He gave my hand a half-humorous pressure, his head turning neither to right nor to left, dear old Nasmith! He must be past forty now, and they tell me, moreover, that he is a Benedictine monk at Downside: he will care nothing what I say of him. And thus we climbed the balmy downs, back to our lunch at the vicarage, without another word.
OUR LADY OF THE UNION.
The Surgeon and the Chaplain had been bidden to roast beef and mashed potatoes in the great tent; and the former, leaving its pleasant firelight, had come out through the night air a little before taps, to spread himself and his triumphs in the eyes of the officers' mess. The Surgeon was a widower in his early prime, and tenderly condescending to the known ways of women. He talked much of the two who in that camp represented all inscrutable womankind, Miss Cecily Carter and Mrs. Willoughby. They had come from New York on a visit, Braleton being just then in profound quiet. The Surgeon adored Miss Cecily, in which mood he was by no means alone; but he had his own opinion of her sister, the Colonel's wife. "The Sultan has hinges in him, and can unbend," he would say; "but the Sultana—O Jerusalem, my Happy Home!" He had also discovered that the train of trunks at the sutler's, objects of deep and incessant objurgation, were hall-marked "A. W.," and that Miss Cecily came to the war with one hand-bag. His auditors sat long astride their chairs, each in his hood of good government tobacco-smoke. The Adjutant's silver-coated hound was asleep on the boards, still as a little mountain-tarn among thunder-clouds. The gusts of genial mirth were suddenly interrupted from without by the even voice of the orderly: "Sergeant Blanchard is wanted at the Colonel's quarters."
A young man playing chess in the corner arose at once, and followed. All along the company streets, the lamp-light streamed through the chinks in the tents; charming tenors and basses, at the far end, were laying them down and deeing for Annie Laurie; and from the long sheds nigh, in the grove, came the subdued pawing and tossing of the horses. Robert Blanchard saluted, and stood outside in the dark, for the Colonel was in his doorway. "They have sent another commission for you," he said shortly. "You deserve it; your behavior has been admirable, a source of immense pride to me, and to all my men." The Sergeant looked at him with a visible gladness. "I thank you. You know I prefer not to be promoted." "I have humored you no fewer than three times before," resumed the Colonel, in an altered tone; "I can't do it always. You are known; the General has complimented you. The rise of a man of your stamp can't be prevented, even by himself. You are meant, if you live, to move rapidly, and go high. This second-lieutenantship is the lowest step; mount it, in Heaven's name, and don't maunder."
The other hesitated, silent. Then he said: "May I have my condition, if I accept,—may I remain color-bearer?" "I can promise nothing of the kind. I fear it would be unusual, to say the least; it has no precedent in any service that I ever heard of. Don't ask me that again." Blanchard, in sober fashion, brought his hand to his cap. "Good-evening, Colonel." The superior officer was exasperated. "Bob," he exclaimed discursively, "you're a fool. God bless you!"
The drums began, quick and light; it was nine o'clock. The Sergeant went back, cheerful as Cincinnatus refusing empery. Before he confided himself to his blanket, lumped on boughs, he made sure that a fold of old bunting on a provisionary stick was slanted securely against the canvas; for he had a sentimental passion for the flag. When it was hauled down at sunset, it went into his hands until daybreak. He had borne it in the van since his first bloody day at Little Bethel; it had been riddled, stained, smoke-blackened, snapped from its support; but he had never dropped it, not when a minie-ball fizzed through his shoulder, not when, fresh from the hospital, he had fallen face downward from his dying horse, in Beauregard's plunging fire of shell. In this lad of twenty-two there burned a formal loyalty so intense, so rooted in every fibre of his grave character, that his comrades, for whom military routine had lost much of its glamour, loved him for it, envied him, and consistently nagged the life out of him with the nickname of Our Colored Brother, and other nicknames based on other puns more or less felicitous. Because in New York, they had several dear friends in common, the Colonel, on the morning of the ladies' arrival at Braleton, had asked him to lunch with them. "My Sergeant, Adela," so James Willoughby, in his eagles, presented him to the wife of his bosom, "my Sergeant; and such a Sergeant!" For he read in her tacticianary social eye that a Sergeant was a minnow indeed for a Colonel's friend and guest, even if he were a gentleman, a cousin of the Windhursts, and the hero of his corps. And she wondered at him the more that he should be a mere color-bearer; a spirited able-bodied creature two years in the army, with nothing to show for it! He had no explanation to give her, but he had an unaccountable hunger, from the first, to confide his secret to Cecily. He had seen her from a distance, and his heart stood still there in the grass; when he came nearer, it gave him, for a certain reason, the veriest wrench in all his life, such as True Thomas may have felt when the sweet yet awful call came to him at last in the market-place, that it was time to say good-bye to earth, and go back to fairyland; to leave for the things which can never be the things that are. He often found her sewing on a silken tri-color, and working its correct number of stars in a pattern. She had begun it in her father's house, for her brother-in-law's regiment, and none too soon, for the flag in use was aging fast. Robert Blanchard never saw her head bent over that bright glory, filling her lap and falling around her feet, without a tightening of the throat. And when she nodded to him going by, with that candid, affectionate grace which never changed, it reminded him inevitably of something which made him happy and unhappy. He could not remember, he said to himself, when he had not loved her, and yet they had never met until this Virginian winter of 1863.
Cecily had taken up her abode in a wee log-house built for her as an ell from the Colonel's tent, delighting much in its frugalities and small hardships. She was becoming attached to the sights and sounds of camp-life: the tags and tassels, the shining accoutrements, and the endless scouring and brushing thereof; the rosy drummer-boy; the company drills in the rain; the hollow pyramids of the stacked short bayonets; the muddy wells on the bluish and reddish lowlands; the loud sing-song of the little bearded Corporal interruptedly reading David Copperfield to a ring of enraptured privates; the welcome drone of the cook announcing his menu; the arrival of despatches, with the thundering and jingling of the cavalry heard a mile away; even the occasional alarms. The long inactions under McClellan, hateful to her mettlesome brother-in-law and to his men, proved pleasant enough to Cecily; she never lacked entertainment. While Adela was at her accurate toilets, and the Colonel, a severe disciplinarian, busy with his troops, she, active and curiously adventurous, walked or rode about alone.
The nine-hundred-acred Brale house topped the hill not far away; the owner, a fine old planter, lived there with the survivors of his family. Six months before, an infantry regiment had bivouacked on the place. A lieutenant, sent on the reasonable suspicion that a number of escaped Confederates were harbored on the premises, clattered up, with an escort, to demand them. The eldest son, with true sullen Confederate pluck, refused him admission. After no long parley, the infantry lieutenant, losing control of himself, shot him dead: a proceeding, which, when it came to the ears of the authorities, cost the bully his commission. The two other sons, Julian and Stephen, were then in the Southern army; the younger had since perished from fever. To this doomed and outraged household, shut in from the world, hopelessly embittered against the Government in whose name murder and devastation stalked, Colonel Willoughby appeared as a new and strange being. He made it his business to see that there were no trespassings, and that the Brales lived not only in peace, but in comfort. He rode out repeatedly to the picket-lines, where a goodly quantity of commissary supplies, spirits, flour, tobacco, tea, and coffee, and divers other necessaries difficult to obtain, were handed over to the slaves in exchange for the chickens, milk, and eggs. On several occasions, he had ridden as far as the door, once to give the married daughter her pass through the lines; once to bring her little girl, who was ill, some delicacies sent in a hamper from his own home. These things broke the proud Brale hearts. They barely thanked him; his Federal uniform was like a dagger in their eyes. But a while ago, when they heard that his wife and his sister were coming to Braleton from the north, the stately old squire had sent him a royal gift, with a short letter in the style of the last century. The gift was Molly, the beautiful black, famous all over the country for her strength and speed; and on her back was a saddle of magnificent workmanship, with a movable pommel, which might be adjusted to suit the ladies. While these were in camp, therefore, the Colonel rode Messenger, his stocky sorrel, and Adela or Cecily sat majestically enthroned upon the majestic Molly. The former was a horsewoman of experience, erect, neat, orthodox, approved of connoisseurs everywhere. But the regiment was in this, as in other things, all for the favorite; and when she came in sight, (with the dare-devil mare going it, six leaps to a mile,) lying flat forward, like her own cavalrymen, with breathless, laughing face, and hair shaken loose along Molly's mane like the sun on a torrent,—such a cheer as would go up from the distracted Eleventh! Cecily and Molly, in the tingling pine-odorous Braleton air, made a familiar and joyful spectacle.