The Iron Game Part 28

Davis smiled, and his eyes twinkled kindly on his boyish inquisitor.

"I know only one woman. That is as much as a man can speak for. She doesn't hate my hates, love my loves, or enter unprotestingly into all my ways. Indeed, I may say that, being a peaceful man, I wanted to remain in Washington, for I believed that Seward was sincere in pleading for a compromise; but the woman I speak of had her own opinion convinced me that she was right, and I came to my own people."

At this moment there was a diversion. A soldier, booted and spurred, entered the room, walked to the head of the table, and bending deferentially to the President, said;

"I am ordered to deliver this message wherever you may be found." He handed Davis a large envelope and retreated respectfully two or three paces backward. Everybody affected to resume conversation as the President, breaking the seal, said;

"Pardon me a moment, madam." But he had no sooner ran over the lines than he turned to the courier, crying, in visible discomfiture:

"When did you leave the war office?"

"At five o'clock, sir."

"General, we must return instantly to Richmond; a hundred or more of the prisoners have broken out of Libby! It is reported that a column of the enemy with gunboats have pa.s.sed up the James.--Madam, this is one of the exigencies of a time of war. I needn't say to an Atterbury that everything must give way to public business!" He called Lee aside, spoke rapidly to him, and the latter, beckoning Vincent, left the room. He returned in ten minutes, announcing that everything was in readiness to set out. The carriage with Mrs. Sprague's and Merry's small luggage was ready when the cavalcade set out, Davis riding with them and the cavalry company from below, divided into squadrons before and behind the carriage. It was eleven o'clock as the last dark line of the troop disappeared. Olympia and Jack stood at the great gate in mournful silence. The swiftness of the parting had lessened the pain, but their minds were full of the sorrow that follows the inevitable. Mrs. Sprague had herself declined to postpone the ordeal when Mrs. Atterbury pointed out the untimely hour. No, it was better to suffer this slight inconvenience to have Vincent's protecting presence all the way to the Union lines; and Jack, acknowledging this, didn't say a word to dissuade her. Vincent's last act was to call Jack to his room.

"I wanted to tell you, Jack, what a great joy it has been to me--it has been to all of us--to have you in our home at this trying time. I can not tell you how much comfort it has been to me now, but some time you shall know," Vincent stammered, and began to open a drawer in the bureau. "Here is something I want you to accept as a keepsake from me."

He drew forth a pistol-case and opened it. "It will be a melancholy pleasure for me to feel, in the dark days to come, that these weapons may prove your friend in battle, where I must be your enemy."

"By George, they're beauties!" Jack cried, taking the weapons out.

"Yes; they were bought last year, and I have had J.S. cut on one, and V.A. on the other. I meant them for your Christmas last year, but they were mislaid."

"What a kind fellow you are, Vint! I don't think I ought to take these."

"Why not? I have others! I shall feel easier, knowing that you have them. You can stow them about you easily, they are so small."

"But it's against the laws of war for a prisoner to be armed."

"That's just the reason I haven't asked you to take them before. You can leave them here in my room until you are exchanged, and then you can carry them with impunity."

The household a.s.sembled at the gate leading into the roadway as the cavalcade took up the march. There were sad, sobbing farewells spoken--the kindly night covering the tears, and the loud neighing of the horses drowning the sobs.

The Northern group remained in the roadway, straining their eyes to catch the last glimpse of the wanderers as they disappeared in the misty foliage, far up the roadway.

The horizon to the zenith was full of shimmering star-points, Olympia, with Jack, turned slowly toward the house, silent and not wholly sad.

d.i.c.k, in a low treble, could be heard just behind them, quoting melancholy verses to Rosa; and the brother and sister returned slowly up the dewy, odorous path. At the porch Rosa exclaimed, in surprise:

"I wonder where Pizarro is? I haven't seen him while we have been out.

It can't be possible he has followed Vincent! What shall we do if he has?"

"Make d.i.c.k take his place. A terrier is sometimes as faithful as a mastiff," Jack said, quickly.

"Oh! Miss Atterbury wants something with a bite, rather than a bark, and a terrier wouldn't do," the boy answered.

"I want Pizarro. I shall never sleep a wink all night if he isn't here,"

Rosa said, in consternation; "he is better than a regiment of soldiers, for he won't let a human being come near the house after the doors are closed, not even the servants."

An expedition, calling upon Pizarro in many keys, set out and wandered through the grounds, back to the quarters, to the gates leading to the rose-fields, to the stable, but Pizarro was not to be found. Lights were burning in the hall only when the four re-entered, and with a very grave face Rosa bade the rest good-night.

CHAPTER XX.

A CATASTROPHE.

Rosedale had been a bed of thorns to Wesley Boone since his recovery. He felt that he was an incongruous visitor among the rest, as a hawk might feel in a dove-cote. He would have willingly returned to Richmond--even at the risk of re-entering the prison--if Kate had not been on his hands. The life of the place, the constant necessity of masking his aversion to the Spragues, his detestation of d.i.c.k, the simple merry-making and intimate amenities of such close quarters, tasked his small art of dissimulation beyond even the most practiced powers. The garment of duplicity was gossamer, he felt, after all, in such atmosphere of loyalty and trust as surrounded him at Rosedale.

He knew that in the daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must see and know him as he was. What was hatefulest and most unendurable of all was the bondage of truce in which the Atterburys held him. Wesley was no coward, and he ached to meet Jack face to face, arm to arm, and settle with that thoughtless insubordinate a rankling list of griefs heaped up in moments of over-vivacious frankness. He would make Jack smart for his arrogance, his insolence, his cursed condescension so soon as they were back among the Caribees.

But meanwhile, here, daily tortured by harmless things--tortured by his soul's imaginings--Wesley was becoming a burden to Kate, who saw too plainly that he was in misery, and realized that it was largely through his own inherent weakness and insincerity. He had all the coa.r.s.e fiber of his father without the same force in its texture. With merely superficial good manners, he was never certain whether the punctilious niceties observed toward him by the Spragues and Atterburys were not a species of studied satire. Vincent, who had never shown him the slightest consideration in Acredale, treated him here with the chivalrous decorum that the code of the South demanded in those days to a guest. Wesley ground his teeth under the burden, not quite sure whether it was mockery or malevolence. He watched with malignant attentiveness the imperceptible change of tone and manner that marked the family's treatment of the Spragues. There was none of the grave ceremoniousness he resented in the Atterburys' behavior with them.

Jack was a hobbledehoy son of the house, almost as much as Vincent.

Kate, too, was, he felt certain, treated with a reserve not shown to Mrs. Sprague or Merry. Brooding on this, brooding on the unhappiness of his own disposition, which denied him the privilege of enjoying the best at the moment, indifferent to what might be behind, Wesley had come to hate the Atterburys for the burden of an obligation that he could never lift. He hated Mrs. Atterbury for her high-bred, easy ignoring of all conditions save those that she exacted. He hated Rosa for her gayety, her absorption in the young scamp d.i.c.k. He hated Vincent because he seemed to think there was no one in the North but the Spragues worthy of a moment's consideration. It is in hate as in love--what we seek we find. Every innocent word and sign that pa.s.sed in the group, in which he did not seek to make himself one, Wesley construed as a gird at him or his family. Constantly on the watch for slights or disparagements, the most thoughtless acts of the two groups were taken by the tormented egotist as in some sense a disparagement to his own good repute or his family standing.

Nor were the marked affection and confidence shown Kate by everybody in the house a mitigation of this malign fabric of humiliation. Jack's fondness for Kate had not escaped the observant eyes of d.i.c.k, who had confided the secret to Rosa, who had likewise unraveled it to mamma, and, as she kept nothing from Vincent, the Atterburys had that sort of interest in Kate that intimate spectators always show in love affairs, where there are no clashing interests involved. It was a moot question, however, between the three, when, after weeks of observation, Mrs.

Atterbury declared that Jack was not in love with Miss Boone. "He can't be," she declared. "He doesn't seek her alone; he doesn't make up to her in the evening. Half the time when they come together it is by d.i.c.k's arrangement. _He_ seems to be in love with Kate."

"How absurd!" Rosa cried, with a laugh; "a boy like him! Why, he would be in school, if there were no war."

"Well, Rosa, I fancy that d.i.c.k hasn't found war very much different from school, so far. He seems to recite a good deal to the mistress, and occupies the dunce's block quite regularly," Vincent retorted, with a provoking significance that set mamma in a brown study and suspended the comments on Kate's and Jack's probable sentiments.

Mrs. Sprague and Wesley were the only people in the house who had no suspicion of a deeper feeling than mere pa.s.sing goodfellowship between Jack and Kate. Both were blinded by the same confidence. The mother could never conceive a son of the house of Sprague making such a breach on the family traditions as a union with a Boone. Wesley could not conceive a sister of his giving her heart to the son of a family that had insolently refused to concede social equality to her father.

Something of Wesley's miserable inner unrest could not fail to be visible to the Atterburys, but the less congenial he became the more watchfully considerate they made their treatment of him. He was their guest, with all the sacred rights and immunities that quality implies, in the exaggerated code of the Southern host. Kate was the single power that Wesley had bent his headstrong will before, ever since he was a boy. His father he obeyed, while in his presence, trusting to wheedling to make his peace in the event of disobedience. But Kate he couldn't wheedle.

She was relentless in her scorn for his meannesses and follies, and, though he did not always heed her counsels, he proved their justness by finding his own course wrong. Kate, however, hesitated about remonstrating with him on his deepening moodiness, for she was not quite sure whether it was mad jealousy of d.i.c.k's favor in Rosa's eyes, or a secret purpose to attempt to fly from the gentle bondage of Rosedale.

Wesley with Rosa it was remarked by Kate, was, or seemed to be, his better self, or rather better than the self with which others identified him. It was, however, she feared, more to torment d.i.c.k, than because she found Wesley to her liking, that the little maid often carried the moody captain off into the garden, pretending to teach him the varied flora of that blooming domain. d.i.c.k remarked these excursions with growing impatience, and visited his anger upon Rosa in protests so pungent and woe-begone that she was forced to own to him that she only pretended an interest in the captain, so that he might not think he was shut out of the confidence of the circle.

"And who cares if he does think he is shut out, I should like to know?

He is a sneak, and I don't like to have you talking with him alone,"

d.i.c.k cries, quite in the tone of the Benedict who has pa.s.sed the marriage-portal and feels safe to make his will known.

"I should like to know what right you have to order what I shall or shall not do?" Rosa protests, half angry, half laughing. "Why, you talk like a grown man--like a husband. How dare you?"

d.i.c.k pauses confused, and looks guiltily about at this.

"Ah, if you put it that way I have no right except this: My whole heart is yours. You know that. You may not have given me all yours."

(Protesting shrug from Rosa's shoulders.) "Well, all the same; if my heart is all your own you have a duty in the case. You ought to spare your own property from pain." (Rosa laughs softly.) "Of course you are right. You are always right. How could such a beautiful being be wrong!"

The artful rogue slips his arm about her waist at this, and, after a feeble struggle, he is permitted to hold this outwork unprotested.

"And, Rosa, if I speak like a man, it is because I am a man. Wasn't it the part of maids in the old times to inspire the arm of their sweethearts; to make them constant in danger, brave in battle, and patient in defeat? Are you less than any of the damsels we read of in chivalry? Am I not a man when I look in your dear eyes and see nothing worldlier than love, nothing earthlier than truth there?"

"What a blarney you are! I must really get Vint to send you away, or he will have a Yankee brother-in-law."

"And the Perleys will have a rebel at the head of the house."

Now, this silly prattle had been carried on in the arbor near the library, and Wesley, sitting under the curtain, had heard every word of it. Neither the words nor the unmistakable sounds that lips meeting lips make, which followed, served to soothe his angry discontent. This was early on the great Davis gala day, and thereafter he disappeared from the scene. He made one of the party to Williamsburg, and, though distraught in the conversation, was keenly alert to all he saw.