Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty Part 40

However, these matters are now by-gones, Gazaway being out of the regiment. I mention them chiefly to show the manliness of character which this intelligent and educated young officer exhibited in remaining in the service notwithstanding moral annoyances more painful to bear than marches and battles. He is still enthusiastic; has not by any means had fighting enough; wants to go to Virginia in order to be in the thickest of it. He is disappointed at not receiving promotion; but bears it bravely and uncomplainingly, for the sake of the nation; bears it as he does sickness, starvation, blistered feet and wounds.

CHAPTER XXVII.

COLONEL CARTER MAKES AN ASTRONOMICAL EXPEDITION WITH A DANGEROUS FELLOW TRAVELLER.

A prospect of flat peace and boundless prosperity is tiresome to the human eye. Although it is morally agreeable to think about the domestic happiness and innocence of the Carters, as sketched in a late chapter, there is danger that the subject might easily prove tiresome to the reader, and moreover it is difficult to write upon it. I announce therefore with intellectual satisfaction that our Colonel is summoned to the trial of bidding good-bye to his wife, and undertaking a journey to Washington.

It was his own work and for his own interests. He felt the necessity of adding to his income, and desired the honor and claimed the justice of promotion. High Authority in the department admitted that the star of a brigadier was not too high a reward for this brave man, thoroughly instructed officer, model colonel. High Authority was tired of gerrymandering seniorities so as to give a superb brigade of three thousand men to the West Point veteran, Carter, and a skeleton division of nine hundred men to the ex-major-general of militia, ex-mayor of Pompoosuc, Brigadier-General John Snooks. Accordingly when the Colonel applied for a month's leave of absence, with the understood purpose of sueing for an acknowledgment of his services, High Authority made him bearer of dispatches to Washington, so that, being on duty, he might pay his travelling expenses out of the Government pocket. The same mail which brought him his order informed him that a steamer would sail for the north on the next day but one. Acting with the rapidity which always marked his movements when he had once decided on his course, he took the next morning's train for New Orleans, first pressing his wife for many times to his breast and kissing away such of her tears as he could stay to witness. To good angels, and other people capable of appreciating such things, it would have been a pretty though pathetic spectacle to see this slender, blonde-haired girl clinging to the strong, bronzed, richly colored man with the burning black eyes.

"Oh, what shall I do without you?" she moaned. "What shall I do with myself?"

"My dear little child," he said, "you will do just what you like. If you choose to stay here and keep house, Captain Colburne will see that you are cared for. Perhaps it may be best, however, to join your father.

Here are two hundred dollars, all the money that I have except what is necessary to take me to New Orleans. I shall get a month's pay there.

Don't settle any bills. Tell people that I will attend to them when I come back.--There. Don't keep me, my dear one. Don't make me lose the train."

So he went, driving to the railroad in an ambulance, while Lillie looked after him with tearful eyes, and waved her handkerchief and kissed her hand till he was out of sight. At first she decided that she would remain at Thibodeaux and think of her husband in every room of the house, and every walk of the garden; but after two days she found herself so miserably lonesome that she shut up the cottage, went to New Orleans and threw herself upon her father for consolation. Having told so much in antic.i.p.ation we will go back to the Colonel. The two hundred dollars which he left with his wife had been borrowed from the willing Colburne. Carter had no pay due him as he had hinted, but he hoped to obtain a month's advance from a paymaster, or, failing in that, to borrow from some one, say the commanding general. In fact, one hundred and fifty dollars, abstracted from Government funds, I fear, were furnished him by a neglected quartermaster, who likewise wanted promotion and was willing to run this risk for the sake of securing the benign influences of Carter's future star. With this friend in need the Colonel took the first gla.s.s of plain whiskey which he had swallowed in three months. To this followed other gla.s.ses, proffered by other friends, whose importunity he could not now resist, although yesterday he had repulsed them with ease. Every brother colonel, every appreciating brigadier, seemed possessed of Satan to lead him to a bar or to his own quarters and there to toast his health, or his luck, or his star. It was "Here's how!" and "Here's towards you!" from ten o'clock in the morning when he got his money, until four in the afternoon when he sprang on board the Creole just as she loosed her moorings from the shaky posts of the tattered wooden wharf. Being in that state of exhilaration which enabled Tam O'Shanter to gaze on the witches of Alloway kirk-yard without flinching, the Colonel was neither astonished nor alarmed at encountering on the quarter-deck the calm, beautiful, dangerous eyes of Madame Larue. The day before he would have been almost willing to lose the steamer rather than travel with her.

Now, in the fearlessness of plain whiskey, he shook both her hands with impetuous warmth and said, "'Pon honor, Mrs. Larue, perfectly delighted to see you."

"And so am I delighted," she answered with a flash of unfeigned pleasure in her eyes, which might have alarmed the Carter of yesterday but which gratified the Carter of to-day.

"Now I shall have a cavalier," she continued, allowing him to pull her down on a seat by his side. "Now I shall have a protector and adviser. I have had such need of one. Did you know that I was going on this boat? I am so flattered if you meant to accompany me! I am going north to invest my little property. I still fear that it is not safe here. No one knows what may happen here. As soon as I could sell for a convenable sum, I resolved to go north. I shall expect you to be my counsellor how to invest."

Carter laughed boisterously.

"My dear, I never invested a picayune in my life," he said.

She noticed the term of endearment and the fact of semi-intoxication, but she was not vexed nor alarmed by either. She was tolerably well accustomed to drunken gentlemen, and she was not easily hurt by love-making, no matter how vigorous.

"You have always invested in the Bank of Love," she remarked with one of those amatory glances which black eyes, it seems to me, can make more effective than blue ones.

"And in monte and faro, and bluff and euchre," he added, laughing loudly again. "In wine bills, and hotel bills, and tailors' bills, and all sorts of negatives."

The debts which weighed somewhat heavily yesterday were mere comicalities and piquancies of life to-day.

"Oh! you are a terrible personage. I fear you are not the protector I ought to choose."

He made no reply, feeling vaguely that the conversation was growing dangerous, and sending back a thought to his wife like a cry for help.

Mrs. Larue divined his alarm and changed the subject.

"What makes you voyage north?" she asked with a knowing smile. "Are you in search of a new planet?"

Through his plain whiskey the Colonel could not see her joke on the star which he was seeking, but he was still clever enough to shun the confession that he was on an expedition in search of promotion.

"I am bearer of dispatches," he said. "Nothing to do now in Louisiana. I shall be back before any more fighting comes off."

"Shall you? I am enchanted of it. I shall return soon, and hope to make the voyage with you. I am not going to forsake New Orleans. I love the city well enough--and more, I cannot sell my house. Remember, you must let me know when you return, and arrange yourself to come on my steamer."

Next morning, in possession of his sober senses, Carter endeavored to detach himself a little from Mrs. Larue, impelled to this seeming lack of chivalry by remembrance of his wife, and mistrust of his own power of self-government. But this prudent course soon appeared to be impossible for a variety of reasons. In the first place it happened, whether by chance or through her forethought he did not know, that their state-rooms opened on the same narrow pa.s.sage. In the second place, he was the only acquaintance that Mrs. Larue had on board, and there was not another lady to take her up, the Creole being a Government transport, and civilian travel being in those times rare between New York and New Orleans. Moreover, the other pa.s.sengers were in his estimation low, or at least plain people, such as sutlers, speculators, and rough volunteer officers--so that, if he left her, she was alone, and could not even venture on deck for a breath of fresh air. At any rate, that was the way that she chose to put it, although there was not the least danger that she would be insulted, and although, had Carter been absent, she would not have failed to strike up a flirtation with some other representative of my n.o.ble s.e.x. Finally, he was obliged to consider that she was a relative of his wife. Thus before the second day was over, he found himself under bonds of courtesy to be the constant attendant of Mrs. Larue. They sat together next the head of the table, the lady being protected from the ign.o.ble crowd of volunteers by the Colonel on one side, and the captain of the Creole on the other.

Opposite them were a major and a chaplain, highly respectable persons so far as one could judge from their conversation, but who never got a word, rarely a look, from Mrs. Larue or Carter. The captain talked, first with one party, then with the other, but never with both at once.

He was a polite and considerate man, accustomed to his delicate official position as a host, and he saw that he would not be thanked for making the conversation general. Except to him, to Carter, and to the servants, Mrs. Larue did not speak one word during the first seven days of the pa.s.sage. All the volunteer officers admired her nun-like demeanor. Kept afar off, and with no other woman in sight, they began to worship her, much as the brigade at Thibodeaux adored that solitary planet of loveliness, Mrs. Carter. The fact that she was a widow, which crept out in some inexplicable manner, only heightened the enthusiasm.

"By Heavens!" declared one fl.u.s.tered Captain, "if I only had Colonel before my name, and a hundred thousand dollars after it, I would rush to her and say, 'Madame, are you inconsolable? _Could_ I persuade you to forget the dear departed?'"

While these gentlemen worshipped her, Carter hoped she would get sea-sick. This great, brawny, boisterous, domineering, heroic fighter had just enough moral vitality to know when he was in danger of falling, and to wish for safety. Those were perilous hours at evening, when the ship swept steadily through a lulling whisper of waters, when a trail of foamy phosph.o.r.escense, like a transitory Milky Way, followed in pursuit, when a broad bar of rippling light ran straight out to the setting moon, when the decks were deserted except by slumberers, and Mrs. Larue persisted in dallying. The temptation of darkness, the temptation of solitude, the fever which begins to turn sleepless brains at midnight, made this her possible hour of coquettish conquest. She varied from delicately phrased sentimentalities to hoydenish physical impertinences.

He was not permitted for five minutes together to forget that she was a bodily, as well as a spiritual presence. He was not checked in any transitory license of speech or gesture. Meantime she quoted fine rhapsodies from Balzac, and repeated telling situations from Dumas le Jeune, and commented on both in the interest of the _sainte pa.s.sion de l'amour_. Once, after a few moments of silence and revery, she said with an air of earnest feeling, "Is it not a horrible fate for a woman--solitude? Do you not pity me? Thirty years old, a widow, and childless! No one to love; no right to love any one."

She changed into French now, as she frequently did when she was animated and wished to express herself freely. Such talk as this sounds unnatural in the language of the Anglo-Saxon, but is not so unbecoming to the tongue of the Gauls.

"A woman to whom the affections are forbidden, is deprived of the use of more than half her being. Whatever her possibilities, she is denied all expansion beyond a certain limit. She may not explore, much less use, her own heart. It contains chambers of joy which she can only guess of, and into which she must not enter. There is a nursery of affections there, but she can only stand with her ear to the door, trying to hear the sweet prattle within. There is an innermost chapel, with an altar all set for the communion of love, but no priest to invite her to the holy banquet. She is capable of a mother's everlasting devotion, but she scarcely dares suspect it. She is fitted to enter upon the tender mysteries of wifehood, and yet she is constantly fearing that she shall never meet a man whom she can love. That is the old maid, horrible name!

The widow is less ashamed, but she is more unhappy. She has been taught her possibilities, and then suddenly forbidden the use of them."

Had the Colonel been acquainted with Michelet and his fellow rhapsodists on women, he might have suspected Madame of a certain amount of plagiarism. But he only thought her amazingly clever, at the same time that he was unable to answer her in her own style.

"Why don't you marry?" he asked, striking with Anglo-Saxon practicality at the root of the matter.

"Satirical question!" responded Madame, putting her face close to his, doubtless in order to make her smile visible by moonlight. "It is not so easy to marry in these frightful times. Besides,--shall I avow it?--what if I cannot marry the man of my choice?"

"That's bad."

"What if he _would_ marry some one else?--Is it not a humiliating confession?--Do you know what is left to a woman then? Either hidden love, or spiritual self-murder. Which is the greater of the two crimes?

_Is_ the former a crime? Society says so. But are there not exceptions to all rules, even moral ones? Love always has this great defence--that nature prompts it, commands it. As for self-repression, asphyxia of the heart, Nature never prompts that."

The logical conclusion of all this sentimental sophistry was clear enough to Carter's intellect, although it did not deceive his Anglo-Saxon conscience. He understood, briefly and in a matter of fact way that Madame was quite willing to be his wife's rival. He was not yet prepared to accept the offer; he only feared and antic.i.p.ated that he should be brought to accept it.

Mrs. Larue was a curious study. Her vices and virtues (for she had both) were all instinctive, without a taint of education or effort. She did just what she liked to do, unchecked by conscience or by anything but prudence. She was as corrupt as possible without self-reproach, and as amiable as possible without self-restraint. Her serenity was at all times as unrippled as was that of Lillie in her happiest conditions. Her temper was so sunny, her smile so ready, and her manner so flattering, that few persons of the male s.e.x could resist liking her. But she was the detestation of most of her lady acquaintance--who were venomously jealous of her attractions--or rather seductions--and abhorred her for the unscrupulous manner in which she put them to use, abusing her in a way which was enough to make a man rally to her rescue. She really cared little for that _divin sens du genesiaque_ concerning which she prattled so freely to her intimates; and therefore she was cool and sure in her coquetries, at the same time that vanity gave her motive force which some naughty flirts derive from pa.s.sion. She took a pride in making conquests of men, at no matter what personal sacrifice.

Carter saw where he was drifting to, and groaned over it in spirit, and made resolutions which he broke in half an hour, and rowed desperately against the tide, and then drifted again.

"A woman in the same house has so many devilish chances at a fellow," he repeated to himself with a bitter laugh; and indeed he coa.r.s.ely said as much to Mrs. Larue, with a desperate hope of angering and alienating her. She put on a meekly aggrieved air, drew away from him, and answered, "That is unmanly in you. I did not think you could be so dishonorable."

He was deeply humiliated, begged her pardon, swore that he was merely jesting, and troubled himself much to obtain forgiveness. During the whole of that day she was distant, dignified and silently reproachful.

Yet all the while she was not a bit angry with him; she was as malicious as Mephistopheles, but she was also as even-tempered; moreover she was flattered and elated by the evident desperation which drove him to the impertinence. In his efforts to obtain a reconciliation Carter succeeded so thoroughly that the scene took place late at night, his arm around her waist and his lips touching her cheek. You must remember--charitably or indignantly, as you please--that she was his wife's relative. From this time forward he pretty much stopped his futile rowing against the tide. He let Mrs. Larue take the helm and guide him down the current of his own emotions, singing meanwhile her syren lyrics about _la sainte pa.s.sion_, etc. etc. There were hours, indeed, when he grated over reefs of remorse. At the thought of his innocent, loving, trusting wife he shut his eyes as if to keep out the gaze of a reproachful spectre, clenched his hands as if trying to grasp some rope of escape, and cursed himself for a fool and a villain. But it was a penitence without fruit, a self-reproach without self-control.

Mrs. Larue treated him now with a familiar and confiding fondness which he sometimes liked and sometimes not, according as the present or the past had the strongest hold on his feelings.

"I am afraid that you do not always realize that we are one for life,"

she said in one of her earnest, French speaking moods. "You are my sworn friend forever. You must never hate me; you cannot. You must never change towards me; it would be a perjury of the heart. But I do not doubt you, my dear friend. I have all confidence in you. Oh, I am so happy in feeling that we are united in such an indissoluble concord of sympathy."

Carter could only reply by taking her hand and pressing it in silence.

He was absolutely ashamed of himself that he was able to feel so little and to say nothing.

"I never shall desire a husband," she proceeded. "I can now use all my heart. What does a woman need more? How strangely Heaven has made us! A woman is only happy when she is the slave, body and soul, of some man.

She is happy, just in proportion to her obedience and self-sacrifice.

Then only she is aware of her full nature. She is relieved from prison and permitted the joy of expansion. It is a seeming paradox, but it is solemnly true."