CHAPTER XIV
After the escape of Julius Roscoe time held to a tranquil pace in the placidities of the storm centre. The rose-red dawns burst into bloom and the days flowered whitely, full of fragrance and singing birds, of loitering sunshine and light-winged breezes. One by one the still noons glowed and glistered, expanding into summer radiance, and dulled gradually to the mellow splendors of the sunset. Then fell the serene dusk, blue on the far-away mountains, violet nearer at hand, with a white star in the sky, and a bugle's strain leaping into the air like a thing of life, a vivified sound. And all the panorama of troops, and forts, and camps, and cannon might be some magnificent military spectacle, so remote seemed the war—so unreal. Every morning the "ladies" wrought at their lessons in the library, and Leonora cut their small summer garments and helped the seamstress, who came in by the day, to sew. Despite these absorptions Mrs. Gwynn managed to find leisure to read aloud to Judge Roscoe his favorite old novels, and essays, and dull antiquated histories. She evolved subjects of controversy on which to argue with him, and was facetious and found occasion to call him "Your Honour" oftener than heretofore. For he had grown old suddenly; his step had lost its elasticity; he looked up a cane that had once been presented to him by some fraternity; his hair was turning white and—worst sign of all—he was not sorry to be approaching the end.
"The night is long, and the day is a burden," he once said.
Then, when she reminded him of duty, he recanted. But he had obviously fallen into that indifference to life incident to advancing age, and was sensible of a not involuntary gravitation toward the tomb. Later he asked her if she did not think those lines of Stephen Hawes's had a most mellow and languorous cadence,—
"For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to even-song."
He showed great anxiety concerning Captain Baynell's recovery, but he had never mentioned to her the fact of Julius's presence in the house. She knew that he and probably old Ephraim had been aware of it, but this was only a constructive knowledge on her part, and founded on no assurance. When once more Baynell was able to come downstairs, she perceived that he himself had no remote consciousness of his assailant. He had entirely accepted the theory of a fall instead of a collision, and was only a little deprecatory and embarrassed at being so long in getting himself away.
"Positively my last appearance!" He was reduced even to the hackneyed phrase.
Mrs. Gwynn made the conventional polite protest, and the "ladies" joyously and affectionately flocked around him, and his heart expanded to the grave kindness of his host. Nevertheless he appreciated a subtle change. Despite the enhancing charm of the season, which even a few days had wrought to a deeper perfection, the place had somehow fallen under a tinge of gloom. But the roses were blooming at the windows, the lilies stood in ranks, tall and stately, in the borders, the humming-birds were rioting all day in the honeysuckle vines over the rear galleries and the side porch, the breeze swept back and forth through the dim, perfumed, wide spaces of the house, which seemed expanded, with all the doors open. Sometimes he attributed the change to the tempered light, for all the trees were in full leaf, and the deeply umbrageous boughs transmitted scarce a beam to the windows, once so sunny; much of the time, too, the shutters were partially closed. And though the children flitted about like little fairies, in their thin white dresses, and Mrs. Gwynn, garbed, too, in white, seemed, with her floating draperies, in the transparent green twilight, like some ethereal dream of youth and beauty, there was a pervasive sense of despondency, of domestic discomfort, of impending disaster. Sometimes he attributed the change to one or two untoward chances, a revelation of the real character of war that happened to be presented to the observation of the household. The "ladies" came clamoring in one day, all wide-eyed and half distraught. With that relish of horror characteristic of ignorance, a negro woman, a visitor of Aunt Chaney's, had detailed to them the sentence of a soldier to be shot for some military crime—shot, as he knelt on his own coffin. Presently they heard the music of the band playing a funeral march along the turnpike as the poor wretch was taken out with a detail from the city limits; then, only the drum, a terrible sound, a dull, muffled thud, at intervals, that barely timed the marching footfall, while the victim was in the midst! And still the vibration of the mournful drum, seeking out every responsive nerve of terror within the shuddering children!
Their painful, tearless cries, their clinging hands, their frantic appeals for help for the doomed creature—would no one help him!—were most pathetic.
And though Leonora could shut the windows and gravely explain, then tell a story and divert the moment,—they were so young, so plastic, so trustful,—no ingenuity could find a satisfactory method to account for the anti-climax of the tragedy, when within the hour came the same detail, marching briskly back along the turnpike, with fife and drum playing a waggish tune. The wide, daunted eyes of the children, their paling cheeks, their breathless silence, annotated the lesson in brutality, in the essential heartlessness of the world, except for the tutored graces of a cultivated philanthropy. For a long time one or the other would wake in the night to cry out that she heard the muffled drum,—they were taking the man out to shoot him, kneeling on his coffin,—and again and again would come the plaintive query, "And is nobody, nobody sorry?"