"Then throwing away your life won"t save hers! Do you surren"--?"
Ferry made a quick gesture for her to shoot low, but she solemnly shook her head and fired through the top of the uppermost panel, and the a.s.sault came.
The log burst the door in at a blow, Ferry and I fired, and our foes sprang in. Certainly they were brave; the doorway let them in only by twos, and the fire-log, falling under foot, became a stumbling-block; yet in an instant the room was ringing and roaring with the fray and benighted with its smoke. Their first ball bit the top of my shoulder and buried itself in the wall--no, not their first, but the first save one; for the bureau mirror stood in dim shade, and the Federal leader made the easy mistake of firing right into it. The error sealed his fate; Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the arms of his followers. They replied hotly but blindly, and in a moment the room was void of a.s.sailants. Ferry started to spring from the bed, but Charlotte threw her arms about him, and as she pressed her head hard down on his breast I could not help but hear "No, my treasure, my heart"s whole treasure, no!"
LV
RESCUE AND RETREAT
I sprang for the door, but the fire-log sent me sprawling with my shoulder on the threshold. As I went down I heard in the same breath the wounded officer wailing "Go back! go in! there are only four of them! don"t leave one alive!" and Miss Harper all but screaming "Our men! our men! G.o.d be praised, our men are coming, they are here! Fly spoilers, for your lives, fly!"
And it was true. Their hoofs rumbled, their carbines banged, and their charge struck three sides of the house at once. Rising only to my elbows,--and how I did that much, stiffened with my wound, the doctors will have to explain,--I laid my cheek to my rifle, and the light of two windows fell upon my gunsights. Every blue-coat in the hall was between me and its rear window, but one besides the officer was wounded, and with these two three others were busy; only the one remaining man saw me. Twice he levelled his revolver, and twice I had almost lined my sights on him, but twice Miss Harper unaware came between us. A third time he aimed, fired and missed. I am glad he fired first, for our two shots almost made one report, and-he plunged forward exactly as I had done over the fire-log, except that he reached the floor dead.
Thereupon came more things at once than can be told: Miss Harper"s outcry of horror and pity; Charlotte"s cry from the bedside--"Richard! Richard!" a rush of feet and shouts of rage in the hall below; and my leap to the head of the stairs, shouting to half a dozen gray-jackets "Two men, no more! two men to guard prisoners, no more! go back, all but you two! go back!"
A sabreless officer with a bandaged hand flew up the stair and into my face. It was Helm. "The ladies! Smith, good G.o.d! Smith, where are the girls?"
"In the smokehouse," cried Miss Harper from her knees beside the prostrate Federal officer; "go bring them!--Richard, Charlotte is calling you!"
I ran to Ferry"s door; Charlotte was leaning busily over his bared chest, while he, still holding a revolver in his right hand, caressed her arm with his left. "d.i.c.k, his wound has opened again, but we must get him away at once anyhow. Isn"t my wagon still here?--oh, thank G.o.d! there it comes now, I hear it in the back yard!"
A Confederate waiting on Miss Harper with basin and towels barely dodged me as I sprang to the far end of the hall and shouted down into the yard for Harry. The little mules, true enough, were just rattling round a half turn at the lower hall"s back door, having been in hiding behind the stables. A score or so of cavalry were boisterously hurrying off across the yard with a few captured horses and prisoners, and I had to call the Lieutenant angrily a second time, to make him hear me amid their din and a happy confusion which he was helping to keep up in a fairer group. For here were all the missing feminine members of the household, white and colored, and Harry was clamorous with joy, compa.s.sion and applause, while Camille and Cecile, pink with weeping, stepped out across the high doorsill of the smokehouse, leading Ned Ferry"s horse and mine.
However, there was not the urgency for instant flight that Charlotte had thought there was; night fell; a whole regiment of our mounted infantry came silently up from the rear of the plantation and bivouacked without lights behind a quarter of a mile of worm-fence; our two wounded and three unharmed prisoners, or Miss Harper"s, I should say, for it was in response to her entreaties that the latter had thrown down their arms, were taken away; the dead man was borne out; lights glowed in every room, the servants returned to their tasks, a maddening fragrance came from the kitchen, and the three nieces flitted everywhere in their benign activities, never discovering the hurt on my shoulder until everything else on earth had been discovered, and then--"Oh, Richard, Richard!" from Estelle, with "Reach-hard, Reach-hard!" from Cecile, and "Mr. Smith!" from Camille, as they bathed and bound it. At length a surgeon arrived, gave a cheering opinion of Ferry and of Charlotte, and scolded Harry savagely for the really bad condition of his hand. Then sounds grew few and faint, our lights went out, we lay down fully dressed, and nearly all of us, for a while, slept.
But about two in the morning Harry awakened me, murmuring "Reach-hard! Reach-hard! come! our sick-train"s moving. Ssh! General Austin"s asleep in the next room!" I asked where Ferry was. "Already started," he whispered, "--in the General"s own ambulance, with Charlotte Oliver in hers, on a mattress, like Ned, and the four Harpers in theirs." While we stole downstairs he murmured on "Our brigade"s come up and General Austin will attack at daylight with this house as his headquarters."
As we mounted I asked whither we were bound. "Tangipahoa," he said; "then by railroad to Brookhaven, and then out to Squire Wall"s."
At the first streak of dawn our slow caravan caught the distant notes of the battle opening behind us. "That"s Fisher"s battery!" joyously cried the aide-de-camp as we paused and hearkened back. "Well, thank the Lord, this time n.o.body"s got to go back for her doll; she"s got it with her; I saw her, just now, combing its hair." We descended into a woody hollow, the sounds of human strife died away, and field and forest offered us only beauty, fragrance, peace, and the love-songs of birds.
LVI
HoTEL DES INVALIDES
A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we reached our goal. Harry"s hand was giving him less trouble, but both my small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my shoulder hot. Miss Harper was "really ill," said the surgeon, but for whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition. "Take you in!" said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; "why, we"d take yo" whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse"v"s!... Oh, Mr. Smith, you po" chi--ild!... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh"s gone on now jess long enough!"
In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. "You po" dears, yo"re hero-ines, now, and hencefo"th fo"evehmo"!" Harry and I agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought alike. We even agreed that Estelle"s grasp of earthly realities was not so feeble as we had thought it.
"Fact is," I said to him, on our first day at the Walls", as he was leaving the soldiers" room, where I sat under the surgeon"s inspection, "you were totally mistaken about her."
"Yes, I was," he replied; "she"s got more sense in a minute than Camille"s got in a week," and shut the door between us.
My blood leaped with rage, yet I sat perfectly calm, while the surgeon laughed like a hyena. "As soon as you can let me go, Doctor," I frigidly said, "I shall look up the Lieutenant. I consider that remark ungentlemanly, and his method of making it as worthy only of a coward."
The surgeon cackled again. "If that man," I dispa.s.sionately resumed, "was not perfectly sure that I am too honorable a gentleman to give Miss Camille the faintest hint of what he has said, sooner than say it he would go out and cut his throat from ear to ear."
"Well! you oughtn"t to get mad at him for thinking you a gentleman."
"He sha"n"t take a low advantage of my being one. You think he"s open and blunt--he"s as sly as a mink. He praises the older sister at the younger"s expense, when it"s the younger one that he"s so everlastingly stuck on that he can"t behave like a gentleman to any man to whom she shows the slightest preference." We heard a coming step, but I talked on: "Sense! poor simpleton! he knows he hasn"t got"--the door opened and Harry stepped partly in, but I only raised my voice,--"hasn"t got as much brains in his whole head as there is in one of her tracks."
With something between a sob, a sputter and a shriek he shut himself out again. Harry was never deep but in a shallow way, and never shallow without a certain treacherous depth. When Ned Ferry the next day summoned me to his bedside I went with a choking throat, not doubting I was to give account of this matter,--until I saw the kindness of his pallid face. Then my silly heart rose as much too high as it had just been too low and I thought "Charlotte has surrendered!" All he wanted was to make me his scribe. But when we were done he softly asked, "That business of yours we talked about on the Plank-road--it looks any better?"
I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said, "I am told there is n.o.body in your way."
I faced him sharply--"Who told you that?" and felt sure he would name the tricky aide-de-camp. But he pointed to the room overhead, which again, as in the other house, was Charlotte"s. I blushed consciously with grat.i.tude. "Well," I said, "it makes me happy to see you beginning again to get well."
Within the same hour I met unexpectedly two other persons. First, Harry Helm; who, before I could speak, was deluging me with words, telling me for the twentieth time how, on that evening of the indoor fight, coming with a platoon of Mississippians which he had procured merely as a guard, he was within a hundred yards of the house before our shots in the bedroom told him he was riding to a rescue. Then suddenly he began to a.s.sure me that in what he had said about the two sisters he had sought only to mislead the surgeon, who, he declared, was more utterly dead-gone on Camille than both of us put together. We parted, and within the next five minutes I confronted the maiden herself.
She came from upstairs with a mixed armful of papers, books and sewing, said she had been with Charlotte, and said no more, only made a mysterious mouth. I inquired how Charlotte was. She shrugged, sank into a seat on the gallery, let her arm-load into her lap, and replied, "Ah! she lies up there and smiles and smiles, and calls us pet names, and says she"s perfectly contented, and then cannot drop half asleep without looking as though she were pressing a knife into her own heart. Oh, d.i.c.k, what is the matter with her?"
"What do you think,--Camille?"
"Oh--I--I"m afraid to say it--even to Estelle, or aunt Martha, or--"
"Say it to me," I murmured.
"Oh, if I could only trust you!" she said, shaking her head sadly and trying to lift her arm"s burden again without taking her eyes from mine. It went to her feet in a landslide, and out of one of the books fluttered three stems of sweet-pea each bearing two mated blossoms. I knew them in an instant, and in the next I had them. She would not let me pile the fallen freight anywhere but into her arm again, nor recover her eye before she was fully re-laden. Then she set her lips freezingly and said "Now give me back my flowers."
I meekly gave them and she turned to go into the house; her head gradually sank forward as she went, and her unparagoned ear and neck flushed to a burning red. On the threshold, by some miscalculation, her burdened arm struck the jamb, and the whole load fell again. I sprang and began to gather the stuff into a chair, but she walked straight on as though nothing had occurred, and shut the nearest door behind her.
In those days used to come out to see us Gregory, in his long-skirted black coat and full civilian dress; of whom I have told a separate history elsewhere. Very pointed was Camille"s neglect of both Harry and me, to make herself lovely to the dark and diffident new-comer, while Estelle positively pursued me with compensatory sweetness; and Gregory, whenever he and I were alone together, labored to rea.s.sure me of his harmlessness by expatiating exclusively upon the charms of Cecile. She seemed to him like a guardian angel of Ferry and Charlotte, while yet everything she said or did was wholly free from that quality of other-worldliness which was beautiful in Estelle, but which would not have endured repet.i.tion in the sister or the cousin. There Harry and I, also, once more agreed. Cecile never allowed herself to reflect a spirit of saintliness, or even of sacrifice, but only of maidenly wisdom and sweet philosophy.
"If it weren"t for Charlotte," whispered the Lieutenant, "I could swear she was created for Ned Ferry!" and when I shook my head he, too, declared "No, no! if ever a match was made on high Charlotte was made for him and he for Charlotte; but, oh, Lord, Lord! Reach-hard Thornd.y.k.e Smith, how is this thing going to end?"
That was the problem in the mind of every looker on, and the lookers-on were legion; the whole wide neighborhood came to see us. Gregory and others outstayed their furloughs; the surgeon lingered shamelessly. Of course, there were three girls besides Charlotte, and it was pure lying--as I told Helm--for some of those fellows to pretend that Captain Ferry"s problem was all they stayed for; and yet it was the one heart-problem which was everybody"s, and we were all in one fever to see forthwith a conclusion which "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" required should not come for months.
"Pooh!" said Harry, ""a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" requires just the reverse!" and the surgeon avowed that it was required by a decent respect to her powers of endurance; he was every day afraid her slow improvement would stop and she would begin to sink. He admitted the event could wait, but he wished to gracious we could have her decision.
I said suppose it should be negative. "Oh, it won"t!" exclaimed both he and Harry. "When it comes to the very point--"
Gregory"s approach interrupted us, but I remembered a trait in Charlotte of which I have spoken, and gave myself the hope that their prediction might prove well founded.
LVII