University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.
MAUDE AND TOM.

IT was then that Maude left him and went back
to the house, where, standing in the door, she
scanned the face and person of the man for
whose safety in part she had pledged her heart and hand.

Tom's tout ensemble was good, and there was about him
a certain air of grace and culture which showed itself in
every movement. A stranger would have trusted him
in a moment, and recognized the true manhood in his
expressive face. And Maude recognized it, as she never

had before, and the contrast between him and Arthur
struck her plainfully.

“If Arthur were more like him, I could love him better,”
she thought, just as the Judge asked the abrupt
question:

“You have a wife, hey?”

“Of course he has,” Maude thought, and still she listened
for the answer.

“My wife died some years ago, before the war broke
out. She was a Mary Williams, a near relative of the
Williamses of Charleston. Perhaps you know them?”

“Know 'em! I'll bet I do!—the finest family in the
State. And you married one of them?” the old Judge
said, his manner indicating an increased respect for the
man who had married a Williams of Charleston.

Maude knew the family, too, or rather knew of them,
and remembered how, some years before, when she was
at St. Mary's, she had heard a Charleston young lady
speaking of a Mrs. Carleton from Boston, who had recently
died, and whose husband had been so kind and
patient and tender, and was “the most perfectly splendid
looking man she ever saw.”

Maude remembered this last distinctly, because it had
called forth a reproof from the teacher who had overheard
it, and who asked what kind of a man “the most perfectly
splendid-looking” one could be. Maude had not thought
of that incident in years, but it came back to her now as
she stood close to the man who had been so kind and
tender to his sick, dying wife. He would be all that, she
knew, for his manner was so quiet and grave and gentle,
and then a great throb of pain swept over Maude De
Vere as she thought of Arthur and the pledge she had
given him. Maude could not analyze her feelings, or understand
why the knowing who Tom Carleton was, and

that he was also free, should make the world so desolate
all on a sudden, and blot out the brightness of the summer
day which had seemed so pleasant at its beginning.

“I did it in part for him,” she said, feeling that in
spite of her pain there was something sweet even in such
a sacrifice.

She was still standing in the door, when Tom, turning
a little more toward his host, saw her, his face lighting up
at once, and the smile, which made him so handsome,
breaking out about his mouth and showing his fine
teeth.

“Ah, Miss De Vere, take this seat,” and with that well-bred
politeness so much a part of his family, he arose and
offered her his chair.

But Maude declined it, and took a seat instead upon a
little camp stool near to the vine-wreathed columns of
the piazza.

It was very pleasant there that morning, and Maude,
sitting against that back-ground of green leaves, made a
very pretty picture in her pink cambric wrapper, trimmed
with white, white pendants in her ears, and a bunch of
the sweet scented heliotrope in her hair, and at her throat
where the smooth linen collar came together. And Tom
enjoyed the picture very much, from the crown of satin
hair, to the high-heeled slipper, with its bright ribbon rosette.
It was not a little slipper, like those which used
to be in Tom's dressing-room in Boston, when Mary was
alive, nor yet like the fairy things which Rose Mather
wore. Nothing about Maude De Vere was small, but
everything was admirably proportioned. She wore a
seven glove and she wore a four boot. She measured just
twenty-five inches around the waist, and five feet six from
her head to her feet, and weighed one hundred and forty.
A perfect Amazon, she called herself; but Tom Carleton

did not think so. He knew she was a large type of
womanhood, but she was perfect in form and feature,
and he would not have had her one whit smaller than she
was, neither did he contrast her with any one he had
ever known. She was so wholly unlike Mary and Rose
and Annie, that comparison between them was impossible.
She was Miss De Vere,—Maude he called her to
himself, and the name was beginning to sound sweetly
to him, as he daily grew more and more intimate with
the queenly creature who bore it. He had buried his
pale, proud-faced, but loving Mary; he had given up the
gentle Annie, and surely he might think of Maude De
Vere if he chose; and the sight of her sitting there before
him with the rich color in her cheek, and the Southern
fire in her eyes, stirred strange feelings in his heart, and
made him so forgetful of what the Judge was saying to
him, that the old man at last rose and walked away,
leaving the two young people alone together. Tom had
never talked much to Maude except upon sick-room topics,
and he felt anxious to know if her mind corresponded
with her face and form. Here was a good opportunity for
testing her mental powers, and in the long, earnest conversation
which ensued concerning men, and books, and politics,
Tom sifted her thoroughly, experiencing that pleasure
which men of cultivation always experience when thrown
in contact with a woman whose intelligence and endowments
are equal to their own. Maude's education had
not been a superficial one, nor had it ceased with her
leaving school. In her room at home there was a small
library of choice books, which she read and studied each
day together with her brother Charlie, whose education
she superintended. Few persons North or South were
better acquainted with the incidents and progress of the
war, than she was. She had watched it from its beginning,
and with her father, from whom she had inherited her
superior mind, she had held many earnest argumentative
discussions concerning the right and wrong of secession.
Maude had opposed it from the first, but her father had
thought differently, and carrying out his principles, had
lost his life in the first battle of Bull Run. Maude spoke
of him to Tom, and her fine eyes were full of tears as she
told of the dark, terrible days which preceded and followed
the news of his death.

“The ball which struck him down went further than
that; it killed mother, too, and made us orphans,” Maude
said, and something in the tone of her voice, and the expression
of her face, puzzled Tom just as it had many
times before, and carried him back to Bull Run, where it
seemed to him he had seen a face like Maude De Vere's.

“Was your father killed in battle?” Tom asked, and
Maude replied:

“No, sir; that is, he did not die on the battle-field.
He was wounded, and crawled away into the woods,
where they found him dead, sitting against a tree, with a
little Union drummer-boy lying right beside him, and
father's handkerchief bound round the poor bleeding
stumps, for the little hands were both shot away. I've
thought of that boy so often,” Maude said, “and cried for
him so much. I know father was kind to him, for the little
fellow was nestled close to him, Arthur said. He was
there, and found my father, though he did not at first
recognize him, as it was a number of years since he had
seen him.”

Tom was growing both interested and excited. He
was beginning to find the key to that familiar look in
Maude De Vere's face, and, coming close to her he said:

“Were any prisoners taken near your father, Miss De
Vere? Union prisoners, I mean?”

“Yes,” Maude replied. Arthur was a private, then,

and, with another soldier, was prowling through the woods
when they came upon father, and two Union soldiers
near him,—one a boy, Arthur said, and one an officer,
whose ankle had been sprained. In their eagerness to capture
somebody they forgot my father, and carried off the
man and boy. Then they went back, and Arthur found,
by some papers in the dead soldier's pocket, that it was
father, and he had him decently buried at Manassas, with
the little boy. I liked Arthur for that. I would never
have forgiven him if he left that child in the woods.
When the war is over, I am going to find the graves.”

She was not weeping now, but her eyes had in them a
strange glitter as they looked far off in the distance, as if
in quest of those two graves.

“Maude De Vere,” Tom Carleton said, and at the
sound, Maude started and blushed scarlet, “you must
forgive me if I call you Maude this once. It's for the
sake of your noble father, by whose side I stood when
the spirit left his body, and went after that of the little
drummer-boy, whose bleeding stumps were bound in
your father's handkerchief. I remember it well. I had
sprained my ankle, and, with a lad of my company
was trying to escape, when I heard the sound of some
one singing that glorious chant of our church, `Peace on
earth, good will toward men.' It sounded strangely
there, amid the dead and dying, who had killed each
other; but there was peace between the Confederate captain
and the Federal boy, as they sang the familiar words. As
well as we could, we cared for him. I wiped the blood
from your father's wound, and the boy brought him water
from the brook, while he talked of his home in North
Carolina; of his children who would never see him again;
and of Nellie, his wife. It comes back to me with perfect
distinctness, and it is your father's look in your eyes

and face which has puzzled me so much. Two soldiers
wearing the Southern grey came up and captured us,
and we were taken to Richmond. Surely, Miss De Vere,
it is a special providence which has brought me at last
to you, the daughter of that man, and made you the
guardian angel, who has stood between me and recapture.
There is a meaning in it, if we could only find it.”

Tom's fine eyes were bent upon Maude, and in his excitement
he had grasped her hand, which did not lie as
cold and pulseless in his as an hour before it had lain
in Arthur's. It throbbed and quivered now, but clung to
Tom's with a firm hold, which was not relaxed even when
Arthur came up, his face growing dark and threatening
as he saw the position of the two.

Maude did not care for Arthur then, or think what
that look in Tom's kindling eyes might mean. She only
remembered that the man whose hand held hers so firmly,
had ministered to her dying father, had held the cup of
water to his parched lip, had wiped the flowing blood
from his face, and spoken to him kindly words of sympathy.

Here was the answer to her prayer, that God would
send her somebody who could tell her of her father's last
minutes. The somebody had come, and, in her gratitude
to him, she could almost have knelt and worshiped him.

“Oh, Arthur!” she cried, “Captain Carleton is the very
man you and Joe Newell captured at Bull Run. He was
with father when he died; he took care of him, and was
so kind until you came and took him.”

And Maude's eyes flashed with anything but affection
upon her lover, who for a moment could not speak for
his surprise.

Curiously he looked at Tom, seeking for something on
which to fasten a doubt, for he did not wish Maude

to have a cause for gratitude to the Northern officer.
But the longer he gazed the less he doubted. The face
of the lame officer in the Virginia woods came up distinctly
before him, and was too much like the face confronting
him to admit of a mistake, especially after Maude repeated
the substance of what she had heard from Captain
Carleton. Arthur was convinced, and as Maude dropped
Tom's hand, he took it in his, and said:

“It is very strange that my first prize, over whose capture
I felt so proud, should fall again into my power.
But this time you are safe, I reckon. I am older than I
was three years ago, and not quite so thirsty for a Yankee's
blood. You did Maude's father good service, it
seems, and to prove that we rebels can be grateful and
generous even to our foes, I will take you under my protection
as one of my party, when I escort Maude home to
Tennessee, as I intend doing in a few days.”

Maude's face was white with passion as she listened to
this patronizing speech, which had in it so much of assumed
superiority over the man who smiled a very peculiar
kind of smile, as he bowed his acknowledgment of
Arthur's kind attentions. Not a hint was there that
Maude was head and front of the arrangement,—that for
Tom's sake she had pledged herself to one whose inferiority
never struck her so painfully as now, when she
saw him side by side with Captain Carleton. Arthur did
not care to have Captain Carleton know how much he
was indebted to Maude for his present pleasant quarters,
and his prospect of a safe transfer to the hills of Tennessee.
But Tom, though never suspecting the whole truth,
did know that his gratitude for past and present kindness
received from that Southern family was mainly due to
Maude, whom he admired more and more, as the days
wore on, and he learned to know her intimately. The

shy reserve which since his convalescence she had manifested
toward him, passed with the knowledge that he
had stood by her dying father, and she treated him as a
friend with whom she had been acquainted all her life
long. Occasionally, as something in Tom's manner made
her think that but for Arthur she might perhaps in time
bear that relation toward him, which Mary Williams had
borne, she felt a fierce throb of pain and a sense of such
utter desolation, that she involuntarily rebelled against
the life before her. But Maude was a brave, sensible girl.
She had chosen her lot, she reasoned, and she would
abide by it, and make Arthur as happy as she could.
He was fulfilling his part of the contract well, as was
proven by the terror-stricken creature, whom he had
found hiding on the plantation, and had brought to
Hetty's cabin, where he now lay so weak, that it was
impossible to take him along on that journey to Tennessee.

“His time will come by and by,” Arthur said, when
Maude expressed anxiety for him. “I'll land him safely
at your Uncle Paul's some night when you least expect it.
My business now is with you and your Yankee captain.”

Maude had asked that for the present nothing should
be said with regard to their engagement. And so,
though the Judge suspected that some definite arrangement
had been made between his son and Maude, he did
not know for certain, even when she stood before him attired
for the journey.

The Judge was sorry to part with Maude, and he was
sorry to part with Tom. He liked him because he was
a gentleman if he was a Yankee, and because his father
had sent Seth back, (poor Seth, with his free papers in his
coffin,) and because he had been kind to Maude's father,
and married Mary Williams, of the Charleston Williamses

and could smoke a cob-pipe, and enjoy it. These were
the things which recommended Tom to the old man, who
shook his hand warmly at parting, saying to him;

“I hate Northern dogs mostly, but hanged if I don't
like you. May you get safely home, and if you do, my
advice is to stay there, and tell the rest of 'em to do
the same. They can't whip us,—no, by George, they
can't, even if they have got some advantage. The papers
say it was all a strategical trap, and we'd rather you'd
have the places than not. You can't take Richmond,—no,
sir! We will die in the last ditch, every mother's son
of us; and what is left will set the town on fire, and let
it go to thunder!”

The old Judge was waxing very eloquent for a man
who had one Union soldier recruiting in Hetty's cabin,
and was bidding good-bye to another; but consistency
was no part of war politics, and he rambled on, until
Arthur cut him short by saying they could wait no longer.
With Arthur as a safeguard in case of an attack from Confederates,
and Tom Carleton in case of an assault from the
Unionists, Maude felt perfectly secure, and in quiet and
safety she accomplished her journey, and was welcomed
with open arms by Paul Haverill and Charlie. Arthur
could only stop for a day among the hills. He might be
ordered back to his regiment at any time, and if he got
that other chap through he must be bestir himself, he said;
and so he bade good-bye to Maude, in whom he had implicit
faith, and whose sober, quiet demeanor he tried to
attribute to her sorrow at parting with him.

“She does like me some, and by and by she will like
me better,” he said, as he went his way, leaving her
standing in the doorway of her uncle's house, her face
very pale, and her hands pressed closely together, as if
forcing back some bitter thought or silent pain.

Turning once ere the winding road hid her from view,
Arthur kissed his hand to her gayly, while with a wave
of her handkerchief she re-entered the house, and neither
guessed nor dreamed how or when they would meet
again.