hanging tumbled foliage, and dark as death, there poured suddenly across
our front a dense body of Federal troopers and Horse Artillery, two
thousand strong at the least, full gallop, to join the main army. We
were surrounded in a second, in a second overpowered by sheer strength
of numbers; only two hundred of us, many sorely wounded, and on mounts
that were jaded and ridden out of all pace, let us fight as we would,
what could we do against fresh and picked soldiers, swarming down on us
like a swarm of hornets, while in our rear was the main body through
which we had just cut our way? That the little desperate band "died
hard," I need not say; but the vast weight of the fresh squadrons
pressed our little knot in as if between the jaws of a trap, crushing it
like grain between two iron weights. The Gray Feather fought like all
the Knights of the Round Table merged in one, till he streamed with
blood from head to foot, and his sabre was hacked and bent like an
ash-stick, as did a man near him, a tall superb Virginian, handsome as
any Vandyke or Velasquez picture. At last both the Gray Feather and he
went down, not by death--it would not come to them--but literally hurled
out of their stirrup-leathers by crowding scores who poured on them,
hamstrung or shot their horses, and made them themselves prisoners--not,
however, till the assailants lay heaped ten deep about their slaughtered
chargers. For myself, a blow from a sabre, a second afterwards, felled
me like so much wood. I saw a whirling blaze of sun, a confused circling
eddy of dizzy color, forked flames, and flashes of light, and I knew no
more, till I opened my eyes in a dark, square, unhealthy wooden chamber,
with a dreamy but settled conviction that I was dead, and in the family
vault, far away under the green old elms of Warwickshire, with the rooks
cawing above my head.
As the delusion dissipated and the mists cleared, I saw through the
uncertain light a face that was strangely but vaguely familiar to me,
connected somehow with incoherent memories of life at home, and yet
unknown to me. It was bronzed deeply, bearded, with flakes of gray among
the fairness of the hair, much aged, much worn, scarred and stained just
now with the blood of undressed wounds and the dust of the combat, for
there was no one merciful enough there to bring a stoup of water; it was
rougher, darker, sterner, and yet, with it all, nobler, too, than the
face that I had known. I lay and stared blankly at it: it was the face
of the Southern Leader of the morning, who sat now, on a pile of straw,
looking wearily out to the dying sun, one amongst a group of twenty,
prisoners all, like myself. I moved, and he turned his eyes on me; they
had laid me down there as a "gone 'coon," and were amazed to see me come
to life again. As our eyes met I knew him--he was Deadly Dash.
The old name left my lips with a shout as strong as a half-killed man
can give. It seemed so strange to meet him there, captives together in
the Unionists' hands! It struck him with a sharp shock. England and he
had been divorced so long. I saw the blood leap to his forehead, and the
light into his glance; then, with a single stride, he reached the straw
I lay on, holding my hands in his, looking on me with the kindly eyes
that had used to make me like the Killer, and greeting me with a warmth
that was only damped and darkened by regret that my battle done for fair
Virginia had laid me low, a prisoner with himself, and that we should
meet thus, in so sharp an hour of adversity, with nothing before us but
the Capitol, the Carroll prison, or worse. Yet thus we did meet once
more and I knew at last what had been the fate of Deadly Dash, whom
England had outlawed as a scoundrel, and the New World had found a hero.
Though suffering almost equally himself, he tended me with the
kindliest sympathy; he came out of his own care to ponder how possible
it might be to get me eventual freedom as a tourist and a mere
accidental sharer in the fray; he was interested to hear all that I
would tell him of my own affairs and of his old friends in England, but
of himself he would not speak; he simply said he had been fighting for
the Confederacy ever since the war had begun; and I saw that he strove
in vain to shake off a deep heart-broken gloom that seemed to have
settled on him, doubtless, as I thought, from the cruel defeat of the
noon, and the hopeless captivity into which he, the most restless and
the most daring soldier that oversaw service, was now flung.
I noticed, too, that every now and then while he sat beside me, talking
low--for there were sentinels both in and out the rude outhouse of the
farm that had been turned into our temporary prison--his eyes wandered
to the gallant Virginian who had been felled down with himself, and who,
covered like himself with blood and dust, and with his broken left arm
hanging shattered, lay on the bare earth in a far-off corner motionless
and silent, with his lips pressed tight under their long black
moustaches, and such a mute unutterable agony in his eyes as I never saw
in any human face, though I have seen deaths enough in the field and the
sick-ward. The rest of the Confederate captives were more ordinary men
(although from none was a single word of lament ever wrenched); but this
superb Virginian excited my interest, and I asked his name, in that sort
of languid curiosity at passing things which comes with weakness, of the
Killer, whose glance so incessantly wandered towards him.
"Stuart Lane," he answered, curtly, and added no more; but if I ever saw
in this world hatred, passionate, ungovernable, and intense, I saw it in
the Killer's look as his glance flashed once more on to the motionless
form of the handsomest, bravest, and most dauntless officer of his
gallant regiment that he had seen cut to pieces there on that accursed
plateau.
"A major of yours?" I asked him. "Ah, I thought so; he fought
magnificently. How wretched he looks, though he is too proud to show
it!"
"He is thinking of--of his bride. He married three weeks ago."
The words were simple enough, and spoken very quietly; but there was an
unsteadiness, as of great effort, over them; and the heel of his heavy
spurred jack-boot crashed into the dry mud with a grinding crush, as
though it trod terrible memories down. Was it a woman who was between
these two comrades in arms and companions in adversity? I wondered if it
were so, even in that moment of keen and heavy anxiety for us all, as I
looked at the face that bent very kindly over the straw to which a shot
in the knee and a deep though not dangerous shoulder-wound bound me. It
was very different to the face of eight or nine years before--browner,
harder, graver far; and yet there was a look as if "sorrow had passed by
there," and swept the old heartlessness and gay callousness away,
burning them out in its fires.
Silence fell over us in that wretched outshed where we were huddled
together. I was hot with incipient fever, and growing light-headed
enough, though I knew what passed before me, to speak to Dash once or
twice in a dreamy idea that we were in the Shires watching the run-in
for the "Soldiers' Blue Riband." The minutes dragged very drearily as
the day wore itself away. There were the sullen monotonous tramp of the
sentinels to and fro, and, from without, the neighing of horses, the
bugle calls, the roll of the drums, the challenge of outposts--all the
varied, endless sounds of a camp; for the farmhouse in whose shed we
were thrown was the head-quarters _pro tem_. of the Federal General who
commanded the Divisions that had cost the Killer's handful of Horse so
fearfully dear. We were prisoners, and escape was impossible. All arms
of course had been removed from us; most, like myself, were too disabled
by wounds to have been able to avail ourselves of escape had it been
possible; and the guard was doubled both in and out the shed; there was
nothing before any of us but the certainty of imprisonment in all its
horrors in some far-off fortress or obscure jail. There was the possible
chance that, since certain officers on whom the Northerners set great
store had lately fallen into Southern hands, an exchange might be
effected; yet, on the other side, graver apprehensions still existed,
since we knew that the General into whose camp we had been brought had
proclaimed his deliberate purpose of shooting the three next
Secessionist officers who fell into his power, in requital for three of
his own officers who had been shot, or were said to have been shot, by a
Southern raider. We knew very well that, the threat made, it would be
executed; and each of us, as the sun sank gradually down through the hot
skies that were purple and stormy after the burning day, knew, too, that
it might never rise again to greet our sight. None of us would have
heeded whether a ball would hit or miss us in the open, in a fair fight,
in a man-to-man struggle; but the boldest and most careless amidst us
felt it very bitter to die like dogs, to die as prisoners.
Even Deadly Dash, coolest, most hardened, most devil-may-care of
soldiers and of sinners, sat with his gaze fastened on the slowly
sinking light in the west with the shadow of a great pain upon his face,
while every now and then his glance wandered to Stuart Lane, and a
quick, irrepressible shudder shook him whenever it did so. The Virginian
never moved; no sign of any sort escaped him; but the passionate misery
that looked out of his eyes I never saw equalled, except, perhaps, in
the eyes of a stag that I once shot in Wallachia, and that looked up
with just such a look before it died. He was thinking, no doubt, of the
woman he loved--wooed amidst danger, won amidst calamity, scarcely
possessed ere lost for ever;--thinking of her proud beauty, of her
bridal caress, that would never again touch his lips, of her fair life
that would perish with the destruction of his.
Exhaustion from the loss of blood made everything pass dreamily, and yet
with extraordinary clearness, before me, I felt in a wakening dream, and
had no sense whatever of actual existence, and yet the whole scene was
so intensely vital and vivid to me, that it seemed burned into my very
brain itself. It was like the phantasmagoria of delirium, utterly
impalpable, but yet intensely real. I had no power to act or resist, but
I seemed to have ten times redoubled power to see and hear and feel; I
was aware of all that passed, with a hundredfold more susceptibility to
it than I ever felt in health. I remember a total impossibility that
came on me to decide whether I was dreaming or was actually awake.
Twilight fell, night came; there was a change of sentries, and a light,
set up in a bottle, shed a flickering, feeble, yellow gleam over the
interior of the shed, on the dark Rembrandt faces of the Southerners and
on the steel of the guards' bayonets. And I recollect that the Killer,
who sat by the tossed straw on which they had flung me, laughed the old,
low, sweet, half-insolent laugh that I had known so well in early days.
"_Il faut souffrir pour etre beau!_ We are picturesque, at any rate,
quite Salvatoresque! Little Dickey would make a good thing of us if he
could paint us now. He is alive, I suppose?"
I answered him I believe in the affirmative; but the name of that little
Bohemian of the Brush, who had used to be our butt and _protege_ in
England, added a haze the more to my senses. By this time I had
difficulty to hold together the thread of how, and when, and why I had
thus met again the face that looked out on me so strangely familiarly in
the dull, sickly trembling of the feeble light of this black, noisome
shed in the heart of Federal Divisions.
Through that haze I heard the challenge of the sentries; I saw a soldier
prod with his bayonet a young lad who had fainted from haemorrhage, and
whom he swore at for shamming. I was conscious of the entrance of a
group of officers, whom I knew afterwards to be the Northern General and
his staff, who came to look at their captives. I knew, but only dreamily
still, that these men were the holders of our fate, and would decide on
it then and there. I felt a listless indifference, utter and opium-like,
as to what became of me, and I remember that Stuart Lane, and Dash
himself, rose together, and stood looking with a serene and haughty
disdain down on the conquerors who held their lives in the
balance--without a trace of pain upon their faces now. I remember how
like they looked to stags that turn at bay; like the stags, outnumbered,
hunted down, with the blood of open wounds and the dust of the long
chase on them; but, like the deer, too, uncowed, and game to the finish.
Very soon their doom was given. Seven were to be sent back with a flag
of truce to be exchanged for the seven Federal officers they wanted out
of the Southerners' hands, ten were to be transmitted to the prisons of
the North,--three were to be shot at day-dawn in the reprisal before
named. The chances of life and of death were to be drawn for by lottery,
and at once.
Not a sound escaped the Virginians, and not a muscle of their English
Leader's face moved: the prisoners, to a man, heard impassively, with a
grave and silent dignity, that they were to throw the die in hazard,
with death for the croupier and life for the stake.
The General and his staff waited to amuse themselves with personally
watching the turns of this new _Rouge et Noir_; gambling in lives was a
little refreshing change that sultry, dreary, dun-colored night, camped
amongst burnt-out farms and wasted corn-lands.
Slips of paper, with "exchange," "death," and "imprisonment" written on
them in the numbers needed, were made ready, rolled up, and tossed into
an empty canteen; each man was required to come forward and draw, I
alone excepted because I was an officer of the British Army. I remember
passionately arguing that they had no right to exempt me, since I had
been in the fray, and had killed three men on my own hook, and would
have killed thirty more had I had the chance; but I was perhaps
incoherent in the fever that was fast seizing all my limbs from the rack
of undressed wounds; at any rate, the Northerners took no heed, save to
force me into silence, and the drawing began. As long as I live I shall
see that night in remembrance with hideous distinctness: the low
blackened shed with its foetid odors from the cattle lately foddered
there; the yellow light flaring dully here and there; the glisten of the
cruel rifles; the heaps of straw and hay soaked with clotted blood; the
group of Union Officers standing near the doorway; and the war-worn
indomitable faces of the Southerners, with the fairer head and slighter
form of their English chief standing out slightly in front of all.
The Conscription of Death commenced; a Federal private took the paper
from each man as he drew it, and read the word of destiny aloud. Not one
amongst them faltered or paused one moment; each went,--even those most
exhausted, most in agony,--with a calm and steady step, as they would
have marched up to take the Flag of the Stars and Bars from Lee or
Longstreet. Not one waited a second's breath before he plunged his hand
into the fatal lottery.
Deadly Dash was the first called: there was not one shadow of anxiety
upon his face; it was calm without effort, careless without bravado,
simply, entirely indifferent. They took his paper and read the words of
safety and of life--"Exchange." Then, for one instant, a glory of hope
flashed like the sun into his eyes--to die the next; die utterly.
Three followed him, and they all drew the fiat for detention; the fifth
called was Stuart Lane.
Let him have suffered as he would, he gave no sign of it now; he
approached with his firm, bold cavalry step, and his head haughtily
lifted; the proud, fiery, dauntless Cavalier of ideal and of romance.
Without a tremor in his wrist he drew his paper out and gave it.
One word alone fell distinct on the silence like the hiss of a shot
through the night--"_Death!_"
He bowed his head slightly as if in assent, and stepped backward--still
without a sign.
His English chief gave him one look,--it was that of merciless
exultation, of brutal joy, of dark, Cain-like, murderous hate; but it
passed, passed quickly: Dash's head sank on his chest, and on his face
there was the shadow, I think, of a terrible struggle--the shadow, I
know, of a great remorse. He strove with his longing greed for this
man's destruction; he knew that he thirsted _to see him die_.
The Virginian stood erect and silent: a single night and the strong and
gallant life, the ardent passions, the chivalrous courage to do and
dare, and the love that was in its first fond hours would all be
quenched in him as though they had never been; but he was a soldier, and
he gave no sign that his death-warrant was not as dear to him as his
bridal-night had been. Even his conquerors cast one glance of admiration
on him; it was only his leader who felt for him no pang of reverence and
pity.
The lottery continued; the hazard was played out; life and death were
scattered at reckless chance amidst the twenty who were the playthings
of that awful gaming; all had been done in perfect silence on the part
of the condemned; not one seemed to think or to feel for himself, and
in those who were sent out to their grave not a grudge lingered against
their comrades of happier fortune. Deadly Dash, whose fate was release,
alone stood with his head sunk, thoughtful and weary.
The three condemned to execution were remanded to separate and solitary
confinement, treated already as felons for that one short night which
alone remained to them. As his guards removed him, Stuart Lane paused
slightly, and signed to his chief to approach him; he held out his hand
to Dash, and his voice was very low, though it came to my ear where they
stood beside me: "We were rivals once, but we may be friends _now_. As
you have loved her, be pitiful to her when you tell her of my
death,--God knows it may be hers! As you have loved her, feel what it is
to die without one last look on her face!"
Then, and then only, his bronze cheek grew white as a woman's, and his
whole frame shook with one great silent sob; his guard forced him on,
and his listener had made him no promise, no farewell; neither had he
taken his hand. He had heard in silence, with a dark and evil gloom
alone upon him.
The Federal General sharply summoned him from his musing, as the chief
of those to be exchanged on the morrow under a white flag of parley;
there were matters to be stated to and to be arranged with him.
"I will only see you alone, General," he answered curtly.
The Northerner stared startled, and casting a glance over the
redoubtable leader of horse, whose gray feather had become known and
dreaded, thought of possible assassination. Deadly Dash laughed his old
light, ironic, contemptuous laugh.
"A wounded unarmed man can scarcely kill you! Have as many of your
staff about you as you please, but let none of my Virginians be present
at our interview."
The Northerners thought he intended to desert to them, or betray some
movement of importance, and assented; and he went out with them from the
cattle-shed into the hot, stormy night, and the Southerners who were
condemned to death and detention looked after him with a long, wistful,
dog-like look. They had been with him in so many spirit-stirring days
and nights of peril, and they knew that never would they meet again. He
had not given one of them a word of adieu; he had killed too many to be
touched by his soldiers' loss. Who could expect pity from Deadly Dash?
An hour passed; I was removed under a guard to a somewhat better lodging
in the granary, where a surgeon hastily dressed my wounds, and left me
on a rough pallet with a jug of water at my side, and the sentinel for
my only watcher, bidding me "sleep." Sleep! I could not have slept for
my ransom. Though life had hardened me, and made me sometimes, as I
fear, callous enough, I could not forget those who were to die when the
sun rose; specially, I could not forget that gallant Virginian to whom
life was so precious, yet who gave himself with so calm a fortitude to
his fate. The rivalry, I thought, must be deep and cruel, to make the
man from whom he had won what they both loved turn from him in hatred,
even in such extremity as his. On the brink of a comrade's grave, feud
might surely have been forgotten?
All that had just passed was reeling deliriously through my brain, and I
was panting in the sheer irritation and exhaustion of gunshot wounds,
when through the gloom Dash entered the granary, closely guarded, but
allowed to be with me on account of our common country. Never was I more
thankful to see a familiar face from home than to see his through the
long watches of that burning, heavy, interminable night. He refused to
rest; he sat by me, tending me as gently as a woman, though he was
suffering acutely himself from the injuries received in the course of
the day; he watched me unweariedly, though often and often his gaze and
his thoughts wandered far from me, as he looked out through the open
granary door, past the form of the sentinel, out to the starry solemn
skies, the deep woods, and the dark silent land over which the stars
were brooding, large and clear.
Was he thinking of the Virginian whose life would die out for ever, with
the fading of those stars, or of the woman whom he had lost, whose love
was the doomed soldier's, and would never be his own, though the grave
closed over his rival with the morrow's sun? Dreamily, half
unconsciously, in the excitement of fever, I asked him of her of whom I
knew nothing:
"Did you love that woman so well?"
His eyes were still fixed on the distant darkening skies, and he
answered quietly, as though rather to his own thoughts than my
words,--"Yes: I love her--as I never loved in that old life in England;
as we never love but once, I think."
"And she?"
"And she--has but one thought in the world--_him_."
His voice, as he answered, now grated with dull, dragging misery over
the words.
"Had she so much beauty that she touched you like this?"
He smiled slightly, a faint, mournful smile, unutterably sad.
"Yes; she is very lovely, but her beauty is the least rare charm. She is
a woman for whom a man would live his greatest, and if he cannot live
for her--may--die."
The utterance was very slow, and seemed to lie on me like a hand on my
lips compelling me to silence; he had forgotten all, except his memory
of her, and where he sat with his eyes fixed outward on the drifting
clouds that floated across the stars, I saw his lips quiver once, and I
heard him murmur half aloud: "My darling! My darling! You will know how
I loved you _then_----"
And the silence was never broken between us, but he sat motionless thus
all the hours through, looking out at the deep still woods, and the
serene and lustrous skies, till the first beams of the sun shone over
the hills in the east, and I shuddered, where I lay, at its light;--for
I knew it was the signal of death.
Then he arose, and bent towards me, and the kindly eyes of old looked
down on mine.
"Dear old fellow, the General expects me at dawn. I must leave you just
now; say good-bye."
His hand closed on mine, he looked on me one moment longer, a little
lingeringly, a little wistfully, then he turned and went out with his
guard; went out into the young day that was just breaking on the world.
I watched his shadow as it faded, and I saw that the sun had risen
wholly; and I thought of those who were to die with the morning light.