Part 28

“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?”