Kitobni o'qish: «The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story», sahifa 17
XXXIII
Under red leaves
Agatha's note, coming after her curt message, was a sore puzzle to its recipient. One might interpret it to mean anything or nothing. It was courteous enough, but its courtesy was colourless and cold. It was such a note as might have been addressed to the veriest stranger. There was nothing in it to reassure the master of Warlock as to Agatha's view of his conduct, nothing to allay his fear that she had resented his inquiries as an impertinence. On the contrary, if that were the meaning of the former silence and of the morning's message, this note was precisely such as a sensitively self-respecting young woman might have written when compelled by his persistence to write to him at all.
It was a very bad quarter of an hour with him, during which he read the missive a dozen times, unable to make out what it meant.
But Baillie Pegram was not a man to despair until he must, or to rest under a painful uncertainty. It was his habit of mind to meet dangers and difficulties half-way, and question them insistently concerning their extent. He called Sam, therefore, and bade him bring the easy-going pacer which he had begun to ride for exercise, and mounting the animal he set off at a gentle gait toward The Forest.
He appeared there half an hour before the four o'clock dinner was announced, and his welcome by his hostesses, Miss Blair and her sister, was all the warmer for the reason that his arrival indicated, more surely than any message from Warlock could have done, the extent of his convalescence.
Perhaps he was welcome also on another account. For the Misses Blair were deeply concerned about Agatha, and they hoped that he might persuade her, as they had failed to do, to give up her plan of going to Richmond and seeking service as a hospital nurse or in some other capacity in which a woman might employ herself. They were deeply concerned as to the matter of nursing for the reason that it was deemed highly improper in Virginia for any but married women to nurse in the military hospitals, where the patients, of course, were men.
Agatha had told them as little as possible of her affairs. She had said nothing whatever of her quarrel with her aunts, only telling them that she had left The Oaks finally, and asking them to send thither for such personal belongings as she had there, so that she might remain overnight at The Forest, and go to Richmond on the morrow. The younger Miss Blair had volunteered to go in person on this errand, and from her the ladies at The Oaks had first learned that Agatha had finally quitted the place in her resentment. They were greatly distressed, and immediately ordered their carriage and drove to The Forest, where Baillie Pegram found them on his arrival.
Their pleadings with Agatha had been earnest, insistent, and wholly fruitless. She had manifested no anger, and they had discovered no resentment in her voice as she replied to them. She had made no complaints and uttered no reproaches. To all their pleadings she had answered, simply:
"I have quite decided upon my course. I shall not change my plans."
The good dames were in such despair that they even welcomed Baillie's coming.
"We have done everything, said everything," they hastily explained to him; "why, we have almost apologised to the child, and all to no purpose. Perhaps you can have some influence, Captain Pegram. Will you not speak to her?"
"I shall speak to her, of course," was his reply. "I am here indeed for that express purpose. But I shall certainly not try to dissuade her from any course that she may desire to pursue. That would be an impertinence of which I am incapable."
The Oaks ladies flushed as he spoke the word "impertinence," remembering their own recent use of the term in connection with his conduct. Perhaps Agatha had told him of that in her letter, they thought. If so it would be most embarrassing for them to dine in his company and hers. So, pleading their great agitation of mind as their excuse, they returned at once to The Oaks, leaving Baillie and Agatha as the only guests of the Misses Blair at dinner.
When left alone with the young woman after dinner, the master of Warlock opened the conversation as promptly as it was his custom to open fire when the proper moment had come.
"Agatha," he began, as the two stood in the piazza in the glow of the early setting sun and in the midst of the blood-red Virginia creepers that embowered the place, "Agatha, do you remember the words I spoke to you on the picket-line at Fairfax Court-house?" Then without waiting for her reply, he continued: "I have come to you now to say those words over again, at a more fitting time and in a more appropriate place. I love you. I have loved you ever since those days in Richmond, those precious days when I first began to know you for what you are. I loved you all through that cruel time when, in obedience to what you believed was your duty, you decreed that there should be 'war between me and thee.' And now after all that you have done and dared for me, my love for a nature so pure, so noble, so heroic, passes understanding. I have a right to tell you this now. Tell me in return, if it displeases you?"
With that absolute truthfulness which was the basis of her nature, Agatha replied as frankly as he had spoken.
"It pleases me," she said. "I had not expected this. I thought I had repulsed you so rudely that – oh! Baillie, you will never know."
In a torrent of tears that were a more welcome answer than any words could have been, she buried her face in her hands.
Half an hour later these two sat by a crackling fire, arranging practical affairs.
"You do not wish to go back to The Oaks, then, even for a few weeks, and to save appearances?"
"No, Baillie, I cannot. I should have to act a lie every hour of my stay there. I should be obliged to pretend friendship for my aunts when I feel nothing of the kind. They have insulted the memory of my grandfather, and they have spoken of you in a way that never so long as I live will I let any human being speak of you without resenting it. I do not care to 'save appearances,' as you put it. Appearances may look out for themselves. 'Saving appearances' is only a sneaking way of lying. No. I will go to some friends in Richmond, if they will let me – "
"Why not go to Warlock?" he asked.
"Why, that would outrage the proprieties beyond forgiveness now that we – well, under the circumstances."
So Mistress Agatha did "care for appearances" and conventions after all. But Baillie did not think of that.
"Why not go there as the mistress of Warlock – as my wife?" he asked. "Why should we not be married to-morrow at Christ-Church-in-the-Woods? I am a soldier. I shall be strong enough to return to duty presently. When I do so I shall want to feel that you are safe at Warlock, that you are mine, my wife to cherish while I live. Say that it shall be so, Agatha! Let me send word to Mr. Berkeley, the rector, to-night, that we shall be at the church at noon to-morrow!"
The girl thought for a moment, and then said:
"Yes, that will be best. For then, if you fall ill or are wounded again, I shall have a right to go to you and care for you. Let it be so. Now you must not ride to Warlock on horseback to-night. It is very cool, and you have already overtaxed your strength. I shall ask Miss Blair to send you over in her carriage."
When he had gone Agatha announced the news to her hostesses and straightway set about writing a score of little notes to be despatched by negro messengers early in the morning, to her friends in the neighbourhood. To her aunts she wrote simply, and without formal address of any kind, the bare statement:
"Captain Baillie Pegram and I are to be married to-morrow, Thursday, at noon, at Christ-Church-in-the-Woods."
This note she sent before going to bed. When it was received at The Oaks, a conversation ensued which was largely ejaculatory:
"How shocking!"
"Yes, and how scandalous!"
"What will people say!"
"The girl must be bewitched!"
"And yet it is better than nursing soldiers, and she an unmarried woman!"
"Perhaps. At any rate it is clear that we can exercise no restraint over the poor, headstrong child."
"No, Captain Pegram has completely undermined our influence. Of course we cannot lend our countenance to the affair by attending!"
"I think we must. Otherwise people will talk. They might even call it a runaway match."
"That would be too dreadful!"
"Yes. I think we must put the best face we can on the affair by attending. In these war-times everything is topsyturvy. Ah, me! What a pity we couldn't have had the child's bringing-up to ourselves!"
"Yes, we should have made a very different woman of her. Anyhow, with this marriage all our responsibility for her will be at an end. And after all, perhaps it is as well to have it so, for if she had remained single there is no knowing at what moment she would have done something else as scandalous as her going North to nurse Mr. Pegram was."
And so they cackled for half the night.
XXXIV
The end and after
A few weeks later came the news that a campaign was on and battle impending. Burnside had replaced McClellan in command of the Federal armies in Virginia. He had at once begun a campaign against Richmond, moving by way of Fredericksburg. There Lee met him, posting the Southern veterans on the circling hills behind the town and awaiting his adversary's assault.
Baillie Pegram had resumed command of his battery now, but no longer with the light guns that he had used while galloping with Stuart. A captured Federal battery of six twelve-pounder Napoleons had been assigned to him, and with these he took position on the crest of Marye's Heights, where there was presently to occur one of the most heroic battles of all the war.
It was nearly mid-December when Burnside crossed the river and moved to assault Lee. His army, though greater than Lee's, was not quite so great in numbers as it had been when McClellan had commanded it near Richmond's gates; but it was greatly more formidable in all other respects. The men who composed it were war-seasoned veterans now, and its officers had fully learned their trade of command. Moreover the army had successfully held its own against Lee at Sharpsburg, and the confidence inspired by that event was an important element of strength. But in Burnside the Federal administration had again failed to find a leader capable of so employing the North's stupendous resources of men, money, and material as to crush the splendid resistance of the Army of Northern Virginia.
So Burnside failed, as McDowell, and McClellan, and Pope had failed before, and as Hooker, who succeeded him in command, failed even more conspicuously, when, in the following spring, he made the campaign of Chancellorsville.
After Chancellorsville Lee crossed the Potomac again. Then came Gettysburg, which proved to be the turning-point in the war, so far as the armies of Virginia were concerned.
For before the next campaign opened – the campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbour – the North had recognised in Grant a leader who knew what use to make of the means at his command, and, more important still, a leader who clearly saw that the strength of the Confederacy lay, not in the possession of cities or the holding of strategic positions, but in the superb fighting force of Lee's army. Grant, in supreme command of all the armies of the Union, directed the work of all of them to the one task of crushing Lee, and in the end he accomplished it. When that was done, this most stupendous war in modern history was over.
In all these epoch-making events the master of Warlock did his part, with a devotion that wrought a colonel's stars upon his collar and added honour to the name he bore. During the long winter of 1863-64, while the mud-bound armies lay helplessly idle in winter quarters, Baillie had Agatha with him in his log hut near Orange Court-house, and before the campaign opened at the Wilderness in the spring, an heir to Warlock was born in camp, – a child veritably "cradled in a revolution."
Agatha was near her husband, too, during the long siege of Petersburg, though she could not be actually with him; for his place was on the lines, where the "scream of shot, and burst of shell, and bellowing of the mortars" were ceaseless by night and by day, for the space of eight months, before the end came. But she was always near at hand, as one of that heroic band of women who stayed and starved in the beleaguered city, heedless of the storm of huge shells that daily wrecked buildings there and tore cavernous trenches in the streets. She remained there to the end as the others did, in order that they might minister in loving, life-saving ways to the wounded, who were daily brought in from the lines on ever-busy litters.
When at last the attenuated lines that had so long and so heroically held their ground against an ever-increasing disparity of numbers, were broken, and Lee ordered the instant evacuation of the city, Agatha made her way on foot to Warlock, and there, with her babe, awaited the return of the man she loved, and whose voice she fancied she could hear in the receding echoes of the cannon.
He came at last, – ten days later, – and Agatha greeted him with loving looks and words that cheered him in that despondency that at first made every returning Confederate lament that he had not been permitted to share the fate of those who had fallen facing the foe.
Over the mantel in that family room which in Virginia was always called "the chamber," Agatha hung up the artillery sword, the pistols, the colonel's sash, and the Mexican spurs that the master of Warlock had worn in his campaigning.
"Those are for the little boy to see daily as he grows up, so that he may know what manner of man his mother wishes him to become – what manner of man his mother loves and reveres."
Then she brought two other mementos and hung them also on the wall. One was the sergeant-major's jacket on which she had stitched the chevrons on the day before Manassas.
"So you found the old jacket, did you?" asked Baillie. "I kept it as a reminder of you."
"Yes – I know. I found it in the little closet where you had hung it. I should have left it there always, just as your hands had placed it, if – if you had not come back to Warlock again."
She was weeping now, but her face was joyous in spite of the tears. For had he not come back to her, strong and well and still young? And should not they two find ways in which to meet their present poverty with stout hearts and heads erect?
"We must 'look up,' Baillie, 'and not down – forward and not backward.' We have each other left – "
"And the boy —our boy!" he interrupted. "Yes, we have enough to live for – enough to enrich our lives to the end. And thanks to you I have courage left both to do and to endure."
"Courage? Of course. You could never lose that and still live. It is as vital a part of you as your head itself is."
Then she brought the other memento and fastened it into its place. It was a faded red feather.
"I have carried that on my person," she said, "ever since that day at Fairfax Court-house when you first told me that you loved me."
A few months later Marshall Pollard came. He hobbled upon a cork leg which he had not yet learned to use with ease, but the old smile was on his face, the old cheer in his voice.
"Agatha," he said, "I should like to occupy my old quarters here during my stay, if I may. You see, Baillie, it is as I told you long years ago – I must ask leave of my lady now. But I don't mind, as my lady happens to be Agatha instead of some other."
"And your other prediction is fulfilled, too," answered the master of Warlock, "the prediction that you made out there by the plantation gate. The old life of Virginia is completely gone, the old conditions have been utterly swept away. We can never re-create them. We can never bring the old life back, and perhaps it is better so. We Virginians had for generations lived in the past. Our manner of life and all our conceptions of living were those of a century ago. We had not kept step with progress. We have been rudely shaken out of the lethargic ease that was so delightful and perhaps so bad for us. We are free now to create a new life in tune with that of the modern world.
"And we shall do that right manfully. We shall develop the resources of our region, and the South will grow more prosperous than it ever was before. Better still, our children will be educated in the gospel of work, and learn the lesson that was never taught to you and me till war came to teach us, that it is in strenuous endeavour, and not in paralysing ease, that a man finds the greatest happiness in life."
"Tell me of your plans, Baillie."
"They are not mine. They are Agatha's. We have arranged to convert this plantation, and The Oaks, and all the land round about – for the company we have formed has bought every acre that could be had – into a nest of coal mines. The deposit is a rich one, you know, and I have had no difficulty in getting practical men with abundant capital to join me in the enterprise. We are already building a branch railroad to carry our product. But there is to be no shaft sunk within half a mile of Warlock House, so that I shall be 'master of Warlock' still. Tell us now of your own affairs, Marshall."
"There is not much to tell. Thanks to Agatha's wonderful economy in spending, I still have investments at the North which yield me a sufficient income for my small needs. I have divided my plantation into little farms, and have let them to the best of the negroes and to some white farmers. I am to get my rentals in the shape of a share of the crops. This sets me free to do the work that best pleases me. You know I have been writing in a small way with some success ever since I grew up. I shall write some books now. I think I have some messages to deliver that some at least of my fellow men may be the better or the happier for hearing."
"But you will want to marry some day."
"No. My 'some day' died years ago."
