of dead leaves were swept into the forest. Falling silent, Dan swung his
arms to quicken the current of his blood, and walked on more rapidly. Over
the long column gloom had settled with the clouds, and they were brave lips
that offered a jest in the teeth of the wind. There were no blankets, few
overcoats, and fewer rations, and the supply wagons were crawling somewhere
in the valley.
The day wore on, and still the rough country road climbed upward embedded
in withered leaves. On the high wind came the first flakes of a snowstorm,
followed by a fine rain that enveloped the hills like mist. As Dan stumbled
on, his feet slipped on the wet clay, and he was forced to catch at the
bared saplings for support. The cold had entered his lungs as a knife, and
his breath circled in a little cloud about his mouth. Through the storm he
heard the quick oaths of his companions ring out like distant shots.
When night fell they halted to bivouac by the roadside, and until daybreak
the pine woods were filled with the cheerful glow of the campfires. There
were no rations, and Dan, making a jest of his hunger, had stretched
himself in the full light of the crackling branches. With the defiant
humour which had made him the favourite of the mess, he laughed at the
frozen roads, at the change in the wind, at his own struggles with the wet
kindling wood, at the supply wagons creeping slowly after them. His courage
had all the gayety of his passions--it showed itself in a smile, in a
whistle, in the steady hand with which he played toss and catch with fate.
The superb silence of Pinetop, plodding evenly along, was as far removed
from him as the lofty grandeur of the mountains. A jest warmed his heart
against the cold; with set lips and grave eyes, he would have fallen before
the next ridge was crossed.
Through the woods other fires were burning, and long reddish shadows crept
among the pine trees over the rotting mould. For warmth Dan had spread a
covering of dried leaves over him, raking them from sheltered corners of
the forest. When he rose from time to time during the night to take his
turn at replenishing the fire the leaves drifted in gravelike mounds about
his feet.
For three days the march was steadily upward over long ridges coated deep
with ice. In the face of the strong wind, which blew always down the steep
road, the army passed on, complaining, cursing, asking a gigantic question
of its General. Among the raw soldiers there had been desertions by the
dozen, filling the streets of the little town with frost-bitten
malcontents. “It was all a wild goose chase,” they declared bitterly, “and
if Old Jack wasn't a March hare--well, he was something madder!”
Dan listened to the curses with his ready smile, and walked on bravely.
Since the first evening he had uttered no complaint, asked no question. He
had undertaken to march, and he meant to march, that was all. In the front
with which he veiled his suffering there was no lessening of his old
careless confidence--if his dash had hardened into endurance it wore still
an expression that was almost debonair.
So as the column straggled weakly upward, he wrung his stiffened fingers
and joked with Jack Powell, who stumbled after him. The cold had brought a
glow to his tanned face, and when he lifted his eyes from the road Pinetop
saw that they were shining brightly. Once he slipped on the frozen mud, and
as his musket dropped from his hand, it went off sharply, the load entering
the ground.
“Are you hurt?” asked Jack, springing toward him; but Dan looked round
laughing as he clasped his knee.
“Oh, I merely groaned because I might have been,” he said lightly, and
limped on, singing a bit of doggerel which had taken possession of his
regiment.
“Then let the Yanks say what they will,
We'll be gay and happy still;
Gay and happy, gay and happy,
We'll be gay and happy still.”
On the third day out they reached a little village in the mountains, but
before the week's end they had pushed on again, and the white roads still
stretched before them. As they went higher the tracks grew steeper, and now
and then a musket shot rang out on the roadside as a man lost his footing
and went down upon the ice. Behind them the wagon train crept inch by inch,
or waited patiently for hours while a wheel was hoisted from the ditch
beside the road. There was blood on the muzzles of the horses and on the
shining ice that stretched beyond them.
To Dan these terrible days were as the anguish of a new birth, in which the
thing to be born suffered the conscious throes of awakening life. He could
never be the same again; something was altered in him forever; this he felt
dimly as he dragged his aching body onward. Days like these would prove the
stuff that had gone into the making of him. When the march to Romney lay
behind him he should know himself to be either a soldier or a coward. A
soldier or a coward! he said the words over again as he struggled to keep
down the pangs of hunger, telling himself that the road led not merely to
Romney, but to a greater victory than his General dreamed of. Romney might
be worthless, after all, the grim march but a mad prank of Jackson's, as
men said; but whether to lay down one's arms or to struggle till the end
was reached, this was the question asked by those stern mountains. Nature
stood ranged against him--he fought it step by step, and day by day.
At times something like delirium seized him, and he went on blindly,
stepping high above the ice. For hours he was tortured by the longing for
raw beef, for the fresh blood that would put heat into his veins. The
kitchen at Chericoke flamed upon the hillside, as he remembered it on
winter evenings when the great chimney was filled with light and the crane
was in its place above the hickory. The smell of newly baked bread floated
in his nostrils, and for a little while he believed himself to be lying
again upon the hearth as he thrilled at Aunt Rhody's stories. Then his
fancies would take other shapes, and warm colours would glow in red and
yellow circles before his eyes. When he thought of Betty now it was no
longer tenderly but with a despairing passion. He was haunted less by her
visible image than by broken dreams of her peculiar womanly beauties--of
her soft hands and the warmth of her girlish bosom.
But from the first day to the last he had no thought of yielding; and each
feeble step had sent him a step farther upon the road. He had often fallen,
but he had always struggled up again and laughed. Once he made a ghastly
joke about his dying in the snow, and Jack Powell turned upon him with an
oath and bade him to be silent.
“For God's sake don't,” added the boy weakly, and fell to whimpering like
a child.
“Oh, go home to your mother,” retorted Dan, with a kind of desperate
cruelty.
Jack sobbed outright.
“I wish I could,” he answered, and dropped over upon the roadside.
Dan caught him up, and poured his last spoonful of brandy down his throat,
then he seized his arm and dragged him bodily along.
“Oh, I say don't be an ass,” he implored. “Here comes old Stonewall.”
The commanding General rode by, glanced quietly over them, and passed on,
his chest bowed, his cadet cap pulled down over his eyes. A moment later
Dan, looking over the hillside, at the winding road, saw him dismount and
put his shoulder to a sunken wheel. The sight suddenly nerved the younger
man, and he went on quickly, dragging Jack up with him.
That night they rested in a burned-out clearing where the pine trees had
been felled for fence rails. The rails went readily to fires, and Pinetop
fried strips of fat bacon in the skillet he had brought upon his musket.
Somebody produced a handful of coffee from his pocket, and a little later
Dan, dozing beside the flames, was awakened by the aroma.
“By George!” he burst out, and sat up speechless.
Pinetop was mixing thin cornmeal paste into the gravy, and he looked up as
he stirred busily with a small stick.
“Wall, I reckon these here slapjacks air about done,” he remarked in a
moment, adding with a glance at Dan, “and if your stomach's near as empty
as your eyes, I reckon your turn comes first.”
“I reckon it does,” said Dan, and filling his tin cup, he drank scalding
coffee in short gulps. When he had finished it, he piled fresh rails upon
the fire and lay down to sleep with his feet against the embers.
With the earliest dawn a long shiver woke him, and as he put out his hand
it touched something wet and cold. The fire had died to a red heart, and a
thick blanket of snow covered him from head to foot. Straight above there
was a pale yellow light where the stars shone dimly after the storm.
He started to his feet, rubbing a handful of snow upon his face. The red
embers, sheltered by the body of a solitary pine, still glowed under the
charred brushwood, and kneeling upon the ground, he fanned them into a
feeble blaze. Then he laid the rails crosswise, protecting them with his
blanket until they caught and flamed up against the blackened pine.
Near by Jack Powell was moaning in his sleep, and Dan leaned over to shake
him into consciousness. “Oh, damn it all, wake up, you fool!” he said
roughly, but Jack rolled over like one drugged and broke into frightened
whimpers such as a child makes in the dark. He was dreaming of home, and as
Dan listened to the half-choked words, his face contracted sharply. “Wake
up, you fool!” he repeated angrily, rolling him back and forth before the
fire.
A little later, when Jack had grown warm beneath his touch, he threw a
blanket over him, and turned to lie down in his own place. As he tossed a
last armful on the fire, his eyes roamed over the long mounds of snow that
filled the clearing, and he caught his breath as a man might who had waked
suddenly among the dead. In the beginning of dawn, with the glimmer of
smouldering fires reddening the snow, there was something almost ghastly in
the sloping field filled with white graves and surrounded by white
mountains. Even the wintry sky borrowed, for an hour, the spectral aspect
of the earth, and the familiar shapes of cloud, as of hill, stood out with
all the majesty of uncovered laws--stripped of the mere frivolous effect of
light or shade. It was like the first day--or the last.
Dan, sitting watchful beside the fire, fell into the peculiar mental state
which comes only after an inward struggle that has laid bare the sinews of
one's life. He had fought the good fight to the end, and he knew that from
this day he should go easier with himself because he knew that he had
conquered.
The old doubt--the old distrust of his own strength--was fallen from him.
At the moment he could have gone to Betty, fearless and full of hope, and
have said, “Come, for I am grown up at last--at last I have grown up to my
love.” A great tenderness was in his heart, and the tears, which had not
risen for all the bodily suffering of the past two weeks, came slowly to
his eyes. The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the large
patience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the white
dawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comes
this sense of kinship with external things--this passionate recognition of
the appeal of the dumb world. Sky and mountains and the white sweep of the
fields awoke in him the peculiar tenderness he had always felt for animals
or plants. His old childish petulance was gone from him forever; in its
place he was aware of a kindly tolerance which softened even the common
outlines of his daily life. It was as if he had awakened breathlessly to
find himself a man.
And Betty came to him again--not in detached visions, but entire and
womanly. When he remembered her as on that last night at Chericoke it was
with the impulse to fall down and kiss her feet. Reckless and blind with
anger as he had been, she would have come cheerfully with him wherever his
road led; and it was this passionate betrayal of herself that had taught
him the full measure of her love. An attempt to trifle, to waver, to
bargain with the future, he might have looked back upon with tender scorn;
but the gesture with which she had made her choice was as desperate as his
own mood--and it was for this one reckless moment that he loved her best.
The east paled slowly as the day broke in a cloud, and the long shadows
beside the fire lost their reddish glimmer. A little bird, dazed by the
cold and the strange light, flew into the smoke against the stunted pine,
and fell, a wet ball of feathers at Dan's feet. He picked it up, warmed it
in his coat, and fed it from the loose crumbs in his pocket.
When Pinetop awoke he was gently stroking the bird while he sang in a low
voice:--
“Gay and happy, gay and happy,
We'll be gay and happy still.”
VII
“I WAIT MY TIME”
When he returned to Winchester it was to find Virginia already there as
Jack Morson's wife. Since her marriage in late summer she had followed her
husband's regiment from place to place, drifting at last to a big yellow
house on the edge of the fiery little town. Dan, passing along the street
one day, heard his name called in a familiar voice, and turned to find her
looking at him through the network of a tall, wrought-iron gate.
“Virginia! Bless my soul! Where's Betty?” he exclaimed amazed.
Virginia left the gate and gave him her hand over the dried creepers on the
wall.
“Why, you look ten years older,” was her response.
“Indeed! Well, two years of beggary, to say nothing of eight months of war,
isn't just the thing to insure immortal youth, is it? You see, I'm turning
gray.”
The pallor of the long march was in his face, giving him a striking though
unnatural beauty. His eyes were heavy and his hair hung dishevelled about
his brow, but the change went deeper still, and the girl saw it. “You're
bigger--that's it,” she said, and added impulsively, “Oh, how I wish Betty
could see you now.”
Her hand was upon the wall and he gave it a quick, pleased pressure.
“I wish to heaven she could,” he echoed heartily.
“But I shall tell her everything when I write--everything. I shall tell her
that you are taller and stronger and that you have been in all the fights
and haven't a scar to show. Betty loves scars, you see, and she doesn't
mind even wounds--real wounds. She wanted to go into the hospitals, but I
came away and mamma wouldn't let her.”
“For God's sake, don't let her,” said Dan, with a shudder, his Southern
instincts recoiling from the thought of service for the woman he loved.
“There are a plenty of them in the hospitals and it's no place for Betty,
anyway.”
“I'll tell her you think so,” returned Virginia, gayly. “I'll tell her
that--and what else?”
He met her eyes smiling.
“Tell her I wait my time,” he answered, and began to talk lightly of other
things. Virginia followed his lead with her old shy merriment. Her marriage
had changed her but little, though she had grown a trifle stately, he
thought, and her coquetry had dropped from her like a veil. As she stood
there in her delicate lace cap and soft gray silk, the likeness to her
mother was very marked, and looking into the future, Dan seemed to see her
beauty ripen and expand with her growing womanhood. How many of her race
had there been, he wondered, shaped after the same pure and formal plan.
“And it is all just the same,” he said, his eyes delighting in her beauty.
“There is no change--don't tell me there is any change, for I'll not
believe it. You bring it all back to me,--the lawn and the lilacs and the
white pillars, and Miss Lydia's garden, with the rose leaves in the paths.
Why are there always rose leaves in Miss Lydia's paths, Virginia?”
Virginia shook her head, puzzled by his whimsical tone.
“Because there are so many roses,” she answered seriously.
“No, you're wrong, there's another reason, but I shan't tell you.”
“My boxes are filled with rose leaves now,” said Virginia. “Betty gathered
them for me.”
The smile leaped to his eyes. “Oh, but it makes me homesick,” he returned
lightly. “If I tell you a secret, don't betray me, Virginia--I am downright
homesick for Betty.”
Virginia patted his hand.
“So am I,” she confessed, “and so is Mammy Riah--she's with me now, you
know--and she says that I might have been married without Jack, but never
without Betty. Betty made my dress and iced my cake and pinned on my veil.”
“Ah, is that so?” exclaimed Dan, absent-mindedly. He was thinking of Betty,
and he could almost see her hands as she pinned on the wedding veil--those
small white hands with the strong fingers that had closed about his own.
“When you get your furlough you must go home, Dan,” Virginia was saying;
“the Major is very feeble and--and he quarrels with almost everyone.”
“My furlough,” repeated Dan, with a laugh. “Why, the war may end to-morrow
and then we'll all go home together and kill the fatted calf among us. Yes,
I'd like to see the old man again before I die.”
“I pray every night that the war may end tomorrow,” said Virginia, “but it
never does.” Then she turned eagerly to the Governor, who was coming toward
them under the leafless trees along the street.
“Here's Dan, papa, do make him come in and be good.”
The Governor, holding himself erect in his trim gray uniform, insisted,
with his hand upon Dan's shoulder, that Virginia should be obeyed; and the
younger man, yielding easily, followed him through the iron gate and into
the yellow house.
“I don't see you every day, my boy, sit down, sit down,” began the
Governor, as he took his stand upon the hearth-rug. “Daughter, haven't you
learned the way to the pantry yet? Dan looks as if he'd been on starvation
rations since he joined the army. They aren't living high at Romney, eh?”
and then, as Virginia went out, he fell to discussing the questions on all
men's lips--the prospect of peace in the near future; hopes of intervention
from England; the attitude of other foreign powers; and the reasons for the
latest appointments by the President. When the girl came in again they let
such topics go, and talked of home while she poured the coffee and helped
Dan to fried chicken. She belonged to the order of women who delight in
feeding a hungry man, and her eyes did not leave his face as she sat behind
the tray and pressed the food upon him.
“Dan thinks the war will be over before he gets his furlough,” she said a
little wistfully.
A shadow crossed the Governor's face.
“Then I may hope to get back in time to watch the cradles in the wheat
field,” he remarked. “There's little doing on the farm I'm afraid while I'm
away.”
“If they hold out six months longer--well, I'll be surprised,” exclaimed
Dan, slapping the arm of his chair with a gesture like the Major's.
“They've found out we won't give in so long as there's a musket left; and
that's enough for them.”
“Maybe so, maybe so,” returned the Governor, for it was a part of his
philosophy to cast his conversational lines in the pleasant places. “Please
God, we'll drink our next Christmas glass at Chericoke.”
“In the panelled parlour,” added Dan, his eyes lighting.
“With Aunt Emmeline's portrait,” finished Virginia, smiling.
For a time they were all silent, each looking happily into the far-off
room, and each seeing a distinct and different vision. To the Governor the
peaceful hearth grew warm again--he saw his wife and children gathered
there, and a few friendly neighbours with their long-lived, genial jokes
upon their lips. To Virginia it was her own bridal over again with the fear
of war gone from her, and the quiet happiness she wanted stretching out
into the future. To Dan there was first his own honour to be won, and then
only Betty and himself--Betty and himself under next year's mistletoe
together.
“Well, well,” sighed the Governor, and came back regretfully to the
present. “It's a good place we're thinking of, and I reckon you're sorry
enough you left it before you were obliged to. We all make mistakes, my
boy, and the fortunate ones are those who live long enough to unmake them.”
His warm smile shone out suddenly, and without waiting for a reply, he
began to ask for news of Jack Powell and his comrades, all of whom he knew
by name. “I was talking to Colonel Burwell about you the other day,” he
added presently, “and he gave you a fighting record that would do honour to
the Major.”
“He's a nice old chap,” responded Dan, easily, for in the first years of
the Army of Northern Virginia the question of rank presented itself only
upon the parade ground, and beyond the borders of the camp a private had
been known to condescend to his own Colonel. “A gentleman fights for his
country as he pleases, a plebeian as he must,” the Governor would have
explained with a touch of his old oratory. “He's a nice old chap himself,
but, by George, the discipline fits like a straight-jacket,” pursued Dan,
as he finished his coffee. “Why, here we are three miles below Winchester
in a few threadbare tents, and they make as much fuss about our coming into
town as if we were the Yankees themselves. Talk about Romney! Why, it's no
colder at Romney than it was here last week, and yet Loring's men are
living in huts like princes.”
“Show me a volunteer and I'll show you a grumbler,” put in the Governor,
laughing.
“Oh, I'm not grumbling, I'm merely pointing out the facts,” protested Dan;
then he rose and stood holding Virginia's hand as he met her upward glance
with his unflinching admiration. “Come again! Why, I should say so,” he
declared. “I'll come as long as I have a collar left, and then--well, then
I'll pass the time of day with you over the hedge. Good-by, Colonel,
remember I'm not a grumbler, I'm merely a man of facts.”
The door closed after him and a moment later they heard his clear whistle
in the street.
“The boy is like his father,” said the Governor, thoughtfully, “like his
father with the devil broken to harness. The Montjoy blood may be bad
blood, but it makes big men, daughter.” He sighed and drew his small figure
to its full height.
Virginia was looking into the fire. “I hope he will come again,” she
returned softly, thinking of Betty.
But when he called again a week later Virginia did not see him. It was a
cold starlit night, and the big yellow house, as he drew near it, glowed
like a lamp amid the leafless trees. Beside the porch a number of cavalry
horses were fastened to the pillars, and through the long windows there
came the sound of laughter and of gay “good-bys.”
The “fringe of the army,” as Dan had once jeeringly called it, was merrily
making ready for a raid.
As he listened he leaned nearer the window and watched, half enviously, the
men he had once known. His old life had been a part of theirs and now,
looking in from the outside, it seemed very far away--the poetry of war
beside which the other was mere dull history in which no names were
written. He thought of Prince Rupert, and of his own joy in the saddle, and
the longing for the raid seized him like a heartache. Oh, to feel again the
edge of the keen wind in his teeth and to hear the silver ring of the hoofs
on the frozen road.
“Jine the cavalry,
Jine the cavalry,
If you want to have a good time jine the cavalry.”
The words floated out to him, and he laughed aloud as if he had awakened
from a comic dream.
That was the romance of war, but, after all, he was only the man who bore
the musket.
VIII
THE ALTAR OF THE WAR GOD
With the opening spring Virginia went down to Richmond, where Jack Morson
had taken rooms for her in the house of an invalid widow whose three sons
were at the front. The town was filled to overflowing with refugees from
the North and representatives from the South, and as the girl drove through
the crowded streets, she exclaimed wonderingly at the festive air the
houses wore.
“Why, the doors are all open,” she observed. “It looks like one big
family.”
“That's about what it is,” replied Jack. “The whole South is here and
there's not a room to be had for love or money. Food is getting dear, too,
they say, and the stranger within the gates has the best of everything.” He
stopped short and laughed from sheer surprise at Virginia's loveliness.
“Well, I'm glad I'm here, anyway,” said the girl, pressing his arm, “and
Mammy Riah's glad, too, though she won't confess it.--Aren't you just
delighted to see Jack again, Mammy?”
The old negress grunted in her corner of the carriage. “I ain' seed no use
in all dis yer fittin',” she responded. “W'at's de use er fittin' ef dar
ain' sumpen' ter fit fer dat you ain' got a'ready?”
“That's it, Mammy,” replied Jack, gayly, “we're fighting for freedom, and
we haven't had it yet, you see.”