The Storm Centre. Mary Noailles MurfreeЧитать онлайн книгу.
tea."
"Now, Baynell," said the lieutenant, exceedingly wroth. "I want you to understand that I take this very ill of you."
He was a tall, spare young fellow, with light, straight brown hair, a light-brown mustache, and a keen, excitable blue eye, which showed well-opened and alert from under the dark brim of his cap as he looked upward, still standing at the side of Baynell's restive horse. "I think it a very poor return for similar courtesy. I took you with me to call on Miss Fisher—and—"
"This is a very different case. I, personally, am not on terms with Mrs. Gwynn. Besides, she is very different from Miss Fisher, who entertains general society. Mrs. Gwynn is a widow—in deep mourning."
"But it is told in Gath that widows are not usually inconsolable," suggested Ashley, with a brightening of his arch eyes, and still laughing it off.
"I am much affronted, Captain Baynell," declared the irascible lieutenant. "I consider this personal. And I will get even with you for this!"
"And I will get an introduction to Mrs. Gwynn without your kind offices," declared Ashley, with a jocular imitation of their young friend's indignant manner.
"I shall be very happy if you can meet her in any appropriate way. It is not appropriate for me, cognizant of their ardent rebel sympathies and intense antagonism to the Union cause and antipathy to all its supporters, to ask to introduce my friends of the invading 'Yankee army,'" Baynell replied with stiff hauteur.
Just then the bugle sang out, its mandatory, clear, golden tones lifting into the sunshine with such a full buoyant effect that it was like the very spirit of martial courage transmuted into sound. Baynell instantly put his horse into motion, and rode off through the brilliant air and the sparse shadows of the budding trees. His blond hair and mustache, gilded by the sunlight, had as decorative an effect as his gold lace; his blue eyes glittered with a stern, vigilant light; his face was flushed, something unusual, for he was wont to be pale, and his erect, imposing, soldierly figure sat his spirited young charger with the firmness of a centaur. The eyes of all the group followed him, several commenting on his handsome appearance, his fine bearing, his splendid horse, and his great value as an officer.
"He is an admirable fellow," declared Dr. Grindley, a surgeon on his way to the hospital hard by. He had paused at a little distance, and had not heard the conversation.
"If he were not such a prig," Ashley assented dubiously. "Such an uncompromising stickler on trifles! Any other man in the world would have slurred the matter over, and never kept the promise of the introduction. If inconvenient or undesirable, he might have postponed the call indefinitely."
"He is a most confounded prig," said Lieutenant Seymour, in great irritation.
"Baynell must have everything out—to the bitter end," said Ashley.
"I'd like to break his head! I'd like to break his face—with my fist," exclaimed the lieutenant, petulantly, clenching his hand again and again. He detailed the tenor of the conversation to the surgeon as the group watched the manœuvring battery. "Isn't that a dog-in-the-manger-ish trick, Dr. Grindley? He wants to keep his Roscoes to himself. Mrs. Gwynn won't speak to him, and so he wants nobody else to go there whom she might speak to!"
Baynell, still uncomfortably conscious of the rancor he had roused, had taken his position in the centre, just the regulation twelve paces in front of the leading horses, with the music four paces distant from the right of the first gun. As the sound blared out gayly on the crisp, clear, vernal breeze, the glittering ranks, every soldier mounted on a strong, fresh steed, moved forward swiftly, with the gun-carriages and caissons each drawn by a team of six horses. The air was full of the tramp of hoofs and the clangor of heavy, revolving wheels, ever and anon punctuated by the sharp monition, "Obstacle!" as one of the giant oaks of the grove intervened and the direction of the march of a piece was obliqued. The efficiency of the battery was very evident. The drill was almost perfect, despite the difficulty of manœuvring among the trees. But when the ranks passed from the grove they swept like a whirlwind over the open spaces of the adjoining pasture-lands, the whole battery swinging here and there in sharp turns, never losing the prescribed intervals of the relative distance of squads, and guns, and caissons—all like some single intricate piece of connected mechanism, impossible of disassociation in its several parts. Ever and anon the clear tenor tones of the captain rang out with a trumpet-like effect, and the refrain of the subalterns and non-commissioned officers commanding the sections followed in their various clamors, while the great whirling congeries of horses and men and wheels and guns obeyed the sound like some automatic creation of the ingenuity of man. Once the surgeon bent an attentive ear.
"By sections—break from the right to march to left!" called the commander, with a sudden "catch" in the tones.
"Caissons forward! Trot! March!" came from a different voice.
"Section forward, guide left!" thundered a basso profundo.
"March!" cried the captain, sharply.
"March!" came the subaltern's echo.
As the moving panorama turned and wheeled and shifted, the surgeon commented in a spirit of forecast:—
"If that fellow doesn't pay some attention to his bronchial tubes, they will pay some attention to him, and that promptly."
So promptly indeed was this prophecy verified that within the next few days old Ephraim, who purveyed all the news of the period to the remote secluded country house, informed Judge Roscoe that Captain Baynell was seriously ill with bronchitis and threatened with pneumonia. In order to have indoor protection and treatment he was to be removed as soon as possible to the hospital near the town. Judge Roscoe verified this rumor upon hastening to camp, and with hospitable warmth he invited the son of his old schoolmate to sojourn instead in his house; for in the college days to which he was fond of recurring he had been taken into the home of the elder Fluellen Baynell, and nursed by his friend's mother through a typhoid attack. To repay the obligation thus was peculiarly acceptable to a man of his type. But Baynell hardly heeded the detail of the hospitable precedent. He needed no persuasion, and thereafter he seemed more than ever lapsed in the serenities of the storm centre, ensconced in one of the great square upper bedrooms, with the spare furnishing of heavy mahogany that gave an idea of so much space, the order of the day when the plethora of decoration, the "cosy corner," the wall pocket, the "art drapery," the crowded knickknackery, did not obtain. For more than a week Baynell could not rise; the surgeon visited him at regular intervals, and Judge Roscoe appeared unfailingly each morning in the sick room; but the rest of the family remained invisible, and held unsympathetically aloof.
This was a shrewd loss to Ashley, for although he had called at first with genuine anxiety as to his friend's state, the humors of the situation appealed to him as time wore on, and he recollected with the enhanced interest of enforced idleness his boast that he would compass an introduction to Mrs. Gwynn, despite Baynell's stiff refusal. Seymour still resented the circumstance so seriously that he had withheld all manifestations of sympathy or concern, and this, the kind Ashley considered, carried the matter much too far. He thought it might effect a general reconciliation if he should meet Mrs. Gwynn by accident, when he fancied he would not fear to introduce any one whom he considered fit for good society. Thus, after he had ceased to be apprehensive concerning Baynell's condition, he called on him again and again, but hearing never a light footfall on the stair or the flutter of flounces that might promise a realization of his quest. He was all unconscious that his project had an unwitting ally in Judge Roscoe himself. For more than once Judge Roscoe was uncomfortably visited by hospitable monitions.
"I should have liked to ask Colonel Ashley to dine with us," he said tentatively to Mrs. Gwynn. "He was leaving the house just as the meal was being served. Old Ephraim—confound the old fellow—has no sort of tact. He brought in the soup to Captain Baynell with Colonel Ashley sitting by the bedside! It was indeed a hint to beat a retreat. I was—I was mortified. I was really mortified not to ask him to stay."
"Heavens, Uncle Gerald!—what are you dreaming about? Ask people to dine, and no trained servant to wait on the table—and this china—and the ladies in