She sat for an hour thinking and planning. Then she got up and hurriedly scribbled two letters. It was after nightfall, and Agatha had never yet gone into the streets by night. Her terror of that particular form of danger was great. But these letters must be posted at once, and by her own hand. There were no lamp-post mailing-boxes in those half-civilised days, and she must travel many blocks to reach the nearest post-office station. She took up the little pistol which she had so long carried for the purpose of defending her honour by self-destruction, if need should arise, examined its chambers, placed it beneath her cloak, and hurried into the street.
Then, as now, to the shame of what we call our civilisation, no woman could traverse the thoroughfares of a great city after dark and unattended without risk of insult or worse. Then, as now, a costly police force utterly ignored its duty of so vigilantly protecting the helpless that the streets should be as safe to women as to men, by night as well as by day.
During that little walk of a dozen city blocks through streets that the public adequately paid to have securely guarded, Agatha felt far more of fear than she had experienced while facing the canister fire of Baillie Pegram's guns.
She escaped molestation more by good fortune than by any security that police protection afforded or now affords to the wives and daughters of a community that calls itself civilised, and pays princely sums every year for a police protection that it does not get.
One of her letters was addressed to a friend in Baltimore. It gave her the address of Marshall Pollard's friend, the banker, and added:
"On receipt of this you are to telegraph, asking him to find and send you a nurse who speaks French—a Frenchwoman preferred. He will send me, in response to the demand, as Mlle. Roland,—an anagram of my own name. I shall speak nothing but French in your house, and afterward."
To Baillie's doctor she wrote:
"I think I see a way out of your difficulties. Can you not make a new diagnosis of Captain Pegram's case—finding him ill of tuberculosis, or typhoid, or some other wasting malady corresponding with his external appearance, thus concealing the fact that he suffers in consequence of a wound? He speaks French like a Parisian—I suppose he can even dream in that language, as I always do—so for safety and by way of forwarding my plan, you may regard him as a French gentleman who has fallen ill during his travels in America, and come to you for treatment. You are to be very anxious to secure a French nurse for him, and to that end you may write as soon as you receive this, to the gentlewoman whose address in Baltimore is enclosed, asking her to procure such a nurse if she can. I will be that nurse, and will know no English during my stay. This plan will enable me to go to Captain Pegram's bedside without exciting the least suspicion, and, when he is sufficiently recovered to travel, there will be little if any trouble in arranging for his nurse to take the convalescent to New York, and thence to Europe. Once out of the country and well again, he can go to Nassau, and thence to a Southern port on one of the English blockade-running ships. To secure all this we must scrupulously maintain the fiction that he is a Frenchman, and I a French nurse."
Agatha's first care on the next morning was to visit the banker and instruct him as to the part he was to play in the conspiracy, when the telegram should come from Baltimore. That done, she plied her needle nimbly, fashioning caps, aprons and the like, such as French nurses only wore at that time, before there were any trained nurses other than Frenchwomen among us. She was already wearing black gowns, of course, and when she added a jet rosary and a stiffly starched broad white collar to her costume, she had no need to inform anybody that she was a hospital-bred nurse from Paris.
In the little Maryland town where Baillie Pegram lay in a stupor, her advent attracted much curious attention, especially because of the jaunty little nurse's cap she wore, and of her inability to speak English. But this curiosity averted, rather than invited suspicion, as Agatha had intended and planned that it should do.