With the artificial step and mysterious hush of the ordinary visitor to a sick bed, Brant entered the room. But some instinct greater than this common expression of humanity held him suddenly in awe. The room seemed no longer his--it had slipped back into that austere conventual privacy which had first impressed him. Yet he hesitated; another strange suggestion--it seemed almost a vague recollection--overcame him like some lingering perfume, far off and pathetic, in its dying familiarity. He turned his eyes almost timidly towards the bed. The coverlet was drawn up near the throat of the figure to replace the striped cotton gown stained with blood and dust, which had been hurriedly torn off and thrown on a chair.
The pale face, cleansed of blood and disguising color, the long hair, still damp from the surgeon's sponge, lay rigidly back on the pillow. Suddenly this man of steady nerve uttered a faint cry, and, with a face as white as the upturned one before him, fell on his knees beside the bed. For the face that lay there was his wife's!
Yes, hers! But the beautiful hair that she had gloried in--the hair that in his youth he had thought had once fallen like a benediction on his shoulder--was streaked with gray along the blue-veined hollows of the temples; the orbits of those clear eyes, beneath their delicately arched brows, were ringed with days of suffering; only the clear-cut profile, even to the delicate imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there in all its beauty. The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its familiar cold contour startled him. He remembered how, in their early married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation, and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange, childless woman. He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate enwrappings in her chamber at Robles. Perhaps it was the intensity of his gaze--perhaps it was the magnetism of his presence--but her lips parted with a half sigh, half moan. Her head, although her eyes were still closed, turned on the pillow instinctively towards him. He rose from his knees. Her eyes opened slowly. As the first glare of wonderment cleared from them, they met him--in the old antagonism of spirit. Yet her first gesture was a pathetic feminine movement with both hands to arrange her straggling hair. It brought her white fingers, cleaned of their disguising stains, as a sudden revelation to her of what had happened; she instantly slipped them back under the coverlet again.
Brant did not speak, but with folded arms stood gazing upon her.
And it was her voice that first broke the silence.
"You have recognized me? Well, I suppose you know all," she said, with a weak half-defiance.
He bowed his head. He felt as yet he could not trust his voice, and envied her her own.
"I may sit up, mayn't I?" She managed, by sheer force of will, to struggle to a sitting posture. Then, as the coverlet slipped from the bare shoulder, she said, as she drew it, with a shiver of disgust, around her again,--"I forgot that you strip women, you Northern soldiers! But I forgot, too," she added, with a sarcastic smile, "that you are also my husband, and I am in your room."
The contemptuous significance of her speech dispelled the last lingering remnant of Brant's dream. In a voice as dry as her own, he said,--"I am afraid you will now have to remember only that I am a Northern general, and you a Southern spy."
"So be it," she said gravely. Then impulsively, "But I have not spied on YOU."
Yet, the next moment, she bit her lips as if the expression had unwittingly escaped her; and with a reckless shrug of her shoulders she lay back on her pillow.
"It matters not," said Brant coldly. "You have used this house and those within it to forward your designs. It is not your fault that you found nothing in the dispatch-box you opened."
She stared at him quickly; then shrugged her shoulders again.
"I might have known she was false to me," she said bitterly, "and that you would wheedle her soul away as you have others. Well, she betrayed me! For what?"
A flush passed over Brant's face. But with an effort he contained himself.
"It was the flower that betrayed you! The flower whose red dust fell in the box when you opened it on the desk by the window in yonder room--the flower that stood in the window as a signal--the flower I myself removed, and so spoiled the miserable plot that your friends concocted."
A look of mingled terror and awe came into her face.
"YOU changed the signal!" she repeated dazedly; then, in a lower voice, "that accounts for it all!" But the next moment she turned again fiercely upon him. "And you mean to tell me that she didn't help you--that she didn't sell me--your wife--to you for--for what was it? A look--a kiss!"
"I mean to say that she did not know the signal was changed, and that she herself restored it to its place. It is no fault of hers nor yours that I am not here a prisoner."
She passed her thin hand dazedly across her forehead.
"I see," she muttered. Then again bursting out passionately, she said--"Fool! you never would have been touched! Do you think that Lee would have gone for you, with higher game in your division commander? No! Those supports were a feint to draw him to your assistance while our main column broke his centre. Yes, you may stare at me, Clarence Brant. You are a good lawyer--they say a dashing fighter, too. I never thought you a coward, even in your irresolution; but you are fighting with men drilled in the art of war and strategy when you were a boy outcast on the plains." She stopped, closed her eyes, and then added, wearily--"But that was yesterday--to-day, who knows? All may be changed. The supports may still attack you. That was why I stopped to write you that note an hour ago, when I believed I should be leaving here for ever. Yes, I did it!" she went on, with half-wearied, half-dogged determination. "You may as well know all. I had arranged to fly.
