The Storm Centre Part 13

"I am _so_ glad you approve my course," he rejoined with an air of relief.

Once more she looked at him as he stood beside her. A white jessamine clambered up the stone pillar at the outer corner of the grille work.

Its blossoms wavered about her; a hummingbird flickered in and out and was still for a moment, the light showing the jewelled effect of the emblazonment of red and gold and green of his minute plumage, then was distinguishable only as a gauzy suggestion of wings. The moon was in her face, ethereal, delicate, seeming to him entrancingly beautiful. He stipulated to himself that it was not this that swayed him. He loved her beauty, but only because it was hers. He did not love her for her beauty. They were close distinctions, but they made an appreciable difference to him. She did not hold his conscience. She did not dictate his sense of right. This was apart from her, a sanction too sacred for any woman, any human soul to control. Yet he sighed with relief to feel the coincidence of his thought and hers.

"You know, about your horse--it was a matter of conscience with me--a sense of duty--a matter of conformity to my oath as a soldier and my knowledge of the needs of the service. I would not for any consideration evade or fail to forward in letter and spirit any detail even of a special order that merely chanced to come to my notice, and with which I was not otherwise concerned. Not for your sake--not even to win your approval, precious as that must always be to me, nor to avoid your displeasure, and I believe that is the strongest coercion that could be exerted upon me. But the destination of the work done by the Sewing-Circle--that is different. I have no information that it is other than is claimed. I am not bound to nourish suspicions, nor to investigate mysteries, nor to take action on details of circ.u.mstantial evidence."

He paused. There was something in her face that he did not understand;--something stunned, blankly silent, and inexpressive. He went on eagerly, the enforced repression of the afternoon finding outlet in a flood of words.

"Lieutenant Seymour understands my position thoroughly well, as Colonel Ashley does. They take a different view--their construction of their duty is more lenient. I don't know why--perhaps because they are volunteers, and the whole war to them is a temporary occupation. But orders are to be obeyed else they would not be issued. If any exceptions were intended, a permit would be granted."

He paused again, looking straight at her with such confident, lucid, trusting eyes,--and she felt that she must say something to divert their gaze.

"Exceptions, such as Miss Fisher's favorite mount, Madcap? How pretty Mildred was to-day! Really beautiful; don't you think so?"

"No." His expression was so tender, so wistful, yet so confident, that, amazed, embarra.s.sed, she felt her color begin to flame in her cheeks.

"How could she seem beautiful where you are,--the loveliest woman in all the world and the best beloved."

"Captain Baynell!" she exclaimed, hardly believing that she heard him aright. "I do not understand the manner in which you have seen fit to speak to me this evening." She paused abruptly, for he was looking at her with a palpable surprise.

"You must know--you must have seen--that I love you!" he said hastily.

"Almost from the moment that I first saw you I have loved you--but more and more, hour by hour, and day by day, as I have learned to know you, to appreciate you--so perfect and so peerless!"

"You surprise me beyond measure. I must beg--I insist that you do not continue to speak to me in this strain."

"Do you mean to say that you did not know it--that you did not perceive it?"

"I did not dream it for one moment," she replied.

It seemed as if he could not accept her meaning. He pondered on the words as if they might develop some difference.

"You afflict me beyond expression!" he exclaimed with a sort of desperate breathlessness. "You destroy my dearest hopes. How could you fail--how could I fancy! I--I would not suggest the subject as long as your mourning attire repelled it, but--but--since--since--I--I thought you knew all my heart and I might speak!"

"You thought I laid aside a widow's weeds to challenge your avowal!"

exclaimed Mrs. Gwynn, in her icy, curt, soft tones.

"Oh, Leonora--for G.o.d's sake--put on it no interpretation except that I love you--I adore you; and I thought such hearty, whole-souled affection must awaken some interest, some response. I could hardly be silent except I so feared precipitancy. I spoke as soon as I might without rank offence."

Even then, in the presence of an agitation, a humiliation peculiarly keen to a man of his type, he was not first in Mrs. Gwynn's thoughts.

She was reviewing the day and wondering if this connection between the lack of the widow's weeds and the presence of the Yankee officer was suggested to any of the sewing contingent. A vague gesture, a pause, a remembered facial expression, sudden, involuntary, at the sight of him and her,--all had a new interpretation in the sequence of this disclosure. They had thought it the equivalent of the acceptance of a new suitor, and the supposed favored lover had thought so himself!

The recollection of her woful married life, with its train of barbarities, and rancors, and terrors, both grotesque and horrible, that still tortured her present--the leisure moments of her laborious days--was bitterly brought to mind for a moment. That she, of all the women in the world--that _she_ should be contemplating matrimony anew!

She gave a light laugh that had in it so little mirth, was so little apposite to ridicule, that he did not feel it a fleer.

"You did not mean it, then?"

"Not for one moment."

"You did not have me in mind?"

"No--no--never at all!"

"Leonora--Mrs. Gwynn--this is like death to me--I--I--"

"I am very sorry--"

"I do not reproach you," he interrupted. "It is my own folly, my own fault! But I have lived on this hope; it is all the life I have. You do not withdraw it utterly? May I not think that in time--"

"No--no--I have no intention of ever marrying again. I--I--was not--not--happy."

"But I am different--" he hesitated. He could not exactly find words to protest his conviction of his superiority to her husband, a man she had loved once. "I mean--we are congenial. I am very considerably older; I am nearly thirty-one. My views in life are fixed, definite; my occupation is settled. Might not--"

"I am sorry, Captain Baynell; I would not willingly add to the unhappiness, real or imaginary, of any one--but all this is worse than useless. I must ask you not to recur to the subject. And now I must leave you, for the 'ladies' are going to bed, and I must hear them say their prayers."

He seemed about to detain her with further protestations, then desisted, evidently with a hopeless realization of futility.

"Ask them to remember me in their pet.i.tions," he only said with a dreary sort of smile.

He had always seemed to love the "ladies" fraternally, with lenient admiration, and she liked this tender little domestic trait in the midst of his unyielding gravity and inexorable stiffness. She hesitated in the moonlight with some stir of genuine sympathy, and held out her hand as she pa.s.sed. He caught it and covered it with kisses. She drew it hastily from him, and Baynell was left alone on the balcony; the scene before him, the vernal glamours of the moon, the umbrageous trees, the sweet spring flowers, the sheen of the river, the bivouacs of the hills, the fort on the height,--these things seemed unrealities and mere shadows as he faced the fragments of that nullity, his broken dream, the only positive actuality in all his life.

CHAPTER IX

That night, so long his step went to and fro in his room as he paced the floor, for he could not sleep and he could not be still, that the Rebel, hidden in the attic, was visited by grave monitions concerning his neighbor and did not venture out to roam the stairways and halls and the unoccupied precincts of the ground floor as he was wont to do.

"'The son of Belial' has something on his mind, to a certainty, and I hope to the powers 'tisn't me," Julius said now and again, as he listened. He had sat long in his rickety arm-chair in the broad slant of the moonlight, that fell athwart the dim furniture and the gray shadows, for the night continued fair and the moon was specially brilliant. Once in the clear glow he saw distinctly in the further s.p.a.ces the figure of a man, watchful-eyed, eager, springing toward him as he moved, and he experienced the cold chill of despair before he realized that it was his own reflection in a dull mirror at the opposite side of the great room that had elicited this apparition of terror. He took himself quickly out of the range of its reflection.

"Two Johnny Rebs are a crowd in this garret! I have just about room enough for myself. I'm not recruiting."

He crept silently to the bed and lay down at full length, all dressed and booted as he was, his hands clasped under his head, with the moonlight in his eyes and illuminating his sleepless pillow, still listening to the regular step marching to and fro in the room below.

Julius did not court slumber.

"I must keep the watch with you, my fine fellow," he said resolutely.

Though there was a strong coercion to wakefulness in the propinquity of that spirit of unrest which possessed his enemy so close at hand, his eyes once grew heavy-lidded and opened with a sudden start as, half dreaming, he fancied a stealthy approach. He sprang from the rec.u.mbent posture, and the floor creaked under the abrupt movement. This gave him pause, and he slowly collected his faculties. Surely the stranger would hardly venture, even under the relentless scourge of his own wakeful thoughts, to roam about the house in search of peace or the surcease of mental tyranny that change might effect. This might savor of disrespect to his host, yet Julius canva.s.sed the suggestion. These were untoward times, and strange people were queerly mannered. The officer must have learned in the length of his residence here that the great vacant attic was untenanted wholly, and of course he knew that the ground floor was altogether unoccupied by night. He might descend and light the library lamp and read. He might indeed roam the deserted rooms with the same sort of satisfaction that Julius himself had already felt in the great s.p.a.ces, the absolute quiet, the still moonlight, the long abeyance of day with its procrastination of the sordid problems and the toilsome business of life. If he had chanced to meet the Rebel on the stairs, he would scarcely have thought the apparition a spectral manifestation, as the poor little twins had construed the encounter in the library, for old Ja.n.u.s, trembling and terrified, had detailed the significance of the scene in the dining room afterward, and the eagerness of Julius to get away, to be off, had been redoubled. Daily he had hoped for news of the approach of the picket-lines, and daily the old servant wrung his hands and made his report, of which the burden was, "Wuss an' wuss!"--or detailed a "scrimmage" in which "dem scand'lous Rebs had run like tuckies, an' deir line is furder off dan it eber was afore!"

The Confederate officer, nevertheless, had hitherto felt a degree of safety in the attic and had the resources of a manly patience to await the event. This nocturnal eccentricity on the part of the guest of the house, however, roused new forebodings. It bore in its own conditions the inception of added danger. It was unprecedented. It marked a turbulent restlessness and the element of change. In the evidently agitated state of the stranger's nerves, some trifle, the scamper of a rat, the dislodgment of the rickety old cornice of this bedstead, the fall of one of the girandoles, teetering over there on a chest of drawers, might rouse him with its clamor and justify the ascent of the attic stairs to investigate its source. These were troublous times.

There were stories forever afloat of lawless marauders. Smoke-houses were broken into and pillaged. Mansions were robbed and fired, and their tenants, chiefly women and children, fleeing into the cornfields to hide, watched the roof-tree flare. It was hard for the authorities to find and fix the responsibility for these dread deeds in remote inaccessible spots, and it would be culpable neglect for this Federal officer to tolerate the suggestion of an ill-omened noise or an unaccustomed presence without seeking out its cause. Evidently any accident would bring him upstairs. It was equally obvious that the garret was no place to sleep to-night! Julius, as he lay on the pillow, could hardly rid himself of the idea of approach. Ever and anon he looked for the stealthy shadow of which he had dreamed, climbing in the moonbeams along the bal.u.s.ters of the stairway. Finally he stole silently out of the reach of the moonlight to a darker corner of the room,--the deep recess of one of the windows which the shadow of a great branch of the white pine made duskier still. The tall tree, with its full, sempervirent boughs, showed the varying nocturnal tints that color may compa.s.s, uninformed by the sun,--the cool suggestion of a fair dull green where the moonbeams glistered, the fibrous leaves tipped with a dim sparkle; the deep umbrageous verdure where the darkness lurked and yet did not annul the vestige of tone. As he reclined on the window-seat, he discerned farther down a faint flare of artificial light. It described a regularly barred square amidst the pine needles, and he presently recognized it as the light from the window of Captain Baynell's room. Now and again it flickered in a way that told how the disregarded candle was beginning to gutter in the socket. Still to and fro the regular footfalls went, m.u.f.fled on the heavy carpet, but in the dead hush of night perceptible enough to the watching listener. At last with a final flare the taper burned out, but the moon was in the windows along the western side of the house, and still to and fro went the steps, betokening the turmoil of unquiet thoughts. Julius watched how the moonbeams shifted from bough to bough as the slow night lingered. He heard the bells from the city towers mark the hour and the recurrent echo from the rocky banks of the river: then one far away, belated, faint, scarcely perceived, beat out the tally of the time on some remote cliff. Once more the air fell silent save for the jubilee of the mocking-birds, for spring had come, and skies were fair, and the gossamer moon was a-swing in the night, and love, and life, and home were dear, and the incredibly sweet, brilliant delight of song arose in pans of joy and faith. Even this waned after a time. A wind with the thrills of dawn in its wings sprang up, and Julius shivered with the chill. The dew was cold and thick in the pines, and the sward glittered like a sheet of water.

At last all was quiet and silent in the room below. Julius listened intently. No creak of opening door; no footfall on the stair. Now, he told himself, was the moment of danger, when he could no longer be a.s.sured of the man's movements, and could not even guess at his intentions. He listened--still--still to silence. Silence absolute, null.

A bird stirred with a half-awakened chirp. The sky showed a clearer tone, a vague blue, growing ever more definite. In the stillness, with an elastic, leaping sound, strong and sweet, the call of a bugle rang out suddenly from the fort on the heights, and, behold, with a flash of red on the water, and a flare of gold in the sky, the sweet spring day was early here.

It came glowing on with all the graces and soft splendors of the season as if it bore, too, none of the prosaic recall to the labors and sordid routine and unavailing troubles and vexations of the workaday world. The camps were alive, the drums were beating, and all the echoes of the hills gave voice to martial summons. The flag was floating anew from the heights of the fort in the fresh and fragrant sunshine, and now and again a bar or two of the music of a military band in the distance came on the wind. The clatter of wagon wheels was audible from the stony streets of the little city. The shriek of a locomotive split the air as an incoming train whizzed across the bridge. The river craft steamed and puffed, and blockaded the landing, now backing water and now forging forward, remonstrating with bells and whistles in strenuous dialogue.