A DAY or two after the coming of the excursionists, and before their departure, Cauthorne went up to La Rue place. Just as he passed through the gate he saw Victor La Rue sitting on the buttress of roots at the foot of an oak. He had his crutch across his lap, and was smoking his pipe.
Cauthorne bowed, and would have passed on to the house, but La Rue called to him.
"Come and sit with me here," he said: "I wish to have a little talk with you."
A chill crept through Cauthorne's big frame. Lately he had been dreading to meet Victor La Rue. The thought had been growing in his mind, that here was all that was left of the soldier he had shot on the field of Chickamauga. Deeds of courage, boldness, valor, done in the midst of a battle-cyclone, are well enough to remember, and to mention upon occasion, so long as there remains a proper impersonality about the matter; but it requires a hardened heart to meet without qualms what was now cast across Cauthorne's path. He looked into La Rue's face, and his fear was confirmed. He was the very man. There were the stubs of the fingers he had shot away, and there was the remnant of the leg his ball had caused to be amputated. It was with illy concealed trepidation that Cauthorne turned aside and approached La Rue, The crutch had an accusing look.
"It is cool here," said the maimed man, making room on the gnarled roots beside him: "the wind comes under the trees, and makes the shade delightful."
Cauthorne sat down, and relighted his partially burned cigar.
"I have been thinking and thinking, since you came to Tallahassee, where I ever saw you before," continued La Rue; "and I believe I have recognized you at last, though I may be mistaken, sir."
Cauthorne rolled his cigar in his mouth, and gazed up into the tree-top, trying to formulate a way to avoid details.
"Had you ever seen me before I came here?" he simply asked.
"I am not sure, sir; but I believe I had. Were you in the battle of Chickamauga?"
"Yes."
"On the Yankee side?"
"On the Union side, yes."
"Beg pardon, sir: I meant no offence by the word 'Yankee.'"
"No offence, I assure you," said Cauthorne quickly.
"You were riding a large black horse," La Rue added.
"Yes."
"You galloped through a line of Confederate skirmishers in a brushy place not far from Lee and Gordon's Mills?"
"Yes."
"I thought I had found you out. Don't you recollect me, sir?"
"Yes," said Cauthorne, rising and standing before La Rue, his face growing white.
The lame soldier grasped his crutch, and scrambled to his feet.
Cauthorne would have given every thing but his honor and his life to have been able to avoid any further interview. He glanced about him as if looking for some way of escape. Would this maimed and mangled man force a fight upon him? The thought was horrible.
"Do you recollect of my jumping out from behind a tree, and shooting at you?" pursued La Rue.
"Yes."
"And I missed you?"
"Yes."
"And — and — you — you shot me!"
"Yes."
Cauthorne fixed his eyes steadily on the face of La Rue. It was a moment which might bring forth a tragedy. The tableau was itself a drama. La Rue stood as straight as his condition would let him, and returned the look of Cauthorne, who towered above him. A great silence had fallen in the grove. The two men seemed content, for a time, to stand and look at each other. Cauthorne's thoughts wandered away to Lucie, to his hopes and his fears regarding her, to the strange barrier this horrible discovery was raising in his path. How could such a thing be surmounted? His great ability in providing expedients at the demand of sudden and unlooked-for emergencies, an ability which had made him a prince among war correspondents, seemed to have deserted him. He stood there dazed and bewildered. He could not quarrel with a pitiable cripple; he could not quarrel with the man he had maimed and ruined; he could not quarrel with Lucie's only brother. But what could he do? He could see very clearly why this man should look upon him as the cause of his life of misery, and feel like focusing years of morbid broodings in one hot moment of vengeance.
But La Rue showed no sign of any violent feeling. His look had more of introspection and hopeless resignation, than of anger and hate.
"If I had killed you," he said, as if half in soliloquy, "it might not have changed the result as to me. Men were being mangled every minute. I might have lost an eye or an ear the next volley."
"It makes me terribly wretched," said Cauthorne simply: "it is awful."
"Oh! don't speak that way," answered La Rue. "We were mere engines of slaughter then. All our better nature was in abeyance. We were acting under the pressure of a cataclysm. But now we are Christians, and love must flow in place of blood."
And then Cauthorne recalled, what he had known before, that La Rue was a Methodist clergyman, a preacher of great eloquence, whose whole sad life had emptied itself into the channel of revivalism.
Cauthorne grasped the sound hand of the rebel soldier, and looked at him in silence. He could command no better mode of expression. Tears sprang into his eyes, and his throat swelled with emotion.
"I think it would be well, sir, for us to keep sacred and secret this knowledge of ours," said La Rue: "it could do no good to burden others with it, and it might give rise to unpleasant comment."
Cauthorne tightened his grasp on the hand he was holding.
"You are right," he articulated with difficulty: "it ought to die with us."
The preacher lifted his eyes toward heaven, a sudden transport burning in them.
"Lord, forgive us as we forgive our enemies," he murmured.
There came a breeze leaping through the grove, loaded with coolness and fragrance, and from the distant fields wandered the plaintive songs of the freedmen trudging behind their ploughs. The great oaks shook their million leaves, and the dusky vines and the dark old fig-trees trembled and whispered. Gay-winged birds, a flock of paroquets, flew along under the lowest boughs. Some distance away Lucie and Willard strayed among the cool shadows, their lithe young forms outlined against the gray front of the old mansion.
"We never were enemies," said Cauthorne, his voice recovering all its sincerity and clearness. "It was not a personal struggle: it was a conflict in which our individualities were merged."
"Yes, yes," murmured La Rue.
If they found a sort of solace in such assertion and admission, we ought not to grudge it. By some such argument nearly all the calamities consequent upon human methods of adjusting differences must be softened and absorbed. But the clear-cut truth remains, that, no matter how different it may be when peace has come, in the days of war, hate is the prevailing passion, and a burning, unquenchable desire to inflict quick and certain death flies with every bullet on a battle-field. It is well that the flexibility and elasticity of human nature is such that the rebound from the deadly passion which war engenders causes the best soldier to be, when peace blooms out of carnage, the first to frame excuses for clasping hands with his foe. And it is also well that very rarely the maimed wreck from the tempest of battle meets and recognizes the individual who wrought his irreparable misfortune.
Cauthorne and La Rue exchanged very few more words. They could find no ground upon which to base a conversation. By a tacit recognition of the hopelessness of the situation they separated, the stalwart Northerner going thoughtfully towards the house, the shattered Southerner hobbling deeper into the gloom of the grove, — one to chafe and agonize over the fatality which had ordered this dark discovery; the other to bend his gloomy eyes upon the life in the hereafter, where the crutch and the disfigurements of wounds are unknown, and where the dark mysteries of our earthly afflictions burst into the fragrant blooms of heavenly delights.
As Cauthorne strode on towards where Willard and Lucie were dallying under the moss-hung trees, his mind admitted a hundred reasons why he ought to treat as hopeless his new-born love for the beautiful Tallahassee girl. He could see no reason, in the first place, why he should expect her ever to love him; and then this dark fact, which must be held secret, and her knowledge that he was engaged in the battle where four of her brothers fell, and where the fifth and only living one was disfigured, which would be forever coming up, seemed to him a barrier which it would be idle to attempt to pass.
He shook hands with Willard, and could not refrain from twitting him about his short stay in the North. This was their first meeting since the latter's return.
"I tried manfully to stay away a respectable length of time," Willard said; "but I might just as well have tried to swim up the rapids of Niagara. By the way, what is keeping you? The legislature has adjourned, and"—
"I shall leave the city to-morrow," Cauthorne interrupted. "I am going down to reconnoitre the smoke of Wakulla."
"I had hoped to see you give up that adventure," said Lucie.
He looked almost eagerly at her. There were those sweet gray eyes overshadowed by the long lashes, the low, broad forehead, with the short locks straying over it, the drooping shoulders and full maidenly bust, the heavy black braids of hair, tied with scarlet bows, the loose, snow-white robe, — the embodiment of purity and beauty. His love for her took hold of him, and shook him as the reed is shaken by the wind. His purpose vanished. The great barrier between him and her was swept away in an instant.
Willard saw the strange, white light in his face; but Lucie was looking another way just then, and fanning herself with the wing of a snowy heron.
