The Long Roll
the Fair--every one is _giving_. Oh, I wish we had a thousand gunboats
and a hundred _Virginias_--"
A door banged in the distance and the windows of the parlour rattled.
The room grew darker. "I knew we should have a storm!" said Miss Lucy.
"If it lightens, put by your needles."
Judith came in suddenly. "There's going to be a great storm! The wind is
blowing the elms almost to the ground! There are black clouds in the
east. I hope that there are clouds over the ocean, and over Chesapeake,
and over Hampton Roads--except where the Merrimac lies! I hope that
there it is still and sunny. Clouds, and a wind like a hurricane, a wind
that will make high waves and drive the ships--and drive the Monitor!
There will be a great storm. If the elms break, masts would break, too!
Oh, if this night the Federal fleet would only go to the bottom of the
sea!"
She crossed the room, opened the French window, and stood, a hand on
either side of the window frame, facing the darkened sky and the
wind-tossed oaks. Behind her, in the large old parlour, there was an
instant's silence. Molly broke it with a shocked cry, "Judith Jacqueline
Cary!"
Judith did not answer. She stood with her hair lifted by the wind, her
hands wide, touching the window sides, her dark eyes upon the bending
oaks. In the room behind her Miss Lucy spoke. "It is they or us, Molly!
They or all we love. The sooner they suffer the sooner they will let us
alone. They have shut up all our ports. God forgive me, but I am blithe
when I hear of their ships gone down at sea!"
"Yes," said Judith, without turning. "Not stranded as they were before
Roanoke Island, but wrecked and sunken. Come, look, Unity, at the wild
storm!"
Unity came and stood beside her. The oaks outside, like the elms at the
back of the house, were moving in the blast. Over them hurried the
clouds, black, large, and low. Down the driveway the yellow forsythias,
the red pyrus japonicas showed in blurs of colours. The lightning
flashed, and a long roll of thunder jarred the room. "You were the
dreamer," said Unity, "and you had most of the milk of human kindness,
and now you have been caught up beyond us all!"
Her sister looked at her, but with a distant gaze. "It is because I can
dream--no, not dream, see! I follow all the time--I follow with my mind
the troops upon the march, and the ships on the sea. I do not hate the
ships--they are beautiful, with the green waves about them and the
sea-gulls with shining wings. And yet I wish that they would sink--down,
down quickly, before there was much suffering, before the men on them
had time for thought. They should go like a stone to the bottom, without
suffering, and they should lie there, peacefully, until their spirits
are called again. And our ports should be open, and less blood would be
shed. Less blood, less anger, less wretchedness, less pain, less
shedding of tears, less watching, watching, watching--"
"Look!" cried Unity. "The great oak bough is going!"
A vast spreading bough, large itself as a tree, snapped by the wind from
the trunk, came crashing down and out upon the lawn. The thunder rolled
again, and large raindrops began to splash on the gravel paths.
"Some one is coming up the drive," exclaimed Unity. "It's a soldier!
He's singing!"
The wind, blowing toward the house, brought the air and the quality of
the voice that sang it.
"Beau chevalier qui partez pour la guerre,
Qu'allez-vous faire
Si loin d'ici?
Voyez-vous pas que la nuit est profonde,
Et que le monde
N'est que souci?"
"Edward!" cried Judith. "It is Edward!"
The Greenwood ladies ran out on the front porch. Around the house
appeared the dogs, then, in the storm, two or three turbaned negresses.
Mammy, coifed and kerchiefed, came down the stairs and through the
house. "O my Lawd! Hit's my baby! O glory be! Singin' jes' lak he uster
sing, layin' in my lap--mammy singin' ter him, an' he singin' ter mammy!
O Marse Jesus! let me look at him--"
"Beau chevalier qui partez pour la guerre,
Qu'allez-vous faire
Si loin de nous?--"
Judith ran down the steps and over the grass, through the storm. Beyond
the nearer trees, by the great pyrus japonica bush, flame-red, she met a
ragged spectre, an Orpheus afoot and travel-stained, a demigod showing
signs of service in the trenches, Edward Cary, in short, beautiful
still, but gaunt as any wolf. The two embraced; they had always been
comrades. "Edward, Edward--"
"Eleven months," said Edward. "Judith, Judith, if you knew how good home
looks--"
"How thin you are, and brown! And walking!--Where is Prince John--and
Jeames?"
"Didn't I tell you in my last letter? Prince John was killed in a fight
we had on the Warwick River.... Jeames is in Richmond down with fever.
He cried to come, but the doctor said he mustn't. I've only three days
myself. Furloughs are hard to get, but just now the government will do
anything for anybody who was on the Merrimac--You're worn yourself,
Judith, and your eyes are so big and dark!--Is it Maury Stafford or
Richard Cleave?"
Amid the leaping of the dogs they reached the gravelled space before the
house. Miss Lucy folded her nephew in her arms. "God bless you,
Edward--" She held him off and looked at him. "I never saw it
before--but you're like your grandfather, my dear; you're like my dear
father!--O child, how thin you are!"
Unity and Molly hung upon him. "The papers told us that you were on the
Merrimac--though we don't know how you got there! Did you come from
Richmond? Have you seen father?"
"Yes, for a few moments. He has come up from the south with General Lee.
General Lee is to be commander of all the forces of the Confederacy.
Father is well. He sent his dear love to you all. I saw Fauquier, too--"
Mammy met him at the top of the steps. "Oh, my lamb! O glory hallelujah!
What you doin' wid dem worn-out close? An' yo' sh'ut tohn dat-er-way?
What dey been doin' ter you--dat's what I wants ter know? My po'
lamb!--Marse Edward, don' you laugh kaze mammy done fergit you ain' er
baby still--"
Edward hugged her. "One night in the trenches, not long ago, I swear I
heard you singing, mammy! I couldn't sleep. And at last I said, 'I'll
put my head in mammy's lap, and she'll sing me
The Buzzards and the Butterflies--
and I'll go to sleep.' I did it, and I went off like a baby--Well,
Julius, and how are you?"
Within the parlour there were explanations, ejaculations, questions, and
answers. "So short a furlough--when we have not seen you for almost a
year! Never mind--of course, you must get back. We'll have a little
party for you to-morrow night. Oh, how brown you are, and your uniform's
so ragged! Never mind--we've got a bolt of Confederate cloth and Johnny
Bates shall come out to-morrow.... All well. Knitting and watching,
watching and knitting. The house has been full of refugees--Fairfaxes
and Fauntleroys. They've gone on to Richmond, and we're alone just now.
We take turn about at the hospitals in Charlottesville--there are three
hundred sick--and we look after the servants and the place and the poor
families whose men are gone, and we read the papers over and over, every
word--and we learn letters off by heart, and we make lint, and we twist
and turn and manage, and we knit and knit and wait and wait--Here's
Julius with the wine! And your room's ready--fire and hot water, and
young Cato to take Jeames's place. Car'line is making sugar cakes, and
we shall have coffee for supper.... Hurry down, Edward, Edward
_darling_!"
Edward darling came down clean, faintly perfumed, shaven, thin,
extremely handsome and debonair. Supper went off beautifully, with the
last of the coffee poured from the urn that had not yet gone to the
Gunboat Fair, with the Greenwood ladies dressed in the best of their
last year's gowns, with flowers in Judith's hair and at Unity's throat,
with a reckless use of candles, with Julius and Tom, the dining-room
boy, duskily smiling in the background, with the spring rain beating
against the panes, with the light-wood burning on the hearth, with
Churchill and Cary and Dandridge portraits, now in shadow, now in gleam
upon the walls--with all the cheer, the light, the gracious warmth of
Home. None of the women spoke of how seldom they burned candles now, of
how the coffee had been saved against an emergency, and of the luxury
white bread was becoming. They ignored, too, the troubles of the
plantation. They would not trouble their soldier with the growing
difficulty of finding food for the servants and for the stock, of the
plough horses gone, and no seed for the sowing, of the problem it was to
clothe the men, women, and children, with osnaburgh at thirty-eight
cents a yard, with the difficulties of healing the sick, medicine having
been declared contraband of war and the home supply failing. They would
not trouble him with the makeshifts of women, their forebodings as to
shoes, as to letter paper, their windings here and there through a maze
of difficulties strange to them as a landscape of the moon. They would
learn, and it was but little harder than being in the field. Not that
they thought of it in that light; they thought the field as much harder
as it was more glorious. Nothing was too good for their soldier; they
would have starved a week to have given him the white bread, the loaf
sugar, and the Mocha.
Supper over, he went down to the house quarter to speak to the men and
women there; then, in the parlour, at the piano, he played with his
masterly touch "The Last Waltz," and then he came to the fire, took his
grandfather's chair, and described to the women the battle at sea.
"We were encamped on the Warwick River--infantry, and a cavalry company,
and a battalion from New Orleans. Around us were green flats, black mud,
winding creeks, waterfowl, earthworks, and what guns they could give us.
At the mouth of the river, across the channel, we had sunk twenty canal
boats, to the end that Burnside should not get by. Besides the canal
boats and the guns and the waterfowl there was a deal of
fever--malarial--of exposure, of wet, of mouldy bread, of homesickness
and general desolation. Some courage existed, too, and singing at times.
We had been down there a long time among the marshes--all winter, in
fact. About two weeks ago--"
"Oh, Edward, were you very homesick?"
"Devilish. For the certain production of a very curious feeling, give me
picket duty on a wet marsh underneath the stars! Poetic
places--marshes--with a strong suggestion about them of The Last Man....
Where was I? Down to our camp one morning about two weeks ago came El
Capitan Colorado--General Magruder, you know--gold lace, stars, and
black plume! With him came Lieutenant Wood, C. S. N. We were paraded--"
"Edward, try as I may, I cannot get over the strangeness of your being
in the ranks!"
Edward laughed. "There's many a better man than I in them, Aunt Lucy!
They make the best of crows'-nests from which to spy on life, and that
is what I always wanted to do--to spy on life!--The men were paraded,
and Lieutenant Wood made us a speech. 'The old Merrimac, you know, men,
that was burnt last year when the Yankees left Norfolk?--well, we've
raised her, and cut her down to her berth deck, and made of her what we
call an iron-clad. An iron-clad is a new man-of-war that's going to take
the place of the old. The Merrimac is not a frigate any longer; she's
the iron-clad Virginia, and we rather think she's going to make her name
remembered. She's over there at the Gosport Navy Yard, and she's almost
ready. She's covered over with iron plates, and she's got an iron beak,