House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Nell brushed her eyes free of tears and smiled. “Oh my darling, you’ve been so sick, so long!”

  “I remember coming to your door.”

  She laughed in rich tenderness. “Milly opened to you, and you frightened her into a fit; said you were dying, Egypt, dying. You thought Milly was me! I’m not complimented!”

  “How long ago?”

  “No questions. You’re still so weak. We’ll make you strong again, Milly and I. Sleep till your breakfast’s ready. Poor Faunt! You’re thin as a picked bird! Sleep again a while.”

  “What’s the matter with me?”

  “You’ve had the smallpox, darling.”

  He tried to rise. “Smallpox? Who took care of me?”

  “Milly and I.”

  “You?”

  “Milly’s had it, Faunt; and I was vaccinated two months ago, when the epidemic here began.”

  He relaxed, grinned weakly, touched his cheek with an exploring finger. “Smallpox, eh? I’m glad I grew this beard.”

  “You didn’t break out badly, Faunt. It turned in. That’s why you were so sick. So don’t worry, vain man. It will hardly show. Now sleep!” She fled away.

  He grew stronger, but he coughed a great deal, a light cough that wearied him. She was with him every hour. Now and again, after supper, he heard the door bell ring; and Milly came to summon Nell to a whispered moment in the hall. But she always returned at once to him, answering his questions with light evasions. “No one I wanted to see; not when I’ve you here.”

  Then one evening after dinner he fell asleep; and when he woke he heard the rumble of a man’s voice somewhere at a distance, and out of nowhere, with the shock of a bullet, came a disturbing memory. When she returned to him he watched her with a new attention.

  “You had a caller,” he said.

  “I often do, you know, my dear.” Then as though she felt the impact of the thoughts he did not utter, she said frankly: “This time I had two, in fact. They wished to rent my house. There are no houses left in Richmond, you know.” She smiled. “They offered me seventeen hundred dollars a month. That was a temptation—to a business woman like me.”

  “Are you a business woman?” His tone was even, but his thoughts were hard.

  “A woman alone in the world has to be, darling.” She smiled. “And every one in Richmond is in business now. Even Mr. Randolph, since he resigned as Secretary of War, has gone into partnership with Mr. Myers, helping men who don’t want to be conscripted into the army, getting details for them or finding them substitutes. Lawyers are growing rich by keeping men out of the army. Substitutes are worth two or three thousand dollars. Everything is business, money, profit now.”

  “I haven’t been in Richmond for so long—’

  “I know. Oh my dear, I know.” She came to kiss him quickly. “Haven’t I tallied off the days?”

  He wished to question her, yet not to seem to do so. “And I don’t know anything that has happened since before Christmas; nothing at all.”

  “Nothing has happened, nothing that matters.” She considered. “General Stuart made another ride behind Burnside’s army, went within a few miles of Washington. Too bad you missed that. And let me see, what else is there? The negroes here didn’t pay any attention to Lincoln’s proclamation saying they were free; but in Norfolk where the Yankees are, thousands of them marched in a parade, and even the Yankees had trouble making them behave. President Davis told Congress that if the proclamation leads to a slave insurrection, he’ll have every Yankee officer we capture hung as high as John Brown; and there’s talk that in the next battle there’ll be no prisoners taken on either side.” He watched her eyes, listened to the tones of her voice, thinking his own wary thoughts: “Now what else?” she wondered. “Do you know—of course you don’t—General Bragg won a great victory in Tennessee; but like most of our victories it led to nothing. All the talk here is that the North is ready for peace, or that England and France will take our side; but the Northern armies are still in Virginia, opposite Fredericksburg and at Norfolk and Suffolk. Two weeks ago they started from Suffolk toward Petersburg; but then they turned around and went back. They could have marched right into Petersburg if they had come on. I hear that some spy told them they could take the city if they chose; but perhaps they didn’t believe it! General Lee is in Richmond now. Maybe that frightened them.”

  Faunt found in her words the opening he had wished for, said quietly: “Speaking of spies, I saw one hanged, last summer.”

  “Really? What happened?” He could discover in her no suggestion of guilty fear, nothing but surprise and interest.

  “Why, it was just before we smashed Pope. I had taken a message from Stuart to General Longstreet, and while I was with him the column halted. He was on the march to join Jackson, and he rode ahead to see what the trouble was. They told him an order to halt had come from Lee, and he asked who brought the order. The courier was just riding away. Longstreet said to fetch him back, and two or three of us overhauled him.” His eye was steady on her. “The message from Lee was forged. Longstreet said to hang the man. Major Sorrel called together a drumhead court-martial, and the fellow admitted he was a Northern spy. He was spinning on a halter rope within ten minutes after we caught him.”

  She nodded. “I suppose so. Poor man.”

  “He said his name was Mason. Captain Mason. I had a feeling I’d seen him somewhere before.”

  “Really?”

  “I finally remembered where it was.” He watched her, yet he was ashamed of his own thoughts. “It was one morning last June, the morning Stuart started on his ride around McClellan. I was to go with Stuart, but I stopped here for a moment; and as I left, a horseman was just passing. We exchanged salutes, and I had an absurd moment of jealousy, thinking he might be coming to you. I think it was that same man.”

  Her eyes were wide with astonishment. “Why, I remember. I saw him meet you. He did come back afterward, too.” She smiled. “Your jealousy wasn’t as absurd as you suppose. I think he was a little in love with me.” If there lay guilt in her, she must be desperately wondering whether the dead man had by any word betrayed her; but if she were frightened she gave no sign. “But his name wasn’t Mason. It was Captain Overgood. Or at least he said it was. He called several times, with one of General Winder’s men. His home was in Baltimore. Did he remember you?”

  The question was natural enough; if she had not asked it, that would have been strange. “No. At least he didn’t say so. I could have testified to having seen him in Richmond; but since he admitted his guilt there was no need.”

  “I wish I’d known he was a spy! I might have prevented the harm he must have done before you caught him.”

  Faunt hesitated, sure now that his doubts of her were groundless; for no one could play a part as perfectly as this. So he was glad; but also he was ashamed, and he sought forgiveness through confession. “Nell, I’ll have to tell you. Since that day, thinking about it, about his being here, I’ve—well, I’ve suspected you.”

  “I see.” For a moment she did not speak, and sadness touched her tone. “Yes, I see. You naturally would.” She met his eyes steadily. “After all, I’m not what anyone would call a—reputable woman. I’ve no illusions about that, and neither have you.” He tried to speak, but she shook her head. “No, don’t protest! We both know it’s true. But—well, do you still suspect me?”

  “Not since I’m with you here again. Not now.”

  “Sure?”

  “Completely sure, Nell.”

  She said in a low tone: “If you had said ‘Yes’, I think I should have died.” She laughed in a breathless way, came to her knees beside him. “Oh Faunt, Faunt, half of me dies anyway, unless you’re here.” He kissed her hands, saw her eyes proud with tenderness. “Don’t get well too soon, my darling,” she pleaded. “As long as you’re sick I can keep you here.”

  “I’m better every day.”

  “Get better! Do get better, please. Yes.” She laughed ric
hly. “Oh my dear, my dear, I want you strong! I want you strong!”

  The days slipped heedlessly away. When he felt fit to do so he began to get up for a few moments and for longer every day. That persistent small cough did not yield, and she was concerned; but he hushed her fears.

  “What I need is the saddle again, the open air.” He laughed. “Riding in cold and rain, sleeping on the frozen ground. Then I’ll be rid of it.”

  He was presently strong enough to begin to think of going back to duty; but General Stuart must long since have given him up, and there was no action in the north to call for his services. The armies lay quiet, the guns hushed by winter’s cold. He need not hasten his return. If she had sought to hold him he might have fretted at any hint of restraint; but when he spoke of his eventual departure she put no hindrance in the way. “Your horse is fat and sleek and ready,” she told him. “Go when you think you must, but stay as long as you’re glad to stay.” She held him by tenderness, by laughter, by quiet talk. They were lovers, but also they were congenial friends, meeting in a companionship of minds in which he delighted; and they talked not only of themselves but of the world of which they were a part. How was the army to be kept up to strength when exemptions from conscription could be had by anyone who would pay for them, when every enrolling officer could be bribed, when any unscrupulous surgeon could say the decisive word that would provide immunity, when the conscription law itself offered a dozen invitations to escape? How was the problem of soaring prices to be solved? Today a week’s supply of food for a small family—the same items that would have cost only six dollars and a half in 1860—would cost almost seventy dollars. Nell thought the flood of paper money was as much responsible as any real shortage, but Faunt argued that the speculators were largely to blame.

  “Oh I know it’s the fashion to call them extortioners,” Nell agreed. “But when prices keep going up, you’re bound to have speculation. That’s just human nature.” And when he laughingly declared she must be a speculator herself, she said frankly: “Why of course! Everyone is, whether they know it or not. When they refuse to buy something because it’s too high, it’s because they’re hoping you can buy it cheaper later on. That’s speculation. Look at these prices in the Dispatch today. Bacon used to be a short bit a pound; now it’s a dollar. Sugar’s up from eight cents to a dollar fifteen. Salt’s fifty times what it was. Why, if you knew prices were going to keep on going up like that, wouldn’t you buy all you could today, so that you needn’t buy them at higher prices later? Well, that’s speculation!” She smiled affectionately. “And it’s simple common sense too, my darling!”

  “I wouldn’t buy to hold for high prices.”

  “Oh yes you would. That’s what we all do. You’d buy things before you wanted them, and hold them to use them later. That’s just as bad as holding them to sell them later. I bought four barrels of flour when it was twelve dollars, and it’s a hundred dollars a barrel now. I’ve no notion of selling. I’d rather have the flour than the paper money.”

  “I’ve seen the time when our soldiers would have liked to have that flour.”

  “Then Colonel Northrop should have bought it for them when I bought mine.” She added honestly: “Of course, rising prices are hard on poor people. I’ve always bought flour by the barrel, because it’s cheaper to buy that way; and women who have to buy by the pound pay more than I do. That’s one of the ways money makes money, Faunt.”

  He smiled at her seriousness. “You sound like my brother-in-law, Mr. Dewain. He’s a great believer in keeping money at work.”

  “Of course. So am I. So is every sensible person. Cotton is worth seventy-five cents a pound in the North now, and our own Government is buying it cheap and sending it through the lines to sell it at a profit. The blockade-runners buy cheap in Nassau and bring things here and sell them at such high prices that a ship pays for itself sometimes in a voyage.”

  “You sound envious!” He chuckled at her tone.

  She laughed. “I am! I like making money, my dear.”

  Faunt enjoyed these days so much that he might have stayed or indefinitely; but an intrusion precipitated his departure. On a Sunday evening in early February they were at supper together, and something had made them laugh aloud just before the doorbell rang and hushed them to a whispering silence. Milly went through the hall below to answer the bell and they heard a man’s voice ask for Mrs. Albion, heard Milly answer: “She ain’ tuh home.” Then they heard the negress in sudden protest repeat: “She ain’ tuh home, suh!”

  The man laughed lightly. “Hush your lying mouth, Milly! I heard her laughing. Yes, I know she has company; but I’ll join them.”

  Faunt knew Darrell’s voice. Nell whispered: “Go to your room, Faunt. I’ll get rid of him.”

  But Darrell’s foot was already on the stair; and Faunt smiled in thin cold rage at this intrusion. “I’ll not hide,” he said. Then Darrell appeared in the open door. His head was high, he was laughing; but he saw Faunt and stopped dead still.

  “Well, by all the gods!” he cried. He laughed again. “By all the naughty little heathen gods!”

  Faunt stepped lightly toward him, hungry to get his grip on that arrogant young throat; but Nell’s hand on his arm checked him, and Darrell laughed once more, and bowed profoundly.

  “I apologize,” he said. “Oh I apologize from the bottom of my heart for forcing myself upon you! But the harm is done. I am here. What possible amends——”

  Faunt said thickly: “Get out.”

  But Nell’s hand tightened on his arm, and Darrell urged: “Need I? After all, Mrs. Albion and I have a long friendship. My esteem for her is the highest possible.” He spoke to her. “I’m leaving for New Orleans tomorrow, Nell, on business for my father. I thought you might permit me to call, pour prendre congé. It may be months before I can pay my respects to you again.”

  Nell hesitated; she said to Faunt, appeasingly: “I’ve known him for years, actually.”

  Faunt was still angry; but to quarrel with Darrell, short of killing him, would do no good, and might do much harm. Darrell, watching them shrewdly, said: “And you too are her friend, Uncle Faunt, I’m sure. Our admiration for her is a new bond between us, sir.”

  “Have supper with us?” Nell suggested. She met Faunt’s eye, appealing to him to yield, and he surrendered. The harm was done, his secret known. Make the best of it. When they were seated, Darrell said courteously:

  “I didn’t know you were in Richmond, Uncle Faunt.”

  “I’m returning to duty tomorrow.” Faunt was surprised by his own words. Why need he go? The reason was obscure; yet he could not stay hiding here with Nell now that Darrell knew.

  “Dolly saw Aunt Cinda at church today,” Darrell reported. “But she didn’t speak of having seen you.” Faunt hesitated and Darrell chuckled and added: “Aunt Cinda didn’t mention anything, in fact, except her new grandchild. Dolly went to admire it this afternoon, says it’s a marvelous baby, looks just like Vesta.”

  Vesta? Faunt felt a quick gladness for her, and a deep wonder too. It seemed to him that years had passed since that night at Williamsburg when Vesta’s Tommy died. Was it really so short a time, this eternity since his own fine and gentle life had shattered into ugly shards? For a while he did not listen to Darrell and to Nell. He was remembering that night at Great Oak when Tilda read those letters by the light from the tall candle stand. He felt again the sick and furious despair, the madness of that moment when he put the old house to the torch. That madness had been a part of his life since then; a life of secret ambush and treachery and any ruthlessness to kill, kill, kill. His only respite came in these intervals of fine content which he had spent with Nell.

  He remembered, as though it were a stranger whom he recalled, himself as he had been till that night last spring. In a brief instant of limpid clarity he was that other man again; he saw through the eyes of the man he then had been, the man he had now become. To think of Vesta, and of her brave love for Tommy
Cloyd, come now at last to sweet fulfillment, filled him with despair and shame.

  In self-defense he tried to attend to what Nell and Darrell were saying, to forget himself in listening to them; but during the hour that followed he said little, till at last Darrell rose to go.

  “If you were anyone else, sir, I’d sit you out,” the young man said smilingly. “A moment alone with Mrs. Albion is worth a long vigil. But I give way to your years.” He said good night. “I expect to be in New Orleans for a while, Mrs. Albion; but I hope you’ll tell Milly to admit me when I call again.” To Faunt: “I’ll tell no one you’re in town, sir; leave to you the happiness of surprising them.”

  Nell went down with him to the door, and while she was gone Faunt moved restlessly to and fro. He met her as she returned and she said understandingly: “I’m sorry.”

  “No help for it. And no harm, I’m sure.”

  “He loves mischief.” Her tone was concerned.

  “He’s a bold young man,” Faunt assented. “But he knows the wisdom of discretion, too. And he values his skin, as all these skulking bombproofs do.”

  “But you must go.” It was not even a question, and he was grateful to her for understanding.

  “Yes. Not because of him; but I must go. I should have gone before.”

  “I wish you needn’t. I hate that cough of yours.”

  He smiled. “I’ll be over it with the first fine days of spring.”

  She looked at him long. “Will you go tonight?” she asked, shaken and still. Faunt came to her, drew her gently close.

  “Not till tomorrow, Nell, no,” he said, as though in comforting. “Not till tomorrow.”

  Next morning she bade him good-by. “Be bold, be brave, be careful,” she told him. “And—come when you can.” His horse was at the gate. When he was mounted he looked back, saw her standing in the open door, raised his hat to her as he rode away.

  His puzzled thoughts rode with him. Why had Darrell’s coming made him sure that he must stay no longer? Why, because Darrell knew or surely guessed the truth about him and Nell, must he now leave her? Because of Vesta and that baby of hers; that babbling baby whose father, months ago, the worms had eaten? What had that baby to do with him; or for that matter what had dead Tommy Cloyd to do with him? Tommy Cloyd was no more now than a rack of bare bones, like those Faunt had seen naked to the rain on the hill above Gaines’ Mill in the interval of his delirium. Why consider Tommy Cloyd? Or his baby? Or Vesta? What had she to do with him? She was not alone in having lost a husband and borne a son! What was this urgency which made him turn from Nell and all her breathless ardors and her soft assuagements; to hasten back to the fierce hot surcease of hard battle hours?