House Divided (54 page)

“Were you all day on the way?”

“All day?” He chuckled grimly. “More like four or five days. I don't know. I lost count of time. We kept walking all night, feeling for the road with our feet. We had to keep going or freeze.” Cinda remembered how, long ago, she and Brett, in haste to come to Great Oak for her mother's birthday, had landed on those outer beaches; but that day had been warm and clear. The wind must rip and scourge the beaches when a gale blew! “But as we came near Norfolk some people met us, and I told them I wanted to reach here, and they found a fishing boat and brought me home.”

“He got here in the middle of the night,” Enid supplemented. “Just simply exhausted, wet, and cold, and that horrible bullet in him. I declare, Cousin Faunt, I don't see how you ever did it!”

“Well, you can do anything you have to.” His voice faltered, and
Cinda saw that he was tired, and he began to cough in a way that distressed her.

“I'm sure you shouldn't talk any more, Faunt. Sleep a while. I'll be near you if you want anything.”

Enid said quickly: “Oh, I'll stay with him. April and Mama and I take turns. We never leave him alone.”

“I'll take my turn too.”

“I don't need anyone, really,” Faunt protested. “I'll be all right in a day or two. Stay and talk to me.”

But Cinda insisted that he rest. She was soon glad she had done so; for that evening he was certainly not so well, and during the night, when she took her turn at his bedside, he sometimes muttered in his sleep. Next day he was delirious, and they fought to ease him with cold compresses on chest and brow.

But that was Cinda's last day at his side, for at dusk Trav rode up to the door. Cinda was with Faunt when she heard Trav's voice in the lower hall, heard Enid's resentful question, “Trav Currain, what are you doing here?” She could not hear Trav's reply, but that he should have come at all alarmed her and she slipped out into the hall, in time to hear Enid say: “Well, what of it? You could have sent word. You didn't have to come rushing down here yourself.”

Then Enid heard Cinda on the stairs behind her, and turned and Cinda brushed past her. “What is it, Travis?” she asked.

Trav said: “Why, Kyle's down with scarlet fever, Cinda.”

Cinda set her teeth to keep them from chattering, an uncontrollable terror turned her cold. Scarlet fever! The Longstreet children! Faunt or no Faunt, she must go!

 

She would not wait for morning, and Enid speeded their departure with a zeal which seemed to Cinda eloquent. Enid was glad to get rid of her, to have Faunt to herself. No matter, she must go. An hour after Trav's arrival they set out, the carriage lurching and rocking on the rutted, frost bound highway. Trav rode with her, his led horse following.

“I wish I could be in two places at once,” she confessed. “Faunt's awfully sick, Travis.”

“Well, Enid says she and Mama can take care of him.”

“I know. And I must be with Kyle.” She asked fearfully: “Do you think he's—as sick as the Longstreet children were?”

“I don't think so; but Vesta said you'd want to be there. Jenny didn't want to send for you, said they could manage.”

“Jenny's wonderful. As strong as a rock. As steady—as you are.”

He did not answer, and they were silent for a long time while the horses climbed the winding road through the woods that would bring them to the Richmond pike at Six-Mile Ordinary. Trav asked at last in a low tone: “Cinda, have you noticed the way Enid is with me?”

She was for a moment too surprised to speak. “Why—how, Travis? What do you mean?” Perhaps the darkness, the silence, the monotonous hoof beats of the horses, the hissing of the wheels in the soft sand of the road had worked some spell upon him, loosed his tongue.

“She was mad at me for coming tonight,” he said. “She hasn't been the same to me since Hetty died.” He hesitated. “Except when we were all here at Christmas, and the night we did the charades at your house. That night she was the way she used to be. I thought she was all right again. But tonight—well, she hasn't any use for me now!”

Cinda put a guard on her tongue, and impulsively she clasped his hand and pressed it. For him to speak thus frankly to her was proof enough of the depth of his unhappiness. “We're all upset nowadays, Travis. You must allow for that.” Rage at Enid mingled with her tenderness for him, yet she must not criticize Enid. “I'm sure you're imagining things. Enid loves you; but of course she's young enough to want excitement, pleasure, gay times.”

“She certainly does,” he agreed. “You can see the difference, just in the way she looks. She's just—beautiful, when she's enjoying herself.”

Cinda said thoughtfully: “And it's lonely for her, with you away. You might bring her to Richmond, make a home for her there. Mama'd be all right alone. She lives in a world of her own anyway.”

“Do you think Mama's mind is failing, Cinda?”

“Of course not!”

“I mean, the way she is about the war?”

“It's just her way of refusing to worry.” Cinda returned to the point. “Why don't you do that, Travis? It might make all the difference in the world to Enid.”

“Well, I'll see.” He hesitated. “I may be back at Great Oak soon.
The General thinks the Federals may land an army on the Peninsula, and we'd have to move down here to meet them.”

Cinda at his words forgot Enid in this new concern. If there was to be fighting on the Peninsula, it might sweep over Great Oak like a storm tide. What would her mother do? She wished to ask Trav, but he knew the answer no more clearly than she did. He was silent now, and she thought presently that he was asleep, but she did not sleep. Anxiety for her mother and fear for little Kyle were her companions as the carriage lumbered through the night.

Before they came to Richmond, dawn broke through a stormy sky, and rain presently spattered them. At home Cinda hurried to the room where Kyle lay. He seemed to her not so desperately ill as the Longstreet children had been. “But I mustn't let myself think so,” she thought. “I must be ready for anything.”

She had need of all her resolution, for not only was Kyle ill, but Janet had a cold, snuffles, a running nose; and little Clayton was fretful. Before the week ended they were all hot with fever; and Cinda gave herself so completely to their care that outside events scarce touched her. She heard Fort Donelson had surrendered, to that same General Grant whom Longstreet considered so dangerous; but the war was far away, the sick children were here. Her universe was all contained within these walls.

Brett was at home for the dreary, rain-drenched day when Mr. Davis was inaugurated as permanent President of the Confederacy, and to feel Brett's arms around her was strength and reassurance; but presidents and politics alike were meaningless and of no account. These sick children were more than all the world.

Not till March brought the first signs of spring were the babies safely on the mend. When she was sure of this, Cinda thought in a great thankfulness that nothing could shake her now.

January–arch, 1862

 

U
NTIL Faunt came home to Great Oak wounded and ill, Enid would have said her affection for him was no more than a natural fondness for the nicest of her kinfolks; and she would have believed herself sincere. If in the past she had pretended more than this, it was rather to plague Cinda and Tony for being so ready to think ill of her than from any deep and genuine emotion. But while she tended Faunt, pretense began to become reality. She was glad when Kyle's illness drew Cinda back to Richmond, for thereafter Faunt was hers alone. Through the weeks that followed she spent herself in a fierce and jealous devotion, enlisting old April's help only when she must, resenting even his mother's visits to his bedside. Faunt was her charge, and she would not willingly share him with anyone; for surely he was not so dear to any of them as to her. None of them realized as she did his charm, his courage, his gentleness, his strength. Had they not let him dwell all these years alone with his grief while they lived their heedless happy lives?

When he was at his worst she slept, if she slept at all, upon a sofa in his room; when he was better, she went no farther away than the small dressing room next to his, where April had set up a narrow cot bed. Under the long strain she who had always been slender became thin, her eyes were deeply shadowed, her cheeks hollowed, her skin acquired a pale translucency. Mrs. Currain, increasingly withdrawn within herself and increasingly blind to all that went on around her, did not observe this; but April fumed and scolded, and she was forever bringing Enid broth to drink and glasses of fresh milk and cups of steaming tea, till Enid protested:

“I declare, April, you treat me as if I were a nursing mother! Stop it! Let me alone! I'll ask for what I want.”

“Missy, you don' know what you want!” April protested in a kindly anger. She had long since included Enid in her loyalty to Trav and to all who belonged to him. “But I does! Hit's high time Marste' Trav come home tuh tek care o' you.”

Trav? If there was one thing Enid was completely sure she did not want, it was for Trav to come home. “Oh, you—” she floundered for words, hating this fat black woman sweating from the kitchen. “Leave me alone! For Heaven's sake go wash your face!”

April grunted indignantly. “What I want to th'ow wateh in mah face foh? I ain't no house afiah!” She stumped away in sullen hurt.

Brett too, on his frequent visits, saw Enid's weariness and urged her to let April take a heavier share of the burden, but she told him gently: “I'm not tired. Really and truly I'm not. I love doing things for him.”

This was profoundly true. Every least act performed in Faunt's service was richly satisfying. To sit beside him while he was delirious, to hear him speak to his Betty who died so long ago, to lean close and catch his half-uttered sentences and piece out the sense of them; this was to share his inmost heart. Oh, he was fine and gallant and tender. He spoke no bitter word except when, remembering in his delirium Belle Vue and all that he had treasured there, trying to sit up in bed, trying to get to his feet, he raged at the war makers, at all men of the North and above all, at Lincoln. In these ravings, furious and blasphemous, Abraham Lincoln was so often the target that Enid came to think of Lincoln as an inhuman and grotesque monster with blood-dripping jaws, mouthing and gobbling and whining over the torn flesh of a still living woman who was the South.

She had not thought Faunt capable of such outright and uncurbed ferocity. Sometimes he shouted in his insensate fury; and then she rose and went to him, beautiful and tender in the candlelight; and at her touch and her gentle words he quickly quieted. Sometimes in these hours he called her Betty, and so ardently that her eyes swam with tears. Sometimes, thinking she was Betty, he clung feverishly to her hand; sometimes he kissed it. Sometimes, to appease him, she must hold him in her arms, kiss his wasted cheek and his hot burning brow.

At such moments there was a tenderness in her deeper than any
physical passion. He was never in her thoughts her lover or her beloved, but her babe, helpless and dependent. Though April made sullen protest at this indelicacy, Enid bathed him. She dressed the suppurating wound in his side which drained for a long time. She assuaged with cold packs the fever which devoured him; and all these intimacies were profoundly contenting. She loved his clean smooth skin, the wiry muscles of arms and legs, the ridged flesh on his flanks; she found a still rapture in brushing his hair, in trimming his light beard, in washing his long, thin hands, in cutting and cleaning his nails. And in thus serving him she surrendered herself as completely as though she lay in his arms, denying him nothing, wholly at his disposal, her only law his need.

When Faunt began to mend, his fever broke in a sweat that left him frighteningly weak. This weakness made him seem at first worse instead of better. April said he would recover, but Enid refused to believe, and stormed at her; and when she herself saw that April was right, she realized for the first time that she would be sorry to see him get well. While he lay ill and helpless, he was hers; sound and whole again, he would escape from her.

So she prolonged his convalescence as much as possible, refusing to let him move. “Your wound is still open, Cousin Faunt. You mustn't. I won't let you.” He smiled at her pretty insistence, and his smile was sunshine, warming her; she kept him a prisoner of tenderness, watching to see him smile again.

The fact that his strength was slow in returning helped her keep him in bed; but by the end of February he was able occasionally to sit up in the great chair in his room. At first, five minutes of this exhausted him; but he was presently well enough to go for a drive with Enid and his mother in the fine carriage that had been Mrs. Currain's Christmas present a year and more ago, and that was her delight and pride. He could walk across the lawns toward the river; and since Lucy and Peter were alike devoted to him and were apt to trail along, Enid no longer had him wholly to herself. She tried bidding April keep the children away, but he asked for them; so on these strolls together she accepted their company, even though this meant that they, not she, had most of his attention. He told them endless, fearfully fascinating stories. They loved to hear of the old Negro woman at Belle
Vue who had known how to brew in the still and secret night the dreadful African poison which took six months to kill its victim.

“No one knows what she puts in it,” he declared. “Not just frogs' heads, and stewed snakes, and lizards' tails and ordinary things like that, but awful secret things. And whoever takes the poison has the worst stomach ache you can imagine, and he has bad dreams and wakes up screaming in the night, and he thinks someone is shooting arrows through him, and after months and months, he dies!”

Peter delighted in these grisly terrors, but Lucy declared she didn't believe a word. “I guess if there was any such poison, white folks would know about it. I guess we're smarter than the people!”

He wagged his head, arguing the point with her. “When horses have knots in their manes in the morning, white folks think it's just accident; but it's really where witches have made stirrups to go night-riding. The people know that.”

“There isn't any such thing as witches!”

“Then why are some horses that are locked in their stalls all night sweaty in the morning, if it wasn't witches who rode them?” And Faunt insisted: “Why, you don't even know what it means when a hen crows like a rooster.”

“I don't believe a hen ever did!”

“They do sometimes, and it's always bad luck! Ask April! She'll tell you.”

Lucy refused to be shaken. “Everything's bad luck for someone. You can call anything a bad sign if you want to.”

Faunt seemed to enjoy her skepticism as much as he did Peter's delighted terror; but not all his talk with them was of these dreadful mysteries. He taught them to soak in vinegar the balls full of powdery black dust that dropped from the oak trees, and thus make a satisfying ink. He showed them the miracle of making fire with a bit of punk and a sun glass, and how to make a cat saddle—four hands clasping four wrists in a square—to carry someone hurt or weary. He and Enid carried Peter thus from the bluff to the house, and Enid was deeply moved by this contact of his hands and hers; because he was so charming with the children, she loved him more and more. If he, instead of Trav, were their father, how different her life would be!

Early in March, Brett and the Howitzers left their camp on Mulberry Island and marched to King's Mill Wharf to take the steamer to City Point. They were ordered to Suffolk, and Brett would no longer be able to come to Great Oak as often as in the past. Enid welcomed his departure, since now she would have Faunt more completely to herself; but Faunt as he grew stronger began to fret at long inaction. One day they heard guns far away down the river, and again the day after; and though he was himself too weak to ride, he sent Big Mill to Williamsburg for information. Thus they heard the great deeds the
Merrimac
had done against the Yankee warships at Newport News, and Faunt's eyes glowed.

He began to speak of returning to duty. The Blues, after their surrender at Roanoke, had been paroled and sent to Richmond to await exchange; but till they were free to serve again a skeleton company was recruited and drilled in camp near the Richmond Reservoir. Faunt wrote Lieutenant Colonel Richardson, commanding the regiment, to report that he was on the way to recovery and would rejoin the company as soon as his strength sufficiently returned.

A few days after the
Merrimac's
exploit, an hour before dinner, Brett and Tony rode up to the door. Faunt and Enid and Mrs. Currain were all downstairs to meet them; and Faunt asked what brought them, but they made no direct reply. Brett said Trav was on their heels. “He stopped to talk to Big Mill,” he explained.

“Mill's better than any overseer we ever had,” Mrs. Currain assured them. “He's been giving the hogs poke root mash, so we never have a sick hog now; and his kitchen garden is splendid. I don't know about the field crops, but he put in his hot beds six weeks ago, and everything, cabbage, egg plant, lettuce, cucumbers, tomato plants, they're just thriving, all the seedlings. He's got the boys transplanting already. We'll have enough broad beans to feed the whole place, and everything else imaginable; not just potatoes and cabbages, but sea kale, and rape, and chives, and horse radish, and leeks, and I don't know what all.”

Brett laughed at her enthusiasm. “I declare, Mama, you talk about vegetables as greedily as if you were a rabbit.”

“Well, we need vegetables,” the old woman insisted. “I feed the people plenty of molasses and vegetables, and that's the reason we never have typhoid fever. It's eating nothing but fats and greases that
makes people have the fever.” As was always the case when she was a little excited, a Highland burr crept into her speech, relic of her childhood long ago. “There! There's Travis now.”

They heard the hoof beats, and Trav came in; and he kissed his mother and turned to Enid, and she gave him her cold lips, and then it was time for dinner. Enid noticed that Brett's face was lumpy and swollen and asked why.

“Mosquitoes,” he said cheerfully. “Over around Suffolk they don't just sting you! They bite a piece out of you and fly up in a tree and eat it before your eyes!” He asked Trav: “Are they bad where you are?”

Trav nodded. “Yes, and flies.” Tony said flies kept him awake of nights, and Trav said seriously: “I keep slapping them till I've killed the ones hanging around me. It does seem to thin them out.”

Brett laughed. “In our huts, if you kill one, ten others come to the funeral feast.”

Mrs. Currain spoke chidingly. “You're all forgetting what you were taught as children. Pennyroyal! It's just as good to keep mosquitoes away as it is to make ticks let go.” She rose to go up for her nap. “Try it and see,” she advised them.

After she was gone, Trav explained to Faunt why he and the others had come. He had met Brett in Richmond on recruiting service, found Tony there too.

“And Faunt, I thought we'd better talk things over,” he said soberly. “You see, General Longstreet thinks McClellan will try to move up the Peninsula to Richmond; and McClellan can use the rivers to outflank any line we try to hold on the lower Peninsula, so the General thinks we'll have to fall back. That means the place here will be in Yankee hands.” He hesitated. “It may not happen, but I thought we ought to decide what to do about Mama if it does.”

Enid watched Faunt and saw him white with anger at the thought of this that might come upon them. He said in a low tone: “Mama will have to go to Richmond.”

“I suppose so,” Trav agreed. “But what about the people?”

Faunt hesitated, and Brett said: “They'll have to be moved, or they'll be taken as contraband of war. We'd better send them to Chimneys and the Plains.”

Tony said there were more hands at Chimneys now than he could profitably use, and Brett said slowly: “We don't need them at the Plains, either; but we have to take care of them. They're used to trusting us. If you don't need them at Chimneys, Tony, we'll send them all to the Plains. I stocked up with supplies a year ago; enough, with what they can raise, to feed them all for a while at least.”

“Mill wants to stay here,” Trav said. They were sitting in the drawing room, Enid near Faunt and watching him. “He says they'll all want to stay. They don't want to leave their homes.”

Faunt said in a harsh tone, “None of us want to leave our homes, Trav.” His hands, still thin and white from his long illness, clenched. “That damned ape!” he whispered. “That damned black Republican baboon!”

After a moment Tony said slowly: “It's all right to blame Lincoln. He's an easy target. But it was people like your South Carolina neighbors, Brett, as much as the abolitionists in the North, who started all this.”