Volume 4 — CHAPTER XXIX.
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ON GUARD.
It was nearly two weeks from the unsuccessful attack upon Island Battery, the fifth and most disastrous that had been made. The morning after it the soldiers, sore over their defeat, had listened sullenly to the shouts of victory from within the French lines. Since then the combined attack by land and sea, planned and eagerly wished for by the two commanders, had been deferred from day to day. But Pepperell was not idle, and he was unable to understand despair. To him a repulse was the starting point of a new attempt. But now, with half his camp in hospital, with French and Indians threatening him in the rear, and the great battlements of Louisburg still formidable, he dared not risk an assault that, if unsuccessful, would further dispirit the army, and might be fatal. He had sent to Governor Shirley for ammunition and re-inforcements, and he had still the resource of sounding away with all his guns, for which, by borrowing, he could find powder and balls. He availed himself of this privilege with a persistence that after the city had surrendered he was able to see had not been useless.
The West gate had long since been demolished, the citadel more than once injured by shot, and as to the city itself, streets of it were in ruin. But Island Battery still held its own and kept the fleet away from the city, the soldiers sickened, and the French governor held out. The incessant cannonade went on until sometimes the men wondered how it would seem not to hear bursting shells. There had been sorties and repulses, and though not much fighting, enough to prove the temper of the men. One day Elizabeth, looking across at a fascine battery where the enemy's fire was hottest in return, discovered Archdale standing in the most exposed position, watching and giving orders with an imperturbable face.
So the siege went on, with brave resistance on one side, and on the other with that invincible determination that makes its way through greater obstacles than stone walls. The weather was magnificent in spite of the fogs at sea that sometimes made it impossible to go from shore to ship. Edmonson lay tossing on his bed in the hospital. He had been badly wounded in the attack, and his feverish mind retarded his recovery. As had been said, he had learned of Katie Archdale's engagement, not through Lord Bulchester, for that was the last thing that the nobleman would have told him, but through a correspondent in Boston to whom he had made it worth while to keep him informed of his lordship's movements.
Edmonson's wound was painful, and his compensation did not come. Nancy, not Elizabeth, was his nurse. Occasionally the latter spent half an hour beside him when her maid was resting or was busy with others, but then, although she ministered to his physical comfort, her mind seemed always elsewhere, often where her eyes wandered, to some private whose suffering was greater than his.
"I wish I had been the worst wounded man here," he said to her one day.
"Why?" she asked bringing her eyes back to him. And then before he could answer, she added: "Your wound is bad enough; you will not get well until you are more quiet. Be a little more patient."
"Patient!" he cried, half raising himself and falling back with a groan. "You are cruel. Patient! with the vision of delight always floating before me, never turning back to look at me or smile upon me. Patient! in torment. Perhaps you would be. Submission is not a constitutional virtue of mine."
"It's being a virtue at all," returned Elizabeth, "depends upon whether we submit to men or to God." If any other lips had spoken the Divine name, Edmonson would have sneered openly. As it was, he lay silent, looking out at the speaker through half-veiled eyes. This tantalizing woman always turned his words into impersonalities. Her power had roused his will to its utmost to make her feel his own. How far had he succeeded, that she would condescend to stay with him when there was no one else to do it and he needed attention? It was because the surgeon would soon be here to look after his wounds and would need help, that she was sitting now, fanning him gently and glancing toward the door of the tent.
"You are very impatient to have Waters come," he said.
"Yes, a great many others need me."
"Not half so much as I do," he began. "Your presence soothes me," he added hastily.
"It is the sort of effect that a nurse ought to have," she answered.
He was silent again. He would have given half the expected years of his life to know if ever so little of her indifference were feigned. He gave himself an impatient toss. Why had he come to this siege at all? He was not sure now that if he had accomplished his object, or should yet do it, the reward would come. He had known women that in Elizabeth's place would like to show their power of torture; but she scarcely deigned to glance at him, and tortured him a thousand times more. Why had Archdale thrown his arm about so clumsily and saved his life? So good an appointment was not likely to make itself again; he must have a hand in framing the next. And if worst came to worst as to absence of chance, he could still pick a quarrel over the clumsiness by challenging it as intention. Yet he was afraid that Archdale was too much of a Puritan to think of duelling.
"Don't tire yourself fanning me," he said. "Talk to me a little."
"I have nothing to say," answered Elizabeth. For it happened that she also was remembering that night in the boat as she had heard of it, and it seemed hard to her that she should be obliged to render Edmonson the smallest service, yet he had been brave in the attack, and had been wounded in fair fight against the enemy. Her first thought that night of the attack, on seeing him borne in, had been that Archdale had given the wound in self-defence. She was humiliated by feeling that her wealth had been played for like a stake by Edmonson. For she had not yet come to confessing to herself what flashed across her mind sometimes. Two years ago Edmonson's approval had seemed to her a desert beyond her talents; now his admiration displeased her,—there was an element of appropriation in it. Where Elizabeth prized regard she could not condescend to woo it; where she did not prize it, it seemed to her, if openly given, almost an impertinence. Stephen had been right when in the midst of his anger at her pride he had felt that love would awake new powers in her, that she could be magnificent in action and in devotion. He had been very human, too, in the breath of wild desire to see her at her best that had swept through him. But the desire slept again as suddenly as it had waked, and the mists of indifference settled about him once more.
Edmonson dared not speak. If he offended Elizabeth he should not see her again, except at a distance as real as the intangible space always between them now. And if he were silent, he might yet win, some day.
"At last!" she smiled, and rose to meet the doctor with an alacrity that made Edmonson bite his under lip hard. She thought that dressing the wound took a long time that evening, that the physician had never been so slow before, nor the patient so fractious. But to Edmonson it seemed as if she vanished like a vision.
At last she was in the open air, under the stars, and refreshed by the breeze. She stood looking out to sea, but there was an expression of trouble on her face, that the air could not blow away.
A voice said, "Good evening," and, turning, she saw Archdale beside her. She asked him if he were on guard that evening.
"Yes," he answered. "You must be very tired, cooped up in that hot place for so many hours," he went on. "Shall we walk down to the shore and back, for a change. I'm sorry that I can't suggest any variations in the route. But we will stop at the brook and I will get you some fresh water."
She took a step, then hesitated.
"But I thought you were on guard," she said.
"So I am, especially detailed by our commander-in-chief to look after the comfort and welfare of a certain gentleman, a civilian in name, but so active an inspector of military operations that I cannot often keep track of him unless I'm under fire myself, and also the welfare of two volunteer nurses who are in great danger of letting their zeal outrun their strength. No, I am wrong; I am in charge of only one nurse; she takes care of the other. It is you whom the General has in mind." Never was Archdale's tact finer and more opportune. After the smouldering passion of Edmonson, felt if not yet confessed to herself, the ease and safety of this companionship seemed to her like the difference between the air of the tents hot and heavy with unhealthy breaths, and the salt wind that came to her softly now, but with invigorating freshness.
"I haven't the least idea where my father is," she said. "I suppose he is so used to business that he must have always something on hand."
"He is with the General now," he said.
"There is one walk I wish you would invite me to take," said Elizabeth, as they sauntered away. "Into the city, I mean." And for a moment she forgot the cost of victory in its exultation.
"I will," he answered. "Will you come, then?"
"Certainly."
They reached the brook and followed it up a little distance above the camp. Elizabeth sat down upon the bank, and Archdale filled his cup and brought it to her. She examined it by the dim light.
"I see that it is silver, and chased," she said. "But I can't make out the figures upon it."
"The Archdale arms," he answered. "I brought the cup with me. It's my canteen." She drank and gave it back to him.
"Thank you," she said. As she spoke, a shot rose high in air and ended its parabola in the heart of the doomed city. It seemed as if a cry uprose. Elizabeth shuddered. "How dreadful it is!"
"You will never forget it," he answered.
"No; no one who has been here ever can." She had risen, and they were walking down toward the shore. Her fatigue, or her mood, gave her an unusual gentleness of manner. As Stephen Archdale walked beside her he tried to imagine Katie as Elizabeth was now, with a background of suffering, with trial and daring, perhaps death before, and failed. He looked at Elizabeth, dimly seen under the starlight, now suddenly brought sharply into view by the flare of cannon, weary, glad of the General's thoughtfulness, without a suspicion that her present companion had suggested it, taking the rest that came to her and enjoying it as simply as a child would do, yet radiant at moments in the presage of national success, or pale with a glow of sublime faith at the efficacy of the sacrifice that was being offered up for her country. She seemed in harmony with the nature about her and the earnestness, perhaps tragedy, of her surroundings. Katie could not have been at home here; it was not because she had been brought up in luxury and laughter, for so had Elizabeth. It was because there was in the latter something responsive to the great realities of life. Did Katie lack this? He drew a quick breath at the thought. Elizabeth turned to him suddenly.
"Is your arm quite well yet?" she asked.
"Quite well, thank you."
"Not even a twinge left?"
"Not one."
"I thought there was then," she said.
"Oh, no, that was my conscience. Are you a good doctor for that? Shall I try you?"
"No; thank you; my own is not clear enough."
"Isn't it?" he said. "Then I think the rest of us had better give up in despair."
She made an impatient movement, and said, "Was that Captain Edmonson's ball? You did not tell me, but I guessed it."
"Yes. At first I thought it had only grazed my sleeve. But it was really very little." Archdale, bringing up the wounded on that night of the repulse, had said nothing of being wounded himself, and Elizabeth, meeting him three days afterward with his arm in a sling, had been assured that he was ashamed to speak of such a scratch.
They sat down upon the rocks and talked for a time about the siege and the soldiers, and even about things at home, away from this strange life, but never about what had happened to themselves, and never one word of Katie. Elizabeth seemed to be resting. Archdale thought that she found it pleasant enough, too. But more than once she turned her face in the direction of the hospital, and he knew that she was thinking of her duties there. He must find some way to keep her a little longer. This hour must not be gone yet. What story could he tell her? If he did not begin, in a moment she would get up from that comfortable niche in the rock, and say that it was time to go back to her patients, and then it would be too late.
"I think I never told you," he began, "how Mr. Edmonson's portrait, my great-grandfather's, came into that hiding-place? Would you care to hear?"
"Very much, if it is not too much family history for you to tell me."
He smiled. "I must begin a good way back, as far as with my grandfather's youth," he said. "I am afraid it was a wild one. He was handsome, and gay, and rich, well-born, too, though not of the Sunderland Archdales, as I had always supposed. He must have said this when he took his own name again after his year of hiding as a criminal from justice. But I don't think that he ever meant crime; it was an irregular duel. I think his adversary's first shot hit him in the shoulder, and at the second, for they were to fire twice, he rushed up to his opponent in a fury of pain, perhaps, and fired at close range. The man fell dead. I don't know how they tell the story in Portsmouth, but it's not worse than that, I suppose."
"It's something like that, I think," she said.
"Pleasant to go back where we've always been so,—well, so esteemed; I mean that the name has been. But I may not go back," he added.
She made no answer for a moment; then she said, "Captain Edmonson is like that."
"But worse," he answered.
"Yes, worse."
"Is his wound doing well?" questioned Archdale.
"It is healing, but very slowly."
"Next time he will not fail of his mark," said the young man.
"Perhaps the next time his mark will be the enemy," she answered. "He has had time to think." Her companion gave an eager glance. "Is she teaching him something?" he wondered. "What?" How could she teach him not to care for her? His pulses quickened. He altered his position a little, which brought him by so much nearer. "But tell me about the portrait," said Elizabeth.
Archdale told the story, the outlines of which Elizabeth had given to Mrs. Eveleigh. But he told it with so many details that it seemed new to her. "Edmonson insists that the nobleman killed in this duel was a distant relative of Sir Temple Dacre," he said, as he finished the account of the flight and the taking of the portrait.
He told of its careful concealment afterwards lest it should identify them, and how, when the daughter's eyes rested upon it, she had a dread of discovery, that amounted almost to a sense of guilt.
"Poor woman!" said Elizabeth, "with the loss of her father and her child, she could not have been very happy."
Her listener recalled that the speaker at one time in her life had not considered the loss of a husband in any other light than a great satisfaction. But he went on to explain that after his grandmother's death, the portrait had been concealed where Elizabeth had discovered it. "My mother knew nothing of it," he said, "but my father had seen it before. He told me so after that day," he added, remembering that Elizabeth had heard Colonel's denial of any knowledge of the portrait. "He knew whom it was a picture of, I mean, and that we were not the Sunderland Archdales, but nothing of Edmonson's rights; and he had looked at the portrait so little that he never perceived the likeness to Edmonson until we all did. Edmonson, you know, was in search of this portrait. He had heard of it from his father, who passed as the child of the old man's only son, who died in India at about the same time that the baby and nurse came to the grandfather's. My grandmother Archdale besought her father to take care of the child until she could send for it, and he was better than her request. I suppose that he could not bear to give up both his children and he hated his son-in-law. Edmonson's father did not know his real name until after the elder Edmonson's death. Then the nurse told him the story. But at that time he was twenty-five; married, and established in his home, with no desire to change, or to share his possessions. Gerald learned the truth only when he came of age, and his capacity for getting through with money made him think that something ought to be made out of his colonial relatives. He had spent his own moderate fortune before he came here. He showed his character in his way of going to work," finished Archdale, contemptuously. "He could not believe that anybody would have honesty enough not to defeat his claim unless he could clinch his proofs instantly."
"It was a cowardly way of doing it," said Elizabeth slowly.
"Yes," he answered, and looked at her, wondering if he should learn what she was thinking about, for it seemed as if she had only half finished her sentence.
"Nothing seems to me stranger than the difference between people in the same family," she said at last, almost more to herself than to him. There was something so utterly impersonal in her tone that she seemed to be setting forth a general trite observation rather than comparing Edmonson with any of his relatives. And it was evident that, if she thought of her listener at all, this was the way in which the remark was meant for him. And yet—Then he heard Elizabeth saying that she must go back.
"Poor Melvin is dying," she said. "He probably will not live through the night. I promised to take down some messages for him. He began to give them to me, but was so exhausted that I had to leave him to rest. But I must not leave him too long, and then there are the others." Stephen helped her down from the rock as she spoke, and they went together along the beach and up the path from the shore, talking as they went. She told him some of the things that the men needed most, and asked his advice and his help toward getting for them what was possible. "I cannot go to the General for these; I cannot put any more burdens upon him," she said. Archdale told her all that he could, and then for a few minutes they walked on in silence. At the hospital she stopped and turned to him.
"Thank you," she said. Then, as he was about to answer, she added hastily, "I think that experience like this is good for us, for every one I mean; it opens up the world a little and shows so much suffering besides one's own. It's a help to get at the proportions of things. Don't you think so?" The appeal in her voice was an exquisite note of sympathy.
Stephen knew that all his life long it had been his way, as it had been that of the other Archdales, to consider his own joys and sorrows not only of more relative but of more actual importance than those of the people about him. He looked at Elizabeth, royal as she stood, full of compassion for him, but with her hand already stretched out to draw back the canvas which separated her from that presence of death in which live and grow, watered by tears, all human sympathies. It seemed as if she always touched some chord in him untouched by others. Was it the truth that she spoke that thrilled him so? He perceived nothing clearly except the one thing that he uttered.
"Yes," he said, "I am glad I came,—glad for my own sake, I mean. Be it for joy or sorrow, for life or death, I am glad that I came."
She drew back the curtain of the tent. He bowed and turned away.