"Baynell would never have done that in this world," he declared, "if you had not been there to hear the neighing, too. Why, it stands to reason. The family must have known the horse might whinny at any moment. They relied on his winking at it, and he would have done it if you had not been there. He took that pose of being so regardful of the needs of the service because he has been favoring the Roscoes in every way imaginable. Why, hardly anybody else has a stick of timber left, and every day houses are seized for military occupation, and the owners turned adrift, but I know that when one of his men stole only a plank from Judge Roscoe's fence, he had the fellow tied up by his thumbs with the plank on his back for hours in the sun. That was for the sake of discipline, my dear fellow—not for Judge Roscoe's plank. On the contrary—quite the reverse!"
Seymour wagged his satiric head, unconvinced, and Ashley remembered afterward that he vaguely wished that Baynell would not make so definite a point about these matters, provoking a sort of comment that ordinary conduct could hardly incur. Baynell ought to be in camp.
CHAPTER VIII
Baynell, himself, reached the same conclusion the next evening, but by an altogether different process of reasoning.
He had noticed the unusual stir among the "ladies" early in the afternoon and a sort of festival aspect that the old house was taking on. The parlors were opened and a glow of sunshine illumined the windows and showed the grove from a new aspect—the choicer view where the slope was steep. The river rounded the point of woods, and there was a great stretch of cliffs opposite; beyond were woods again, reaching to the foot-hills that clustered about the base of the distant mountains bounding the prospect. The glimpse seen through the rooms was like a great painting in intense, clear, fine colors, and he paused for a moment to glance at it as he passed down the hall, for all the doors were standing broadly aflare and all the windows were open to the summer-like zephyr that played through the house.
"Oh, Captain Baynell!" cried Adelaide, catching sight of him and gasping in the sheer joy of the anticipation of a great occasion. "The Sewing-Society is going to meet here, and you can come in, too! Mayn't he come in, Cousin Leonora?"
Mrs. Gwynn was filling a large bowl on a centre-table with a gorgeous cluster of deep red tulips, and Baynell noticed that she had thrust two or three into the dense knot of fair hair at the nape of her neck. As she turned around one of the swaying bells was still visible, giving its note of fervid brilliancy to her face. Her dress was a white mull, of simple make—old, even with a delicate darn on one of its floating open sleeves, but to one familiar with her appearance in the sombre garb of widowhood she seemed radiant in a sort of splendor. What was then called a "Spanish waist," a deeply pointed girdle of black velvet, flecked with tiny red tufts, made the sylphlike grace of her figure more pronounced, and at her throat was a collarette of the same material. Her cheeks were flushed. It had been a busy day—with the morning lessons, with the arrangement of the parlors, the array of materials, the setting of the sewing-machines in order, including two or three of the earlier hand-power contrivances, sent in expressly from the neighbors, the baskets for lint,—one could hear even now the whirring of the grindstone as old Ephraim put a keener edge on the scissors. Last but not least Leonora had accomplished the bedizenment of the "ladies."
Adelaide was not born to blush unseen. She realized the solecism that her vanity lured her to commit, yet she said hardily, "Look at me, Captain—I'm got me a magenta sash!"