"Childless," was the word which she murmured in her heart, as she
entered the building which had once been the Presidential Mansion of
Jefferson Davis and now is the Confederate Museum. Why the thought of
her estranged daughter flashed upon her as she came to do honor to the
memory of her long dead husband, Mrs. Desborough could not have told,
but so overwhelming was the sadness of her mood that she could hardly
wonder if this bitter memory took advantage of her moment of weakness to
obtrude itself. She set her lips tightly and put it determinedly into
the background. She would not think of the daughter who was lost to her;
to-day and here no thought but should go back in loving homage and
passionate grief to the hero whose name she bore.
She went at once to the Virginia Room, bowing quickly but kindly to the
custodian of the Museum, and as she pushed open the door of the sad
place, she thought herself alone. The heavy April rain which was
drenching Richmond outside kept visitors away, and the building was
almost deserted. In her yearly visits to this spot, those pilgrimages
which she had made as to a shrine, she had once before had the Virginia
Room to herself, untroubled by the presence of strangers; and now with
a quick sigh of relief she realized how great had been the comfort of
that solitude. To her sensitive nature it was hard to stand before
the memorials of her dead and yet to be aware that strange eyes, eyes
curious if sympathetic, might be reading in her face all the emotions
of her very soul. To preserve the calm necessary before the public had
always seemed to her almost like being untrue to the memory she came to
consecrate; and to-day it was with a swelling sigh of relief that she
threw back her heavy widow's veil with the free, proud motion which
belonged to the women of her race and time--the women bred in the South
before the war. She was an old woman, though not much over sixty, for
pain can age more swiftly than time. The high-bred mien would be hers
as long as life remained, and wonderful was her self-control. Again and
again she had felt unshed tears burn in her eyes like living fire, yet
had been sure that no stranger had had reason to look upon her as more
than a casual visitor to the museum; but to be able to let her grief
have way seemed almost a joy. She felt the quick drops start at the bare
thought. Life had left her no greater blessing than this liberty to weep
undiscovered over the memorials of her dead.
At the instant a man came from behind one of the cases, so near that she
might have touched him. Instinctively she tried to take her handkerchief
from her chatelaine, and in her confusion detached the bag. It fell at
the feet of the gentleman, who stooped at once to pick it up. As he held
it out, she forced a smile to her fine old face.
"Thank you," she said; "I--I was very awkward."
"Not at all," he responded. "Those bags are so easily unhooked."
The tone struck her almost like a blow. To the disappointment of finding
that she was not alone in this solemn place was added the bitter fact
that the intruder who had come upon her was not of her people. An
impulse of bitterness from the old times of blood and of fire swept over
her like a wave. The room had carried her back as it always did to the
past, and after almost two-score years she for the first time broke
through the stern resolve that had kept her from hostile speech.
"You are a Northerner!" she exclaimed.
The words were nothing, but the tone, she knew, was hot with all the
long pent-up bitterness. She felt her cheek flush as, almost before
the words were spoken, she realized what she had said. The stranger,
however, showed no sign of resentment. He smiled, then grew grave again.
"Yes. Do not Northerners visit the Museum? I supposed nobody came to
Richmond without coming here."
She was painfully annoyed, and felt her thin cheeks glow as hotly as
if she were still a girl. To be lacking in politeness was sufficiently
humiliating, but to seem rude to one from the North, to fail in living
up to her traditions, was intolerable.
"I beg your pardon," she forced herself to say. "To come through that
door is to step into the past, and I spoke as I might have when--"
"When a Yankee in the house of President Davis would have required
explicit explanation," the stranger finished the sentence she knew not
how to complete.
Even in her discomposure she appreciated both the courtesy which spared
her the embarrassment of being left in the confusion of an unfinished
remark and the adroitness which gave to his reply just the right tone of
lightness. He was evidently a man of the world. Her instinct, not to be
outdone in politeness, least of all by one of her race, made her speak
again.
"I was rude," she said stiffly. "To-day is an anniversary on which I
always come here, and I forgot myself."
"Then I must have seemed doubly obtrusive," he returned gravely.
He was certainly a gentleman. He was well groomed, moreover, with the
appearance of quiet wealth. One of his hands was ungloved, and she noted
appreciatively how finely shaped it was, how white and well kept. The
North had all the wealth now, she reflected involuntarily, while so many
of the descendants of old Southern families were forced to earn their
very bread by occupations unworthy of them. They could not keep their
fine hands, hands that told of blood and breeding for generations,
as could this stranger before her. His attractiveness, his air of
prosperity, were offensive to her because they emphasized the pitiful
poverty of so many of her kin whose forefathers had never known what
want could be.
"The Museum is open to the public," she replied, with increasing
coldness.
She expected him to bow and leave her. Not only did he linger, but she
seemed to see in his face a look of pity. Before she could resent this
pity, however, she met his eyes with her own, and the look seemed to her
to be one of sympathy.
"Will you pardon my saying that I too came here to-day because it is an
anniversary?"
"An anniversary?" she echoed. "How can an anniversary bring a Northerner
here?"
"It is n't mine exactly. It is my son's. His mother is a Virginian."
So highly strung was her mood that she noticed almost with approval that
he had said "is" and not "was." He had at least not deprived his wife of
her birthright as a daughter of the sacred soil. She began to be aware
of a growing excitement. She could hardly have heard unmoved any
allusion to a marriage which had taken from the South a woman born to
its traditions and to its sorrows. She felt a fresh impulse of anger
against this prosperous son of the North who had carried away from a
Virginia mother a daughter as she had been robbed of hers. The cruel
pang of crushed motherhood which ached within her at the remembrance
of her own child, the child she had herself cast off because of her
marriage, was so fierce that for a moment she could not command her
voice. She could not shape the question which was in her heart, but she
felt that with her eyes she all but commanded the stranger to tell her
more.
"We live in the North," he explained, "but she has long promised the
boy that when he was eight he should see the relics of his Virginian
grandfather which are in the museum here. Unfortunately, when the time
came, she was not well enough to come with him; and as she wished him to
be here on this especial day, I have brought him."
The Southern woman felt her heart beating tumultuously, and it was
almost as if another spoke when she said in a manner entirely
conventional:--
"I trust that her illness is not serious."
"If it were, I should not be here myself," he answered.
She collected her strength, which seemed to be leaving her, and forced
herself to look around the room. She could not have told what she
expected, or whether she most hoped or feared what she might see.
"But your son?" she asked.
The man's face changed subtly.
"My father," he replied, "was an officer in the Union army. I wished to
see this place first, to be prepared for Desborough's questions. It is
n't easy to answer the questions of a clever lad whose two grandfathers
have been killed in the same battle, fighting on opposite sides."
The name struck her like a blow. She leaned for support against the
corner of the nearest case, and fixed her gaze on the pathetic coat of
General Lee behind the glass which showed her as a faint wraith the
reflection of her own face. Desborough had been her husband's name, and
this the anniversary of his death; she felt as if the dead had arisen to
confront her, and that some imperative call in the blood insistently
responded. Yet she could not believe that her son-in-law was before
her, regarding her with that straightforward, appealingly honest gaze;
she said to herself that the name was merely a coincidence, that every
day in the year was the anniversary of the death of some Virginian hero,
and that this could not be her daughter's husband.
"Have you decided what to tell your son?" she heard her voice, strange
and far off, asking amid the thrilling quiet of the room.
The stranger regarded her as if struck by the note of challenge in her
tone. His serious eyes seemed to her to be endeavoring to probe her own
in search of the cause of her sharpness.
"I can do no more," was his answer, "than to tell him what I have always
told him--the truth, as far as I can see it."
"And the truth which you can tell him here--here, before the sacred
relics of our dead, the sacred memorials of our Lost Cause--"
She could not go on, but stopped suddenly that he might not hear her
voice break.
"He has never been taught anything but that the men of the South fought
for what they believed, and that no man can do a nobler thing than to
give his life for his faith."
She became suddenly and illogically sure that she was talking to her
son-in-law, although the ground of her conviction was no other than the
one she had just before rejected. The whole thing flashed upon her mind
as perfectly simple. Her daughter knew that on this day she was always
to be found here, and had meant to meet her, with the little son bearing
his grandfather's name. The question now was whether the husband knew.
Something in his air, something half-propitiatory, something certainly
beyond the ordinary deference offered to a lady who is a stranger,
gave her a vague distrust. She was not untouched by the desire for
reconciliation, but she had again and again resisted that before,
and least of all could she tolerate the idea of being tricked. The
possibility that her son-in-law might be feigning ignorance to work the
more surely upon her sympathy angered her.
"Do you know who I am?" she demanded abruptly.
"I beg your pardon," he answered, evidently surprised, "but I have never
been in Richmond before. If you are well known here, or are the wife of
some man famous in the South, I am too completely a stranger to
recognize you."
"Yet you seemed to wish to explain yourself to me. Why?"
"I don't know," he began hesitatingly, searching her face with his
straightforward gray eyes. Then he flushed slightly, and broke out
with new feeling: "Yes; I do know. You came just as I was going away
because I could not endure the sadness of it; when every one of these
cases seemed to me to drip with blood and tears. That sounds to you
extravagant, but the whole thing came over me so tremendously that I
could n't bear it."
"I do not understand," she returned tremulously. "You have such
collections at the North, I suppose."
"But here it came over me that to all the sorrow of loss was added the
bitterness of defeat. I felt that no Southerner could come here without
feeling that all the agony this commemorates had been in vain; and the
pity of it took me by the throat so that when I spoke to you, you were a
sort of impersonation of the South--of the Southern women; and I wanted
to ask for pardon."
She drew a deep breath and raised her head proudly.
"Not for the war," he said quickly, with a gesture which seemed to wave
aside her pride and showed her how well he had understood her triumph at
the admission seemingly implied in his words. "I am a Northern man, and
I believe with my whole soul that the North was right. I believe in the
cause for which my father died. Only I see now that if he had lived in
the South, the same spirit would have carried him into the Confederate
army."
"But for what should you ask pardon, if the North was in the right?"
"For myself; for not understanding--for being so dull all these years
that I have lived with a wife faithful in her heart to the South and too
loyal to me to speak. We in the North have forgiven, and we think that
the South should forget. It has come over me to-day how easy it is for
the conquerors to forgive and how hard that must be for the conquered."
"You do not understand even now," she said, her voice low with feeling.
"Because we are conquered we can forgive; but we should be less than
human to forget."
The room was very still for a little, and then, following out her
thought, she said as if in wonder: "And you, a Northerner, have felt
all this!"
He shook his head, with a little smile.
"It is perhaps too much to ask," returned he, "that you Southern women
should realize that even a Northerner is still human."
"Yes, yes; but to feel our suffering, to see--"
"It has always been facing me, I understand now, in my wife's eyes--the
immeasurable pathos of a people beaten in a struggle they felt to be
right; but she had been so happy otherwise, and she never spoke of it."
"In the heart of every Southern woman," she said solemnly, though now
without bitterness, "is always the anguish of our Lost Cause. We cover
the surface, we accept, and God knows we have been patient; but each of
us has deep down a sense of the blood that was poured out in vain, of
the agony of the men we loved, of how they were humiliated--humiliated,
and of the great cause of liberty lost--lost!"
For long, bitter years she had not spoken even to her nearest friends as
she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner. The consciousness of
this brought her back to the remembrance that he was the husband of her
daughter.
"Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you
understand how we Southern women must feel?" she asked.
He grew instantly colder.
"I have never seen her Southern relatives."
"Pardon the curiosity of an old woman," she went on, watching him
keenly; "may I ask why?"
"My wife's mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter
married."
"And you?"
"I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on
sufferance," he answered crisply. "I was aware of no wrong, and I did
not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner."
She knew that in her heart she was already accepting this strong, fine
man, alien as he was to all the traditions of her life, and she was not
ill pleased at his pride.
"But have you ever considered what it must have cost the mother to give
up her daughter?"
"Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the North and the
South have been common enough without any family breach."
She was utterly sure that he knew neither to whom he was talking nor
what had been the real cause of her separation from her daughter. She
experienced a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had come the
moment when she might justify herself; when she might tell the whole
dreadful story which had been as eating poison in her veins. She raised
her head proudly, and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes.
"If you have patience to listen," she said, feeling her cheeks warm,
"and will pardon my being personal, I should like to tell you what has
happened to me. My husband was a colonel in the Confederate army. We
were married when I was seventeen, in a brief furlough he won by being
wounded at the battle of the Wilderness. I saw him, in the four years of
the war before he fell at Five Forks, less than a dozen times, and
always for the briefest visits--poor scraps of fearful happiness torn
out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my only child, was born
after her father's death. Our fortune had gone to the Cause. My father
and my husband both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it
disloyal, and they put everything into Confederate securities even after
they felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too loyal to
withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril."
She paused, but he did not speak, and with swelling breast and parching
throat she went on:--
"At Five Forks my husband was killed in a hand-to-hand fight with a
Northern officer. He struck his enemy down after he had received his own
death-wound. I pray God he did not know the day was lost. He had gone
through so much, I hope that was spared him. On the other side of death
he must have found some comfort to help him bear it. God must have had
some comfort for our poor boys when he permitted the cause of liberty to
be lost."
She pressed her clenched hand against her bosom, and as she did so her
eyes met those of her companion. She felt the sympathy of his look, but
something recalled her to the sense that she was speaking to one from
the North.
"It is not the cause of liberty to you," she said. "I have forgotten
again. I have not spoken of all this for so long. I have not dared; but
to-day--to-day I must speak, and you must forgive me if I use the old
language."
He dropped his glance as if he felt it an intrusion to see her bitter
emotion, and said softly: "I think I understand. You need not
apologize."
"After the war," she went on hurriedly and abruptly, "I lived for my
daughter. I worked for her. She--she was like her father."
She choked, but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.
"When she was a woman--she was still a child to me; over twenty, but I
was not twice her age--she went North, and there she fell in love. She
wrote me that she was to marry a Northerner, and when she added his
name--it was the son of the man who killed her father."
"It is not possible!" the other exclaimed. "You imagined it. Such
things happen in melodramas--"
She put up her hand and arrested his words.
"This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy--in my life," she
said. "I need not go into details. She married him, and I have never
seen her since."
"Did he know?"
"No. It was my wedding gift to my daughter--that I kept her secret. That
was all I had strength to do. You think I was an unnatural mother, of
course; but--"
She saw that his eyes were moist as he raised them in answering.
"I should have said so yesterday without any hesitation; to-day--"
"To-day?" she echoed eagerly, as he paused.
"To-day," he answered, letting his glance sweep over the pathetic
memorials so thick about them--"to-day at least I understand, and I do
not wonder."
She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes, trying to read his
most hidden feeling. Then she touched his arm lightly with the tips of
her slender black-gloved fingers.
"Come," she said.
She led him across the room, and pointed to a colonel's sash and pistols
which lay in one of the cases under a faded card.
"Those were my husband's."
"Those!" he cried. "You Louise's mother? It is impossible!"
"It may be impossible; but, as I said of the other thing, it is true."
"The other thing?" he repeated. "What--do you mean the thing you
said--that my father and he-- That cannot be true. I should surely have
known!"
"It is true," she insisted. "At the moment it happened they were
surrounded by our soldiers, and his own men probably did not realize
just what happened. But I--I know every minute of that fight! One of my
husband's staff had been at West Point with them both, and he told me.
He saw it, and tried to come between them. Your wife married you,
knowing you to be the son of the man who killed her father."
The Northerner passed his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away
the confusion of his mind. His eyes were cast down, but she saw that
their lids were wet.
"Poor Louise!" he murmured, seemingly rather to himself than to her;
"how she must have suffered over that secret. Poor Louise!"
"You come here," Mrs. Desborough went on, feeling herself choke at his
words, but determined not to give way to the warmer impulse of her
heart, "and even you are moved by these sacred relics. What do you think
they are to us?"
She was half conscious that she was appealing to the memorials around
her to strengthen her in her purpose not to yield, not to make peace
with the son of the man who had slain her husband, her hero, her love;
she felt that in harboring for an instant such an impulse she was untrue
to the Cause which, though lost, was for her forever living with the
deathless devotion of love and anguish.
"These relics do move me," her son-in-law said gently. "They move me so
deeply that they seem to me wrong. I confess that I was thinking, before
you came in, that if I were a Southerner, with the traditions of the
South behind me, and the bitter sense of failure to embitter me, they
would stir me to madness; that I should feel it impossible ever to be
loyal to anything but the South. The war is over. The South at last is
understood. She is honored for the incredible bravery with which, under
crushing odds, she fought for her conviction. Why prolong the inevitable
pain? Why gather these relics to nourish a feeling absolutely
untrue--the feeling that the Union is less your country than it is
ours?"
"Because it is just to the dead," she answered swiftly. "Because it
is only justice that we keep in remembrance how true they were, how
gallant, how brave, how noble, and--O God!--that we make some poor
record of what we of the South have suffered!"
He shook his head and sighed. She saw the tears in his eyes and did not
attempt to hide her own.
"Would you have it forgotten," she demanded passionately, "that the
grandfather of your son--the father of your wife--was one of God's
noblemen? Would you have him remembered only as a beaten rebel? I tell
you that if we had not gathered these memorials, every clod that was wet
with their blood would cry out against us! In the North you call these
men rebels; there is no battlefield in the South where the very rustle
of the grass does not whisper over their graves that they were patriots
and heroes! And this, poor though it be"--and she waved her hand to the
cases around them--"is the best memorial we can give them."
He made a step forward, and held out both his hands impulsively. She did
not take them, and they dropped again. He hesitated, and then drew back.
"It must be as it is," he said sadly. "Even if I blamed you women of
the South, I could not say so here. Only," he added, his voice falling,
"can you forget that the women of the North suffered too? I grew up
in the shadow of a grief so great that it sapped the very life of my
mother, and in the end killed her. Do you think I could visit that
upon the innocent head of Louise?--I did not mean, though, to speak of
myself, now that I know who you are. I will not intrude on you; but my
little son, with your husband's name and his mother's eyes, is certainly
guiltless. I will not come with him, but may I not send him with my man
to see you this afternoon, so that I may say to Louise that you have
kissed him and given him your blessing? Sorrow has taken away his other
grandmother."
It seemed to her that she could not endure the speaking of one syllable
more. Her whole body trembled, and she raised her hands in an impulsive
gesture which implored him to be silent. All the old mother-love for
Louise, the passionate crying of her lonely heart for this unseen
grandson with the blood of her dead husband warm in his veins, the
grief of black years and fidelity to old ideals, warred within her, and
tore her like wolves. She cast a glance around as if to find some way by
which she could flee from this position which it was too terrible to
face. Then she saw her companion look at her with infinite pity and
sadness.
"Then," he said, "I can only say good-by."
But she sprang forward as if she burst from chains, and threw herself
upon his breast, the agony of the long, bitter past gushing in a torrent
of hot tears.
"Oh, my son! my son!" she sobbed.
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