“He was shot, and besides you never got him. I know you never got nigh enough to him in battle to shoot him.”
“I think you’ll have to go this alone,” said Jacquelin. The Lieutenant admitted himself routed.
Late that evening Jacquelin’s ambulance was toiling up the hill to Red Rock, while the troop of cavalry, sent to keep order in that section, with its tents pitched in the court-house yard under the big trees, were taking a survey of the place they had come to govern. Little Thurston, who, as they rode in, had caught sight of a plump young girl gazing at them from the open door of the old clerk’s office, with mingled curiosity and defiance, declared that it was not half as bad as some places he had been in in the South. At that moment, as it happened, Miss Elizabeth Dockett, the young lady in question, daughter of Mr. Dockett, the old County Clerk, was describing to her mother the little Lieutenant as the most ridiculous and odious-looking little person in the world.
It was night when Jacquelin reached home; but so keen was the watch in those times, that the ambulance had been heard in the dark, so that when he arrived there was quite a crowd on the lawn ready to receive him, and the next moment he was in his mother’s arms.
Sergeant O’Meara, who had been detailed to go on with the ambulance, took back to the court-house an account of the meeting.
“It was wurruth the drive,” he said, “to see ’um whan we got there. An’ if I’d been th’ Gineral himself, or the Captain, they couldn’t ’a’ made more fuss over me. Bedad! I thought they moust tak’ me for a Gineral at least; but no, ut was me native gintilitee. I was that proud of meself I almost shed tears of j’y. The only thing I lacked was some wan to say me so gran’ that could appreciate me. An ould gintleman—a Docther Major Cary—a good Oirish naim, bedad!—was there to say wan of the leddies, and ivery toime a leddy cooms in, oop he gits, and bows very gran’, an’ the leddy bows an’ passes by, an’ down he sets, an’ I watches him out o’ the tail of me eye, an’ ivery toime he gits oup, oup I gits too. An’ I says:
“‘I always rise for the leddies; me mither was a leddy,’ an’ he says, with a verra gran’ bow: ‘Yis,’ he says, ‘an’ her son is a gintleman, too.’ What dy’e think o’ that? An’ I says, ‘Yis, I know he is.’”
Next morning Jacquelin was in a very softened mood. The joy of being free and at home again was tempered by memory of the past and realization of the present; but he was filled with a profound feeling which, perhaps, he himself could not have named. As he hobbled out to the front portico and gazed around on the wide fields spread out below him, with that winding ribbon of tender green, where the river ran between its borders of willows and sycamores, he renewed his resolve to follow in his father’s footsteps. He would keep the place at all sacrifices. He was in this pleasant frame of mind when Hiram Still came around the house. Still had aged during the war, his voice had become more confidential.
As he came up to Jacquelin, the latter, notwithstanding his outstretched hand and warm words, had a sudden return of his old feeling of suspicion and dislike.