CHAPTER V.

THE battle-field, the cannon-shattered house that rose like a monument in its midst, had so impressed Estwicke, that when he was here once more he had a strong sense of familiarity with all the details of the unaccustomed place. It seemed to him that he had often sat in the dim light of the flickering fire and the shaded lamp, watching through the window the weird new moon in the cloud rifts, as it hung, a curved, red blade above the dark glooms of Fort Despair, then fell like an avenging sword in their midst; that he had often noted the bizarre reflections in the shattered mirror, which gave distorted glimpses of the gay carpet, the crimson curtains, the stiff mahogany furniture and the family group. And perhaps because of this savor of old associations he was quick to detect something which he did not recognize. The young lady looked at him with changed eyes. They were more brilliant than he had thought them, and colder. A deep, rich flush glowed on her delicate cheek. She seemed older, more formed. Her manner was collected, and he observed with a sense of loss that her smile lacked a certain spontaneous cordiality which he had supposed was characteristic of her. For a time he could not understand this change. It roused him to a keener interest in his visit, which had been prompted only by duty, and perhaps unduly postponed, for it was a drive of but eight miles from the barracks to General Vayne’s plantation, these being intermediate points between Marston and Chattalla. The mistake under which he fancied he had been invited still rankled, and he had promised himself that, after taking due cognizance of this involuntary hospitality by a call, he would drop off and trouble the Vaynes no more with his acquaintance.

He often glanced toward her as she sat close to the table in the mellow dimness of the shaded lamp. The pliancy of her figure and the soft, black folds of her dress were prettily accented by the stiff, angular outline of the old arm-chair. Sometimes as she turned her head her brown hair caught the flicker of the fire and sent out a golden gleam. Her silence struck him as significant. It seemed tense and studiously maintained--unlike the mute quietude of the young stranger, Miss St. Pierre, which had the ease and languor that suggested habit. Miss Vayne was alert in every fibre and vivacious in every impulse. He saw in her eyes the interest with which she followed the conversation. She was denying herself in that she took no part in it. He had a vague idea that he had something to do with this--that she sedulously forbore to claim his attention.

Was it possible, he asked himself in swift alarm, that he had so received her unsophisticated little apology as to induce in her restraint, even resentment? He made an effort to recall the interview--it had not since recurred to his mind--and it seemed to him that what he had said was peculiarly neat, even more appropriate than he had thought it at the time. Surely she could not know that he was secretly amused by her contrition; that he had laughed because she had seemed to fancy him so susceptible to her unintentional sarcasm. Even then he had recognized how gentle an impulse had prompted her. He valued it adequately now that he had apparently forfeited her kindly feeling. He was all at once eager to recover lost ground.

To win a proud and alienated young lady to graciousness, in a general conversation founded upon so recent an acquaintance that only platitudes are in order; with her father and her aunt solemn sentinels on either side; with a silent, observant young stranger to mark all lapses from established usage, was, he felt, no easy matter. Still he took advantage of the earliest hiatus in that weary subject, the state of the turnpike--which had certainly been a sufficiently severe trial while he travelled it.

He addressed an observation directly to her, although he could think of nothing more felicitous to say than--

“As the spring advances the road will be better, and I assure you, Miss Vayne, it is a very picturesque drive to the barracks. I hope that some Sunday afternoon you will come with your aunt and Miss St. Pierre and witness dress parade.”

Marcia looked smilingly from her aunt to Miss St. Pierre, as if submitting the question.

“Oh, delightful!” cried Mrs. Kirby, amiably effusive.

“No doubt it is very interesting,” murmured Miss St. Pierre.

Mrs. Kirby’s face grew abruptly grave, as if the sins of many sinful years had suddenly found her out.

“Oh--but, dear me--now I come to think of it--_Sunday_ afternoon--yes,” she said, in an appalled _staccato_, her waving curls stilled into becoming solemnity.

An ethical discussion with the old lady was hardly what Estwicke wanted. Once more he fixed his eyes on Marcia.

“Do you think it too frivolous an entertainment for Sunday afternoon? All the ladies in Marston come.”

The girl’s cheek dimpled. Her sudden laughter broke upon the air.

“Thank you for suggesting ‘the ladies of Marston!’ In a case of conscience nothing is so valuable as a precedent,” she cried, joyously.

Estwicke was a trifle confused by having this sentiment attributed to him, and Mrs. Kirby rustled hastily to the rescue.

“Not that I mean to imply that the dress parade is in itself sinful on Sunday. I--well--I, myself--I don’t judge of that--yes--I don’t judge--for military men have no--no--”

“No souls to be saved?” suggested Marcia, raiding like a guerrilla through the conversation.

“Oh, my dear child!” protested Mrs. Kirby, aghast.

“I beg your pardon, Aunt Alice. Don’t let me interrupt you. You were saying that military men have no--” She paused, expectant.

In breaking her silence her mood had changed. A daring spirit was shining in her eyes. She had a freakish delight in her aunt’s embarrassment and involution of explanation. Mrs. Kirby was eagerly desirous not to seem to reflect on Captain Estwicke and his Sunday parade, but was bewildered by Marcia’s conduct, which she supposed was inadvertent.

“I meant that military men have peculiar duties, and--”

“Very peculiar, if one of them is to break the Sabbath,” cried the bushwhacker, harassing the enemy’s march.

“Perhaps the life does not tend to foster a sense of religious responsibility,” said Estwicke, demurely, commiserating the old lady’s anxiety.

“I didn’t mean _that_, exactly. I meant--I meant--” Then Mrs. Kirby plucked up a little spirit. “It is very hard that _I_ should have to fight the battles of the _military men_,” she said. “You should resent these reflections, Captain Estwicke.”

“I am too wary a soldier to give battle to a superior force,” Estwicke declared. “I am retreating in good order.”

The girl had the grace to be a little ashamed. She was still laughing, but she did not look at him, and she blushed.

“And you ought to remember, Marcia, that your father is a soldier, too,” said Mrs. Kirby, reprehensively.

“Oh,” cried Marcia, altogether reckless, and rejoiced to throw a bomb into the cowering circle, “that kind of soldier has--has gone out of fashion.”

She was frightened when she had said this, and a sudden grave pause ensued.

“How far are the barracks from Marston, Captain?” asked General Vayne, feeling bound to interfere. He was a serious and earnest man, a little slow; he had had no large experience of the world, and he did not pretend to understand women. In a girl, the general feminine incomprehensibilities were enhanced by the caprice of youth, and he made no effort to tackle the problems which Marcia daily suggested. What she had just said seemed to him singularly inappropriate, but he did not even wonder how she had happened to say it. He was relieved to see that she had subsided at last, and that Estwicke entered with unimpaired gayety upon the new theme.

For Estwicke was pleased and flattered. It is true he began to understand that she regretted her apology and had repented of her repentance. She evidently wished him to think that it was a matter of no such paramount importance to her as it had seemed then; that she had no special solicitude about hurting his feelings and jarring his prejudices. In order to convince him of this she was handling them sufficiently carelessly now. But she only succeeded in convincing him that she had thought much about him, and that she had schemed in her innocent and inexpert fashion to produce these impressions upon him. He deprecated infinitely wounding her pride and sustaining her resentment, and once more he sought to conciliate her. With that smoothness and suavity which were evidently only superimposed upon his manner, having no root in the rougher material of his character, and which affected her as an exponent of worldliness and insincerity, he again addressed her.

“What amusements do you have in Chattalla in winter--no sleighing nor skating, I suppose?”

“No; I hardly know how to describe the amusements. We have the rain and the mud.”

Estwicke laughed. “Oh, that sort of gayety! You have been deprived of it for the last three weeks.”

“Singular drought, sir, for this time of the year; protracted, sir,--very, indeed,” said General Vayne, with a planter’s chronic disaffection with the elements.

“It looks like rain this evening--very cloudy,” said Estwicke. He watched the glowing fire for a moment in silence. “The wind is rising,” he added.

A meditative pause ensued.

“That sound,” said General Vayne, slowly, “is not the wind.”

His eyes, too, were fixed absently on the fire, but as Estwicke lifted his head he became all at once conscious that the others were watching him with some strange, furtive meaning, some intent expectation. A yearning sense of desolation had struck suddenly across the warm domestic atmosphere, and although an alien it shared the hearth with them. The hickory logs flung jets of sparks and long, quivering plumes of flame high up the chimney; the fender glittered as if set with scintillating jewels; the faces of the girls bloomed like rare exotics. In this quiet sanctuary of home even the hot hearts of the men were fain to beat calmly. The shattered mirror reflected the sheltered, peaceful group; but oh, for the battle-field without! and oh, for the graves beyond the river!

The earth pulsated with a strong tremor; the windows shook with a responsive vibration; all the air thrilled and shivered with a tumultuous throb.

“It is a drum!” cried Estwicke.

He was unprepared for the effect of his words.

“Oh, don’t say that!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby.

“Oh, surely _you_ don’t recognize it, too,” cried Miss St. Pierre, her soft voice strangely agitated.

He faced round and looked at them in amaze.

“I beg your pardon?” he said, interrogatively. They made no reply, and he turned toward Miss Vayne. She was softly biting her under-lip, and looking at her friend with eyes suffused with laughter.

“I begin to think, Antoinette,” she said, “that you are superstitious; you really believe the battle-field is haunted by the dead soldiers.”

Only Mrs. Kirby observed that Estwicke recoiled as if from a blow. His face was pale, rigid, and very grave, but it had, even in its gravity, a consciousness of self-betrayal. He visibly strove to regain his composure.

“I hardly think _I_ am superstitious, Marcia,” returned Miss St. Pierre, speaking with more animation than usual, and with a shade of annoyance in her voice, “but _you_ have positively no imagination.”

“What you call your imagination seems to be only a thorn in your side.”

“Perhaps what she calls her imagination might be translated as a heart,” said Mrs. Kirby, blandly allying herself with the visitor.

“And what is a heart but a thorn in the side!” cried Marcia, joyously.

General Vayne began to explain. “The country, sir, is so cavernous that the gradual approach of railway trains produces very peculiar effects of sound.”

“I lived here,” said Mrs. Kirby, significantly, “for many years. I never heard those sounds before the war. Of course I don’t believe that terrible story--but--but this is one of its inexplicable points.”

“There is the wind, at last,” said General Vayne, with the air of a man impatient of nonsense, and striving to effect a diversion.

It came with a hollow roar through the vastness of the night and the plain. There was a sense of a mighty movement without. The tramp of feet, that long ago finished their marches, rose and fell in dull iteration in the distance. The gusts were hurled through the bomb-riven cupola, which swayed and groaned and crashed as it had done on the day when even more impetuous forces tore through its walls. Far--far and faint--a bugle was fitfully sounding the recall.

“Ah-h!” said Mrs. Kirby, shuddering a little--“hear that!”

Estwicke mechanically turned his eyes toward the window. They distended suddenly, and he sprang to his feet.

For the empty embrasures of Fort Despair were belching flame and smoke once more. The haunted thickets, visible in the lurid light thus projected into the midst of the black waste, were in grim commotion; and here was a prickly growth that might be bayonets--for who could say, in this strange glow and this strange place?--and here was a triumphant, waving hand--and one might fear to look at the ground, remembering what once lay there. The pallid horizon alternately advanced and shrank away as the fire rose and fell. The deep, surly glooms of the night pressed close about, but veins of flame were beginning to pulse through the thickets wherever a dead leaf might cling, and a glittering rim had encircled the dry crab-grass, and was flaring and broadening round all the field.

“Some miser-r-able boy,” exclaimed General Vayne through his set teeth--he was a man of punctilio, and even with this provocation he did not forget the presence of ladies--“some miser-r-able boy has been hunting over the plantation, and his gun-wad has set the grass afire. Ten to one the fence will burn!”

Estwicke was still standing near the window, his hand upon the red curtain. Mrs. Kirby looked at him speculatively. Certainly he--a man and a soldier--could not be afraid of ghosts like Antoinette, who was morbidly timid and afraid of everything. She could not thus translate the emotion he had manifested. Here was something different, deeper. It baffled conjecture.

No trace of it was on his face when he turned. “The wind has shifted,” he said. “That fence must be in considerable danger now. General, we had better make a sortie.”

Marcia’s face grew very grave. “If the fence should catch, papa, would the fire be strong enough to blow to the gin-house?”

There was a pause. “I hardly think that,” her father replied, “but it is possible. I couldn’t spare the gin--and--and I’ve a good deal of cotton there still.”

“We had better go at once,” said Estwicke.

General Vayne glanced hurriedly about him for his hat, and strode after his guest out into the night.

There was no moon; there was no star; tumultuous clouds surged over the battle-field. The glare showed the great, gaunt waste in its immensity. The wind rioted fantastically with the flames. Here and there a ball of fire was thrown from the empty embrasures of Fort Despair, and fell into the midst of the crab-grass, and burst into a thousand waving plumes, and expanded and glowed into a thousand more. Now and then, as a dead branch crashed to the ground in the thicket, a fiery flag waved so high that one might see the livid sky look down--then the flag was struck amid a shower of sparks. A deep, steady glow in the distance suggested that the flames had given over these airy effects, sustained only by leaves, and dead-wood, and crab-grass, for the solid business of burning the fence. They quickened their steps, and presently the younger man began to run. He was not a light weight, but he was swift on his feet, and he soon left General Vayne far behind.

And as he ran, a thing happened which seemed to him strange at the time, and afterward still more strange. He was not so far from the blazing redoubt as to believe that what he saw was imagination. Among the slender growth that fringed the parapet, some of which was already aflame, there appeared suddenly two figures that walked with a measured gait, presently accelerated to a soldierly double-quick. He had not a touch of superstition--he instantly suspected that General Vayne had secret enemies, who had fired his field of set purpose, so that his gin-house and cotton might be burned as if by accident.

Estwicke, with characteristic inconsequence--without an idea of what he should say, how he should deal with them, or how they might deal with him--held both his hands, trumpet-wise, to his mouth, and shouted to them with all the force of his lungs. The crackling brush drowned his voice. They had halted abruptly upon the parapet, arguing with each other, to judge by their excited gestures--one of them was so wild of demeanor that Estwicke fancied him drunk. At the second stentorian halloo, they faced round suddenly. Perhaps in the far flickering vistas which the flames revealed among the dun shadows they caught a glimpse of Estwicke. With a simultaneous movement they dropped out of sight, leaving him staring at the blazing panorama in blank amaze.

As he pressed on he began to overtake other men, both white and black, chiefly tenants of General Vayne, all running toward the gin-house. They were inspired only by friendly feeling, for their rents were already paid, and the cotton still there belonged to their landlord. The figures of a distant group loomed up, gigantic and distorted, through the smoke, and seemingly in the midst of the fire as they knocked down the burning fence and scattered the rails. With these grewsome effects the simple significance of the gin-house was oddly incongruous as it came in sight, mounted grotesquely on its stilts, and distinctly defined against the black whirl of skurrying clouds, and the lurid, unnatural glare. The out-door press, which stood near, was like some menacing monster, with its levers, huge, uncanny black arms, poised above the negro who with a balky mule was trying to plough a few furrows to hold within bounds the impetuously burning crab-grass. The sharp, ringing strokes of an axe sounded high above the roar of the flames and the clamor of voices, for a dead apple-tree, a fatally near neighbor, had caught fire from the fence, and was blossoming white and red anew. Before the sharp steel had pierced through its rotten trunk it had fallen, sending up myriads of sparks into the dark sky, and a moment later the cedar shingles that roofed the gin-house were blazing timorously. When Estwicke came up the smell of burning cotton was on the air.

They made an effort, however, to save what they might. After a few minutes of such desperate exertion as left a soreness in his muscles for days, Estwicke happened to glance up in the midst of tearing out the soft, fluffy, infinitely bulky masses of unginned cotton. He caught the steady gaze of a man with a pallid, frightened face, who stood idle on the outskirts of the sweating, struggling, panting crowd. Save for that frightened pallor Estwicke might not have recognized the face, but he had not forgotten the scene on the ferry-boat, and Toole’s expression recalled both it and him.

“Hello, my man, lend a hand here!” Estwicke called out fiercely. “Do you find nothing to do but to stand and watch us work?”

The man fell to without a word.

But once or twice afterward Estwicke came in contact with him, and noticed that, big fellow as he was, he was doing no good. His hands trembled; he was confused; he seemed to see nothing; he was in everybody’s way. And he _was_ a big fellow. Estwicke measured him critically, noting closely his gait, gestures, build; then silently fell to work.

The gin-house and press were burned. The rescued cotton, scorched, begrimed with cinders and dirt, lay, nearly worthless, upon the ground hard by. The air was still dense with smoke, and pervaded by the pungent odors of charred cornstalks and crab-grass, and of the burnt cotton. It had grown intensely dark; the very outline of Fort Despair was swallowed up in the black night, and except the sullen glow of the embers of the press and gin-house, there was no spark nor gleam in all the vast stretch of country. Estwicke was looking about for his coat, which he had flung upon the ground when he went to work at the cotton. He stumbled upon it presently, and, as he picked it up, he accosted Toole suddenly.

“You’re one of the men I saw on the parapet yonder to-night. I know your build. Didn’t you hear me call?”

So imbued was he with the idea of incendiarism that he wondered the man did not affect surprise,--did not attempt denial.

Still Toole seemed agitated, anxious, almost piteous.

“An’ I knowed it war ye ez war a-callin’ of me, ’kase I seen ye ez well ez hearn ye. But it got so hot thar that I war obleeged to scoot outern them works, an’ dust away in a hurry.”

But for the man’s tremulous deprecation Estwicke would have thought all suspicion of evil-doing absurd. “Who was with you?” he persisted.

The other’s face was very white; or perhaps some livid flame had started up among the ashes and cast a pallid gleam upon it.

“’Twar Tim Jones ez I started away from the turnpike with, but I dunno ez I hadn’t caught up with that darkey Bateman--no, I overhauled him down ter the spring. ’Twar Tim, or mebbe Pete Winsley.”

Estwicke turned away, half ashamed. Then with his insistent exactingness, he looked over his shoulder. “How did you happen to go up on the parapet? That was a queer manœuvre.”

Why should the man tremble? The reply was so obviously natural. “Waal, Cap’n, I lives not fur on t’other side o’ that redoubt, an’ it hadn’t been long burnin’ when I seen it, an’ naterally I run ter whar I seen the fire fust. Then it air toler’ble good walkin’ up thar on them old forts, an’ I jes’ thought I could run along the parapets till I got hyar; but the fire got het up so hot ez I war obleeged ter come down.”

If he had resented any of these questions, which must have seemed to impute to him some evil intent, Estwicke would have dismissed the subject from his mind. As it was, he spoke to General Vayne when they were tramping back together through the darkness toward the lights beginning to be faintly visible in the windows of the distant house.

“My dear sir,” exclaimed General Vayne, “he is my good friend, although a very humble one. Why, he served four years in my Brigade!”

“That settles it,” said Estwicke, satirically; but he said it to himself.

However, he felt justified in throwing aside his suspicion, since the man most interested refused to entertain it.

He was sorry, of course, that General Vayne’s cotton and gin-house and press were burned, and wondered that the loss should be borne so calmly, knowing that it must be disproportionately large to a man in his financial condition. But Estwicke’s was a temperament to which excitement is always grateful, and he strode into the bare, echoing hall, flushed and warm, but feeling all the more active and alert for it. He looked like a young blacksmith, with his soot-begrimed face and hands, and his hair and whiskers powdered with cinders, and his collar and shirt-front ornamented with arabesques in charcoal. He was distinctly deprecatory of the presence of the three ladies, as they surged out into the hall, eager for news. Mrs. Kirby did not scruple to hold up her hands at the sight of him.

General Vayne noticed this. “We will go and get rid of some of these cinders,” he said. “Then we will give you an account of the affair.”

But when they returned, he did not at once mention the fire. Estwicke was speaking as they entered the library. “I assure you, General,” he protested, in a tone that sought to veil impatience and annoyance, “it is nothing--nothing whatever.”

“I am afraid, Alice,” said General Vayne, gravely, addressing his sister, “that Captain Estwicke has burnt his hand severely.”

There was a sympathetic chorus of “Oh-h!”

“You must let me bind it up,” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby.

Marcia turned to the door. “I will get bandages, and sweet oil, and flour--and what else is good for a burn?”

Estwicke glanced keenly from one to the other, as if doubting their seriousness; then he flung himself into a chair, held up his hand, looked at it, and laughed aloud.

“If I go back to the barracks bearing such desperate wounds as these, it will demoralize the men. They will mutiny--desert. They won’t stay in a country where such horrors are possible.”

But his ridicule had no effect. And in fact their sympathy was not altogether misplaced, for the burns were sufficiently severe to cause great pain, which he had borne with the stoical pride of a man who piques himself on his fortitude, who has known the poignant anguish of serious wounds, and who is supported by the consciousness that this is no killing complaint. He had intended to say nothing of it, and at the earliest opportunity to bid his entertainers good evening, but his host had accidentally discovered it. He was soon reconciled, however, to the offices of these gentle Samaritans, as he sat by the table while the three stood in anxious absorption around him. He thought the pain would be considerably assuaged if one of the young ladies should bind up the injured member; but as that might not be, he was in a measure consoled that Marcia held the saucer, and Antoinette the bandages, while Mrs. Kirby’s gentle, wrinkled hands were soft and soothing to the touch.

He could not forbear a gibe at her old-fashioned remedies and the amateur performance. “I can’t let this stay on till I get back to the barracks,” he declared.

“But you must--and why not?” asked Mrs. Kirby, sternly, repressing him as if he were a refractory boy.

“I wouldn’t--I wouldn’t have the surgeon see this extraordinary bit of work for--” He looked at the bandages and the slow, tender hand hovering above them, and shook his head silently.

“Good surgery as any!” cried Mrs. Kirby, strong in her faith in herself. “I assure you, Captain Estwicke, _I_ am not ashamed of it.”

“Oh!” cried Marcia, abruptly--“his wrist!”

“His _wrist_ is burned, too!” exclaimed Mrs. Kirby in an animated _crescendo_. “The flesh is baked! yes--fairly baked! You will carry that scar to your grave!” she prophesied with grieved solemnity.

Estwicke broke out laughing afresh.

“What a pity! What a pity!” he protested.

“Oh, how it must pain you,” exclaimed Marcia. “And to have burned it _here_--trying to save our cotton!”

Estwicke was daring at best. This sympathy did not tend to decrease his courage. He lifted his head and looked straight at the girl, with a sudden meaning kindling in his eyes.

“To make amends you must promise that you will always think kindly of me after this,” he said.

Mrs. Kirby paused, her head inquiringly askew. She looked quickly from one to the other of the young people. His eyes were still fixed upon Marcia’s face, which had crimsoned from the roots of her hair to the lace knot at her throat. Her long eyelashes dropped. The hand that held the saucer trembled visibly. And she evidently could not speak. Mrs. Kirby answered for her.

“You must be very wicked indeed if you make us”--_Us_ was the word the punctilious old lady used--“think unkindly of you--on so short an acquaintance.”

But Estwicke did not care for this thrust. He saw that the young girl understood him, that Mrs. Kirby did not, and that the episode had been unnoticed by General Vayne and Miss St. Pierre, who were now standing near the hearth listening to the account which one of the boys was giving of his experiences at the fire.

Marcia was very silent and demure after this. And Estwicke was demure, too. He got away as soon as he could, and as he rode off he said to himself that it was a pleasant little circle, and he would come again next week.

“That young man has a very wilful temper,” said Mrs. Kirby, thinking of his resistance to the blandishments of flour and sweet-oil. “But,” added the judicious old lady, “he is as handsome as a picture.”

Miss St. Pierre was more discriminating.

“He has fine eyes, and he carries himself splendidly, but I can’t say I think he is handsome. His features are too irregular.”

Only Marcia said nothing.

One of the boys broke the silence. “He’s got a red head on him,” he submitted.

“Reg’lar sorrel-top,” drawled Dick. And this was _his_ contribution to the evening’s entertainment.

They did not linger long about the hearth, for it was growing late. The haggard anxiety of General Vayne’s expression began to be reflected on his daughter’s face as on a mirror. She became very grave. She seemed absorbed. But he talked with his habitual manner of lofty cheerfulness, and bade his sister good-night with a smile. As he rose and with his dexterous left hand moved a chair from Miss St. Pierre’s way, she said mellifluously--“I hope your loss is not very severe, General.”

“I have been apprenticed to pessimism,” he evaded, with a smile. “This is the way I learn the trade.”

He opened the door, stood aside, and bowed her out with his old-fashioned ceremoniousness.

Marcia had gone to the dining-room on a household errand connected with laying the cloth for to-morrow’s breakfast. She came back presently. His eyes were on the door as he sat by the embers alone. He had expected her, but for a moment he said nothing. She looked at him eagerly--very anxiously.

“How much of the cotton was burned, papa?” she asked, placing her right hand on his left hand as it lay on the table.

“Nearly all, Marcia, nearly all,” he groaned.

“And the rest is ruined?--and the gin, and the press?”

“Ruined--yes, ruined,” he assented, with a sigh.

In the days of his wild enthusiasm he himself had put the torch with his right hand--a misguided hand that, and better gone perhaps--had put the torch to a thousand bales on his Mississippi plantation rather than risk the capture of the cotton or smuggle it through the lines, and, to use his own rotund phrase, stain his palm with the enemy’s gold.

It seemed the veriest fleer of fortune that now he should have such bitter cause to sigh for the loss of perhaps twenty bales, which at the best could be but a sop to Cerberus, to meet the interest of impending debts, to stave off the foreclosure of the mortgage that menaced forever the shattered and quaking old house and the grewsome fields about it.

She still kept her hand pressed upon his hand--one of her ceremonies in their councils of war.

“Papa, what will the creditors take?”

“Anything they like, Marcia,” he said, bitterly.

She glanced instinctively about her; it was not a cheerful home, with the wild waste without and the gnawing anxieties within, but they had no other.

Then she turned her eyes upon him with a pained intensity that was pathetic in its helplessness.

“How will we live, papa?” she asked, in a tense voice.

The strain on his nerves suddenly gave way. “God knows, Marcia,” he exclaimed, tumultuously. “I don’t!”

He rose and walked heavily out of the room. The tears started to her eyes, but she forbore to follow him, and presently she heard him tramping, tramping, back and forth, the long length of the dark, unfurnished drawing-rooms opposite, according to his wont when he could not be still for the throes of his financial distress, or when he was only reflective.

For sometimes his anxieties seemed to relax their clutch, and then the interval, empty of pleasure, of interest, gave him opportunity to review the most important events of his life, and he busied himself with those distraught questions--settled, thank God, long ago--which involved the righteousness of the Lost Cause. Doubts thickened about him. Doubts! And his right arm was gone, and his future lay waste, and his children’s lot was blighted. And he had flung away the rich treasure of his blood, and the exaltation of his courage, and his potent enthusiasms, and the lives of his noble comrades, who had followed him till they could follow no longer. So he was glad when the screws of the usurers came down again, and the present bore so heavily upon him that he grew dulled in suffering for the past.

No one suspected this--not even his favorite child. She only knew that he was on one of his “forced marches,” as she called these demonstrations. To-night it was more prolonged than usual. His soldierly step resounded through the empty rooms and echoed over the quiet building. The faint glimmer from the windows guided him--he would not have had it more. In the intense darkness it seemed as if he were rid of himself--annihilated.

The house had been still for hours, when he saw with surprise a long shaft of light steal past the door. He walked out into the big, bare, black hall, and looked up at the landing of the wide stairs.

Marcia was standing there, her crimson shawl caught about the shoulders of her dark blue dressing-robe, her hair floating in confusion over it. With the aureola of the candle, held above her head among the dusky shadows, she looked like some pictured saint. She smiled at him, and waved her hand toward his room, which was on the ground-floor, and reproached him in pantomime for disturbing, with his heavy tramping, the sleep of the guests in the house.

She kissed her right hand to him, and he kissed his left hand to her. She silently watched him walk softly to his own door, enter and close it after him.

Then, with a wild gesture born of a sudden, mad impatience with this troublous world, she smote the candle upon the balustrade, and in the instantaneous darkness she burst into stormy tears. She had had her touch of martyrdom to-night. As she leaned sobbing against the wall, the extinguished candle still in her hand, she heard the heavy rain begin to fall in the vast waste outside. She recognized once more in the wailing wind those sad sounds which, it was said, were the dead soldiers’ cries.

“Oh, my poor fellows!” she exclaimed. “Life is so hard! Be content that your battle is fought--and rest--rest!”

As she went groping up-stairs, blinded by her tears as well as by the darkness, she thought of that hopeless warfare her father was waging now--she had a bitter prevision that it would end only with his life. It might have been happier for him, perhaps, if this new sordid struggle had never begun--if he were now with his comrades outside--outside of the world! Then she shrunk back shuddering from the unspoken thought.

She lay awake for hours, her mind busy with the deep significance of this disproportionate loss. She canvassed the relative obduracy of the creditors, for from her father’s experience she knew their respective characteristics better, perhaps, than they knew themselves. In many an anxious struggle since the war the cannon-shattered home had had more hair-breadth escapes than even in those three terrible days when the world about it went mad, when the air was powder and smoke, and the light was flashes of flame, and the rain was lead. She tried to remember what she had heard her father say of the various complicated liens that lay on the property--even on the worn chairs and tables, even on the jog-trot sorrels that munched their hay in replevied jeopardy. She computed the interest with a dexterity acquired in her daily task of teaching arithmetic to the boys. Sometimes, when the total was less than she had feared, she brightened. But in a moment some forgotten item would recur to her mind, and she would fall to sobbing afresh, and bury her face in the pillow. Then she would resign herself to this additional load, and begin again her expert calculations. Once, in the midst of her tears, she did not lift her head--gradually they ceased to flow. Sleep had overtaken her, and had even crowded out the debts.

It was not a restful sleep. She rose in the gray, wet morning, harried and fagged out, with heavy eye-lids and pale cheeks. As she went down stairs she met, in the hall and on the landing, trickling streams of water, that insidiously slipped in where the great shot and shells had made way for the rain. She paused at the door of the empty drawing-rooms--a mass of damp plaster, fallen from the ceiling of the bay-window, lay on the floor, and moisture was still dripping down upon it. She looked up at the grinning laths. She gave a little laugh that was more bitter than tears.

“It’s a poor roof you are,” she cried, “that we make such an ado to save!”

With all this ruin to clear away, it was to be a field-day with the housekeeping, and when breakfast was fairly over, she made haste to be at it. She went back presently to the dining-room door to admonish her brothers, who sat learning their lessons at the side-table, where it was their habit to partake of mental refreshment, convenient to the household duties of their preceptress. As she looked in a frown gathered on her fair brow. There they were, ostensibly hard at their books, but panting and flushed, as if to master the rule of three were a matter of physical exertion. A tell-tale marble was rolling over the floor, and she noted the swelling and hastily stuffed pocket of the middle-sized boy. His face was grave, studious, but the green cover of the table was drawn aside, and she could see his hilarious, brass-toed boots kicking his brothers, to gleefully call their attention to the fact of how ludicrous was their task-mistress, as she stood apparently deceived by this show of devotion to duty. The stalwart kicking legs must have inflicted severe pain on the other boys, but they made no sign, except to actively return it in kind.

“Boys,” she said, sternly, “attend to your lessons. I will keep you in two hours by the clock if you don’t recite perfectly.” Then in an altered tone, “Don’t let me have to do that,” she pleaded. “I’m not well, and there’s so much work to-day about the house.”

“Bet on me, Marsh,” said the roguish, middle-sized boy, with a gravely reassuring face. “I’m just a-stavin’ ahead on these here old ’rithmetic sums.”

“Me, too, Marsh,” the others promised in concert.

But what a tumult of the silently deceitful feet under the table! How much they expressed of the gayety of the games of marbles when she was away. How they congratulated each other on her ignorance of these pastimes. How they jeered and gibed at her in their fantastic gestures.

She gave no sign of her consciousness of this sly pantomime. In her normal state of feeling the discovery would have resulted in more trouble to the little miscreants than to her. But now she was greatly depressed, mentally and physically, and she regarded it tragically. She walked away along the hall and into the empty drawing-rooms, her face flushed, and with a swelling, indignant heart. Was she such a tyrant that she must be secretly scoffed at and derided among them? They cared nothing for her, she said--she had expected the recompense of their affection, for young as she was, she did all for them that a mother might. She made their clothes--no dainty work; she taught them and kept them in order; she schemed and contrived for their comfort; they and their rough ways rendered the housekeeping a heavy burden. She worked for them till her hands were hard--_hard_--she protested with despairing iteration. She held up these hands and looked critically at them. They were shapely and white, but the palms were a little roughened, and this was a grief to her.

As she stood in the midst of the fallen plaster, waiting for the one house-servant with brooms and pails, General Vayne chanced to pass the door.

Instead of his lofty cheerfulness there was a pained resignation, almost meekness, on his face. It smote upon her very heart-strings. That dominant impulse of her nature to help to lift up, was suddenly all astir within her.

“Papa,” she cried, passionately, “when ill-fortune takes the field in force like this there’s nothing for it but to form in line of battle and give it the bravest fight we can make.”

There was a tense vibration in her voice; her face was replete with feeling, and all aglow; her eloquent young eyes looked at him from out the ruins of the big rooms that had been so fine in their day.

He had paused abruptly. His hand stole slowly up to stroke his mustache.

“That is very true, Marcia,” he said, with weighty conclusiveness. And again,--“That is very true.”

The dignity of the metaphor could efface for him the sordid aspects of the situation.

Her words were to him like the blast of a bugle. They rallied his courage. He had lifted his head. He turned away, twirling his long, gray mustache, and strode out buoyantly into the rain.

And she herself had experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. She went back to her work with a light step, already beginning to evolve plans. She had a full realization of the terrible menace of the future--of the pitiable straits of the present. But now that she had formed anew in the face of these inexorable facts she returned to the charge with the desperate ardor of a forlorn hope.

Despite her youth and her effervescent girlish gayety she had a broad and mature appreciation of the seriousness of life;--her experience warranted this. Even the terrors of her childhood were never the hobgoblins of the nursery tales; instead, she had known what it was to quake in the cellars of bombarded towns and listen to the shriek of the shell. Her imagination had been tutored by the imposing spectacle of a gallant division in line of battle. She derived a commensurate idea of the grim tragedies of existence from the sight of the same crack troops, before the sun went down, decimated and demoralized, mangled and routed. Her only impressions of the gala-world were reminiscences of those hurried festivities in the Confederacy, when she had watched with precocious eyes the unprescient gayety of spirited young officers, who danced all night and marched out and were killed in the morning. Her only experience of travel was in the rôle of refugee, knocking about with her mother through all the South, a prey to a deadly anxiety about the distant “command,” and in terror of a newspaper lest she might read her father’s name among the long lists of the killed. Her participation in those mad, panic-stricken flights of non-combatants, sometimes in the dead of night, to escape an unexpected insidious approach of the enemy, had sharpened her comprehension of an emergency. Perhaps all this had added to her decision and force of character, and gave her that practical element of precocious management which had been of infinite service in enabling her and her father to readjust the fragments of their shattered home.

All the plans she was revolving now had a certain phase of feasibility. She was utterly lacking in his marvellous susceptibility to abstractions. The case was so desperate that little could be done, but she projected with a sense of triumph small savings here and there in the small supplies. She would hope for the best, and work for it, too.

When the debris of the night’s rain had been cleared away she went blithely back to the boys and their ill-learned lessons. She was no longer occupied with the tragic aspects of their callow ingratitude; here, too, the wonted practical element of her management reasserted itself. Not one second was abated of the threatened two hours’ penance--even after the others were released she watched above her sewing the roguish middle-sized boy--roguish no longer--alternately weep and “wrastle” over the doctrine of projectile forces as set forth by his primary philosophy. Who so skilled as he in the great feat of plumping out the middle-man from taw--who so reluctant to recognize the scientific principles thus illustrated.

As he was gathering up his books at last his hard-hearted tyrant put her dimpled elbows on the table and looked across at him with a smile. He returned it by a surly, mutinous stare.

“I am going to make,” she remarked incidentally, as it were, “--Royal pudding for dinner--on account of _Somebody’s_ sweet tooth.”

A reluctant smile broke upon his face. This beguilement he could not resist.

Thus she made amends for having had “hard thoughts of the poor boys,” as she phrased it to herself, and silently forgave the nimble iniquities of those brass-toed kicks.