“If it be your pleasure.”
And that, it may be thought, should have satisfied me, who an instant before had despaired. But so presumptuous is success I was already jealous, already exigent. “Ah, not as a debt?” I cried. “If you cannot give me your love, Con?”
“I cannot,” she answered with smiling eyes. “It has been given to you this month past.” Then as she hung back from me, blushing divinely, “They have touched Tom’s black hands,” she said.
“God bless them for it!” I answered.
Later she told me that she had loved me from the hour I had kept silence as to her part in the outrage at the Bluff. “I was ashamed, oh, I was horribly ashamed of it,” she said. “I knew that neither my father nor my god-father would have done that! Yet, I am not sure that it was not earlier than that? I think it was your mention of the soldier’s wife when you were yourself in—in danger—that clung to my memory, and would not be shaken off, and—”
“Poor Simms!” I said. “And I once envied him!”
At Camden the Wateree becomes the Catawba, and happiness becomes memory or anticipation, according as you gaze up or down the stream. For there, in a tiny parlor in a white frame house looking on a poplar wood, I parted from Constantia, and left her with the friends who were to see her as far as Rocky Mount on her homeward journey. I fear that they were rebels. But there are things which it is wise to leave sub silentio; the dog that has found a bone does not bark. And my position was delicate.
I felt that position grow more delicate in proportion as, with my face turned towards Winnsboro’, I approached the camp. I was not sad; the future held that which would make amends for present evils. But I knew that I had an unpleasant passage before me, and my conscience was not quite clear. At any rate I had misgivings, and taking care to reach the camp at sunset, and as the guard was changing, I made my way to Paton’s quarters without beat of drum. I was lucky enough to find him before the Provost-Marshal found me.
He shook with laughter when he saw me. “Upon my honor, Major,” he said. “We are all vastly obliged to you! You are a whole company of players in yourself. As the hero-errant who relieves the Distressed Damsel and releases the Beleaguered Knight you fill the stage. The camp is agog with you. The latest about you is that the rebels have hung you from the roof of a remote house in the marshes. And, lo, we are all lamenting you, when in you walk as coolly as if the Dragon at Headquarters, robbed of his prey, were not breathing Court Martials and Firing Parties and the worst threats against you.”