The Long Roll
of that day. In the evening again, just at dusk, she reentered the room,
and presently again took her seat by the window. The red light of the
camp-fires was beginning to show.
There was a knock at the door. Judith rose and opened to a turbaned
coloured girl. "Yes, Dilsey?"
"Miss Judith, de gin'ral air downstairs. He say, ax you kin he come up
to yo' room?"
"Yes, yes, Dilsey! Tell him to come."
When her father came he found her standing against the wall, her hands,
outstretched behind her, resting on it. The last soft bloom of day was
upon her; indefinably, with her hands so, the wall behind her and her
lifted head, she looked a soldier facing a firing party. "Tell me
quickly," she said, "the exact truth."
Warwick Gary closed the door behind him and came toward her. "The court
found him guilty, Judith."
As she still stood, the light from without upon her face, he took her in
his arms, drew her from the wall and made her sit in the chair by the
window, then placed himself beside her, and leaning over took her hands
in his strong clasp. "Many a court has found many a man guilty, Judith,
whom his own soul cleared."
"That is true," she answered. "Your own judgment has not changed?"
"No, Judith, no."
She lifted his hand and kissed it. "Just a moment, and then you'll tell
me--"
They sat still in the soft summer air. The stars were coming out. Off to
the east showed the long red light where was the army. Judith's eyes
rested here. He saw it, and saw, presently, courage lift into her face.
It came steady, with a deathless look. "Now," she said, and loosed her
hands.
"It is very bad," he answered slowly. "The evidence was more adverse
than I could have dreamed. Only on the last count was there acquittal."
"The last count?--"
"The charge of personal cowardice."
Her eyelids trembled a little. "I am glad," she said, "that they had a
gleam of reason."
The other uttered a short laugh, proud and troubled. "Yes. It would not
have occurred to me--just that accusation.... Well, he stood cleared of
that. But the other charges, Judith, the others--" He rested his hands
on his sword hilt and gazed broodingly into the deepening night. "The
court could only find as it did. I myself, sitting there, listening to
that testimony.... It is inexplicable!"
"Tell me all."
"General Jackson's order was plain. A staff officer carried it to
General Winder with perfect correctness. Winder repeated it to the
court, and word for word Jackson corroborated it. The same officer,
carrying it on from Winder to the 65th came up with a courier belonging
to the regiment. To this man, an educated, reliable, trusted soldier, he
gave the order."
"He should not have done so?"
"It is easy to say that--to blame because this time there's a snarl to
unravel! The thing is done often enough. It should not be done, but it
is. Staff service with us is far too irregular. The officer stands to
receive a severe reprimand--but there is no reason to believe that he
did not give the order to the courier with all the accuracy with which
he had already delivered it to Winder. He testified that he did so give
it, repeated it word for word to the court. He entrusted it to the
courier, taking the precaution to make the latter say it over to him,
and then he returned to General Jackson, down the stream, before the
bridge they were building. That closed his testimony. He received the
censure of the court, but what he did has been done before."
"The courier testified--"
"No. That is the link that drops out. The courier was killed. A Thunder
Run man--Steven Dagg--testified that he had been separated from the
regiment. Returning to it along the wooded bank of the creek, he arrived
just behind the courier. He heard him give the order to the colonel.
'Could he repeat it?' 'Yes.' He did so, and it was, accurately,
Jackson's order."
"Richard--what did Richard say?"
"He said the man lied."
"Ah!"
"The courier fell before the first volley from the troops in the woods.
He died almost at once, but two men testified as to the only thing he
had said. It was, 'We ought never all of us to have crossed. Tell Old
Jack I carried the order straight.'"
He rose and with a restless sigh began to pace the little room. "I see a
tangle--something not understood--some stumbling-block laid by laws
beyond our vision. We cannot even define it, cannot even find its edges.
We do not know its nature. Things happen so sometimes in this strange
world. I do not think that Richard himself understands how the thing
chanced. He testified--"
"Yes, oh, yes--"
"He repeated to the court the order he had received. It was not the
order that Jackson had given and that Winder had sent on to him, though
it differed in only two points. And neither--and there, Judith, there is
a trouble!--neither was it with entire explicitness an order to do that
which he did do. He acknowledged that, quite simply. He had found at the
time an ambiguity--he had thought of sending again for confirmation to
Winder. And then--unfortunate man! something happened to strengthen the
interpretation which, when all is said, he preferred to receive, and
upon which he acted. Time pressed. He took the risk, if there was a
risk, and crossed the stream."
"Father, do you blame him?"
"He blames himself, Judith, somewhat cruelly. But I think it is because,
just now, of the agony of memory. He loved his regiment.--No. What sense
in blaming where, had there followed success, you would have praised?
Then it would have been proper daring; now--I could say that he had been
wiser to wait, but I do not know that in his place I should have waited.
He was rash, perhaps, but who is there to tell? Had he chosen another
interpretation and delayed, and been mistaken, then, too, commination
would have fallen. No. I blame him less than he blames himself, Judith.
But the fact remains. Even by his own showing there was a doubt. Even
accepting his statement of the order he received, he took it upon
himself to decide."
"They did not accept his statement--"
"No, Judith. They judged that he had received General Jackson's order
and had disobeyed it.--I know--I know! To us it is monstrous. But the
court must judge by the evidence--and the verdict was to be expected. It
was his sole word, and where his own safety was at stake. 'Had not the
dead courier a reputation for reliability, for accuracy?' 'He had, and
he would not lay the blame there, besmirching a brave man's name.'
'Where then?' 'He did not know. It was so that he had received the
order'--Judith, Judith! I have rarely seen truth so helpless as in this
case."
She drew a difficult breath. "No help. And they said--"
"He was pronounced guilty of the first charge. That carried with it the
verdict as to the second--the sacrifice of the regiment. There,
too--guilty. Only the third there was no sustaining. The loss was
fearful, but there were men enough left to clear him from that charge.
He struggled with desperation to retrieve his error, if error it were;
he escaped death himself as by a miracle, and he brought off a remnant
of the command which, in weaker hands, might have been utterly swallowed
up. On that count he is clear. But on the others--guilty, and without
mitigation."
He came back to the woman by the window. "Judith, I would rather put the
sword in my own heart than put it thus in yours. War is a key, child,
that unlocks to all dreadful things, to all mistakes, to every sorrow!"
"I want every worst drop of it," she said. "Afterward I'll look for
comfort. Do not be afraid for me; I feel as strong as the hills, the
air, the sea--anything. What is the sentence?"
"Dismissal from the army."
Judith rose and, with her hands on the window-sill, leaned out into the
night. Her gaze went straight to the red light in the eastern sky. There
was an effect as though the force, impalpable, real, which was herself,
had gone too, flown from the window straight toward that horizon,
leaving here but a fair ivory shell. It was but momentary; the chains
held and she turned back to the shadowed room. "You have seen him?"
"Yes."
"How--"
"He has much of his mother in him, Judith. Eventually he will, I think,
take it that way. But now it is his father that shows. He is very
silent--grey and hard and silent."
"Where is he?"
"At present yet under guard. To-morrow it will all be over."
"He will be free, you mean?"
"Yes, he will be free."
She came and put her arm around her father's neck. "Father, you know
what I want to do then? To do just as soon as I shall have seen him and
made him realize that it is for my happiness. I want to marry him....
Ah, don't look at me so, saying nothing!" She withdrew herself a little,
standing with her clasped hands against his breast. "You expected that,
did you not? Why, what else.... Father, I am not afraid of you. You will
let me do it."
He regarded her with a grave, compassionate face. "No. You need not fear
me, Judith. It is hardly father and child with you and me. It is soul
and soul, and I trust your soul with its own concerns. Moreover, if it
is pain to consider what you would do, the pang would be greater to find
you not capable.... Yes, I would let you do it. But I do not think that
Richard will."
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CEDAR RUN
The Seven Days brought a sterner temper into this war. The two sides
grew to know each other better; each saw how determined was the other,
and either foe, to match the other, raised the bronze in himself to
iron. The great army, still under McClellan, at Harrison's Landing,
became the Army of the Potomac. The great army guarding Richmond under
Lee, became the Army of Northern Virginia. President Lincoln called
upon the Governors of the Northern States for three hundred thousand
men, and offered bounties. President Davis called upon the Governors of
the Southern States for conscripts, and obtained no great number, for
the mass of the men had volunteered. The world at large looked on, now
and henceforth, with an absorbed regard. The struggle promised to be
Homeric, memorable. The South was a fortress beleaguered; seven hundred
thousand square miles of territory lost and inland as the steppes of
Tartary, for all her ports were blocked by Northern men-of-war. Little
news from the fortress escaped; the world had a sense of gigantic grey
figures moving here and there behind a great battle veil, of a push
against the fortress, a push from all sides, with approved battering
rams, scaling ladders, hooks, grapples, mines, of blue figures, all
known and described in heroic terms by the Northern public prints, a
push repelled by the voiceless, printless, dimly-discerned grey figures.
Not that the grey, too, were not described to the nations in the prints
above. They were. The wonder was that the creatures could fight--even,
it appeared, fight to effect. Around and over the wide-flung fortress
the battle smoke rolled and eddied. Drums were distantly heard, now
rallying, now muffled. A red flag with a blue cross rose and fell and
rose again; grey names emerged, floated, wraith-like, over the sea, not
to be stopped by blue men-of-war, names and picturesque nicknames, loved
of soldiers. It grew to be allowed that there must be courage in the
fortress, and a gift of leadership. All was seen confusedly, but with a
mounting, mounting interest. The world gaped at the far-borne clang and
smoke and roar. Military men in clubs demonstrated to a nicety just how
long the fortress might hold out, and just how it must be taken at last.
Schoolboys fought over again in the schoolyards the battles with the
heathenish names. The Emperor of the French and the King of Prussia and
the Queen of Spain and the Queen of England and the Czar and the Sultan