THE ROAD TO WINNSBORO’
She was a wise as well as a fair woman, and yet, the day after the
burning of Columbia, she took a road that led northward from the
smoking ruins. In the cold morning sunlight Sherman himself had come
to the churchyard, and hat in hand had spoken to the Mother Superior.
He regretted the accidental burning of the convent. Any yet standing
house in town that she might designate should be reserved for her, her
nuns and pupils. She named a large old residence from which the family
had gone, and walking between files of soldiers the nuns and their
charges came here. “We learned,” says the Mother Superior, “from the
officer in charge that his orders were to fire it unless the Sisters
were in actual possession of it, but if even ‘a detachment of Sisters’
were in it, it should be spared on their account. Accordingly we took
possession of it, although fires were already kindled near and the
servants were carrying off the bedding and furniture, in view of the
house being consigned to the flames.”
All morning the burning, the looting and shouting went on. Smoke
rolled through the streets, the wind blew flames from point to point.
The house was crowded to oppression; there came a question of food for
so many. Some one was needed to go to the mayor with representations,
which might in turn be brought before the Federal commander. Désirée
volunteered and the distance not being great, went and returned in
safety. Not far from the door that would open to receive her was a
burned house and before it an ancient carriage, and in the carriage
two ladies and a little girl. There were soldiers in the street and to
be seen through smoke beyond the fallen house, but here beside the
carriage was an officer high in command and order prevailed. The
officer was speaking to the ladies. “If there is any trouble, show
your pass. I won’t say that you are wise to leave this place, sad as
it is! These are wild times, and there are more marauders than I like.
Even if you make your way to your brother’s house, you may find it in
ashes. And if you overtake the rear of your army, what can that help?
We will be sweeping on directly and the rebels—I beg your pardon,
General Beauregard’s army—will have to fall back before us or
surrender. I think you had better stay. General Sherman will surely
issue rations to the place.”
“We prefer to go on,” said the eldest of the two women. “We may find
friends somewhere, and somewhere to lay our heads. We do thank you for
the pass.”
“Not at all!” said the officer. “As I told you, your father and my
father were friends.”
As he moved from the carriage door Désirée saw that there was an empty
seat. “Oh,” she thought, “if I might have it!”
Her face, turned toward the carriage, showed from out her hood. The
younger of the women saw her, started and uttered an exclamation.
“Désirée Gaillard!” she cried.
Lo! it was an acquaintance, almost a friend, a girl who had been much
in New Orleans, with whom she had laughed at many a party. “Go with
them!—yes, indeed, she might go with them.” She ran to the house that
was now the convent, gave the Mayor’s message and thanked the Sisters
for the help they would have given, then out she came to the
smoke-filled street and took her place in the carriage. It had a guard
out of town; the officer had been punctilious to do his best. It was
understood that there were Federal troops on the Camden road, but they
were going toward Winnsboro’. When the burning city lay behind them
and the quiet winter fields around, when the guard had said a gruff
“You’re safe enough now! Good-day!” and turned back, when the negro
driver said, “Git up, Lance! Git up, France!” to the horses, and the
carriage wheels turned and they passed a clump of cedars, they were on
the road that the grey troops had travelled no great chain of hours
before.
They drove on and on, and now they overtook and passed or kept company
with for a while mournful folk, refugees, people with the noise of
falling walls in their ears. They had tales to tell and some were
dreadful enough. Then for a time the road would be bare, a melancholy
road, much cut to pieces, with ruts and hollows. Now and then in
dropped haversack, or broken bayonet, or torn shoe, or blood-stained
rag were visible tokens that soldiers had passed. They had a little
food and they ate this, and now and then they talked in low voices,
but for the most part they sat silent, looking out on the winter
landscape. The little girl was restless, and Désirée told her French
fairy stories, quaint and fragrant. At last she slept, and the three
women sat in silence, looking out. In the late afternoon, turning a
little from the main road, they came to the country house for which
they were bound.
The welcome was warm, with a clamour for news. “_Columbia
burned!_—_oh, well-a-way!_... No Yankees in this part as yet. Our
troops went by yesterday on the Winnsboro’ road. It’s said they’ll
wait there until General Hardee gets up from Charleston and they can
make junction. There’s a rumour that General Johnston will be put in
command. Oh, the waiting, waiting! One’s brain turns, looking for the
enemy to come, looking for the South to fall—worse and worse news
every day! If one were with the Army it would not be half so bad.
Waiting, waiting here’s the worst!”
In this Désirée agreed. It was away in a wood and upon a creek like
the Fusilier place. The army was no great distance further on, and
halted. In a day or two it would move, away, away! Her whole being
cried out, I cannot stay here! If it comes to danger, this lonely
place will be burned like the others. I were safer there than here.
And what do I care for danger? Have I not travelled with danger for
two years?”
That night when, exhausted, she fell asleep, she had a dream. She was
back in Dalton, in the house with the lace-handkerchief dooryard. She
was on her knees, cording a hair trunk, and the old negro
Nebuchadnezzar and his horse Julius Cæsar were waiting. Somebody—it
was not the two sisters who lived in the house—but somebody, she could
not make out who it was—was persuading her to stay quietly there, not
to take the road to Resaca. At first she would not listen, but at last
she did listen and said she would stay. And then at once she was at
Cape Jessamine and the house was filled with people and there was
dancing. Everything was soft and bright and a myriad of wax candles
were burning, and the music played and they talked about going to New
Orleans for Mardi-gras and what masks they should wear. And she was
exceedingly happy, with roses in her hair and an old gold-gown. But
all the time she was trying to remember something or somebody, and it
troubled her that she could not bring whatever it was to mind. And
then, though she still danced, and though there stayed a gleaming edge
of floor and light and flowers and moving people, the rest rolled away
into darkness and a battlefield. She saw the stars above it and heard
the wind, and then she left the dancers and the lights and they faded
away and she walked on the battlefield, but still there was something
she could not remember. She was unhappy and her heart ached because
she could not. And then she came to a corner of the field where were
dark vines and broken walls, and a voice came to her out of it,
“Désirée! Désirée!” She remembered now and knew that Edward lay there,
and she cried, “I am coming!” But even so the dream turned again, and
she was back in the house with the lace-handkerchief yard, and the
hair trunk was being carried back into the house and up the stairs,
and the wagon at the gate turned and went away without her. Then there
was darkness again, and the cave at Vicksburg, and a cry in her ears,
“_Désirée! Désirée!_”
She waked, and, trembling, sat up in bed. “If I had not gone from
Dalton,” she said, “he would have died.” She rose, crossed the room to
a window and set it wide. It looked across the wood toward the road
they had left, the Winnsboro’ road. She stood gazing, in the night
wind, the winter wind. There was a faint far light upon the horizon.
Rightly or wrongly, she thought it was the camp-fires of the grey
army. Another night and they would be further away perhaps, another
night and further yet! Sooner or later there would be the battle, and
the dead and the wounded left on the field. The wind blew full upon
her, wrapping her white gown closely about her limbs, lifting her dark
hair. “_Désirée! Désirée!_” The dream cry was yet in her ears, and
there on the horizon flamed his camp-fires.
When morning came she begged a favour of her new friends in this
place. Could they let her have a cart and a horse, anything that might
take her to Winnsboro’? They said that if she must go she should have
the carriage and horses and the old driver of yesterday, but surely it
was not wise to go at all! News was here this morning that the ravage
north of Columbia had begun. All this country would be unsafe—was
perhaps unsafe at this moment and henceforth! No one expected this
house to be spared—why should it be, more than another?—but at least
it was not burned yet, and it was better to face what might come in
company than alone! “Stay with us, my dear, stay with us!” But when
she would go on, they understood. It was a time of wandering and of
much travel under strange and hard conditions. As for danger—when it
was here and there and everywhere what use in dwelling on it? No one
could say with any knowledge, “Here is safety,” or “There is danger.”
The shuttle was so rapid! What to-day seemed the place of safety was
to-morrow the very centre of danger. What was to-day’s field of danger
might become to-morrow, the wave rushing on, quiet of foes as any
desert strand!—Désirée kissed her friends and went away in the old
carriage toward the Winnsboro’ road.
The morning was dull and harsh with scudding clouds. The side road was
as quiet as death, but when they came upon the broader way there grew
a difference. The old negro looked behind him. “Dere’s an awful fuss,
mistis, ener dust! des lak de debbil got loose!”
“Drive fast,” said Désirée. “If you come to a lane turn into it.”
But the road went straight between banks of some height, without a
feasible opening to either hand. Moreover, though the driver used the
whip and the horses broke into something like a gallop, the cloud of
dust and the noise behind steadily gained. There came a round of
pistol shots. “They are firing at us,” said Désirée. “Check the horses
and draw the carriage to the side of the road.”
Dust and noise enveloped them. A foraging party, twenty jovial
troopers, drew rein, surrounded the carriage, declined to molest or
trouble the lady, but claimed the carriage-horses in the name of the
Union.
They cut the traces and took them, Désirée standing by the roadside
watching. These men, she thought, were much like schoolboys, in wild
spirits, ready for rough play but no malice. She was so used to
soldiers and used to seeing in them such sudden, rough and gay humour
as this that she felt no fear at all. When a freckled, humorous-faced
man came over and asked her if she had far to travel, and if she
really minded walking, she answered with a wit and composure that made
him first chuckle, then laugh, then take off his cap and make her a
bow. The troop was in a hurry. When it had the horses and had joked
and laughed and caracoled enough, off it prepared to go in another
cloud of dust. But the freckled man came back for a moment to Désirée.
“If I may make so bold, ma’am,” he said, “I’d suggest that you don’t
do much walking on this road, and that as soon as you come to a house
you ask the people to let you take pot-luck with them for a while! The
army’s coming on, and we’ve got plenty of bands out that don’t seem
ever to have had any good womenfolk to teach them manners. If you’ll
take a friend’s advice you’ll stop at the nearest house—though of
course, in these times, that ain’t very safe neither!”
The carriage had the forlornest air, stranded there in the road,
beneath a sky so cloudy that now there threatened a storm. The negro
driver was old and slightly doddering. Moreover, when she said, “Well,
Uncle, now we must walk!” he began to plain of his rheumatism. She
found that it was actual enough; he would be able to walk neither fast
or far. She looked behind her. A league or two back lay the turning
that would lead to the house she had quitted.... But she shook her
head. She had made her choice.
A mile from where they left the carriage they found at a crossroads
the cabin of some free negroes—a man and a woman and many children.
Here Désirée left her companion. If she took the narrower road, where,
she asked, would it lead her? Could she reach Winnsboro’ that
way?—Yes, if she went on to a creek and a mill, and if then she took
the right-hand road. No, it wasn’t much out of the way—three or four
miles.
“And a quiet, safe road?”
“Yaas, ma’am. Jus’ er-runnin’ along quiet by itself. Hit ain’t much
travelled.”
“But it will bring me to Winnsboro’?”
“Yaas, ma’am. Quicker’n de main road wif all dese armies hollerin’
down it.”
“Those men who went by a little while ago—were they the first to pass
to-day?”
“No, ma’am, dat dey wasn’t! En _dey_ was sober, Lawd!”
“And they’ve all kept on the main road?”
“Yaas, ma’am. All taken de main road.”
She looked down the road she had come—the main road. Here was another
cloud of dust; she heard a faint shouting. She had with her some
Confederate notes, and now she put one of a large denomination into
the hand of the old driver, nodded good-bye, and turned into the
narrow way, that seemed merely a track through the forest. Almost
immediately, as she came beneath the arching trees, the cabin, the
negro family, the gleaming, wider road sank away and were lost.
She walked lightly and swiftly. She might have been wearied. For a
month now she had known that she carried life beneath her heart. But
she did not feel wearied. She felt strong and well and deathless. The
miles were not many now before her. With good luck she might even
reach her goal to-night. If not to-night then she would sleep where
she might and go forward at dawn. Before another sun was high it would
be all right—all right. The clouds began to lift, and though it was
cold it did not seem so cold to her as it had been. At long intervals
she passed, set back from the road, small farmhouses or cabins in
ragged gardens. Most of these houses looked quite deserted; others had
every shutter closed, huddling among the trees with a frightened air.
As the afternoon came on the houses grew further apart. The road was
narrow, untravelled of late—it seemed a lonely country.... At last she
came to the promised creek and the mill. The mill-wheel was not
turning, no miller and his men stood about the door, no horses with
sacks thrown across waited without. There was no sign of life. But the
miller’s house was behind the mill, and here she saw a face at a
window. She went and knocked at the door. An old woman opened to her.
“Be the Yankees coming?” she said.
Désirée asked for a bit of bread, and to warm herself beside the fire.
While she ate it, crouched in the warm corner of the kitchen hearth,
the old woman took again her post at the window. “I keep a-watching
and a-watching for them to come!” she said. “They’ve got a spite
against mills. My father built this one, and when he died my husband
took it, and when he died my boy John. The wheel turned when I was
little, and when I was grown and had a lover, and when I was married
and when there were children. It turned when there was laughing and
when there was crying. The sound of the water over it and the flashing
is the first thing I can remember. I used to think it would be the
last thing I’d hear when I came to die, and I kind of hoped it would.
I liked it. It was all mixed up with all kinds of things. But now I
reckon before this time to-morrow it’ll be burned. They’ve got a spite
against mills.—Won’t you stay the night?”
But there was an hour yet before sunset. The road to Winnsboro’? Yes,
that was it, and it was only so many miles. The army? Yes, she thought
the army was still there. Yesterday there had been what they called a
reconoissance this way. A lot of grey soldiers had passed, going down
to the Columbia road and back.
Désirée rose refreshed, gave her thanks and went her way. A wind bent
the trees and tore and heaped the clouds. The low sun shone out and
turned the clouds into purple towers, fretted and crowned with gold.
The rays came to Désirée like birds and flowers of hope. For all the
woe of the land her heart began to sing. She walked on and on, not
conscious of weariness, moving as though she were on air, drawn by a
great magnet. The clouds were enchanted towers, the sky between, a
waveless sea; the wind at her back, driving her on, was welcome, the
odour of woods and earth was welcome. On and on she went, steady and
swift, an arrow meaning to pierce the gold.
Suddenly, with a shock, the enchantment went. The wind, blowing with
her, brought a distant, confused sound. She turned. It was sunset, the
earth was suddenly stern and dark. Above the woods, back the way she
had come, rose thick smoke. She knew it for what it was, knew that
some one of Sherman’s roving bands was there at the mill, burning it
down. She stood with knit brows, for now she heard men upon the road.
The ground here rose slightly, the road running across a desolate,
open field, covered with sedge, from which rose at intervals tall,
slender pines. Their trunks and bushy heads outlined against the sky,
that was now all flushed with carmine, gave them a curious resemblance
to palm trees. West of the road, half way across the sedgy stretch,
ran a short and ruined wall of stones, part of some ancient enclosure.
Behind it showed again the darker, thicker wood. Désirée, leaving the
road, went toward this, but she had hardly stepped from the trodden
way into the sedge when behind her at the turn of the road appeared a
man in uniform. She was above him, clear against the great suffusion
of the sunset sky. He stared a moment, then turned his head and
whooped, whereupon there appeared half a dozen of his fellows.
They caught up with her just as she reached the broken wall. She saw
that without exception they were drunk, and she set her back against
the stones and prepared to fight.
Five thousand men could not meet in battle sixty thousand, but they
could and did send out reconnoitring bodies that gathered news of
Sherman, tarrying yet upon the Congaree, and gave some sense of
protection to the country people and gave sharp lessons to the
marauding parties that now and again they met with. By moving here and
there they made a rumour, too, of gathering grey troops and larger
numbers, of reinforcements perhaps from North Carolina, of at any rate
grey forces and some one to play now protector, now avenger. So it was
that on this winter afternoon the ——th Virginia, three or four hundred
muskets, with a small detachment of cavalry going ahead, found itself
marching down the main road, fifteen miles toward Columbia. It knew by
now of the burning of Columbia. “Everything in ashes—houses and stores
and churches and a convent. The people with neither food nor
shelter—going where they can.” Grey cavalry and infantry asked nothing
better than to meet its foes to-day. So great, around the blue army,
was the fringe of foragers and pillagers and those engaged in “making
the country untenable for the enemy,” that the grey did meet to-day
various bands of plunderers. When they did they gave short shrift, but
charged, firing, cut them down and rode them over and chased them back
toward Columbia and their yet stationary great force. The grey’s
humour to-day was a grim and furious humour.
The ——th Virginia passed a cross-roads, and a little later came to
something that aroused comment among the men. It was an empty,
old-fashioned carriage, standing without horses, half on the road,
half over the edge. “Looks,” said the men, “like the ark on
Ararat!”—“Forlorn, ain’t it?”—“Where’s the horses and the people who
were in it?”—“Reckon those Yanks before us took the horses. As for the
people—I’d rather be a humming-bird in winter than the people in this
State!”
Edward Cary rode across and checking his horse, leaned from the saddle
and looked into the carriage—why, he hardly knew, unless it was that
once in Georgia they had found a carriage stranded like this, and in
it a child asleep. There was in this one nothing living. ... Just as
he straightened himself he caught a glint of something small and
golden lying in a corner. He dismounted, drew the swinging door
further open and picked it up. It was a locket, and he had had it in
his hands before.
He remembered passing, a little way back, a negro cabin. After a word
to the commanding officer he galloped back to this place. Yes, they
could tell him, and did. “She took this road?” “Yaas, sah. Long erbout
midday. We done tol’ her erbout de creek en de mill en de right-han’
road—”
“Has any one else gone by this road? Any soldiers?”
“Yaas, sah. Right smart lot ob soldiers. Dey ax where dat road go, en
I say hit go to de mill. Den dey say dey gwine burn de mill, en dey
goes dat way. I reckon hits been mo’n three hours ergo, sah.”
It was dusk when Edward Cary and twenty cavalrymen turned into this
road, and it had been night for some time when they came to the
reddened place where had stood the mill. It was all down now, though
the flames were yet playing through the mass of fallen timbers. The
mill-wheel was a wreck, the miller’s house behind was burned. There
were no soldiers here: they had destroyed and were gone. But out from
some hiding-place came an old woman who seemed distraught. She stood
in the flickering glow and said, “Yankees! Yankees!” and “They took an
axe and killed the mill-wheel!”
Edward spoke to her, soothed her, and at last she drew her wits
together, talked to him, and answered his questions. “Yes, a woman had
been there and had left a little before sunset. Yes, dressed so and
so—a beautiful woman. Yes, she had gone by that road, walking away
alone. She said good-bye and then she had seen and heard nothing more
of her. Then, in a little, little time, came the Yankees. Some of them
were drunk, and she had run out of the house and hid within a brush
heap. ... And now the mill-wheel would never turn again.”
“Which road did they take when they left—the Winnsboro’ road or that
one running south?”
She was not sure. She thought the one running south—but maybe some
went one way, some another. She did not know how many there were of
them. They were on foot and horseback, too. Her eyes strayed to where
the wheel had been, and she fell again to plucking at her apron.
Cary and his men took the right-hand road. It lay quiet as death
beneath the winter stars. They travelled it slowly, looking from side
to side, but if there were signs that an enemy had been that way, in
the darkness they could not read them. Neither did they see any sign
of a solitary traveller. All was quiet, with only the sighing of the
wind. At last, nearing Winnsboro’, they came to their own picket-line.
Camped by the road was a cavalry post. Edward spoke with the men here.
“No. A quiet night—nothing seen and nothing heard out of the way. No
one had passed—no, no woman.”
Cary turned in his saddle and looked behind him. Clear night, and dark
and still through all the few miles between this place which she had
not passed and the mill which she had.... The men with him had been in
the saddle since dawn. They were weary enough, and under orders to
report that night at Winnsboro’. At the end he sent on upon the road
well-nigh all the troop, then turned himself and with but three or
four horsemen behind him, began to retrace the road to the mill. Light
and sound of the picket post died behind him, there came only the
quiet miles of a lonely country and the stars above.
The night was old when, suddenly, near again to the burned mill, there
burst out of a by-path the men who had burned it. They had taken the
southward running road, had burned two houses that lay that way, then
encountering rough country and a swollen river, had elected, horse and
foot, to march back the way they came. Now, emerging suddenly upon the
wider road, they saw before them four horsemen, divined that they were
grey, and with a shout joined battle.
“They are six to one, men!” cried Cary. “Save yourselves!”
There came the crash. He fired twice, emptying a saddle and giving a
ball in the shoulder to the half-drunken giant who seemed to be
leading. Then with oaths three pushed against him. His horse reared,
screamed and fell, pierced by bullets. He leaped clear of the saddle
and fired again, breaking a man’s raised sabre arm. There was a
blinding flash, a deafening sound—down, down he went into blackness
and silence, into night deep as the nadir....
When he came slowly, slowly back to feeling and consciousness he was
alone. It was dawn, he saw that. For a long time there seemed nothing
but the fact of dawn. Then he suddenly rested his hand on the earth
and tried to lift himself. With the vain effort and the pain it
brought came a troubled memory. He put his hand to his side and felt
the welling blood. The wound, he presently saw, was deep and hopeless,
deep enough to let death in. His head fell back against the bank
behind him and he faced the dawn. He was lying at the edge of the
road, his dead horse near. All noise and war and strife were gone, the
three or four men who had been with him cut down, or taken prisoner,
or fled, the blue triumphant band gone its way. There was an utter
stillness, and the dawn coming up cool and pure like purple lilies. He
slightly turned his head. About him was a field of sedge with
scattered pines. The wind was laid, and it was not cold. He knew that
his hurt was mortal.... Suddenly, as from another world, there came to
him a very faint cry—half cry for help, half plaint to a heaven blind
and deaf. He dragged himself to his knees, with his hand cleared the
mist from his eyes and gazed across an half acre of sedge to a heap of
ruined stones like a broken wall. The voice rose again, faintly. With
a vast, illuminating rush came fully memory and knowledge, and like a
dying leap of the flame, strength. He rose and crossed the sedge.
She was lying where her murderers had left her, beneath the ruined
wall. She was dying, but she knew him when, with a cry, he fell beside
her, stretched his arms above her. “Yes,” she said. “I believed that
you would come.” Then, when she saw the blood upon him, “Are you going
with me?”
“Yes, Love,” he said. “Yes, Love.”
The great dawn climbed stealthily, from tint to deeper tint, from
height to height. The pine trees stood like dreaming palms, and the
sedge spread like a floor of gold. “The river!” she said, “the great
river that is going to eat us up at last! How it beats against Cape
Jessamine!”
“When I saw Cape Jessamine go down, I thought only ’If I were there!
If I were with her, together in the wave!’”
Their voices died to whispers. With a vague and fluttering hand she
touched his brow and lips. “I wanted the child to live—I wanted that.
But it was not to be—it was not to be—”
“Désirée! Désirée!”
A smile was on her lips—almost of derision. “War is so stupid,” she
said.
Upon the purple wall of the east a finger began to write in gold. The
mist was stirring in the woods, the wind beginning. It lifted her
dark, loosened hair, that was so wildly spread. It brought a drift of
dead leaves across them where they lay. They lay side by side, like
wreathed figures on a tomb. “Is it light?” she asked. “Can you see the
light?”
“I can see it faintly. It is like the sound of the sea.”
“It is very cold,” she breathed. “Dark and cold.”
“Yes.... Dark and cold.”
“Give me your hand,” she said. “Kiss me. We have been happy, and we
will be so again.... Now I am going.... Dark, dark—dark—”
“Désirée—”
“I see light like a star.... Good-bye.”
She died. With a last effort he moved so that his arms were around her
body and his head upon her breast, and then, as the sun came up, his
spirit followed hers.