Part 29

“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.”

VII

THE SILENT BATTLE

Despite the cheerfulness of Betty's letters, there were times during the next dark years when it seemed to her that starvation must be the only end. The negroes had been freed by the Governor's will, but the girl could not turn them from their homes, and, with the exception of the few field hands who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. “It makes no difference what I eat,” she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. “I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes.”

Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting. It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major's lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. “We will rise or fall with the government,” Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle authority. “Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely.”

“Surely money is of no matter,” Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful of worldly goods. “Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have grandma's pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know.”

“If need be--let us wait, dear,” replied her mother, who, grave and pallid as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach the army.

“I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I,” she would say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.

“But I am hungry for you, mamma--take it for my sake,” the girl would beg, on the point of tears. “You are starving, that is it--and yet it does not feed the army.”

In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death to which she went with her slow and stately tread.

For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.

“Oh, mamma, do it to please me,” she entreated.

“Well, give it back, my dear,” Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always, and when Betty triumphantly declared, “You feel better now--you know you do, you dearest,” she responded readily:--

“Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait--I have grown to like to have my hands busy. Your old bonnet is almost gone, so I shall plait you one of this and trim it with a piece of ribbon Aunt Lydia found yesterday in the attic.”

“I don't mind going bareheaded, if you will only eat.”

“I was never a hearty eater. Your father used to say that I ate less than a robin. It was the custom for ladies to have delicate appetites in my day, you see; and I remember your grandma's amazement when Miss Pokey Mickleborough was asked at our table what piece of chicken she preferred, and answered quite aloud, 'Leg, if you please.' She was considered very indelicate by your grandma, who had never so much as tasted any part except the wing.”

She sat, gentle and upright, in her rosewood chair, her worn silk dress rustling as she crossed her feet, her beautiful hands moving rapidly with the straw plaiting. “I was brought up very carefully, my dear,” she added, turning her head with its shining bands of hair a little silvered since the beginning of the war. “'A girl is like a flower,' your grandpa always said. 'If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.' Things are different now--very different.”

“But this is war,” said Betty.

Mrs. Ambler nodded over the slender braid.

“Yes, this is war,” she added with her wistful smile, and a moment afterward looked up again to ask in a dazed way:--

“What was the last battle, dear? I can't remember.”

Betty's glance sought the lawn outside where the warm May sunshine fell in shafts of light upon the purple lilacs.

“They are fighting now in the Wilderness,” she answered, her thoughts rushing to the famished army closed in the death grapple with its enemy. “Dan got a letter to me and he says it is like fighting in a jungle, the vines are so thick they can't see the other side. He has to aim by ear instead of sight.”

Mrs. Ambler's fingers moved quickly.

“He has become a very fine man,” she said. “Your father always liked him--and so did I--but at one time we were afraid that he was going to be too much his father's son--he looked so like him on his wild days, especially when he had taken wine and his colour went high.”

“But he has the Lightfoot eyes. The Major, Champe, even their Great-aunt Emmeline have those same gray eyes that are always laughing.”

“Jane Lightfoot had them, too,” added Mrs. Ambler. “She used to say that to love hard went with them. 'The Lightfoot eyes are never disillusioned,' she once told me. I wonder if she remembered that afterwards, poor girl.”

Betty was silent for a moment.

“It sounds cruel,” she confessed, “but you know, I have sometimes thought that it may have been just a little bit her fault, mamma.”

Mrs. Ambler smiled. “Your grandpa used to say 'get a woman to judge a woman and there comes a hanging.'”

“Oh, I don't mean that,” responded Betty, blushing. “Jack Montjoy was a scoundrel, I suppose--but I think that even if Dan had been a scoundrel, instead of so big and noble--I could have made his life so much better just because I loved him; if love is only large enough it seems to me that all such things as being good and bad are swallowed up.”

“I don't know--your father was very good, and I loved him because of it. He was of the salt of the earth, as Mr. Blake wrote to me last year.”

“There has never been anybody like papa,” said Betty, her eyes filling. “Not even Dan--for I can't imagine papa being anything but what he was--and yet I know even if Dan were as wild as the Major once believed him to be, I could have gone with him not the least bit afraid. I was so sure of myself that if he had beaten me he could not have broken my spirit. I should always have known that some day he would need me and be sorry.”

Tender, pensive, bred in the ancient ways, Mrs. Ambler looked up at her and shook her head.

“You are very strong, my child,” she answered, “and I think it makes us all lean too much upon you.”