And still every moment men fell, and what could we do but smite while the foe"s bugles still rang out from beside his unfurled standard. Thitherward sprang a swarm of us and found a brave group ma.s.sed on foot around the colors, men and officers shoulder to shoulder in sudden equality. I saw Ned Ferry make straight for their commander, who alone had out his sabre; the rest stood with c.o.c.ked revolvers, and at twenty yards fired low. Ferry"s horse was. .h.i.t; he reared, but the spur carried him on; his rider"s sword flashed up and then down, the Federal"s sabre turned it, the pistols cracked in our very faces, and down went my leader and his horse into the bottom of the whirlwind, right under the standard. I saw the standard-bearer bring down one of our men on top of Ferry, and as Ferry half regained his feet the Federal aimed point-blank against his breast. But it was I who fired and the Federal who fell. As he reeled I stretched out for the standard, and exactly together Ned Ferry and I seized it--the same standard we had seen the night before. But instantly, graciously, he thrust it from him. "Tis yours!" he cried in the midst of a general huzza, smiling up at it and me as I swung the trophy over my head. Then he turned ghastly pale, his smile faded to an unmeaning stare, two or three men leaped to his side, and he sank lifelessly into their arms beside his dying horse.
I was swinging from the saddle to my leader"s relief, when a familiar voice forbade it, and old Dismukes came by at a long trot, pointing forward with the reddest sabre I ever saw, and bellowing to right and left with oaths and curses "Fall in, every man, on yon line! Ride to yon line and fall in, there"s more Yankees coming! Ride down yonder and fa"--here, you, Legs, there! follow me, and shoot down every man that stops to plunder!"
Now I saw the new firing-line, out on our left, and as the rattle of it quickened, the Colonel galloped, still roaring out his rallying-cries and wiping his reeking blade across his charger"s mane. Throngs gathered after him; the high-road swarmed with prisoners double-quicking to the rear under mounted guards; here, thinly stretched across the road at right-angles, were our horse-holders, steadily, coolly falling back; farther forward, yet vividly near, was our skirmish-line, crackling and smoking, and beyond it the enemy"s, in the edge of a wood, not yet quite venturing to fling itself upon us. We pa.s.sed General Austin standing, mounted, at the top of the rise, with a number of his staff about him. Minie b.a.l.l.s had begun to sing about them and us, and some officer was telling me rudely I had no business bringing that standard--when something struck like a sledge high up on my side, almost in the arm-pit; I told one of our men I was wounded and gave him the trophy, our horse-holders suddenly came forward, every man afoot rose into his saddle, and my horse wheeled and hurried rearward at a speed I strove in vain to check. Then the old messmate to whom I had said good-bye at this very hour just a week before, came and held me by the right arm, while I begged him like a drunk-and-disorderly to let me go and find Ned Ferry.
But he said Lieutenant Ferry was in a captured ambulance ahead of us and of our hundreds of prisoners, that a full creek and a burning bridge were between us and the foe, and that the fight was over.
LI
UNDER THE ROOM WHERE CHARLOTTE LAY
The fight was over only in degree. Our brigade was drawing away into the north and the enemy were pressing revengefully after them. Our hundreds of prisoners and our few wounded were being taken back eastward over the road by which we had come in the night, and even after we had turned into it I saw a Yankee sh.e.l.l kill a wounded man and his horse not thirty yards from me.
Before we had gone another mile I met Harry Helm. The General had left him in camp with flat orders to remain, but at daylight he had ridden out to find us. He was in two tremendous moods at once; lifted to heaven on the glory of our deeds, yet heart-broken over the fate of Ned Ferry. "Surgeon"s told him he can"t live, d.i.c.k! And all the effect that"s had--"No opiates, then, Doctor," s"e, "till I get off these two or three despatches." So there he lies in that ambulance cross-questioning prisoners and making everybody bring him every sc.r.a.p of information, as if he were General Austin and Major Harper rolled into one and they were wounded instead of him--By George! d.i.c.k, he knows you"re hit and just how you"re hit, and has sent me to find you!"
I said I thought I could gallop if Harry could, and in a few minutes we were up with the ambulance. It had stopped. There were several men about it, including Sergeant Jim and Kendall, which two had come from Quinn, and having just been in the ambulance, at Ferry"s side, were now remounting, both of them openly in tears. "h.e.l.lo, Kendall."
"h.e.l.lo, Smith." He turned sharply from me, horse and all.
"Good-morning, sergeant, is Lieutenant Ferry--worse?"
The sergeant only jabbed in the spurs, and leapt away with Kendall, bearing despatches to the brigade. Harry, looking back to me from the ambulance, called softly, "All right again; it was only a bad swoon!"
"h.e.l.lo, Smith," said some one whom I was too sick and dizzy to recognize, "one of those prisoners says he saw Oliver dead."
They say two or three men sprang to catch me, but the first thing I knew was that the ambulance was under way and I in it on my back within elbow-touch of Ferry, looking up into a surgeon"s face. "How"s the Lieutenant?" I asked.
"Oh--getting on, getting on," he replied. Doctors think patients are fools.
In a parlor under the room where Charlotte lay they made a bed for Ferry and one for me, and here, lapped in luxury and distinction, I promptly fell asleep, and when I reopened my eyes it was again afternoon. In the other bed Ferry was slumbering, and quite across the room, beside a closed door, sat Cecile and Camille. The latter tiptoed to me. Her whispers were as soft as breathing, and when I answered or questioned, her ear sank as near as you would put a rose to smell it. "The Lieutenant, sleeping? yes, this hour past; surgeons surprised and more hopeful. Miss Estelle? in another room with other wounded. Her aunt? upstairs with Charlotte, who was--oh--getting on, getting on." That made me anxious.
"Does Charlotte," I asked, "know--everything?"
Camille allowed herself all the motions of a laugh, and said "No, not quite everything;" and then with solemn tenderness she added that Charlotte knew about Ferry. "And she knows about you," the whisperer went on; "they all know."
I thought she was alluding to the verses, and had an instant of terror and rage before I saw what she meant. She glided back to the door and the two opened it an inch or so to answer some inquirer without. I saw her no more until bedtime, when she stood at her aunt"s elbow to hand and hold things, while Miss Harper, to my all but screaming embarra.s.sment, bared the whole upper half of one side of me and washed and dressed my wound anew. Ferry it was imperative to let alone, but when I awoke the next morning there was a radiance of joy throughout all the house; for he had slept and improved. The next morning again he was ever so much stronger, and Harry Helm rode off in simulated disgust, not seeing "any fun in hanging round girls who were hanging round other fellows."
Another day arose. A courier brought pa.s.ses for our three or four other wounded to go home as soon as they were fit to travel, and by night they were all gone. At early bedtime came two surgeons of high rank all the way from Johnston"s army up in Mississippi. General Austin had asked this favor by telegraph. Harry had been gone thirty-six hours, and Ferry was just asking if he had not yet got back, when the surgeons came in to the room. A pleasantry or two consumed a few moments. Then the surgeon in charge of us told of a symptom or two, to which they responded only "hmm," and began the examination. Miss Harper sent her three nieces away. I lay and listened in the busy stillness. Presently one of the examiners murmured with a certain positiveness to the other, who after a moment"s silence replied with conviction; Miss Harper touched our surgeon"s arm inquiringly and he looked back in a glad way and nodded. Miss Harper nodded to me; they had located the ball! Now the conversation turned upon men and events of the day, while one of the visitors, with his back to the patient, opened a case of glittering knives. Presently the professional heads came so close together as quite to hide the patient; they spoke once or twice in a manly soothing tone. Miss Harper stroked my temples to keep me down, one of the busy ones spoke again, and lo! the thing was done, there was the ball in the basin. As the men of blood sped through their kind after-work the news flew to and fro; Camille wept,--since she could not hurrah,--Cecile told Charlotte, the heavenly-minded Estelle was confirmed in her faith, Miss Harper"s black eyes, after a brief overflow, were keener and kindlier than ever, and as the surgeons spoke the word "done," Ferry asked again if Harry had not got back yet. Pretty soon Harry did arrive, with news of great feats by our cavalry against our old enemy Grierson, in which Austin"s brigade had covered themselves with glory, and in which he had had his own share; his hand was swelled as big as his heart. In all the Confederacy no houseful went to sleep that night in sweeter content. I sank into perfect bliss planning a double wedding.
LII
SAME BOOK AND LIGHT-HEAD HARRY
The next day found me so robustly happy that I was allowed to dress and walk out to the front door. Three days later the surgeons were gone, all three, and at the approach of dew-fall Cecile and Harry, Camille and I, walked in a field-path, gathered hedge roses, and debated the problem of Mrs. Roy"s daughter"s book, which all of us were reading and none had finished.
"A woman," I remarked, "who, for very love of a man, can say to him, "Go on up the hill without me, I have a ball and chain on my foot and you shall not carry them and me, you have a race to run,"--a woman so wonderfully good as to say that--"
"Ah, no!" interrupted Cecile, with her killing Creole accent, "not a woman so good to say that, only with the so-good sanse to say it."
Harry was openly vexed. "Well, either way! would any true man leave that woman behind?" and I tried to put in that that was what I had been leading up to; but it makes me smile yet, to recall how jauntily she discomfited us both. She triumphed with the airy ease of a king-bird routing a crow in the upper blue. Camille had more than once told me that Cecile was wise beyond the hope of her two cousins to emulate her; which had only increased my admiration for Camille; yet now I began to see how the sisters came by their belief. In the present discussion she was easily first among the four of us. At the same time her sensuous graces also took unquestionable preeminence; city-bred though she was, she had the guise of belonging to the landscape, or, rather, of the landscape"s belonging, by some fairy prerogative, to her. She seemed just let loose into the world, yet as ready and swift to make right use of it as any humming-bird let into a garden; as untimorous as any such, and as elusive. In this sultry June air she had all the animation both of mind and of frame that might have been expected of her on a keen, clear winter day. Her face never bore the same expression at the beginning and middle, or at either of these and the close, of any of her speeches, yet every change was lovely, the sign of a happy play of feeling, and proof of a mercurial intelligence. No report of them by this untrained pen would fully bear me out, and the best tribute I can offer is to avoid the task.
It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former loveliness had increased, and what new n.o.bility it had taken on. That any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had ever conceived of a pa.s.sion already conscious between Charlotte and Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art.
When we got back to the house Harry detained me on the veranda alone. Camille told me how long I might tarry. It was heaven to have her bit in my mouth, and I found it hard to be grum even when Harry beat with his good hand the rhythm of "Maiden pa.s.sing fair, turn away thine eyes."
"d.i.c.k," he said, suddenly grave as he walked me down the veranda, "her cousin Cecile! isn"t it awful? Now that poor girl"s gone back to Ned"s bedside; back to her torture! Why do they let her? My George! it"s merciless! Has her aunt no eyes?"
"But, Lieutenant, you don"t know she loves him; there are signs, I admit; but proofs, no. She"s lost color, and her curves are more slender, but, my goodness! a dozen things might account for that."
"d.i.c.k Smith,"--my questioner worked himself up over the rail and sat out on the shelf that held the bucket of drinking-water and its gourd--"do you imagine she didn"t know, when we were talking about that book, that she was arguing against the union of Ned Ferry and Charlotte Oliver? Didn"t she do it bravely! Richard, my friend, she couldn"t have done it if she had suspected us of suspecting her. It"s a bleeding pity! And yet you can"t side with her, for I just swear Ned"s got to have Charlotte Ol"--what? No, he won"t overhear a blank word; here"s his window shut, right here. He"s got to have her, I say, and he"s got to have her just as soon as the two of "em can stand up together to be sworn in! Don"t you say so?"
I replied that I was not aware of any one who did not say so.
"Well, I can name several! I don"t call Scott Gholson anybody, but there"s Major Harper--No, I"m not talking too loud, Ned isn"t hearing a word. Major Harper"s so hot against this thing that he brought it up, with me, yesterday on the battlefield."
"Major Harper doesn"t really know her," I softly remarked.
Harry swore with military energy. "I told him he didn"t, and he fairly snorted. We don"t know her, he says; you nor I nor his sister nor his niece nor his daughters, oh, we don"t know her at all; and neither do we know Ned; Ned has graceful manners, and she"s a born actress, and we"re simply infatuated by their romantic situation. Good Lordy! he got up on his Charleston pride-of-family like a circus-girl on stilts, and "Edgard Ferry-Durand has got a great public career before him," s"s he, "and no true friend will let him think of taking a wife who is all history and no antecedents, a blockade-runner, a spy, and the brand-new widow of a blackguard and a jayhawker she had run away from practically on her wedding-night." Hy Jo"! the way he went on, you"d "a" thought he was already Ned"s uncle-in-l"--" The speaker"s face took a sudden distress--"Great Caesar!" He pointed up to the second-story front room and slipped down from the shelf just as Estelle came out to us with her aunt"s message for me to come in.
"How"s the fair patient?" I hurried to ask as the three of us went.
"Why, Mr. Smith, she"s actually been sitting up--in the twilight--at the open window--while Aunt Martha and I smoothed up her bed." Harry groaned.
"She"s still very weak," said Aunt Martha when we came to her; "the moment her bed was made up she asked to lie down again."
"Yes," softly exclaimed Camille, "but, oh, aunt Martha, with such courage in those eyes!"
"Smith," privately asked the agonized Harry, "what would you do if you were in my place; go and cut your throat from ear to ear?"
"No," I said, as black as an executioner, "but I wish you"d done it yesterday."
LIII
"CAPTAIN, THEY"VE GOT US"
More days slipped by. Neighbors pressed sweet favors upon us; calls, joyful rumors, delicacies, flowers. One day Major Harper paid us a flying visit, got kisses galore, and had his coat sponged and his b.u.t.tons reanimated. In the small town some three miles northwest of us he was acc.u.mulating a great lot of captured stuff. On another day came General Austin and stayed a whole hour. Ferry took healing delight in these visits, asking no end of questions about the movements afield, and about the personal fortunes of everyone he knew. When the General told him Ferry"s scouts were doing better without him than with him--"I thought he would smile himself into three pieces," said the General at the supper-table.