House Divided (68 page)

May, 1862

 

F
AUNT had lived too long in a world of which he was the only resident, thinking of himself as a lonely figure upon whom life had laid a cloak of sadness which he could never cast aside. The onset of the war was an addition in kind to that old wrong inflicted upon him by the fates when his loved ones died. Just as death then had robbed him of his wife and of his child, so now war robbed him of Belle Vue, and shattered forever his ordered way of life. It was in the temper of the flagellant, who lays a scourge of thorns across his own shoulders and relishes pain, that he suffered the long misery of service in the Wise brigade in Western Virginia; the wounds he took at Roanoke and the ordeal of that terrible plodding journey up the beaches to Norfolk produced in him a sort of holy rapture. He found a mournful pleasure in thinking of himself as the chosen target of all the cruel gods, upon whom they delighted to heap most grievous wrongs.

To be told that from his father's loins had sprung, in a second generation, that monster in the White House was the culminating blow. Wrongs he could have continued with a meek patience to endure; but this was worse than an injury, it was an insult. His first exploding spleen gave way to reckless anger. His world was gone, the very foundation of his life withdrawn. So be it. Then Great Oak, the old house which was a part of the flesh and blood, the bone and sinew of each one of them, that too should go. In that first hour of knowledge he set it all aflame, room by room, smashing every movable thing into kindling to feed the waxing fires. He made a thorough business of it, starting in the east wing, then in the lower floors; he retreated
before the flames as they advanced; and when the task was done, sated with destruction as a vulture may be sated with carrion, he rode to overtake his mother's carriage.

It was as much his own passions as the long tedium of the journey to Richmond which brought him near exhaustion. In Richmond he wished to escape from his mother, from Cinda, from them all; when Tony suggested they go to Mrs. Albion's, he agreed. In this hour of his own shame, to call upon the base and degraded woman who had been Tony's mistress suited his mood. After all, who was he that he should hesitate to consort with feminine depravity; who was he to feel a righteous scorn of any man or woman?

Who was he? Why, he was a kinsman of that murderous and apelike creature in Washington; that gluttonous beast hungry for tender flesh, thirsty for blood. His thoughts dramatized this hour in resounding phrases. Mrs. Albion would doubtless prove to be a tawdry, tinsel creature; a shiny serpent of a woman as abhorrent to any honest man as her life had been, fit company for such a man as he now felt himself to be.

But after a first mild surprise to find she was not the sorry drab he had expected, he forgot her in listening to the words of that sandy-haired young cavalryman named Mosby. To be a soldier in battle, one among many; that in itself could never again content Faunt. He wished to deal out many deaths, and to know his victims. In his thoughts that were blurred by wine and by weariness, he imagined himself in the role Mosby described, pursuing a host of fleeing Yankees, pistolling them one by one till he came up at last to the leader of them, headlong in flight like the rest; and this leader was Lincoln, gaunt and long-armed and grotesquely tall, more like an animal than a man. Faunt in his thoughts that turned insensibly to dreams sent heavy bullets smashing into the enemy's back; and each thudding impact was as delicious as a kiss. From sleep which brought such dreams, he did not wish to wake.

When at last he did return to sensibility, the room in which he lay was dark; but he could see the oblong of a door obliquely illumined by the flickering light of an unseen candle. As his wits cleared, he became conscious that someone sat near him, near his bedside. He turned his head on the pillow to look that way and saw the figure of
a woman, dim in the half-dark. At his movement she stirred, bowing toward him; he heard her voice.

“Are you awake at last?”

He recognized her voice. This was Mrs. Albion; so he and Tony must have stayed on here in her house. Why not? Why should he not do what he chose? “Yes, yes, I am awake,” he said. A sense of time returned to him. “Where is Tony?” Her head moved in denial, as though she said she did not know. “It must be late, near morning,” he reflected. Then, realizing that someone had removed his clothes, realizing more completely his condition, he lay trying to remember what had happened. “I must have slept,” he said.

“Yes, slept the clock around.” Her voice was husky and low.

“You serve a heady wine.” The fumes still confused him.

“You were very tired.”

“Where is Tony?” He repeated the question.

After a moment she said: “I sent him away. I do not know.”

She did not know. Well, there were things he did not know. “Who put me to bed? Tony?”

“Milly and I.”

He considered himself in dispassionate contempt. He had come here with Tony, to the home of this woman; he had drunk himself into a stupor; he had lain here in sodden sleep for—how long? The clock around, she said. Through the night, then, and the day, and into another night. He, Faunt Currain, who had lived all his life so proudly, had slept the clock around in this woman's bed. He grinned in sudden realization. He, Faunt Currain, kinsman of Lincoln. Since that other was true, these depths had no terrors for him now. He could descend no lower.

“You have been too kind to me, more than I deserved.” He spoke in gracious irony. She and her servant had put him to bed; but this woman was no doubt beyond embarrassment, inured to shameless intimacies.

She rose. “Rest a little longer. I will bring you something. You must be hungry.” She moved toward the door, her figure for a moment silhouetted against the candlelight in the hall outside the room where he lay. He saw with approval that she moved gracefully, and
her head was proud and high. Something in her quiet dignity pleased him.

When she returned—alone, bringing a waiter laden with all he could desire—he had not moved. It was pleasant to lie relaxed and submissive, pleasant to be waited upon; pleasant to know without knowing how he knew that there dwelt in this handsome woman a readiness for rich surrender. Why should there not? Surely such a woman was past all scruples long ago. And—why should he not seize that which was so surely in his grasp? What right had he to scruples now? Below the pit in which he dwelt there was no deeper degradation. Like a man who having done one murder more easily kills again, Faunt felt himself released from long bondage to the standards he had so recently held high. While he ate sparingly, while she watched him and foresaw his wants, while they talked together—surprisingly at ease—he let his thoughts and his eyes appraise her. She must of course be older than she seemed; yes, years older than he. What was that whimsical advice old Ben Franklin had given someone or other; to take as your first mistress a woman older than yourself? Faunt's own thoughts amused him; there was a sardonic mirth in the simplest word he said.

Yet their words for a while were commonplace enough. Was he feeling more rested?

“Yes. Yes, I slept away fatigue.”

“You were very tired.”

“We had been on the road from Great Oak all the night before and all that day. We moved my mother to Richmond, could not leave her to fall into Yankee hands.”

“No.”

He added: “And in the last confusion, the house caught fire and burned. We could see the fire behind us as we came away.”

“I felt that there was more than physical exhaustion to tire you so. The old house burning would have been an added grief to you.”

“Oh no. Better see it burn than leave it for the Yankees to debauch.”

She looked at him with wise eyes. “If you felt so, perhaps you put the torch to it yourself.”

He smiled. “Perhaps indeed I did.”

“Coffee?” She filled his cup again. “Tony has told me the beauty of Great Oak.”

That she should speak of Tony thus simply and straightforwardly impressed him. She must know he knew the truth. This woman had strength in her. To cover his own thoughts he spoke of the man he had met here when he first came to her house.

“Mr. Mosby is a striking person.”

“Mr. Berry brought him. I had not met him before.”

“His idea of pistolling Yankees, that is a sport which would appeal to me.”

Her eyes for a moment clouded, as though she gave this possibility more consideration than his casual remark on its surface deserved. “I know nothing of such matters,” she said.

He smiled. “I think you know more than you admit.” He was comfortable and at ease with her, sure of some strong bond between them. “I think you have a gift for listening. Perhaps that's why the little editor—what was his name?”

“Mr. Berry.”

“Perhaps that's why he admires you. A woman, to be considered brilliant by men, need only hold up a mirror in which they can see themselves reflected.”

She said in a low tone: “No woman is complete except as the mirror of some man.”

He smiled. “I have also heard it said that no man is complete unless he is nourished by some woman's love.”

Her eyes met his. “Tony has told me that you are incomplete. Alone.”

He felt a momentary anger at this intrusion into his heart, and with an instinct to give wound for wound, he said: “You've known Tony a long time?”

She answered simply: “I think there is nothing you do not know about Tony and me.” He felt himself reproved. She rose to take away the waiter with the soiled dishes; and when she reached the door he was afraid she would not return.

“But all that is past,” he said, wishing to placate her.

“Past, yes,” she assented. She set the waiter on a table outside the door, returned to stand beside him. “Milly has cleaned your garments. They are in the wardrobe there. The bathing room is across the hall. If you wish to sleep, do. If you wish to find me, I will be near.”

He looked up at her, relishing this moment; he smiled in a quizzical way. “Why should I wish to—find you?”

After a moment she said: “I hope you will.”

“I must go back to—my mother, the others.”

“Must you? You need not.” She held his eyes a moment longer, then moved away.

 

Faunt did not at once arise from where he lay. Her eyes and her tone, more than her words—and her words were open enough—left no doubt in him. Then—why scruple? Who was he to hold himself so high? For a moment, despair swept through him like hot desert winds; but—to remember her, the rich sheen of her heavy hair, her deep warm tones, the poise of her head, was comfort and assuagement. Half in self-scorn, half in hunger, he dressed and went to her.

Into the days that followed, the world outside did not once intrude. Faunt accepted this insulation without question. Here in Nell's house was a world complete enough; here were forgetfulness, and comradeship, and friendliness. “You're such a woman as I have never known,” he told her once; and she smiled in his arms and said, as she was to say during those days so many times: “You've made me know things I've never known before.” He asked for nothing she did not provide; and it came about that he sometimes tested her resources, leading her to talk about herself, wondering always at her completeness and her lucid honesty and her level self-appraisal. Once he said: “You and my sister Cinda would like each other,” and she said: “We do,” and told him of the day Cinda came to invite her to Burr's wedding; and after a moment's hesitation she told him too how she went to Cinda for advice when she had that information from the North which led to the Confederate success at Leesburg.

“You did the South a service,” he remarked.

“A woman can do so little. I will always do what I can.”

Sometimes he wished these days need never end; but at other times he felt himself debased by this association, and sharp spurs of uneasy restlessness more and more beset him. He asked once where his horse was, and she told him. He remarked once that his disappearance must have caused his mother and Cinda worry and concern. To this—he had learned that she never argued against manifest truth—she offered
no reply. Eventually he asked a question about the retreat from Williamsburg; and she told him of the fighting there when Longstreet turned back the first pursuit. “Now the army is on the Chickahominy,” she said. “And—Norfolk has been abandoned to the Yankees. We destroyed the
Merrimac
—the
Virginia
—so that it need not fall into their hands.”

“That's sorry news.”

“We are in straits,” she assented. “People say Richmond will be abandoned without a fight. The tobacco in the warehouses here is to be burned to keep it out of enemy hands.”

“You never leave the house, yet you know all that is happening.”

“Milly and Rufus are good listeners.”

He smiled. “Well taught by you,” he remarked; and for a while they spoke of themselves and of no one else at all.

But next morning he referred again to the fighting at Williamsburg. “Burr and Julian, and Vesta's brand-new husband must have been there.”

His words were a question. For a moment she did not speak; then she said: “Burr is at home with a slight wound. No one knows what happened to Julian; he has not been found. Lieutenant Cloyd was killed.”

Sorrow swept him, and then shame; for in her grief, since Brett was away at Suffolk, Cinda must have wished for him. He had failed her, and it would be hard to face her now. “Do they know anything at all about Julian?”

“I only know what Rufus has heard from the negroes; but Julian's body was not found, or not recognized if it was found.”

He might discover the truth, and thus make amends to Cinda. If he went to Williamsburg it would mean slipping through the Yankee lines; but that could be managed. When he told Nell he must leave her, he said no word of his intention. “It's high time I went back to duty,” he explained, and spoke of Mosby. “I shall find him,” he said. “Offer my services.”