northward--northward, northward, always northward--to cold,
corpse-strewed Virginia, who cried aloud to us continually, 'More!
more!' Her roads are marked with death from her Peaks of Otter to the
sea, and her great valley ran red. We went to her from all over the
South, from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and from our own Carolina. We
died there by thousands, and by tens of thousands. O Virginia, our dead
lie thick in thy tidewater plains, in thy tangled Wilderness, and along
thy river-shores, with faces upturned, and hearts still for ever.
"John came back to us once, and wedded the fair girl to whom he was
betrothed. It was a sad bridal, although we made it as gay as we could;
for we had come to the times of determined gayety then. The tone of
society was like the determinedly gay quicksteps which the regimental
bands play when returning from a funeral, as much as to say, 'Le roi est
mort, vive le roi!' So we turned our old silk dresses, and made a brave
appearance; if our shoes were shabby, we hid them under our skirts as
well as we could, and held our heads the higher. Maum Sally made a big
wedding-cake, as of old, and we went without meat to pay for the spices
in it; such luxuries we obtained from the blockade-runners now and then,
but they were worth almost their weight in gold. Then John, too, left
us. In four months he also was taken--killed by guerrillas, it is
supposed, as he rode through a lonely mountain-defile. He was not found
for weeks; the snow fell and covered him, mercifully giving the burial
the frozen earth denied. After a while the tidings came to us, and poor
Mabel slowly wept herself into the grave. She was a loving-hearted
little creature, and her life was crushed. She looked at her baby once,
called his name John, and then died. The child, that boy yonder, seems
to have inherited her grief. He sheds no tears, however; his girl-mother
shed them all, both for him and for herself, before ever he saw the
light. My turn came next.
"You have been married, madam? Did you love, too? I do not mean regard,
or even calm affection; I do not mean sense of duty, self-sacrifice, or
religious goodness. I mean love--love that absorbs the entire being.
Some women love so; I do not say they are the happiest women. I do not
say they are the best. I am one of them. But God made us all; he gave us
our hearts--we did not choose them. Let no woman take credit to herself
for her even life, simply because it has been even. Doubtless, if he had
put her out in the breakers, she would have swayed too. Perhaps she
would have drifted from her moorings also, as I have drifted. I go to no
church; I can not pray. But do not think I am defiant; no. I am only
dead. I seek not the old friends, few and ruined, who remain still
above-ground; I have no hope, I might almost say no wish. Torpidly I
draw my breath through day and night, nor care if the rain falls or the
sun shines. You Northern women would work; I can not. Neither have I the
courage to take the child and die. I live on as the palsied animal
lives, and if some day the spring fails, and the few herbs within his
reach, he dies. Nor do I think he grieves much about it; he only eats
from habit. So I.
"It was in the third year of the war that I met Ralph Kinsolving. I was
just eighteen. Our courtship was short; indeed, I hardly knew that I
loved him until he spoke and asked me to give him myself. 'Marry me,
Judith,' he pleaded ardently; 'marry me before I go; let it be my wife I
leave behind me, and not my sweetheart. For sweethearts, dear, can not
come to us in camp when we send, as we shall surely send soon, that you
may all see our last grand review.' So spoke Rafe, and with all his
heart he believed it. We all believed it. Never for a moment did we
doubt the final triumph of our arms. We were so sure we were right!
"'Our last grand review,' said Rafe; but he did not dream of that last
review at Appomattox, when eight thousand hungry, exhausted men stacked
their muskets in the presence of the enemy, whose glittering ranks,
eighty thousand strong, were drawn up in line before them, while in the
rear their well-filled wagons stood--wagons whose generous plenty
brought tears to the eyes of many a poor fellow that day, thinking, even
while he eagerly ate, of his desolated land, and his own empty fields at
home.
"I did marry my soldier, and, although it was in haste, I had my
wedding-dress, my snowy veil; lace and gauze were not needed at the
hospitals! But we went without the wedding-cake this time, and my satin
slippers were made at home, looking very like a pair of white moccasins
when finished.
"In the middle of the ceremony there was an alarm; the slaves had risen
at Latto's down the river, and were coming to the village armed with
clubs, and, worse still, infuriated with liquor they had found. Even our
good old rector paused. There were but few white men at home. It seemed
indeed a time for pausing. But Rafe said, quietly,'Go on!' and,
unsheathing his sword, he laid it ready on the chancel-rail. 'To have
and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for
poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us
do part,' repeated Rafe, holding my hand in his firm clasp, and looking
down into my frightened face so tenderly that I forgot my
alarm--everything, indeed, save his love. But when the last word was
spoken, and the blessing pronounced over our bowed heads, the shining
sword seeming a silent witness, Rafe left me like a flash. The little
church was empty when I rose from my knees; the women had hurried home
with blanched faces to bar their doors and barricade their windows, and
the men had gone for their horses and guns; only my old father waited to
give me his blessing, and then we, too, hastened homeward. Our little
band of defenders assembled in the main street, and rode gallantly out
to meet the negroes, who were as fifty to their one. Rafe was the
leader, by virtue of his uniform, and he waved his hand to me as he
rode by. 'Cheer up, Judith,' he cried; 'I will soon return.'
"I never saw him again.
"They dispersed the negroes without much difficulty; Latto's slaves had
been badly treated for months, they had not the strength to fight long.
But Rafe rode to the next town with the prisoners under his charge, and
there he met an imploring summons to the coast; the Federal ships had
appeared unexpectedly off the harbor, and the little coast-city lay
exposed and helpless at the mouth of the river. All good men and true
within reach were summoned to the defense. So my soldier went, sending
back word to me a second time, 'I will soon return.' But the siege was
long, long--one of those bitterly contested little sieges of minor
importance, with but small forces engaged on each side, which were so
numerous during the middle times of the war--those middle times after
the first high hopes had been disappointed, and before the policy of
concentration had been adopted by the North--that slow, dogged North of
yours that kept going back and beginning over again, until at last it
found out how to do it. This little siege was long and weary, and when
at last the Federal vessels went suddenly out beyond the bar again, and
the town, unconquered, but crippled and suffering, lay exhausted on the
shore, there was not much cause for rejoicing. Still I rejoiced; for I
thought that Rafe would come. I did not know that his precious furlough
had expired while he was shut up in the beleaguered city, and that his
colonel had sent an imperative summons, twice repeated. Honor, loyalty,
commanded him to go, and go immediately. He went.
"The next tidings that came to me brought word that he loved me and was
well; the next, that he loved me and was well; the next, that he loved
me and was--dead. Madam, my husband, Ralph Kinsolving, was shot--as a
spy!
"You start--you question--you doubt. But spies were shot in those days,
were they not? That is a matter of history. Very well; you are face to
face now with the wife of one of them.
"You did not expect such an ending, did you? You have always thought of
spies as outcasts, degraded wretches, and, if you remembered their wives
at all, it was with the idea that they had not much feeling, probably,
being so low down in the scale of humanity. But, madam, in those bitter,
hurrying days men were shot as spies who were no spies. Nay, let me
finish; I know quite well that the shooting was not confined to one
side; I acknowledge that; but it was done, and mistakes were made. Now
and then chance brings a case to light, so unmistakable in its proof
that those who hear it shudder--as now and then also chance brings a
coffin to light whose occupant was buried alive, and came to himself
when it was too late. But what of the cases that chance does _not_ bring
to light?
"My husband was no spy; but it had been a trying time for the Northern
commanders: suspicion lurked everywhere; the whole North clamored to
them to advance, and yet their plans, as fast as they made them, were
betrayed in some way to the enemy. An example was needed--my husband
fell in the way.
"He explained the suspicious circumstances of his case, but a cloud of
witnesses rose up against him, and he proudly closed his lips. They gave
him short shrift; that same day he was led out and met his death in the
presence of thousands. They told me that he was quite calm, and held
himself proudly; at the last he turned his face to the south, as if he
were gazing down, down, into the very heart of that land for whose sake
he was about to die. I think he saw the cotton-fields then, and our
home; I think he saw me, also, for the last time.
"By the end of that year, madam, my black hair was gray, as you see it
now; I was an old woman at nineteen.
"My father and I and that grave-eyed baby lived on in the old house. Our
servants had left us, all save one, old Cassy, who had been my nurse or
'maumee,' as we called her. We suffered, of course. We lived as very
poor people live. The poorest slaves in the old time had more than we
had then. But we did not murmur; the greater griefs had swallowed up the
less. I said, 'Is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?' But the end was
not yet.
"You have heard the story of the great march, the march to the sea? But
there was another march after that, a march of which your own writers
have said that its route was marked by a pillar of smoke by day and of
flame by night--the march through South Carolina. The Northern soldiers
shouted when they came to the yellow tide of the Savannah, and looked
across and knew that the other shore was South Carolina soil. They
crossed, and Carolina was bowed to the dust. Those were the days we
cried in the morning, 'O God, that it were night!' and in the night, 'O
God, that it were morning!' Retribution, do you say? It may be so. But
love for our State seemed loyalty to us; and slavery was the sin of our
fathers, not ours. Surely we have expiated it now.
"'Chile, chile, dey is come!' cried old Cassy, bursting into my room one
afternoon, her withered black face grayly pale with fear. I went out.
Cavalrymen were sweeping the village of all it contained, the meager
little that was left to us in our penury. My father was asleep; how I
prayed that he might not waken! Although an old man, he was fiery as a
boy, and proudly, passionately rebellious against the fate which had
come upon us. Our house was some distance back from the road, and broad
grounds separated us from the neighboring residences. Cassy and I softly
piled our pillows and cushions against the doors and windows that opened
from his room to the piazza, hoping to deaden the sounds outside, for
some of our people were resisting, and now and then I heard shouts and
oaths. But it was of no use. My dear old father woke, heard the sounds,
and rushed out into the street sword in hand; for he had been a soldier
too, serving with honor through the Mexican War. Made desperate by my
fears for him, I followed. There was a _mêlée_ in the road before our
house; a high wind blew the thick dust in my eyes and half blinded me,
so that I only saw struggling forms on foot and on horseback, and could
not distinguish friend or foe. Into this group my father rushed. I never
knew the cause of the contest; probably it was an ill-advised attack by
some of our people, fiery and reasonless always. But, whatever it was,
at length there came one, two, three shots, and then the group broke
apart. I rushed forward and received my old father in my arms,
dying--dead. His head lay on my shoulder as I knelt in the white road,
and his silver hair was dabbled with blood; he had been shot through the
head and breast, and lived but a moment.
"We carried him back to the house, old Cassy and I, slowly, and with
little regard for the bullets which now whistled through the air; for
the first shots had brought together the scattered cavalrymen, who now
rode through the streets firing right and left, more at random, I think,
than with direct aim, yet still determined to 'frighten the rebels,' and
avenge the soldier, one of their number, who had been killed at the
beginning of the fray. We laid my father down in the center of the hall,
and prepared him for his long sleep. No one came to help us; no one came
to sorrow with us; each household gathered its own together and waited
with bated breath for what was still to come. I watched alone beside my
dead that night, the house-doors stood wide open, and lights burned at
the head and foot of the couch. I said to myself, 'Let them come now and
take their fill.' But no one disturbed me, and I kept my vigil from
midnight until dawn; then there came a sound of many feet, and when the
sun rose our streets were full of blue-coated soldiers, thousands upon
thousands; one wing of the great army was marching through. There was
still hot anger against us for our resistance, and when the commanding
officers arrived they ordered guards to be stationed at every house,
with orders to shoot any man or boy who showed himself outside of his
doorway. All day and night the Federal soldiers would be passing
through, and the guards gave notice that if another man was injured
twenty rebel lives should answer for it.
"'We must bury my father, you and I together, Cassy,' I said; 'there is
no one to help us. Come!'
"The old woman followed me without a word. Had I bidden her go alone,
even as far as the door-step, she would have cowered at my feet in
abject terror; but, following me, she would have gone unquestioning to
the world's end. The family burial-place was on our own grounds,
according to the common custom of the South; thither we turned our
steps, and in silence hollowed out a grave as best we could. The guard
near by watched us with curiosity for some time; at last he approached:
"'What are you two women doing there?'
"'Digging a grave.'
"'For whom?'
"'For my father, who lies dead in the house.'
"He withdrew a short distance, but still watched us closely, and when
all was ready, and we returned to the house for our burden, I saw him
signal the next guard. 'They will not interrupt us,' I said; 'we are
only two women and a dead man.'
"I wrapped my dear father in his cloak, and covered his face; then we
bore the lounge on which he lay out into the sunshine down toward the
open grave. The weight of this poor frame of ours when dead is
marvelous, and we moved slowly; but at length we reached the spot. I had
lined the grave with coverlids and a fine linen sheet, and now, with the
aid of blankets, we lowered the clay to its last resting-place. Then,
opening my prayer-book, I read aloud the service for the burial of the
dead, slowly, and without tears, for I was thinking of the meeting above
of the old father and his two boys: 'Lord, thou hast been our refuge
from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever the earth and the world were made, thou art God from
everlasting.' I took a clod and cast it upon the shrouded breast below.
'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' I said, and old Cassy,
kneeling opposite, broke forth into low wailing, and rocked her body to
and fro. Then we filled the grave. I remember that I worked with
feverish strength; if it was not done quickly, I knew I could never do
it at all. Can you realize what it would be to stand and shovel the
earth with your own hands upon your dead?--to hear the gravel fall and
strike?--to see the last shrouded outline disappear under the stifling,
heavy clods? All this it was mine to do. When it was over I turned to
go, and for the first time lifted my eyes. There at the fence-corner
stood a row of Federal soldiers, silent, attentive, and with bared
heads; my father was buried with military honors after all.
"During all that day and night the blue-coated ranks marched by; there
seemed to be no end to the line of glittering muskets. I watched them
passively, holding the orphan-boy on my knee; I felt as though I should
never move or speak again. But after the army came the army-followers
and stragglers, carrion-birds who flew behind the conquerors and
devoured what they had left. They swept the town clean of food and
raiment; many houses they wantonly burned; what they could not carry
with them they destroyed. My own home did not escape: rude men ransacked
every closet and drawer, and cut in ribbons the old portraits on the
wall. A German, coming in from the smoke-house, dripping with
bacon-juice, wiped his hands upon my wedding-veil, which had been
discovered and taken from its box by a former intruder. It was a little
thing; but, oh, how it hurt me! At length the last straggler left us,
and we remained in the ashes. We could not sit down and weep for
ourselves and for our dead; the care of finding wherewithal to eat
thrust its coarse necessity upon us, and forced us to our feet. I had
thought that all the rest of my life would be but a bowed figure at the
door of a sepulchre; but the camp-followers came by, took the bowed
figure by the arm, and forced it back to every-day life. We could no
longer taste the luxury of tears. For days our people lived on the
refuse left by the army, the bits of meat and bread they had thrown
aside from their plenty; we picked up the corn with which they had fed
their horses, kernel by kernel, and boiled it for our dinner; we groped
in the ashes of their camp-fires; little children learned the sagacity
of dogs seeking for bones, and quarreled over their findings. The
fortune of war, do you say? Yes, the fortune of war! But it is one thing
to say, and another thing to feel!
"We came away, madam, for our home was in ashes--old Cassy, the child,
and I; we came on foot to this place, and here we have staid. No, the
fields are never cultivated now. The dike has been broken down in too
many places, and freshets have drained all the good out of the soil; the
land is worthless. It was once my father's richest field. Yes, Cassy is
dead. She was buried by her own people, who forgave her at the last for
having been so spiritless as to stay with 'young missis,' when she might
have tasted the glories of freedom over in the crowded hollow where the
blacks were enjoying themselves and dying by the score. In six months
half of them were gone. They had their freedom--oh, yes, plenty of it;
they were quite free--to die! For, you see, madam, their masters, those
villainous old masters of theirs, were no longer there to feed and
clothe them. Oh! it was a great deliverance for the enfranchised people!
Bitter, am I? Put yourself in my place.
"What am I going to do? Nothing. The boy? He must take his chances. Let
him grow up under the new _régime_; I have told him nothing of the old.
It may be that he will prosper; people do prosper, they tell me. It
seems we were wrong, all wrong; then we must be very right now, for the
blacks are our judges, councilors, postmasters, representatives, and
law-makers. That is as it should be, isn't it? What! not so? But how can
it be otherwise? Ah, you think that a new king will arise who knows not
Joseph--that is, that a new generation will come to whom these
questions will be things of the past. It may be so; I do not know. I do
not know anything certainly any more, for my world has been torn
asunder, and I am uprooted and lost. No, you can not help me, no one can
help me. I can not adjust myself to the new order of things; I can not
fit myself in new soil; the fibers are broken. Leave me alone, and give
your help to the young; they can profit by it. The child? Well, if--if
you really wish it, I will not oppose you. Take him, and bring him up in
your rich, prosperous North; the South has no place for him. Go, and God
speed you! But, as for me, I will abide in mine own country. It will not
be until such as I have gone from earth that the new blood can come to
her. Let us alone; we will watch the old life out with her, and when her
new dawning comes we shall have joined our dead, and all of us, our
errors, our sins, and our sufferings will be forgotten."
FELIPA.
Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that, myriad cloven,
Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs.
... Green colonnades
Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
The wide sea-marshes of Glynn.
... Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.
Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds
of the land.
Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger
and curl
As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm, sweet
limbs of a girl.
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade.
SIDNEY LANIER.
Christine and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned,
yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny,
lithe and wild, shy yet fearless--not unlike one of the little brown
deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine-barren behind the
house. She did not come to us--we came to her; we loomed into her life
like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly
proud of us. For were we not her guests? proud thought! and, better
still, were we not women? "I have only seen three women in all my life,"
said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, "and I like women. I am a woman too,
although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy; I
wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The
son of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me,
what would you have? It was a chance not to be despised. But when I am
grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the señora's." The
little creature was dressed in a boy's suit of dark-blue linen, much the
worse for wear, and torn.
"If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?" I said.
"Do you mend, señora?"
"Certainly: all women sew and mend."
"The other lady?"
Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of
pine-needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The
child has divined me already, Catherine," she said.
Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of
arm, long sloping shoulders, and a long fair throat; her straight hair
fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one
shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue. Her
small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white
teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching
in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to
the rules of art. Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred
outlines and smudged profiles many of us possess--seen to best
advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked
bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of
noses! When Christine had finished her laugh--and she never hurried
anything--she stretched out her arm carelessly and patted Felipa's curly
head. The child caught the descending hand and kissed the long white
fingers.