Madam Constantia

The High Hills of Santee are a long irregular chain of Sandhills on the left bank of the Wateree. Though directly above the noxious river the air on them is healthy and the water pure, making an oasis in the wide tract of miasma and fever in which the army had been operating.

It was not until we had left the camp a considerable distance behind us, and were clear of the neighboring roads with their stragglers and wagons and forage-parties that a word was spoken between us. Even that word turned only on the condition of the horses, the bay and grey that Paton had borrowed from the lines of the Fourteenth Dragoons. Let it be said of the British that, whatever their faults, they are magnanimous. The life of an enemy might depend—though I did not think, and hardly hoped that it would depend—on the speed of our horses. Yet the dragoons had lent us the best that they had, nor did I doubt that when the officer appeared on parade on the morrow, he would turn a blind eye on the gap in his ranks. It was I who broke the silence.

“They should carry us to the High Hills in six hours,” I said.

The girl assented by a single word, uttered with an indifference which surprised me. And that was all.

Her silence had at least this advantage, that it left me free to consider her more closely, and I dropped back a horse’s length that I might do this at my ease. As my eyes rested on her, I do not know whether my admiration or my wonder were the greater. She must have been weary to the bone and sick at heart. She must have been racked by suspense and torn by anxiety. Every nerve in her tender frame must have ached with pain, every pulse throbbed with fever. Probably, and almost certainly, she had had to face moments when hope failed her, and she saw things as they really were; when she tasted the bitterness of the coming hour and recognized that all her efforts to avert it were in vain.

Yet every line of her figure, the carriage of her head, the forward gaze of her eyes told but one tale of steadfast purpose. She was no longer a mere woman, subject to woman’s weakness; but a daughter fighting for her father’s life. She was love in action, moulded to its purest shape. To suffer the eye to dwell on the curling lock that stained the white of her neck, to give a thought to the long lashes that shaded her cheek, to eye the curve of her chin, or the slender fullness of her figure, seemed to be at this moment a sacrilege. Her sex had fallen from her, and she rode as safe in my company as if she had been a man. More, I reflected that if there were many like her on the rebel side—if there were others who, daughters of our race, grafted on its virtues the spirit of this new land, then, I had no doubt of the issue of the unhappy contest in which we were engaged. In that case the thirteen colonies were as safe from us and as certainly lost to His Majesty as if they were the six planets and the seven Pleiades.

Nor in anything, I reflected, was her firmness more plain than in her treatment of me. She knew what I had done. She knew that she owed her misery to me. She must hate me in her heart. And doubtless when she had used me she would cast me aside. But in the meantime and because my help was needful to her plans, she was content to use me. She was willing to speak to me, to ride beside me, to breathe the same air with me, she could bear the sound of my voice and the touch of my hand. She could constrain herself to stoop even to this, if by any means she might save the father she loved and whom I had betrayed!

But while she did this, she was as cold as a stone, she made no pretence of friendship or of amity; and the light was failing, we had ridden ten miles, passing now a picket-guard, and now a lonely vedette on a hill-top, and many a sutler’s cart on the road, before she spoke again. Then as we descended a gorge, following the winding of a mountain stream that brawled below us amid mosses and alders, and under fern-clad banks, she asked me if we should reach the ferry on the Wateree by eight.

She spoke to me over her shoulder, for she was riding a pace in front of me and I had made no effort to place myself on a level with her. “I am afraid not,” I said. “If we reach the ferry by nine we shall be fortunate. Very soon it will be dark and we must go more slowly.”

“Then let us push on while we can,” she replied. And starting her horse with the spur she cantered down the uneven winding track, flinging the dirt and stones behind her, as if she had no neck and I had two arms. If she gave a thought to my drawback she must have decided that it was no time to consider it; as from her point of view it was not. Fortunately the sky was still pale and clear, the light had not quite failed, and presently without mishap we reached more level ground. Here the road, parting from the stream, wound on a level round the flank of a low hill, and for a mile or two we made fair progress. It was only when the darkness closed in on us at last that we drew rein, and trusting our horses’ instincts rather than our own eyes pushed forward, now at a trot and now at a walk.

“When does the moon rise?” she asked presently.

“At eight,” I told her.

“The ferry boat runs all night?”

Now I had not thought of that. It was a much-used ferry situate at a point where the traffic from Charlestown separated, a part of the traffic using the boat and crossing to the higher and drier road on the right bank, the rest pursuing the shorter but heavier way through Camden. As a second route the ferry road was of value, and a considerable portion of our supplies came in that way. I knew that there was a half company of the 33rd posted to protect the crossing, but I remembered that the ferry house was on the farther or eastern bank. Probably the detachment also would be on that side.

I had to tell her this, and that I was not sure that the ferry ran at night. “I hope,” I added, “that we shall be able to make the men hear, if it does not. But if we fail we may be detained.”

“All night?” she asked and I thought that I read in her tone not only anxiety but contempt—contempt of my ignorance and inefficiency. “Do you mean that?”

I told her that I feared that we might be detained until daybreak; and with pity I wondered how, fatigued as she was, she would be able to endure a night in the open. “Still, it is not more than two leagues,” I continued, “from the river to the hills, and when we are across the stream we should travel the remainder of the distance in an hour.”

Her only answer was a weary sigh. A minute later we passed from the darkness of the night, which has always a certain transparency, into the black depths of a pinewood. In an instant it was impossible to see a yard before us. The carpet of leaves deadened the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the air was close, and great moths flew into our faces. I pictured bats, the large bats of Carolina, swinging past our heads. The whip-poor-will warned us again and again from the depth of the forest. Still for a time the horses stepped on daintily, feeling their way and snorting at intervals. At last the grey stopped. It refused to proceed. “We must lead the horses,” I said.

“I will,” she cried quickly. “You have only one arm.” And before I could remonstrate I heard her slip from her saddle.

So she had not after all forgotten my arm.

But it was humiliating, it was depressing to follow while she led. And the way seemed to be endless. Once I heard her stumble. She uttered a low cry and the grey shied away from her. She mastered it again, and anew she went forward, though with each moment I expected her to propose that we should halt until the moon rose. Still she persisted, bent on her purpose, and after a long stage of this strange traveling we came forth into the light again. She climbed into the saddle. The horses flung up their heads as they scented the freshness and perfume of the night, and we broke into a trot. I rode up beside her. It was then or a little later, when we had slackened our speed on rising ground that she began to talk to me.

Not freely, but with constraint and an under-note of bitterness which her story explained. At dawn on the morning after my departure from the Bluff she had started to ride to Winnsboro’ to warn her father of his danger. Unfortunately, when she and Tom had traveled a dozen miles they had fallen in with a band of straggling Tories—one of Brown’s bands from Ninety-six, she believed. These men, knowing her to be Wilmer’s daughter and having a grudge against him—and doing no worse than the other side did—had forced her and Tom to dismount and had taken their horses, telling them that they were lucky to escape with no other ill-treatment.

Thus stranded on the way, the two had walked seven miles to a friendly plantation, only to learn that there, too, the horses had been swept off by the same gang of Tories. In the end they had been forced to return to the Bluff on foot. Here there were horses indeed, but they were out on the hill and perforce she rested while they were found and brought in. Again the pair set out, but twenty-four hours had been lost, and ten miles short of the camp she learned from friends that she was too late. A man whom she had no difficulty in conjecturing to be her father had been seized, tried and sentenced on the previous day.

It was a pitiful story of effort, of strain, of failure, and she told it piece-meal, with long intervals of silence as her feelings or the condition of the road dictated. In the telling we covered a good part of the journey, now riding freely over hills clothed with low brushwood, where myrtles and dogwood and sweet herbs, crushed by the passage of our horses, filled the air with fragrance, now plodding through the gloom of oak-woods where the notes of the mocking bird brought the English nightingale to mind; and now—this more often at the last—crossing patches of low country where masses of tall cypress, black in the moonlight, betrayed the presence of swamps, and where the voices of a thousand frogs, challenging, insistent, unceasing, bade us look to our going. We were descending quickly from the uplands to the low country of South Carolina, the home of the rice-fields and of fever; and except the High Hills of Santee, scarcely a rising ground of any size now stood between us and Charles Town neck, ninety odd miles distant.

If she could not tell her tale without agitation I could not hear it without pain, and pain that grew the keener, as I saw that in the telling she was working herself into a fiercer mood. Once or twice a bitter word fell from her and betrayed the soreness she felt; and these complaints, I came to think, were uttered with intention. If I had soothed myself at any time with the thought that she did not see events as I saw them, if I had tried to believe that she accepted my help willingly, I was now convinced that I might dismiss the notion. It was no fancy of mine that she shrank from me.

It was at the moment when she had let fall the most cruel of these gibes, that she pulled up the gray and changed the subject, asking me abruptly if we had lately passed a road on the left.

I told her—I could not answer her with spirit—that I had not observed one.

“What time is it?” was her next question.

It was nearly nine, I answered.

“We pass through a village before we reach the ferry, do we not?” she asked.

“There should be a house or two about a mile before us,” I explained.

After that she rode on in silence. But when we had traveled another half mile we came to a post set up at a corner; and there a by-way on the left did run into our road. By this time the moon was high and the sign-post stood up white and ghastly. “Here is the turning,” she said, reining in her horse. “Do you know this road?”

“Only that it is not ours,” I answered wondering what she had in her mind.

“I am not sure of that,” she replied abruptly. “There is an old ferry half a mile up the stream, and I am told that this road leads to it. Ten years ago the present ferry crossed there, but it was moved to a point lower down to shorten the road. Now do you see?”

“What?” I asked.

“That we might cross the river there. The boat is on this side, I believe. Whereas if we go to the new ferry and can make no one hear, we shall be detained until morning.”

I was considerably taken aback both by her knowledge of the district and by a proposal so unlooked for. Moreover, I had never heard of a second ferry, though there might be one. “I think if we are wise we shall keep to the high road,” I said prudently, “and go to the proper ferry. At any rate we ought to go as far as the hamlet. We can learn there if the ferry be working, and if it is not we may be able to secure a boat. We don’t know the old crossing—”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

The taunt did not affect me. “No,” I said, “but a ferry at night, if it is seldom worked, and the man is old too,—well, it is not the safest of ventures.”

“A ferry in good moonlight!” she cried in scorn. “Are you afraid, sir? When the risk is mine and if I do not reach the High Hills in time it will not be you who will pay the penalty?”

I could not meet that argument, nor the passion in her voice. Yet I remember that I hesitated. The place was forbidding. We were halfway down the slope that led to the river, and below us stretched the marshes that fringed the stream, marshes always dreary and deceitful, and at night veiled in poisonous mists. At the foot of the sign-post, which rose pale and stark against a background of pines, there was something which had the look of a newly-dug grave; while halfway up the mast a wisp of stuff, the relic, perhaps, of a flag which had been nailed up and torn down, fluttered dismally in the wind. I looked along the main road but no one was stirring. The lights of the hamlet were not in sight.

I suspected that, quietly as she sat her horse, she was in suspense until I answered, and I gave way. “Very well,” I said reluctantly. “But you must not blame me if we go wrong. God knows I only want to do the best for you?”

I do not know why my words displeased her, but they seemed to prick her in some tender spot.

“The best?” she cried, “and you boast of that? You!”

“God forbid,” I said, breaking in on her speech. “If there were more I could do, I would do it and gladly, but—”

“Don’t! Don’t!” she said, pain in her tone. And she turned her horse’s head and plodded down the side-road in silence. I followed.

Still I was uneasy. The night, the loneliness, the scene, all chilled me; and this tardy suggestion, this change of plan at the last moment had an odd look. However I reflected that I had nothing to lose; the loss was hers if we were not in time. And though a one-armed man in an old and rotten ferry boat—so I pictured the craft we were to enter—is not very happily placed, if she did not see this, I could not raise the point.

My perplexity grew, however, when twenty minutes’ riding failed to bring us to the river, though the road had by this time sunk to the marshes, and ran deep and foundrous, lapped on either side by sullen pools. The time came when I drew rein—I would go no farther; the air was laden with ague, I felt it in my bones. “I don’t think we are right,” I said.

“You would do so much!” she cried bitterly. “But you won’t do this for me.”

“I will do anything that will be of service, Miss Wilmer,” I said firmly, “but to waste our time here will not be of serivce.”

“What will?” she wailed. “Will anything?” Then, stopping me as I was about to answer, “There! a light!” she cried. “Do you see? There is a light before us! We can inquire.”

She was right, there was a light. Nay, when we had advanced a few yards we saw that there were two lights, which proceeded from the windows of some building. I was grateful for the discovery, grateful for anything that put an end to the contest between us; and “Thank God!” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Now we shall learn where we are, and we can decide what to do.”

“More, there is the river,” she added; and a moment later I, too, caught the gleam of moonlight on a wide water, that flowed on the farther side, as it seemed to me, of the spot whence the lights issued.

I was glad to see it, and I said so. I could discern the building now—a gaunt, dark block set high against the sky; a mill apparently, for a skeleton frame of ribs rose against one end of it. The lights that we had seen issued from two windows at some distance from the ground and not far apart. As well as I could judge, the building stood between road and river on piles, with a rood or so of made ground to landward, and a few wind-bent cypresses fringing the river bank behind. It was a lonely house, and dark and forbidding by night; but by day it might be cheerful enough.

“I will inquire,” I said, briskly slipping from my saddle. “You had better wait here while I go,” I added.

I was in the act of leading my horse towards the door, when she thrust out her hand and seized my rein. “Stop!” she said. And then for a moment she did not speak.

I obeyed; for the one word she had uttered conveyed to me, I don’t know how, that a new peril threatened us. “Why?” I muttered. “What is it?” I looked about us. I could see nothing alarming. I turned to her.

She sat low in the saddle, her head sunk on her breast, and for a moment I fancied that she was ill. Then in a low, despairing tone, “I cannot,” she muttered, speaking rather to herself than to me, “I cannot do it.”

I stared at her. To fail now, to succumb now—she who had borne up so well, gone through so much, endured so bravely! “I am afraid I do not understand,” I said. “What is the matter, Miss Wilmer?”

Her head sank lower. By such light as there was I could see that the spirit had gone out of her, that her courage had left her, and hope. “I cannot do it,” she said again. “God forgive me!”

“What? What cannot you do!” I asked, carried away by my impatience.

“Let us go back,” she said. “We will go back.” And she began to turn her horse’s head.

But that was absurd, and out of the question, now that we were here; and in my turn I caught her rein. Here was the ferry, here were persons who could direct us. Had we traveled so far, and were we at the last moment, because a house looked dark and lonely, to lose heart and retrace our steps? “Go back?” I said. “Surely not without some reason, Miss Wilmer? Surely not without knowing—”

“Without knowing what?” she replied, cutting me short. “Why we are here?” And then in a different tone, “Do you know, sir, why we are here?”

“No,” I said, in astonishment. For she who had all day been so calm, so cool, so steadfast, now spoke with a wildness that alarmed me. “Why?”

“To put you,” she replied, “into the power of those with whom you will fare as my father fares! Do you understand, sir? To make you a hostage for him, your life for his life, your freedom for his freedom! Do you know that there are those, in yonder house, who are waiting for you,—who are waiting for you, and who, if my father suffers, will do to you as your friends do to him? Do you know that it was for that that I brought you hither; yes, for that! And now, now that I am here, I cannot do it—” her voice sank to a whisper—“even to save my father!”

A dry painful sob shook her in the saddle. She clung to the pommel, the reins fell from her hands, the tired horse under her hung its head. “Good Lord!” I whispered. “Good Lord! And you brought me here for that.”

“Yes,” she said, “for that.”

“And—and Lord Cornwallis—you knew that you had nothing to expect from him?” She bowed her head. “But did you not know, Miss Wilmer, that this—this, too, was hopeless? Insane, mad? Did you not know that Lord Rawdon would as soon depart from his duty in order to save me, as the sun from his course?”

“Men have been saved that way,” she cried, with something of her old spirit. “And you are his friend, sir, you have influence, you have rank, oh, he would do much to save you! Yes, I might have saved my father! I might have preserved him—and now!” her chin sank again upon her breast.

“It was a mad plot!” I said.

“But it might have saved him,” she whispered. “My lord spoke warmly of you, he shewed me your sword on the table. Yes, I might have saved my father—but I could not do it. And now—” Her voice died away.

“It was a mad plot,” I repeated. However strong her belief, I, of course, knew that such a step was hopeless; that no danger in which I might stand would turn Rawdon from his duty, but on the contrary would stiffen him in it. It was a mad plan. But apparently she had believed in it, apparently she had trusted in it; and at the last she had been unable to harden her heart to carry it through! Why? I asked myself the question.

She sighed, and the sound went to my heart. She gathered up her reins. “We had better go, sir,” she said, in a lifeless tone, “before they discover our presence. They may hear our voices.”

She had not had the strength to carry it through! Why? My heart beat more quickly as I pondered the question. I no longer felt the fog on my cheek, the ague in my bones. The note of the bull-frog lost its melancholy, the sigh of the wind across the marshes its sadness. Warmth awoke in me, and with it hope, and a purpose—a purpose, wild it might be, high-strained it might be, and extravagant, but deliberate. For as certainly as I loved her, as certainly as my heartstrings were torn for the tenderness of her body broken by so many fatigues, for the agony of her spirit which had borne her so far, as certainly as she was heaven and earth to me—and she loved me, I believed it now!—so surely did I know that there was but one bridge which could cross the gulf that divided me from her! There was one way, and one way only, which could bring me to her.

And that way lay through the door of the mill. Yet first—first, strong as my purpose was, I had to fight the temptation to pay myself a part of that which fate might withhold from me. To clasp her knees as I stood beside her, to draw her down to me, to hold her on my breast, to cover her face, white and woe-begone in the moonlight, with kisses, to tell her that I loved her—this had been heaven to me! But I had to forego it. I might not pay myself beforehand. Afterwards—but I dared not think of afterwards. I dared not think of what lay between the present and the future. I must act, not think.

“We had better go,” she repeated dully.

“And you thought it might save him?” I said.

“I thought that I could do it!” she answered. She shivered.

“You shall do it,” I replied. “Come!”

I led my horse towards the door, and had travelled half the space that lay between us and the threshold before she grasped my meaning; before she moved. Then, “Stop!” she cried. She pressed her horse abreast of me. “Don’t you understand?” she cried. “Don’t you see—”

“Yes,” I said, “I see.” And for a moment, as we passed from the moonlight into the shadow, and the horses’ shoes clattered on the stones before the door, I let my hand rest on her knee. “I see. But I also remember. I remember that your father saved my life. I remember that I delivered him up to death. I remember—many things. And if any risk of mine may avail to save him, God knows that I take the hazard cheerfully!”

She cried, “No!” with a sort of passion, and she tried to draw me back. But it was too late. I was at the door. I kicked it.

“House!” I cried. “House!” My mind was made up. Whatever came of it, whatever the issue, I would go through with the venture.

Immediately a light shone under the door, a voice cried, “Halloa!” And while, stammering words half-heard, the girl still tried to turn me from my purpose, the door was opened, and a light was flashed in my face. A man confronted me on the threshold, two others slipped by me into the darkness. Probably the purpose of the latter was to cut off my retreat, but I paid no heed to them.

“Can you direct us to the ferry?” I said.

“Why not?” the man drawled. “Step inside, sir. Ben will hold your horse. And a lady? Well, we did not expect to see company and we’ll do the best we can. We shall not be for letting you go in a hurry,” he added with meaning in his tone.

It was not my cue to notice the sneer, or to show suspicion, and I followed the man into the lower room of the mill, a damp stable-like place, where the light fell on the shining, startled eyes of a row of horses tethered at a rack. I ran my eye along them; it was well to know what force I had against me. There were six. We passed behind their heels, and picking our way over the filthy floor followed the man up a ladder to what appeared to be the living-room of the place. As I climbed I heard above me a sharp question and an exultant answer; and, I confess, my heart sank, for I recognized the voice that put the question. It was with no surprise, and certainly it was with no pleasure, that emerging from the trap I found myself face to face with my old acquaintance, Levi.

There were two more of the gang with him—I knew them again. The three men were seated on boxes before a fire, the smoke from which found a leisurely exit through a broken chimney of clay. The walls were formed of squared logs, the shingled roof was festooned with cobwebs. In one corner lay a heap of dirty cornstraw, in another a pile of drift-wood. The floor was a litter of broken casks and cases, with some rotting gear and fishing-nets, and a keg or two.

Levi made me a mock bow. “Evening, Major,” he said, “Well, well, you surely never know your luck! Never know when you’re going to meet old friends! I’m d—d if we’ll part this time as easily as we did last time!”

“We only want the ferry,” I said, playing out my part.

“Oh!” he cried rudely. “Our duty to you, and hang the ferry! We’ve wanted you mightily, Major, and now you are here we mean to keep you. Here, sirree, get up,” he continued, kicking the box from under one of the other men, “Let the lady sit down. Cannot you see that she’s dog-weary?”

The man moved awkwardly out of the way.

“The Captain will have a high opinion of you, Ma’am,” Levi continued in an oily tone that made me long to wring his neck. “If you’ll be bidden by me, you will allow me to offer you a sup of Kentucky whisky. It’s the queen of liquors to bring the color back to your cheeks.”

She did not decline the offer; no doubt she needed support. He put a cloak on the box and she sat down with her back to me, either to play her part the better, or because she could not bear to face me. None the less could I picture the ordeal through which she was passing! Levi, fussing about her, brought out a bottle and drawing the corn-cob cork poured some of the spirit into a small bowl. She drank it and said something to him in a low voice.

“Pete is saddling his horse now,” he answered. “He’s a mighty good man in the saddle, and he’ll not spare his spurs. He’ll take the message! But we shall need a piece of the fur to prove that the bear is trapped. Here you,” he went on truculently, turning to me, “You are in our power and we are going to hold you as a hostage for Wilmer. Do you understand? If your folks hang him, we shall hang you! Do you see? Have I spoken plainly, sir?”

“Plainly enough,” I said. “But you must be very foolish if you think that that will do Captain Wilmer any good; if you think that a threat of that kind will make Lord Rawdon hold his hand.”

“D—n my lord and his hand!” he retorted coarsely; and he spat on the floor. “My lord will decide as he pleases. But as he decides, you, Major, will hang or go free. So, by your leave do you write and tell your folks what I say.”

“If I write,” I replied, “I shall tell his lordship to do his duty.”

“Major,” he answered. “Do you see that fire? We have means to persuade you and if you try us too far—”

“I shall not write,” I said. “If I write those are my terms. That is what I shall write. But if it’s only proof that I am in your hands that you require, take my ring. It will be known and will do what you want. Only I warn you, my friend, that the man who carries the message will slip his neck into a noose.”

“Do you think that we don’t know that!” Levi replied, grinning. “We need no Philadelphia lawyer to teach us our business. This country is ours—ours, Englishman, and it is going to remain ours. We have ten friends where King George has one, and we shall know how to place your ring where we want it. Many is the time that I’ve laughed to think of Wilmer fighting your quails for you, and you putting on the money, and your bird not worth a continental cent!”

The girl raised her head. She said something that I could not hear.

“To be sure, Miss,” he answered obsequiously. “To be sure, time is running. Here, give me the ring.” He weighed it a minute in his hand and his eyes sparkled as if he had no mind to part with it. Then he turned to the ladder. The girl rose too. “I will speak to Pete,” she said.

“We need not trouble you,” he answered. “You sit down, Ma’am, and rest.”

“I will speak to Pete,” she said again, as if he had not spoken. And carefully averting her face from me—I wondered if she knew how deeply, how pitifully I felt for her—she followed Levi down the ladder.