Maude had gained her point, and with Mrs. Tunbridge, who had a soft, kind heart, she hastened to make ready a large, airy chamber, somewhat remote from the rooms occupied by the family and their frequent guests. It was not the best room in the house, but he would be safer there than elsewhere, and Maude made it as inviting as possible, by pulling the bed out from the corner to the centre of the room, covering the plain stand with a clean, white towel, and the table with a gaily-colored shawl of her own. Then with Hetty and one of Hetty’s sons she started for the cabin, followed by the Squire himself. Since the war began he had not seen a Yankee, and curiosity as much as anything took him to Tom Carleton, whom he assailed with a string of epithets, telling him “to see what he’d got by making war on people so much better than himself. Good enough for you,” he continued, as, assisted by Hetty and Claib, Tom tried to walk up the winding path, with Maude in front and the Squire in the rear. “Yes, good enough for you, if you die like a dog, and I dare say you will. Fevers go hard with you Bunker Hill chaps. Claib, you villain, you are letting him fall. Don’t you see he hasn’t strength to walk? Carry him, you rascal!” And thus changing the nature of his tirade the Squire thrust his cane against Tom’s back by way of assisting him up the hill.
He was human if he was not quite consistent, and his face was very red, and he was very much out of breath when the house was reached at last, and Tom was comfortably disposed in bed.
“For thunder’s sake, Hetty, take that grey, niggery thing off from him,” the Squire said, pointing to the coarse shirt Tom had thought so nice, when he exchanged it for his dirty uniform. “If you women are going to do a thing, do it decent. Arthur’s shirts won’t fit him, I reckon, for Arthur ain’t bigger than a pint of cider, but mine will. Fetch him one, and for gracious sake souse him first in the bath-tub. He needs it bad, for them prison pens ain’t none the neatest according to the tell.”
In spite of his aversion to the Boston Yankees, the Judge had taken the ordering of this one into his own hands, and it was to him that Tom owed the refreshing bath which did him so much good, and abated the force of the fever, which nevertheless ran high for many days, during which time Maude nursed him as carefully as if he had been her brother. Arthur was absent when the moving occurred, but when he found that it was done, and the Yankee was actually an inmate of his father’s house, he concluded to make the best of it, merely remarking that “they would be in a pretty mess if the story got out of their harboring a prisoner.”
The Judge knew that, and in fancy he saw his house burned down, and himself, perhaps, ridden on a rail by his justly incensed neighbors. The fear wore upon him terribly, until a new idea occurred to him. Maude, as everybody knew, had long been talking of going back to Tennessee, and what more natural than for Paul Haverill to send an escort for her in the person of some cousin or other, who was foolish enough to fall sick immediately after his arrival. This was a smart thought; and as that very day at least a dozen people called at the Cedars, as the Judge called his place, so the dozen were told of “John Camp,” sick abed up stairs, “kind of cousin to Maude, and sent to see her home, by her Uncle Paul.”
“Right smart chap,” the Judge said, feeling amazed at the facility with which he invented falsehoods when once he began. “Been a guerrilla there in the mountains, and done some tall fightin’, I reckon.”
This was the Judge’s story, which his auditors believed, wondering, some of them, why the visitor should occupy that back chamber in preference to the handsome rooms in front. Still they had no suspicion of the truth. “John Camp” was accepted as a reality, and kind inquiries were made after his welfare, as, day after day, the fever ran its course, and Maude De Vere bent over him, bathing his forehead, smoothing his pillows, and brushing his hair, her white fingers insinuating queer fancies into his brain, as, half unconscious, he felt their touch upon his face, and saw the soft eyes above him.
At first Arthur had kept aloof from Tom, but as the latter grew better, he yielded to Maude’s entreaties and went in to see him, feeling intuitively that he was in the presence of a gentleman as well as of a superior. He could not dislike him, for there was something about Tom Carleton which disarmed him of all prejudice, and many a quiet, friendly talk the two had together on the all-absorbing topic of the day.
“He is a splendid fellow, if he is a Yankee,” was Arthur’s mental verdict, “and fine looking, too,—finer a hundred times than I,” and then there crept into his heart a fear lest Maude should think as he did, and ere he was aware of it, he found himself fiercely jealous of one who was at his mercy, and whom, if he chose, he might have removed so easily.