VI
A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more gray than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a heavy revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her drawn features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said fretfully:
“Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt.” She closed her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to cry with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should discharge a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a chest at the wall.
“Oh, Indy!” a shaken voice exclaimed. “Do you think he's dying?” The colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched him on a shoulder.
“'Deed, Miss Rosemary,” she replied, relieved and angry, “that shot didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing.” She grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. “Dressed like a soldier,” she proceeded scornfully, “and scaring us out of our wits. What did you want to come here for anyhow calling out names?”
Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses, voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.
He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak—he was lying in the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so massive and tall that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see a marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a gleaming brass hod; a highboy with a dark lustrous surface; oval gold frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon, the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.
The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.
“I told her,” she said in an aggrieved voice, “there wasn't nothing at all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat. Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?”
“To set you free!” Elim Meikeljohn replied.
She gazed at him thoughtfully.
“Capt'n,” she asked finally, “are you free?”
“Why, certainly——” he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom, a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not liberated—solved—by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: “Freedom ... spirit.”
“You're not as wholesome as you appeared,” the woman judged. “You can't have nothing beside a glass of milk.” She crossed the room and, stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at the door she paused. “Don't you try to move about,” she directed; “you stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs, and Mr. McCall, and—” her voice took on a faint insistent note of warning. He paid little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of weariness.
The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a pleasant zest.
“The city's just burning right up,” she informed him, standing in the middle of the floor; “the boats on the river caught fire and their camions banged into Canal Street.” She had a pale even color, a straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.
“Are the Union troops in charge?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not the worst now—a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr. McCall and Mr. John are here,” she declared again; “they could just finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand.”
This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.
Still he made no inquiry. The breakfast finished, he relapsed once more on his pillows and heard the key stealthily turn in the door from the outside.
He told himself, without conviction, that he must rise and join his command. The war, he knew, was over; the courage that had sustained him during the struggle died. The simple question of the colored woman had largely slain it. His own personality, the vision of his forthcoming life and necessity, rose to the surface of his consciousness. Elim realized what had drawn, him to his present situation—it had, of course, been the memory of Rosemary Roselle. The days when he—an assistant to a professor of philosophy and letters—had read and marked her essays seemed to lie in another existence, infinitely remote. How would he excuse his presence, the calling of her name before the house? This was an inopportune—a fatal—moment for a man in the blue of the North to make his bow to a Richmond girl, in the midst of her wasted and burning place of home. He decided reluctantly that it would be best to say nothing of his connection with her academic labors, but to depart as soon as possible and without explanation of his first summons.... Rosemary Roselle—the name had clung persistently to his memory. It was probable that he would see her—once. That alone was extraordinary. He marveled at the grim humor of circumstance that had granted him such a wildly improbable wish, and at the same time made it humanly impossible for him to benefit from it.