LIII

“You think he’d sashay in there like a Marmaduke; a Yankee soldier in my house?” Mrs. Bedford said to the row of Confederates who stood in the front door next morning. It was soon after breakfast. They were a part of the cavalry she had seen the night before. The tallest of them had two old waistcoats on, one buttoned in front, one in the back; and among them she saw the youth who had held the horse under the first prisoner hanged. She saw he was not the sort to tell his feelings and, despite his worn home-made uniform, how neat he kept himself. The gray young eyes were as honest as daylight.

“How old are you, Major,” she asked, her eyes twinkling.

“Seventeen.”

“The whole war?”

One of the other soldiers, a lean Scotch type, answered. “He ran off to join Forrest’s cavalry, when he was fourteen. But they persuaded him to come home, his father promised him a horse.”

“If I’d just wait, my mother said,” the young soldier explained.

“I’d take my oath whenever there’s a call for volunteers you’re the first one.” She leaned her head to one side, studying him as she said this.

“That’s a fact,” the other soldier said, while the youth stood with his eyes gazing into hers.

“And all your life you’ll do the same thing,” she said.

“A man has to.”

“I only hope you’ll get some thanks for it. We must remember your name.”

“Alfred Alexander.”

“Bless your little heart! I hope the war spares you, for the sake of decency among us generally. And here’s some advice: don’t rush to volunteer. Let some of the others risk somethin’.”

“We’ve been sent to look for a man,” he said, simply.

Here Sallie Bedford turned gruffly to the soldiers. “I asked you people if you thought the Marmaduke was here in my house, didn’t I?”

The soldiers laughed: “Dead in the woods somewhere, I reckon,” the tall soldier said, “but no harm, ma’m, when a prisoner had escaped in the dark last night, asking you if you’ve seen or heard anything of him.”

She learned that the agent had been bribing negroes to show him where a plantation’s cotton was hid, and that this cotton then either was burned or was shipped by the river North, where it brought 400 a bale. This, as every one knew, had been going on all over the South. Sometimes the agent when he took the cotton had given a receipt for it, which was supposed to be convertible—when the time came, that is—into cash. At any rate thousands of bales were one way or another being seized. In fact General Grant had complained that his soldiers were being robbed of their rations and hospitals of their supplies, because the quartermasters’ teams were being employed hauling cotton to the river. He estimated that the surreptitious traffic had come to at least 200,000,000.

“The reason,” the soldier went on, “our captain says he’ll hang every Yankee he catches is because his old mother is paralyzed and one day a lot of soldiers, black and white, got in her room and danced round and round her bed, hoopin’ and stickin’ her with their bayonets. So he just vowed he’d hang every Yankee he got his hands on.”

“Poor wretch,” she said.

“ ’Twas up in Lafayette County.”

“Well, you’d better go catch some more for him,” she said.

“Yes, ma’m.”

They turned and descended the steps to their horses, which they had ridden up to the very door. On the way down the avenue the horseman with the two waistcoats on and no coat rode close by the statues along one side, touching his hat to each he had passed.

After this visit, Sallie Bedford saw more than ever how important it was, any way you took it, to get the escaped soldier out of the house, and was relieved when she returned to his room, to find him sitting up in an armchair. Valette was not with him.

“Let’s see us,” she said, in a friendly tone, and went around to look at the wound. A piece of the scalp had been torn away, with the loss of blood, but the wound was not deep. As she dressed the wound, she asked him what did he think of when they were going to hang him. He said he thought of his father and mother. The soldier said that so simply that her throat tightened.

“We thought you were dead last night,” she said; and without making a reply, he followed her with his eyes around the room. She had devised a plan to get him into Natchez.

The doctor in charge with the Federals in Natchez had chosen the Gardens, her friends the Prynells’ home, for his hospital. Once they adapted themselves to his arbitrary temper and authority, the old lady and her daughter had found Doctor Blackall a kind man and a gentleman. At the Gardens the fences had been torn down, brick ovens built over the grounds for baking the rations of bread, the piano had been turned into a horse trough, and the camellias and shrubs trampled or cut down. But the camellias sent to Mrs. Prynell from Portobello, where the neglected garden showed still so many, had been admired by the doctor; Mrs. Prynell had said that in her note of thanks.

Sallie Bedford rummaged the secretary for a proper sheet of note paper and sent an invitation; would Doctor Blackall, since he liked camellias, ride over at once before the petals began to fall. The note ended with a quotation from Pope. She wrote, with a twist of her mouth,

When opening buds salute the Welcome day,

And earth relenting feels the genial ray.

The camellias, starring the green masses of the garden so thickly, put the doctor in a good temper. He professed to have formed a most favorable impression of the Southern people and deplored the war, which, doubtless, only the haste of certain characters had brought on.

Portobello was indeed a Southern mansion; from the pavilion walk he stood looking at the house, with its white columns among the leaves. Mrs. Bedford had received him walking under the trees of the avenue, and contrived not to invite him indoors, thinking that, though some of the valued objects were wrapped in sheets and taken up to the dark attic, it was just as well he should not get a taste for what the house afforded.

“Very fine,” Doctor Blackall repeated, squinting to get the picture of the house, and suddenly looking banal as he did so.

“From over here, perhaps,” she said, guiding him to another spot away from the pavilion and the blood stains that might be there.

“I myself am not an abolitionist. Can the leopard change his spots, can the Ethiopian change his skin?” Doctor Blackall said, stepping lightly along and pointing with his small hand. “This is the alba plena, this camellia, but I have always been a Union man. I learn that many of the planters in this country were also Union men. Unfortunately now they are solidly against us. It may be the price of ultimate peace, we must accept it.”

“That,” Mrs. Bedford replied, smiling, “that’s what my father said about Andrew Jackson’s campaign.” Doctor Blackall gave his polite social laugh, but stopped when his eye met hers, which seemed to say, “What do you know about it?”

She excused herself to go into the house for a basket and shears; and Valette, who had been keeping a lookout from between the library curtains, came darting to her. Valette should go at once and tell the Yankee soldier that he was proceeding to Natchez with the Yankee doctor; to steal out by the kitchen and through the orchard and wait at the gate for Doctor Blackall. And not to let him or anybody else know about being here in this house. To pretend he was coming along by the road. “And tell him to drink all the milk he can get for a while, what cows haven’t been driven off or killed, and tell him we don’t want to hear of him again, either.”

The tall, high-shouldered figure of the doctor could be seen strolling up and down before the statues of the four continents. He no longer spoke of politics or sections when she joined him, but praised the quiet at Portobello. “Peace, what peace reigns out here! Like a retreat,” he said, in an affected tone.

“Andrew Marvel’s line, ‘like a green thought in a green shade,’ ” she said.

She smiled because she saw for two seconds a flash of the good doctor himself standing upon a horse with a rope on his neck; and because, also, he was lauding the quiet of Portobello to a woman whose ears were still full of curses and moans and horses in the dark.

“I must confess,” he went on, “that being constantly surrounded by sick and wounded men is hardly the ideal life. It’s more tedious at a hospital than all the times I’ve been on battlefields with wounded men brought in by the score. In a hospital away from the field the men have less stoicism about pain.”

From his tone he might have been asking the difference between camellias. But as he spoke he made a gesture with the left hand, and she noticed for the first time that half the palm with the little and ring fingers was shot away and a long red scar extended to the wrist. She no longer resented the tone he had used about the sick and dying at the hospital. He had won the right to speak of it as he chose. And so she merely said, “Mrs. Prynell tells me she has come to regard you as a friend.”

“I should be most happy to think so,” said the doctor, and again he laughed. This time it did not sound to her so much a polite society laugh, but more that of a man who, like her, felt a sense of futility and despair.

By that time twilight was drawing on, and under the trees at the end of the avenue a new moon hung lightly down the blue sky. She pointed it out. “I always think it’s a pretty little thing, don’t you, Doctor? My chillun love it,” she said, noticing at the same time through the gate palings the shadow of the soldier waiting.