Daisy
Both looks were gone before I could ask him what they meant, or
perhaps I should have asked; for I was beginning to feel very much at
my ease with Mr. Thorold. I trusted him.
"Did he want you for this dance?" was all he said.
"For this, and for the next," I answered.
"Both gone! Well, may I have the third, and so disappoint somebody
else?" he said, laughing.
If I did not talk much with Mr. Thorold in intervals of dancing, at
least we did not talk nonsense. In the next pause he remarked that he
saw I was fond of this amusement.
"I think I like everything," I told him.
"Are the hills better than this?" he whispered.
"Oh, yes!" I said. "Don't you think so?"
He smiled, and said "truly he did." "You have been over the Flirtation
walk, of course?" he added.
"I do not know which it is."
He smiled again, that quick illuminating smile, which seemed to
sparkle in his hazel eyes; and nodded his head a little.
"I had the pleasure to see you there, very early one morning."
"Oh, is that it?" I said. "I have been down that way from the hotel
very often."
"That way leads to it. You were upon it, where you were sitting. You
have not been through it yet? May I show it to you some day?
To-morrow?"
I agreed joyfully; and then asked who were certain of the cadets whom
I saw about the room, with rosettes of ribbon and long streamers on
the breast of their grey coats?
"Those are the Managers," said my companion. "You will see enough of
them. It is their duty to introduce poor fellows who want partners."
I did not see much of them, however, that evening. As soon as I was
released from that dance, Capt. Percival brought up Capt. Lascelles;
and somebody else, Mr. Sandford, I believe, introduced Lt. Vaux, and
Major Fairbairn; and Major Pitt was another, I believe. And Col.
Walruss brought up his son, who was in the corps of cadets. They all
wanted to dance with me; so it was lucky Mr. Thorold had secured his
second dance, or I could not have given it to him. I went over and
over again the same succession of topics, in the intervals of standing
still. How the day had been warm, and the evening kept up its
character; the hotels were full now; the cadets well off to have so
many ladies; dancing a pleasant pastime, and West Point a nice place.
I got so accustomed to the remarks I might expect, that my mouth was
ready with an assenting "yes" before the speaker began. But the
talking was a small part of the business, after all; and the evening
went merrily for me, till on a sudden a shrill piercing summons of
drum and fife, rolling as it were into our very ears, put a stop to
proceedings. Midway in the movement the dancers stopped; there was a
hurried bow and curtsey, and an instant scattering of all the
grey-coated part of the assembly. The "hop" was over. We went home in
the warm moonlight, I thinking that I had had a very nice time, and
glad that Mr. Thorold was coming to take me to walk to-morrow.
CHAPTER XVI.
HOPS.
The afternoon was very sultry; however, Mr. Thorold came, and we went
for our walk. It was so sultry we went very leisurely and also met few
people; and instead of looking very carefully at the beauties of
nature and art we had come to see, we got into a great talk as we
strolled along; indeed, sometimes we stopped and sat down to talk. Mr.
Thorold told me about himself, or rather, about his home in Vermont
and his old life there. He had no mother, and no brothers nor sisters;
only his father. And he described to me the hills of his native
country, and the farm his father cultivated, and the people, and the
life on the mountains. Strong and free and fresh and independent and
intelligent--that was the impression his talk made upon me, of the
country and people and life alike. Sometimes my thoughts took a
private turn of their own, branching off.
"Mr. Thorold," said I, "do you know Mr. Davis of Mississippi?"
"Davis? No, I don't know him," he said shortly.
"You have seen him?"
"Yes, I have seen him often enough; and his wife, too."
"Do you like his looks?"
"I do not."
"He looks to me like a bad man--" I said slowly. I said it to Mr.
Thorold; I would hardly have made the remark to another at West Point.
"He is about bad business--" was my companion's answer. "And yet I do
not know what he is about; but I distrust the man."
"Mr. Thorold," said I, beginning cautiously, "do you want to have
slavery go into the territories?"
"No!" said he. "Do you?"
"No. What do you think would happen if a Northern President should be
elected in the fall?"
"Then slavery would _not_ go into the territories," he said, looking a
little surprised at me. "The question would be settled."
"But do you know some people say--some people at the South say--that
if a Northern President is elected, the Southern States will not
submit to him?"
"Some people talk a great deal of nonsense," said Mr. Thorold. "How
could they help submitting?"
"They say--it is said--that they would break off from the North and
set up for themselves. It is not foolish people that say it, Mr.
Thorold."
"Will you pardon me, Miss Randolph, but I think they would be very
foolish people that would do it."
"Oh, I think so too," I said. "I mean, that some people who are not
foolish believe that it might happen."
"Perhaps," said Mr. Thorold. "I never heard anything of it before.
You are from the South yourself, Miss Randolph?" he added, looking at
me.
"I was born there," I said. And a little silence fell between us. I
was thinking. Some impression, got I suppose from my remembrance of
father and mother, Preston, and others whom I had known, forbade me to
dismiss quite so lightly, as too absurd to be true, the rumour I had
heard. Moreover, I trusted Dr. Sandford's sources of information,
living as he did in habits of close social intercourse with men of
influence and position at Washington, both Southern and Northern.
"Mr. Thorold,"--I broke the silence,--"if the South should do such a
thing, what would happen?"
"There would be trouble," he said.
"What sort of trouble?"
"Might be all sorts," said Mr. Thorold, laughing; "it would depend on
how far people's folly would carry them."
"But suppose the Southern States should just do that;--say they would
break off and govern themselves?"
"They would be like a bad boy that has to be made to take medicine."
"How could you _make_ them?" I asked, feeling unreasonably grave about
the question.
"You can see, Miss Randolph, that such a thing could not be permitted.
A government that would let any part of its subjects break away at
their pleasure from its rule, would deserve to go to pieces. If one
part might go, another part might go. There would be no nation left."
"But how could you _help_ it?" I asked.
"I don't know whether we could help it," he said; "but we would try."
"You do not mean that it would come to _fighting_?"
"I do not think they would be such fools. I hope we are supposing a
very unlikely thing, Miss Randolph."
I hoped so. But that impression of Southern character troubled me yet.
Fighting! I looked at the peaceful hills, feeling as if indeed "all
the foundations of the earth" would be "out of course."
"What would _you_ do in case it came to fighting?" said my neighbour.
The words startled me out of my meditations.
"I could not do anything."
"I beg your pardon. Your favour--your countenance, would do much; on
one side or the other. You would fight--in effect--as surely as I
should."
I looked up. "Not against you," I said; for I could not bear to be
misunderstood.
There was a strange sparkle in Mr. Thorold's eye; but those flashes of
light came and went so like flashes, that I could not always tell what
they meant. The tone of his voice, however, I knew expressed pleasure.
"How comes that?" he said. "You _are_ Southern?"
"Do I look it?" I asked.
"Pardon me--yes."
"How, Mr. Thorold?"
"You must excuse me. I cannot tell you. But you _are_ South?"
"Yes," I said. "At least, all my friends are Southern. I was born
there."
"You have _one_ Northern friend," said Mr. Thorold, as we rose up to
go on. He said it with meaning. I looked up and smiled. There was a
smile in his eyes, mixed with something more. I think our compact of
friendship was made and settled then and at once.
He stretched out his hand, as if for a further ratification. I put
mine in it, while he went on,--"How comes it, then, that you take such
a view of such a question?"
There had sprung up a new tone in our intercourse, of more
familiarity, and more intimate trust. It gave infinite content to me;
and I went on to answer, telling him about my Northern life. Drawn on,
from question to question, I detailed at length my Southern experience
also, and put my new friend in possession not only of my opinions, but
of the training under which they had been formed. My hand, I remember,
remained in his while I talked, as if he had been my brother; till he
suddenly put it down and plunged into the bushes for a bunch of wild
roses. A party of walkers came round an angle a moment after; and
waking up to a consciousness of our surroundings, we found, or _I_
did, that we were just at the end of the rocky walk, where we must
mount up and take to the plain.
The evening was falling very fair over plain and hill when we got to
the upper level. Mr. Thorold proposed that I should go and see the
camp, which I liked very much to do. So he took me all through it, and
showed and explained all sorts of things about the tents and the
manner of life they lived in them. He said he should like it very
much, if he only had more room; but three or four in one little tent
nine feet by nine, gave hardly, as he said, "a chance to a fellow."
The tents and the camp alleys were full of cadets, loitering about, or
talking, or busy with their accoutrements; here and there I saw an
officer. Captain Percival bowed, Captain Lascelles spoke. I looked for
Preston, but I could see him nowhere. Then Mr. Thorold brought me
into his own tent, introduced one or two cadets who were loitering
there, and who immediately took themselves away; and made me sit down
on what he called a "locker." The tent curtains were rolled tight up,
as far as they would go, and so were the curtains of every other tent;
most beautiful order prevailed everywhere and over every trifling
detail.
"Well," said Mr. Thorold, sitting down opposite me on a
candle-box--"how do you think you would like camp life?"
"The tents are too close together," I said.
He laughed, with a good deal of amusement.
"That will do!" he said. "You begin by knocking the camp to pieces."
"But it is beautiful," I went on.
"And not comfortable. Well, it is pretty comfortable," he said.
"How do you do when it storms very hard--at night?"
"Sleep."
"Don't you ever get wet?"
"_That_ makes no difference."
"Sleep in the rain!" said I. And he laughed again at me. It was not
banter. The whole look and air of the man testified to a thorough
soldierly, manly contempt of little things--of all things that might
come in the way of order and his duty. An intrinsic independence and
withal control of circumstances, in so far as the mind can control
them. I read the power to do it. But I wondered to myself if he never
got homesick in that little tent and full camp. It would not do to
touch the question.
"Do you know Preston Gary?" I asked. "He is a cadet."
"I know him."
I thought the tone of the words, careless as they were, signified
little value for the knowledge.
"I have not seen him anywhere," I remarked.
"Do you want to see him? He has seen you."
"No, he cannot," I said, "or he would have come to speak to me."
"He would if he could," replied Mr. Thorold--"no doubt; but the