Baynell's disposition to recur to the subject inaugurated a habit of
conversation with Mrs. Gwynn after the scholastic hours of the "ladies,"
when he sat in the library through the long afternoons. The vast subject
of the abstract values of right and wrong, the ultimate decrees of
conscience, whether in matters of great or minute importance, might seem
inexhaustible in itself. But he gradually drifted therefrom into a
discursive monologue of many things. He began to talk of himself as
never before, as he had never dreamed that he could. He described his
friends and acquaintances; he rehearsed his experiences; he even
repeated traditional stories of his father's college life, and the mad
pranks which the staid Judge Roscoe had played in the callow days of
their youth, thus emphasizing the bond of intimacy and his own claim to
recognition as a hereditary friend; he went farther and detailed his own
intimate plans for the future.
Throughout she maintained a conventional pose of courteous attention.
Surely, he thought, he must have roused some responsive interest. For
himself, in all his life, he had never experienced moments so surcharged
with significance, with pleasure, with importance. One day he concluded
a long exposition of thought and conviction, intensely vital to him, by
making a direct appeal to her opinion. She looked up with half-startled
eyes, then hesitatingly replied, while a quick, deep flush sprang into
her pale cheeks. Elated, confident, victorious, he beheld the color rise
and glow, and noted her lingering, conscious embarrassment; for the
subject was unimportant save as it concerned him, and why, but for his
sake, should she blush and falter in sweet confusion?
How could he know that hardly one word in ten had she heard! Absent,
absorbed, she was silently turning again and again the ashes of the dead
past, while he, insistently, clamorously, was knocking at the door of
the living present.
Step by step she had been retracing her early foolish fondness for the
man who had been her husband. How could she have been so blind! she was
asking herself. Why could she not have seen him with the eyes of
others,--that wise, kindly, far-sighted vision which scanned the present
with caution for her sake, and by its gauge measured the future with an
unerring and an appalled accuracy? How contemptuously, like a heroine of
romance indeed, she had flouted the well-meant opposition of her
relatives to her marriage! They had proved wise prophets. Drunkard,
gambler, spendthrift, he had wrecked her fortune and embittered her
whole life. The two years she had spent with him seemed an aeon of
misery. They had obliterated the past as well as excluded the future.
Somehow she could not look beyond them into her earlier days save upon
those gradations of events--the swift courtship, the egregious,
headstrong, romantic resolution, the foolish love founded on false
ideals which led her at last to the altar, so confiding, so happy, so
disdainful of the grave faces and the disapproving shaking heads of all
her elder kith and kindred, so triumphant in setting them at naught and
enhancing Rufus Gwynn's victory with the quelling of their every claim.
In these long, quiet afternoons she would silently canvass humiliating
details--when was it that she had first known him for the liar he was;
when had she admitted to herself his inherent falsity? Even the truth
had faltered for his sake. She had eagerly sought to deceive herself--to
gloze over his lies, now told for a purpose, and constrained to their
misleading device, now thrown off without intention or effect, as if the
false were the more native incident of his moral atmosphere. Perhaps,
with the love that possessed her, she, too, might have acquired the
proclivity; she meditated on this possibility with a bowed head. At
first, when he lied to her, she herself could not distinguish the truth
from the false in his words. She had found herself at sea without a
rudder. However she might have desired to protect him, whether she might
have bent in time to deceit for his sake, there is a sort of monopoly
in falsehood. It is a game at which two cannot play to good effect. The
first time he struck her full in the face was in the fury which
possessed him, when, through her agency, a lie had been fairly fixed
upon him. She had given him as her authority for a statement she made to
Judge Roscoe, and her uncle had, in repeating it to him, discovered the
lie--the blatant open lie--that could not be qualified or gainsaid.
And she had forgiven this, both the word and the blow. How strange! She
made allowances for his irritation, for his mortification at the
discovery by a man so upright, so ascetic, so unsympathetic with any
moral weakness as Judge Roscoe. She offered to herself excuses which
even she, however, in her inmost soul, hardly accepted--for the lie
itself! He desired to avoid reproaches for mistaken arrangements about
money matters, she had said to herself; he shrank from contention with
her thus. Never dreaming that she might be questioned, he had been led
to palliate, to distort the facts. For at first she would have no
traffic with the ignoble word "lie." The restrictions of her own phrases
began to have a sort of terror for her. She could no longer talk freely.
She hardly dared make the most obvious statement concerning any simple
fact of household affairs, or amusements, or visits, or friends, lest,
in his prodigal untruth, for no reason,--the abandonment of folly, or a
momentary whim,--he should have committed himself and her unequivocally
to some different effect. She hesitated, stammered, when she was in
company,--faltered, blushed,--she who used to be so different!--while
all her world stared. And when they were alone, he would storm at her
for it, furiously mimicking her distressful uncertainty, her tremulous
solicitude lest she openly convict him of lying continually. She sought
to give him no occasion for anger, not that she so dreaded the hurt of
his heavy hand, but that she might save him from the ignominy of
striking his wife. She studied his face and conformed to his whims, and
anticipated his wants, and forbore vexation. Her subjection was so
obvious that while her own near friends raged inwardly, divining that he
was unkind, their casual acquaintance sportively fleered, never dreaming
how their arrows sped to the mark.
Their fleers nettled him; he was specially out of countenance one day
because of a careless shaft of Mildred Fisher's.
"It is one of the beautiful aspects of matrimony that the law once
recognized the right of a man to correct his wife with 'a stick not
thicker than his thumb'; let me see the size of your thumb, Mr.
Gwynn,--it must be that which keeps Leonora in this edifying state of
subjection."
And when she had gayly gone her way, Rufus Gwynn bitterly upbraided his
wife.
"Damn you!" he had cried; "can't you hold up your head at all?"
Then it was that she had donned her most charming toilette--a dress of
heavy white satin simple yet queenly--and had gone to one of those balls
of the early times of the Confederacy, where the cavaliers were many and
gay; she was all smiles and bright eyes, though these were the only
jewels she wore, for had she not discovered at the moment of opening the
case that her diamonds--Rufus Gwynn's own bridal gift to her--were
missing!--sold, pawned, given away, it was never known. Thus seeking her
duty in these devious ways and to do his choice credit, as a wife
should, her charm held a court about her,--even Mildred Fisher, who
loved splendor, ablaze with the collection of precious stones at her
disposal, her mother's, her grandmother's, and her aunt's, was eclipsed.
The glittering officers followed the beautiful young wife in the
promenade, and stood about and awaited the cessation of the whirl as she
waltzed with one of the number, and devoutly held her bouquet while in
the banqueting room, and drank her health and toasted her happiness, and
broke her fan, soliciting a breeze for her comfort. The result?--When in
the carriage homeward bound, she was fit to throw herself out of the
window and under the wheels in sheer terror of the demon of jealousy she
had aroused. Her husband loaded her with curses, he foamed at the mouth
as he threatened the men with whom she had danced, more than one of
whom he had himself introduced for the purpose. He protested he would
shoot Julius Roscoe because he had _not_ asked her to dance, but had
turned pale when he saw her, and had stood in the shadows of the columns
at the upper end of the ball room and with melancholy, love-lorn eyes
watched her in the waltz. When she declared she had not seen Julius, she
had not spoken to him--"You dare not!" he cried. And but that she
clutched his arm, he would have sprung from the vehicle in motion to
hide in the shrubbery--the pine hedge--as they passed Judge Roscoe's
gate, to shoot Julius in the back as he went home from the ball,--in the
back, in the darkness, from ambush, that none might know! Then as her
husband could not force himself from her grasp, he turned and struck her
across the face twice, heavily.
All her soldier friends, old playmates, youthful compeers, elder
associates, marched away without a farewell word from her,--a last
farewell it would have been to many, who, alack, came never marching
back again; for she was denied at the door to all callers, since her
bruises were so deep and lacerated that she must needs keep her room in
order that the conjugal happiness might not be impugned. For still she
made excuses for Gwynn, sought to shield him from himself. He had begun
to drink heavily under the sting of the universal financial disasters
occasioned by the war which he also shared, supplemented by heavy
losses at the gaming table and the race track and often "was not
himself," as she phrased it. He was expert at repentance, practised in
confession, and had a positive ingenuity for shifting responsibility to
stronger shoulders. He could burst into torrents of protesting tears,
and dramatically fling himself on his knees at her feet, and bury his
face in her hands, covering them with kisses, and craving her pardon and
help. And she would once more, inconsistently, hopefully, take up her
faith in him anew, albeit it had all the tearful tremors of
despair,--believing, yet doubting, with a strange duality of emotion
impossible to the analysis of reason. Thus the curtain was rung up
again, and the terrible tragedy of her life on this limited stage went
on apace.
He had infinite ingenuity in concealment, abetted by her silence in
suffering which her pride fostered. Albeit her friends had divined his
unkindness, the extent of his brutality was not suspected by them until
one night when frightful screams had been heard to issue from the house,
despite the closed and shuttered windows of winter weather. These were
elicited by the sheer agony of being dragged by the hair through the
rooms and halls and down the stairs, and thrust out into the chill of
the fierce January freeze. She was given hardly time for the instinct of
flight to assert itself, to rise up with wild eyes looking adown the
snowy street; for the door opened, and he dragged her within once more,
as a watchman of the precinct, Roanoke City being at this time heavily
policed, ascended the steps to the portico with an inquiry as to the
sound. He was satisfied with the explanation from the husband that Mrs.
Gwynn was suffering with a violent attack of hysterics. But the next
day, while the mistress of the house, bruised and almost shattered, lay
half unconscious in her own room, the housemaid, in the hall polishing
the stair rail and wainscot, was terrified to draw out here and there
from the balusters great bloody lengths of Mrs. Gwynn's beautiful hair
which had caught and held as she was dragged by it down the stairs. This
rumor, taken in connection with the explanation of her screams offered
by her husband to the watchman, occasioned Mrs. Gwynn's relatives great
anxiety for her safety. It was with the view of discovering from her the
truth, insisting on its disclosure as a matter of paramount importance,
that Judge Roscoe as her nearest kinsman and former guardian had
suggested a ride with her, when in the quiet of an uninterrupted
conversation he intended to remonstrate against her lack of candor, seek
to ascertain the facts, and then devise some measures looking toward the
betterment of the unhappy situation.
The slaughter by Rufus Gwynn of the unoffending horse had eliminated the
necessity alike of remonstrance or advice. Her ideals, her hope, her
love, were destroyed as by one blow. Her resolution of separation was
taken and, albeit her anxious friends feared her capacity for
forgiveness was not exhausted, it proved final. The end came on the day
that Rufus Gwynn's horse, rearing under whip and spur, and falling,
broke his rider's neck.
This was her romance and her awakening from love's young dream. These
were the scenes that she lived over and over. This was her past that
every moment of leisure converted into her present,--palpable, visible,
vital,--and her future seemed bounded only by the possibilities of
retrospect.
With the many-thonged scourge of her memory how could she listen to the
monologue of this stranger! Thus it was that her attentive attitude was
suddenly stultified by his direct appeal to her. Thus she had reddened
and faltered in embarrassment for the rude solecism, and gathered her
faculties for some hesitant semblance of polite response.
Lapsed in the delight of his fool's paradise, Baynell discerned naught
of the truth. Left presently alone in the library, he serenely watched
through the long window the slow progress of the shadows following the
golden vernal sunshine throughout the grove. The wind faintly stirred,
barely enough to shake the bells of the pink and darkly blue hyacinths
standing tall and full in the parterre at one side of the house. The
plangent tone of a single key, struck on the grand piano, fell on the
stillness within, and after a time another, and slowly still another, in
doubting ascension of the gamut, as one of the "ladies" submitted to the
cruelty of a music lesson. His lip smilingly curved at the thought. And
still gazing out in serene languor, all unprescient, he once more noted
the spring sun of that momentous day slowly westering, westering.
A red sky it found at the horizon; a chill wind starting up over a
purple earth spangled with golden camp-fires. Presently the world was
sunk in a slate-tinted gloom, and the night came on raw and dark, with
moon and stars showing only in infrequent glimpses through gusty clouds.
A great fire had burned out on the library hearth; the group had
genially sat together till the candles were guttering in their sockets
in the old crystal-hung candelabra. Judge Roscoe still lingered,
smoking, meditating before the embers. All the house was asleep, silent
save for the martial tread of the sentry walking to and fro before the
portico. Suddenly Judge Roscoe heard a sound, alien, startling,--a sound
at the side window. The room was illumined by a pervasive red glow from
the embers, in which he saw his own shadow, gigantic, gesticulatory, as
he rose to his feet, listening again to--silence! Only the wind rustling
in the lilac hedge, only the ring of the sentry's step, crisp and clear
on the frosty air.
The moment that the soldier turned to retrace his way to the farther
side of the house, there came once more that grating sound at the
window, distinct, definite, of sinister import.
For one instant Judge Roscoe was tempted to call for the sentry's aid.
The next the shutter opened, the sash glided up noiselessly, and, as the
old gentleman gazed spellbound with starting eyes and chin a-quiver, a
tiny flame flickered up, keenly white amongst the embers, illuminating
the room, revealing the object at the window. Only for one moment; for
in a frenzy of energy Judge Roscoe had caught up the heavy velvet rug
and, as he held it against the aperture of the chimney, the room once
more sunk into indistinguishable gloom; the sudden bounding entrance of
an agile figure was wholly invisible to the sentry, albeit he was almost
immediately under the window, peering in with a stern "Who goes there?"
"There seems something amiss with the catch of the shutter," said the
placid voice of the master of the house, who had left the rug still
standing on its thick edge before the chimney place. "Can you help me
there? Thank you very much."
The sentry muttered a sheepish apology, pleading the unusual noise at
this hour. His excuse was cheerfully accepted. "It is well to be on the
alert. Good night!"
"Good night, sir!" And once more there sounded through the sombre air
the martial beat of the sentry's tread on the frosty ground.
Then two men in the darkness within, reaching out in the gloom, fell
into each other's arms with tears of joy, but presently reproaches too.
"Oh, my son, my son! why did you come here?"
"Came a-visiting!" said a voice out of the obscurity, with a boy's
buoyant laughter. "The picket-lines are so close to-night, I couldn't
resist slipping in. Is Leonora here? How are my dear little nieces,--the
'ladies'?"
"Oh, Julius! My boy, this is so dangerous!"
"I'd risk ten times more to hear your dear voice again--" with a
rib-cracking hug--"only think, father, it's more than two years now
since I have seen you! I want to see Leonora ten minutes and kiss the
'ladies,' and then I'm off again in a day or so, and none the wiser."
"No, no, that is out of the question! No one must know. The camps are
too close; you must have seen them, even in the grove."
"Why, I can lie low."
"And there is a--" Judge Roscoe hardly knew how to voice it--"a--a
Yankee officer in the house."
"Thunderation! The dickens there is! Why--"
"There is no time to explain; you must go back at once, while the
Federal pickets are so close, and you can slip through the line. It's
just at the creek."
"But they have thrown it out since dark, five miles. Our fellows
skedaddled back to their support. And I tell you it will never do for me
to be caught inside the lines. The Yankees might think I was spying
around!"
Judge Roscoe turned faint and sick. Then, rising to the emergency, and
considering the suspicions the sound of voices here at this hour of the
night might excite in the mind of the sentry, he grasped his son's arm,
with a warning clutch imposing silence, and led him along the dark hall,
groping up the staircase. As the boy was about to bolt in the direction
of his former chamber, his father turned the corner to the second
flight.
"Sky parlor, is it?" the young daredevil muttered, as they stumbled
together up the steep ascent to the garret.
A dreary place it showed as they entered, large, low ceiled, extending
above the whole expanse of the square portion of the house. It was
lighted only by the windows at either side; through one of these pale
watery glimmers were falling from a moon which rolled heavily like a
derelict in the surges of the clouds. This sufficed to show to each the
other's beloved face; and that Judge Roscoe's ribs were not fractured in
the hugs of the filial young bear betokened the enduring strength of his
ancient physique.
The place was sorely neglected since the reduction of the service in the
old house. Cobwebs had congregated about ceiling and windows; the dust
was thick on rows of old trunks, which annotated the journeyings of the
family since the hair-covered, brass-studded style was the latest
fashion to the sole leather receptacle that bore the initials of Judge
Roscoe's dead wife, and the gigantic "Saratoga" that had served in Mrs.
Gwynn's famous wedding journey. There were many specimens of broken
chairs, and some glimmering branching girandoles, five feet high, that
had illumined the house at one of the great weddings of long ago. A
large cedar chest, proof against moths, preserved the ancient shawls and
gowns of beauties of by-gone times, who little thought this ephemeral
toggery would survive them. Certain antiquated pieces of furniture,
hardly meet for the more modern assortment below,--chests of drawers
surmounted by quaint little cabinets with looking-glasses, a lumbering
wardrobe that seemed built for high water and stood on four long
stilt-like legs, a pair of old mantel mirrors, wide and low, with
tarnished gilded frames, dividing the reflecting surface into three
equal sections, a great barometer that surlily threatened stormy
weather, clumsy bureaus, bedsteads, each with four tall "cluster posts"
surmounted by testers of red, quilled cloth drawn to a brass star in the
centre, fire-dogs and fenders of dull brass--all were grouped here and
there. One of these bedsteads had been occupied on some occasion when
the house had been overcrowded, for the cords that sufficed in lieu of
the more modern slats now supported a huge feather-bed. Judge Roscoe
threw on it a carriage rug that had been hung to air on a cord which was
stretched across one corner of the room. He almost fainted at a sudden,
frightened clutch upon his arm, and, turning, saw his son in the agonies
of panic, his teeth chattering, his eyes starting out of his head, his
hand pointing tremulously toward the bed, as if bereft of his senses,
demanding to be informed what that object might be. It was the
time-honored joke of the young Southern soldiers that they had not seen
or slept in a bedstead for so long that the mere sight of so
unaccustomed a thing threw them into convulsions of fear. His father
forgave the genuine tremors the joke had occasioned him for the joker's
sake, and as Julius, flinging off his cap, coat, and boots, stretched
out at his long length luxuriously, he stood by the pillow and
admonished him of the plan of the campaign.
The Yankee officer had been ill, Judge Roscoe explained, and,
convalescing now, joined the family in their usual gathering places--the
library, dining room, on the portico, in the grove. If Leonora or the
"ladies" knew of the presence here of Julius, they could hardly preserve
in this close association with the enemy an unaffected aspect; so
significant a secret might be betrayed in facial expression, a tone of
voice, a nervous start. This would be fatal; his life might prove the
forfeit. It was a mistake to come, and this mistake must forthwith be
annulled. Despite the man in the house, Julius could lie perdu here in
the garret, observing every precaution of secrecy, till the ever
shifting picket-line should be drawn close enough to enable him to hope
to reach it without challenge. They would confide in trusty old Ephraim.
He would maintain a watch and bring them news. And old Ephraim, too,
would bring up food, cautiously purloined from the table.
"The typical raven! appropriately black!" murmured Julius.
"Are you hungry now, dear?" Judge Roscoe asked disconsolately, after
telling him that he must wait till morning.
"If you have such a thing as the photograph of a chicken about you, I
should be glad to see it," Julius murmured demurely.
Judge Roscoe bent down and kissed him good night on the forehead, then
turned to pick his way carefully among the debris of the old furniture.
Soon he had reached the stairway, and noiseless as a shadow he flitted
down the flight.
The young officer lay for a while intently listening, but no stir
reached his ear; naught; absolute stillness. For a long time, despite
his fatigue, the change, the pleasant warmth, the soft luxury of the
feather-bed, would not let him slumber. He was used to the canopy of
heaven, the chill ground, the tumult of rain; the sense of a roof above
his head was unaccustomed, and he was stiflingly aware of its
propinquity. Nevertheless he contrasted its comfort with his own recent
plight and that of his comrades a few miles away, lying now asleep under
the security of their camp-guards, some still in the mud of the
trenches, all on the cold ground, shelterless, half frozen, half
starved, ill, destitute, but fired with a martial ardor and a zeal for
the Southern cause which no hardship could damp, and only death itself
might quench. As he gazed about at the grotesqueries of the great room,
now in the sheen of the moon, and now in the shadow of the cloud, he
thought how little he had anticipated finding the enemy here ensconced
in his place in his father's house, a convalescent, "the son of an old
friend, of whom we have all grown very fond." He raged inwardly at the
destruction of his cherished plans wrought by the mere presence of the
Federal officer. The joy of his visit was brought to naught. Dangerous
as it would have been under the best auspices, its peril was now great
and imminent. Instead of the meeting his thoughts had cherished,--the
sweets of the stolen hours at the domestic fireside, with the dear faces
that he loved, the dulcet voices for which he yearned,--he was to skulk
here, undreamed of, like some unhappy ghost haunting a lonely place,
fortunate indeed if he might chance to be able to make off elusively
after the fashion of the spectral gentry, without becoming a ghost in
serious earnest by the event of capture, or catching the pistol ball of
the Yankee officer. So much he had risked for this visit--life and
limb!--and to be relegated to the surplusage of the garret, the
loneliness, the desolate moon, the deserted dust of the unfrequented
place! He was to approach none of them--none of the hearthstone group!
There was to be no joyous greeting, no stealthy laughter, no interchange
of loving words, and clasps, and kisses. He was still young; his eyes
filled, his throat closed. But that shadowy glimpse of his dear
father--he had had that boon!
"I'll remember it, if I bite the dust in the next skirmish. And the
question is to get away--for the next skirmish!"
Once more he fell to studying mechanically the grouping of the archaic,
disordered furniture; the shifting of the shadows amongst it as a cloud
sped by with the wind; the spare boughs of a bare aspen tree etched on
the floor by the moon, shining down through the high windows; and that
melancholy orb itself, suggestive of a futile vanished past, a time
forgotten, and spent illusions, the familiar of loneliness, and the deep
empty hours of the midnight--itself a spectre of a dead planet, haunting
its wonted pathway of the skies. When its light ceased to fill his
lustrous, contemplative eyes he did not know, but as the moon passed on
to the west, his melancholy gaze had ceased to follow.