And perhaps something more than my curiosity. For I could not deny that, handsome and perplexing, cold, yet capable of ardor, she had taken a strong grip upon my thoughts. I could not keep her out of my mind for an hour together. A dozen times a day I caught myself looking for her, listening for the sound of her voice, watching for her appearance. The morning was long, the hour dragged that brought neither the one nor the other. Nay, there were times—I was idle, be it remembered, and crippled—when the desire to bridge the distance between us and to set myself right with her became a passion; when I would have given very much for a smile from the averted face, or a look from the eyes that passed coldly by me.
It was absurd, but I have said I was idle. And yet after all was it so absurd? I compared her with the women whom I had known at home; with the women of fashion with their red and white cheeks, their preposterous headdresses, their insipid talk of routs and the card table; or again with our country-bred hoydens, honest and noisy, with scarce an idea beyond the stillroom or the annual race meeting: and I found that she rivaled the former in dignity and the latter in simplicity. Adorable, inexorable creature, she was well named Constantia! I was glad—such a hold was she getting on my mind—when her father returned, two days later than he had said, and brought news that distracted my thoughts.
The check at King’s Mountain had stopped Lord Cornwallis in his advance on North Carolina. He had fallen back and established himself again at Winnsboro’, so that he was still not more than sixty or seventy miles from us. “If your bone were set, I should send you north, Major,” Wilmer said with a look more than commonly thoughtful. “But I fancy that your friend, Tarleton, has learned his lesson from Ferguson, and won’t stray far from Headquarters. And now Greene has taken over Gates’s command—”
“Is that so?”
“It is—he won’t leave your people so much time to look about them. I do not think that they will journey as far as this, but if I thought they would, you would have to travel, my friend, fare as you might.”
That with a little more, not to the purpose, was the only talk I had with him for some days. And presently I conceived the idea that this was no accident. I began to suspect that Madam Constantia, not content with sending me to Coventry herself, was bent on keeping him from me. I came even to think that I owed to this desire on her part the fact that I now saw something, though little more, of her. For she would interpose between us rather than let me talk to him. If her father, as he crossed the veranda or came in from the fields had the air of drifting towards me, she was sure to see it, and to draw him aside, sometimes by a word, more often by a look, rarely by speaking to me herself. More than once when he approached me—he was in his cynical way a good-natured man—she appeared so pat to the occasion that I gave her the credit of watching us, and believed that her eyes were upon me more often than I knew.
I fancied even that there was an understanding between them on this point. For when she surprised him in my neighborhood, though he might have stood only to say “Good morning!” or “Good fall weather!” he would wear an air half guilty and half humorous, as of a child caught transgressing. And once when this happened, I had a queer illusion. It seemed to me that the look of amusement that Wilmer shot at the girl, and which I was not meant to catch, transformed his face in the most curious way. It shortened it, vulgarized it, widened it. For a moment I saw him no longer as the shrewd, lean Southerner he was, but as a jovial, easy, smiling person, for all the world like an English yeoman or innkeeper. The fancy lasted for an instant only, and I set it down to the shadow cast by his hat or to a tricky cast of the sunshine as it shimmered through the leaves of the magnolia behind him. But later I thought of it more than once. The change in the man, though passing, was so great that I should not have known him for himself; and it haunted me.
I believe that it was about three days after this, when he was abroad upon the plantation, on which he spent most of his time, that Madam Constantia and I came again to blows. Time lay heavy on my hands—he may be thankful who has never known the aimless hours and long tedium of the prisoner—and though I had no prospect of forwarding letters, I thought that I would amuse myself by learning to write with my left hand. It was not a thing to be done in a moment, but Mammy Jacks provided the means and I fell to the task in the leisurely way of an invalid, now scrawling a few words in round hand, now looking away to the purple distances that reminded me of our Cheviots on a fine October day, and now lazily watching the blacks who were trooping past, bringing in the last of the cotton. It was sunny, it was warm, and the slaves in their scanty white clothes with baskets on their heads formed a picture new to me. I was gazing at it, pen in hand, when the girl came through the veranda, glanced my way, and in a twinkling descended on me like a whirlwind.
She snatched away the paper that lay under my hand and before, taken by surprise, I knew what she was about, she tore it across and across.
“Ungrateful!” she cried. “Have you forgotten your parole, sir? Were Colonel Marion here, you would not dare to do this!”