The Cavalier by George Washington Cable

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[Illustration: "Stand, gentlemen! Every man is covered by two!"]

THE CAVALIER

BY

GEORGE W. CABLE

1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. She Wanted to Laugh
II. Lieutenant Ferry
III. She
IV. Three Days' Rations
V. Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty
VI. A Handsome Stranger
VII. A Plague on Names!
VIII. Another Curtained Wagon
IX. The Dandy's Task
X. The Soldier's Hour
XI. Captain Jewett
XII. In the General's Tent
XIII. Good-Bye, Dick
XIV. Coralie Rothvelt
XV. Venus and Mars
XVI. An Aching Conscience
XVII. Two Under One Hat-Brim
XVIII. The Jayhawkers
XIX. Asleep in the Death-Trap
XX. Charlotte Oliver
XXI. The Fight on the Bridge
XXII. We Speed a Parting Guest
XXIII. Ferry Talks of Charlotte
XXIV. A Million and a Half
XXV. A Quiet Ride
XXVI. A Salute Across the Dead-Line
XXVII. Some Fall, Some Plunge
XXVIII. Oldest Game on Earth
XXIX. A Gnawing in the Dark
XXX. Dignity and Impudence
XXXI. The Red Star's Warning
XXXII. A Martyr's Wrath
XXXIII. Torch and Sword
XXXIV. The Charge in the Lane
XXXV. Fallen Heroes
XXXVI. "Says Quinn, S'e"
XXXVII. A Horse! A Horse!
XXXVIII. "Bear a Message and a Token"
XXXIX. Charlotte Sings
XL. Harry Laughs
XLI. Unimportant and Confidential
XLII. "Can I Get There by Candle-Light?"
XLIII. "Yes, and Back Again"
XLIV. Charlotte in the Tents of the Foe
XLV. Stay Till To-Morrow
XLVI. The Dance at Gilmer's
XLVII. He's Dead--Is She Alive?
XLVIII. In the Hollow of His Right Arm
XLIX. A Cruel Book and a Fool or Two
L. The Bottom of the Whirlwind
LI. Under the Room Where Charlotte Lay
LII. Same Book and Light-Head Harry
LIII. "Captain, They've Got Us"
LIV. The Fight in the Doorway
LV. Rescue and Retreat
LVI. Hôtel des Invalides
LVII. A Yes and a No
LVIII. The Upper Fork of the Road
LIX. Under Charlotte's Window
LX. Tidings
LXI. While Destiny Moved On
LXII. A Tarrying Bridegroom
LXIII. Something I Have Never Told Till Now
LXIV. By Twos. March

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Stand, gentlemen! Every man is covered by two!"

"I surrender," he said, with amiable ease

"Well, you _air_ in a hurry!"

With the rein dangling under the bits he went over the fence like a deer

Ferry saluted with his straight blade

"Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be very arch

Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the arms of his
followers

Springing to the ground between our two candles, she bent over the open
page

I

SHE WANTED TO LAUGH

Our camp was in the heart of Copiah County, Mississippi, a mile or so
west of Gallatin and about six miles east of that once robber-haunted
road, the Natchez Trace. Austin's brigade, we were, a detached body of
mixed Louisiana and Mississippi cavalry, getting our breath again after
two weeks' hard fighting of Grant. Grierson's raid had lately gone the
entire length of the State, and we had had a hard, vain chase after
him, also.

Joe Johnston's shattered army was at Jackson, about forty-five miles to
northward; beleaguered Vicksburg was in the Northwest, a trifle farther
away; Natchez lay southwest, still more distant; and nearly twice as far
in the south was our heartbroken New Orleans. We had paused to
recuperate our animals, and there was a rumor that we were to get new
clothing. Anyhow we had rags with honor, and a right to make as much
noise as we chose.

It was being made. The air was in anguish with the din of tree-felling
and log-chopping, of stamping, neighing, braying, whooping, guffawing,
and singing--all the daybreak charivari beloved of a camp of
Confederate "critter companies." In the midst of it a chum and I sat
close together on a log near the mess fire, and as the other boys of the
mess lifted their heads from their saddle-tree pillows, from two of them
at once came a slow, disdainful acceptance of the final lot of the
wicked, made unsolicited on discovering that this chum and I had sat
there talking together all night. I had the day before been wheedled
into letting myself be detailed to be a quartermaster's clerk, and this
comrade and I were never to snuggle under the one blanket again. The
thought forbade slumber.

"If I go to sleep," I said,--"you know how I dream. I shall have one of
those dreams of mine to carry around in my memory for a year, like a
bullet in my back." So there the dear fellow had sat all night to give
me my hourly powders of reassurance that I could be a quartermaster's
clerk without shame.

"Certainly you can afford to fill a position which the leader of Ferry's
scouts has filled just before you."

But my unsoldierly motive for going to headquarters kept my misgivings
alive. I was hungry for the gentilities of camp; to be where Shakespeare
was part of the baggage, where Pope was quoted, where Coleridge and
Byron and Poe were recited, Macaulay criticized, and "Les
Misérables"--Madame Le Vert's Mobile translation--lent round; and where
men, when they did steal, stole portable volumes, not currycombs. Ned
Ferry had been Major Harper's clerk, but had managed in several
instances to display such fitness to lead that General Austin had lately
named him for promotion, and the quartermaster's clerk was now
Lieutenant Ferry, raised from the ranks for gallantry, and followed
ubiquitously by a chosen sixty or so drawn from the whole brigade. Could
the like occur again? And could it occur to a chap who could not
comprehend how it had ever occurred at all?

By and by we breakfasted. After which, my precious horse not having
finished his corn, I spread my blanket and let myself doze, but was soon
awakened by the shouts of my companions laughing at me for laughing so
piteously in my sleep.

"Would I not tell my dream, as nice young men in the Bible always did?"

"No, I would not!" But I had to yield. My dream was that our General had
told me a fable. It was of a young rat, which seeing a cockerel, whose
tail was scarcely longer than his own, leap down into a barrel, gather
some stray grains of corn and fly out again, was tempted to follow his
example, but having got in, could only stay there. The boys furnished
the moral; it was not complimentary.

"Well, good-bye, fellows."

"Good-bye, Smith." I have never liked my last name, but at that moment
the boys contrived to put a kindness of tone into it which made it
almost pleasing. "Good-bye, Smith, remember your failings."

Remember! I had yet to make their discovery. But I was on the eve of
making it.

As I passed up the road through the midst of our nearly tentless camp I
met a leather-curtained spring-wagon to which were attached a pair of
little striped-legged mules driven by an old negro. Behind him, among
the curtains, sat a lady and her black maid. The mistress was of
strikingly graceful figure, in a most tasteful gown and broad Leghorn
hat. Her small hands were daintily gloved. The mules stopped, and
through her light veil I saw that she was handsome. Her eyes, full of
thought, were blue, and yet were so spirited they might as well have
been black, as her hair was. She, or fate for her, had crowded thirty
years of life into twenty-five of time.

For many a day I had not seen such charms of feminine attire, and yet I
was not charmed. Every item of her fragrant drapery was from the world's
open market, hence flagrantly un-Confederate, unpatriotic,
reprehensible. Otherwise it might not have seemed to me that her thin
nostrils had got their passionateness lately.

"Are you not a New Orleans boy?" she asked as I lifted my képi and drew
rein.

Boy! humph! I frowned, made myself long, and confessed I had the honor
to be from that city. Whereupon she let her long-lashed eyes take on as
ravishing a covetousness as though I had been a pretty baby.

"I knew it!" she said delightedly. "But tell me, honor bright,"--she
sparkled with amusement--"you're not regularly enlisted, are you?"

I clenched my teeth. "I am nineteen, madam."

Her eyes danced, her brows arched. "Haven't you got"--she hid her smile
with an embroidered handkerchief--"haven't you got your second figure
upside down?" I glared, but with one look of hurt sisterliness she
melted me. Then, pensive just long enough to say, "I was nineteen once,"
she shot me a sidelong glance so roguish that I was dumb with
indignation and tried to find my mustache, forgetting I had shaved it
off to stimulate it. She smiled in sweet propitiation and then came
gravely to business. "Have you come from beyond the pickets?"

"No, madam."

"Have you met any officer riding toward them?"

I had not. Her driver gathered the reins and I drew back.

"Good-bye, New Orleans soldier-boy," she said, gaily, and as I raised my
cap she gave herself a fetching air and added, "I'll wager I know
your name."

"Madam,"--my cap went higher, my head lower--"I never bet."

I could not divine what there was ridiculous about me, except a certain
damage to my dress, of which she could not possibly be aware as long as
I remained in the saddle. Yet plainly she wanted to laugh. I made it as
plain that I did not.

"Good-day, sir," she said, with forced severity, but as I smiled
apologetically and moved my rein, she broke down under new temptation
and, as the wagon moved away, twittered after me unseen,--"Good-bye, Mr.
Smith."

II

LIEUTENANT FERRY

I passed on, flattered but scandalized, wasting no guesses on how she
knew me--if she really knew me at all--but taking my revenge by
moralizing on her, to myself, as a sign of the times, until brigade
headquarters were in full view, a few rods off the road; four or five
good, white wall-tents in a green bit of old field backed by a thicket
of young pines.

Midway of this space I met Scott Gholson, clerk to the Adjutant-general.
It was Gholson who had first spoken of me for this detail. He was an
East Louisianian, of Tangipahoa; aged maybe twenty-six, but in effect
older, having from birth eaten only ill-cooked food, and looking it;
profoundly unconscious of any shortcoming in his education, which he had
got from a small church-pecked college of the pelican sort that feed it
raw from their own bosoms. One of his smallest deficiencies was that he
had never seen as much art as there is in one handsome dinner-plate.
Now, here he was, riding forth to learn for himself, privately, he said,
why I did not appear. Yet he halted without turning, and seemed to wish
he had not found me.

"Did you"--he began, and stopped; "did you notice a"--he stopped again.

"What, a leather-curtained spring-wagon?"

"No-o!" he said, as if nobody but a gaping idiot would expect anybody
not a gaping idiot to notice a leather-curtained spring-wagon. "No-o!
did you notice the brown horse that man was riding who just now passed
you as you turned off the road?"

No, I barely remembered the rider had generously moved aside to let me
go by. In pure sourness at the poverty of my dress and the perfection of
his, I had avoided looking at him higher than his hundred-dollar boots.
My feet were in uncolored cowhide, except the toes.

"He noticed you," said Gholson; "he looked back at you and your bay.
Wouldn't you like to turn back and see his horse?"

"Why, hardly, if I'm behindhand now. Is it so fine as that?"

"Well, no. It's the horse he captured the time he got the Yankee who had
him prisoner."

"Who?" I cried. "What! You don't mean to say--was that Lieutenant
Ferry?"

"Yes, so called. He wa'n't a lieutenant then, he was a clerk, like you
or me."

"Oh, I wish I had noticed him!"

"We can see him yet if you--"

"Do you want to see him?" I gathered my horse.

"Me!--No, sir. But you spoke as if--"

I shook my head and we moved toward the tents. This was worse than the
dream; the rat had not seen the cockerel, but the cockerel had observed
the rat--dropping into the barrel: the cockerel, yes, and not the
cockerel alone, for I saw that Gholson was associating him with her of
the curtained wagon. By now they were side and side. I asked if Ferry
came often to headquarters. "Yes, quite as often as he's any business
to." "Ah, ha!" thought I, and presently said I had heard he was a
great favorite.

"Well,--yes,--he--he is,--with some."

"Don't you like him?"

"Who, me? Oh!--I--I admire Ned Ferry--for a number of things. He's more
foolhardy than brave; he's confessed as much to me. Women call him
handsome. He sings; beautifully, I suppose; I can't sing a note; and
wouldn't if I could. Still, if he only wouldn't sing drinking-songs
--but, Smith, I think that to sing drinking-songs--and all
the more to sing them as well as some folks think he does--is to
advocate drinking, and to advocate drinking is next door to excusing
drunkenness!"

"Then Ned Ferry doesn't drink?"

"Indeed he does! I don't like to say it, and I don't say he drinks 'too
much', as they call it; but, Smith, he drinks with men who do! Oh, _I_
admire him; only I do wish--"

"Wish what?"

"Oh, I--I wish he wouldn't play cards. Smith, I've seen him play cards
with the shells bursting over us!"

For my part I privately wished this saint wouldn't rub my uninteresting
surname into me every time he spoke. As we dismounted near the tents I
leaned against my saddle and asked further concerning the object of his
loving anxiety. Was Ned Ferry generous, pleasant, frank?

"Why, in outward manner, yes; but, Smith, he was raised to be a Catholic
priest. I could a heap-sight easier trust him if he'd sometimes show
distrust, himself. If he ever does I've never seen it. And yet--Oh,
we're the best of friends, and I'm speaking now only as a friend and
_toe_ a friend. Oh, if it wa'n't for just one thing, I could admit what
Major Harper said of him not ten minutes ago to me; that you never
finish talking to Ned Ferry without feeling a little brighter, happier
and cleaner than when you began; whereas talking with some men it's just
the reverse."

I looked carefully at my companion and asked him if the Major had said
_all_ of that. He had, and Gholson's hide had turned it without taking a
scratch. "That's fine!--as to Ferry," I said.

"Oh, yes,--it would be--if it was only _iso_. Trouble is, you keep
remembering he's such a stumbling-block to any real spiritual inquirer.
Yes, and to himself; for, you know, spiritually there's so much less
hope for the moralist than what there is for the up-and-down reprobate!
You know that,--_Smith_."

My silence implied that I knew it, though I did not feel any brighter,
happier or cleaner.

"Smith, Ned Ferry is not only a Romanist, he's a romanticist. We--you
and me--are religionists. _Our_ brightness and happiness air the
brightness and happiness of faith; our cleanness is the cleanness of
religious scruples. Worst of it with Ned is he's satisfied with the
difference, I'm afraid! That's what makes him so pleasant to fellows who
don't care a sou marquee about religion."

I said one might respect religion even if he did not--

"Oh, he's always _polite_ to it; but he's--he's read Voltaire! Oh, yes,
Voltaire, George Sand, all those men. He questions the Bible, Smith. Not
to me, though; hah, he knows better! Smith, I can discuss religion and
not get mad, with any one who don't question the Bible; but if he does
that, I just tell you, I wouldn't risk my soul in such a discussion!
Would you?"

I could hardly say, and we moved pensively toward Major Harper's tent.
Evidently the main poison was still in Gholson's stomach, and when I
glanced at him he asked, "What d'you reckon brought Ned Ferry here just
at this time?"

I made no reply. He looked momentous, leaned to me sidewise with a hand
horizontally across his mouth, and whispered a name. It was new to me.
"Charlie Toliver?" I murmured, for we were at the tent door.

"The war-correspondent," whispered Gholson; "don't you know?" But the
flap of the tent lifted and I could not reply.

III

SHE

Major Harper was the most capable officer on the brigade staff. I had
never met a man of such force and dignity who was so modestly affable.
His new clerk dined with him that first day, at noon in his tent, alone.
Hot biscuits! with butter! and rock salt. Fried bacon also--somewhat
vivacious, but still bacon. When the tent began to fill with the smoke
of his meerschaum pipe, and while his black boy cleared the table for us
to resume writing, we talked of books. Here was joy! I vaunted my love
for history, biography, the poets, but spoke lightly of fiction.

The smoker twinkled. "You're different from Ned Ferry," he said.

"Has he a taste for fiction?" I asked, with a depreciative smirk.

"Yes, a beautiful story is a thing Ned Ferry loves with a positive
passion."

"I suppose we might call him a romanticist," said I, "might we not?"

The patient gentleman smiled again as he said, "Oh--Gholson can attend
to that."

I took up my pen, and until twilight we spoke thereafter only of
abstracts and requisitions. But then he led me on to tell him all about
myself. I explained why my first name was Richard and my second name
Thorndyke, and dwelt especially on the enormous differences between the
Smiths from whom we were and those from whom we were not descended.

And then he told me about himself. He was a graduate of West Point, the
only one on the brigade staff; was a widower, with a widowed brother, a
maiden sister, two daughters, and a niece, all of one New Orleans
household. The brothers and sister were Charlestonians, but the two men
had married in New Orleans, twin sisters in a noted Creole family. The
brother's daughter, I was told, spoke French better than English; the
Major's elder daughter spoke English as perfectly as her father; and the
younger, left in her aunt's care from infancy, knew no French at all. I
wondered if they were as handsome as their white-haired father, and
when I asked their names I learned that the niece, Cécile, was a year
the junior of Estelle and as much the senior of Camille; but of the days
of the years of the pilgrimage of any of the three "children" he gave me
no slightest hint; they might be seven years older, or seven years
younger, than his new clerk.

To show him how little I cared for any girl's age whose father preferred
not to mention it, I reverted to his sister and brother. She was in New
Orleans, he said, with her nieces, but might at any moment be sent into
the Confederacy, being one of General Butler's "registered enemies." The
brother was--

"Out here somewhere. No, not in the army exactly; no, nor in the navy,
but--I expect him in camp to-night. If he comes you'll have to work when
you ought to be asleep. No, he is not in the secret service, only in _a_
secret service; running hospital supplies through the enemy's lines
into ours."

I was thrilled. _I_ was taken into the staff's confidence! Me, _Smith!_
That _Major Harper_ would tell me part of a matter to conceal the rest
of it did not enter my dreams, good as I was at dreaming. The flattery
went to my brain, and presently, without the faintest preamble, I asked
if there was any war-correspondent at headquarters just now. There came
a hostile flash in his eyes, but instantly it passed, and with all his
happy mildness he replied, "No, nor any room for one."

Just then entered an ordnance-sergeant, so smart in his rags that the
Major's affability seemed hardly a condescension. He asked me to supper
with his mess--"of staff _attatchays_," he said, winking one eye and
hitching his mouth; at which the Major laughed with kind disapprobation,
and the jocose sergeant explained as we went that that was only one of
Scott Gholson's mispronunciations the boys were trying to tease him
out of.

I found the clerks' mess a bunch of bright good fellows. After supper,
stretched on the harsh turf under the June stars, with everyone's head
(save mine) in some one's lap, we smoked, talked and sang. Only Gholson
was called away, by duty, and so failed to hear the laborious jests got
off at his expense. To me the wits were disastrously kind. Never had I
been made a tenth so much of; I was even urged to sing "All quiet along
the Potomac to-night," and was courteously praised when I had done so.
But there is where affliction overtook me; they debated its authorship.
One said a certain newspaper correspondent, naming him, had proved it to
be the work--I forget of whom. But I shall never forget what followed.
Two or three challenged the literary preeminence of that correspondent,
and from as many directions I was asked for my opinion. Ah me! Lying
back against a pile of saddles with my head in my hands, sodden with
self-assurance, I replied, magnanimously, "Oh, I don't set up for a
critic, but--well--would you call him a better man than
Charlie Toliver?"

"Who--o?" It was not one who asked; the whos came like shrapnel; and
when, not knowing what else to do, I smiled as one dying, there went up
a wail of mirth that froze my blood and then heated it to a fever. The
company howled. They rolled over one another, crying, "Charlie
Toliver!--Charlie Toliver!--Oh, Lord, where's Scott Gholson!--Charlie
Toliver!"--and leaped up and huddled down and moaned and rolled and
rose and looked for me.

But, after all, fortune was merciful, and I was gone; the Major had
summoned me--his brother had come. I went circuitously and alone. As I
started, some fellow writhing on the grass cried, "Charlie Tol--oh, this
is better than a tcharade!" and a flash of divination enlightened me.
While I went I burned with shame, rage and nervous exhaustion; the name
Scott Gholson had gasped in my ear was the name of her in the curtained
wagon, and I cursed the day in which I had heard of Charlotte Oliver.

IV

THREE DAYS' RATIONS

In the vocabulary of a prig, but in the wrath of a fishwoman, I
execrated Scott Gholson; his jealousies, his disclosures, his religion,
his mispronunciations; and Ned Ferry--that cockerel! Here was I in the
barrel, and able only to squeal in irate terror at whoever looked down
upon me. I could have crawled under a log and died. At the door of the
Major's tent I paused to learn and joy of one to whom comes reprieve
when the rope is on his neck, I overheard Harry Helm, the General's
nephew and aide de-camp, who had been with us, telling what a howling
good joke Smith had just got off on Gholson!

"We shall have to get Ned Ferry back here," the Major was saying as I
entered, "to make you boys let Scott Gholson alone."

The young man laughed and turned to go. "Why doesn't Ned Ferry make
_her_ let Gholson alone? He can do it; he's got her round his finger as
tight as she's got Gholson round hers."

"Harry," replied the Major, from his table full of documents, "don't you
know that any man who's got a woman wrapped round his finger has also
got her wrapped round his throat?"

The aide-de-camp laughed like a rustic and vanished. "Smith," said the
Major, "your eyes are--"

"I've been awake for forty-eight hours, Major. But--oh, I'm not
sleepy."

"Well, go get some sleep.--No, go at once; you'll be called when
needed."

But I was not needed; while I slept, who should come back and do my work
in my stead but Ned Ferry. When I awoke it was with a bound of alarm to
see clear day. The command was breaking camp. I rushed out of the tent
with canteen, soap and comb, and ran into the arms of the mess-cook. We
were alone. "Oh, yass, seh," he laughed as he poured the water into my
hands, "th'ee days' rairtion. Seh? Lawd! dey done drawed and cook' befo'
de fus' streak o' light. But you all right; here yo' habbersack, full
up. Oh, I done fed yo' hoss. Here yo' jacket an' cap; and here yo'
saddle an' bridle--Oh, you welcome; I dess tryin' to git shet of 'em
so's I kin strak de tent."

As I mounted, our wagonmaster rode by me, busy as a skipper in a storm.
"Oh, here!" he cried, wheeled, and reaching something to me added,
"that's your pass. Major Harper wants you as quick as you can show up.
He says never mind the column, ride straight after him. Keep this road
to Hazlehurst and then go down the main Brookhaven road till you
overtake him. He's by himself--nearly."

As the rider wheeled away I blurted out with anxious loudness in the
general hubbub, "Isn't his brother with him?"

He flashed back a glare of rebuke and then bellowed to heaven and earth,
"Oh, the devil and Tom Walker! I don't keep run of sutlers and
citizens!" He took a circuit, standing in his stirrups and calling
orders to his teamsters, and as he neared me again he said very gently,
"Good Lord! my boy, don't you know better than to shoot your mouth off
like that? You'll find nobody with the Major but Ned Ferry, and I don't
say you'll find him."

I galloped to the road. Away down through the woods it was full of
horsemen falling into line. With the nearest colonel was Lieutenant
Helm, the aide-de-camp. I turned away from them toward Hazlehurst, but
looked back distrustfully. Yes, sure enough, the whole command was
facing into column the other way! My horse and I whirled and stood
staring and swelling with indignation--we ordered south, and the brigade
heading westward! He fretted, tramped, neighed, and began hurriedly to
paw through the globe to head them off on the other side. He even
threatened to rear; but when I showed him I was ashamed of that, he bore
me proudly, and I sat him as proudly as he bore me, for he made me more
than half my friends. And now as the aide-de-camp wheeled about from the
receding column and came our way saluting cordially, we turned and
trotted beside him jauntily. Our first talk was of saddles, but very
soon I asked where the General was.

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