Clearly that is the state of the case, and she is naturally
angry now that I have forced an attention upon her which compels her to
tell me directly what she had meant me to infer. What an idiot I was to
do that!"
In the meanwhile Agatha had walked rapidly to the house. At the
beginning of her journey she indulged her indignation freely. She
rehearsed all the bitingly sarcastic things she meant to say to her
aunts, all the defiance she intended to hurl at their helpless heads.
But as she spent her superfluous vitality in brisk walking, she
recovered her self-control.
"I will not scold," she resolved. "That would be undignified. I will be
calm and courteous, saying as little as may be necessary to let them see
my displeasure. They have grievously compromised my dignity by what they
have done. I must not sacrifice what remains of it by a petulant
outbreak. They have treated me like a child in pinafores, who must be
restrained lest she misbehave. I must show them that I have outgrown
pinafores. I must prove myself incapable of childish misbehaviour."
Firm in this determination, she entered the house with Baillie Pegram's
note in her hand, and upon joining her aunts before the library fire,
she said quite calmly:
"I have a note from Captain Pegram, who has got a notion into his head
that I am seriously ill, and that you are concealing the fact from his
friendly knowledge. He tells me he has twice asked you for news of me,
and you have made no response. Of course you forgot to mention in your
notes that I am quite well again."
The ladies looked at each other with troubled eyes. Presently one of
them spoke:
"No, dear, we did not forget. We have only been mindful of proprieties
which Mr. Pegram seems strangely to forget or ignore. Under the
circumstances, and in view of the relations between the Ronalds and the
Pegrams, it seemed to us rather impertinent in him to send messages to
you, even through us. We intended to rebuke his presumption by ignoring
the messages. Why, he even went so far as to ask us to let you write to
him yourself."
Agatha received all this in silence, controlling herself with
difficulty. It was not until a full minute after her aunt had ceased to
speak that she said:
"Go on, please."
"There would seem to be no more to say; for surely it is needless to
comment upon Mr. Pegram's crowning impertinence in writing directly to
you."
"Go on, please. Tell me all about it. You see I don't at all
understand."
By this time the good dames began to realise that Agatha was either very
angry or very deeply hurt, so they decided to soothe and placate her.
This is how they did it.
"No, dear, I suppose you do not understand. How should you, with such
bringing up as your grandfather gave you? Of all the strange
perversities--"
"Stop!" cried Agatha, rising from her chair with a look upon her face
which her aunts did not understand but gravely feared. Their last spoken
words had set her free to speak. She had not dared resent their
criticism of Baillie Pegram's conduct. That might have been
misinterpreted. But the reflection upon her grandfather was a different
matter. She stood there livid to the lips and shaking with the
indignation which she was struggling to suppress. After that one word,
"Stop!" she remained silent for a space, struggling to restrain the
angry utterance that was surging to her lips. At last, speaking in a
constrained voice, she said:
"I will not hear another word. Neither you nor any other human being is
worthy to speak my grandfather's name except with reverence. He was
great, and wise, and unspeakably good. He hated lies and shams and false
conventionalities."
Here the roused tigress in Agatha was sharply restrained. She found
herself about to indulge in a tirade, and that she was resolved not on
any account to do. Still speaking in a voice of enforced calm, she
added:
"I must go now and write to Captain Pegram. I shall dine with the Misses
Blair at The Forest to-day."
To Baillie she wrote:
"It is very kind of you to feel so much solicitude on my account. But it
is needless, as I am quite well again and growing stronger every day. I
go in half an hour to dine at The Forest, where I shall remain till
to-morrow. After that I shall go to Richmond in search of some way in
which I may be of service. I am pleased to hear through Sam that you are
so greatly better. Thank you again for all your kindness to me, and
good-bye."
Having despatched this note, Agatha donned her hat and cloak and walked
out of the house. Without a pause she passed on through the grounds and
along the road to the plantation known as The Forest.
She had made no adieus to her aunts. "To do that," she reflected, "I
should have to tell lies, or act them. I should have to say I am sorry
to leave them, and I am not sorry. Oh, Chummie! the world is very lonely
now that you are not in it! But you mustn't grieve in heaven, Chummie.
It will not be for long, you know, and while I stay here I'm going to
try harder than ever to be true and good and altogether truthful, as you
want me to be, and when I go to join you I'll be happy enough to make up
for all these little troubles here."
At that moment a merry gust of wind blew off her headgear. She picked it
up, but did not replace it on her head. She liked to feel the crisp
breezes in her face. She even indulged the fancy that they bore caresses
to her from Chummie.
XXXIII
_UNDER RED LEAVES_
Agatha's note, coming after her curt message, was a sore puzzle to its
recipient. One might interpret it to mean anything or nothing. It was
courteous enough, but its courtesy was colourless and cold. It was such
a note as might have been addressed to the veriest stranger. There was
nothing in it to reassure the master of Warlock as to Agatha's view of
his conduct, nothing to allay his fear that she had resented his
inquiries as an impertinence. On the contrary, if that were the meaning
of the former silence and of the morning's message, this note was
precisely such as a sensitively self-respecting young woman might have
written when compelled by his persistence to write to him at all.
It was a very bad quarter of an hour with him, during which he read the
missive a dozen times, unable to make out what it meant.
But Baillie Pegram was not a man to despair until he must, or to rest
under a painful uncertainty. It was his habit of mind to meet dangers
and difficulties half-way, and question them insistently concerning
their extent. He called Sam, therefore, and bade him bring the
easy-going pacer which he had begun to ride for exercise, and mounting
the animal he set off at a gentle gait toward The Forest.
He appeared there half an hour before the four o'clock dinner was
announced, and his welcome by his hostesses, Miss Blair and her sister,
was all the warmer for the reason that his arrival indicated, more
surely than any message from Warlock could have done, the extent of his
convalescence.
Perhaps he was welcome also on another account. For the Misses Blair
were deeply concerned about Agatha, and they hoped that he might
persuade her, as they had failed to do, to give up her plan of going to
Richmond and seeking service as a hospital nurse or in some other
capacity in which a woman might employ herself. They were deeply
concerned as to the matter of nursing for the reason that it was deemed
highly improper in Virginia for any but married women to nurse in the
military hospitals, where the patients, of course, were men.
Agatha had told them as little as possible of her affairs. She had said
nothing whatever of her quarrel with her aunts, only telling them that
she had left The Oaks finally, and asking them to send thither for such
personal belongings as she had there, so that she might remain overnight
at The Forest, and go to Richmond on the morrow. The younger Miss Blair
had volunteered to go in person on this errand, and from her the ladies
at The Oaks had first learned that Agatha had finally quitted the place
in her resentment. They were greatly distressed, and immediately ordered
their carriage and drove to The Forest, where Baillie Pegram found them
on his arrival.
Their pleadings with Agatha had been earnest, insistent, and wholly
fruitless. She had manifested no anger, and they had discovered no
resentment in her voice as she replied to them. She had made no
complaints and uttered no reproaches. To all their pleadings she had
answered, simply:
"I have quite decided upon my course. I shall not change my plans."
The good dames were in such despair that they even welcomed Baillie's
coming.
"We have done everything, said everything," they hastily explained to
him; "why, we have almost _apologised_ to the child, and all to no
purpose. Perhaps you can have some influence, Captain Pegram. Will you
not speak to her?"
"I shall speak to her, of course," was his reply. "I am here indeed for
that express purpose. But I shall certainly not try to dissuade her from
any course that she may desire to pursue. That would be an impertinence
of which I am incapable."
The Oaks ladies flushed as he spoke the word "impertinence," remembering
their own recent use of the term in connection with his conduct. Perhaps
Agatha had told him of that in her letter, they thought. If so it would
be most embarrassing for them to dine in his company and hers. So,
pleading their great agitation of mind as their excuse, they returned at
once to The Oaks, leaving Baillie and Agatha as the only guests of the
Misses Blair at dinner.
When left alone with the young woman after dinner, the master of Warlock
opened the conversation as promptly as it was his custom to open fire
when the proper moment had come.
"Agatha," he began, as the two stood in the piazza in the glow of the
early setting sun and in the midst of the blood-red Virginia creepers
that embowered the place, "Agatha, do you remember the words I spoke to
you on the picket-line at Fairfax Court-house?" Then without waiting for
her reply, he continued: "I have come to you now to say those words over
again, at a more fitting time and in a more appropriate place. I love
you. I have loved you ever since those days in Richmond, those precious
days when I first began to know you for what you are. I loved you all
through that cruel time when, in obedience to what you believed was your
duty, you decreed that there should be 'war between me and thee.' And
now after all that you have done and dared for me, my love for a nature
so pure, so noble, so heroic, passes understanding. I have a right to
tell you this now. Tell me in return, if it displeases you?"
With that absolute truthfulness which was the basis of her nature,
Agatha replied as frankly as he had spoken.
"It pleases me," she said. "I had not expected this. I thought I had
repulsed you so rudely that--oh! Baillie, you will never know."
In a torrent of tears that were a more welcome answer than any words
could have been, she buried her face in her hands.
Half an hour later these two sat by a crackling fire, arranging
practical affairs.
"You do not wish to go back to The Oaks, then, even for a few weeks, and
to save appearances?"
"No, Baillie, I cannot. I should have to act a lie every hour of my stay
there. I should be obliged to pretend friendship for my aunts when I
feel nothing of the kind. They have insulted the memory of my
grandfather, and they have spoken of you in a way that never so long as
I live will I let any human being speak of you without resenting it. I
do not care to 'save appearances,' as you put it. Appearances may look
out for themselves. 'Saving appearances' is only a sneaking way of
lying. No. I will go to some friends in Richmond, if they will let me--"
"Why not go to Warlock?" he asked.
"Why, that would outrage the proprieties beyond forgiveness now that
we--well, under the circumstances."
So Mistress Agatha did "care for appearances" and conventions after all.
But Baillie did not think of that.
"Why not go there as the mistress of Warlock--as my wife?" he asked.
"Why should we not be married to-morrow at Christ-Church-in-the-Woods? I
am a soldier. I shall be strong enough to return to duty presently. When
I do so I shall want to feel that you are safe at Warlock, that you are
mine, my wife to cherish while I live. Say that it shall be so, Agatha!
Let me send word to Mr. Berkeley, the rector, to-night, that we shall be
at the church at noon to-morrow!"
[Illustration: "'_'At Christ-church-in-the-wood_'"]
The girl thought for a moment, and then said:
"Yes, that will be best. For then, if you fall ill or are wounded again,
I shall have a right to go to you and care for you. Let it be so. Now
you must not ride to Warlock on horseback to-night. It is very cool, and
you have already overtaxed your strength. I shall ask Miss Blair to send
you over in her carriage."
When he had gone Agatha announced the news to her hostesses and
straightway set about writing a score of little notes to be despatched
by negro messengers early in the morning, to her friends in the
neighbourhood. To her aunts she wrote simply, and without formal address
of any kind, the bare statement:
"Captain Baillie Pegram and I are to be married to-morrow, Thursday, at
noon, at Christ-Church-in-the-Woods."
This note she sent before going to bed. When it was received at The
Oaks, a conversation ensued which was largely ejaculatory:
"How shocking!"
"Yes, and how scandalous!"
"What will people say!"
"The girl must be bewitched!"
"And yet it is better than nursing soldiers, and she an unmarried
woman!"
"Perhaps. At any rate it is clear that we can exercise no restraint
over the poor, headstrong child."
"No, Captain Pegram has completely undermined our influence. Of course
we cannot lend our countenance to the affair by attending!"
"I think we must. Otherwise people will talk. They might even call it a
runaway match."
"That would be too dreadful!"
"Yes. I think we must put the best face we can on the affair by
attending. In these war-times everything is topsyturvy. Ah, me! What a
pity we couldn't have had the child's bringing-up to ourselves!"
"Yes, we should have made a very different woman of her. Anyhow, with
this marriage all our responsibility for her will be at an end. And
after all, perhaps it is as well to have it so, for if she had remained
single there is no knowing at what moment she would have done something
else as scandalous as her going North to nurse Mr. Pegram was."
And so they cackled for half the night.
XXXIV
_THE END AND AFTER_
A few weeks later came the news that a campaign was on and battle
impending. Burnside had replaced McClellan in command of the Federal
armies in Virginia. He had at once begun a campaign against Richmond,
moving by way of Fredericksburg. There Lee met him, posting the Southern
veterans on the circling hills behind the town and awaiting his
adversary's assault.
Baillie Pegram had resumed command of his battery now, but no longer
with the light guns that he had used while galloping with Stuart. A
captured Federal battery of six twelve-pounder Napoleons had been
assigned to him, and with these he took position on the crest of Marye's
Heights, where there was presently to occur one of the most heroic
battles of all the war.
It was nearly mid-December when Burnside crossed the river and moved to
assault Lee. His army, though greater than Lee's, was not quite so great
in numbers as it had been when McClellan had commanded it near
Richmond's gates; but it was greatly more formidable in all other
respects. The men who composed it were war-seasoned veterans now, and
its officers had fully learned their trade of command. Moreover the army
had successfully held its own against Lee at Sharpsburg, and the
confidence inspired by that event was an important element of strength.
But in Burnside the Federal administration had again failed to find a
leader capable of so employing the North's stupendous resources of men,
money, and material as to crush the splendid resistance of the Army of
Northern Virginia.
So Burnside failed, as McDowell, and McClellan, and Pope had failed
before, and as Hooker, who succeeded him in command, failed even more
conspicuously, when, in the following spring, he made the campaign of
Chancellorsville.
After Chancellorsville Lee crossed the Potomac again. Then came
Gettysburg, which proved to be the turning-point in the war, so far as
the armies of Virginia were concerned.
For before the next campaign opened--the campaign of the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbour--the North had recognised in Grant a
leader who knew what use to make of the means at his command, and, more
important still, a leader who clearly saw that the strength of the
Confederacy lay, not in the possession of cities or the holding of
strategic positions, but in the superb fighting force of Lee's army.
Grant, in supreme command of all the armies of the Union, directed the
work of all of them to the one task of crushing Lee, and in the end he
accomplished it. When that was done, this most stupendous war in modern
history was over.
In all these epoch-making events the master of Warlock did his part,
with a devotion that wrought a colonel's stars upon his collar and added
honour to the name he bore. During the long winter of 1863-64, while the
mud-bound armies lay helplessly idle in winter quarters, Baillie had
Agatha with him in his log hut near Orange Court-house, and before the
campaign opened at the Wilderness in the spring, an heir to Warlock was
born in camp,--a child veritably "cradled in a revolution."
Agatha was near her husband, too, during the long siege of Petersburg,
though she could not be actually with him; for his place was on the
lines, where the "scream of shot, and burst of shell, and bellowing of
the mortars" were ceaseless by night and by day, for the space of eight
months, before the end came. But she was always near at hand, as one of
that heroic band of women who stayed and starved in the beleaguered
city, heedless of the storm of huge shells that daily wrecked buildings
there and tore cavernous trenches in the streets. She remained there to
the end as the others did, in order that they might minister in loving,
life-saving ways to the wounded, who were daily brought in from the
lines on ever-busy litters.
When at last the attenuated lines that had so long and so heroically
held their ground against an ever-increasing disparity of numbers, were
broken, and Lee ordered the instant evacuation of the city, Agatha made
her way on foot to Warlock, and there, with her babe, awaited the return
of the man she loved, and whose voice she fancied she could hear in the
receding echoes of the cannon.
He came at last,--ten days later,--and Agatha greeted him with loving
looks and words that cheered him in that despondency that at first made
every returning Confederate lament that he had not been permitted to
share the fate of those who had fallen facing the foe.
Over the mantel in that family room which in Virginia was always called
"the chamber," Agatha hung up the artillery sword, the pistols, the
colonel's sash, and the Mexican spurs that the master of Warlock had
worn in his campaigning.
"Those are for the little boy to see daily as he grows up, so that he
may know what manner of man his mother wishes him to become--what manner
of man his mother loves and reveres."
Then she brought two other mementos and hung them also on the wall. One
was the sergeant-major's jacket on which she had stitched the chevrons
on the day before Manassas.
"So you found the old jacket, did you?" asked Baillie. "I kept it as a
reminder of you."
"Yes--I know. I found it in the little closet where you had hung it. I
should have left it there always, just as your hands had placed it,
if--if you had not come back to Warlock again."
She was weeping now, but her face was joyous in spite of the tears. For
had he not come back to her, strong and well and still young? And should
not they two find ways in which to meet their present poverty with stout
hearts and heads erect?
"We must 'look up,' Baillie, 'and not down--forward and not backward.'
We have each other left--"
"And the boy--_our_ boy!" he interrupted. "Yes, we have enough to live
for--enough to enrich our lives to the end. And thanks to you I have
courage left both to do and to endure."