House Divided (67 page)

“Eat yo' breakfast, Honey,” June urged. “How come you ask so many questions?” Her tone was almost normal; almost, but not quite.

Cinda felt her heart pound; she spoke evenly. “June.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don't treat me like a baby. What's happened?”

After a moment, the old woman came to her; and Cinda saw tears on June's black cheeks, and she thought abstractedly that tears on dark skin looked like drops of ink. Then June drew her close, cradling
Cinda's head against her bosom, rocking to and fro, crooning over and over: “Don' you cry, Honey Chile! My baby, my little ol' Miss Cindy, please ma‘am, don' you go carryin' on!”

It was sweet and richly assuaging to be held so; and for a moment Cinda let herself go, and her own eyes filled. With others, she must wear a brave front; but with June she need never pretend. Ever since she was a baby, she had always been able to weep out her woes on this black bosom.

Then she freed herself, gently, trying to laugh. “Why June, here we are both of us crying like silly women!” There was no gulf between them now; no question of mistress and slave. They were two who had loved each other long. “What's happened, June? Tell me.”

She had at first to draw out the truth with many questions; but once well started, June told all she knew. One of Mr. Frisbie's Negroes had come to Richmond in the night from Williamsburg. His name was Sam—June as a narrator had one failing: she never omitted any least detail—and he rode Mr. Frisbie's roan hunter and led three of Mr. Frisbie's horses; because Mr. Frisbie was in the cavalry and wanted them safe away from the Yankees. Mr. Frisbie had told Sam to start early Monday morning, but the armies were fighting so near the Frisbie place that Sam and the other people crowded into the smoke house, and into the cellar of the big house to be out of the way of the bullets. The fighting stopped along toward dark, and Sam got his courage up and went to the stables. It was by that time late at night. While he was saddling the roan, he heard someone crying, right outside the stable door, in the dark shadows; and he took the lantern to see who it was, and it was Elegant, Mister Julian's body servant.

June said it had been hard for Sam to get much out of Elegant for a while. Cinda by this time was listening without questions, feeling no longer any emotion at all, allowing the old woman's words to flow over her, herself withdrawn in passive submission. Elegant was hurt half to death, June said. “And serve dat wuthless niggah right if he uz kilt daid!” she commented, her grief for a moment giving way to indignation.

Because Elegant had lost Mister Julian. He told Sam that the regiment marched up to a rail fence, miles and miles; and Yankees behind the fence were shooting at them with a hundred cannons. Elegant
said he was so scared he tried to hide behind Mister Julian; and he tried to get his young master to run away into the woods and hide, but he couldn't. He couldn't do anything but follow along, trying to keep Mister Julian between him and the Yankee bullets. “ ‘Stead of gittin' in front where he belonged to be,” June angrily declared. “So's he cud stop de bullets and do some good!”

He said—according to Sam and now to June—that just about everybody in the regiment was killed before some of them reached the fence. He said—Cinda felt the hard clutch at her heart, yet knew no pain—that bullets hit Lieutenant Cloyd and just ripped him open the way you rip a catfish up the belly; and Elegant saw him fall and ran across to him, and some bullets hit Elegant while he was kneeling by the shattered body. But he ran back to Mister Julian, and they got to the fence and lay down there till someone said they had to go back across the field. Elegant didn't know much about what happened after that. He said he tried to stand up, and fell down, and Mister Julian got him on his shoulders piggyback to carry him. The next thing he knew it was dark, and he was in some woods somewhere, and Mister Julian wasn't anywhere around. Elegant crawled as far as he could, looking for Mister Julian all over the place, and never did find him.

“Sam went and fotch Mistuh Frisbie's old Sarah,” June explained, “And dey laid Elegant in de hay mow tuh tek keer ob him de best dey could, and Sam tuk de hosses an' put out fo' Richmond de way Mistuh Frisbie tolt him to. An' soon as he git shet ob de hosses heah, he come along at daylight dis mawnin' an' tolt us.”

And though Cinda harried her with many questions, that was all the old woman knew.

 

So Vesta's Tommy was dead. Julian? Not to know whether he lived or died was almost worse than knowing he was dead. Cinda was in some obscure way grateful that she could turn her thoughts on Vesta; on Vesta, so young and brave and sure. There was nothing she could do about Julian; but she could cherish Vesta, muster strength and offer it to Vesta as a staff and stay. To think of Vesta, to think only of Vesta; this would help her put thought of Julian into the deep background of her mind.

But oh, why could not Brett be here? Why could not he and she be
together now, if only for an hour? Clayton was dead, and Vesta's Tommy—as dear to Cinda, since Vesta loved him, as her own son—and now Julian! Yes, and perhaps Burr too! Burr had been in that battling. Till he came home, till some word of his safety reached them, Cinda must live in a helpless dread. So must Barbara.

Cinda roused herself. Vesta and Barbara were her charge. While she dressed, while she fortified herself to go to them, she thought of Travis. He might do something; she did not know what.

He might at least bring her news of Julian.

Her little baby.

She found herself wondering absently what that kinsman in Washington, that Abraham Lincoln, would feel if he knew the grief and the pain he had brought to them all today. But probably if he knew the truth about his mother's birth, he had long since learned to curse the name of Currain. Lucy Hanks in one of her angry letters had called down a long damnation on Anthony Currain who had wronged her so shamefully. Had she perhaps, while this Abraham Lincoln was still a baby, taught him to repeat those curses parrotlike, taught him long hatred at her knee?

But what did it matter? Clayton was dead, and Tommy. And Julian? Cinda had seen poor shattered wounded in Miss Sally Tompkins' hospital; men so witless from suffering that they forgot their own names; men whose faces were lacerated beyond recognition. Julian might be dead; or he might be alive, groaning his life away in some secret thicket, dying alone; or he might be like one of those senseless ones, his mind forever shattered, his sweet face so marred that only loving eyes could recognize him.

She pressed her hands hard to her temple. She must put such thoughts away.

She opened her door, and from the open door of Vesta's room along the hall, the room which for the present Vesta shared with Barbara, she heard their sudden laughter at something that amused them there. June, at Cinda's shoulder, heard that bright laughter too, and broke into wrenching sobs. Cinda thrust the old woman gently back into the room and closed the door upon her. She went on to face Vesta and her task alone.

May, 1862

 

T
HAT Sunday evening when Tony brought his brother to her house, Mrs. Albion was within a week of being fifty years old; but never in her life had she felt a passionate and self-forgetting attachment for any man. She married while she was still emotionally a child, and she had with her young husband a few jolly years. When he died and left her still a careless young woman, the pinch of encroaching poverty taught her the importance of having enough money so that money did not matter. Her attempt to marry Travis Currain because he was wealthy failed as much because of her own overeagerness as because of Enid's spiteful interference; she turned to Tony in a greedy desperation.

Ten years as Tony's mistress taught her that men are lonely, simple, eager for friendliness, grateful for an audience, hungry for a sympathetic and approving and interested listener. She cultivated the art of listening; and thus she acquired a constantly widening circle of masculine friends. She liked men; not any one man in particular but men in general. She understood that by her relationship with Tony she was from the world of sheltered and respectable womankind forever excluded; and this, after a while, ceased to provoke in her any bitterness. There was another feminine world the doors of which were open to her, but for this other world she had no inclination. The result was that though she knew many men, she had few women acquaintances—and no women friends.

Her relationship with Tony came to be, at least in her own mind, regularized by its very persistence. She thought of herself as secure in
a pseudo wifehood which provided all the rewards of marriage except respectability, while it imposed none of the obligations. During this period, there was a change in her. The men who learned to enjoy her company were apt to be persons of some intellectual capacity. Attracted at first by the provocative irregularity which was tacitly associated with her establishment, they found her a pleasant and gracious woman, and a good listener, and came again and again. She had the gift of silence. Their conversations among themselves in her company —for since men are instinctively conventional, no one but Tony and Darrell ever called upon her except with a companion—dealt with business, with politics, with subjects essentially masculine, and of which few women had any real understanding. She bolstered what her listening taught her by wide and thoughtful reading. She began to have opinions, and sometimes, if she were asked to do so, to express them. The men who knew her found her opinions worth hearing.

These years of settled and orderly living had another result. She was naturally as healthy as an animal, and freedom from anxieties preserved in her a sleek and contenting beauty. This was not, of course, the fresh loveliness of youth, but the richness of maturity. Her hair lost none of its lustre, her countenance showed no betraying lines, her throat was a smooth column. No one would have mistaken her for a girl; she was a woman. But no man, meeting her for the first time, ever stopped to ask himself: “I wonder how old she is.”

When Tony cast her aside, she knew only a momentary panic which took the form of contriving that the profitable North Carolina plantation. should pass into his hands. She was quite sure that she could when she chose go back to him; and always there lay in the background of her thoughts the fear of poverty. Against poverty she must insure herself. It was to do so that with the approach of hostilities between North and South she decided to capitalize upon her wide acquaintance among men of importance in the Confederacy. By returning to Richmond she would be in a position to learn many things of value to the Northern generals.

She sought to make sure beforehand that for her services she should be adequately paid; but when she tried to make a bargain she was met by a complacent Northern confidence in early victory. She returned to Richmond as it were on speculation; but a week after
Manassas an emissary, a Baltimore man posing as one of General Winder's detectives charged with policing Richmond, came secretly to enlist her services for the North. Since then she had contributed more than once to the flood of information which funnelled into the Richmond clearing house of the Union Secret Service.

She recognized the risk she ran. Early in April, not a month before she first saw Faunt, two men named Lewis and Scully had been convicted as spies and sentenced to be hanged; and on the day set for their execution a great throng of curious and morbid people trooped out Broad and Grace and Franklin Streets to the Fair Grounds to watch their execution. It was true that at the last moment the men were reprieved to give evidence against Timothy Webster; and the crowd, which had been once disappointed, expecting another reprieve, did not trouble to go to the Fair Grounds on the day set for his death. But Webster was well and duly hanged, so Nell knew that it was a deadly and dangerous game she played. It was because she might some day need a friendly witness to her loyalty that she had gone to Cinda with the information which led to the famous Confederate victory at Leesburg; and once or twice afterward, for a like reason, she played a double game, till she thought herself secure.

To open new sources of information and to increase her value to the North—and hence her earnings—she widened her pleasant hospitality. Her reputation as a charming and brilliant woman spread, and her pleasant little suppers acquired a limited fame. There were many men, officers in the army or members of the Government, whose homes were far away and who were glad to spend an evening thus amiably. She was such a receptive listener that their tongues forgot discretion, and her task was made absurdly easy. If a regiment moved through Richmond to the Peninsula, in this spring of 1862, the movement was recorded on a bulletin board outside the Provost Marshal's office where anyone who chose could read. Espionage was in fact so simple that its rewards were few; but Mrs. Albion discovered other profitable activities. Such men as Redford Streean were already shipping cotton and tobacco through the lines, trading ostensibly for supplies badly needed in the Confederacy, but plucking out a fat plum for themselves from every pie. She shared their plans and their profits. She had no troubling scruples, felt herself under no obligation to the
South. She went her calm and careful way without bitterness, but equally without any sense of guilt at all. She was at once cool and bold, completely mistress of herself, doing nothing without a reason, and nothing recklessly. It was her habit to appraise the men she met, to try to foresee how they might be useful to her; she saw them only as they affected her and her activities.

But from the first moment, Faunt, whether because she was at a vulnerable age when any chance acquaintance might have awakened her, or because his haggard eyes and his weariness aroused in her a maternal tenderness, or because between them some mysterious emotional current passed, made her forget herself. To watch him sitting here in her drawing room with tortured misery in his eyes roused in her emotions she had never known. She felt all her senses sharpened and demanding. She heard him speak and hungered for his next word; she filled her eyes with him, her glance touching his every feature, his image engraving itself upon her heart beyond forgetting. She felt or seemed to feel an electric emanation from him which set off in her veins an answering vibration. To bring him brandy, to fill his glass with wine, to see him eat the food she provided was rich content. But content was not assuagement. She longed to touch his hand, his cheek, his brow; and when this longing became unbearable she yielded to it. That under her touch he relaxed, surrendering to long fatigue, drowning in sudden sleep, filled her with a fierce proud passion. When Mosby and the little editor departed, she resented Tony's staying. Tony's desire to be alone with her woke in her an icy anger; when Tony was gone and she was alone with Faunt she found herself trembling, breathless as a girl.

Faunt still slept, leaning back in his chair. She came to stand beside him, touching his shoulder with one finger as though to assure herself of his actual presence here. Here was where he belonged; here he should stay. He must stay and stay and stay; stay till he was rested and well and strong again. The Negro maid came to the door and saw her mistress and saw Faunt, and her eyes widened in stammering surprise.

“Who dat, ma'am? I herd de gemmun go.”

Mrs. Albion brushed the question aside. “See if his horse is at the gate, Milly.”

The woman drew the curtain aside to peep out of the window. “Yes, ma'am, hit shore is.”

“The gentleman is ill. We must keep him here, take care of him. Wake Rufus.” The Negro slept in the shed at the foot of the garden. “Tell him to take care of the horse.” Her voice tightened warningly. “Tell him if anyone ever finds out the gentleman is here, I'll sell both of you South.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Milly's promise had the emphasis of terror.

“Tell Rufus, then come back to me.”

Between them they put Faunt, still stupid with drink and with fatigue, to bed. Milly grumbled at this indelicacy. “You go on 'bout your bizness, ma'am. I'll 'tend to him.” But Nell said curtly: “He's hurt and sick, Milly; and I'm no child.” When they removed his shirt and she discovered Faunt's deep scars she whispered pitying tenderness, and Milly muttered:

“Hm! De gemmun sho' ain' got no fat on him, is he? Dem ribs stick out lak a skellykin. Poah as a picked chicken. Hm-m!” Her black hands were as gentle as Mrs. Albion's. Faunt lay limp under their ministrations.

They put him in the room next Nell's own; and when their task was done Nell sent the other away. “I'll leave my door open, in case he calls,” she said.

“He ain' gwine call nobody, woah out de way he is.” Milly chuckled in sly amusement. “No, ma'am, he ain' gwine to be no botheh tuh you at all!” Then, seeing how still and tense her mistress was: “Ma'am, you come let Milly bresh down youh hair. You all upset you own se‘f, ma'am.”

Nell submitted to the other's attendance, and when she was ready for the night, Milly tucked her in, soothed her with comforting endearments. But when Milly was gone, Nell rose and drew a match and lighted a candle and went to the other room; and she stood for a long time by the bed where Faunt lay, looking down at him till her eyes were swimming and she felt her heart's thudding pound. The bed was wide. She set the candle on the stand and lay down with him, her head pillowed beside his, watching his still face with tireless eyes. Once sudden terror seized her; for he slept so soundly that he seemed not to breathe at all. She rose on one elbow to lean above him, and
held her cheek near his lips till she felt the soft warmth of his breath. She stayed there in a brooding wonder at him, and at herself; yet more and more completely she forgot herself in thoughts of this dear, weary man.

Back in her own bed she lay awake, feeling a slow amazement at this thing which had come to her; at this incredible and overwhelming flood in which it was bliss to drown. Why, she had never seen this man until tonight; she had not heard him speak a dozen times. How was he different from other men? By what magic did he reveal to her these things she had never known before?

“These things I've never known before.” She was to use these words more than once during the days that followed, telling Faunt over and over that which words could never tell, feeling always that he was far away from her, feeling always in him remoteness, ironic amusement, an indifferent tolerance. Too wise to demand of him more than he could give her, she shut her mind to this understanding, refused to acknowledge it to herself, took care never to challenge him. “You've taught me things I've never known before.” They laughed at the phrase together, but she took care not to oppress him even with her gratefulness, giving much and demanding nothing,

During these days she denied herself to everyone, so they were completely undisturbed. It was good to see strength come back to him, to see his cheeks fill out again, to see his eyes clear, to see his rare smile. When he decided at last upon departure she did not urge him to stay; nor did she exact from him any pledge or promise. Yet at the last she said:

“I think we've found something we will never lose, Faunt; you and I.”

He smiled a little. “There are so many things in our lives which we think we'll never lose.”

“There's a shadow in your eyes, my dear; but sometimes I've seen your eyes without that shadow.”

“I'll come back,” he told her. “When I need to banish it again.”

When he was gone, she counted up the days. There had been nine of them, since that night he came. She would have given all the years of her life for those nine days.