XLIX A CRUEL BOOK AND A FOOL OR TWO

I could see by Ferry's face that there was no worse news. He met me aside, and privately bade me go to Roy's (where Charlotte was). "Kendall is there," he said; "I leave you and him in charge. That will rest your horses. Kendall has your Yankee horse, his own is sick. You and Kendall get all the sleep you can, you may get none to-night."

"Lieutenant," I began eagerly as he was drawing away, "is--?"

"Yes! oh, yes, yes!" His eyes danced, and a soft laugh came, as happy as a child's. "The surgeon is yonder, he will tell you."

This person Kendall and I had the luck to meet at the Roy's breakfast-table. "Yes, left lung," he said. "No, hardly 'perforated,' but the top deeply grazed." The ball, he said, had passed on and out, and he went into particulars with me, while I wondered if Kendall knew, as I did, what parts of the body the pleura, the thorax, the clavicle and the pyemia were.

We lay down to sleep on some fodder in the Widow Roy's stable, while around three sides of the place, in a deep wooded hollow, Quinn and the company, well guarded by hidden videttes, drowsed in secret bivouac. I dreamed. I had feared I should, and it would have been a sort of bitter heart's-ease to tell Kendall of my own particular haunting trouble. For now, peril and darkness, storm, hard riding, the uproar and rage of man-killing, all past and gone, my special private wretchedness came back to me bigger than ever, like a neglected wound stiffened and swollen as it has grown cold. But Kendall would not talk, and when I dreamed, my dream was not of Camille. It seemed to me there was a hot fight on at the front, and that I, in a sweat of terror, was at the rear, hiding among the wagons and telling Gholson pale-faced lies as to why I was there. All at once Gholson became Oliver, alive, bloody-handed, glaring on me spectrally, cursing, threatening, and demanding his wife. His head seemed not "laid wide open," but to have only a streak of the skull bared by Ferry's glancing left-cut and a strip of the scalp turned inside out. Cécile drew his head down and showed it to me, in a transport of reproaches, as though my false report had wronged no one else so ruinously as her.

I awoke aghast. If Kendall had still been with me I might, in the first flush of my distress, have told my vision; but in the place where Kendall had lain lay Harry Helm. Kendall was gone; a long beam of afternoon sunlight shone across my lair through a chink in the log stable. I sprang half up with an exclamation, and Harry awoke with a luxurious yawn and smile. Kendall, he said, had left with the company, which had marched. Quinn was in command and had told Harry that he was only going to show the enemy that there was no other hostile force in their front, and get himself chased away southeastward.

"I don't know whether he was telling me the truth or not," said Helm, as we led our saddled horses toward the house; "I reckon he didn't want me alongside of him with this arm in a sling." The hand was bad; lines of pain were on the aide's face. He had taken the dead Louisianian home, got back to camp, and ridden down here to get the latest news concerning Charlotte. Kendall had already given him our story of the night; I had to answer only one inquiry. "Oh, yes," was my reply, "head laid wide open!" But to think of my next meeting with Ned Ferry almost made me sick.

Harry was delighted. "That lays their way wide open--Ned's and hers! Smith, some God-forsaken fool brought a chaplain here to talk religion to her! He hasn't seen her--Doctor wouldn't let him; but he's here yet, and--George! if I was them I'd put him to a better use than what he came here for, and I'd do it so quick it would make his head swim!" He went on into all the arguments for it; the awkwardnesses of Charlotte's new situation, her lack of means for even a hand-to-mouth daily existence, and so on. Seeing an ambulance coming in through the front gate, and in order not to lose the chance for my rejoinder, I interrupted. "Lieutenant, she will not allow it! She will make him wait a proper time before he may as much as begin a courtship, and then he will have to begin at the beginning. She's not going to let Ned Ferry narrow or lower her life or his--no, neither of them is going to let the other do it--because a piece of luck has laid the way wide open!" I ended with a pomp of prophecy, yet I could hear Ned Ferry saying again, with Charlotte's assenting eyes in his, "There is no turning back."

The driver of the ambulance did not know why he had been ordered to report here, but when the Widow Roy came to the door she brought explanation enough. A courier had come to her and gone again, and the chaplain and the surgeon and every one else of any "army sort" except us two had "put out," and she was in a sad flurry. "The Lieutenant," she said, "writes in this-yeh note that this-yeh place won't be safe f'om the Yankees much longer'n to-day, and fo' us to send the wounded lady in the avalanch. Which she says, her own self, it'd go rough with her to fall into they hands again. My married daughter she's a-goin' with her, and the'd ought to be a Mr. Sm'--oh, my Lawdy! you ain't reg-lahly in the ahmy, air you?"

With some slave men to help us, Harry and I bore Charlotte out and laid her in the ambulance, mattress and all, on an under bedding of fodder. She had begged off from opiates, and was as full of the old starlight as if the day, still strong, were gone. I helped the married daughter up beside the driver, Harry and I mounted, and we set forth for the brigade camp. Mrs. Roy's daughter had with her a new romance, which she had been reading to Charlotte. Now she was eager to resume it, and Charlotte consented. It was a work of some merit; I have the volume yet, inscribed to me on the fly-leaf "from C.O.," as I have once already stated, in my account of my friend "The Solitary." At the end of a mile we made a change; Harry rode a few yards ahead with an officer who happened to overtake us, I took the reins from the ambulance driver, and he followed on my horse; I thought I could drive more smoothly than he.

And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.

"Shut it," said Charlotte, with a sigh like that which had risen when the lead first struck her. "If I could be moved ever so little,--" she said.

I had the driver tie my horse behind the vehicle and resume the lines. Then the soldier's wife and I moved Charlotte, and when the reader began to handle the book again wishfully our patient said, with the kindest voice, "Read the rest of it to yourself; I know how it will end; it will end to please you, not as it ought; not as it ought."

For a while we went in silence, and she must have seen that my heart was in a rage, for with suffering on her brow, amusement on her lips, and a sweet desperation in her eyes, she murmured my name. "Richard:--what fun it must have been to live in those old Dark Ages--when all you had to do--was to turn any one passion into--one splendid virtue--at the expense--of all the rest."

I could answer pleadingly that it were far better not to talk now. But she would go on, until in my helplessness I remarked how beautiful the day had been. Her eyes changed; she looked into mine with her calm inward-outward ken, and once more with smiling lips and suffering brow murmured, "Yes." I marvelled she should betray such wealth of meaning to such as I; yet it was like her splendid bravery to do it.

At the brigade's picket, where I was angry that Ferry did not meet us, and had resumed the saddle and stretched all the curtains of the ambulance, who should appear but Scott Gholson. Harry and I were riding abreast in advance of the ambulance. Gholson and he barely said good-evening. I asked him where was Lieutenant Ferry, and scarcely noted his words, so promptly convinced was I by their mere tone that he had somehow contrived to get Ferry sent on a distant errand. "Is she better?" he inquired; "has the hemorrhage stopped?"

"It's begun again," growled Harry, who wanted both of us to suffer all we could. Gholson led us through the camp. A large proportion of the men were sleeping when as yet it was hardly night.

"Has the brigade got marching orders?" I asked, and he said the three regiments had, though not the battery. He passed over to me two pint bottles filled, corked, and dangling from his fingers by a stout double twine on the neck of each. "Every man has them," he said; "hang one on each side of your belt in front of your pistol."

I held them up and scowled from them to Harry, and we both laughed, so transparent was Gholson's purpose to get every one away from our patient who yearned to be near her. "One in front of each pistol," I said, so tying them; "but use the pistols first, I suppose."

"Yes," replied Gholson, "pistols first, and then the turpentine." Whereat Harry and I exchanged glances again, it came so pat that Scott Gholson should be a dispenser of inflammables. At a house a mile behind the camp the surgeon stood waiting for us. He frowned at me the instant he saw Charlotte, and I heard him swear. As we bore her in with Gholson and me next her head she murmured to him:

"Mr. Gholson, when does the command move?"

"At twelve," he replied, and I bent and softly added "That's why--"

"Yes," she said, with a quick, understanding look, and wiped her lips as daintily as if it were with wine they were crimsoned.