lang-bladed daggers to kill cavaliers,But they shrunk to the wall and the causey left free
At one toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee!
So fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Saddle my horses and call up my men,
Open your west-port and let me gae free,
For it's up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!"
Some one in the distance, echoing the last line with an emphasis, caught her ear in the pause. It was Ray. He had already returned, then. She snatched the letter and sped into the kitchen, where she was sure to find him.
Mrs. Vennard rocked in her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room to room. Ray sat before the fire in the kitchen and toasted some savory morsel suspended on a string athwart the blaze.
"Where have you been, Ray?" said Vivia, approaching, with her glowing cheeks, her sparkling eyes. "And what are you doing now?"
"Trying camp-life again," replied Ray, looking up at her in a fixed admiration.
"I've had a letter from Beltran."
"Oh! where is he?" cried Ray.
"Beltran is in camp."
"And where?"
"Perhaps on the Rio Grande, perhaps on the Potomac."
"Do you mean to say," cried Ray, springing up, while string and all fell into the coals, "that Beltran, my brother"—
"Is a Rebel."
"Then I am a rebel, too," said Ray, chokingly, sitting down again, and mechanically stooping to pick up the burning string,—"a rebel to him!"
"You won't be a rebel to him, if you'll listen to reason,—his reason."
"He's got no reason. It's only because he was there."
"Now, Raymond Lamar! if you talk so, you sha'n't read the letter!"
"I don't want to read it."
"Have you left off loving Beltran, because he differs from you?"
"Left off loving Beltran!"
Vivia waited a moment, leaning on the back of his chair, and then Ray, bending, covered his face with his hands, and the large tears oozed from between his brown fingers.
Little Jane, whipping the frothy snow of her eggs, went on whipping all the harder for fear Ray should know she saw him. And Vivia, with one hand upon his head, took away the brown fingers, that her own cool, fragrant palm might press upon his burning lids. Such sudden tears belong to such tropical natures. For there was no anger or sullenness in Ray's grief; he was just and simply sorry.
"He must have forgotten me," said Ray, after a sober while.
"There was this note for you in mine, and a draft on New York, because he thought you might be in arrears."
"No, I'm not. Aunty can have the draft, though; she may need it before I come back," said Ray, brokenly, gazing into the fire. "Do you suppose Beltran wrote mine or yours first?"
"Yours."
"Then you've the last thing he ever set his hand to, perhaps!"
"Don't talk so, child!" said Vivia, with an angry shiver. "Come back! Where are you going?"
"I enlisted, yesterday, in the Kansas Cavalry."
"Great heavens, Ray! was there not another regiment in all the world than one to be sent down to New Mexico to meet Beltran and the Texan Rangers?" cried Vivia, wringing her hands.
Ray was on his feet again, a swarm of expletives buzzing inarticulately at his lips.
"I never thought of that," said he, whiter than ashes.
"What made you? oh, what made you?"
"There was no other company. I liked this captain. He gave me to-day's furlough. I'm going to-night; little Jane's promised to fix my traps; she's making me these cookies now, you see. Pshaw! Beltran's up on the Potomac, or else you couldn't have gotten this letter,—don't you know? You made my heart jump into my mouth!"
And resuming his seat, to find his string and jack in cinders, he turned round astride his chair and commenced notching his initials into its back, with cautious glances at his aunt.
"That's for little Jane to cry over after I'm gone," said he.
"Ray—How do you think Beltran will like it?"
"I can't help what Beltran likes. I shall be doing God's work."
"Beltran says God does His own work. He only requires of us our duty."
"That is my duty."
"You feel, Ray, as if you were possessed by the holy ardor of another Sir Galahad!"
"I feel, Vivia, that I shall give what strength I have towards ridding the world of its foulest disease."
"With what a good grace that comes from you!"
"With all the better grace."
"The old Berserker rage over again!"
"Quite as fine as running amuck."
"Ray, the race that does not rise for itself deserves its fate."
"Vivia, no race deserves such a fate as this one has found."
"Idle! I have seen slavery; own slaves: there is nothing monstrous in it."
"In Maryland."
"Anywhere."
"Wailing children, sundered families, women under the lash"—
"You know very well, Ray, that there is a law against the separation of families."
"I never heard of it."
"Audubon says there is."
"A little bird told him," interpolated Jane.
"But I've seen them separated."
"I don't believe," urged Vivia, "but for exceptional abuses, there's a system providing for a happier peasantry on the face of the earth."
"It can't be a good system that allows such abuses."
"There are even abuses of the sacraments."
"Pshaw, Vivia!"
"Well, Ray, I don't believe in this pseudo-chivalry of yours, any more than Beltran does."
"If Beltran said black was white, you'd think that true!"
"If Beltran said
