Daisy in the Field Part 13

I looked up at him. His face was safely grave; it meant business; but his eyes sparkled a little for me; and as I looked he smiled, and added,

"He wants a spur."

"To make him run? I had difficulty enough to prevent his doing that just now, Mr. Thorold."

"No; to make him stand still. He wants punishing."

"Miss Randolph deserves a great deal of credit," said the major. "But all Southern women know how to ride; and the men to fight."

"We are going to have a hard time then," said Thorold; with a wilful presuming on his privileges.

"But what have you done with your battery?" I asked.

"Taken it to pieces - as you see."

"Pray, what for? I thought something was the matter."

"Nothing was the matter, I am glad to know," Thorold said looking at me. "It is sometimes necessary to do this sort of thing in a hurry; and the only way to do it then in a hurry, is to practise now when there is no hurry. You shall see how little time it will take to get ready for another order to fire. But Miss Randolph had better be out of the way first.

Are you going farther?"

The major said he hoped so, and I answered certainly.

"I shall fire no more while you are here," Thorold said as he touched his cap, and he gallopped back to his place. He sat like a rock; it was something pretty to see. Then came an order, which I could not distinguish; and in an incredibly short time wheels were geared, guns were mounted, and the dismantled condition of everything replaced by the most alert order. The major said it was done very well, and told me how quick it could be done; I forget, but I think he said in much less than a minute; and then I know he wanted to move; but I could not. I held my place still, and the battery manoeuvred up and down the ground in all manner of directions, forming in various forms of battery; which little by little I got the major partially to explain. He was not very fluent; and I did not like his explanations; but nevertheless it was necessary to give him something to do, and I kept him busy, while the long line of artillery wagons rushed over the ground, and skirted it, and trailed across it in diagonal lines; walking sometimes, and sometimes going at full speed of horses and wheels. It stirred me, it saddened me, it fascinated me, all at once; while the gray horse and his rider held my eye far and near with a magnet hold. Sometimes in one part of the line, sometimes in another, the moving spirit and life of the whole. I followed and watched him with eye and heart, till my heart grew sick and I turned away.

CHAPTER VI.

IN THE FIRE

My ride with Major Fairbairn made me unsettled. Or else it was my seeing Mr. Thorold at his drill. A certain impatience seized me; an impatience of the circ.u.mstances and position in which I found myself privately, and of the ominous state and position of affairs in public. The horizon black with clouds, the grumble of the storm, and yet the portentous waiting and quiet which go before the storm's burst. It irked me to see Mr. Thorold as I had seen him yesterday; knowing ourselves united, but standing apart as if it were not so, and telling a lie to the world. It weighed on me, and I half felt that Christian was right and that anything openly acknowledged was easier to bear. And then Major Fairbairn's talk had filled me with fears. He represented things as being so very threatening, and the outbreak of the storm as being so very near; I could not regain the tranquillity of the days past, do what I would. I did a very unwise thing, I suppose, for I went to reading the papers. And they were full of Northern preparations and of Southern boastings; I grew more and more unsettled as I read. Among other things, I remember, was a letter from Russell, the _Times_ correspondent, over which my heart beat wearily. For Mr. Russell, I thought, being an Englishman, and not a party to our national quarrel, might be expected to judge more coolly and speak more dispa.s.sionately than our own writers, either South or North. And the speeches he reported as heard from Southern gentlemen, and the feelings he observed to be common among them, were most adverse to any faint hope of mine that the war might soon end, or end advantageously for the North, or when it ended, leave my father and mother kindly disposed for my happiness. All the while I read, a slow knell seemed to be sounding at my heart.

"We could have got on with those fanatics if they had been either Christians or gentlemen" - "there are neither Christians nor gentlemen among them." "Nothing on earth shall ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal, bigoted blackguards of the New England States, who neither comprehend nor regard the feelings of gentlemen." That was like what Preston said. I recognised the tone well. And when it was added, "Man, woman, and child, we'll die first" - I thought it was probably true. What chance then for Christian and me?

"There is nothing in all the dark caves of human pa.s.sion," Mr.

Russell wrote, "so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees." The end of the letter contained a little comfort in the intimation of more moderate counsels just then taking favour; but I went back to my father and mother, and aunt, and Preston, and others; and comfort found no lodgment with me. Then there was an extract from a Southern paper, calling Yankees "the most contemptible and detestable of G.o.d's creation" - speaking of their "mean, n.i.g.g.ardly lives - their low, vulgar and sordid occupations" - and I thought, How can peace be? or what will it be when it comes?

I went out for my usual evening walk, longing and half dreading to see Mr. Thorold; for I did not like to show him my fears; they gave him pain; and yet at the same time I wanted him to scold them away. But this time I did not see him. I walked the avenue, at first eagerly, then anxiously; then with an intense pressing pain and suspense which could hardly be borne. Neither Thorold nor Thorold's horse appeared among all the figures moving there; and after walking as long as I dared, I was fain to go home with that pain in my heart. It seemed, as I went up the stairs to my room, almost as if I could die at once with it. Yet I had to make my hair smooth and meet Mrs. Sandford at tea, and hear all her little details about Dr. Sandford's illness; which, as they were precisely the same as those of the day before, had nothing even to hold my attention for a moment. But I attended. It was necessary.

And I eat toast and drank tea. That was necessary too; with every mouthful a stab of pain, and every little ordinary incident of the tea-table a wrenching of my heartstrings. One does those things quietly and the world never knows. But I hailed it as a great relief when Mrs. Sandford rose from the table.

"Poor Daisy!" she said. "I must leave you to yourself again - all alone. It's too bad!"

"I like it very well so," I told her.

"It mustn't go on," she said. "Really it must not. You will mope, if you don't already. _Don't_ you, Daisy? Where are all your admirers?"

She had touched my face caressingly with her fingers, and I had to look up and meet her. It was one of the hardest minutes of self-control I ever knew. I met her and answered calmly, even coldly; and she went; and I sat down and shrank, I remember how I shrank, lowering my head and neck and shoulders in a crushing reaction from the erect self-a.s.sertion of the moment before. The next thing, two hands were on my shoulders and a voice whispered in my ear a question, "what was the matter?". So as no other voice ever asked me that question; - with the tender a.s.sumption of the right to know, and an equally gentle hint that there was comfort and help somewhere not far off. Now, however, I only started up with terror at hearing that voice there; - terror instantly displaced by another terror at the reason of its being there. I knew, I can't tell how I knew, by the first glance into Mr. Thorold's face.

"Yes," said he, in a low voice, "I have got orders."

"Where?" I managed to ask. "To do what?"

"I must take a battery across the country to General Patterson."

"That will take you out of the way," I said.

"Out of the way of what?" said he, drawing me to his breast, and looking down into my face with his hazel eyes sparkling over a depth of something that was not merry. "Out of the way of what, Daisy?" he repeated. "Out of the way of fighting, do you mean? Is that your way of being a proper soldier's wife?

It is out of your way, love; that is what I think of."

I hid my face and we stood still. It was no time then to be dignified.

"How long?" - I whispered at last.

"Impossible to tell, you know. I could not meet you this evening. I must be off in an hour."

"To-night?"

"Yes."

There was another silence.

"What is General Patterson doing?" I ventured then.

"I suppose he has to keep Johnston in order. How long will you stay in Washington? - can you tell?"

"Till Dr. Sandford can travel. - He is no better."

"Well!" - and a breath of a sigh came then which went to my heart - "Something will be decided before a few days; and then we shall know a little better where we stand. I must go!"

He clasped me close and gave me kisses all over my face; but I would not have lost one this time. Then he gently put me on the sofa, pressed his lips to mine one last time, and was out of the room in an instant. I listened to every step in the hall; I heard him open the door and shut it; I heard his foot upon the stone steps outside two or three times; and then I had lost all.

I sat very still and stunned for a long time. There seemed nothing to do. I could not rouse myself. It was the fear of being found there that roused me at last. I gathered myself up, and went to my room. Oh days, days! How much one lives through.

I was keen set now for news, army news especially; and I spent hours in studying all the public prints that were within reach of my hand. So contradictory they were, and so confusing, that they made me only the more long for actual living advices. The second day, Major Fairbairn came to ask me again to ride; and though at first I thought I could not, the next feeling of restless uncertainty and suspense decided me. Better be on a horse's back than anywhere else, perhaps. And Major Fairbairn was not a bad person to talk to. But I had to nerve myself forcibly to the task of entering upon the subject I wanted.

"How perplexing the papers are," I remarked, by way of making an easy beginning.

"Find them so?" said the major. "That is because you read all sides."

"How else can one make up one's mind? How can you know what is the truth?"

"Apparently you do not know it that way," said the major, smiling. "No; the way is, to choose your side, and stick to it. Then you stand a chance to be comfortable."

"But you cannot go into society without hearing more sides than one."

"Silence the wrong."

"I want to know first which is right."

"Haven't you found _that_ out yet?" my companion said, with a surprised glance at me. "I thought, Miss Randolph, you were a safe person; all right for the good cause."