CHAPTER VIII
AS A MAN THINKETH IN HIS HEART
When Mary recovered consciousness, it was to find herself lying in Nannie's own bed and her friend beside her. For a moment, she did not remember what had happened, and then the full flood tide of recollection swept over her mind. She buried her head on Nannie's bosom and sobbed out her story.
"Never mind," said Nannie, "never mind, you're going to come here and stay with me, that's what you are going to do. No hard-hearted fathers are going to bother you, that's what they're not."
Say what you will, there is always something of the child left in every woman, and though the soft-hearted girl talked and cooed to Mary as she would have done to a restless child, the heart-broken woman was soothed by it.
"Don't you think father ought to understand, Nannie? It isn't because Robert is a copper-head or a rebel, whichever he is, that I love him, but in spite of it."
"Mary," said Nannie, and her voice was meditative and her face dreamy, "don't you know there never was a man yet who knew how or why a woman loved?" A new wisdom, a half playful wisdom though it was, seemed to have come to the girl. Some women never grow clear-sighted until their eyes are opened to the grey form of an oncoming sorrow. Nannie was of this class. "But," she went on laughing, "it's all the fault of Father Adam. Men are so much the sons of their fathers, and it all comes of giving him the first woman while he was asleep and not letting him know when nor how."
"And yet men do love," said Mary seriously.
"Oh, of course they love, but—" the girls' eyes met and both of them blushed. "It won't last long anyhow, Mary, so what's the use of being sad? Let's talk about them." Nannie cuddled down close to the bed.
"About whom?" was the deceitful question.
"Oh, you minx, you know whom. What's the use of asking? I wonder where Tom is to night?"
"It's hard telling, they've been delaying them so much along the road."
"I don't think it's right at all. They rushed them off toward Washington, and I think they ought to be allowed to get there. How's a man going to distinguish himself if he can't get anywhere within sight of the enemy?"
"I haven't your spirit, Nannie, I wish I had. I forget all about distinction. I only wonder how it's all going to turn out, and if those I love are coming back to me."
"Oh, Mary, don't be like that. Of course, they're coming back, Tom and Rob and all of them, and we're going to be happy again, and there won't be any such names called as copperhead and rebel and abolitionist. Let me show you what I've made for Tom. I'd have given it to him before he went away, but it was all so sudden. Oh, my!" and for an instant the girl dropped her chin upon her hands and sat staring into Mary's eyes without seeing her. Then she sprang up and darted away. In a few minutes she returned bearing with her some mysterious piece of feminine handiwork over which the two fell into the sweet confidences so dear to their age and sex.
Nannie, light and frivolous as she seemed, had a deep purpose in her mind. She saw clearly that the serious, not to say, morbid cast, of Mary's character, would drive her to lay too much importance upon her father's act and so perhaps, let it prove more injurious to her than was necessary. Without Mary's depth, she saw more clearly than Bradford Waters' daughter that a little space of madness was at hand, and every deed had to be judged not by its face alone, but by its face as affected by the surrounding atmosphere, just as the human countenance shows ghastly in one light and ruddy in another, without really changing. So she strove to draw her companion's thought away from her sorrows and to avert the dangers she anticipated. She succeeded only in part. After awhile, Mary fell into a light sleep, but on the morrow she awoke with a raging fever. The strain on her nerves had been too great and she had succumbed to it.
At the first intimation of danger to his daughter, Nannie had bid her father hasten to notify Bradford Waters.
"It's no use," said Nathan Woods, "Waters is more set in his views than any man I ever saw. If he believes that he had reason to send her out of his house, not even death itself could take her back there unless those reasons were destroyed. I know Bradford Waters, and he's a hard man." But the young woman insisted, and, as usual, had her way. Her father went to Waters. There was not much tact or finesse about his approach. He found his neighbor sitting down to a lonely breakfast, and depositing his hat on the floor, after an embarrassed silence, he began.
"Kind of lonesome, eh?"
"These are no times for men to be lonesome. The Lord makes every loyal man a host in himself."
"That's good, and yet it isn't the kind of host that crowds on each other's toes and cracks jokes to keep the time a-going."
"You're irreverent, Nathan, and besides, this is no time to be cracking jokes. The hour has come when the cracking of rifles is the only thing."
"I didn't mean to be irreverent, and I'm afraid you don't understand. I've come for your own good, Waters. The little girl sent me. Don't you think you're doing wrong?"
"No, as the god of battles is my judge, no!" Waters' eyes were blazing, and he had forgotten his breakfast.
"Your daughter is at my house, and she is sick, very sick."
"I have no daughter."
"God gave you one."
"He also said that a house divided against itself cannot stand."
"What of that?"
"My house is my son Tom and myself."
"What of your daughter, Mary?"
Waters turned upon him his sad bright eyes, sad in spite of their hardness.
"If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off," he said, with a slashing gesture.
"That's not right," said Nathan Woods. "It's not right, I say, to be using the Scripture to stand between you and your daughter."
"I have no daughter. The daughter I had has gone out after other gods than mine."
The old New England fanaticism, the Puritanical intolerance, was strong in the man.
"My God," exclaimed his opposer, "quit mutilating the Bible to bolster up your own pride. Mary's sick, she's sick enough to die, maybe."
"If she die away from home, it is God's will, perhaps his punishment," said Waters solemnly.
"Is it Jepthah and his daughter?"
"No, it is David and Absalom."
Nathan Woods got up; he looked long and hard at his old friend. Then, taking his hat from the floor, he started for the door. There he paused.
"And the war has done this," he said slowly. "Well, Bradford, I say damn the war."
The lonely father sat down again to his breakfast, but the food disgusted him. Mary sick and away from home. What would Tom say? What would Tom have done? But then the memory of the whole wrong she had done him and her brother came back upon the old man, and he shut his teeth hard. It was a crime. It was treason. Let her go her way and die among the people who were willing to condone her faults. He could not. It was not flesh and blood, but soul and spirit that counted now. It was not that the South had touched his body, and that Mary had sided with them. It was that a rebellious section had touched not his soul, but the soul of his country, and his daughter had bade them God-speed. This was the unforgivable thing. This was the thing that put the girl outside the pale of parental pardon. So thinking, he rose from the table and went out of the disordered house.
Dorbury was a town of just the size where any one's business is every one's else. So it was an impossibility that the breach between Mary and her father should long remain a secret. A half-dozen neighbors knew the story an hour after the doctor had left Nathan Woods' door, and had told it in varying degrees of incorrectness.
One gossip said that Waters' daughter had sought to elope with Robert Van Doren, had even got as far as the railway station, when her father had found her and brought her back. She was now imprisoned at the Woods', with Nannie to watch her.
Another knew on good authority that Mary had denounced the Union, declared her intention of doing all she could to aid the Confederacy, and had then fled from home to escape from her father's just wrath. Anice Crowder's story of the affair in the sewing-circle gave color to this view of the case.
Still, another, however, told how Robert Van Doren's sweetheart, mad for love of him, and crazed at the choice he had made, went wandering about the streets until friendly hands took her to Nannie's door. One man had helped to take her there.
So the rumors flew from lip to lip like shuttlecocks and the story grew with the telling of it.
It would have been strange then, if it had not reached the ears of the Van Dorens. Indeed, it came to them on the first morning. Stephen Van Doren chuckled.
"You're making a great stir for one poor copperhead," he said to his son. "You've made the wolf's stir in the Waters' sheepfold. If you'll only cause the Yankees as much trouble when you have a musket in your hand, I shall have reason to be proud of my son."
Robert turned angrily upon his father.
"I wish you wouldn't talk that way about the matter, father. I don't like all this talk about Mary, and I wish I could stop it. If the girl is suffering on account of loyalty to me, God bless her. It's as little as my father could do to speak respectfully of her sacrifice."
"You do not understand me, Robert, I do not laugh at the girl. It is at her father and his folly that I laugh."
"My love for his daughter makes the father sacred to me."
"It must be a very strong love that makes Bradford Waters sacred."
"My love for Mary is deeper and stronger than any political prejudice that you or I might have."
"Very well, Bob, very well, go your own way. My business is not with your love, but with your politics; if the latter be all right I shall not worry about the former."
Robert Van Doren spent little time after hearing of Mary's illness, but betook himself immediately to her door. Nannie met him and drew him inside.
"I am so sorry," she began before he could tell his errand, "but you cannot see her. She is very sick and excitable. Oh, Robert, isn't it awful, this war and all that it is bringing to us?"
"I wish it were over. Is Mary delirious?"
"At times, and when she isn't, we could almost wish she were; she is so piteous."
"Her father has been hard upon her."
"Yes, that's because he's delirious too. Every one is mad, you and I and all of us. When shall we come to our senses?"
"God knows. Will you give Mary this?" He drew off his glove and laid it in Nannie's hand. "Tell her it is forbidden me to say good-bye to her, but I leave this as a pledge, and when I may, I shall come back and redeem it."
There were tears on Nannie's face as he turned toward the door. With an impulsive movement, she sprang forward and laid her hand on his arm. "You may kiss me," she said, "and I will bear it to her, and place it on her lips as you would have done."
Robert paused, and bent over her lips as he might have done over Mary's, and then with a wave of his hand, he was gone and the door behind him closed. Nannie turned and went to Mary's room where she laid the glove on the pillow beside the pale face of the unconscious girl. Her brow was fevered and her hair dishevelled, and every now and then incoherent words forced themselves between her parched lips.
"I might have let him see her for a minute, but it was better not to. He would only have gone away with the misery of it in his heart." Then Nannie stooped and kissed her friend's lips. "There, Mary," she said, "it's from him. Oh, my dear, dear girl, if your father could see you now, I believe even his heart would melt towards you."
But Bradford Waters was not to see her then. With bowed head and slow steps, eaten by grief, anger and anxiety, he made his way towards the tobacco warehouse where he spent a large part of the day among his employees. The place had never seemed quite the same to him since the first day Tom had been absent from his desk. He was thinking of him now as he went cheerlessly along. What a head for business the boy had. How much more of a success he would be than ever his father had been. How the men loved him already. It was no wonder that Mary—but Mary——— He checked his thoughts and set his teeth hard. There was no Mary, no sister any more. She had broken the tie that bound her to Tom and him. He said this to himself because he did not know how women wrench and tear their hearts to keep from breaking ties that war with each other.
He was absorbed in such thoughts when some one hailed him from a doorway.
"What news?" said a gentleman stepping out and joining him in his walk.
"No news, except of delay," said Waters in a dissatisfied tone.
"Where is the gallant First now?"
They were already the "Gallant First" although they had not yet got within powder smelling distance of the enemy.
"The gallant First is being delayed and played with somewhere between Columbus and Washington."
"Why should that be?"
"It all comes of electing a gentleman governor."
"Why now, Waters," said Davies, smilingly. "There is surely no objection to a governor's being a gentleman?"
"There's some objection to his being nothing else."
"You remind me a good deal of the Methodists and the devil; whatever bad happens, they are never at a loss to know where to put the blame. I sometimes think that maybe the devil is painted a little black, and likewise, maybe, Dennison isn't to blame for everything that goes wrong in the handling of this situation."
Waters took this sally with none too good a grace. Davies was suspected of being luke-warm in the Union cause, and some had even accused him of positive Southern sympathies. He was a wealthy, polished, easy-going man, and his defence of Governor Dennison, whose acts every one felt free to blame at that time, was more because he sympathized with that gentleman's aristocratic tastes and manners than because he wished delay to the progress of the Union's forces.
"So you think it's Dennison who's delaying the troops, do you?" he went on in a light, bantering tone.
"I think nothing about it, I only know that our boys went rushing away to the state capital, and under the impression that Washington was menaced, were sent flying east half equipped and totally unprepared for the conflict, and I do know that despite their haste, they have not reached their destination yet."
"For which, of course, the devil is to blame?"
"Whoever is to blame, this is no time for a banqueting, bowing, speech-making governor. We need a man of action in the chair now, if we ever did. Look how things are going at Columbus. Troops flocking there, no provision made for them. Half of them not knowing whether they are to be accepted or not and the dandy who calls himself the chief executive sits there and writes letters. My God, what have we come to!"
"Have you ever thought that even a governor needs time to adjust himself to a great crisis? Is it not true that the authorities of the general government insisted on the regiment in which your son's company is placed going directly to Washington?"
"Then why are they not there instead of dallying about, heaven knows where, while a lot of other fellows are being quartered at the Columbus hotels at extortionate prices which the tax-payers must pay?" "Are you measuring your patriotism by dollars and cents?"
"I'm measuring my patriotism by the greatest gift that any one could make to his country, his only son. Have you an equal measure?"
"No, but I have some confidence in my state and my country's officers, and that is worth something in a time like this. Now don't get hot in the collar, Waters, but you wait awhile and give Dennison and the government time."
"Yes, wait, wait, that's been the cry right along. Wait until every road this side the capital of the country is blocked and from Maryland and Virginia the rebels march victorious into Washington. Don't talk to me of waiting, Davies, we have waited too long already, that's what's the matter."
Davies laughed lightly as he turned down the street which led to his own office.
Bradford Waters' intemperance was a great index of the spirit of the time as it was manifested in Ohio. Governor Dennison was too slow for the radicals; too swift for the conservatives, and incompetent in the opinion of both. Nothing could happen, except what was good, nothing could go wrong but that he was blamed for it. All the men who volunteered could not be accepted and Dennison was to blame. The soldiers were delayed enroute and Dennison was to blame. Rations were scarce and prices high and Dennison was to blame, and so all the odium that attaches to a great war which strikes a people unprepared for it, fell upon the head of the hapless executive.