CHAPTER XL
“Oh, Tait!” she sobbed, “I did not know you were here. We all thought you were in Virginia. Oh, I am so glad you are here!”
“Here, Sis, here in this hospital with a game leg?”
“But, Tait, I am here, and you can tell me about Ervin. Is he, oh, brother, is he dead?” The last words sank to a terror’s whisper.
“Dead!” exclaimed her brother. “Good gracious! No! He’s as ’live as a Wa-haw squirrel. He’s captured, that’s all. Cheer up, Sis, he’s all right.”
“Oh, Tait, you are so sweet! Tell me over again, tell me he is just captured! But he—I know he is sick!”
“Not much, I guess. You can’t make old Ervin sick.”
“I know he is ill, Tait, very ill, and I am going to him. I am going to him now.”
As she had left father, so she now left brother, and following his directions, passed out through the long rows of wounded, into the street.
“Go to the Confederate post on James’ Island,” Tait had said, “and they will get a message through for you. Tell Captain Dillard who you are, Sis, and he’ll do all he can to help you.” The words rang hopefully in her ears.
She returned to the Chronicle office, bearing the good news to Colonel Masters, who immediately began arrangements for her conveyance to James’ Island. Joe and another trusty man were detailed as escort. “I regret exceedingly, my dear Miss Preston,” the gallant colonel declared, “that I am unable to accompany you myself, but Ervin’s d⸺ absence—” he corrected himself joyfully, “leaves me tied here. Joe, however, will do all that any one can do.”
Joe dressed in an old broadcloth suit, Prince Albert coat, silk hat crushed into an Egyptian ruin, and hair almost white, made a striking picture. Little tufts of gray hair grew here and there on his scalp, like the scrubby bushes that dot a far Eastern landscape.
Once in the boat with its sea-begrimed sails, Helen began to take in the beauty of the view. Far out in the harbor, Sumter, the unconquerable, looked like a little black box floating on the water. Cumming’s Point was on the right, Moultrie on the left, and the famous hundred pines, so tall that they were seen first of all by the ships at sea, were near at hand on James’ Island. These were the charmed shores of which she had dreamed so often, and now she saw for herself the long low islands fringed with dense deep forests, of palmetto and live oak. The waving salt marshes, too, now sought, now deserted by the sea, seemed familiar, and the deep estuaries and the silver ribboned streams. As the boat moved swiftly over the river, Joe told of the winter residences of the rich planters that lined the banks farther up, of the golden rice fields and the snowy drifts of sea island cotton, of how the teal and mallard duck and wild geese came from the great lakes and wintered in the marshes, and fish swarmed the channels through the rice fields. Deer there were in the forest, too, and tough-necked alligators, which had to be pulled out of the mud when the rice fields dried up in the spring. Emboldened by her silence, he described the great Christmas festival, as it used to be, when for weeks the servants in the great houses had been busy. The river was deserted now, but once sailing crafts of all kinds made the Ashley look like a blue heaven filled with white-winged gulls, and from every bank and field came the song of the happy laborers. Time was when large schooners, fresh from the rice fields along the banks, were making for the Cooper River wharves, and barges laden with snowy cotton bales were being towed to the city.
Captain Dillard himself met her on James’ Island. Colonel Masters’ messenger had found him.
“He is here!” she cried, as soon as she saw the captain’s face. “Is he—is he—how is he?”
“Why, Miss Preston, he is desperately wounded. I can’t imagine how you knew he was here.”
“I knew he was ill, too,” she murmured.
“Then an angel of God must have told you, for it only happened a few days ago, and we have kept it absolutely secret.”
“A little bird told me,” she answered, smiling.
“They almost captured him, but our men heard the firing. Two negroes were dead in the boat, and he had emptied his revolver and was running for the bushes. They shot him as he made a dash for the woods.”
“Does he know anyone?”
“Absolutely no one, and nothing. He is wildly delirious at times, but here we are. Colonel Masters wrote me that you had a right to see him. I shall await your wishes.”
“I will go in now.”
He lay upon a pallet that loving comrades had made in a cabin under the shadow of the pines. His eyes shone wildly, the unnatural brightness intensified the pallor of his emaciated face. As Helen entered, he seemed to know her, and a smile lit up his wan features, a smile which Helen prized above her life. She bent low over his pillow and he whispered, “Helen, darling!”
Great tears sprang to her eyes, for she, too, had seen of the travail of her soul and was satisfied.
“Helen,” he murmured, “we will be married soon, in the little red church in under the oaks. I will care for you always, I will strike down your enemies as I struck down the man who smote you in the face!” His voice rose to a shriek.
“He’s delirious again, madam,” Captain Dillard said sadly, passing out of the door.
But her heart was happy as was the Dawn-Maiden’s when Ioskeha came.
“He’s delirious now, but he knew me,” she murmured, ecstatically, “he knew me at first, and he loves me!”
“Ervin, darling boy,” she whispered. “You love me, do you not, you love only me?”
“I love—I love Helen—” he said, vacantly.
And she clasped him again in her arms, and covered his pale face with kisses.