Project Gutenberg's Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2, by Various
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Title: Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2
The Brigade Commander by J. W. Deforest; Who Was She? by
Bayard Taylor; Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski by Thomas
Bailey Aldrich; Brother Sebastian's Friendship by Harold
Frederic; A Good-For-Nothing by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen;
The Idyl Of Red Gulch by Bret Harte; Crutch, The Page by
George Alfred Townsend ("Gath"); In Each Other's Shoes by
George Parsons Lathrop; The Denver Express by A. A. Hayes;
Jaune D'antimoine by Thomas Allibone Janvier; Ole 'Stracted
by Thomas Nelson Page; Our Consul At Carlsruhe by F. J.
Stimson ("J. S. Of Dale")
Author: Various
Editor: William Patten
Release Date: August 20, 2005 [EBook #16556]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STORY CLASSICS ***
Produced by Michael Gray
COPYRIGHT
1905
BY
P. F. COLLIER
& SON
————————
The use of the copyrighted stories in this
collection has been authorized in every
instance by the authors or
their representatives.
BROTHER SEBASTIAN'S FRIENDSHIP
John William De Forest (born March 36, 1826, in Seymour, Ct.) at the outbreak of the Rebellion abandoned a promising career as a historian and writer of books of travel to enlist in the Union army. He served throughout the entire war, first as captain, then as major, and so acquired a thorough knowledge of military tactics and the psychology of our war which enabled him, on his return to civil life, to write the best war stories of his generation. Of these "The Brigade Commander" is Mr. De Forest's masterpiece. Solidly grounded on experience, and drawing its emotive power from our greatest national cataclysm, like a Niagara dynamo the story sends us a thrill undiminishing with the increasing distance of its source.
THE BRIGADE
COMMANDER
BY J. W. DE FOREST
[By permission of "The New
York Times."]
THE Colonel was the idol of
his bragging old regiment and of the bragging brigade which for the last six
months he had commanded.
He was the idol, not because he was good and
gracious, not because he spared his soldiers or treated them as fellow-
citizens, but because he had led them to victory and made them famous. If a man
will win battles and give his brigade a right to brag loudly of its doings, he
may have its admiration and even its enthusiastic devotion, though he be as
pitiless and as wicked as Lucifer.
"It's nothin' to me what the Currnell
is in prrivit, so long as he shows us how to whack the rrebs," said Major
Gahogan, commandant of the "Old Tenth." "Moses saw God in the burrnin' bussh,
an' bowed down to it, an' worrshipt it. It wasn't the bussh he worrshipt; it
was his God that was in it. An' I worr-ship this villin of a Currnell (if he is
a villin) because he's almighty and gives us the vict'ry. He's nothin' but a
human burrnin' bussh, perhaps, but he's got the god of war in urn. Adjetant
Wallis, it's a ——— long time between dhrinks, as I think ye
was sayin', an' with rayson. See if ye can't confiscate a canteen of whiskee
somewhere in the camp. Bedad, if I can't buy it I'll stale it. We're goin' to
fight tomorry, an' it may be it's the last chance we'll have for a dhrink,
unless there's more lik'r now in the other worrld than Dives got."
The
brigade was bivouacked in some invisible region, amid the damp, misty darkness
of a September night. The men lay in their ranks, each with his feet to the
front and his head rearward, each covered by his overcoat and pillowed upon his
haversack, each with his loaded rifle nestled close beside him. Asleep as they
were, or dropping placidly into slumber, they were ready to start in order to
their feet and pour out the red light and harsh roar of combat. There were two
lines of battle, each of three regiments of infantry, the first some two
hundred yards in advance of the second. In the space between them lay two four-
gun batteries, one of them brass twelve-pounder "Napoleons," and the other
rifled Parrotts. To the rear of the infantry were the recumbent troopers and
picketed horses of a regiment of cavalry. All around, in the far, black
distance, invisible and inaudible, paced or watched stealthily the sentinels of
the grand guards.
There was not a fire, not a torch, nor a star-beam in
the whole bivouac to guide the feet of Adjutant Wallis in his pilgrimage after
whiskey. The orders from brigade headquarters had been strict against
illuminations, for the Confederates were near at hand in force, and a surprise
was proposed as well as feared. A tired and sleepy youngster, almost dropping
with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the
trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-
boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil
were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, or there
would have been more noise in it. He fell over a sleeping sergeant, and said to
him hastily, "Steady, man—a friend!" as the half-roused soldier clutched
his rifle. Then he found a lieutenant, and shook him in vain; further on a
captain, and exchanged saddening murmurs with him; further still a camp-
follower of African extraction, and blasphemed him.
"It's a God-forsaken
camp, and there isn't a horn in it," said Adjutant Wallis to himself as he
pursued his groping journey. "Bet you I don't find the first drop," he
continued, for he was a betting boy, and frequently argued by wagers, even with
himself. "Bet you two to one I don't. Bet you three to one—ten to
one."
Then he saw, an indefinite distance beyond him, burning like red-
hot iron through the darkness, a little scarlet or crimson gleam, as of a
lighted cigar.
"That's Old Grumps, of the Bloody Fourteenth," he
thought. "I've raided into his happy sleeping-grounds. I'll draw on
him."
But Old Grumps, otherwise Colonel Lafayette Gildersleeve, had no
rations—that is, no whiskey.
"How do you suppose an officer is to
have a drink, Lieutenant?" he grumbled. "Don't you know that our would-be
Brigadier sent all the commissary to the rear day before yesterday? A
canteenful can't last two days. Mine went empty about five minutes
ago."
"Oh, thunder!" groaned Wallis, saddened by that saddest of all
thoughts, "Too late!" "Well, least said soonest mended. I must wobble back to
my Major."
"He'll send you off to some other camp as dry as this one.
Wait ten minutes, and he'll be asleep. Lie down on my blanket and light your
pipe. I want to talk to you about, official business—about our would-be
Brigadier."
"Oh, your turn will come some day," mumbled Wallis,
remembering Gildersleeve's jealousy of the brigade commander—a jealousy
which only gave tongue when aroused by "commissary." "If you do as well as
usual to-morrow you can have your own brigade."
"I suppose you think we
are all going to do well to-morrow," scoffed old Grumps, whose utterance by
this time stumbled. "I suppose you expect to whip and to have a good time. I
suppose you brag on fighting and enjoy it."
"I like it well enough when
it goes right; and it generally does go right with this brigade. I should like
it better if the rebs would fire higher and break quicker."
"That
depends on the way those are commanded whose business it is to break them,"
growled Old Grumps. "I don't say but what we are rightly commanded," he added,
remembering his duty to superiors. "I concede and acknowledge that our would-be
Brigadier knows his military business. But the blessing of God, Wallis! I
believe in Waldron as a soldier. But as a man and a Christian,
faugh!"
Gildersleeve had clearly emptied his canteen unassisted; he
never talked about Christianity when perfectly sober.
"What was your
last remark?" inquired Wallis, taking his pipe from his mouth to grin. Even a
superior officer might be chaffed a little in the darkness.
"I made no
last remark," asserted the Colonel with dignity. "I'm not a-dying yet. If I
said anything last it was a mere exclamation of disgust—the disgust of an
officer and gentleman. I suppose you know something about our would-be
Brigadier. I suppose you think you know something about him."
"Bet you I
know all about him" affirmed Wallis. "He enlisted in the Old Tenth as a
common soldier. Before he had been a week in camp they found that he knew his
biz, and they made him a sergeant. Before we started for the field the Governor
got his eye on him and shoved him into a lieutenancy. The first battle h'isted
him to a captain. And the second—bang! whiz! he shot up to colonel right
over the heads of everybody, line and field. Nobody in the Old Tenth grumbled.
They saw that he knew his biz. I know all about him. What'll you
bet?"
"I'm not a betting man, Lieutenant, except in a friendly game of
poker," sighed Old Grumps. "You don't know anything about your Brigadier," he
added in a sepulchral murmur, the echo of an empty canteen. "I have only been
in this brigade a month, and I know more than you do, far, very far more, sorry
to say it. He's a reformed clergyman. He's an apostatized minister." The
Colonel's voice as he said this was solemn and sad enough to do credit to an
undertaker. "It's a bad sort, Wallis," he continued, after another deep sigh, a
very highly perfumed one, the sigh of a barkeeper. "When a clergyman falls, he
falls for life and eternity, like a woman or an angel. I never knew a
backslidden shepherd to come to good. Sooner or later he always goes to the
devil, and takes down whomsoever hangs to him."
"He'll take down the Old
Tenth, then," asserted Wallis. "It hangs to him. Bet you two to one he takes it
along."
"You're right, Adjutant; spoken like a soldier," swore
Gildersleeve. "And the Bloody Fourteenth, too. It will march into the burning
pit as far as any regiment; and the whole brigade, yes, sir! But a backslidden
shepherd, my God! Have we come to that? I often say to myself, in the solemn
hours of the night, as I remember my Sabbath-school days, 'Great Scott! have we
come to that?' A reformed clergyman! An apostatized minister! Think of it,
Wallis, think of it! Why, sir, his very wife ran away from him. They had but
just buried their first boy," pursued Old Grumps, his hoarse voice sinking to a
whimper. "They drove home from the burial-place, where lay the new-made grave.
Arrived at their door, he got out and extended his hand to help
her out. Instead of accepting, instead of throwing herself into his arms
and weeping there, she turned to the coachman and said, 'Driver, drive me to my
father's house.' That was the end of their wedded life, Wallis."
The
Colonel actually wept at this point, and the maudlin tears were not altogether
insincere. His own wife and children he heartily loved, and remembered them now
with honest tenderness. At home he was not a drinker and a rough; only amid the
hardships and perils of the field.
"That was the end of it, Wallis," he
repeated. "And what was it while it lasted? What does a woman leave her husband
for? Why does she separate from him over the grave of her innocent first-born?
There are twenty reasons, but they must all of them be good ones. I am sorry to
give it as my decided opinion, Wallis, in perfect confidence, that they must
all be whopping good ones. Well, that was the beginning; only the beginning.
After that he held on for a while, breaking the bread of life to a skedaddling
flock, and then he bolted. The next known of him, three years later, he
enlisted in your regiment, a smart but seedy recruit, smelling strongly of
whiskey."
"I wish I smelt half as strong of it myself," grumbled Wallis.
"It might keep out the swamp fever."
"That's the true story of Col. John
James Waldron," continued Old Grumps, with a groan which was very somnolent, as
if it were a twin to a snore. "That's the true story."
"I don't believe
the first word of it—that is to say, Colonel, I think you have been
misinformed—and I'll bet you two to one on it. If he was nothing more
than a minister, how did he know drill and tactics?"
"Oh, I forgot to
say he went through West Point—that is, nearly through. They graduated
him in his third year by the back door, Wallis."
"Oh, that was it, was
it? He was a West Pointer, was he? Well, then, the backsliding was natural, and
oughtn't to count against him. A member of Benny Havens's church has a right to
backslide anywhere, especially as the Colonel doesn't seem to be any worse than
some of the rest of us, who haven't fallen from grace the least particle, but
took our stand at the start just where we are now. A fellow that begins with a
handful of trumps has a right to play a risky game."
"I know what
euchered him, Wallis. It was the old Little Joker; and there's another of the
same on hand now."
"On hand where? What are you driving at,
Colonel?"
"He looks like a boy. I mean she looks like a boy. You know
what I mean, Wallis; I mean the boy that makes believe to wait on him. And her
brother is in camp, got here to-night. There'll be an explanation to-morrow,
and there'll be bloodshed."
"Good-night, Colonel, and sleep it off,"
said Wallis, rising from the side of a man whom he believed to be sillily drunk
and altogether untrustworthy. "You know we get after the rebs at
dawn."
"I know it—goo-night, Adjutant—gawblessyou," mumbled
Old Crumps. "We'll lick those rebs, won't we?" he chuckled. "Goo-night, ole
fellow, an' gawblessyou."
Whereupon Old Grumps fell asleep, very
absurdly overcome by liquor, we extremely regret to concede, but nobly sure to
do his soldierly duty as soon as he should awake.
Stumbling wearily
blanketward, Wallis found his Major and regimental commander, the genial and
gallant Gahogan, slumbering in a peace like that of the just. He stretched
himself anear, put out his hand to touch his sabre and revolver, drew his caped
greatcoat over him, moved once to free his back of a root or pebble, glanced
languidly at a single struggling star, thought for an instant of his far-away
mother, turned his head with a sigh and slept. In the morning he was to fight,
and perhaps to die; but the boyish veteran was too seasoned, and also too
tired, to mind that; he could mind but one thing—nature's pleading for
rest.
In the iron-gray dawn, while the troops were falling dimly and
spectrally into line, and he was mounting his horse to be ready for orders, he
remembered Gildersleeve's drunken tale concerning the commandant, and laughed
aloud. But turning his face toward brigade headquarters (a sylvan region marked
out by the branches of a great oak), he was surprised to see a strange officer,
a fair young man in captain's uniform, riding slowly toward it.
"Is that
the boy's brother?" he said to himself; and in the next instant he had
forgotten the whole subject; it was time to form and present the
regiment.
Quietly and without tap of drum the small, battle-worn
battalions filed out of their bivouacs into the highway, ordered arms and
waited for the word to march. With a dull rumble the field-pieces trundled
slowly after, and halted in rear of the infantry. The cavalry trotted off
circuitously through the fields, emerged upon a road in advance and likewise
halted, all but a single company, which pushed on for half a mile, spreading
out as it went into a thin line of skirmishers.
Meanwhile a strange
interview took place near the great oak which had sheltered brigade
headquarters. As the unknown officer, whom Wallis had noted, approached it,
Col. Waldron was standing by his horse ready to mount. The commandant was a man
of medium size, fairly handsome in person and features, and apparently about
twenty-eight years of age. Perhaps it was the singular breadth of his forehead
which made the lower part of his face look so unusually slight and feminine.
His eyes were dark hazel, as clear, brilliant, and tender as a girl's, and
brimming full of a pensiveness which seemed both loving and melancholy. Few
persons, at all events few women, who looked upon him ever looked beyond his
eyes. They were very fascinating, and in a man's countenance very strange. They
were the kind of eyes which reveal passionate romances, and which make
them.
By his side stood a boy, a singularly interesting and beautiful
boy, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and delicate in color. When this boy saw the
stranger approach he turned as pale as marble, slid away from the brigade
commander's side, and disappeared behind a group of staff officers and
orderlies. The new-comer also became deathly white as he glanced after the
retreating youth. Then he dismounted, touched his cap slightly and, as if
mechanically, advanced a few steps, and said hoarsely, "I believe this is
Colonel Waldron. I am Captain Fitz Hugh, of the —th
Delaware."
Waldron put his hand to his revolver, withdrew it
instantaneously, and stood motionless.
"I am on leave of absence from my
regiment, Colonel," continued Fitz Hugh, speaking now with an elaborate
ceremoniousness of utterance significant of a struggle to suppress violent
emotion. "I suppose you can understand why I made use of it in seeking
you."
Waldron hesitated; he stood gazing at the earth with the air of
one who represses deep pain; at last, after a profound sigh, he raised his eyes
and answered:
"Captain, we are on the eve of a battle. I must attend to
my public duties first. After the battle we will settle our private
affair."
"There is but one way to settle it, Colonel."
"You shall
have your way if you will. You shall do what you will. I only ask what good
will it do to her?"
"It will do good to me, Colonel,"
whispered Fitz Hugh, suddenly turning crimson. "You forget
me."
Waldron's face also flushed, and an angry sparkle shot from
under his lashes in reply to this utterance of hate, but it died out in an
instant.
"I have done a wrong, and I will accept the consequences," he
said. "I pledge you my word that I will be at your disposal if I survive the
battle. Where do you propose to remain meanwhile?"
"I will take the same
chance, sir. I propose to do my share in the fighting if you will use
me."
"I am short of staff officers. Will you act as my aid?"
"I
will, Colonel," bowed Fitz Hugh, with a glance which expressed surprise, and
perhaps admiration, at this confidence.
Waldron turned, beckoned his
staff officers to approach, and said, "Gentlemen, this is Captain Fitz Hugh of
the —th Delaware. He has volunteered to join us for the day, and will act
as my aid. And now, Captain, will you ride to the head of the column and order
it forward? There will be no drum-beat and no noise. When you have given your
order and seen it executed, you will wait for me."
Fitz Hugh saluted,
sprang into his saddle and galloped away. A few minutes later the whole column
was plodding on silently toward its bloody goal. To a civilian, unaccustomed to
scenes of war, the tranquillity of these men would have seemed very wonderful.
Many of the soldiers were still munching the hard bread and raw pork of their
meagre breakfasts, or drinking the cold coffee with which they had filled their
canteens the day previous. Many more were chatting in an undertone, grumbling
over their sore feet and other discomfits, chaffing each other, and laughing.
The general bearing, however, was grave, patient, quietly enduring, and one
might almost say stolid. You would have said, to judge by their expressions,
that these sunburned fellows were merely doing hard work, and thoroughly
commonplace work, without a prospect of adventure, and much less of danger. The
explanation of this calmness, so brutal perhaps to the eye of a sensitive soul,
lies mainly in the fact that they were all veterans, the survivors of marches,
privations, maladies, sieges, and battles. Not a regiment present numbered four
hundred men, and the average was not above three hundred. The whole force,
including artillery and cavalry, might have been about twenty-five hundred
sabres and bayonets.
At the beginning of the march Waldron fell into the
rear of his staff and mounted orderlies. Then the boy who had fled from Fitz
Hugh dropped out of the tramping escort, and rode up to his side.
"Well,
Charlie," said Waldron, casting a pitying glance at the yet pallid face and
anxious eyes of the youth, "you have had a sad fright. I make you very
miserable."
"He has found us at last," murmured Charlie in a tremulous
soprano voice. "What did he say?"
"We are to talk to-morrow. He acts as
my aide-de-camp to-day. I ought to tell you frankly that he is not
friendly."
"Of course, I knew it," sighed Charlie, while the tears
fell.
"It is only one more trouble—one more danger, and perhaps it
may pass. So many have passed."
"Did you tell him anything to
quiet him? Did you tell him that we were married?"
"But we are not
married yet, Charlie. We shall be, I hope."
"But you ought to have told
him that we were. It might stop him from doing something—mad. Why didn't
you tell him so? Why didn't you think of it?"
"My dear little child, we
are about to have a battle. I should like to carry some honor and truth into
it."
"Where is he?" continued Charlie, unconvinced and unappeased. "I
want to see him. Is he at the head of the column? I want to speak to him, just
one word. He won't hurt me."
She suddenly spurred her horse, wheeled
into the fields, and dashed onward. Fitz Hugh was lounging in his saddle, and
sombrely surveying the passing column, when she galloped up to
him.
"Carrol!" she said, in a choked voice, reining in by his side, and
leaning forward to touch his sleeve.
He threw one glance at her—a
glance of aversion, if not of downright hatred, and turned his back in
silence.
"He is my husband, Carrol," she went on rapidly. "I knew you
didn't understand it. I ought to have written you about it. I thought I would
come and tell you before you did anything absurd. We were married as soon as he
heard that his wife was dead."
"What is the use of this?" he muttered
hoarsely. "She is not dead. I heard from her a week ago. She was living a week
ago."
"Oh, Carrol!" stammered Charlie. "It was some mistake then. Is it
possible! And he was so sure! But he can get a divorce, you know. She abandoned
him. Or she can get one. No, he can get it—of course, when
she abandoned him. But, Carrol, she must be dead—he was so
sure."
"She is not dead, I tell you. And there can be no divorce.
Insanity bars all claim to a divorce. She is in an asylum. She had to leave
him, and then she went mad."
"Oh, no, Carrol, it is all a mistake; it is
not so. Carrol," she murmured in a voice so faint that he could not help
glancing at her, half in fury and half in pity. She was slowly falling from her
horse. He sprang from his saddle, caught her in his arms, and laid her on the
turf, wishing the while that it covered her grave. Just then one of Waldron's
orderlies rode up and exclaimed: "What is the matter with the—the boy?
Hullo, Charlie."
Fitz Hugh stared at the man in silence, tempted to tear
him from his horse. "The boy is ill," he answered when he recovered his self-
command. "Take charge of him yourself." He remounted, rode onward out of sight
beyond a thicket, and there waited for the brigade commander, now and then
fingering his revolver. As Charlie was being placed in an ambulance by the
orderly and a sergeant's wife, Waldron came up, reined in his horse violently,
and asked in a furious voice, "Is that boy hurt?
"Ah—fainted," he
added immediately. "Thank you, Mrs. Gunner. Take good care of him—the
best of care, my dear woman, and don't let him leave you all
day."
Further on, when Fitz Hugh silently fell into his escort, he
merely glanced at him in a furtive way, and then cantered on rapidly to the
head of the cavalry. There he beckoned to the tall, grave, iron-gray Chaplain
of the Tenth, and rode with him for nearly an hour, apart, engaged in low and
seemingly impassioned discourse. From this interview Mr. Colquhoun returned to
the escort with a strangely solemnized, tender countenance, while the
commandant, with a more cheerful air than he had yet worn that day, gave
himself to his martial duties, inspecting the landscape incessantly with his
glass, and sending frequently for news to the advance scouts. It may properly
be stated here that the Chaplain never divulged to any one the nature of the
conversation which he had held with his Colonel.
Nothing further of note
occurred until the little army, after two hours of plodding march, wound
through a sinuous, wooded ravine, entered a broad, bare, slightly undulating
valley, and for the second time halted. Waldron galloped to the summit of a
knoll, pointed to a long eminence which faced him some two miles distant, and
said tranquilly, "There is our battle-ground."
"Is that the enemy's
position?" returned Captain Ives, his adjutant-general. "We shall have a tough
job if we go at it from here."
Waldron remained in deep thought for some
minutes, meanwhile scanning the ridge and all its surroundings.
"What I
want to know," he observed, at last, "is whether they have occupied the wooded
knolls in front of their right and around their right flank."
Shortly
afterward the commander of the scouting squadron came riding back at a furious
pace.
"They are on the hill. Colonel," he shouted.
"Yes, of
course," nodded Waldron; "but have they occupied the woods which veil their
right front and flank?"
"Not a bit of it; my fellows have cantered all
through, and up to the base of the hill."
"Ah!" exclaimed the brigade
commander, with a rush of elation. "Then it will be easy work. Go back,
Captain, and scatter your men through the wood, and hold it, if possible.
Adjutant, call up the regimental commanders at once. I want them to understand
my plan fully."
In a few minutes, Gahogan, of the Tenth; Gilder-sleeve,
of the Fourteenth; Peck, of the First; Thomas, of the Seventh; Taylor, of the
Eighth, and Colburn, of the Fifth, were gathered around their commander. There,
too, was Bradley, the boyish, red-cheeked chief of the artillery; and Stilton,
the rough, old, bearded regular, who headed the cavalry. The staff was at hand,
also, including Fitz Hugh, who sat his horse a little apart, downcast and
sombre and silent, but nevertheless keenly interested. It is worthy of remark,
by the way, that Waldron took no special note of him, and did not seem
conscious of any disturbing presence. Evil as the man may have been, he was a
thoroughly good soldier, and just now he thought but of his
duties.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I want you to see your field of battle.
The enemy occupy that long ridge. How shall we reach it?"
"I think, if
we go at it straight from here, we shan't miss it," promptly judged Old Crumps,
his red-oak countenance admirably cheerful and hopeful, and his jealousy all
dissolved in the interest of approaching combat.
"Nor they won't miss us
nuther," laughed Major Gahogan. "Betther slide our infantree into thim wuds,
push up our skirmishers, play wid our guns for an hour, an' thin rowl in a
couple o' col'ms."
There was a general murmur of approval. The limits of
volunteer invention in tactics had been reached by Gahogan. The other
regimental commanders looked upon him as their superior in the art of
war.
"That would be well, Major, if we could do nothing better," said
Waldron. "But I do not feel obliged to attack the front seriously at all. The
rebels have been thoughtless enough to leave that long semicircle of wooded
knolls unoccupied, even by scouts. It stretches from the front of their centre
clear around their right flank. I shall use it as a veil to cover us while we
get into position. I shall throw out a regiment, a battery, and five companies
of cavalry, to make a feint against their centre and left. With the remainder
of the brigade I shall skirt the woods, double around the right of the
position, and close in upon it front and rear."
"Loike scissors blades
upon a snip o' paper," shouted Gahogan, in delight. Then he turned to Fitz
Hugh, who happened to be nearest him, and added, "I tell ye he's got the God o'
War in um. He's the burrnin' bussh of humanity, wid a God o' Battles inside
on't."
"But how if they come down on our thin right wing?" asked a
cautious officer, Taylor, of the Eighth. They might smash it and seize our line
of retreat."
"Men who have taken up a strong position, a position
obviously chosen for defence, rarely quit it promptly for an attack," replied
Waldron. "There is not one chance in ten that these gentlemen will make a
considerable forward movement early in the fight. Only the greatest geniuses
jump from the defensive to the offensive. Besides, we must hold the wood. So
long as we hold the wood in front of their centre we save the
road."
Then came personal and detailed instructions. Each regimental
commander was told whither he should march, the point where he should halt to
form line, and the direction by which he should attack. The mass of the command
was to advance in marching column toward a knoll where the highway entered and
traversed the wood. Some time before reaching it Taylor was to deploy the
Eighth to the right, throw out a strong skirmish line and open fire on the
enemy's centre and left, supported by the battery of Parrotts, and, if pushed,
by five companies of cavalry. The remaining troops would reach the knoll, file
to the left under cover of the forest, skirt it for a mile as rapidly as
possible, infold the right of the Confederate position, and then move upon it
concentrically. Counting from the left, the Tenth, the Seventh, and the
Fourteenth were to constitute the first line of battle, while five companies of
cavalry, then the First, and then the Fifth formed the second line. Not until
Gahogan might have time to wind into the enemy's right rear should Gildersleeve
move out of the wood and commence the real attack.
"You will go straight
at the front of their right," said Waldron, with a gay smile, to this latter
Colonel. "Send up two companies as skirmishers. The moment they are clearly
checked, lead up the other eight in line. It will be rough work. But keep
pushing. You won't have fifteen minutes of it before Thomas, on your left, will
be climbing the end of the ridge to take the rebels in flank. In fifteen
minutes more Gahogan will be running in on their backs. Of course, they will
try to change front and meet us. But they have extended their line a long way
in order to cover the whole ridge. They will not be quick enough. We shall get
hold of their right, and we shall roll them up. Then, Colonel Stilton, I shall
expect to see the troopers jumping into the gaps and making
prisoners."
"All right, Colonel," answered Stilton in that hoarse growl
which is apt to mark the old cavalry officer. "Where shall we find you if we
want a fresh order?" "I shall be with Colburn, in rear of Gildersleeve. That is
our centre. But never mind me; you know what the battle is to be, and you know
how to fight it. The whole point with the infantry is to fold around the
enemy's right, go in upon it concentrically, smash it, and roll up their line.
The cavalry will watch against the infantry being flanked, and when the latter
have seized the hill, will charge for prisoners. The artillery will reply to
the enemy's guns with shell, and fire grape at any offensive demonstration. You
all know your duties, now, gentlemen. Go to your commands, and
march!"
The colonels saluted and started off at a gallop. In a few
minutes twenty-five hundred men were in simultaneous movement. Five companies
of cavalry wheeled into column of companies, and advanced at a trot through the
fields, seeking to gain the shelter of the forest. The six infantry regiments
slid up alongside of each other, and pushed on in six parallel columns of
march, two on the right of the road and four on the left. The artillery, which
alone left the highway, followed at a distance of two or three hundred yards.
The remaining cavalry made a wide detour to the right as if to flank the
enemy's left.
It was a mile and a quarter—it was a march of fully
twenty minutes—to the edge of the woodland, the proposed cover of the
column. Ten minutes before this point was reached a tiny puff of smoke showed
on the brow of the hostile ridge; then, at an interval of several seconds,
followed the sound of a distant explosion; then, almost immediately, came the
screech of a rifled shell. Every man who heard it swiftly asked himself, "Will
it strike me?" But even as the words were thought out it had passed, high in
air, clean to the rear, and burst harmlessly. A few faces turned upward and a
few eyes glanced backward, as if to see the invisible enemy. But there was no
pause in the column; it flowed onward quietly, eagerly, and with business-like
precision; it gave forth no sound but the trampling of feet and the muttering
of the officers, "Steady, men! Forward, men!"
The Confederates, however,
had got their range. A half minute later four puffs of smoke dotted the ridge,
and a flight of hoarse humming shrieks tore the air. A little aureole cracked
and splintered over the First, followed by loud cries of anguish and a brief,
slight confusion. The voice of an officer rose sharply out of the flurry,
"Close up, Company A! Forward, men!" The battalion column resumed its even
formation in an instant, and tramped unitedly onward, leaving behind it two
quivering corpses and a wounded man who tottered rearward.
Then came
more screeches, and a shell exploded over the highroad, knocking a gunner
lifeless from his carriage. The brigade commander glanced anxiously along his
batteries, and addressed a few words to his chief of artillery. Presently the
four Napoleons set forward at a gallop for the wood, while the four Parrotts
wheeled to the right, deployed, and advanced across the fields, inclining
toward the left of the enemy. Next, Taylor's regiment (the Eighth) halted,
fronted, faced to the right, and filed off in column of march at a double-quick
until it had gained the rear of the Parrotts, when it fronted again, and pushed
on in support. A quarter of a mile further on these guns went into battery
behind the brow of a little knoll, and opened fire. Four companies of the
Eighth spread out to the right as skirmishers, and commenced stealing toward
the ridge, from time to time measuring the distance with rifle-balls. The
remainder of the regiment lay down in line between the Parrotts and the forest.
Far away to the right, five companies of cavalry showed themselves, manoeuvring
as if they proposed to turn the left flank of the Southerners. The attack on
this side was in form and in operation.
Meantime the Confederate fire
had divided. Two guns pounded away at Taylor's feint, while two shelled the
main column. The latter was struck repeatedly; more than twenty men dropped
silent or groaning out of the hurrying files; but the survivors pushed on
without faltering and without even caring for the wounded. At last a broad belt
of green branches rose between the regiments and the ridge; and the rebel
gunners, unable to see their foe, dropped suddenly into silence.
Here it
appeared that the road divided. The highway traversed the forest, mounted the
slope beyond and dissected the enemy's position, while a branch road turned to
the left and skirted the exterior of the long curve of wooded hillocks. At the
fork the battery of Napoleons had halted, and there it was ordered to remain
for the present in quiet. There, too, the Fourteenth filed in among the dense
greenery, threw out two companies of skirmishers toward the ridge, and pushed
slowly after them into the shadows.
"Get sight of the enemy at once!"
was Waldron's last word to Gildersleeve. "If they move down the slope, drive
them back. But don't commence your attack under half an hour."
Next he
filed the Fifth into the thickets, saying to Colburn, "I want you to halt a
hundred yards to the left and rear of Gildersleeve. Cover his flank if he is
attacked; but otherwise lie quiet. As soon as he charges, move forward to the
edge of the wood, and be ready to support him. But make no assault yourself
until further orders."
The next two regiments—the Seventh and
First—he placed in échelon, in like manner, a quarter of a mile
further along. Then he galloped forward to the cavalry, and a last word with
Stilton. "You and Gahogan must take care of yourselves. Push on four or five
hundred yards, and then face to the right. Whatever Gahogan finds let him go at
it. If he can't shake it, help him. You two must reach the top of the
ridge. Only, look out for your left flank. Keep a squadron or two in reserve on
that side."
"Currnel, if we don't raich the top of the hill, it'll be
because it hasn't got wan," answered Gahogan. Stilton only laughed and rode
forward.
Waldron now returned toward the fork of the road. On the way he
sent a staff officer to the Seventh with renewed orders to attack as soon as
possible after Gildersleeve. Then another staff officer was hurried forward to
Taylor with directions to push his feint strongly, and drive his skirmishers as
far up the slope as they could get. A third staff officer set the Parrotts in
rear of Taylor to firing with all their might. By the time that the commandant
had returned to Colburn's ambushed ranks, no one was with him but his enemy,
Fitz Hugh.
"You don't seem to trust me With duty, Colonel," said the
young man.
"I shall use you only in case of extremity, Captain," replied
Waldron. "We have business to settle tomorrow."
"I ask no favors on that
account. I hope you will offer me none."
"In case of need I shall spare
no one," declared Waldron.
Then he took out his watch, looked at it
impatiently, put it to his ear, restored it to his pocket, and fell into an
attitude of deep attention. Evidently his whole mind was on his battle, and he
was waiting, watching, yearning for its outburst.
"If he wins this
fight," thought Fitz Hugh, "how can I do him a harm? And yet," he added, "how
can I help it?"
Minutes passed. Fitz Hugh tried to think of his injury,
and to steel himself against his chief. But the roar of battle on the right,
and the suspense and imminence of battle on the left, absorbed the attention of
even this wounded and angry spirit, as, indeed, they might have absorbed that
of any being not more or less than human. A private wrong, insupportable though
it might be, seemed so small amid that deadly clamor and awful expectation!
Moreover, the intellect which worked so calmly and vigorously by his side, and
which alone of all things near appeared able to rule the coming crisis, began
to dominate him, in spite of his sense of injury. A thought crossed him to the
effect that the great among men are too valuable to be punished for their evil
deeds. He turned to the absorbed brigade commander, now not only his ruler, but
even his protector, with a feeling that he must accord him a word of peace, a
proffer in some form of possible forgiveness and friendship. But the man's face
was clouded and stern with responsibility and authority. He seemed at that
moment too lofty to be approached with a message of pardon. Fitz Hugh gazed at
him with a mixture of profound respect and smothered hate. He gazed, turned
away, and remained silent.
Minutes more passed. Then a mounted orderly
dashed up at full speed, with the words, "Colonel, Major Gahogan has
fronted."
"Has he?" answered Waldron, with a smile which thanked the
trooper and made him happy. "Ride on through the thicket here, my man, and tell
Colonel Gildersleeve to push up his skirmishers."
With a thud of hoofs
and a rustling of parting foliage the cavalryman disappeared amid the
underwood. A minute or two later a thin, dropping rattle of musketry, five
hundred yards or so to the front, announced that the sharpshooters of the
Fourteenth were at work. Almost immediately there was an angry response, full
of the threatenings and execution of death. Through the lofty leafage tore the
screech of a shell, bursting with a sharp crash as it passed overhead, and
scattering in humming slivers. Then came another, and another, and many more,
chasing each other with hoarse hissings through the trembling air, a succession
of flying serpents. The enemy doubtless believed that nearly the whole
attacking force was massed in the wood around the road, and they had brought at
least four guns to bear upon that point, and were working them with the utmost
possible rapidity. Presently a large chestnut, not fifty yards from Fitz Hugh
was struck by a shot. The solid trunk, nearly three feet in diameter, parted
asunder as if it were the brittlest of vegetable matter. The upper portion
started aside with a monstrous groan, dropped in a standing posture to the
earth, and then toppled slowly, sublimely prostrate, its branches crashing and
all its leaves wailing. Ere long, a little further to the front, another Anak
of the forest went down; and, mingled with the noise of its sylvan agony, there
arose sharp cries of human suffering. Then Colonel Colburn, a broad-chested and
ruddy man of thirty-five, with a look of indignant anxiety in his iron-gray
eyes, rode up to the brigade commander.
"This is very annoying,
Colonel," he said. "I am losing my men without using them. That last tree fell
into my command."
"Are they firing toward our left?" asked Waldron. "Not
a shot."
"Very good," said the chief, with a sigh of contentment. "If we
can only keep them occupied in this direction! By the way, let your men lie
down under the fallen tree, as far as it will go. It will protect them from
others."
Colburn rode back to his regiment. Waldron looked impatiently
at his watch. At that moment a fierce burst of line firing arose in front,
followed and almost overborne by a long-drawn yell, the scream of charging men.
Waldron put up his watch, glanced excitedly at Fitz Hugh, and smiled.
"I
must forgive or forget," the latter could not help saying to himself. "All the
rest of life is nothing compared with this."
"Captain," said Waldron,
"ride off to the left at full speed. As soon as you hear firing at the shoulder
of the ridge, return instantly and let me know."
Fitz Hugh dashed away.
Three minutes carried him into perfect peace, beyond the whistling of ball or
the screeching of shell. On the right was a tranquil, wide waving of foliage,
and on the left a serene landscape of cultivated fields, with here and there an
embowered farm-house. Only for the clamor of artillery and musketry far behind
him, he could not have believed in the near presence of battle, of blood and
suffering and triumphant death. But suddenly he heard to his right, assaulting
and slaughtering the tranquillity of nature, a tumultuous outbreak of file
firing, mingled with savage yells. He wheeled, drove spurs into his horse, and
flew back to Waldron. As he re-entered the wood he met wounded men streaming
through it, a few marching alertly upright, many more crouching and groaning,
some clinging to their less injured comrades, but all haggard in face and
ghastly.
"Are we winning?" he hastily asked of one man who held up a
hand with three fingers gone and the bones projecting in sharp spikes through
mangled flesh.
"All right, sir; sailing in," was the answer.
"Is
the brigade commander all right?" he inquired of another who was winding a
bloody handkerchief around his arm.
"Straight ahead, sir; hurrah for
Waldron!" responded the soldier, and almost in the same instant fell lifeless
with a fresh ball through his head.
"Hurrah for him!" Fitz Hugh answered
frantically, plunging on through the underwood. He found Waldron with Colburn,
the two conversing tranquilly in their saddles amid hissing bullets and
dropping branches.
"Move your regiment forward now," the brigade
commander was saying; "but halt it in the edge of the wood."
"Shan't I
relieve Gildersleeve if he gets beaten?" asked the subordinate officer
eagerly.
"No. The regiments on the left will help him out. I want your
men and Peck's for the fight on top of the hill. Of course the rebels will try
to retake it; then I shall call for you."
Fitz Hugh now approached and
said, "Colonel, the Seventh has attacked in force."
"Good!" answered
Waldron, with that sweet smile of his which thanked people who brought him
pleasant news. "I thought I heard his fire. Gahogan will be on their right rear
in ten minutes. Then we shall get the ridge. Ride back now to Major Bradley,
and tell him to bring his Napoleons through the wood, and set two of them to
shelling the enemy's centre. Tell him my idea is to amuse them, and keep them
from changing front."
Again Fitz Hugh galloped off as before on a
comfortably safe errand, safer at all events than many errands of that day.
"This man is sparing my life," he said to himself. "Would to God I knew how to
spare his!"
He found Bradley lunching on a gun caisson, and delivered
his orders. "Something to do at last, eh?" laughed the rosy-cheeked youngster.
"The smallest favors thankfully received. Won't you take a bite of rebel
chicken, Captain? This rebellion must be put down. No? Well, tell the Colonel I
am moving on, and John Brown's soul not far ahead."
When Fitz Hugh
returned to Waldron he found him outside of the wood, at the base of the long
incline which rose into the rebel position. About the slope were scattered
prostrate forms, most numerous near the bottom, some crawling slowly rearward,
some quiescent. Under the brow of the ridge, decimated and broken into a mere
skirmish line sheltered in knots and singly, behind rocks and knolls and
bushes, lay the Fourteenth Regiment, keeping up a steady, slow fire. From the
edge above, smokily dim against a pure, blue heaven, answered another rattle of
musketry, incessant, obstinate, and spiteful. The combatants on both sides were
lying down; otherwise neither party could have lasted ten minutes. From Fitz
Hugh's point of view not a Confederate uniform could be seen. But the smoke of
their rifles made a long gray line, which was disagreeably visible and
permanent; and the sharp whit! whit! of their bullets continually passed
him, and cheeped away in the leafage behind.
"Our men can't get on
another inch," he ventured say to his commander. "Wouldn't it be well for me to
ride up and say a cheering word?"
"Every battle consists largely in
waiting," replied Waldron thoughtfully. "They have undoubtedly brought up a
reserve to face Thomas. But when Gahogan strikes the flank of the reserve, we
shall win."
"I wish you would take shelter," begged Fitz Hugh.
"Everything depends on your life."
"My life has been both a help and a
hurt to my fellow-creatures," sighed the brigade commander. "Let come what will
to it."
He glanced upward with an expression of profound emotion; he was
evidently fighting two battles, an outward and an inward one.
Presently
he added, "I think the musketry is increasing on the left. Does it strike you
so?"
He was all eagerness again, leaning forward with an air of earnest
listening, his face deeply flushed and his eye brilliant. Of a sudden the
combat above rose and swelled into higher violence. There was a clamor far
away—it seemed nearly a mile away—over the hill. Then the nearer
musketry—first Thomas's on the shoulder of the ridge, next Gildersleeve's
in front—caught fire and raged with new fury.
Waldron laughed
outright. "Gahogan has reached them," he said to one of his staff who had just
rejoined him. "We shall all be up there in five minutes. Tell Colburn to bring
on his regiment slowly."
Then, turning to Fitz Hugh, he added, "Captain,
we will ride forward."
They set off at a walk, now watching the smoking
brow of the eminence, now picking their way among dead and wounded. Suddenly
there was a shout above them and a sudden diminution of the firing; and looking
upward they saw the men of the Fourteenth running confusedly toward the summit.
Without a word the brigade commander struck spurs into his horse and dashed up
the long slope at a run, closely followed by his enemy and aid. What they saw
when they overtook the straggling, running, panting, screaming pell-mell of the
Fourteenth was victory!
The entire right wing of the Confederates,
attacked on three sides at once, placed at enormous disadvantage, completely
outgeneraled, had given way in confusion, was retreating, breaking, and flying.
There were lines yet of dirty gray or butternut; but they were few, meagre,
fluctuating, and recoiling, and there were scattered and scurrying men in
hundreds. Three veteran and gallant regiments had gone all to wreck under the
shock of three similar regiments far more intelligently directed. A strong
position had been lost because the heroes who held it could not perform the
impossible feat of forming successively two fresh fronts under a concentric
fire of musketry. The inferior brain power had confessed the superiority of the
stronger one.
On the victorious side there was wild, clamorous, fierce
exultation. The hurrying, shouting, firing soldiers, who noted their commander
riding among them, swung their rifles or their tattered hats at him, and
screamed "Hurrah!" No one thought of the Confederate dead underfoot, nor of the
Union dead who dotted the slope behind. "What are you here for, Colonel?"
shouted rough old Gildersleeve, one leg of his trousers dripping blood. "We can
do it alone."
"It is a battle won," laughed Fitz Hugh, almost worshiping
the man whom he had come to slay.
"It is a battle won, but not used,"
answered Waldron. "We haven't a gun yet, nor a flag. Where is the cavalry? Why
isn't Stilton here? He must have got afoul of the enemy's horse, and been
obliged to beat it off. Can anybody hear anything of Stilton?"
"Let him
go," roared Old Crumps. "The infantry don't want any help."
"Your
regiment has suffered, Colonel," answered Waldron, glancing at the scattered
files of the Fourteenth. "Halt it and reorganize it, and let it fall in with
the right of the First when Peck comes up. I shall replace you with the Fifth.
Send your Adjutant back to Colburn and tell him to hurry along. Those fellows
are making a new front over there," he added, pointing to the centre of the
hill. "I want the Fifth, Seventh and Tenth in échelon as quickly as
possible. And I want that cavalry. Lieutenant," turning to one of his staff,
"ride off to the left and find Colonel Stilton. Tell him that I need a charge
in ten minutes."
Presently cannon opened from that part of the ridge
still held by the Confederates, the shell tearing through or over the
dissolving groups of their right wing, and cracking viciously above the heads
of the victorious Unionists. The explosions followed each other with stunning
rapidity, and the shrill whirring of the splinters was ominous. Men began to
fall again in the ranks or to drop out of them wounded. Of all this Waldron
took no further note than to ride hastily to the brow of the ridge and look for
his own artillery.
"See how he attinds to iverything himself," said
Major Gahogan, who had cantered up to the side of Fitz Hugh. "It's just a
matther of plain business, an' he looks after it loike a business man. Did ye
see us, though, Captin, whin we come in on their right flank? By George, we
murthered um. There's more'n a hundred lyin' in hapes back there. As for old
Stilton, I just caught sight of um behind that wood to our left, an' he's
makin' for the enemy's right rair. He'll have lots o' prisoners in half an
hour."
When Waldron returned to the group he was told of his cavalry's
whereabouts, and responded to the information with a smile of
satisfaction.
"Bradley is hurrying up," he said, "and Taylor is pushing
their left smartly. They will make one more tussle to recover their line of
retreat; but we shall smash them from end to end and take every gun."
He
galloped now to his infantry, and gave the word "Forward!" The three regiments
which composed the échelon were the Fifth on the right, the Seventh
fifty yards to the rear and left of the Fifth, the Tenth to the rear and left
of the Seventh. It was behind the Fifth, that is the foremost battalion, that
the brigade commander posted himself.
"Do you mean to stay here,
Colonel?" asked Fitz Hugh, in surprise and anxiety.
"It is a certain
victory now," answered Waldron, with a singular glance upward. "My life is no
longer important. I prefer to do my duty to the utmost in the sight of all
men."
"I shall follow you and do mine, sir," said the Captain, much
moved, he could scarcely say by what emotions, they were so many and
conflicting.
"I want you otherwheres. Ride to Colonel Taylor at once,
and hurry him up the hill. Tell him the enemy have greatly weakened their left.
Tell him to push up everything, infantry, and cavalry, and artillery, and to do
it in haste."
"Colonel, this is saving my life against my will,"
remonstrated Fitz Hugh.
"Go!" ordered Waldron, imperiously. "Time is
precious."
Fitz Hugh dashed down the slope to the right at a gallop. The
brigade commander turned tranquilly, and followed the march of his
échelon. The second and decisive crisis of the little battle was
approaching, and to understand it we must glance at the ground on which it was
to be fought. Two hostile lines were marching toward each other along the
broad, gently rounded crest of the hill and at right angles to its general
course. Between these lines, but much the nearest to the Union troops, a
spacious road came up out of the forest in front, crossed the ridge, swept down
the smooth decline in rear, and led to a single wooden bridge over a narrow but
deep rivulet. On either hand the road was hedged in by a close board fence,
four feet or so in height. It was for the possession of this highway that the
approaching lines were about to shed their blood. If the Confederates failed to
win it all their artillery would be lost, and their army captured or
dispersed.
The two parties came on without firing. The soldiers on both
sides were veterans, cool, obedient to orders, intelligent through long
service, and able to reserve all their resources for a short-range and final
struggle. Moreover, the fences as yet partially hid them from each other, and
would have rendered all aim for the present vague and
uncertain.
"Forward, Fifth!" shouted Waldron. "Steady. Reserve your
fire." Then, as the regiment came up to the fence, he added, "Halt; right
dress. Steady, men."
Meantime he watched the advancing array with an
eager gaze. It was a noble sight, full of moral sublimity, and worthy of all
admiration. The long, lean, sunburned, weather-beaten soldiers in ragged gray
stepped forward, superbly, their ranks loose, but swift and firm, the men
leaning forward in their haste, their tattered slouch hats pushed backward,
their whole aspect business-like and virile. Their line was three battalions
strong, far outflanking the Fifth, and at least equal to the entire
échelon. When within thirty or forty yards of the further fence they
increased their pace to nearly a double-quick, many of them stooping low in
hunter fashion, and a few firing. Then Waldron rose in his stirrups and yelled,
"Battalion! ready—aim—aim low. Fire!"
There was a stunning
roar of three hundred and fifty rifles, and a deadly screech of bullets. But
the smoke rolled out, the haste to reload was intense, and none could mark what
execution was done. Whatever the Confederates may have suffered, they bore up
under the volley, and they came on. In another minute each of those fences, not
more than twenty-five yards apart, was lined by the shattered fragment of a
regiment, each firing as fast as possible into the face of the other. The Fifth
bled fearfully: it had five of its ten company commanders shot dead in three
minutes; and its loss in other officers and in men fell scarcely short of this
terrible ratio. On its left the Seventh and the Tenth were up, pouring in
musketry, and receiving it in a fashion hardly less sanguinary. No one present
had ever seen, or ever afterward saw, such another close and deadly
contest.
But the strangest thing in this whole wonderful fight was the
conduct of the brigade commander. Up and down the rear of the lacerated Fifth
Waldron rode thrice, spurring his plunging and wounded horse close to the
yelling and fighting file-closers, and shouting in a piercing voice
encouragement to his men. Stranger still, considering the character which he
had borne in the army, and considering the evil deed for which he was to
account on the morrow, were the words which he was distinctly and repeatedly
heard to utter. "Stand steady, men—God is with us!" was the extraordinary
battle-cry of this backslidden clergyman, this sinner above many.
And it
was a prophecy of victory. Bradley ran up his Napoleons on the right in the
nick of time, and, although only one of them could be brought to bear, it was
enough; the grape raked the Confederate left, broke it, and the battle was
over. In five minutes more their whole array was scattered, and the entire
position open to galloping cavalry, seizing guns, standards, and
prisoners.
It was in the very moment of triumph, just as the stubborn
Southern line reeled back from the fence in isolated clusters, that the
miraculous immunity of Waldron terminated, and he received his death wound. A
quarter of an hour later Fitz Hugh found a sorrowful group of officers gazing
from a little distance upon their dying commander.
"Is the Colonel hit?"
he asked, shocked and grieved, incredible as the emotion may
seem.
"Don't go near him," called Gildersleeve, who, it will be
remembered, knew or guessed his errand in camp. "The chaplain and surgeon are
there. Let him alone."
"He's going to render his account," added
Gahogan. "An' whativer he's done wrong, he's made it square to-day. Let um lave
it to his brigade."
Adjutant Wallis, who had been blubbering aloud, who
had cursed the rebels and the luck energetically, and who had also been trying
to pray inwardly, groaned out, "This is our last victory. You see if it ain't.
Bet you, two to one."
"Hush, man!" replied Gahogan. "We'll win our share
of urn, though we'll have to work harder for it. We'll have to do more
ourselves, an' get less done for us in the way of tactics."
"That's so,
Major," whimpered a drummer, looking up from his duty of attending to a wounded
comrade. "He knowed how to put his men in the right place, and his men knowed
when they was in the right place. But it's goin' to be uphill through the
steepest part of hell the rest of the way."
Soldiers, some of them
weeping, some of them bleeding, arrived constantly to inquire after their
commander, only to be sent quietly back to their ranks or to the rear. Around
lay other men—dead men, and senseless, groaning men—all for the
present unnoticed. Everything, except the distant pursuit of the cavalry,
waited for Waldron to die. Fitz Hugh looked on silently with the tears of
mingled emotions in his eyes, and with hopes and hatreds expiring in his heart.
The surgeon supported the expiring victor's head, while Chaplain Colquhoun
knelt beside him, holding his hand and praying audibly. Of a sudden the
petition ceased, both bent hastily toward the wounded man, and after what
seemed a long time exchanged whispers. Then the Chaplain rose, came slowly
toward the now advancing group of officers, his hands outspread toward heaven
in an attitude of benediction, and tears running down his haggard white
face.
"I trust, dear friends," he said, in a tremulous voice, "that all
is well with our brother and commander. His last words were, 'God is with
us.'"
"Oh! but, man, that isn't well," broke out Gahogan, in a
groan. "What did ye pray for his soul for? Why didn't ye pray for his
loife?"
Fitz Hugh turned his horse and rode silently away. The next day
he was seen journeying rearward by the side of an ambulance, within which lay
what seemed a strangely delicate boy, insensible, and, one would say, mortally
ill.
James Bayard Taylor (born at Kennett Square, Pa., in 1825; died in 1878) was probably in his day the best American example of the all- round literary craftsman. He was poet, novelist, journalist, writer of books of travel, translator, and, in general, magazine writer. Says Albert H. Smith in the volume on Taylor in the "American Men of Letters" series: "He was a man of talent, and master of the mechanics of his craft. On all sides he touched the life of his time." Henry A. Beers, in his "Initial Studies in American Letters," says that in his short stories, as in his novels, "Taylor's pictorial skill is greater, on the whole, than his power of creating characters or inventing plots." In the present selection, however, he has both conceived an original type of character in the mysterious heroine, and invented an ingenious situation, if not plot, and so, in one instance at least, has achieved a short story classic.
WHO WAS SHE?
BY BAYARD TAYLOR
[Reprinted
by permission. From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September,
1874.]
COME, now, there may as well be an
end of this! Every time I meet your eyes squarely, I detect the question just
slipping out of them. If you had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you
had shown in your motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my
account; if this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend
who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than
sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at
this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that
region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble
to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole
story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or,
what is worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterward—when the
external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic,
foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was
playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can
find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of
a paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to prepare you
for, maybe, a little morbid sensitiveness of my moral nerves.
The
documents are all in this portfolio under my elbow. I had just read them again
completely through when you were announced. You may examine them as you like
afterward: for the present, fill your glass, take another Cabana, and keep
silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached its most lamentable
conclusion.
The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs, three years
ago last summer. I suppose most unmarried men who have reached, or passed, the
age of thirty—and I was then thirty-three—experience a milder
return of their adolescent warmth, a kind of fainter second spring, since the
first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearly conscious of
this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passion and my tragic
disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into what Thackeray used
to call the cryptic mysteries to save me from the Scylla of dissipation, and
yet preserved enough of natural nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charyb-
dis. My devotion to my legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction;
the paternal legacy was a good nest-egg for the incubation of wealth—in
short, I was a fair, respectable "party," desirable to the humbler mammas, and
not to be despised by the haughty exclusives.
The fashionable hotel at
the Springs holds three hundred, and it was packed. I had meant to lounge there
for a fortnight and then finish my holidays at Long Branch; but eighty, at
least, out of the three hundred were young and moved lightly in muslin. With my
years and experience I felt so safe that to walk, talk, or dance with them
became simply a luxury, such as I had never—at least so
freely—possessed before. My name and standing, known to some families,
were agreeably exaggerated to the others, and I enjoyed that supreme
satisfaction which a man always feels when he discovers, or imagines, that he
is popular in society. There is a kind of premonitory apology implied in my
saying this, I am aware. You must remember that I am culprit, and culprit's
counsel, at the same time.
You have never been at Wampsocket? Well, the
hills sweep around in a crescent, on the northern side, and four or five
radiating glens, descending from them, unite just above the village. The
central one, leading to a waterfall (called "Minne-hehe" by the irreverent
young people, because there is so little of it), is the fashionable drive and
promenade; but the second ravine on the left, steep, crooked, and cumbered with
bowlders which have tumbled from somewhere and lodged in the most extraordinary
groupings, became my favorite walk of a morning. There was a footpath in it,
well-trodden at first, but gradually fading out as it became more like a ladder
than a path, and I soon discovered that no other city feet than mine were
likely to scale a certain rough slope which seemed the end of the ravine. With
the aid of the tough laurel-stems I climbed to the top, passed through a cleft
as narrow as a doorway, and presently found myself in a little upper dell, as
wild and sweet and strange as one of the pictures that haunts us on the brink
of sleep.
There was a pond—no, rather a bowl—of water in the
centre; hardly twenty yards across, yet the sky in it was so pure and far down
that the circle of rocks and summer foliage inclosing it seemed like a little
planetary ring, floating off alone through space. I can't explain the charm of
the spot, nor the selfishness which instantly suggested that I should keep the
discovery to myself. Ten years earlier I should have looked around for some
fair spirit to be my "minister," but now—
One forenoon—I
think it was the third or fourth time I had visited the place—I was
startled to find the dent of a heel in the earth, half-way up the slope. There
had been rain during the night and the earth was still moist and soft. It was
the mark of a woman's boot, only to be distinguished from that of a walking-
stick by its semicircular form. A little higher, I found the outline of a foot,
not so small as to awake an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness,
elasticity, and grace. If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and
nothing of the attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would
attract and others repel us: with footprints the impression is weaker, of
course, but we can not escape it. I am not sure whether I wanted to find the
unknown wearer of the boot within my precious personal solitude: I was afraid I
should see her, while passing through the rocky crevice, and yet was
disappointed when I found no one.
But on the flat, warm rock overhanging
the tarn—my special throne—lay some withering wild-flowers and a
book! I looked up and down, right and left: there was not the slightest sign of
another human life than mine. Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and
listened: there were only the noises of bird and squirrel, as before. At last,
I took up the book, the flat breadth of which suggested only sketches. There
were, indeed, some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a
few not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced as
portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary notes,
written in pencil. I found no name, from first to last; only, under the
sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the initials could
hardly be discovered unless one already knew them.
The writing was a
woman's, but it had surely taken its character from certain features of her
own: it was clear, firm, individual. It had nothing of that air of general
debility which usually marks the manuscript of young ladies, yet its firmness
was far removed from the stiff, conventional slope which all Englishwomen seem
to acquire in youth and retain through life. I don't see how any man in my
situation could have helped reading a few lines—if only for the sake of
restoring lost property. But I was drawn on, and on, and finished by reading
all: thence, since no further harm could be done, I reread, pondering over
certain passages until they stayed with me. Here they are, as I set them down,
that evening, on the back of a legal blank:
"It makes a great deal of
difference whether we wear social forms as bracelets or handcuffs."
"Can
we not still be wholly our independent selves, even while doing, in the main,
as others do? I know two who are so; but they are married."
"The men who
admire these bold, dashing young girls treat them like weaker copies of
themselves. And yet they boast of what they call 'experience'!"
"I
wonder if any one felt the exquisite beauty of the noon as I did to-day? A
faint appreciation of sunsets and storms is taught us in youth, and kept alive
by novels and flirtations; but the broad, imperial splendor of this summer
noon!—and myself standing alone in it—-yes, utterly
alone!"
"The men I seek must exist: where are they? How make an
acquaintance, when one obsequiously bows himself away, as I advance? The fault
is surely not all on my side."
There was much more, intimate enough to
inspire me with a keen interest in the writer, yet not sufficiently so to make
my perusal a painful indiscretion. I yielded to the impulse of the moment, took
out my pencil, and wrote a dozen lines on one of the blank pages. They ran
something in this wise:
"IGNOTUS IGNOTAE!—You
have bestowed without intending it, and I have taken without your knowledge. Do
not regret the accident which has enriched another. This concealed idyl of the
hills was mine, as I supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it. Shall
we share the possession, or will you banish me?"
There was a
frank advance, tempered by a proper caution, I fancied, in the words I wrote.
It was evident that she was unmarried, but outside of that certainty there lay
a vast range of possibilities, some of them alarming enough. However, if any
nearer acquaintance should arise out of the incident, the next step must be
taken by her. Was I one of the men she sought? I almost imagined
so—certainly hoped so.
I laid the book on the rock, as I had found
it, bestowed another keen scrutiny on the lonely landscape, and then descended
the ravine. That evening, I went early to the ladies' parlor, chatted more than
usual with the various damsels whom I knew, and watched with a new interest
those whom I knew not. My mind, involuntarily, had already created a picture of
the unknown. She might be twenty-five, I thought; a reflective habit of mind
would hardly be developed before that age. Tall and stately, of course;
distinctly proud in her bearing, and somewhat reserved in her manners. Why she
should have large dark eyes, with long dark lashes, I could not tell; but so I
seemed to see her. Quite forgetting that I was (or had meant to be)
Ignotus, I found myself staring rather significantly at one or the other
of the young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to
the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with
me. They had been kept in a coop so many years that now, when I suddenly turned
them loose, their rickety attempts at flight quite bewildered me.
No!
there was no use in expecting a sudden discovery. I went to the glen betimes,
next morning: the book was gone and so were the faded flowers, but some of the
latter were scattered over the top of another rock, a few yards from mine. Ha!
this means that I am not to withdraw, I said to myself: she makes room for me!
But how to surprise her?—for by this time I was fully resolved to make
her acquaintance, even though she might turn out to be forty, scraggy, and
sandy-haired.
I knew no other way so likely as that of visiting the glen
at all times of the day. I even went so far as to write a line of greeting,
with a regret that our visits had not yet coincided, and laid it under a stone
on the top of her rock. The note disappeared, but there was no answer in
its place. Then I suddenly remembered her fondness for the noon hours, at which
time she was "utterly alone." The hotel table d'hôte Avas at one
o'clock: her family, doubtless, dined later, in their own rooms. Why, this gave
me, at least, her place in society! The question of age, to be sure, remained
unsettled; but all else was safe.
The next day I took a late and large
breakfast, and sacrificed my dinner. Before noon the guests had all straggled
back to the hotel from glen and grove and lane, so bright and hot was the
sunshine. Indeed, I could hardly have supported the reverberation of heat from
the sides of the ravine, but for a fixed belief that I should be successful.
While crossing the narrow meadow upon which it opened, I caught a glimpse of
something white among the thickets higher up. A moment later it had vanished,
and I quickened my pace, feeling the beginning of an absurd nervous excitement
in my limbs. At the next turn, there it was again! but only for another moment.
I paused, exulting, and wiped my drenched forehead. "She can not escape me!" I
murmured between the deep draughts of cooler air I inhaled in the shadow of a
rock.
A few hundred steps more brought me to the foot of the steep
ascent, where I had counted on overtaking her. I was too late for that, but the
dry, baked soil had surely been crumbled and dislodged, here and there, by a
rapid foot. I followed, in reckless haste, snatching at the laurel branches
right and left, and paying little heed to my footing. About one-third of the
way up I slipped, fell, caught a bush which snapped at the root, slid, whirled
over, and before I fairly knew what had happened, I was lying doubled up at the
bottom of the slope.
I rose, made two steps forward, and then sat down
with a groan of pain; my left ankle was badly sprained, in addition to various
minor scratches and bruises. There was a revulsion of feeling, of
course—instant, complete, and hideous. I fairly hated the Unknown. "Fool
that I was!" I exclaimed, in the theatrical manner, dashing the palm of my hand
softly against my brow: "lured to this by the fair traitress! But,
no!—not fair: she shows the artfulness of faded, desperate spinsterhood;
she is all compact of enamel, 'liquid bloom of youth' and hair
dye!"
There was a fierce comfort in this thought, but it couldn't help
me out of the scrape. I dared not sit still, lest a sunstroke should be added,
and there was no resource but to hop or crawl down the rugged path, in the hope
of finding a forked sapling from which I could extemporize a crutch. With
endless pain and trouble I reached a thicket, and was feebly working on a
branch with my pen-knife, when the sound of a heavy footstep surprised
me.
A brown harvest-hand, in straw hat and shirtsleeves, presently
appeared. He grinned when he saw me, and the thick snub of his nose would have
seemed like a sneer at any other time.
"Are you the gentleman that got
hurt?" he asked. "Is it pretty tolerable bad?"
"Who said I was hurt?" I
cried, in astonishment.
"One of your town-women from the hotel—I
reckon she was. I was binding oats, in the field over the ridge; but I haven't
lost no time in comin' here."
While I was stupidly staring at this
announcement, he whipped out a big clasp-knife, and in a few minutes fashioned
me a practicable crutch. Then, taking me by the other arm, he set me in motion
toward the village.
Grateful as I was for the man's help, he aggravated
me by his ignorance. When I asked if he knew the lady, he answered: "It's
more'n likely you know her better." But where did she come from? Down
from the hill, he guessed, but it might ha' been up the road. How did she look?
was she old or young? what was the color of her eyes? of her hair? There, now,
I was too much for him. When a woman kept one o' them speckled veils over her
face, turned her head away, and held her parasol between, how were you to know
her from Adam? I declare to you, I couldn't arrive at one positive particular.
Even when he affirmed that she was tall, he added, the next instant: "Now I
come to think on it, she stepped mighty quick; so I guess she must ha' been
short."
By the time we reached the hotel, I was in a state of fever;
opiates and lotions had their will of me for the rest of the day. I was glad to
escape the worry of questions, and the conventional sympathy expressed in
inflections of the voice which are meant to soothe, and only exasperate. The
next morning, as I lay upon my sofa, restful, patient, and properly cheerful,
the waiter entered with a bouquet of wild flowers.
"Who sent them?" I
asked.
"I found them outside your door, sir. Maybe there's a card; yes,
here's a bit o' paper."
I opened the twisted slip he handed me, and
read: "From your dell—and mine." I took the flowers; among them were two
or three rare and beautiful varieties which I had only found in that one spot.
Fool, again! I noiselessly kissed, while pretending to smell them, had them
placed on a stand within reach, and fell into a state of quiet and agreeable
contemplation.
Tell me, yourself, whether any male human being is ever
too old for sentiment, provided that it strikes him at the right time and in
the right way! What did that bunch of wild flowers betoken? Knowledge, first;
then, sympathy; and finally, encouragement, at least. Of course she had seen my
accident, from above; of course she had sent the harvest laborer to aid me
home. It was quite natural she should imagine some special, romantic interest
in the lonely dell, on my part, and the gift took additional value from her
conjecture.
Four days afterward, there was a hop in the large dining-
room of the hotel. Early in the morning, a fresh bouquet had been left at my
door. I was tired of my enforced idleness, eager to discover the fair unknown
(she was again fair, to my fancy!), and I determined to go down, believing that
a cane and a crimson velvet slipper on the left foot would provoke a glance of
sympathy from certain eyes, and thus enable me to detect them.
The fact
was, the sympathy was much too general and effusive. Everybody, it seemed, came
to me with kindly greetings; seats were vacated at my approach, even fat Mrs.
Huxter insisting on my taking her warm place, at the head of the room. But Bob
Leroy—you know him—as gallant a gentleman as ever lived, put me
down at the right point, and kept me there. He only meant to divert me, yet
gave me the only place where I could quietly inspect all the younger ladies, as
dance or supper brought them near.
One of the dances was an old-
fashioned cotillon, and one of the figures, the "coquette," brought every one,
in turn, before me. I received a pleasant word or two from those whom I knew,
and a long, kind, silent glance from Miss May Danvers. Where had been my eyes?
She was tall, stately, twenty-five, had large dark eyes, and long dark lashes!
Again the changes of the dance brought her near me; I threw (or strove to
throw) unutterable meanings into my eyes, and cast them upon hers. She seemed
startled, looked suddenly away, looked back to me, and—blushed. I knew
her for what is called "a nice girl"—that is, tolerably frank, gently
feminine, and not dangerously intelligent. Was it possible that I had
overlooked so much character and intellect?
As the cotillon closed, she
was again in my neighborhood, and her partner led her in my direction. I was
rising painfully from my chair, when Bob Leroy pushed me down again, whisked
another seat from somewhere, planted it at my side, and there she
was!
She knew who was her neighbor, I plainly saw; but instead of
turning toward me, she began to fan herself in a nervous way and to fidget with
the buttons of her gloves. I grew impatient.
"Miss Danvers!" I said, at
last.
"Oh!" was all her answer, as she looked at me for a
moment.
"Where are your thoughts?" I asked.
Then she turned, with
wide, astonished eyes, coloring softly up to the roots of her hair. My heart
gave a sudden leap.
"How can you tell, if I can not?" she
asked.
"May I guess?"
She made a slight inclination of the head,
saying nothing. I was then quite sure.
"The second ravine to the left of
the main drive?"
This time she actually started; her color became
deeper, and a leaf of the ivory fan snapped between her fingers.
"Let
there be no more a secret!" I exclaimed. "Your flowers have brought me your
messages; I knew I should find you—"
Full of certainty, I was
speaking in a low, impassioned voice. She cut me short by rising from her seat;
I felt that she was both angry and alarmed. Fisher, of Philadelphia, jostling
right and left in his haste, made his way toward her. She fairly snatched his
arm, clung to it with a warmth I had never seen expressed in a ballroom, and
began to whisper in his ear. It was not five minutes before he came to me,
alone, with a very stern face, bent down, and said:
"If you have
discovered our secret, you will keep silent. You are certainly a
gentleman."
I bowed, coldly and savagely. There was a draught from the
open window; my ankle became suddenly weary and painful, and I went to bed. Can
you believe that I didn't guess, immediately, what it all meant? In a vague
way, I fancied that I had been premature in my attempt to drop our mutual
incognito, and that Fisher, a rival lover, was jealous of me. This was rather
flattering than otherwise; but when I limped down to the ladies' parlor, the
next day, no Miss Danvers was to be seen. I did not venture to ask for her; it
might seem importunate, and a woman of so much hidden capacity was evidently
not to be wooed in the ordinary way.
So another night passed by; and
then, with the morning, came a letter which made me feel, at the same instant,
like a fool and a hero. It had been dropped in the Wampsocket post-office, was
legibly addressed to me and delivered with some other letters which had arrived
by the night mail. Here it is; listen!
"NOTO
IGNOTA!—Haste is not a gift of the gods, and you have been impatient,
with the usual result. I was almost prepared for this, and thus am not wholly
disappointed. In a day or two more you will discover your mistake, which, so
far as I can learn, has done no particular harm. If you wish to find me, there
is only one way to seek me; should I tell you what it is, I should run the risk
of losing you—that is, I should preclude the manifestation of a certain
quality which I hope to find in the man who may—or, rather, must—be
my friend. This sounds enigmatical, yet you have read enough of my nature, as
written in those random notes in my sketch-book, to guess, at least, how much I
require. Only this let me add: mere guessing is useless.
"Being unknown,
I can write freely. If you find me, I shall be justified; if not, I shall
hardly need to blush, even to myself, over a futile experiment.
"It is
possible for me to learn enough of your life, henceforth, to direct my relation
toward you. This may be the end; if so, I shall know it soon. I shall also know
whether you continue to seek me. Trusting in your honor as a man, I must ask
you to trust in mine, as a woman."
I did discover my
mistake, as the Unknown promised. There had been a secret betrothal between
Fisher and Miss Danvers, and, singularly enough, the momentous question and
answer had been given in the very ravine leading to my upper dell! The two
meant to keep the matter to themselves; but therein, it seems, I thwarted them;
there was a little opposition on the part of their respective families, but all
was amicably settled before I left Wampsocket.
The letter made a very
deep impression upon me. What was the one way to find her? What could it be but
the triumph that follows ambitious toil—the manifestation of all my best
qualities as a man? Be she old or young, plain or beautiful, I reflected, hers
is surely a nature worth knowing, and its candid intelligence conceals no
hazards for me. I have sought her rashly, blundered, betrayed that I set her
lower, in my thoughts, than her actual self: let me now adopt the opposite
course, seek her openly no longer, go back to my tasks, and, following my own
aims vigorously and cheerfully, restore that respect which she seemed to be on
the point of losing. For, consciously or not, she had communicated to me a
doubt, implied in the very expression of her own strength and pride. She had
meant to address me as an equal, yet, despite herself, took a stand a little
above that which she accorded to me.
I came back to New York earlier
than usual, worked steadily at my profession and with increasing success, and
began to accept opportunities (which I had previously declined) of making
myself personally known to the great, impressible, fickle, tyrannical public.
One or two of my speeches in the hall of the Cooper Institute, on various
occasions—as you may perhaps remember—gave me a good headway with
the party, and were the chief cause of my nomination for the State office which
I still hold. (There, on the table, lies a resignation, written to-day, but not
yet signed. We'll talk of it afterward.) Several months passed by, and no
further letter reached me. I gave up much of my time to society, moved
familiarly in more than one province of the kingdom here, and vastly extended
my acquaintance, especially among the women; but not one of them betrayed the
mysterious something or other—really I can't explain precisely what it
was!—which I was looking for. In fact, the more I endeavored quietly to
study the sex, the more confused I became.
At last, I was subjected to
the usual onslaught from the strong-minded. A small but formidable committee
entered my office one morning and demanded a categorical declaration of my
principles. What my views on the subject were, I knew very well; they were
clear and decided; and yet, I hesitated to declare them! It wasn't a temptation
of Saint Anthony—that is, turned the other way—and the belligerent
attitude of the dames did not alarm me in the least; but she! What was
her position? How could I best please her? It flashed upon my mind,
while Mrs. ——— was making her formal speech, that I had taken
no step for months without a vague, secret reference to her. So I strove
to be courteous, friendly, and agreeably noncommittal; begged for further
documents, and promised to reply by letter in a few days.
I was hardly
surprised to find the well-known hand on the envelope of a letter shortly
afterward. I held it for a minute in my palm, with an absurd hope that I might
sympathetically feel its character before breaking the seal. Then I read it
with a great sense of relief.
"I have never assumed to
guide a man, except toward the full exercise of his powers. It is not opinion
in action, but opinion in a state of idleness or indifference, which repels me.
I am deeply glad that you have gained so much since you left the country. If,
in shaping your course, you have thought of me, I will frankly say that, to
that extent, you have drawn nearer. Am I mistaken in conjecturing that you
wish to know my relation to the movement concerning which you were recently
interrogated? In this, as in other instances which may come, I must beg you to
consider me only as a spectator. The more my own views may seem likely to sway
your action, the less I shall be inclined to declare them. If you find this
cold or unwomanly, remember that it is not easy!"
Yes! I felt
that I had certainly drawn much nearer to her. And from this time on, her
imaginary face and form became other than they were. She was twenty-
eight—three years older; a very little above the middle height, but not
tall; serene, rather than stately, in her movements; with a calm, almost grave
face, relieved by the sweetness of the full, firm lips; and finally eyes of
pure, limpid gray, such as we fancy belonged to the Venus of Milo. I found her
thus much more attractive than with the dark eyes and lashes—but she did
not make her appearance in the circles which I frequented.
Another year
slipped away. As an official personage, my importance increased, but I was
careful not to exaggerate it to myself. Many have wondered (perhaps you among
the rest) at my success, seeing that I possess no remarkable abilities. If I
have any secret, it is simply this—doing faithfully, with all my might,
whatever I undertake. Nine-tenths of our politicians become inflated and
careless, after the first few years, and are easily forgotten when they once
lose place.
I am a little surprised now that I had so much patience with
the Unknown. I was too important, at least, to be played with; too mature to be
subjected to a longer test; too earnest, as I had proved, to be doubted, or
thrown aside without a further explanation.
Growing tired, at last, of
silent waiting, I bethought me of advertising. A carefully written "Personal,"
in which Ignotus informed Ignota of the necessity of his
communicating with her, appeared simultaneously in the "Tribune," "Herald,"
"World," and "Times." I renewed the advertisement as the time expired without
an answer, and I think it was about the end of the third week before one came,
through the post, as before.
Ah, yes! I had forgotten. See! my
advertisement is pasted on the note, as a heading or motto for the manuscript
lines. I don't know why the printed slip should give me a particular feeling of
humiliation as I look at it, but such is the fact. What she wrote is all I need
read to you:
"I could not, at first, be certain that
this was meant for me. If I were to explain to you why I have not written for
so long a time, I might give you one of the few clews which I insist on keeping
in my own hands. In your public capacity, you have been (so far as a woman may
judge) upright, independent, wholly manly: in your relations with other men I
learn nothing of you that is not honorable: toward women you are kind,
chivalrous, no doubt, overflowing with the usual social refinements,
but—Here, again, I run hard upon the absolute necessity of silence. The
way to me, if you care to traverse it, is so simple, so very simple! Yet, after
what I have written, I can not even wave my hand in the direction of it,
without certain self-contempt. When I feel free to tell you, we shall draw
apart and remain unknown forever.
"You desire to write? I do not
prohibit it. I have heretofore made no arrangement for hearing from you, in
turn, because I could not discover that any advantage would accrue from it. But
it seems only fair, I confess, and you dare not think me capricious. So, three
days hence, at six o'clock in the evening, a trusty messenger of mine will call
at your door. If you have anything to give her for me, the act of giving it
must be the sign of a compact on your part that you will allow her to leave
immediately, unquestioned and unfollowed."
You look puzzled, I
see: you don't catch the real drift of her words? Well, that's a melancholy
encouragement. Neither did I, at the time: it was plain that I had disappointed
her in some way, and my intercourse with or manner toward women had something
to do with it. In vain I ran over as much of my later social life as I could
recall. There had been no special attention, nothing to mislead a susceptible
heart; on the other side, certainly no rudeness, no want of "chivalrous" (she
used the word!) respect and attention. What, in the name of all the gods, was
the matter?
In spite of all my efforts to grow clearer, I was obliged to
write my letter in a rather muddled state of mind. I had so much to say!
sixteen folio pages, I was sure, would only suffice for an introduction to the
case; yet, when the creamy vellum lay before me and the moist pen drew my
fingers toward it, I sat stock dumb for half an hour. I wrote, finally, in a
half-desperate mood, without regard to coherency or logic. Here's a rough draft
of a part of the letter, and a single passage from it will be
enough:
"I can conceive of no simpler way to you than
the knowledge of your name and address. I have drawn airy images of you, but
they do not become incarnate, and I am not sure that I should recognize you in
the brief moment of passing. Your nature is not of those which are instantly
legible. As an abstract power, it has wrought in my life and it continually
moves my heart with desires which are unsatisfactory because so vague and
ignorant. Let me offer you personally, my gratitude, my earnest friendship,
you would laugh if I were to now offer more."
Stay!
here is another fragment, more reckless in tone:
"I
want to find the woman whom I can love—who can love me. But this is a
masquerade where the features are hidden, the voice disguised, even the hands
grotesquely gloved. Come! I will venture more than I ever thought was possible
to me. You shall know my deepest nature as I myself seem to know it. Then, give
me the commonest chance of learning yours, through an intercourse which shall
leave both free, should we not feel the closing of the inevitable
bond!"
After I had written that, the pages filled rapidly. When
the appointed hour arrived, a bulky epistle, in a strong linen envelope, sealed
with five wax seals, was waiting on my table. Precisely at six there was an
announcement: the door opened, and a little outside, in the shadow, I saw an
old woman, in a threadbare dress of rusty black.
"Come in!" I
said.
"The letter!" answered a husky voice. She stretched out a bony
hand, without moving a step.
"It is for a lady—very important
business," said I, taking up the letter; "are you sure that there is no
mistake?"
She drew her hand under the shawl, turned without a word, and
moved toward the hall door.
"Stop!" I cried: "I beg a thousand pardons!
Take it—take it! You are the right messenger!"
She clutched it,
and was instantly gone.
Several days passed, and I gradually became so
nervous and uneasy that I was on the point of inserting another "Personal" in
the daily papers, when the answer arrived. It was brief and mysterious; you
shall hear the whole of it:
"I thank you. Your letter
is a sacred confidence which I pray you never to regret. Your nature is sound
and good. You ask no more than is reasonable, and I have no real right to
refuse. In the one respect which I have hinted, I may have been
unskilful or too narrowly cautious: I must have the certainty of this.
Therefore, as a generous favor, give me six months more! At the end of that
time I will write to you again. Have patience with these brief lines: another
word might be a word too much."
You notice the change in her
tone? The letter gave me the strongest impression of a new, warm, almost
anxious interest on her part. My fancies, as first at Wampsocket, began to play
all sorts of singular pranks: sometimes she was rich and of an old family,
sometimes moderately poor and obscure, but always the same calm, reposeful face
and clear gray eyes. I ceased looking for her in society, quite sure that I
should not find her, and nursed a wild expectation of suddenly meeting her,
face to face, in the most unlikely places and under startling circumstances.
However, the end of it all was patience—patience for six
months.
There's not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for
me to read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I
began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had no
funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The fact in it
stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before the words and
sentences became intelligible.
"The stipulated time has
come, and our hidden romance is at an end. Had I taken this resolution a year
ago, it would have saved me many vain hopes, and you, perhaps, a little
uncertainty. Forgive me, first, if you can, and then hear the
explanation:
"You wished for a personal interview: you have had, not
one, but many. We have met, in society, talked face to face, discussed the
weather, the opera, toilettes, Queechy, Aurora Floyd, Long Branch and Newport,
and exchanged a weary amount of fashionable gossip; and you never guessed that
I was governed by any deeper interest! I have purposely uttered ridiculous
platitudes, and you were as smilingly courteous as if you enjoyed them: I have
let fall remarks whose hollowness and selfishness could not have escaped you,
and have waited in vain for a word of sharp, honest, manly reproof. Your manner
to me was unexceptionable, as it was to all other women: but there lies the
source of my disappointment, of—yes—of my sorrow!
"You
appreciate, I can not doubt, the qualities in woman which men value in one
another—culture, independence of thought, a high and earnest apprehension
of life; but you know not how to seek them. It is not true that a mature and
unperverted woman is flattered by receiving only the general obsequiousness
which most men give to the whole sex. In the man who contradicts and strives
with her, she discovers a truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed,
spindle-shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of billiards,
much less of horses, and still less of navigation, soon grow inexpressibly
wearisome to us; but the men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking to
arouse, uplift, instruct us, are a bitter disappointment.
"What would
have been the end, had you really found me? Certainly a sincere, satisfying
friendship. No mysterious magnetic force has drawn you to me or held you near
me, nor has my experiment inspired me with an interest which can not be given
up without a personal pang. I am grieved, for the sake of all men and all
women. Yet, understand me! I mean no slightest reproach. I esteem and honor you
for what you are. Farewell!"
There! Nothing could be kinder in
tone, nothing more humiliating in substance. I was sore and offended for a few
days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was
wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her
would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing
that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can
meet.
The fact is—there's no use in hiding it from myself (and I
see, by your face, that the letter cuts deep into you own conscience)—she
is a free, courageous, independent character, and—I am not.
But
who was she?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (born at Portsmouth, N. H., Nov. n, 1836) is an artist to his finger tips, whether working in verse or prose. His short story of a non-existent heroine, "Marjorie Daw" has been repeatedly mentioned by the critics as a masterpiece of dainty workmanship. Consequently most readers are familiar with it. It gave title to a volume of short stories, one of which, the present selection, hardly deserved to be thrust in this manner into the background. Its denouement is fully as ingenious and unexpected as that of "Marjorie Daw," and it is led up to with an art that is just as illusory. The reader, too, is relieved at the final shattering of the romance, where, in the same case with "Marjorie Daw," he can hardly bring himself to forgive the author.
MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE
ZABRISKI
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
[Copyright, 1873 and
1901, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Published by special arrangement with Messrs.
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers of Mr. Aldrich's works.]
I
WE are accustomed to speak with
a certain light irony of the tendency which women have to gossip, as if the sin
itself, if it is a sin, were of the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a
masculine peccadillo. So far as my observation goes, men are as much given to
small talk as women, and it is undeniable that we have produced the highest
type of gossiper extant. Where will you find, in or out of literature, such
another droll, delightful, chatty busybody as Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary to
the Admiralty in the reigns of those fortunate gentlemen Charles II and James
II of England? He is the king of tattlers, as Shakespeare is the king of
poets.
If it came to a matter of pure gossip, I would back Our Club
against the Sorosis or any women's club in existence. Whenever you see in your
drawing-room four or five young fellows lounging in easy chairs, cigar in hand,
and now and then bringing their heads together over the small round Japanese
table which is always the pivot of these social circles, you may be sure that
they are discussing Tom's engagement, or Dick's extravagance, or Harry's
hopeless passion for the younger Miss Fleurdelys. It is here old Tippleton gets
execrated for that everlasting bon mot of his which was quite a success
at dinner-parties forty years ago; it is here the belle of the season passes
under the scalpels of merciless young surgeons; it is here B's financial
condition is handled in a way that would make B's hair stand on end; it is
here, in short, that everything is canvassed—everything that happens in
our set, I mean—much that never happens, and a great deal that could not
possibly happen. It was at Our Club that I learned the particulars of the Van
Twiller affair.
It was great entertainment to Our Club, the Van Twiller
affair, though it was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To
understand the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is
one of the proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant of
Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old Dutch governor of New York—Nieuw
Amsterdam, as it was then; his ancestors have always been burgomasters or
admirals or generals, and his mother is the Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van
Twiller whose magnificent place will be pointed out to you on the right bank of
the Hudson as you pass up the historic river toward Idlewild. Ralph is about
twenty-five years old. Birth made him a gentleman, and the rise of real
estate—some of it in the family since the old governor's time—made
him a millionaire. It was a kindly fairy that stepped in and made him a good
fellow also. Fortune, I take it, was in her most jocund mood when she heaped
her gifts in this fashion on Van Twiller, who was, and will be again, when this
cloud blows over, the flower of Our Club.
About a year ago there came a
whisper—if the word "whisper" is not too harsh a term to apply to what
seemed a mere breath floating gently through the atmosphere of the billiard-
room—imparting the intelligence that Van Twiller was in some kind of
trouble. Just as everybody suddenly takes to wearing square-toed boots, or to
drawing his neckscarf through a ring, so it became all at once the fashion,
without any preconcerted agreement, for everybody to speak of Van Twiller as a
man in some way under a cloud. But what the cloud was, and how he got under it,
and why he did not get away from it, were points that lifted themselves into
the realm of pure conjecture. There was no man in the club with strong enough
wing to his imagination to soar to the supposition that Van Twiller was
embarrassed in money matters. Was he in love? That appeared nearly as
improbable; for if he had been in love all the world—that is, perhaps a
hundred first families—would have known all about it
instantly.
"He has the symptoms," said Delaney, laughing. "I remember
once when Jack Fleming—"
"Ned!" cried Flemming, "I protest against
any allusion to that business."
This was one night when Van Twiller had
wandered into the club, turned over the magazines absently in the reading-room,
and wandered out again without speaking ten words. The most careless eye would
have remarked the great change that had come over Van Twiller. Now and then he
would play a game of billiards with De Peyster or Haseltine, or stop to chat a
moment in the vestibule with old Duane; but he was an altered man. When at the
club, he was usually to be found in the small smoking-room upstairs, seated on
a fauteuil fast asleep, with the last number of "The Nation" in his hand. Once,
if you went to two or three places of an evening, you were certain to meet Van
Twiller at them all. You seldom met him in society now.
By and by came
whisper number two—a whisper more emphatic than number one, but still
untraceable to any tangible mouthpiece. This time the whisper said that Van
Twiller was in love. But with whom? The list of possible Mrs. Van
Twillers was carefully examined by experienced hands, and a check placed
against a fine old Knickerbocker name here and there, but nothing satisfactory
arrived at. Then that same still small voice of rumor but now with an easily
detected staccato sharpness to it, said that Van Twiller was in love—with
an actress! Van Twiller, whom it had taken all these years and all this waste
of raw material in the way of ancestors to bring to perfection—Ralph Van
Twiller, the net result and flower of his race, the descendant of Wouter, the
son of Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller—in love with an actress!
That was too ridiculous to be believed—and so everybody believed
it.
Six or seven members of the club abruptly discovered in themselves
an unsuspected latent passion for the histrionic art. In squads of two or three
they stormed successively all the theatres in town—Booth's, Wallack's,
Daly's Fifth Avenue (not burned down then), and the Grand Opera House. Even the
shabby homes of the drama over in the Bowery, where the Germanic Thespis has
not taken out his naturalization papers, underwent rigid exploration. But no
clew was found to Van Twiller's mysterious attachment. The opéra bouffe,
which promised the widest field for investigation, produced absolutely nothing,
not even a crop of suspicions. One night, after several weeks of this, Delaney
and I fancied that we caught sight of Van Twiller in the private box of an
uptown theatre, where some thrilling trapeze performance was going on, which we
did not care to sit through; but we concluded afterward that it was only
somebody who looked like him. Delaney, by the way, was unusually active in this
search. I dare say he never quite forgave Van Twiller for calling him Muslin
Delaney. Ned is fond of ladies' society, and that's a fact.
The
Cimmerian darkness which surrounded Van Twiller's inamorata left us free to
indulge in the wildest conjectures. Whether she was black-tressed Melpomene,
with bowl and dagger, or Thalia, with the fair hair and the laughing face, was
only to be guessed at. It was popularly conceded, however, that Van Twiller was
on the point of forming a dreadful mésalliance.
Up to this period
he had visited the club regularly. Suddenly he ceased to appear. He was not to
be seen on Fifth Avenue, or in the Central Park, or at the houses he generally
frequented. His chambers—and mighty comfortable chambers they
were—on Thirty-fourth Street were deserted. He had dropped out of the
world, shot like a bright particular star from his orbit in the heaven of the
best society.
The following conversation took place one night in the
smoking-room:
"Where's Van Twiller?"
"Who's seen Van
Twiller?
"What has become of Van Twiller?"
Delaney picked up the
"Evening Post," and read—with a solemnity that betrayed young Firkins
into exclaiming, "By Jove, now!—"
"Married, on the 10th instant,
by the Rev. Friar Laurence, at the residence of the bride's uncle, Montague
Capulet, Esq., Miss Adrienne Le Couvreur to Mr. Ralph Van Twiller, both of this
city. No cards."
"Free List suspended," murmured De Peyster.
"It
strikes me," said Frank Livingstone, who had been ruffling the leaves of a
magazine at the other end of the table, "that you fellows are in a great fever
about Van Twiller."
"So we are."
"Well, he has simply gone out of
town."
"Where?"
"Up to the old homestead on the
Hudson."
"It's an odd time of year for a fellow to go into the
country."
"He has gone to visit his mother," said
Livingstone.
"In February?"
"I didn't know, Delaney, that there
was any statute in force prohibiting a man from visiting his mother in February
if he wants to."
Delaney made some light remark about the pleasure of
communing with Nature with a cold in her head, and the topic was
dropped.
Livingstone was hand in glove with Van Twiller, and if any man
shared his confidence it was Living-stone. He was aware of the gossip and
speculation that had been rife in the club, but he either was not at liberty or
did not think it worth while to relieve our curiosity. In the course of a week
or two it was reported that Van Twiller was going to Europe; and go he did. A
dozen of us went down to the "Scythia" to see him off. It was refreshing to
have something as positive as the fact that Van Twiller had sailed.
II
Shortly after Van Twiller's departure the whole thing
came out. Whether Livingstone found the secret too heavy a burden, or whether
it transpired through some indiscretion on the part of Mrs. Vanrensselaer
Vanzandt Van Twiller, I can not say; but one evening the entire story was in
the possession of the club.
Van Twiller had actually been very deeply
interested—not in an actress, for the legitimate drama was not her humble
walk in life,
but—in Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, whose really
perilous feats on the trapeze had astonished New York the year before, though
they had failed to attract Delaney and me the night we wandered into the up-
town theatre on the trail of Van Twiller's mystery.
That a man like Van
Twiller should he fascinated even for an instant by a common circus-girl seems
incredible; but it is always the incredible thing that happens. Besides,
Mademoiselle Olympe was not a common circus-girl; she was a most daring and
startling gymnaste, with a beauty and a grace of movement that gave to her
audacious performance almost an air of prudery. Watching her wondrous dexterity
and pliant strength, both exercised without apparent effort, it seemed the most
natural proceeding in the world that she should do those unpardonable things.
She had a way of melting from one graceful posture into another like the
dissolving figures thrown from a stereopticon. She was a lithe, radiant shape
out of the Grecian mythology, now poised up there above the gaslights, and now
gleaming through the air like a slender gilt arrow.
I am describing Mademoiselle
Olympe as she appeared to Van Twiller on the first occasion when he strolled
into the theatre where she was performing. To me she was a girl of eighteen or
twenty years of age (maybe she was much older, for pearl powder and distance
keep these people perpetually young), slightly but exquisitely built, with
sinews of silver wire; rather pretty, perhaps, after a manner, but showing
plainly the effects of the exhaustive draughts she was making on her physical
vitality. Now, Van Twiller was an enthusiast on the subject of calisthenics.
"If I had a daughter," Van Twiller used to say, "I wouldn't send her to a
boarding school, or a nunnery; I'd send her to a gymnasium for the first five
years. Our American women have no physique. They are lilies, pallid,
pretty—and perishable. You marry an American woman, and what do you
marry? A headache. Look at English girls. They are at least roses, and last the
season through."
Walking home from the theatre that first night, it
flitted through Van Twiller's mind that if he could give this girl's set of
nerves and muscles to any one of the two hundred high-bred women he knew, he
would marry her on the spot and worship her forever.
The following
evening he went to see Mademoiselle Olympe again. "Olympe Zabriski," he
soliloquized as he sauntered through the lobby—"what a queer name! Olympe
is French and Zabriski is Polish. It is her nom de guerre, of course;
her real name is probably Sarah Jones. What kind of creature can she be in
private life, I wonder? I wonder if she wears that costume all the time, and if
she springs to her meals from a horizontal bar. Of course she rocks the baby to
sleep on the trapeze." And Van Twiller went on making comical domestic tableaux
of Mademoiselle Zabriski, like the clever, satirical dog he was, until the
curtain rose.
This was on a Friday. There was a matinee the next day,
and he attended that, though he had secured a seat for the usual evening
entertainment. Then it became a habit of Van Twiller's to drop into the theatre
for half an hour or so every night, to assist at the interlude, in which she
appeared. He cared only for her part of the programme, and timed his visits
accordingly. It was a surprise to himself when he reflected, one morning, that
he had not missed a single performance of Mademoiselle Olympe for nearly two
weeks.
"This will never do," said Van Twiller. "Olympe"—he called
her Olympe, as if she were an old acquaintance, and so she might have been
considered by that time—"is a wonderful creature; but this will never do.
Van, my boy, you must reform this altogether."
But half-past nine that
night saw him in his accustomed orchestra chair, and so on for another week. A
habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is
led—with what silken threads and down what pleasant avenues it leads him!
By and by the soft silk threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues
Avernus!
Quite a new element had lately entered into Van Twiller's
enjoyment of Mademoiselle Olympe's ingenious feats—a vaguely born
apprehension that she might slip from that swinging bar; that one of the thin
cords supporting it might snap, and let her go headlong from the dizzy height.
Now and then, for a terrible instant, he would imagine her lying a glittering,
palpitating heap at the foot-lights, with no color in her lips! Sometimes it
seemed as if the girl were tempting this kind of fate. It was a hard, bitter
life, and nothing but poverty and sordid misery at home could have driven her
to it. What if she should end it all some night, by just unclasping that little
hand? It looked so small and white from where Van Twiller sat!
This
frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to make it nearly
impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the beginning his
attendance had not interfered with his social duties or pleasures; but now he
came to find it distasteful after dinner to do anything but read, or walk the
streets aimlessly, until it was time to go to the play. When that was over, he
was in no mood to go anywhere but to his rooms. So he dropped away by
insensible degrees from his habitual haunts, was missed, and began to be talked
about at the club. Catching some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the
orchestra stalls, but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box
in which Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.
Now, I find
it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly unable to explain to
himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle Olympe. He had no wish to speak
to her, or to hear her speak. Nothing could have been easier, and nothing
further from his desire, than to know her personally. A Van Twiller personally
acquainted with a strolling female acrobat! Good heavens! That was something
possible only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical
setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe Zabriski
would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's body. He was
simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and élan, and the magnetic
recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and very weak, and no member
of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters together, could have been more severe on
Van Twiller than he was on himself. To be weak, and to know it, is something of
a punishment for a proud man. Van Twiller took his punishment, and went to the
theatre, regularly.
"When her engagement comes to an end," he meditated,
"that will finish the business."
Mademoiselle Olympe's engagement
finally did come to an end and she departed. But her engagement had been highly
beneficial to the treasury-chest of the uptown theatre, and before Van Twiller
could get over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.
On a dead wall
opposite the windows of Van Twiller's sleeping-room there appeared, as if by
necromancy, an aggressive poster with MADEMOISELLE
OLYMPE ZABRISKI on it in
letters at least a foot high. This thing stared him in the face when he woke up
one morning. It gave him a sensation as if she had called on him overnight and
left her card.
From time to time through the day he regarded that poster
with a sardonic eye. He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the
previous month. To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would be to
deprive it of merit. It cost him many internal struggles. It is a fine thing to
see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and wrestling with it, and
trampling it underfoot like St. Anthony. This was the spectacle Van Twiller was
exhibiting to the angels.
The evening Mademoiselle Olympe was to make
her reappearance, Van Twiller, having dined at the club, and feeling more like
himself than he had felt for weeks, returned to his chamber, and, putting on
dressing-gown and slippers, piled up the greater portion of his library about
him, and fell to reading assiduously. There is nothing like a quiet evening at
home with some slight intellectual occupation, after one's feathers have been
stroked the wrong way.
When the lively French clock on the
mantelpiece—a base of malachite surmounted by a flying bronze Mercury
with its arms spread gracefully in the air, and not remotely suggestive of
Mademoiselle Olympe in the act of executing her grand flight from the
trapeze—when the clock, I repeat, struck nine, Van Twiller paid no
attention to it. That was certainly a triumph. I am anxious to render Van
Twiller all the justice I can, at this point of the narrative, inasmuch as when
the half hour sounded musically, like a crystal ball dropping into a silver
bowl, he rose from the chair automatically, thrust his feet into his walking-
shoes, threw his overcoat across his arm, and strode out of the room.
To
be weak and to scorn your weakness, and not to be able to conquer it, is, as
has been said, a hard thing; and I suspect it was not with unalloyed
satisfaction that Van Twiller found himself taking his seat in the back part of
the private box night after night during the second engagement of Mademoiselle
Olympe. It was so easy not to stay away!
In this second edition of Van
Twiller's fatuity, his case was even worse than before. He not only thought of
Olympe quite a number of times between breakfast and dinner, he not only
attended the interlude regularly, but he began, in spite of himself, to occupy
his leisure hours at night by dreaming of her. This was too much of a good
thing, and Van Twiller regarded it so. Besides, the dream was always the
same—a harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to shattering the
nerves of a man like Van Twiller. He would imagine himself seated at the
theatre (with all the members of Our Club in the parquette), watching
Mademoiselle Olympe as usual, when suddenly that young lady would launch
herself desperately from the trapeze, and come flying through the air like a
firebrand hurled at his private box. Then the unfortunate man would wake up
with cold drops standing on his forehead.
There is one redeeming feature
in this infatuation of Van Twiller's which the sober moralist will love to look
upon—the serene unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went
through her rôle with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be
assumed, punctually, and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that
there was a miserable slave wearing her chains nightly in the left-hand
proscenium box.
That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with the
persistency of an ex-actor, conducted himself so discreetly as not to draw the
fire of Mademoiselle Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller, however deeply
under a spell, was not in love. I say this, though I think if Van Twiller had
not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family and no position and no
money, if New York had been Paris and Thirty-fourth Street a street in the
Latin Quarter—but it is useless to speculate on what might have happened.
What did happen is sufficient.
It happened, then, in the second week of
Queen Olympe's second unconscious reign, that an appalling Whisper floated up
the Hudson, effected a landing at a point between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Cold
Spring, and sought out a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing on the
bank of the river. The Whisper straightway informed the lady dwelling in this
mansion that all was not well with the last of the Van Twillers; that he was
gradually estranging himself from his peers, and wasting his nights in a
playhouse watching a misguided young woman turning unmaidenly somersaults on a
piece of wood attached to two ropes.
Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van
Twiller came down to town by the next train to look into this little
matter.
She found the flower of the family taking an early breakfast
at
11 A. M., in his cosey apartments on Thirty-fourth Street. With the least
possible circumlocution she confronted him with what rumor had reported of his
pursuits, and was pleased, but not too much pleased, when he gave her an exact
account of his relations with Mademoiselle Zabriski, neither concealing nor
qualifying anything. As a confession, it was unique, and might have been a
great deal less entertaining. Two or three times in the course of the
narrative, the matron had some difficulty i