Jefferson Carter

“ I have to live for a month under your roof, Miss Wilmer. We must see one another, we must meet hourly and daily whether we will or not. Cannot you forget for a month that I am an enemy?”
“No,” she answered with the utmost directness, “You are an enemy. Why should I pretend that you are not? We are rebels and we are proud of the name. You are of those who are paid to reduce us, to make war on us”—her color rose, her eyes dilated as she spoke—“to burn our towns, to waste our fields, to render our old homeless and our children motherless! ”

“ These were nothings, I saw now; things imponderable, intangible, evasive as the air, fugitive as the wind. She had not loved me. She had only made her market of me. She had only made use of me. She had drawn me into her plans with others, with Tom, with Levi, with her god-father, with Rawdon, with Paton! She had made her market of us all—and saved her father’s life. ”

“ I would not grant that request, no, not if Lord North himself endorsed it, Major Craven. In his Excellency’s absence I command here, mine is the responsibility! I will not make that responsibility immeasurably more heavy, sir, by stooping to a weakness which must rob me, and rightly rob me, of the confidence of every soldier in the camp. I should deserve to be shot, if I did so! There, I have been patient, Craven—I have been patient because I know your position. I have given you a good hearing, but I can hear no more. The thing you ask is impossible. ”

“ It was in vain that Tom fretted me with attentions; I was useless, I was a log, any one might look down on me. To be taken twice! Could a man of spirit be taken twice? No, it was too much. It was bad enough to stand for that which was hateful, without also standing for that which was contemptible.
It was a grey rainy day such as we have in England in July after a spell of heat; soft and perfumed, grateful to those abroad but dull to the housebound. And Wilmer was gone. I heard no voices in the house, no spinning-wheel, the business of the plantation was no longer transacted within my hearing. ”

“ I heard the voice of a man in the living-room. Presently I heard another voice, nay, more than one. “Yes, Wilmer has come,” I thought, “and not alone. I shall have some one to speak to at last, and news perhaps. Doubtless they are occupied with him, but they need not forget me altogether. They might bring me a light and my supper.”
And then—strange how swiftly, in a flash, in a heartbeat, the mind seizes and accepts a new state of things!—then I knew why Mammy Jacks had brought no light and no supper. ”

“ When a man is laid aside by illness or by an injury, something of the woman awakes in him, and he is wounded by trifles which would not touch him at another time. With Wilmer gone, with none but black faces about me, with no certainty of safety, I had only this girl to whom I could open my views or impart my wishes. And enemy as she was, she was a woman—in that lay much of my grievance. ”

“ My pride rose and on the very threshold I turned. Why should I hide? I had Marion’s word and the girl’s word. And weeks had elapsed and nothing had happened since Levi’s last attempt. Was this some new trick for my good for if so, I would not stoop to it. The part I had played at the Bluff had been poor so far; I was not going to make it worse and disgrace myself by hiding in a nigger’s hut from a parcel of low rebels whom a single man with a pistol had put to flight. ”

“ Before I had grasped what was amiss, or understood what was doing, the man and the women had crowded back into the house, the lower half of the door was closed, I heard a bolt shot. “No, no! you’ve no right to ask us!” the old man quavered. “You’ve no right to ask us, Cap’en! He’s a redcoat! We’ll take in no King’s man and no Tory! Not we!”
“We daren’t, Cap’en Wilmer,” the woman said. “If we did the boys would take him out, and hang him, and, as likely as not, burn the house over us! It’s as much as our lives are worth to take him in!” ”

“ I looked abroad over the silent trees, over the carpet of forest which autumn was beginning to dye to its pattern. I viewed for a moment the smooth green head of King’s Mountain, that to the westward rose above the trees. Then I turned to mark, in the direction whence I came, the cleft in the woods which marked the clearing about the Bluff. Beyond it the forest sank and was replaced by the more distant view of the mountains. ”

“ Why, a white woman on her knees kissing a black man’s hands! A spoiled nigger, Major! You may take it from me, a spoiled nigger! Wilmer may as well free him. He’ll never be worth a continental cent to him again.”
“It was a clever plan,” I said. But I could not throw much spirit into my words.
“Oh, she’s a jewel is Madam Constantia!” he answered. “It makes me laugh now to think how she made use of us all. She wanted me to beat up Winnsboro’ at sunrise to-day if Tom’s plan failed; as if I were likely to venture my fellows against the whole British army! No, I couldn’t do that, even for Wilmer. ”

“ I answered, “that after I am exchanged I shall fight against you, it is true. But we can fight without ill will and suffer without rancor. While we observe the rules of the game, we are brothers-in-arms though we are in opposite camps. That is the legacy, Miss Wilmer, that chivalry has left to us.”
She seemed to think this over. “And honor?” she resumed, her face averted. “It binds always, I suppose? It imposes rules which it is not possible to evade, no matter what the exigency may be? If you had to choose between your mother’s life—shall I say?—and your honor, what then, Major Craven?” ”

“ But knowing that if I cried out, here was this rebel Yankee—who had no more nerves than a plantation Sambo—to hear me, I set my teeth while, with a splint made of two pieces of wood, he secured my arm in its due position, and eased as far as he could the crushed shoulder. He did it not untenderly, and when he rose to his feet, “You look pretty sick,” he said, “as if you’d be the better for a sup of Kentucky whisky. But there’s none here, and there’s worse to come. So pull yourself together, and think of old England!” ”

“ There are good and bad, fine and mean in every country, sir, and some day we shall understand that, and shall cease to set down the faults of the few to the account of the many. War is tolerable, Major; war between you and me! It is the abuse of war that is intolerable. But I must go, or may be you will be making me a prisoner. My compliments to Tarleton when you see him—a good man but over sharp; over sharp, Major! ”

“ We are worlds apart.”
Before I could reply Mammy Jacks came to summon her. One of the blacks wanted her, and she broke off and went into the house.
She left me adrift on a full tide of wonder. What a woman, I thought! Nay, what a girl, for she was not more than twenty, if she were not still in her teens! If all the women on the Colonial side were like her, I thought, if but a tithe of her spirit and will were in them, the chances of poor old England in the strife which she had provoked were small indeed! ”

“ I rejoined—I was not to be moved from my purpose now. “I know that I was your father’s prisoner and your guest; and that you stood aside, you did not raise a hand, not a finger to save me, Miss Wilmer. You did not speak, though a word might have availed, and I believe would have availed to preserve me! You let me go out to a cruel death, you turned your back on me—”
“Oh, don’t! don’t!” she cried.
“You quail at the picture,” I retorted. “I do not wonder that you do. I was your guest, I was wounded, I was in pain, alone. Has a man, when he is maimed and laid aside, no claim on a woman? ”

“ There are hours so painful and situations so humiliating that the memory shrinks from traversing the old ground. Wilmer, on his side, had no ground for hope, and so could bear himself bravely and with an effort could add magnanimity to courage. He could smile on me, call me “Major” in the old tone, banter me grimly. ”

“ A smile would naturally shorten a man’s face. Perhaps it was the sunlight. Or perhaps it was just a fancy that had taken hold of me. Wilmer, like most Southerners, had humor of a kind, but he was certainly neither jovial nor talkative, and I should not have described him as an easy companion. His wit was of the dry and caustic sort, that leaves the person addressed at a disadvantage.
He left home again three days later—to join Davy’s band I gathered; and I had seen so little of him, while he was at the Bluff, that I did not miss him. ”

“ Wilmer’s face lightened. “What?” he said. “Do you mean that there was any appearance of—of that?”
“A cur like that!” I said contemptuously. “A devil of a fellow in a tavern!” I looked at Marion whose silence and steady gaze embarrassed me. “Or among women!”
“Ah!”
“But you must pardon me,” I said. “I am done. I must lie down or I shall fall down. My shoulder is in Hades. For God’s sake, Wilmer, let me go to bed,” I continued peevishly—and indeed I was at the end of my strength. “You are worse than Levi and company!” ”

“ The scarlet of the King’s uniform, peeping here and there through the trees that shaded the village street, the smart sentries who paced the walk before this door or that, the Twenty-Third drilling in an open space with their queues and ribbons and powdered heads, the old flag flying above Headquarters—these were sights pleasant enough. And the greetings of old friends were welcome; the camaraderie of an army campaigning abroad is a thing by itself. But when that was said, all was said. A camp is a camp, and the older it is the worse it grows. ”

“ The five began to trot.
Marion laughed softly. “They are grand folks—in a tavern!” he said.
A man who has had such an escape as I had had, and whose throat aches as he thinks of the rope that he has evaded, is not at his best as an observer. If he is capable of thought at all, he is prone to think only of himself. But I had heard so much of the partisan leader, whose craft and courage had defied the energy of Tarleton, and whose name was a terror to our people from the Pine Barrier to the ocean, and from the Santee River to the Gadkin, that I could not take my eyes off Marion. ”

“ Marion, issuing from the swamps of the Pee Dee carried alarm to the gates of Charles Town. Sumter made his name a terror through all the country between the Broad and the Catawba Rivers. Colonel Campbell on the Watauga, Davy on the North Carolina border flung the fiery torch far and wide. It was all that Tarleton and his British Legion, the best force for this light work that we possessed, and Ferguson and his Provincials, now a shattered body—it was all that these could do to make head against the rebels or maintain the spirits of our party.
There were humane men, thank God, in both camps. ”

“ But there is in us a vast force of silence. Where the Frenchman is proud we, until a certain day comes, are ashamed of passion. And apart from the distance which she maintained between us, there was a dignity about Constantia as she moved in the midst of her household, and governed her slaves, that set all thought of love at defiance. ”

“ The injured arm was already bound to my side, but by passing the other arm through the sleeve of a coat—Wilmer’s I suppose, for my uniform was not wearable—and looping the garment loosely round my neck, I was clothed after a fashion. With these men looking sombrely on, and their shadows, cast by the wavering light of the candle, rising and falling on the ceiling, and the hurry and silence, broken now and again by some, “Lord ha’ mercy” from the outer room, it was such a toilet as men make in Newgate but surely nowhere else.
“That’ll do,” Levi cried by and by. “You’ll not catch cold.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ But no man is fit to be a soldier who cannot snatch the pleasures of the passing moment; and when the next day saw me out of doors, when I found myself established on the veranda and the view broke upon me, liquid with early sunshine, and my gaze travelled from the green slopes that fringed the farther bank of the creek to the wooded hills and so to the purple distances of the Blue Ridge—the boundary in those days of civilization—I felt that life was still worth living and worth preserving. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Pursued to his haunts in the marshes of the Pee Dee, he issued from them the moment the pressure was relaxed; and while Sumter and Davy and Pickens, all leaders of note, harassed us on our borders, it was Marion who sapped the foundations of our power, cut off our detachments, and harried our friends to the very gates of Charles Town. Tarleton, whom he had evaded a dozen times, called him the Swamp Fox, and grew dull at his name. But Tarleton could bear no rival, friend or foe, and carried into war a spirit far too bitter. ”

“ I cried peevishly, “as a starving dog!”
“I know,” he said. “The Carolina flea is grand. But I suppose that you’ve not heard the news? We’ve hoodwinked you again, Craven.” This time his tone was more grave but his eyes still twinkled. “Wilmer walked past your sentries at nine o’clock last night, and he’s not a hundred miles away at this moment and as free as air.”
“Thank God!” I said. And I meant it.
“Yes, you can’t fight a people, Major,” he continued. “You can’t fight a people. You may be what you like on your side of the big water, but here you’re no more than a garrison! ”