She has been with us a good nice long time, now. You are troubled
about your sprite because this is such a wild frontier, hundreds of
miles from civilization, and peopled only by wandering tribes of savages?
You fear for her safety? Give yourself no uneasiness about her.
Dear me, she’s in a nursery! and she’s got more than eighteen
hundred nurses. It would distress the garrison to suspect that
you think they can’t take care of her. They think they can.
They would tell you so themselves. You see, the Seventh Cavalry
has never had a child of its very own before, and neither has the Ninth
Dragoons; and so they are like all new mothers, they think there is
no other child like theirs, no other child so wonderful, none that is
so worthy to be faithfully and tenderly looked after and protected.
These bronzed veterans of mine are very good mothers, I think, and wiser
than some other mothers; for they let her take lots of risks, and it
is a good education for her; and the more risks she takes and comes
successfully out of, the prouder they are of her. They adopted
her, with grave and formal military ceremonies of their own invention—solemnities
is the truer word; solemnities that were so profoundly solemn and earnest,
that the spectacle would have been comical if it hadn’t been so
touching. It was a good show, and as stately and complex as guard-mount
and the trooping of the colors; and it had its own special music, composed
for the occasion by the bandmaster of the Seventh; and the child was
as serious as the most serious war-worn soldier of them all; and finally
when they throned her upon the shoulder of the oldest veteran, and pronounced
her “well and truly adopted,” and the bands struck up and
all saluted and she saluted in return, it was better and more moving
than any kindred thing I have seen on the stage, because stage things
are make-believe, but this was real and the players’ hearts were
in it.
It happened several weeks ago, and was followed by some additional
solemnities. The men created a couple of new ranks, thitherto
unknown to the army regulations, and conferred them upon Cathy, with
ceremonies suitable to a duke. So now she is Corporal-General
of the Seventh Cavalry, and Flag-Lieutenant of the Ninth Dragoons, with
the privilege (decreed by the men) of writing U.S.A. after her name!
Also, they presented her a pair of shoulder-straps—both dark blue,
the one with F. L. on it, the other with C. G. Also, a sword.
She wears them. Finally, they granted her the salute.
I am witness that that ceremony is faithfully observed by both parties—and
most gravely and decorously, too. I have never seen a soldier
smile yet, while delivering it, nor Cathy in returning it.
Ostensibly I was not present at these proceedings, and am ignorant
of them; but I was where I could see. I was afraid of one thing—the
jealousy of the other children of the post; but there is nothing of
that, I am glad to say. On the contrary, they are proud of their
comrade and her honors. It is a surprising thing, but it is true.
The children are devoted to Cathy, for she has turned their dull frontier
life into a sort of continuous festival; also they know her for a stanch
and steady friend, a friend who can always be depended upon, and does
not change with the weather.
She has become a rather extraordinary rider, under the tutorship
of a more than extraordinary teacher—BB, which is her pet name
for Buffalo Bill. She pronounces it beeby. He has
not only taught her seventeen ways of breaking her neck, but twenty-two
ways of avoiding it. He has infused into her the best and surest
protection of a horseman—confidence. He did it gradually,
systematically, little by little, a step at a time, and each step made
sure before the next was essayed. And so he inched her along up
through terrors that had been discounted by training before she reached
them, and therefore were not recognizable as terrors when she got to
them. Well, she is a daring little rider, now, and is perfect
in what she knows of horsemanship. By-and-by she will know the
art like a West Point cadet, and will exercise it as fearlessly.
She doesn’t know anything about side-saddles. Does that
distress you? And she is a fine performer, without any saddle
at all. Does that discomfort you? Do not let it; she is
not in any danger, I give you my word.
You said that if my heart was old and tired she would refresh it,
and you said truly. I do not know how I got along without her,
before. I was a forlorn old tree, but now that this blossoming
vine has wound itself about me and become the life of my life, it is
very different. As a furnisher of business for me and for Mammy
Dorcas she is exhaustlessly competent, but I like my share of it and
of course Dorcas likes hers, for Dorcas “raised” George,
and Cathy is George over again in so many ways that she brings back
Dorcas’s youth and the joys of that long-vanished time.
My father tried to set Dorcas free twenty years ago, when we still lived
in Virginia, but without success; she considered herself a member of
the family, and wouldn’t go. And so, a member of the family
she remained, and has held that position unchallenged ever since, and
holds it now; for when my mother sent her here from San Bernardino when
we learned that Cathy was coming, she only changed from one division
of the family to the other. She has the warm heart of her race,
and its lavish affections, and when Cathy arrived the pair were mother
and child in five minutes, and that is what they are to date and will
continue. Dorcas really thinks she raised George, and that is
one of her prides, but perhaps it was a mutual raising, for their ages
were the same—thirteen years short of mine. But they were
playmates, at any rate; as regards that, there is no room for dispute.
Cathy thinks Dorcas is the best Catholic in America except herself.
She could not pay any one a higher compliment than that, and Dorcas
could not receive one that would please her better. Dorcas is
satisfied that there has never been a more wonderful child than Cathy.
She has conceived the curious idea that Cathy is twins, and that
one of them is a boy-twin and failed to get segregated—got submerged,
is the idea. To argue with her that this is nonsense is a waste
of breath—her mind is made up, and arguments do not affect it.
She says:
“Look at her; she loves dolls, and girl-plays, and everything
a girl loves, and she’s gentle and sweet, and ain’t cruel
to dumb brutes—now that’s the girl-twin, but she loves boy-plays,
and drums and fifes and soldiering, and rough-riding, and ain’t
afraid of anybody or anything—and that’s the boy-twin; ’deed
you needn’t tell me she’s only one child;
no, sir, she’s twins, and one of them got shet up out of sight.
Out of sight, but that don’t make any difference, that boy is
in there, and you can see him look out of her eyes when her temper is
up.”
Then Dorcas went on, in her simple and earnest way, to furnish illustrations.
“Look at that raven, Marse Tom. Would anybody befriend
a raven but that child? Of course they wouldn’t; it ain’t
natural. Well, the Injun boy had the raven tied up, and was all
the time plaguing it and starving it, and she pitied the po’ thing,
and tried to buy it from the boy, and the tears was in her eyes.
That was the girl-twin, you see. She offered him her thimble,
and he flung it down; she offered him all the doughnuts she had, which
was two, and he flung them down; she offered him half a paper of pins,
worth forty ravens, and he made a mouth at her and jabbed one of them
in the raven’s back. That was the limit, you know.
It called for the other twin. Her eyes blazed up, and she jumped
for him like a wild-cat, and when she was done with him she was rags
and he wasn’t anything but an allegory. That was most undoubtedly
the other twin, you see, coming to the front. No, sir; don’t
tell me he ain’t in there. I’ve seen him with
my own eyes—and plenty of times, at that.”
“Allegory? What is an allegory?”
“I don’t know, Marse Tom, it’s one of her words;
she loves the big ones, you know, and I pick them up from her; they
sound good and I can’t help it.”
“What happened after she had converted the boy into an allegory?”
“Why, she untied the raven and confiscated him by force and
fetched him home, and left the doughnuts and things on the ground.
Petted him, of course, like she does with every creature. In two
days she had him so stuck after her that she—well, you
know how he follows her everywhere, and sets on her shoulder often when
she rides her breakneck rampages—all of which is the girl-twin
to the front, you see—and he does what he pleases, and is up to
all kinds of devilment, and is a perfect nuisance in the kitchen.
Well, they all stand it, but they wouldn’t if it was another person’s
bird.”
Here she began to chuckle comfortably, and presently she said:
“Well, you know, she’s a nuisance herself, Miss Cathy
is, she is so busy, and into everything, like that bird.
It’s all just as innocent, you know, and she don’t mean
any harm, and is so good and dear; and it ain’t her fault, it’s
her nature; her interest is always a-working and always red-hot, and
she can’t keep quiet. Well, yesterday it was ‘Please,
Miss Cathy, don’t do that’; and, ‘Please, Miss Cathy,
let that alone’; and, ‘Please, Miss Cathy, don’t make
so much noise’; and so on and so on, till I reckon I had found
fault fourteen times in fifteen minutes; then she looked up at me with
her big brown eyes that can plead so, and said in that odd little foreign
way that goes to your heart,
“’Please, mammy, make me a compliment.”
“And of course you did it, you old fool?”
“Marse Tom, I just grabbed her up to my breast and says, ‘Oh,
you po’ dear little motherless thing, you ain’t got a fault
in the world, and you can do anything you want to, and tear the house
down, and yo’ old black mammy won’t say a word!’”
“Why, of course, of course—I knew you’d
spoil the child.”
She brushed away her tears, and said with dignity:
“Spoil the child? spoil that child, Marse Tom?
There can’t anybody spoil her. She’s the king
bee of this post, and everybody pets her and is her slave, and yet,
as you know, your own self, she ain’t the least little bit spoiled.”
Then she eased her mind with this retort: “Marse Tom, she makes
you do anything she wants to, and you can’t deny it; so if she
could be spoilt, she’d been spoilt long ago, because you are the
very worst! Look at that pile of cats in your chair, and
you sitting on a candle-box, just as patient; it’s because they’re
her cats.”
If Dorcas were a soldier, I could punish her for such large frankness
as that. I changed the subject, and made her resume her illustrations.
She had scored against me fairly, and I wasn’t going to cheapen
her victory by disputing it. She proceeded to offer this incident
in evidence on her twin theory:
“Two weeks ago when she got her finger mashed open, she turned
pretty pale with the pain, but she never said a word. I took her
in my lap, and the surgeon sponged off the blood and took a needle and
thread and began to sew it up; it had to have a lot of stitches, and
each one made her scrunch a little, but she never let go a sound.
At last the surgeon was so full of admiration that he said, ‘Well,
you are a brave little thing!’ and she said, just as ca’m
and simple as if she was talking about the weather, ‘There isn’t
anybody braver but the Cid!’ You see? it was the boy-twin
that the surgeon was a-dealing with.
“Who is the Cid?”
“I don’t know, sir—at least only what she says.
She’s always talking about him, and says he was the bravest hero
Spain ever had, or any other country. They have it up and down,
the children do, she standing up for the Cid, and they working George
Washington for all he is worth.”
“Do they quarrel?”
“No; it’s only disputing, and bragging, the way children
do. They want her to be an American, but she can’t be anything
but a Spaniard, she says. You see, her mother was always longing
for home, po’ thing! and thinking about it, and so the child is
just as much a Spaniard as if she’d always lived there.
She thinks she remembers how Spain looked, but I reckon she don’t,
because she was only a baby when they moved to France. She is
very proud to be a Spaniard.”
Does that please you, Mercedes? Very well, be content; your
niece is loyal to her allegiance: her mother laid deep the foundations
of her love for Spain, and she will go back to you as good a Spaniard
as you are yourself. She has made me promise to take her to you
for a long visit when the War Office retires me.
I attend to her studies myself; has she told you that? Yes,
I am her school-master, and she makes pretty good progress, I think,
everything considered. Everything considered—being translated—means
holidays. But the fact is, she was not born for study, and it
comes hard. Hard for me, too; it hurts me like a physical pain
to see that free spirit of the air and the sunshine laboring and grieving
over a book; and sometimes when I find her gazing far away towards the
plain and the blue mountains with the longing in her eyes, I have to
throw open the prison doors; I can’t help it. A quaint little
scholar she is, and makes plenty of blunders. Once I put the question:
“What does the Czar govern?”
She rested her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand and took
that problem under deep consideration. Presently she looked up
and answered, with a rising inflection implying a shade of uncertainty,
“The dative case?”
Here are a couple of her expositions which were delivered with tranquil
confidence:
“Chaplain, diminutive of chap. Lass is
masculine, lassie is feminine.”
She is not a genius, you see, but just a normal child; they all make
mistakes of that sort. There is a glad light in her eye which
is pretty to see when she finds herself able to answer a question promptly
and accurately, without any hesitation; as, for instance, this morning:
“Cathy dear, what is a cube?”
“Why, a native of Cuba.”
She still drops a foreign word into her talk now and then, and there
is still a subtle foreign flavor or fragrance about even her exactest
English—and long may this abide! for it has for me a charm that
is very pleasant. Sometimes her English is daintily prim and bookish
and captivating. She has a child’s sweet tooth, but for
her health’s sake I try to keep its inspirations under cheek.
She is obedient—as is proper for a titled and recognized military
personage, which she is—but the chain presses sometimes.
For instance, we were out for a walk, and passed by some bushes that
were freighted with wild goose-berries. Her face brightened and
she put her hands together and delivered herself of this speech, most
feelingly:
“Oh, if I was permitted a vice it would be the gourmandise!”
Could I resist that? No. I gave her a gooseberry.
You ask about her languages. They take care of themselves;
they will not get rusty here; our regiments are not made up of natives
alone—far from it. And she is picking up Indian tongues
diligently.
