As she often observed, "the plough-handles seemed red-hot," and as soon as political conditions favored he ran for office. On the strength of his war record, a potent lever in those days, he was elected register of the county. True, there was only a population of about fifty souls in the county town, and the houses were log-cabins, except the temple of justice itself, which was a two-story frame building. But his success was a step on the road to political preferment, and his ambitious eyes were on the future. Into the midst of his quiet inc.u.mbency as register came Fate, all intrusive, and found him through the infrequent medium of a weekly mail. It was at the beginning of the retrospective enthusiasm that has served to revive the memories of the War, and he received a letter from an old comrade-in-arms, giving the details of a brigade reunion shortly to be held at no great distance, and, being of the committee, inviting him to be present.
Girard had partic.i.p.ated in great military crises; he had marshalled his troop in line of battle; as a mere boy, he had ridden with the guidon lance planted on his stirrup, with the pennant flying above his head, as the marker to lead the fierce and famous Dovinger Rangers into the thickest of the fight; yet he had never felt such palpitant tremors of excitement as when he stood on the hotel piazza of the New Helvetia Springs, where the banqueters had gathered, and suffered the ordeal of introduction to sundry groups of fashionable ladies. He had earlier seen specimens of the species in the course of military transitions through the cities of the low-lands, and he watched them narrowly to detect if they discerned perchance a difference between him and the men of education and social station with whom his advancement in the army had a.s.sociated him. He did not reflect that they were too well-bred to reveal any appreciation of such incongruity, but he had never experienced a more ardent glow of gratification than upon overhearing a friend"s remark: "Girard is great! Anybody would imagine he was used to all this!"
No strategist was ever more wary. He would not undertake to dance, for he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly dissimilar to the clumsy capering to which he had been accustomed on the puncheon floor of a mountain cabin. He had the less reason for regret since he was privileged instead to stroll up and down the veranda,-"promenade" was the technical term,-a slender hand, delicately gloved, on the sleeve of his gray uniform, the old regimentals being de rigueur at these reunions. A white ball-gown, such as he had never before seen, fashioned of tissue over l.u.s.trous white silk, swayed in diaphanous folds against him, for these were the days of voluminous draperies; a head of auburn hair elaborately dressed gleamed in the moonlight near his shoulder. Miss Alicia Duval thought him tremendously handsome; she adored his record, as she would have said-unaware how little of it she knew-and she did not so much intend to flirt as to draw him out, for there was something about him different from the men of her set, and it stimulated her interest.
"Isn"t the moon heavenly?" she observed, gazing at the brilliant orb, now near the full, swinging in the sky, which became a definite blue in its light above the ma.s.sive dark mountains and the misty valley below; for the building was as near the brink as safety permitted-nearer, the cautious opined.
"Heavenly? Not more"n it"s got a right to be. It"s a heavenly body, ain"t it?" he rejoined.
"Oh, how sarcastic!" she exclaimed. "In what school did you acquire your trenchant style?"
He thought of the tiny district school where he had acquired the very little he knew of aught, and said nothing, laughing constrainedly in lieu of response.
The music of the orchestra came to them from the ball-room, and the rhythmic beat of dancing feet; the wind lifted her hair gently and brought to them the fragrance of flowering plants and the pungent aroma of mint down in the depths of the ravine hard by, where lurked a chalybeate spring; but for the noisy rout of the dance, and now and again the flimsy chatter of a pa.s.sing couple on the piazza, promenading like themselves, they might have heard the waters of the fountain rise and bubble and break and sigh as the pulsating impulse beat like heart-throbs, and perchance on its rocky marge an oread a-singing.
"But you don"t answer me," she pouted with an affectation of pettishness. "Do you know that you trouble yourself to talk very little, Captain Girard?"
"I think the more," he declared.
"Think? Oh, dear me! I didn"t know that anybody does anything so unfashionable nowadays as to think! And what do you think about, pray?"
"About you!"
And that began it: he was a gallant man, and he had been a brave one. He was not aware how far he was going on so short an acquaintance, but his temerity was not displeasing to the lady. She liked his manner of storming the citadel, and she did not realize that he merely spoke at random, as best he might. He was in his uniform a splendid and martial presentment of military youth, and indeed he was much the junior of his compeers.
"Who are Captain Girard"s people, Papa?" she asked Colonel Duval next morning, as the family party sat at breakfast in quasi seclusion at one of the small round tables in the crowded dining-room, full of the chatter of people and the clatter of dishes.
"Girard?" Colonel Duval repeated thoughtfully. "I really don"t know. I have an impression they live somewhere in East Tennessee. I never met him till just about the end of the war."
"Oh, Papa! How unsatisfactory you are! You never know anything about anybody."
"I should think his people must be very plain," said Mrs. Duval. Her social discrimination was extremely acute and in constant practice.
"I don"t know why. He is very much of a gentleman," the Colonel contended. His heart was warm to-day with much fraternizing, and it was not kind to brush the bloom off his peach.
"Oh, trifles suggest the fact. He is not at all au fait."
He was, however, experienced in ways of the world unimagined in her philosophy. The reunion had drawn to a close, ending in a flare of jollity and tender reminiscence and good-fellowship. The old soldiers were all gone save a few regular patrons of the hotel, who with their families were completing their summer sojourn. Captain Girard lingered, too, fascinated by this glimpse of the frivolous world, hitherto unimagined, rather than by the incense to his vanity offered by his facile acceptance as a squire of dames. For the first time in his life he felt the grinding lack of money. Being a man of resource, he set about swiftly supplying this need. In the dull days of inaction, when the armies lay supine and only occasionally the monotony was broken by the engagement of distant skirmishers or a picket line was driven in on the main body, he had learned to play a game at cards much in vogue at that period, though for no greater hazards than grains of corn or Confederate money, almost as worthless. In the realization now that the same principles held good with stakes of value, he seemed to enter upon the possession of a veritable gold mine. The peculiar traits that his one unique experience of the world had developed-his coolness, his courage, his discernment of strategic resources-stood him in good stead, and long after the microcosm of the hotel lay fast asleep the cards were dealt and play ran high in the little building called the casino, ostensibly devoted to the milder delights of billiards and cigars.
Either luck favored him or he had rare discrimination of relative chances in the run of the cards, or the phenomenally bold hand he played disconcerted his adversaries, but his almost invariable winning began to affect injuriously his character. Indeed, he was said to be a rook of unrivalled rapacity. Colonel Duval was in the frame of mind that his wife called "bearish" one morning as his family gathered for breakfast in the limited privacy of their circle about the round table in the dining-room.
"I want you to avoid that fellow, Alicia," he growled sotto voce, as he intercepted a bright matutinal smile that the fair Alicia sent as a morning greeting to Girard, who had just entered and taken his seat at a distance. "We know nothing under heaven about his people, and he himself has the repute of being a desperate gambler."
His wife raised significant eyebrows. "If that is true, why should he stay in this quiet place?"
Colonel Duval experienced a momentary embarra.s.sment. "Oh, the place is right enough. He stays, no doubt, because he likes it. You might as well ask why old Mr. Whitmel stays here."
"The idea of mentioning a clergyman in this connection!"
"Mr. Whitmel is professionally busy," cried Alicia. "He told me that he is studying "the disintegration of a soul." I hope it is not my soul."
The phrase probably interested Alicia in her idleness, for she was certainly actuated by no view of a moral uplift in the character of Girard, the handsome gambler. She did not recognize a subtle cruelty in her system of universal fascination, but her vanity demanded constant tribute, and she was peculiarly absorbed in the effort to bring to her feet this man of iron, her knight in armor, as she was wont to call him, to control him with her influence, to bend this unmalleable material like the proverbial wax in her hands.
She had great faith in the coercive power of her hazel eyes, and she brought their batteries to bear on Girard on the first occasion when she had him at her mercy.
"I have heard something about you which is very painful," she said one day as they sat together beside the chalybeate spring. The crag, all discolored in rust-red streaks by the dripping of the mineral water through its interstices, towered above their heads; the ferns, exquisite and of subtle fragrance, tufted the niches; the trees were close about them, and below, on the precipitous slope; sometimes the lush green boughs parted, revealing a distant landscape of azure ranges, far stretching against a sky as blue, and in the valley of the foreground long bars of golden hue, where fields, denuded of the harvested wheat, took the sun. Girard lounged, languid, taciturn, and quiescent as ever, on the opposite side of the circular rock basin wherein the clear water fell.
"I will tell you what it is," Alicia went on, after a pause, for, though he looked attentive, he gave not even a glance of question. "I hear that you gamble."
His gaze concentrated as he knitted his brows, but he said nothing.
She pulled her broad straw hat forward on her auburn hair and readjusted the flounces of her white morning dress, saying while thus engaged, "Yes, indeed; that you gamble-like-like fury!"
"Why, don"t you know that"s against the law?" he demanded unexpectedly.
"I know that it is very wrong and sinful," she said solemnly.
"Thanky. I"ll put that in my pipe an" smoke it! I"m very wrong and sinful, I am given to understand."
"Why, I didn"t mean you so much," she faltered, perturbed by this sudden charge of the enemy. "I meant the practice."
"Oh, I know that I"m a sinner in more ways "n one; but I didn"t know that you were a lady-preacher."
"You mean that it is none of my business--"
"You ought to be so glad of that," he retorted.
She maintained a silence that might have suggested a degree of offended pride, and she was truly humiliated that her vaunted hazel eyes had so signally failed to work their wonted charm. As they strolled back together up the steep path to the hotel he seemed either un.o.bservant or uncaring, so impa.s.sive were his manners, and she was aware that her demonstration had resulted in giving him information which he could not otherwise have gained. Later, she was nettled to notice that he had utilized it in prosaic fashion, for that night no lights flared late from the casino.
The gamesters, informed that rumors were a-wing, had betaken themselves elsewhere. A small smoking-room in the hotel proper seemed less obnoxious to suspicion in the depleted condition of the guest-list, since autumn was now approaching. After eleven o"clock the coterie would scarcely be subject to interruption, and there they gathered as the hour waxed late. The cards were duly dealt, the draw was on, when suddenly the door opened and old Mr. Whitmel, his favorite meerschaum in his hand and a sheaf of newly arrived journals, entered with the evident intention of a prolonged stay. A "standpatter" seemed hardly so a.s.sured as before he encountered the dim, surprised gaze, but the old clergyman was esteemed a good sort, and he ventured on a reminder:
"You have been here before, haven"t you, Mr. Whitmel? Saw a deal of this sort of thing in the army!" And he rattled the chips significantly.
"Used to see that sort of thing in the army? Yes, yes, indeed-more than I wanted to see-very much more!"
Colonel Duval took schooling much amiss. He turned up his florid face with its auburn mustachios and Burnside whiskers from its bending over the cards and showed a broad arch of glittering white teeth in an ungenial laugh.
"Remember, Mr. Whitmel, at that fight we had in the hills not far from the Ocoee, how you rebuked two artillerymen for swearing? Something was wrong with the vent-hole of the piece, and one of the gunners asked what business you had with their language; and you said, "I am a minister of the Lord," and the fellow gave it back very patly, "I ain"t carin" ef you was a minister of state!" Then you said, "No, you would doubtless swear in the presence of an angel." And the fellow with the sponge-staff declared, "Say, Mister, ef you are that, you are an angel off your feed certain"-you were worn to skin and bone then-"an" the rations of manna must be ez skimpy in heaven ez the rations o" bacon down here in Dixie." Ha, ha, ha!"
Mr. Whitmel had taken a seat in an easy-chair; he had struck a match and was composedly kindling his pipe. "I felt nearer a higher communion that day than often since," he said.
The coterie of gentlemen looked at one another in disconsolate uncertainty, and one turned his cards face downward and laid them resignedly on the table. The party was evidently in for one of the old chaplain"s long stories, with a few words by way of application, and there was no decent opportunity to demur. They were the intruders in the smoking-room-not he! Here with his pipe and his paper, he was within the accommodation a.s.signed him. They must hie them back to the casino to be at ease, and this would they do when he should reach the end of his story-if indeed it had an end.
For with the prolixity of the eye-witness he was detailing the points of the battle; what troops were engaged; how the flank was turned; how the reserve was delayed; how the guns were planted; how the cavalry was ordered to charge over impracticable ground, and how in consequence he saw a squadron literally annihilated; how for hours after the fight was over a sergeant of the Dovinger Rangers pervaded the field with the guidon, calling on them by name to rally.
"And, gentlemen," he continued, turning in his chair, the fire kindling in his eyes as it died in the bowl of his pipe, "not one man responded, for none could rise from that horrid slaughter."
There was a moment of tense silence. Then, "Back and forth the guidon flaunted, and the rain began to fall, and the night came on, and still the dusk echoed the cry, "Guide right! Dovinger"s Rangers! Rally on the guidon! Rally on the reserve!""