The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

XXI

At parting

News of Colonel Archer's death ran rapidly through a State of which he had been one of the foremost citizens, by reason alike of his public services and his private virtues. It quickly reached Stuart's ears, and he promptly sent a courier with a letter of sympathy and friendship, at the end of which he wrote:

"Now, my dear Miss Agatha, I crave a favour at your hands. Your grandfather was a soldier greatly distinguished in two wars. He should have a soldier's burial, and with your permission, which I take for granted, I am ordering a company of dragoons and a battery now stationed at Warrenton and under my command, to move at once to Willoughby, and there pay the last honours to the veteran."

Heart-broken as she was, Agatha met calamity with a fortitude which astonished even herself. She was still scarcely more than a girl, but the blood of a soldier filled her veins, – a soldier who had never flinched from danger or murmured under suffering. "I too will neither flinch nor murmur," she said to herself. "Chummie would like it best to see me brave and resolute, if he could know – and perhaps he does know. I will bear myself as he would like me to."

And she kept that vow to the letter. The tears would mount to her eyelids now and then in spite of her and trickle down her cheeks; but they were silent tears, accompanied by no moanings that were audible; they were the tears of heart-break, not the tears of weakness and self-pity. They were hidden for the most part from human view, and resolutely restrained in the presence of others. And when any of those who thronged about her for her consolation caught momentary sight of them, the effect was like that produced when a strong man weeps.

When the soldiers came she directed an attentive ministry to their comfort, and after the last salutes to the dead had been fired over the grave, she turned to Captain Marshall Pollard, whose battery it was that had paid that tribute of honour, and asked in a steady voice:

"Can you arrange to stay at Willoughby overnight? I have need to talk with you of matters of some importance. It will be very kind and good of you, if you can manage it."

After a moment's reflection, Marshall answered:

"I can stay till midnight, and that will give us time for our talk. I must be at Warrenton at reveille in the morning, but my horse will easily make the distance if I start by one o'clock."

Then he spoke a few words in a low tone to his lieutenant, who took command and marched the battery away, with all heads bared till they had passed out of the grounds.

"Let us not talk of my grandfather, please," said the girl, as the two entered the drawing-room. "Not that I shrink from that," she quickly added. "It can never be painful to me to speak of him. But it might distress you. You knew him and loved him long ago, before – before you and I quarrelled."

She did not shrink from this reference to the past, or try in any way to disguise the truth of it. Her mind was full of the dear dead man's last words spoken in praise of her courage and truthfulness, and she was more resolute than ever to live up to the character he had approved so earnestly and with so much of loving admiration.

"I think we did not quarrel," the young captain responded; "you did not, at any rate. I misjudged you cruelly, and in my anger I falsely accused you in my heart. Believe me, Agatha," – he had called her so in the old days, and the name came easily to his lips now, – "believe me when I say that I have outlived all that bitterness. Let us be true, loyal friends hereafter, friends who know and trust each other, friends who do not misunderstand."

The girl held out her hand, in response, and made no effort to hide the tears with which she welcomed this healing of the old wounds.

The young man, too, rejoiced in a reconciliation which laid his old love for this woman for ever to rest and planted flowers of friendship upon its grave. He was astonished at his own condition of mind and heart. He learned now the truth that his mad love for Agatha had become completely a thing of the past, and that the bitterness which had at first succeeded it was utterly gone. He could think of her henceforth with a tender affection that had no trace of passion in it. The dead past had buried its dead, and the grass grew green above it.

At that moment dinner was announced, for Agatha had decreed that life at Willoughby should at once resume its accustomed order. "Chummie would like it so," she thought. So the two friends passed through the hall to the dining-room hand in hand, just as they had so often done in the old days before passion had come to disturb their lives.

Marshall had now one supreme desire with respect to Agatha, – a great yearning to comfort her and help her as a brother might. He told her so, when they returned to the drawing-room after dinner, to sit before the great fire of hickory logs during all the remaining hours of Marshall's stay.

"Tell me now," he said, "of your plans, that I may share in them and help you carry them out perhaps. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to find Baillie if I can, and nurse him back to health – if it is not too late."

"But he is in the hands of the enemy, you know."

"Yes, I know. That makes it more difficult, but we must not shrink from difficulties. I shall start north to-morrow."

"But how? – Tell me about it, please."

She explained her plans, telling him of the arrangements she had made for bringing medicines through the blockade, transmitting letters, and finding friends at every step in case of need. Then she added:

"I'm going to take Sam with me this time. He is devoted to his master, and his sagacity is extraordinary. I shall depend upon him to help me find where Baillie is, and to do whatever there is to do for him."

"Will you let me have writing materials?" the young man abruptly asked.

Without asking for an explanation, she brought her lap desk, and with the awkwardness which a man always manifests in attempting to use that peculiarly feminine device, he managed to fill two or three sheets. When he had done, he handed the papers to her, saying:

"I can really help, I think. You will need money for your expenses. You must have it in sufficient supply to meet all emergencies, so that you may never be delayed or baffled in any purpose for want of it. And it may easily happen that you shall need a considerable sum at once. Money is the pass-key to many difficult doors. It so happens that I have a very considerable sum invested in railroad and other securities, in the hands of a very close friend of mine in New York. I have written to him to sell out the whole of them and place the proceeds at your disposal in any banks that may be most convenient to you."

"But, Marshall, you are impoverishing yourself – "

"In the which case," he responded, with his gentle, half-mocking smile, "I should be doing no more than all the rest of us Virginians are doing in this struggle. But I am doing nothing of the kind. I have a plantation, you know, and absolutely nobody dependent upon me. If I survive the war I shall have some land, at any rate, out of which to dig a living. These investments of mine at the North were made long before the war, and I should have sold them out at the beginning of the trouble if I hadn't been too lazy to attend to my affairs. I'm glad now that I was lazy. It enables me to help the two best friends I ever had in this rather lonely world, – Baillie Pegram and you. A man may do as he likes with his own, you know, and this is precisely what I like to do with my securities. Fortunately my friend who has them in charge is a blue-blooded Virginian, who would be fighting with us out there on the lines, if he were not a helpless cripple, fit for nothing, as he wrote to me when the trouble came, but to manage his banking-house. But how are you to get these papers through with you, without risk of discovery?"

"I'll make Sam carry them," she responded. "Nobody will ever think of searching him, particularly as his connection with my affairs will be known to nobody except my friends and co-conspirators."

"What a strategist you are, Agatha! What a general you would have made if you'd happened to be a man!" exclaimed the young man in admiration.

"No," she answered, hesitating for a moment, and then resolutely going on to speak truthfully the thought that was in her. "No, Marshall, for then I should not have had the impulse that teaches me now what to do. Tell me now, about the war. Shall I find Willoughby occupied as a Federal general's headquarters when I get back to Virginia?"

"I don't know. I cannot even guess what the officials at Richmond mean. I only know we have thrown away an opportunity that will never come back to us. The army was full of enthusiasm after Manassas – it is discouraged and depressed now. Then it was strong with the hope and confidence that are born of victory; now it sits there wondering when the enemy will be ready for it to fight again. It was fit for any enterprise then, and the enemy was utterly unfit to resist anything it might have undertaken. But it was not permitted to undertake anything. It was made to lie still, like a pointer in a turkey blind, quivering with eagerness to be up and doing, but restrained by the paralysis of misdirected authority. While we have been doing nothing, the Federal enemy has been swollen to more than twice our numbers. More important still, it has been fashioned by McClellan's skilled hand into as fine a fighting-machine as any general need wish for his tool. The officers have been instructed in their profession, and the men have been taught their trade. Their organisation is perfect, their discipline is almost as good as that of regulars, and their confidence in themselves and their commanders is daily and hourly increasing. Our men have abundant confidence in themselves, but none at all in generals who throw away their opportunities or in a government that touches nothing without paralysing it. Moreover, the Federal army has supply departments behind it that could not be bettered, while ours seem wholly imbecile and incapable. It should have been obvious to every intelligent man at the outset, that with our vastly inferior material resources, our best chance of winning in this war was by bringing to bear from the first all we could of dash and ceaseless activity. We should have taken the aggressive at once and all the time, knowing that every day of delay must strengthen the enemy and weaken us. Instead of that, after winning a great battle in such fashion as well-nigh to destroy for a time the enemy's capacity of resistance, we have taken up a defensive attitude and let the precious opportunity slip from our grasp. It will never return. I do not say that we shall be beaten in the end; I say only that our task is immeasurably more difficult now than it was three months ago, and it is growing more and more difficult every day."

"You are discouraged then?"

"No. I am only depressed. As for courage, we must all of us keep that up to the end. We must be brave to endure as well as to fight, – if we are ever graciously permitted to fight again. But I did not mean to talk of these things. I am only a battery captain. I have no business to think. But unfortunately our army is largely composed of men who can't help thinking. Tell me now, for I must ride presently, is there anything that I can do for you – any way in which I can help you?"

"You will be helping me all the time, just by letting me feel that the old boy and girl friendship is mine again. That is more precious to me than you can imagine. Good-bye, now. Your horse is at the door. Thank you for all, and God bless you."

XXII

Sam as a strategist

Agatha's second progress northward was far more difficult of accomplishment than the first had been. Under McClellan's skilled vigilance the armed mob which he found "cowering on the Potomac" in August, had been converted into an army, drilled, disciplined, and familiar with every detail of that military art which it was called upon to practise. The lines west of Washington were far more rigidly drawn and more fully manned than before, and the officers and men who held them exercised a vigilance that had not been thought of a few months earlier.

And this was not the only difficulty that Agatha encountered in her effort to reach Baltimore. A passport system had been inaugurated at the North, under operation of which those who would travel, and especially those who travelled toward Baltimore, – a city whose loyalty to the Union lay under grave suspicion, – must give a satisfactory account of themselves in order to secure the necessary papers. War had begun to bring the country under that despotism which military force always and everywhere regards as the necessary condition of its effectiveness.

It was a strange spectacle that the country presented during that four years of fratricidal strife. A great, free people, the freest on earth, fell to fighting, one part with another part. Each side was battling, as each side sincerely believed, for the cause of liberty; each was unsparingly spending its blood and treasure in order, in Mr. Lincoln's phrase, that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people might not perish from the earth." Yet on both sides a military rule as rigorous as that of Russia laid its iron hand upon the people, and the people submitted themselves to its exactions almost without a murmur. Arbitrary, inquisitorial, intolerant, this military despotism wrought its will both at the North and at the South, overriding laws and disregarding constitutions, making a mockery of chartered rights, and restraining personal liberty in ways that would have caused instant and universal revolt, had such things been attempted by civil authority.

The military arm is a servant which is apt to make itself the unrelenting master of those who invoke its assistance.

Agatha encountered this difficulty while yet inside the Confederate lines. She was not permitted to pass in any northward direction upon any pretence. The authorities at one place under Confederate control forbade her to go to another place under like control. She appealed to Stuart in this emergency, and although his authority did not extend into the Shenandoah Valley, he made such representations to the commandants in that quarter as were sufficient for her purposes.

To get within the Federal lines was a still more perplexing problem. One device after another proved ineffectual, and the girl was almost in despair. She appealed at last to the general in command of the cavalry in that region, – one of those to whom Stuart had written in her behalf, – and he promptly responded:

"At precisely what point have you friends in coöperation with you?"

She named a little town within the Federal line where lived some of her nearest friends.

"I can manage that," he said. "The point is an insignificant one ten miles within their lines. There are pretty certainly no troops there, and the picket-lines in front are not very strong, as nothing could be more improbable than the raid I shall make in that direction. You can ride, of course."

"Of course."

"Very well. I'll take a strong force, make a dash through the picket-lines, gallop into the town, and make a foray through the region round about. You will follow my column as closely as you can without placing yourself under fire, and when we reach the town, settle yourself with your friends there, turning your horse loose lest he attract attention. You'd better do that just before we reach the town, and walk the rest of the way. Can you wear a walking-skirt under your riding-habit, and slip off the outer – you see I'm a bachelor, Miss Ronald, and don't understand such things."

"You may safely leave all that to my superior feminine sagacity. When shall we start?"

"Whenever you wish. Only we'd better march in the afternoon and reach the town after nightfall. The nights are very dark now, and you will perhaps be able to escape observation in the town. Let me see," looking at his watch, "it's now half past one. We could do the thing this afternoon, if you were ready."

"I can be ready in fifteen minutes," she replied.

"You're very prompt," the officer said, with a suggestion of admiration in his voice.

"O, I'm half-soldier, you know. General Stuart approves me."

"Very well, then. We'll march in half an hour."

The operation was a very simple one, in its military part, at least. The expedition was composed of a force much too strong for resistance by the handful of men available for immediate use on the enemy's part. In the guise of a foraging party it easily dispersed the picket-lines and pushed forward rapidly, taking the little town in its course, but making no halt there. It scoured the country round about, and as soon as Federal forces began to gather for its destruction, it retreated by quite a different route from that by which it had advanced.

It was nine o'clock in the evening when Agatha slipped off her horse in the little Maryland town and left it in charge of a trooper. A five-minutes' walk brought her to the house of her friends, where she was safe.

With her walked her negro maid, who had ridden behind her. That maid's name was Sam, and he quickly divested himself of the feminine outer garments which he had worn over his own clothes. This device had been of Sam's own invention, for that worthy, under stress of circumstances, was rapidly developing into something like genius that gift of diplomacy which he had before employed in discouraging his mammy's efforts to make him her assistant in the kitchen. Sam was a consummate liar whenever lying seemed to him to be necessary or even useful. In the service of his master he had no hesitation in saying, or indeed in doing, anything that might be convenient, and during her long stay north of the Potomac Agatha was far more deeply indebted to Sam's unscrupulousness than she knew. For when he found that his mistress had conscientious objections to his methods, he simply forbore to mention them to her, and carried out his plans on his own responsibility. Long afterward, in relating the experiences of this time to his black companions at Warlock, he made it an interesting feature of his discourse to keep reminding his hearers that, "Mis' Agatha's so dam' hones' dat she wouldn't tell a lie even to a Yankee."