The Storm Centre. Mary Noailles Murfree

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СКАЧАТЬ couldn't be," said Ashley, "that happened nearly a year ago."

      This talk hung on for a long time, as it seemed to Baynell. Yet he did not welcome its conclusion, for a greater source of irritation was to come.

      "But now that you have a footing there, Fluellen, I want you to introduce me," said Colonel Ashley, who was a person of consideration in high and select circles at home, and spoke easily from the vantage-ground of an acknowledged social position. "I should be glad to meet Mrs. Gwynn. I never saw any one whose appearance so impressed me."

      "Take me with you when you two call," the lieutenant, all unprescient, interjected casually. The next moment he was flushing angrily, for, impossible as it seemed, Baynell was declining in set terms.

      "My footing there would not justify me in asking to introduce my friends," he said. "I should be afraid of a refusal."

      Ashley, too, cast a swift, indignant glance upon him. Then, "I'll risk it," he said easily; for ill-humor with him was "about face" so suddenly that it was hardly to be recognized.

      Baynell showed a stiff distaste for the persistence, but maintained his position.

      "Judge Roscoe made it plain that it was only for the sake of his friendship with my father that he offered any civility to me—no concession politically. My status as an officer of the 'Yankee army' is an offence and a stumbling-block to him."

      "Bless his fire-eating soul! I don't want to convert him from his treason. I desire only to call on the lady."

      "I myself could not call on Mrs. Gwynn," protested Baynell. "She hardly spoke a word to me."

      "It will be quite sufficient for her to listen to me," laughed Ashley.

      "She took only the most casual notice of my presence—barely to give me a cup of tea."

      "Now, Baynell," said the lieutenant, exceedingly wroth. "I want you to understand that I take this very ill of you."

      He was a tall, spare young fellow, with light, straight brown hair, a light-brown mustache, and a keen, excitable blue eye, which showed well-opened and alert from under the dark brim of his cap as he looked upward, still standing at the side of Baynell's restive horse. "I think it a very poor return for similar courtesy. I took you with me to call on Miss Fisher—and—"

      "This is a very different case. I, personally, am not on terms with Mrs. Gwynn. Besides, she is very different from Miss Fisher, who entertains general society. Mrs. Gwynn is a widow—in deep mourning."

      "But it is told in Gath that widows are not usually inconsolable," suggested Ashley, with a brightening of his arch eyes, and still laughing it off.

      "I am much affronted, Captain Baynell," declared the irascible lieutenant. "I consider this personal. And I will get even with you for this!"

      "And I will get an introduction to Mrs. Gwynn without your kind offices," declared Ashley, with a jocular imitation of their young friend's indignant manner.

      "I shall be very happy if you can meet her in any appropriate way. It is not appropriate for me, cognizant of their ardent rebel sympathies and intense antagonism to the Union cause and antipathy to all its supporters, to ask to introduce my friends of the invading 'Yankee army,'" Baynell replied with stiff hauteur.

      Just then the bugle sang out, its mandatory, clear, golden tones lifting into the sunshine with such a full buoyant effect that it was like the very spirit of martial courage transmuted into sound. Baynell instantly put his horse into motion, and rode off through the brilliant air and the sparse shadows of the budding trees. His blond hair and mustache, gilded by the sunlight, had as decorative an effect as his gold lace; his blue eyes glittered with a stern, vigilant light; his face was flushed, something unusual, for he was wont to be pale, and his erect, imposing, soldierly figure sat his spirited young charger with the firmness of a centaur. The eyes of all the group followed him, several commenting on his handsome appearance, his fine bearing, his splendid horse, and his great value as an officer.

      "He is an admirable fellow," declared Dr. Grindley, a surgeon on his way to the hospital hard by. He had paused at a little distance, and had not heard the conversation.

      "If he were not such a prig," Ashley assented dubiously. "Such an uncompromising stickler on trifles! Any other man in the world would have slurred the matter over, and never kept the promise of the introduction. If inconvenient or undesirable, he might have postponed the call indefinitely."

      "He is a most confounded prig," said Lieutenant Seymour, in great irritation.

      "Baynell must have everything out—to the bitter end," said Ashley.

      "I'd like to break his head! I'd like to break his face—with my fist," exclaimed the lieutenant, petulantly, clenching his hand again and again. He detailed the tenor of the conversation to the surgeon as the group watched the manœuvring battery. "Isn't that a dog-in-the-manger-ish trick, Dr. Grindley? He wants to keep his Roscoes to himself. Mrs. Gwynn won't speak to him, and so he wants nobody else to go there whom she might speak to!"

      Baynell, still uncomfortably conscious of the rancor he had roused, had taken his position in the centre, just the regulation twelve paces in front of the leading horses, with the music four paces distant from the right of the first gun. As the sound blared out gayly on the crisp, clear, vernal breeze, the glittering ranks, every soldier mounted on a strong, fresh steed, moved forward swiftly, with the gun-carriages and caissons each drawn by a team of six horses. The air was full of the tramp of hoofs and the clangor of heavy, revolving wheels, ever and anon punctuated by the sharp monition, "Obstacle!" as one of the giant oaks of the grove intervened and the direction of the march of a piece was obliqued. The efficiency of the battery was very evident. The drill was almost perfect, despite the difficulty of manœuvring among the trees. But when the ranks passed from the grove they swept like a whirlwind over the open spaces of the adjoining pasture-lands, the whole battery swinging here and there in sharp turns, never losing the prescribed intervals of the relative distance of squads, and guns, and caissons—all like some single intricate piece of connected mechanism, impossible of disassociation in its several parts. Ever and anon the clear tenor tones of the captain rang out with a trumpet-like effect, and the refrain of the subalterns and non-commissioned officers commanding the sections followed in their various clamors, while the great whirling congeries of horses and men and wheels and guns obeyed the sound like some automatic creation of the ingenuity of man. Once the surgeon bent an attentive ear.

      "By sections—break from the right to march to left!" called the commander, with a sudden "catch" in the tones.

      "Caissons forward! Trot! March!" came from a different voice.

      "Section forward, guide left!" thundered a basso profundo.

      "March!" cried the captain, sharply.

      "March!" came the subaltern's echo.

      As the moving panorama turned and wheeled and shifted, the surgeon commented in a spirit of forecast:—

      "If that fellow doesn't pay some attention to his bronchial tubes, they will pay some attention to him, and that promptly."

      So promptly indeed was this prophecy verified that within the next few days old Ephraim, who purveyed all the news of the period to the remote secluded country house, informed Judge Roscoe that Captain Baynell was seriously ill with bronchitis and threatened СКАЧАТЬ