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In the week that followed, there were almost daily visits between the ladies of the Royal and Camp Street households. Vinton had sufficiently improved to be able to drive out every day and to take very short walks, accompanied by his radiant fiancée. Much mysterious shopping was going on, Mrs. Amory and Kitty being occupied for some hours each bright morning in accompanying Miss Summers on her Canal Street researches. Mars had returned to duty with his troop, and almost every evening could be seen riding down to Royal Street to report to his captain how matters were progressing. I was struck by the regularity and precision with which those reports seemed to be necessary, and the absolute brevity of their rendition. Having nothing better to do, as I fancied, I was frequently there at Royal Street when Mars would come trotting down the block pavement. Each evening seemed to add to the spring and activity with which he would vault from the saddle; toss the reins to his attendant orderly, and come leaping up the steps to the second floor. "All serene" was the customary extent of his report to Vinton, who was almost invariably playing backgammon with Miss Summers at that hour; while the judge, Harrod, and I would be discussing the affairs of the day in a distant corner. This left Kitty the only unoccupied creature in the room, unless the listless interest bestowed upon the book she held in her lap could be termed occupation. What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Amory should turn to her for conversation and entertainment on his arrival? And then Kitty had improved so in health and spirits of late. She was so blithe and gay; humming little snatches of song; dancing about the old house like a sprite; striving very hard to settle down and be demure when I came to see the judge; and never entirely succeeding until Amory appeared, when she was the personification of maidenly reserve and propriety. Occasionally Mars would escort his mother down, and then there would be a joyous gathering, for we had all learned to love her by this time; and as for Vinton – Miss Summers once impetuously declared that she was with good reason becoming jealous. When she came, Kitty would quit her customary post on the sofa; take a low chair, and actually hang about Mrs. Amory's knees; and all Mars' chances for a tête-à-tête were gone. Nevertheless, he was losing much of the old shyness, and apparently learning to lose himself in her society, and to be profoundly discontented when she was away; and one lovely evening a funny thing happened. There was to be a procession of some kind on Canal Street, – no city in the world can compete with New Orleans in the number and variety of its processions, – and as the bands were playing brilliantly over towards the St. Charles, Vinton proposed that we should stroll thither and hear the music. The judge offered his arm with his old-fashioned, courtly grace to Mrs. Amory; Vinton, of course, claimed Pauline; Harrod and I fell back together; and Amory and Kitty paired off both by force of circumstances and his own evident inclination. Once on the banquette, Amory showed a disposition to linger behind and take the rear with his sweet companion, but Miss Kit would none of it. With feminine inconsistency and coquettishness she fairly took the lead, and so it resulted that she and Amory headed instead of followed the party. Plainly Mars was a little miffed; but he bore up gallantly, and had a most unexpected and delightful revenge.
At the very first crossing, something of a crowd had gathered about the cigar store, and so it resulted for a moment that our party was brought to a stand, all in a bunch, right by the old Dago's orange counter to which Harrod had made disdainful allusion in connection with Kitty's mysterious mission of the previous week; and now, close beside the counter, there was seated a chatty old negress with a great basket before her heaped with violets: some in tiny knots, others in loose fragrant pyramids. The instant she caught sight of Kitty her face beamed with delight. She eagerly held forward her basket; Kitty struggled as though to push ahead through the throng on the narrow pavement, but all to no purpose. She could not move an inch; and there, imprisoned, the little beauty, bewildered with confusion and dismay, was forced to hear what we all heard, the half-laughing, half-reproachful appeal of the darky flower-vender.
"Ah, lady! you doan' come to me no mo' for vi'lets now de captain's up agin." And there was no help for it; one and all we burst into a peal of merry laughter; even poor Kitty, though she stamped her foot with vexation and turned away in vehement wrath. And oh! how proud, wild with delight Frank Amory looked as he bent over her and strove to make some diversion in her favor by boring a way through the crowd and hurrying her along! We could see him all the rest of the evening striving hard to make her forget that which he never could. But Kitty had only one feminine method of revenging herself, and that was on him. Womanlike, she was cold and distant to him all the evening; left him at every possible opportunity to lavish attentions on anybody else, – even me; and after all Mars went home that night looking far from happy.
No sooner was he out of the house than Harrod turned to me with an expression of inspired idiocy on his face and said, "What was it you were all laughing at up there at the corner, – something about violets and captains?"
Whereat Kitty flounced indignantly out of the room, and we saw her no more that night.
But all this time not another word had I heard from Bella Grayson. In fact, not a word had I written to her. She had parried the verbal thrusts in my letter with such consummate ease and skill that it occurred to me I was no match for her in that sort of diplomacy. Now the question that was agitating my mind was, how was Mars to get out of that entanglement if it really existed? My efforts in his behalf did not seem to be rewarded with the brilliant and immediate success that such depth of tact had deserved; and, my intervention being of no avail, what could he expect?
Fancy the surprise, therefore, with which I received on the following day a visit from Mars himself. It was late in the afternoon; I was alone in the office and hard at work finishing some long neglected business, when the door opened and my young cavalryman appeared.
He shook my hand cordially; said that he had come to see me on personal business; and asked if I could give him half an hour. I gladly said yes, and, noting his heightened color and his evident embarrassment, bade him pull up a chair and talk to me as he would to an old chum. I can best give his story in nearly his own words.
"Mother says I owe it to you, Mr. Brandon, to tell you what has been on my mind so long. You have been very kind and very indulgent, and I wish I had told you my trouble long ago. I'll make it short as I can." And with many a painful blush – but with manful purpose and earnestness – Mars pushed ahead.
"I met Miss Grayson, your niece, during my first class summer at West Point, and got to admire her, as everybody else did. I got to more than admire her. She absolutely fascinated me. I don't mean that she tried to in the least, – she just couldn't help it. Before camp was half over I was just beside myself about her; couldn't be content if I didn't see her every day; take her to the hops, and devote myself generally. Every man in the class thought I was dead in love with her. Mr. Brandon, I – I did myself. I never ceased to think so – until last – until after that Ku-Klux fight at Sandbrook. I made her think so. She really tried to talk me out of it at first, – she did indeed. She said that it was simply a fancy that I would soon outgrow; and she never for once could be induced to say that she cared anything for me. She was always lovely and ladylike, always perfect, it seemed to me. She even went so far as to remind me that she was as old as I was, and far older in the ways of the world, and cadets especially. She never encouraged me one bit, and I just went on getting more and more in love with her all that year; used to write to her three or four times a week; dozens of letters that she only occasionally answered. Then she came up in June, and I was incessantly at her side. She might not care for me, but she did not seem to care for anybody else, and so it went on. She would not take my class ring when I begged her to that summer. She wore it a few days, but made me take it back the day we graduates went away; but I went back that summer to see her twice, and when I came away I swore that after I'd been in service a year I would return to New York to offer myself again; and we used to write to each other that winter, only her letters were not like mine. They were nice and friendly and all that, – still, I knew she had my promise. I thought she would expect me to come back. I felt engaged so far as I was concerned; then when I got wounded her letters grew far more interested, you know (Mr. Brandon nodded appreciatively); and then they began to come often; and, whether it was that she thought our life was very hazardous, or that the climate was going to be a bad thing for me, or that I would not recover rapidly there, her letters began to urge me to come North. I got two at Sandbrook – one the very day you were there at the tent – and two since we came here; and then – then I found only too surely that it was not love I felt for her; indeed, that I had grown to love – you know well enough (almost defiantly) – Miss Carrington. I felt in honor bound to carry out my promise to Miss Grayson, and to avoid – to – well, to be true to my promise in every way. But I was utterly miserable. Mother detected it in my letters, and at last I broke down and told her the truth. She said there was only one honorable course for me to pursue, and that was to write to Miss Grayson and tell her the same, tell her the whole truth; and it was an awful wrench, but I did it that day you were at the house. It came hard too, for only the day before a letter came from her full of all sorts of queer things. A little bird had whispered that, like all the rest, I had found my cadet attachment something to be forgotten with the gray coat and bell buttons. She had heard this, that, and the other thing; she would not reproach. It was only what she had predicted all along, etc., and it cut me up like blazes; but mother smiled quietly when I told her, said that I must expect to be handled without gloves, and warned me that I must look for very just comments on my conduct; and then somehow I decided that you had written to her about me. You said nothing to make me think so, and altogether I was in an awful stew until this morning."
"And what now?" I asked, eagerly.
"Her answer came. Brandon, she's a trump; she's a gem; and so's her letter. Mother's got it, and is writing to her herself. I'm inexpressibly humbled, but somehow or other happier than I've ever been." And the boy and I shook hands warmly, and Mr. Brandon bethought himself that that blessed Bella should have the loveliest Easter present the avuncular purse could buy.
"What did Bella say?" he asked.
"Oh! I can't quite tell you. It was all just so sweet and warm-hearted and congratulatory (though that is possibly premature), and just as lovely a letter as ever was written."
"And we may look for two weddings in the – th Cavalry, then?"
But Mars' features clouded. "Vinton and Miss Summers will be married next month; for Vinton says we may expect to be ordered to the plains with the coming of summer, but no such luck for me. I have precious little hope just now."
"And has Miss Carrington heard of our Bella?" I asked, mischievously.
"Good heavens! I hope not. That would be the death-blow to everything."
Yes, it struck me that there would be a weapon that Miss Kit would use with merciless power.
CHAPTER XVIII
It was a gala night at the opera. The grand old house, so perfect in acoustic properties, so comfortably old-fashioned in design, so quaintly foreign in all its appointments, was filled with an audience composed of the music-loving people of New Orleans, and a sprinkling of Northern visitors still lingering amid the balmy odors of the magnolia and the orange-blossoms. Spring had come, – summer was coming. The sun was already high and warm enough to warrant the appearance of parasols by day; while, after it sank to rest, the ray-warmed breezes were welcomed through open door and casement; and in hundreds of slender hands the fan, swung and flirted with the indolent grace our Southern women have so readily learned from their Castilian sisterhood across the sea, stirred the perfumed air, and rustled soft accompaniment to the witchery of the music.
Entering that old French opera-house on Bourbon Street, one steps on foreign soil. America is left behind. French is the language of every sign, of the libretto, even of the programme. French only is or was then spoken by the employés of the house. French the orchestra, the chorus, the language of the play. French, everything but the music. The ornamentation of the house, the arrangement of the boxes, the very division of the audience was the design of foreign hands, and here, more readily than anywhere in our land, could one imagine oneself abroad.
These were days of triumph for the stockholders of the old company. The somewhat over-gilded and too ornate decorations might have lost much of their freshness, the upholstery had grown worn and faded; but the orchestra and the company were admirable. Aiming at perfection and completeness in all details, the managers had kept up the old system of putting everything thoroughly upon the stage. Costumes and properties, though old, were accurate and appropriate; the chorus was full, admirably schooled and disciplined; and the orchestra, in the days when Calabresi's bâton called it into life, had no superior in the country. Instead of lavishing fortunes on some one marvellous prima donna and concomitant tenor, the aim of the management had been to secure excellent voices, good actors, conscientious artists, and so be sure of rendering an opera in its entirety, – every part well and suitably filled, instead of turning the grand creations of the great composers into mere concert recitations. One heard the opera in New Orleans as he heard it nowhere else in the country, and there, and there only of all its places of public amusement, could one see in full force the culture and the refinement of the Crescent City.
It was a "full dress" night. The parquet was filled with men in the conventional black swallow-tail. The dress and second circles of open boxes, the loges behind them, were brilliant with the toilets of beautifully-dressed women; and in one of these latter enclosures were seated Miss Summers and Kitty, behind whom could be seen Vinton, Amory, and Harrod.
Leaving my seat in the parquet, I strolled up to their box immediately after the curtain fell upon the first act of "The Huguenots." Some forty-eight hours had passed since my meeting with Mars, and that vivid curiosity of mine was all aflame as to the later developments. Both ladies turned and gave me cordial welcome as I entered. Vinton made room for me behind Miss Summers' chair, and Harrod strolled out to see some friends.
Though both officers were in civilian evening dress, the story of Pauline's engagement was known among the few acquaintances she had in society, and her escort, a stranger to the city, was doubtless assumed to be the Yankee major. It was too soon after the war for such an alliance to be looked on with favor by those who had recently been in bitter hostility to the army blue, and the few glances or nods of recognition that passed between Miss Summers and a party of ladies in an adjoining box were constrained – even cold. To my proud-spirited friend this was a matter of little consequence. If anything, it served only the more deeply and firmly to attach her to the gallant gentleman, still pale and languid from his recent illness, who so devotedly hovered about her the entire evening. Her sweet, womanly face was full of the deepest tenderness as she leaned back to speak to him from time to time, and soon, with woman's quick intuition, observing that I was anxious to watch Kitty and Mars, she delightedly resigned herself to my abstraction and gave her undivided attention to Vinton.
Never in my brief acquaintance with her had Kitty Carrington looked so bewitchingly pretty. Never were her eyes so deep, dark, lustrous; never – I could plainly see – so dangerous. Never was her color so brilliant, never were her lips so red, her teeth so flashingly white; and never yet had I seen her when all her fascinations were so mercilessly levelled at a victim's heart, even while she herself was tormenting him to the extent of every feminine ingenuity. The situation was plain at a single glance.
Her greeting to me had been coquettishly cordial, and for a moment she looked as though she expected me to accept Mr. Amory's proffered chair at her back. But Mars had risen with so rueful a look in his eyes – something so appealing and wistful in his bearing – that I had the decency to decline; and with vast relief of manner he slid back into his seat, and the torment went on.
In low, eager tones he was murmuring to her over the back of her chair. She – with head half turned, so that one little ear, pink and shell-like, was temptingly near his lips – was listening with an air of saucy triumph to his pleadings, – whatever they were, – her long lashes sweeping down over her flushed cheeks, and her eyes, only at intervals, shooting sidelong glances at him. What he was saying I could not hear, but never saw I man so plunged in the depths of fascination. His eyes never left their adoring gaze upon her face, yet they were full of trouble, full of pleading that might have moved a heart of stone. But Kitty was merciless. At last there came a bubble of soft, silvery laughter and the mischievous inquiry, —
"And how should a lady answer? How – Miss Grayson, for instance?"
For a moment there was no word of reply. Amory sat like one in a daze. Then very slowly he drew back, and I could see that his hand was clinched and that his bright young face had paled. Alarmed at his silence, toying nervously with her fan, she strove to see his eyes, yet dared not look around. Mars slowly rose to his feet, bent calmly over her, and, though his voice trembled and his lips were very white, he spoke distinctly, even cuttingly, —
"Miss Grayson would have answered at least with courtesy and – good-night, Miss Carrington."
And before another word could be said he had quickly bowed to the rest of us and abruptly quited the box.
Evidently she had tormented him until his quick, impulsive, boyish nature could bear it no longer, – until his spirit had taken fire at her merciless coquetry, – and then, giving her no chance to retract or relent, he had vanished in choking indignation. Kitty sat still as a statue one little minute, turning from red to white. Pauline, who had heard only Amory's sudden words of farewell, looked wonderingly up an instant, then seeing plainly that there had been a misunderstanding, and that remark or interference would only complicate matters, she wisely turned back to Vinton, and the rising of the curtain gave all an excuse to concentrate their eyes, if not their thoughts, upon the stage.
But the opera was an old story to me. Kitty was a novelty, a study of constantly varying phases, a picture I never tired of gazing at, and now she was becoming even more – a perfect fascination. Pauline glanced furtively, anxiously, at her from time to time, but I, – I most unblushingly watched and stared. She was manifestly ill at ease and grievously disquieted at the result of her coquetry. Her brilliant color had fled. Her eyes, suspiciously moistened, wandered nervously about the house, as though searching for her vanished knight, that they might flash their signal of recall. I, too, kept an eye on the parquet and the lobby, far as I could see, vaguely hoping that Mars might relent and take refuge there, when his wrath would have time to cool, and he could be within range of her fluttering summons to "come back and be forgiven." But the second act came to a close. Mars never once appeared. Vinton and Miss Summers once or twice addressed some tentative remark to Kitty, as though to bring her again into the general conversation and cover her evident distress; but monosyllabic replies and quivering lips were her only answer. I began to grow nervous, and decided to sally forth in search of my peppery hero. My ministrations had been vastly potent and diplomatic thus far, and might be again. So, with a word or two of excuse, I made my bow and strolled into the foyer.
One or two acquaintances detained me a few moments, but during the intermission between the acts I was able to satisfy myself that Mr. Amory was no longer in the house. Indeed, some of the officers stationed in town told me that they had seen him crossing the street just as they re-entered. Presently I met Colonel Newhall, and his first question was, —
"How is Vinton to-night?"
"Very well, apparently. Do you want to see him?"
"Not particularly. He is here, I believe. You might tell him that his sick-leave is granted. It may be welcome news to him – just now."
"Naturally: as he expects to be married next month."
"Yes. I'm glad he got the leave – when he did," said the colonel, as he turned away to speak to some friends.
Something in his manner set me to thinking. What could he mean by saying that he was glad Vinton had secured his leave of absence? Was any sudden move probable? Amory did say that it was current talk that their regiment was to be ordered to the frontier in the spring. Could it be that the order had already come?
I went back to the box. Kitty looked eagerly around as I entered, then turned back in evident disappointment. Not a word was exchanged between us until the close of the act; but for two occupants of the loge "The Huguenots" had lost all interest.
It was eleven o'clock and after as we reached the lodgings on our return from the opera. Mars had nowhere appeared, though Kitty's eyes sought him in the throng at the doorway, and, as we drew near the house, she looked eagerly ahead at a soldierly form in cavalry undress uniform. A corporal of the troop was lounging under the gas-light at the entrance. The moment he caught sight of our party he stepped forward and handed Vinton a letter.
There was nothing unusual about a letter arriving for Major Vinton – day or night. Orderlies came frequently to the old house on Royal Street with bulky missives for him; yet I felt a premonition in some inexplicable way that this was no ordinary communication. It was a mere note, and I thought the corporal said, "From the lieutenant, sir." Yet I knew it meant tidings of importance, – and so did others.
Miss Summers had withdrawn her hand from Vinton's arm as he took the note, and with deep anxiety in her paling face stood watching him as he opened and read it under the lamp. Kitty too had stepped forward, and, resting one little hand on the stone post at the doorway, gazed with equal intensity and a face that was paler yet than her cousin's. Harrod and I, a little behind them, were silent witnesses. Presently Vinton looked up, his eyes seeking the face he loved.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Our orders have come."
For an instant no one spoke. I could not take my eyes off Kitty, whose back was towards me, but who I could see was struggling hard for composure. Pauline instinctively put forth her hand, drawing Kitty closer to her side.
"Shall I read it?" asked Vinton, gently, looking at Pauline, after one hurried glance at Kitty. She nodded assent.
"It is from Amory," he said.
"Dear Major, – Parker has just met me. The orders are out. Regiment ordered to Dakota. Our troop goes by first boat to St. Louis. Your leave is granted, so it does not affect you; but – I'm glad to go. Parker says by 'James Howard' to-morrow night.
"Yours in haste,
"Amory"
Without a word Kitty Carrington turned from us and hurried into the house.
"What on earth could take the regiment to Dakota?" asked Harrod, after a moment of silence.
"The Sioux have been troublesome all along the Missouri and Yellowstone of late, and this is anything but unexpected. We had a lively campaign against the Southern Cheyennes, you remember, and this promises more work of the same kind, only much farther north."