One day a little party, among them Cauthorne and Lucie, went to picnic on the shore of Lake Bradford, — a pretty little basin-full of water, lying some three or four miles south-west from Tallahassee. The journey was performed on horseback, and it gave Cauthorne an excellent opportunity to study the exquisite equestrianism displayed by the ladies. One girl, a sparkling miss of fifteen, rode with all the grace and ease of one trained in the best school. In fact, hers had been the best school, — that of perfect freedom to ride when she pleased, from childhood up.
The way lay along the road past the Murat place; thence diagonally across the beautiful Bloxham plantation, and on through a flat pine-woods into a wild swamp; through a sluggish stream, which made the gentlemen draw up their feet, and the ladies handle the skirts of their flowing habits; then past a queer log cabin, in the door of which an old negress sat smoking a pipe; and through a scrubby oak-wood, into full view of the little lake shining like liquid glass in its green-bordered basin. It was a free-and-easy ride, now at a gallop, now in a walk, with much talking and some laughter; but it had none of that echoing gayety so often an accompaniment to such a lark in the North. There was more bowing and hand-waving and other easeful gestures of formality all the time visible, and more marks of deference to the ladies, more of quiet respect shown to the men.
Miss Julie La Rue, stout and rather aged as she was, made herself the leader of this cavalcade and picnic, and to her they all were indebted for the more substantial part of the day's enjoyments. She had an eye to the proprieties, and watched her flock with delicate care.
There were some skiffs at their service, but none of them had sails. Cauthorne took occasion to display his great power at the oars. He was a man of mighty and trained muscles, and his many wounds seemed not to have weakened them in the least. He was so willing and so frank and so strong, that he easily became a great favorite with all, and especially with the girls. To these, who had all their lives been used to men who would never unbend from a certain formal stiffness, he seemed a great, big, honest boy, glad to be alive and useful, ready to enjoy whatever might turn round to him. He had nothing of the air which would say, "I am of this or that old family;" he did not suggest a line of ancestors by the way he waved his hand or arched his brows. But he was friendly and kindly-voiced, and full of expedients for making amusement, and quick to see what every trivial exigency demanded. None of the other gentlemen of the party were near so big-limbed and broad-shouldered and tall and large-headed and liberal-visaged. They were straighter, lither, more graceful, quicker-motioned, more like military officers or cadets at dress parade. They were more inclined to erect attitudes and to standing squarely upon both feet at the same time.
It chanced — and, after all, chance had nothing to do with it — that late in the afternoon Cauthorne took Lucie far out on the lake, and then, throwing down his oars, crossed his hands in front of him, and began to talk with her. He was not quite satisfied, lately, when not talking with her.
"I have half determined," he said, smiling in what to her seemed his boyish way, "to stay right here with you forever, drifting as the swell lists, going as the breeze may draw."
"Are all you Northern men full of that sort of — of sentiment?" she asked, bending over the little gunwale, and idly tipping the water with her fan.
"It is not sentiment," he replied in a tone of gentle resentfulness: "it is sincere responsiveness to a most charming influence, — this climate, the local spirit of things, and all that. Why, one dips into an atmosphere of romance as soon as he enters the Tallahassee hills. You wouldn't wish one to be unnatural, would you?"
"Oh, certainly !" she cried almost gleefully: "unnatural people are the most charming in the world. They make you forget the immense monotony of real life."
He was thoughtful for a minute or more, and then he suddenly said, —
"Miss La Rue, I do not wonder you think real life monotonous. You are living in a little city which is the type of perfect monotony and dulness. You ought to see our Northern life. We buzz, whirl, leap joyfully on. Every day we are farther along, with limbs trained for the race, and eyes alert for every possible demand of progress. Your people feed upon the past: they will not admit that there is any future."
She looked up at him with the first flash of anger he had ever seen on her finely-chiselled face.
"Who robbed us of hope, ambition, our property, our prosperity, our renown, our bravest and strongest young lives?" she exclaimed, in that calm way of hers, with her hands clinched on the gunwale. "How can one help feeding on the past with four brothers in soldiers' graves, and another worse than dead — all one's property gone, and a black cloud of ignorant freedmen camping upon one's ruined estates?"
"Forgive me," he cried: "forgive me: I did not mean to be understood as you have understood me. I spoke of your surroundings as monotonous and perhaps unwholesome. I did not mean to reproach your people for what they cannot help. I beg you not to be offended at an idle comparison !"
She smiled, a wan, far-away smile, as she came slowly back to herself after her burst of energetic displeasure. Never before, in all her life, had she exhibited such passionate resentment. She was still trembling from the effect of it. She was aware, in a sort of indefinite way, that it was because he had said what he did, and not because it had been said, that she had felt hurt. Somehow she expected him to always be soothing in his talk, never irritating. Now she had a hard struggle to repress her tears. She saw very clearly that she had misconstrued him. However, her smile re-assured him, and he quickly and lightly changed the subject of talk.
"What is that?" he asked, touching with his boot a curious wooden bucket, which lay in the bottom of the boat.
"It is a water-telescope, — a sponger's bucket," she replied.
"And what is it for?"
"You don't know? You see it has a glass bottom. Put it on the water, and look down through it, and you can see to the bottom of the lake. The sponge-gatherers on the gulf-coast use them. They float on the water all day long, gazing through their sponge-buckets, with their long-handled sponge-tongs lying in their boats beside them."
He adjusted the rude instrument as she directed, and, leaning low over the gunwale of the skiff, looked down into the water. The effect was so wonderful that he started back. It made the water so perfectly transparent that he seemed suspended in mid-air. Far down he saw the sand-grains and pebbles at the bottom, seemingly undiminished in apparent size by the distance. The sensation of flying, as he had experienced it in his dreams, came upon him with all its strange witchery. For many minutes he did not move except with the slight rising and dipping of the skiff. Lucie brushed a tear from her cheek, and, in her struggle to regain her composure, sang a little song in a low, bewilderingly sweet voice.
Why was it that there and then, as he seemed to hang like a bird in the air, and with her gentle music filling his ears, his mind went back almost a score of years to revel in the smoke and blood of battle where the musketry was like the roar of a tempest, and the thunder of the cannons shook the hills? Was it the voice of his consciousness telling him that never in this life could he and Lucie La Rue interpret alike the meaning of that tempest and that thunder? Why should he suddenly recollect every little detail of his ride across the battle front of Chickamauga, as a courier from below Gordon's Mills to the cross-roads at the mountain gap? He could hear the hoof-beats of his horse, he could see the spouting smoke of the field-guns, and the keen lightning of the rifles. He is there,—he is madly tearing on, — he rushes into a little thicket,— a rebel soldier rises before him with levelled gun,—he jerks his horse aside just as the rebel fires, — quick as lightning he levels his pistol, and sends a ball crashing through the fellow's hand, and another through his leg, and sees him sink down. Every line of that young rebel's handsome face comes out on the field of his memory. Why does he start, and sit up in the boat, and gaze so hopelessly at Lucie? The face of the mangled rebel boy was the very face of Victor La Rue. Why does Cauthorne glance over his own stalwart form in thinking of poor wrecked Victor? Does he think he represents the strong, symmetrical, prosperous North — Victor the shattered, scarred, dispirited, moody South?
"What was that little thing you sang just now? Go over the first stanza again, please," he said, as Lucie looked up at him.
"Take me home to the place where I first saw the light,
To the sweet, sunny South take me home,
Where the mocking-bird sang me to rest every night:
Oh ! why was I tempted to roam?"
sang Lucie, giving the whole wonderful power of her voice to the effort; and she did not stop with the stanza, but went on to the end of the song. Her friends far away on the lake-shore heard every word with perfect distinctness.
As she ceased, she lifted her hand, and cried out, "Oh, look, look !"
Cauthorne raised his eyes, and saw a broad Japanese sketch against the sky, — a flight of herons above the lake from horizon to zenith; long folded necks, slender bills pointing upward; shadowy legs stretched far behind; broad, laboring wings. Slowly they passed on to the northward, thinking, no doubt, of the brooks of Indiana, and the broad marshes of the Illinois and the Kankakee.
"I must soon be following them," he said, "unless our paper concludes to send me to reconnoitre the smoke of Wakulla."
"You might better go home than to undertake that," she replied; "but you must not take it that I want you to go."
He looked eagerly to read her eyes.
"Do you really wish me to stay?" he asked, knowing that he was treating her unfairly.
"Not right here any longer," she quickly and lightly replied. "I am ever so ready to return to our friends yonder. See, they are making signals."
Cauthorne had noticed a whirl of clouds rising in the south-west, and rightly suspected there would soon be a little blow without any rain. He took up the oars none too quickly, for little cat's-paws and counter-flaws began to scamper over the water. Lucie looked alarmed.
"I can outgo a cyclone," he said gayly; and, leaning to, he drove the little skiff along, skimming the surface like a swallow.
And Lucie's face grew sweetly calm. She knew she was perfectly safe.
Cauthorne rode home with Lucie's aunt, and found her remarkably well informed touching some things of great interest to him, especially the past social, commercial, and political history of the Tallahassee region. She described the town of Newport and the celebrated sulphur-springs near there, as they existed before the war. The town once had two thousand inhabitants, large hotels, and warehouses. It was one of the ports of Tallahassee, being situated on the St. Mark's River, and shipped its fifty thousand bales of cotton and its vast cargoes of sugar every year.
"It is gone now," she said: "nothing is left to tell where it was, save one large, deserted hotel, and a few dilapidated houses mostly occupied by negroes. And there was Belair, only a few miles southward from Tallahassee, — a beautiful little town, composed of the summer residences of rich planters. It was a centre of wit, refinement, wealth, and great luxury. Ah, what social gatherings I have attended there! But those stately homes are actually rotting down. Only two white families and some listless negroes live there now. Down near the Gulf was St. Mark's, on the river below Newport. It was another Tallahassee port, and the southern terminus of the St. Mark's and Tallahassee Railroad. It is gone too, only a house or two left."
She talked freely of the distinguished people she had met, — statesmen, poets, artists, foreign noblemen, famous women, the stars of the stage, and the brilliant lights of Washington, Baltimore, and Charleston society."They used to come every winter," she said, — "gay, brilliant troops of them; and our grand houses were flung open to receive them, and we made their stay a continued source of delight to themselves and to us."
She spoke of remembering, when she was a mere child, meeting Harriet Martineau at a friend's plantation house near Montgomery, Ala. She said, —
"I was there, on a visit with my mother, when Miss Martineau came. I recollect her as a queer, deaf person, much more interested in peering into negro cabins, and talking politics with the gentlemen, than in seeking the society of ladies."
She remarked upon the degradation of the fine old plantations by the system of tillage adopted by the freedmen. She called Cauthorne's attention to the shallow ploughing consequent on the use of little primitive ploughs drawn by an ox or a diminutive mule.
"Year by year," she said, "this manner of working is exhausting these once apparently inexhaustible fields, and soon they must become worthless."
"And what is to be the end of it all?" Cauthorne asked, desiring to hear the final result as she would draw it.
"Abandonment to the negroes and a set of whites who are still more abject," she replied.
He remembered too well the effect of his own sort of argument on Lucie to care to try it with Miss Julie La Rue, so he made no direct response.
When he had parted with the ladies at the gate of their homestead, and had returned to his room at the hotel, he found a letter awaiting him from his employers.
Its purport may be gathered from the following extract: —
"If the Wakulla smoke seems to be any thing more than mere smoke, take two or three weeks, and look into it. You are on the ground, and ought to be able to judge fairly of the probabilities of its importance. As for us, we do not believe it is worth any trouble or expense. But you are to be guided by the facts as they exist."
Cauthorne at once determined to make further examination of the probabilities before entering upon any actual exploration. For the three or four days next following he was busily engaged in consultations and interviews with such persons as had, or pretended to have, knowledge of the location and nature of the great swamp out of which the smoke had, for fifty years, been seen rising.
The end of the matter was, he arranged for a reconnoissance.
