The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story

In his note he told Agatha of his unanswered inquiries, and of the great uneasiness he felt concerning her health. Finally he begged her to relieve his anxiety by sending a line in reply.

XXXII

In righteous wrath

The grounds about The Oaks mansion were much more extensive than was customary on Virginia plantations. The late owner, Agatha's father, had cherished the forest growths jealously, permitting no tree to be cut that could in any wise be preserved, and forbidding the encroachment of the lawns immediately about the house upon the wild woodland growths that bordered and surrounded them. It was Agatha's delight on windy autumn days to wander in these woodlands, and on this morning Sam encountered her quite half a mile from the house. She was hatless, and the wind was taking what liberties it pleased with her thick-growing hair, while she, having turned child again in her enjoyment of the brilliant, gusty morning, was wading about in the depths of the fallen leaves, delighting her soul with their rustling.

Sam delivered his note and she read it. Instantly the child spirit in her took flight and she became the strong, resolute, self-contained young woman that she had learned to be during the storm and stress period of her recent life. Her sudden access of dignity did not spare even Sam. Like an officer in battle issuing his orders, she turned to the negro boy and said:

"Return to your master at once. Tell him you met me far from the house. Say to him that I am almost as well as ever, and that I will answer his note during the day. There. Go now, and deliver the message as I have given it to you. Do you hear?"

Sam's face grew long, as he turned about, and Agatha caught sight of it. She was in a mighty rage, but not with Sam. She bethought her that the boy had misunderstood, to the injury of his feelings, so she called to him, and added:

"I did not mean to speak sharply to you, Sam. You don't deserve any but kindly words. I was thinking of something else. How are you since you got back to Warlock, and tell me truly how your master is."

"Thank you, Mis' Agatha," answered the boy, his face all smiles again, "Mas' Baillie he's a-gittin' as lively as a spring chicken what don't mean to be ketched. He rides every day now, an' don't he jes' eat! He'll be all right in a week or two, yo' may be sure. As fer Sam, he ain't never nothin' else but well, specially now dat we done git away from dem Yankees an' back to Warlock ag'in!"

Nevertheless Sam grew distinctly melancholy as he rode homeward, repeating his message time and again in order that he might deliver it correctly. The message seemed to him unduly curt, and certainly the note he had delivered seemed somehow to have angered Agatha. Sam wondered how and why, and he grieved over the circumstance, too, for Sam had taken the liberty of making up his mind that Agatha would make an ideal mistress at Warlock, and that the master of Warlock was planning some such destiny for her. Her message and her manner suggested that she resented all this, and that his master's hopes, which he took for granted, were likely to be disappointed.

Baillie Pegram's interpretation of the message when it was delivered to him did not materially differ from that which Sam had put upon it.

"She resents the liberty I have taken," he thought, "in writing to her directly. She has forbidden her aunts to reply to my inquiries made through them. She has sought in that way to tell me, by indirection, that the old family war between herself and me still endures; that all her suffering and sacrifice in ministering to me was inspired solely by a sense of duty; that she wishes now to end our intimacy as she did two years ago. Clearly that is the state of the case, and she is naturally angry now that I have forced an attention upon her which compels her to tell me directly what she had meant me to infer. What an idiot I was to do that!"

In the meanwhile Agatha had walked rapidly to the house. At the beginning of her journey she indulged her indignation freely. She rehearsed all the bitingly sarcastic things she meant to say to her aunts, all the defiance she intended to hurl at their helpless heads. But as she spent her superfluous vitality in brisk walking, she recovered her self-control.

"I will not scold," she resolved. "That would be undignified. I will be calm and courteous, saying as little as may be necessary to let them see my displeasure. They have grievously compromised my dignity by what they have done. I must not sacrifice what remains of it by a petulant outbreak. They have treated me like a child in pinafores, who must be restrained lest she misbehave. I must show them that I have outgrown pinafores. I must prove myself incapable of childish misbehaviour."

Firm in this determination, she entered the house with Baillie Pegram's note in her hand, and upon joining her aunts before the library fire, she said quite calmly:

"I have a note from Captain Pegram, who has got a notion into his head that I am seriously ill, and that you are concealing the fact from his friendly knowledge. He tells me he has twice asked you for news of me, and you have made no response. Of course you forgot to mention in your notes that I am quite well again."

The ladies looked at each other with troubled eyes. Presently one of them spoke:

"No, dear, we did not forget. We have only been mindful of proprieties which Mr. Pegram seems strangely to forget or ignore. Under the circumstances, and in view of the relations between the Ronalds and the Pegrams, it seemed to us rather impertinent in him to send messages to you, even through us. We intended to rebuke his presumption by ignoring the messages. Why, he even went so far as to ask us to let you write to him yourself."

Agatha received all this in silence, controlling herself with difficulty. It was not until a full minute after her aunt had ceased to speak that she said:

"Go on, please."

"There would seem to be no more to say; for surely it is needless to comment upon Mr. Pegram's crowning impertinence in writing directly to you."

"Go on, please. Tell me all about it. You see I don't at all understand."

By this time the good dames began to realise that Agatha was either very angry or very deeply hurt, so they decided to soothe and placate her. This is how they did it.

"No, dear, I suppose you do not understand. How should you, with such bringing up as your grandfather gave you? Of all the strange perversities – "

"Stop!" cried Agatha, rising from her chair with a look upon her face which her aunts did not understand but gravely feared. Their last spoken words had set her free to speak. She had not dared resent their criticism of Baillie Pegram's conduct. That might have been misinterpreted. But the reflection upon her grandfather was a different matter. She stood there livid to the lips and shaking with the indignation which she was struggling to suppress. After that one word, "Stop!" she remained silent for a space, struggling to restrain the angry utterance that was surging to her lips. At last, speaking in a constrained voice, she said:

"I will not hear another word. Neither you nor any other human being is worthy to speak my grandfather's name except with reverence. He was great, and wise, and unspeakably good. He hated lies and shams and false conventionalities."

Here the roused tigress in Agatha was sharply restrained. She found herself about to indulge in a tirade, and that she was resolved not on any account to do. Still speaking in a voice of enforced calm, she added:

"I must go now and write to Captain Pegram. I shall dine with the Misses Blair at The Forest to-day."

To Baillie she wrote:

"It is very kind of you to feel so much solicitude on my account. But it is needless, as I am quite well again and growing stronger every day. I go in half an hour to dine at The Forest, where I shall remain till to-morrow. After that I shall go to Richmond in search of some way in which I may be of service. I am pleased to hear through Sam that you are so greatly better. Thank you again for all your kindness to me, and good-bye."

Having despatched this note, Agatha donned her hat and cloak and walked out of the house. Without a pause she passed on through the grounds and along the road to the plantation known as The Forest.

She had made no adieus to her aunts. "To do that," she reflected, "I should have to tell lies, or act them. I should have to say I am sorry to leave them, and I am not sorry. Oh, Chummie! the world is very lonely now that you are not in it! But you mustn't grieve in heaven, Chummie. It will not be for long, you know, and while I stay here I'm going to try harder than ever to be true and good and altogether truthful, as you want me to be, and when I go to join you I'll be happy enough to make up for all these little troubles here."

At that moment a merry gust of wind blew off her headgear. She picked it up, but did not replace it on her head. She liked to feel the crisp breezes in her face. She even indulged the fancy that they bore caresses to her from Chummie.

XXXIII

Under red leaves

Agatha's note, coming after her curt message, was a sore puzzle to its recipient. One might interpret it to mean anything or nothing. It was courteous enough, but its courtesy was colourless and cold. It was such a note as might have been addressed to the veriest stranger. There was nothing in it to reassure the master of Warlock as to Agatha's view of his conduct, nothing to allay his fear that she had resented his inquiries as an impertinence. On the contrary, if that were the meaning of the former silence and of the morning's message, this note was precisely such as a sensitively self-respecting young woman might have written when compelled by his persistence to write to him at all.

It was a very bad quarter of an hour with him, during which he read the missive a dozen times, unable to make out what it meant.

But Baillie Pegram was not a man to despair until he must, or to rest under a painful uncertainty. It was his habit of mind to meet dangers and difficulties half-way, and question them insistently concerning their extent. He called Sam, therefore, and bade him bring the easy-going pacer which he had begun to ride for exercise, and mounting the animal he set off at a gentle gait toward The Forest.

He appeared there half an hour before the four o'clock dinner was announced, and his welcome by his hostesses, Miss Blair and her sister, was all the warmer for the reason that his arrival indicated, more surely than any message from Warlock could have done, the extent of his convalescence.

Perhaps he was welcome also on another account. For the Misses Blair were deeply concerned about Agatha, and they hoped that he might persuade her, as they had failed to do, to give up her plan of going to Richmond and seeking service as a hospital nurse or in some other capacity in which a woman might employ herself. They were deeply concerned as to the matter of nursing for the reason that it was deemed highly improper in Virginia for any but married women to nurse in the military hospitals, where the patients, of course, were men.

Agatha had told them as little as possible of her affairs. She had said nothing whatever of her quarrel with her aunts, only telling them that she had left The Oaks finally, and asking them to send thither for such personal belongings as she had there, so that she might remain overnight at The Forest, and go to Richmond on the morrow. The younger Miss Blair had volunteered to go in person on this errand, and from her the ladies at The Oaks had first learned that Agatha had finally quitted the place in her resentment. They were greatly distressed, and immediately ordered their carriage and drove to The Forest, where Baillie Pegram found them on his arrival.

Their pleadings with Agatha had been earnest, insistent, and wholly fruitless. She had manifested no anger, and they had discovered no resentment in her voice as she replied to them. She had made no complaints and uttered no reproaches. To all their pleadings she had answered, simply:

"I have quite decided upon my course. I shall not change my plans."

The good dames were in such despair that they even welcomed Baillie's coming.

"We have done everything, said everything," they hastily explained to him; "why, we have almost apologised to the child, and all to no purpose. Perhaps you can have some influence, Captain Pegram. Will you not speak to her?"

"I shall speak to her, of course," was his reply. "I am here indeed for that express purpose. But I shall certainly not try to dissuade her from any course that she may desire to pursue. That would be an impertinence of which I am incapable."

The Oaks ladies flushed as he spoke the word "impertinence," remembering their own recent use of the term in connection with his conduct. Perhaps Agatha had told him of that in her letter, they thought. If so it would be most embarrassing for them to dine in his company and hers. So, pleading their great agitation of mind as their excuse, they returned at once to The Oaks, leaving Baillie and Agatha as the only guests of the Misses Blair at dinner.

When left alone with the young woman after dinner, the master of Warlock opened the conversation as promptly as it was his custom to open fire when the proper moment had come.

"Agatha," he began, as the two stood in the piazza in the glow of the early setting sun and in the midst of the blood-red Virginia creepers that embowered the place, "Agatha, do you remember the words I spoke to you on the picket-line at Fairfax Court-house?" Then without waiting for her reply, he continued: "I have come to you now to say those words over again, at a more fitting time and in a more appropriate place. I love you. I have loved you ever since those days in Richmond, those precious days when I first began to know you for what you are. I loved you all through that cruel time when, in obedience to what you believed was your duty, you decreed that there should be 'war between me and thee.' And now after all that you have done and dared for me, my love for a nature so pure, so noble, so heroic, passes understanding. I have a right to tell you this now. Tell me in return, if it displeases you?"

With that absolute truthfulness which was the basis of her nature, Agatha replied as frankly as he had spoken.