"I take your word for that, Doctor. I believe you when you tell me there"s n.o.body but your patient in that room. But your patient may happen to be the very man we want, even without your knowing the fact.
Our man is very ill, recovering from a severe wound,--and he"d be sure to need a doctor after walking, as he must have done, a dozen miles in this snow. Pardon me, Doctor; I do not mean to accuse you of any complicity; but you are a physician, bound to do your best for any patient who sends for you, and to keep his confidence--professional ethics requires that. I shall not blame you if I find your patient to be my man. You are doing only your professional duty. But I must see the man. I can tell whether he"s the one we want. Our man has been shot through the body, and the wound is not yet completely healed. My orders are to look for that wound on every man I have reason to suspect, and I must do my duty."
"O, certainly," replied the physician. "You"ll find no wounds on my patient, and I earnestly beg you to avoid exciting him more than is absolutely necessary. You see, in his condition, any undue excitement--"
"O, I"ll be very careful, Doctor, very careful, indeed."
"Thank you. It is very good of you. You see, as I was saying, in his condition, any undue excitement--"
"O, yes, I know all about that. You may trust me to be careful."
"Again thank you. Come, Bob," looking at his watch, and addressing Baillie, who was sitting by, "we must be going. I"ve half a dozen patients waiting for me."
Baillie rose, nerving himself for the effort, bowed to the lieutenant, and walked out of the house. A minute later, m.u.f.fled to the ears in furs, the two men were speeding over the snow, with Sam clinging on behind, and playing the part of "doctah"s man."
"Here," said the physician, handing Baillie a flask, "take a stiff swig of that. You must keep up your strength." Then after he had replaced the flask in his overcoat pocket, he chuckled:
"That was very neatly done--to have you walk away in that fashion from under the very nose of the man who was looking for you."
Sam echoed the chuckle, and Baillie said:
"I hope your patient will suffer no harm from all this!"
"O, not a bit. He"s in the game, and he"ll enjoy it, especially after they are gone, and he suddenly recovers from his extreme illness."
"But why was it necessary to take him there at all?"
"Why, under the circ.u.mstances, it would never have done for me to be seen driving away from there with a companion when I had been seen driving out there alone. As it is, your presence in the sleigh is satisfactorily accounted for to everybody who sees us. But how about your discarded uniform? Won"t they find that?"
"No. Sam reduced it to ashes early this morning, and then aired the room to get rid of the smell of burning wool."
"That was excellent. Who thought of doing it?"
"Sam."
XXVI
_MADEMOISELLE ROLAND_
During all those months of waiting, Agatha Ronald had remained in New York, under the advice of Marshall Pollard"s friend, who was accustomed to put his counsel into the form of something like a command whenever that seemed to him necessary. She was urged to remain in the city, too, by all her friends who were near Baillie Pegram"s prison hospital. "Stay where you are," was the burden of all their letters. "You can do no good here, and you may do much harm if you attempt to come, while you will very surely be needed where you are, if we succeed, as we hope, in effecting Captain Pegram"s escape. We shall do all that is possible to accomplish that, but when we do he will still be a very ill man,--for if he is to escape at all, it must be before he sufficiently recovers to be sent to a prison. You will be needed then to care for him somewhere, for, of course, he must not remain in this quarter of the country. Be patient and trust us--and Sam. For that boy is a wonder of devotion and ingenuity. He has just left us to return to the hospital before morning.
He makes the journey on foot by night, three times a week, walking twenty odd miles each trip, in all sorts of weather. When we remonstrated with him to-night--for a fearful storm is raging--and told him he should have waited for better weather, he indignantly replied: "Den Mis" Agatha would have had to wait a whole day beyond her time fer news. No sirree. Sam"s a-gwine to come on de "pinted nights, ef it rains pitchforks an" de win" blows de ha"r offen he haid.""
So Agatha busied herself with such concerns as were hers. She laboured hard to improve the service of her "underground railroad," and sent medicines and surgical appliances through the lines with a frequency that surprised the authorities at Richmond. She corresponded in a disguised way with her friends in and near Washington, offering all she could of helpful suggestion to them and through them to Sam. It was by her command that Sam told his master, while in the hospital, just where and how she was to be found if he should escape, and how perfectly equipped she was to come to his a.s.sistance in such a case.
For the rest, she battled bravely with her sorrow and her anxieties, lest they unfit her for prompt and judicious action when the time for action should come. In brief, she behaved like the devoted and heroic woman she was.
After long months of weary waiting, her pulse was one day set bounding by the tidings that the master of Warlock had escaped from the hospital, and was in safe hands. This news was communicated by means of a telegram, which said only, "Dress goods satisfactory. Tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs excellent."
Fuller news came by letter a day later, and it was far less joyous. It told her that the exposure, exertion, and excitement of the escape had brought Baillie into a condition of dangerous illness; that he lay helpless in the physician"s house; that no one was permitted to see him for fear of discovery, except Sam, who had been installed as nurse.
Other letters followed this daily for a week, each more discouraging than the last. Finally came one from the doctor himself, in answer to Agatha"s demand, in which he wrote:
"I labour under many difficulties. Captain Pegram"s presence in my house must be concealed as long as that can be accomplished. I am a bachelor, and I often receive patients for treatment here, but in this case the man"s illness is the consequence of a bullet wound, and should that fact become known, it would pretty certainly cause an inquiry; for my Southern sentiments are well known, and in the eyes of the governmental secret service, I am very distinctly a "suspect." The consequence of all this is that I dare not introduce a competent nurse into the house.
"Sam is willing and absolutely devoted, but of course he knows nothing of nursing. Yet nursing, and especially the tender nursing of a woman, is this patient"s chief need. If he were in New York now, where political rancour is held in check by the fact that sentiment there is divided, and where people are too busy to meddle with other people"s affairs, we could manage the matter easily. You can scarcely imagine how different the conditions here are. I might easily command the services of any one of half a dozen or a dozen gentlewomen of Maryland whom I could trust absolutely. But the very fact of my bringing one of them here to nurse a stranger, would set a pack of clever detectives on the scent, and within twenty-four hours they would know the exact truth.
"You will see, my dear young lady, how perplexing a situation it is. I hoped at first that Capt. P. might presently rally sufficiently to stand the trip to New York. I could have managed that. But he simply cannot be moved now, or for many weeks to come. It would be murder to make the attempt."
When Agatha had read this latter, her mind was instantly made up.
"I must go to him at all hazards and all costs, and nurse him myself.
But first I must think out a way, so that there may be no failure."
She sat for an hour thinking and planning. Then she got up and hurriedly scribbled two letters. It was after nightfall, and Agatha had never yet gone into the streets by night. Her terror of that particular form of danger was great. But these letters must be posted at once, and by her own hand. There were no lamp-post mailing-boxes in those half-civilised days, and she must travel many blocks to reach the nearest post-office station. She took up the little pistol which she had so long carried for the purpose of defending her honour by self-destruction, if need should arise, examined its chambers, placed it beneath her cloak, and hurried into the street.
Then, as now, to the shame of what we call our civilisation, no woman could traverse the thoroughfares of a great city after dark and unattended without risk of insult or worse. Then, as now, a costly police force utterly ignored its duty of so vigilantly protecting the helpless that the streets should be as safe to women as to men, by night as well as by day.
During that little walk of a dozen city blocks through streets that the public adequately paid to have securely guarded, Agatha felt far more of fear than she had experienced while facing the canister fire of Baillie Pegram"s guns.
She escaped molestation more by good fortune than by any security that police protection afforded or now affords to the wives and daughters of a community that calls itself civilised, and pays princely sums every year for a police protection that it does not get.
One of her letters was addressed to a friend in Baltimore. It gave her the address of Marshall Pollard"s friend, the banker, and added:
"On receipt of this you are to telegraph, asking him to find and send you a nurse who speaks French--a Frenchwoman preferred. He will send me, in response to the demand, as Mlle. Roland,--an anagram of my own name.
I shall speak nothing but French in your house, and afterward."
To Baillie"s doctor she wrote:
"I think I see a way out of your difficulties. Can you not make a new diagnosis of Captain Pegram"s case--finding him ill of tuberculosis, or typhoid, or some other wasting malady corresponding with his external appearance, thus concealing the fact that he suffers in consequence of a wound? He speaks French like a Parisian--I suppose he can even dream in that language, as I always do--so for safety and by way of forwarding my plan, you may regard him as a French gentleman who has fallen ill during his travels in America, and come to you for treatment. You are to be very anxious to secure a French nurse for him, and to that end you may write as soon as you receive this, to the gentlewoman whose address in Baltimore is enclosed, asking her to procure such a nurse if she can.
I will be that nurse, and will know no English during my stay. This plan will enable me to go to Captain Pegram"s bedside without exciting the least suspicion, and, when he is sufficiently recovered to travel, there will be little if any trouble in arranging for his nurse to take the convalescent to New York, and thence to Europe. Once out of the country and well again, he can go to Na.s.sau, and thence to a Southern port on one of the English blockade-running ships. To secure all this we must scrupulously maintain the fiction that he is a Frenchman, and I a French nurse."
Agatha"s first care on the next morning was to visit the banker and instruct him as to the part he was to play in the conspiracy, when the telegram should come from Baltimore. That done, she plied her needle nimbly, fashioning caps, ap.r.o.ns and the like, such as French nurses only wore at that time, before there were any trained nurses other than Frenchwomen among us. She was already wearing black gowns, of course, and when she added a jet rosary and a stiffly starched broad white collar to her costume, she had no need to inform anybody that she was a hospital-bred nurse from Paris.
In the little Maryland town where Baillie Pegram lay in a stupor, her advent attracted much curious attention, especially because of the jaunty little nurse"s cap she wore, and of her inability to speak English. But this curiosity averted, rather than invited suspicion, as Agatha had intended and planned that it should do.
The physician"s knowledge of the French language was scant, and his p.r.o.nunciation was execrably bad, but he managed to greet the nurse in that tongue on her arrival, and to say, very gallantly:
"Now my patient should surely get well. Under care of such a nurse even a dead man might be persuaded back to life."
XXVII
_AGATHA"S WONDER-STORY_