IV. — IN THE SILENCE OF THE GUNS
At noon the next day, Dan, sitting beside the fireless hearth, with his head resting on his clasped hands, saw a shadow fall suddenly upon the floor, and, looking up, found Mrs. Ambler standing in the doorway.
“I am too late?” she said quietly, and he bowed his head and motioned to the pallet in the corner.
Without seeing the arm he put out, she crossed the room like one bewildered by a sudden blow, and went to where the Governor was lying beneath the patchwork quilt. No sound came to her lips; she only stretched out her hand with a protecting gesture and drew the dead man to her arms. Then it was that Dan, turning to leave her alone with her grief, saw that Betty had followed her mother and was coming toward him from the doorway. For an instant their eyes met; then the girl went to her dead, and Dan passed out into the sunlight with a new bitterness at his heart.
A dozen yards from the cabin there was a golden beech spreading in wide branches against the sky, and seating himself on a fallen log beneath it, he looked over the soft hills that rose round and deep-bosomed from the dim blue valley. He was still there an hour later when, hearing a rustle in the grass, he turned and saw Betty coming to him over the yellowed leaves. His first glance showed him that she had grown older and very pale; his second that her kind brown eyes were full of tears.
“Betty, is it this way?” he asked, and opened his arms.
With a cry that was half a sob she ran toward him, her black skirt sweeping the leaves about her feet. Then, as she reached him, she swayed forward as if a strong wind blew over her, and as he caught her from the ground, he kissed her lips. Her tears broke out afresh, but as they stood there in each other's arms, neither found words to speak nor voice to utter them. The silence between them had gone deeper than speech, for it had in it all the dumb longing of the last two years—the unshaken trust, the bitterness of the long separation, the griefs that had come to them apart, and the sorrow that had brought them at last together. He held her so closely that he felt the flutter of her breast with each rising sob, and an anguish that was but a vibration from her own swept over him like a wave from head to foot. Since he had put her from him on that last night at Chericoke their passion had deepened by each throb of pain and broadened by each step that had led them closer to the common world. Not one generous thought, not one temptation overcome but had gone to the making of their love to-day—for what united them now was not the mere prompting of young impulse, but the strength out of many struggles and the fulness out of experiences that had ripened the heart of each.
“Let me look at you,” said Betty, lifting her wet face. “It has been so long, and I have wanted you so much—I have hungered sleeping and waking.”
“Don't look at me, Betty, I am a skeleton—a crippled skeleton, and I will not be looked at by my love.”
“Your love can see you with shut eyes. Oh, my best and dearest, do you think you could keep me from seeing you however hard you tried? Why, there's a lamp in my heart that lets me look at you even in the night.”
“Your lamp flatters, I am afraid to face it. Has it shown you this?”
He drew back and held up his maimed hand, his eyes fastened upon her face, where the old fervour had returned.
With a sob that thrilled through him, she caught his hand to her lips and then held it to her bosom, crooning over it little broken sounds of love and pity. Through the spreading beech above a clear gold light filtered down upon her, and a single yellow leaf was caught in her loosened hair. He saw her face, impassioned, glorified, amid a flood of sunshine.
“And I did not know,” she said breathlessly. “You were wounded and there was no one to tell me. Whenever there has been a battle I have sat very still and shut my eyes, and tried to make myself go straight to you. I have seen the smoke and heard the shots, and yet when it came I did not know it. I may even have laughed and talked and eaten a stupid dinner while you were suffering. Now I shall never smile again until I have you safe.”
“But if I were dying I should want to see you smiling. Nobody ever smiled before you, Betty.”
“If you are wounded, you will send for me. Promise me; I beg you on my knees. You will send for me; say it or I shall be always wretched. Do you want to kill me, Dan? Promise.”
“I shall send for you. There, will that do? It would be almost worth dying to have you come to me. Would you kiss me then, I wonder?”
“Then and now,” she answered passionately. “Oh, I sometimes think that wars are fought to torture women! Hold me in your arms again or my heart will break. I have missed Virginia so—never a day passes that I do not see her coming through the rooms and hear her laugh—such a baby laugh, do you remember it?”
“I remember everything that was near to you, beloved.”
“If you could have seen her on her wedding day, when she came down in her pink crepe shawl and white bonnet that I had trimmed, and looked back, smiling at us for the last time. I have almost died with wanting her again—and now papa—papa! They loved life so, and yet both are dead, and life goes on without them.”
“My poor love, poor Betty.”
“But not so poor as if I had lost you, too,” she answered; “and if you are wounded even a little remember that you have promised, and I shall come to you. Prince Rupert and I will pass the lines together. Do you know that I have Prince Rupert, Dan?”
“Keep him, dear, don't let him get into the army.”
“He lives in the woods night and day, and when he comes to pasture I go after him while Uncle Shadrach watches the turnpike. When the soldiers come by, blue or gray, we hide him behind the willows in the brook. They may take the chickens—and they do—but I should kill the man who touched Prince Rupert's bridle.”
“You should have been a soldier, Betty.”
She shook her head. “Oh, I couldn't shoot any one in cold blood—as you do—that's different. I'd have to hate him as much—as much as I love you.”
“How much is that?”
“A whole world full and brimming over; is that enough?”
“Only a little world?” he answered. “Is that all?”
“If I told you truly, you would not believe me,” she said earnestly. “You would shake your head and say: 'Poor silly Betty, has she gone moon mad?'”
Catching her in his arms again, he kissed her hair and mouth and hands and the ruffle at her throat. “Poor silly Betty,” he repeated, “where is your wisdom now?”
“You have turned it into folly, sad little wisdom that it was.”
“Well, I prefer your folly,” he said gravely. “It was folly that made you love me at the first; it was pure folly that brought you out to me that night at Chericoke—but the greatest folly of all is just this, my dear.”
“But it will keep you safe.”
“Who knows? I may get shot to-morrow. There, there, I only said it to feel your arms about me.”
Her hands clung to him and the tears, rising to her lashes, fell fast upon his coat.
“Oh, don't let me lose you,” she begged. “I have lost so much—don't let me lose you, too.”
“Living or dead, I am yours, that I swear.”
“But I don't want you dead. I want the feel of you. I want your hands, your face. I want you.”
“Betty, Betty,” he said softly. “Listen, for there is no word in the world that means so much as just your name.”
“Except yours.”
“No interruptions, this is martial law. Dear, dearest, darling, are all empty sounds; but when I say 'Betty,' it is full of life.”
“Say it again, then.”
“Betty, do you love me?”
“Ask: 'Betty, is the sun shining?'”
“It always shines about you.”
“Because my hair is red?”
“Red? It is pure gold. Do you remember when I found that out on the hearth in free Levi's cabin? The colour went to my head, but when I put out my hand to touch a curl, you drew away and fastened them up again. Now I have pulled them all down and you dare not move.”
“Shall I tell you why I drew away?”
The tears were still on her lashes, but in the exaltation of a great passion, life, death, the grave, and things beyond had dwindled like stars before the rising sun.
“You told me then—because I was 'a pampered poodle dog.' Well, I've outgrown that objection certainly. Let us hope you have a fancy for lean hounds.”
She put up her hands in protest.
“I drew away partly because I knew you did not love me,” she said, meeting his eyes with her clear and ardent gaze, “but more because—I knew that I loved you.”
“You loved me then? Oh, Betty, if I had only known!”
“If you had known!” She covered her face. “Oh, it was terrible enough as it was. I wanted to beat myself for shame.”
“Shame? In loving me, my darling?”
“In loving you like that.”
“Nonsense. If you had only said to me: 'My good sir, I love you a little bit,' I should have come to my senses on the spot. Even pampered poodle dogs are not all fat, Betty, and, as it was, I did come to the years of discretion that very night. I didn't sleep a wink.”
“Nor I.”
“I walked the floor till daybreak.”
“And I sat by the window.”
“I hurled every hard name at myself that I could think of. 'Dolt and idiot' seemed to stick. By George, I can't get over it. To think that I might have galloped down that turnpike and swept you off your feet. You wouldn't have withstood me, Betty, you couldn't.”
“Yet I did,” she said, smiling sadly.
“Oh, I didn't have a fair chance, you see.”
“Perhaps not,” she answered, “though sometimes I was afraid you would hear my heart beating and know it all. Do you remember that morning in the garden with the roses?—I wouldn't kiss you good-by, but if you had done it against my will I'd have broken down. After you had gone I kissed the grass where you had stood.”
“My God! I can't leave you, Betty.”
She met his passionate gaze with steady eyes.
“If you were not to go I should never have told you,” she answered; “but if you die in battle you must remember it at the last.”
“It seems an awful waste of opportunities,” he said, “but I'll make it up on the day that I come back a Major-general. Then I shall say 'forward, madam,' and you'll marry me on the spot.”
“Don't be too sure. I may grow coy again when the war is over.”
“When you do I'll find the remedy—for I'll be a Major-general, then, and you a private. This war must make me, dear. I shan't stay in the ranks much longer.”
“I like you there—it is so brave,” she said.
“But you'll like me anywhere, and I prefer the top—the very top. Oh, my love, we'll wring our happiness from the world before we die!”
With a shiver she came back to the earth.
“I had almost forgotten him,” she said in keen self-reproach, and went quickly over the rustling leaves to the cabin door. As Dan followed her the day seemed to grow suddenly darker to his eyes.
On the threshold he met Mrs. Ambler, composed and tearless, wearing her grief as a veil that hid her from the outside world. Before her calm gray eyes he fell back with an emotion not unmixed with awe.
“I did the best I could,” he said bluntly, “but it was nothing.”
She thanked him quietly, asking a few questions in her grave and gentle voice. Was he conscious to the end? Did he talk of home? Had he expressed any wishes of which she was not aware?
“They are bringing him to the wagon now,” she finished steadily. “No, do not go in—you are very weak and your strength must be saved to hold your musket. Shadrach and Big Abel will carry him, I prefer it to be so. We left the wagon at the end of the path; it is a long ride home, but we have arranged to change horses, and we shall reach Uplands, I hope, by sunrise.”
“I wish to God I could go with you!” he exclaimed.
“Your place is with the army,” she answered. “I have no son to send, so you must go in his stead. He would have it this way if he could choose.”
For a moment she was silent, and he looked at her placid face and the smooth folds of her black silk with a wonder that checked his words.
“Some one said of him once,” she added presently, “that he was a man who always took his duty as if it were a pleasure; and it was true—so true. I alone saw how hard this was for him, for he hated war as heartily as he dreaded death. Yet when both came he met them squarely and without looking back.”
“He died as he had lived, the truest gentleman I have ever known,” he said.
A pleased smile hovered for an instant on her lips.
“He fought hard against secession until it came,” she pursued quietly, “for he loved the Union, and he had given it the best years of his life—his strong years, he used to say. I think if he ever felt any bitterness toward any one, it was for the man or men who brought us into this; and at last he used to leave the room because he could not speak of them without anger. He threw all his strength against the tide, yet, when it rushed on in spite of him, he knew where his duty guided him, and he followed it, as always, like a pleasure. You thought him sanguine, I suppose, but he never was so—in his heart, though the rest of us think differently, he always felt that he was fighting for a hopeless cause, and he loved it the more for very pity of its weakness. 'It is the spirit and not the bayonet that makes history,' he used to say.”
Heavy steps crossed the cabin floor, and Uncle Shadrach and Big Abel came out bringing the dead man between them. With her hand on the gray coat, Mrs. Ambler walked steadily as she leaned on Betty's shoulder. Once or twice she noticed rocks in the way, and cautioned the negroes to go carefully down the descending grade. The bright leaves drifted upon them, and through the thin woods, along the falling path, over the lacework of lights and shadows, they went slowly out into the road where Hosea was waiting with the open wagon.
The Governor was laid upon the straw that filled the bottom, Mrs. Ambler sat down beside him, and as Betty followed, Uncle Shadrach climbed upon the seat above the wheel.
“Good-by, my boy,” said Mrs. Ambler, giving him her hand.
“Good-by, my soldier,” said Betty, taking both of his. Then Hosea cracked the whip and the wagon rolled out into the road, scattering the gray dust high into the sunlight.
Dan, standing alone against the pines, looked after it with a gnawing hunger at his heart, seeing first Betty's eyes, next the gleam of her hair, then the dim figures fading into the straw, and at last the wagon caught up in a cloud of dust. Down the curving road, round a green knoll, across a little stream, and into the blue valley it passed as a speck upon the landscape. Then the distance closed over it, the sand settled in the road, and the blank purple hills crowded against the sky.
V. — “THE PLACE THEREOF”
In the full beams of the sun the wagon turned into the drive between the lilacs and drew up before the Doric columns. Mr. Bill and the two old ladies came out upon the portico, and the Governor was lifted down by Uncle Shadrach and Hosea and laid upon the high tester bed in the room behind the parlour.
As Betty entered the hall, the familiar sights of every day struck her eyes with the smart of a physical blow. The excitement of the shock had passed from her; there was no longer need to tighten the nervous strain, and henceforth she must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest—in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories. While there was something for her hands to do—or the danger of delay in the long watch upon the road—it had not been so hard to brace her strength against necessity, but here—what was there left that she must bring herself to endure? The torturing round of daily things, the quiet house in which to cherish new regrets, and outside the autumn sunshine on the long white turnpike. The old waiting grown sadder, was begun again; she must put out her hands to take up life where it had stopped, go up and down the shining staircase and through the unchanged rooms, while her ears were always straining for the sound of the cannon, or the beat of a horse's hoofs upon the road.
The brick wall around the little graveyard was torn down in one corner, and, while the afternoon sun slanted between the aspens, the Governor was laid away in the open grave beneath rank periwinkle. There was no minister to read the service, but as the clods of earth fell on the coffin, Mrs. Ambler opened her prayer book and Betty, kneeling upon the ground, heard the low words with her eyes on the distant mountains. Overhead the aspens stirred beneath a passing breeze, and a few withered leaves drifted slowly down. Aunt Lydia wept softly, and the servants broke into a subdued wailing, but Mrs. Ambler's gentle voice did not falter.
“He, cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
She read on quietly in the midst of the weeping slaves, who had closed about her. Then, at the last words, her hands dropped to her sides, and she drew back while Uncle Shadrach shovelled in the clay.
“It is but a span,” she repeated, looking out into the sunshine, with a light that was almost unearthly upon her face.
“Come away, mamma,” said Betty, holding out her arms; and when the last spray of life-everlasting was placed upon the finished mound, they went out by the hollow in the wall, turning from time to time to look back at the gray aspens. Down the little hill, through the orchard, and across the meadows filled with waving golden-rod, the procession of white and black filed slowly homeward. When the lawn was reached each went to his accustomed task, and Aunt Lydia to her garden.
An hour later the Major rode over in response to a message which had just reached him.
“I was in town all the morning,” he explained in a trembling voice, “and I didn't get the news until a half hour ago. The saddest day of my life, madam, is the one upon which I learn that I have outlived him.”
“He loved you, Major,” said Mrs. Ambler, meeting his swimming eyes.
“Loved me!” repeated the old man, quivering in his chair, “I tell you, madam, I would rather have been Peyton Ambler's friend than President of the Confederacy! Do you remember the time he gave me his last keg of brandy and went without for a month?”
She nodded, smiling, and the Major, with red eyes and shaking hands, wandered into endless reminiscences of the long friendship. To Betty these trivial anecdotes were only a fresh torture, but Mrs. Ambler followed them eagerly, comparing her recollections with the Major's, and repeating in a low voice to herself characteristic stories which she had not heard before.
“I remember that—we had been married six months then,” she would say, with the unearthly light upon her face. “It is almost like living again to hear you, Major.”
“Well, madam, life is a sad affair, but it is the best we've got,” responded the old gentleman, gravely.
“He loved it,” returned Mrs. Ambler, and as the Major rose to go, she followed him into the hall and inquired if Mrs. Lightfoot had been successful with her weaving. “She told me that she intended to have her old looms set up again,” she added, “and I think that I shall follow her example. Between us we might clothe a regiment of soldiers.”
“She has had the servants brushing off the cobwebs for a week,” replied the Major, “and to-day I actually found Car'line at a spinning wheel on the back flagstones. There's not the faintest doubt in my mind that if Molly had been placed in the Commissary department our soldiers would be living to-day on the fat of the land. She has knitted thirty pairs of socks since spring. Good-by, my dear lady, good-by, and may God sustain you in your double affliction.”
He crossed the portico, bowed as he descended the steps, and, mounting in the drive, rode slowly away upon his dappled mare. When he reached the turnpike he lifted his hat again and passed on at an amble.
During the next few months it seemed to Betty that she aged a year each day. The lines closed and opened round them; troops of blue and gray cavalrymen swept up and down the turnpike; the pastures were invaded by each army in its turn, and the hen-house became the spoil of a regiment of stragglers. Uncle Shadrach had buried the silver beneath the floor of his cabin, and Aunt Floretta set her dough to rise each morning under a loose pile of kindling wood. Once a deserter penetrated into Betty's chamber, and the girl drove him out at the point of an old army pistol, which she kept upon her bureau.
“If you think I am afraid of you come a step nearer,” she had said coolly, and the man had turned to run into the arms of a Federal officer, who was sweeping up the stragglers. He was a blue-eyed young Northerner, and for three days after that he had set a guard upon the portico at Uplands. The memory of the small white-faced girl, with her big army pistol and the blazing eyes haunted him from that hour until Appomattox, when he heaved a sigh of relief and dismissed it from his thoughts. “She would have shot the rascal in another second,” he said afterward, “and, by George, I wish she had.”
The Governor's wine cellar was emptied long ago, the rare old wine flowing from broken casks across the hall.
“What does it matter?” Mrs. Ambler had asked wearily, watching the red stream drip upon the portico. “What is wine when our soldiers are starving for bread? And besides, war lives off the soil, as your father used to say.”
Betty lifted her skirts and stepped over the bright puddles, glancing disdainfully after the Hessian stragglers, who went singing down the drive.
“I hope their officers will get them,” she remarked vindictively, “and the next time they offer us a guard, I shall accept him for good and all, if he happens to have been born on American soil. I don't mind Yankees so much—you can usually quiet them with the molasses jug—but these foreigners are awful. From a Hessian or a renegade Virginian, good Lord deliver us.”
“Some of them have kind hearts,” remarked Mrs. Ambler, wonderingly. “I don't see how they can bear to come down to fight us. The Major met General McClellan, you know, and he admitted afterwards that he shouldn't have known from his manner that he was not a Southern gentleman.”
“Well, I hope he has left us a shoulder of bacon in the smokehouse,” replied Betty, laughing. “You haven't eaten a mouthful for two days, mamma.”
“I don't feel that I have a right to eat, my dear,” said Mrs. Ambler. “It seems a useless extravagance when every little bit helps the army.”
“Well, I can't support the army, but I mean to feed you,” returned Betty decisively, and she went out to ask Hosea if he had found a new hiding place for the cattle. Except upon the rare mornings when Mr. Bill left his fishing, the direction of the farm had fallen entirely upon Betty's shoulders. Wilson, the overseer, was in the army, and Hosea had gradually risen to take his place. “We must keep things up,” the girl had insisted, “don't let us go to rack and ruin—papa would have hated it so,” and, with the negro's aid, she had struggled to keep up the common tenor of the old country life.
Rising at daybreak, she went each morning to overlook the milking of the cows, hidden in their retreat among the hills; and as the sun rose higher, she came back to start the field hands to the ploughing and the women to the looms in one of the detached wings. Then there was the big storehouse to go into, the rations of the servants to be drawn from their secret corners, the meal to be measured, and the bacon to be sliced with the care which fretted her lavish hands. After this there came the shucking of the corn, a negro frolic even in war years, so long as there was any corn to shuck, and lastly the counting of the full bags of grain before the heavy wagon was sent to the little mill beside the river. From sunrise to sunset the girl's hands were not idle for an instant, and in the long evenings, by the light of the home-made tallow dips, which served for candles, she would draw out a gray yarn stocking and knit busily for the army, while she tried, with an aching heart, to cheer her mother. Her sunny humour had made play of a man's work as of a woman's anxiety.
Sometimes, on bright mornings, Mr. Bill would stroll over with his rod upon his shoulder and a string of silver perch in his hand. He had grown old and very feeble, and his angling had become a passion mightier than an army with bayonets. He took small interest in the war—at times he seemed almost unconscious of the suffering around him—but he enjoyed his chats with Union officers upon the road, who occasionally capped his stories of big sport with tales of mountain trout which they had drawn from Northern streams. He would sit for hours motionless under the willows by the river, and once when his house was fired, during a raid up the valley, he was heard to remark regretfully that the messenger had “scared away his first bite in an hour.” Placid, wide-girthed, dull-faced, innocent as a child, he sat in the midst of war dangling his line above the silver perch.
VI. — THE PEACEFUL SIDE OF WAR
On a sparkling January morning, when Lee's army had gone into winter quarters beside the Rappahannock, Dan stood in the doorway of his log hut smoking the pipe of peace, while he watched a messmate putting up a chimney of notched sticks across the little roadway through the pines.
“You'd better get Pinetop to daub your chinks for you,” he suggested. “He can make a mixture of wet clay and sandstone that you couldn't tell from mortar.”
“You jest wait till I git through these shoes an' I'll show you,” remarked Pinetop, from the woodpile, where he was making moccasins of untanned beef hide laced with strips of willow. “I ain't goin' to set my bar' feet on this frozen groun' agin, if I can help it. 'Tain't so bad in summer, but, I d'clar it takes all the spirit out of a fight when you have to run bar-footed over the icy stubble.”
“Jack Powell lost his shoes in the battle of Fredericksburg,” said Baker, as he carefully fitted his notched sticks together. “That's why he got promoted, I reckon. He stepped into a mud puddle, and his feet came out but his shoes didn't.”
“Well, I dare say, it was cheaper for the Government to give him a title than a pair of shoes,” observed Dan, cynically. “Why, you are going in for luxury! Is that pile of oak shingles for your roof? We made ours of rails covered with pine tags.”
“And the first storm that comes along sweeps them off—yes, I know. By the way, can anybody tell me if there's a farmer with a haystack in these parts?”
“Pinetop got a load about three miles up,” replied Dan, emptying his pipe against the door sill. “I say, who is that cavalry peacock over yonder? By George, it's Champe!”
“Perhaps it's General Stuart,” suggested Baker witheringly, as Champe came composedly between the rows of huts, pursued by the frantic jeers of the assembled infantry.
“Take them earrings off yo' heels—take 'em off! Take 'em off!” yelled the chorus, as his spurs rang on the stones. “My gal she wants 'em—take 'em off!”
“Take those tatters off your backs—take 'em off!” responded Champe, genial and undismayed, swinging easily along in his worn gray uniform, his black plume curling over his soft felt hat.
As Dan watched him, standing in the doorway, he felt, with a sudden melancholy, that a mental gulf had yawned between them. The last grim months which had aged him with experiences as with years, had left Champe apparently unchanged. All the deeper knowledge, which he had bought with his youth for the price, had passed over his cousin like the clouds, leaving him merely gay and kind as he had been of old.
“Hello, Beau!” called Champe, stretching out his hand as he drew near. “I just heard you were over here, so I thought I'd take a look. How goes the war?”
Dan refilled his pipe and borrowed a light from Pinetop.
“To tell the truth,” he replied, “I have come to the conclusion that the fun and frolic of war consist in picket duty and guarding mule teams.”
“Well, these excessive dissipations have taken up so much of your time that I've hardly laid eyes on you since you got routed by malaria. Any news from home?”
“Grandma sent me a Christmas box, which she smuggled through, heaven knows how. We had a jolly dinner that day, and Pinetop and I put on our first clean clothes for three months. Big Abel got a linsey suit made at Chericoke—I hope he'll come along in it.”
“Oh, Beau, Beau!” lamented Champe. “How have the mighty fallen? You aren't so particular now about wearing only white or black ties, I reckon.”
“Well, shoestrings are usually black, I believe,” returned Dan, with a laugh, raising his hand to his throat.
Champe seated himself upon the end of an oak log, and taking off his hat, ran his hand through his curling hair. “I was at home last summer on a furlough,” he remarked, “and I declare, I hardly knew the valley. If we ever come out of this war it will take an army with ploughshares to bring the soil up again. As for the woods—well, well, we'll never have them back in our day.”
“Did you see Uplands?” asked Dan eagerly.
“For a moment. It was hardly safe, you know, so I was at home only a day. Grandpa told me that the place had lain under a shadow ever since Virginia's death. She was buried in Hollywood—it was impossible to bring her through the lines they said—and Betty and Mrs. Ambler have taken this very hardly.”
“And the Governor,” said Dan, with a tremor in his voice as he thought of Betty.
“And Jack Morson,” added Champe, “he fell at Brandy Station when I was with him. At first he was wounded only slightly, and we tried to get him to the rear, but he laughed and went straight in again. It was a sabre cut that finished him at the last.”
“He was a first-rate chap,” commented Dan, “but I never knew exactly why Virginia fell in love with him.”
“The other fellow never does. To be quite candid, it is beyond my comprehension how a certain lady can prefer the infantry to the cavalry—yet she does emphatically.”
Dan coloured.
“Was grandpa well?” he inquired lamely.
With a laugh Champe flung one leg over the other, and clasped his knee.
“It's an ill wind that blows nobody good,” he responded. “Grandpa's thoughts are so much given to the Yankees that he has become actually angelic to the rest of us. By the way, do you know that Mr. Blake is in the army?”
“What?” cried Dan, aghast.
“Oh, I don't mean that he really carries a rifle—though he swears he would if he only had twenty years off his shoulders—but he has become our chaplain in young Chrysty's place, and the boys say there is more gun powder in his prayers than in our biggest battery.”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Dan.
“You ought to hear him—it's better than fighting on your own account. Last Sunday he gave us a prayer in which he said: 'O Lord, thou knowest that we are the greatest army thou hast ever seen; put forth thy hand then but a very little and we will whip the earth.' By Jove, you look cosey here,” he added, glancing into the hut where Dan and Pinetop slept in bunks of straw. “I hope the roads won't dry before you've warmed your house.” He shook hands again, and swung off amid the renewed jeers that issued from the open doorways.
Dan watched him until he vanished among the distant pines, and then, turning, went into the little hut where he found Pinetop sitting before a rude chimney, which he had constructed with much labour. A small book was open on his knee, over which his yellow head drooped like a child's, and Dan saw his calm face reddened by the glow of the great log fire.
“Hello! What's that?” he inquired lightly.
The mountaineer started from his abstraction, and the blood swept to his forehead as he rose from the half of a flour barrel upon which he had been sitting.
“'Tain't nothin',” he responded, and as he towered to his great height his fair curls brushed the ceiling of crossed rails. In his awkwardness the book fell to the floor, and before he could reach it, Dan had stooped, with a laugh, and picked it up.
“I say, there are no secrets in this shebang,” he said smiling. Then the smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on the thumbed and tattered page the word “RAT” stared at him in capital letters.
“By George, man!” he exclaimed beneath his breath, as he turned from Pinetop to the blazing logs.
For the first time in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved—a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change—born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now. In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven to make easy, he had overlooked the white sharer of the negro's wrong. To men like Pinetop, slavery, stern or mild, could be but an equal menace, and yet these were the men who, when Virginia called, came from their little cabins in the mountains, who tied the flint-locks upon their muskets and fought uncomplainingly until the end. Not the need to protect a decaying institution, but the instinct in every free man to defend the soil, had brought Pinetop, as it had brought Dan, into the army of the South.
“Look here, old man, you haven't been quite fair to me,” said Dan, after the long silence. “Why didn't you ask me to help you with this stuff?”
“Wall, I thought you'd joke,” replied Pinetop blushing, “and I knew yo' nigger would.”
“Joke? Good Lord!” exclaimed Dan. “Do you think I was born with so short a memory, you scamp? Where are those nights on the way to Romney when you covered me with your overcoat to keep me from freezing in the snow? Where, for that matter, is that march in Maryland when Big Abel and you carried me three miles in your arms after I had dropped delirious by the roadside? If you thought I'd joke you about this, Pinetop, all I can say is that you've turned into a confounded fool.”
Pinetop came back to the fire and seated himself upon the flour barrel in the corner. “'Twas this way, you see,” he said, breaking, for the first time, through his strong mountain reserve. “I al'ays thought I'd like to read a bit, 'specially on winter evenings at home, when the nights are long and you don't have to git up so powerful early in the mornings, but when I was leetle thar warn't nobody to teach me how to begin; maw she didn't know nothin' an' paw he was dead, though he never got beyond the first reader when he was 'live.”
He looked up and Dan nodded gravely over his pipe.
“Then when I got bigger I had to work mighty hard to keep things goin'—an' it seemed to me every time I took out that thar leetle book at night I got so dead sleepy I couldn't tell one letter from another; A looked jest like Z.”
“I see,” said Dan quietly. “Well, there's time enough here anyhow. It will be a good way to pass the evenings.” He opened the primer and laid it on his knee, running his fingers carelessly through its dog-eared pages. “Do you know your letters?” he inquired in a professional tone.
“Lordy, yes,” responded Pinetop. “I've got about as fur as this here place.” He crossed to where Dan sat and pointed with a long forefinger to the printed words, his mild blue eyes beaming with excitement.
“I reckon I kin read that by myself,” he added with an embarrassed laugh. “T-h-e c-a-t c-a-u-g-h-t t-h-e r-a-t. Ain't that right?”
“Perfectly. We'll pass on to the next.” And they did so, sitting on the halves of a divided flour barrel before the blazing chimney.
From this time there were regular lessons in the little hut, Pinetop drawling over the soiled primer, or crouching, with his long legs twisted under him and his elbows awkwardly extended, while he filled a sheet of paper with sprawling letters.
“I'll be able to write to the old woman soon,” he chuckled jubilantly, “an' she'll have to walk all the way down the mounting to git it read.”
“You'll be a scholar yet if this keeps up,” replied Dan, slapping him upon the shoulder, as the mountaineer glanced up with a pleased and shining face. “Why, you mastered that first reader there in no time.”
“A powerful heap of larnin' has to pass through yo' head to git a leetle to stick thar,” commented Pinetop, wrinkling his brows. “Air we goin' to have the big book agin to-night?”
“The big book” was a garbled version of “Les Miserables,” which, after running the blockade with a daring English sailor, had passed from regiment to regiment in the resting army. At first Dan had begun to read with only Pinetop for a listener, but gradually, as the tale unfolded, a group of eager privates filled the little hut and even hung breathlessly about the doorway in the winter nights. They were mostly gaunt, unwashed volunteers from the hills or the low countries, to whom literature was only a vast silence and life a courageous struggle against greater odds. To Dan the picturesqueness of the scene lent itself with all the force of its strong lights and shadows, and with the glow of the pine torches on the open page, his eyes would sometimes wander from the words to rest upon the kindling faces in the shaggy circle by the fire. Dirty, hollow-eyed, unshaven, it sat spellbound by the magic of the tale it could not read.
“By Gosh! that's a blamed good bishop,” remarked an unkempt smoker one evening from the threshold, where his beef-hide shoes were covered with fine snow. “I don't reckon Marse Robert could ha' beat that.”
“Marse Robert ain't never tried,” put in a companion by the fire.
“Wall, I ain't sayin' he had,” corrected the first speaker, through a cloud of smoke. “Lord, I hope when my time comes I kin slip into heaven on Marse Robert's coat-tails.”
“If you don't, you won't never git thar!” jeered the second. Then they settled themselves again, and listened with sombre faces and twitching lips.
It was during this winter that Dan learned how one man's influence may fuse individual and opposing wills into a single supreme endeavour. The Army of Northern Virginia, as he saw it then, was moulded, sustained, and made effective less by the authority of the Commander than by the simple power of Lee over the hearts of the men who bore his muskets. For a time Dan had sought to trace the groundspring of this impassioned loyalty, seeking a reason that could not be found in generals less beloved. Surely it was not the illuminated figure of the conqueror, for when had the Commander held closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan's hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of fortune—somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields. After this it was always as a high figure against a low horizon that he had seen the man who made his army.
As the long winter passed away, he learned, not only much of the spirit of his own side, but something that became almost a sunny tolerance, of the great blue army across the Rappahannock. He had exchanged Virginian tobacco for Northern coffee at the outposts, and when on picket duty along the cold banks of the river he would sometimes shout questions and replies across the stream. In these meetings there was only a wide curiosity with little bitterness; and once a friendly New England picket had delivered a religious homily from the opposite shore, as he leaned upon his rifle.
“I didn't think much of you Rebs before I came down here,” he had concluded in a precise and energetic shout, “but I guess, after all, you've got souls in your bodies like the rest of us.”
“I reckon we have. Any coffee over your side?”
“Plenty. The war's interfered considerably with the tobacco crop, ain't it?”
“Well, rather; we've enough for ourselves, but none to offer our visitors.”
“Look here, are all these things about you in the papers gospel truth?”
“Can't say. What things?”
“Do you always carry bowie knives into battle?”
“No, we use scissors—they're more convenient.”
“When you catch a runaway nigger do you chop him up in little pieces and throw him to the hogs?”
“Not exactly. We boil him down and grease our cartridges.”
“After Bull Run did you set up all the live Zouaves you got hold of as targets for rifle practice?”
“Can't remember about the Zouaves. Rather think we made them into flags.”
“Well, you Rebels take the breath out of me,” commented the picket across the river; and then, as the relief came, Dan hurried back to look for the mail bag and a letter from Betty. For Betty wrote often these days—letters sometimes practical, sometimes impassioned, always filled with cheer, and often with bright gossip. Of her own struggle at Uplands and the long days crowded with work, she wrote no word; all her sympathy, all her large passion, and all her wise advice in little matters were for Dan from the beginning to the end. She made him promise to keep warm if it were possible, to read his Bible when he had the time, and to think of her at all hours in every season. In a neat little package there came one day a gray knitted waistcoat which he was to wear when on picket duty beside the river, “and be very sure to fasten it,” she had written. “I have sewed the buttons on so tight they can't come off. Oh, if I had only papa and Virginia and you back again I could be happy in a hovel. Dear mamma says so, too.”
And after much calm advice there would come whole pages that warmed him from head to foot. “Your kisses are still on my lips,” she wrote one day. “The Major said to me, 'Your mouth is very warm, my dear,' and I almost answered, 'you feel Dan's kisses, sir.' What would he have said, do you think? As it was I only smiled and turned away, and longed to run straight to you to be caught up in your arms and held there forever. O my beloved, when you need me only stretch out your hands and I will come.”