The Long Roll
The other kissed her, clinging for a moment to her. "Oh, mother,
mother!... I hear the cannon, too, louder and louder!" She broke away.
"I must _not_ cry to-night. To-night we must all have large bright
eyes--like the women in Brussels when 'There was revelry by
night'--Isn't it fortunate that the heart doesn't show?"
The town was all soft dusk when she came to the kinsman's house which
had opened to her. Crowded though it was with refugee kindred, with
soldier sons coming and going, it had managed to give her a small quiet
niche, a little room, white-walled, white-curtained, in the very arms
of a great old tulip tree. The window opened to the east, and the view
was obstructed only by the boughs of the tree. Beyond them, through
leafy openings, night by night she watched a red glare on the eastern
horizon--McClellan's five-mile-distant camp-fires. Entering presently
this room, she lit two candles, placed them on the dressing table, and
proceeded to make her toilette for the President's House.
Through the window came the sound of the restless city. It was like the
beating of a distant sea, with a ground swell presaging storm. The wind,
blowing from the south, brought, too, the voice of the river, passionate
over its myriad rocks, around its thousand islets. There were odours of
flowers; somewhere there was jasmine. White moths came in at the window,
and Judith, rising, put glass candle-shades over the candles. She sat
brushing her long hair; fevered with the city's fever, she saw not
herself in the glass, but all the stress that had been and the stress
that was to be. Cleave's latest letter had rested in the bosom of her
dress; now the thin oblong of bluish paper lay before her on the
dressing table. The river grew louder, the wind from the south stirred
the masses of her hair, the jasmine odour deepened. She bent forward,
spreading her white arms over the dark and smooth mahogany, drooped her
head upon them, rested lip and cheek against the paper. The sound of the
warrior city, the river and the wind, beat out a rhythm in the
white-walled room. _Love--Death! Love--Death! Dear Love--Dark
Death--Eternal Love_--She rose, laid the letter with others from him in
an old sandalwood box, coiled her hair and quickly dressed. A little
later, descending, she found awaiting her, in the old, formal, quaint
parlour, Fauquier Cary.
The two met with warm affection. Younger by much than was the master of
Greenwood, he was to the latter's children like one of their own
generation, an elder brother only. He held her from him and looked at
her. "You are a lovely woman, Judith! Did it run the blockade?"
Judith laughed: "No! I wear nothing that comes that way. It is an old
dress, and it is fortunate that Easter darns so exquisitely!"
"Warwick will meet us at the house. We both ride back before dawn. Why,
I have not seen you since last summer!"
"No. Just before Manassas!"
They went out. "I should have brought a carriage for you. But they are
hard to get--"
"I would rather walk. It is not far. You look for the battle to-morrow?"
"That depends, I imagine, on Jackson. Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps the
next day. It will be bloody fighting when it comes--Heigho!"
"The bricks of the pavement know that," said Judith. "Sometimes,
Fauquier, you can see horror on the faces of these houses--just as
plain! and at night I hear the river reading the bulletin!"
"Poor child!--Yes, we make all nature a partner. Judith, I was glad to
hear of Richard Cleave's happiness--as glad as I was surprised. Why, I
hardly know, and yet I had it firmly in mind that it was Maury
Stafford--"
Judith spoke in a pained voice. "I cannot imagine why so many people
should have thought that. Yes, and Richard himself. It never was; and I
know I am no coquette!"
"No. You are not a coquette. Ideas like that arrive, one never knows
how--like thistledown in the air--and suddenly they are planted and hard
to uproot. Stafford himself breathed it somehow. That offends you,
naturally; but I should say there was never a man more horribly in love!
It was perhaps a fixed idea with him that he would win you, and others
misread it. Well, I am sorry for him! But I like Richard best, and he
will make you happier."
He talked on, in his dry, attractive voice, moving beside her slender,
wiry, resolute, trained muscle and nerve, from head to foot. "I was at
the Officer's Hospital this morning to see Carewe. He was wounded at
Port Republic, and his son and an old servant got him here somehow. He
was talking about Richard. He knew his father. He says he'll be a
brigadier the first vacancy, and that, if the war lasts, he won't stop
there. He'll go very high. You know Carewe?--how he talks? 'Yes, by God,
sir, Dick Cleave's son's got the stuff in him! Always was a kind of
dumb, heroic race. Lot of iron ore in that soil, some gold, too. Only
needed the prospector, Big Public Interest, to come along. Shouldn't
wonder if he carved his name pretty high on the cliff.'--Now, Judith, I
have stopped beneath this lamp just to see you look the transfigured
lover--happier at praise of him than at garlands and garlands for
yourself!--Hm! Drawn to the life. Now we'll go on to the President's
House."
The President's House on Shockoe Hill was all alight, men and women
entering between white pillars, from the long windows music floating.
Beyond the magnolias and the garden the ground dropped suddenly. Far and
wide, a vast horizon, there showed the eastern sky, and far and wide,
below the summer stars, there flared along it a reddish light--the
camp-fires of two armies, the grey the nearer, the blue beyond. Faint,
faint, you could hear the bugles. It was a dark night; no moon, only the
flicker of fireflies in magnolias and roses and the gush of light from
the tall, white-pillared house. The violins within were playing
"Trovatore." Warwick Cary, an aide with him, came from the direction of
the Capitol and joined his daughter and brother. The three entered
together.
There was little formality in these gatherings at the White House of the
Confederacy. The times were too menacing, the city too conversant with
alarm bells, sudden shattering bugle notes, thunderclaps of cannon, men
and women too close companions of great and stern presences, for the
exhibition of much care for the minuter social embroidery. No necessary
and fitting tracery was neglected, but life moved now in a very intense
white light, so deep and intense that it drowned many things which in
other days had had their place in the field of vision. There was an old
butler at the President's door, and a coloured maid hovered near to help
with scarf or flounce if needed. In the hall were found two volunteer
aides, young, handsome, gay, known to all, striking at once the note of
welcome. Close within the drawing-room door stood a member of the
President's Staff, Colonel Ives, and beside him his wife, a young,
graceful, and accomplished woman. These smilingly greeted the coming or
said farewell to the parting guest.
The large drawing-room was fitted for conversation. Damask-covered sofas
with carved rosewood backs, flanked and faced by claw-foot chairs, were
found in corners and along the walls; an adjoining room, not so brightly
lit, afforded further harbourage, while without was the pillared
portico, with roses and fireflies and a view of the flare upon the
horizon. From some hidden nook the violins played Italian opera. On the
mantles and on one or two tables, midsummer flowers bloomed in Parian
vases.
Scattered in groups, through the large room, were men in uniform and
civilians in broadcloth and fine linen. So peculiarly constituted were
the Confederate armies that it was usual to find here a goodly number of
private soldiers mingling with old schoolmates, friends, kindred wearing
the bars and stars of lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, and
brigadiers. But to-night all privates and all company officers were with
their regiments; there were not many even of field and staff. It was
known to be the eve of a fight, a very great fight; passes into town
were not easy to obtain. Those in uniform who were here counted; they
were high in rank. Mingling with them were men of the civil
government,--cabinet officers, senators, congressmen, judges, heads of
bureaus; and with these, men of other affairs: hardly a man but was
formally serving the South. If he were not in the field he was of her
legislatures; if not there, then doing his duty in some civil office; if
not there, wrestling with the management of worn-out railways; or, cool
and keen, concerned in blockade running, bringing in arms and
ammunition, or in the Engineer Bureau, or the Bureau of Ordnance or the
Medical Department, or in the service of the Post, or at the Treasury
issuing beautiful Promises to Pay, or at the Tredegar moulding cannon,
or in the newspaper offices wrestling with the problem of worn-out type
and wondering where the next roll of paper was to come from, or in the
telegraph service shaking his head over the latest raid, the latest cut
wires; or he was experimenting with native medicinal plants, with
balloons, with explosives, torpedoes, submarine batteries; or thinking
of probable nitre caves, of the possible gathering of copper from old
distilleries, of the scraping saltpetre from cellars, of how to get tin,
of how to get chlorate of potassium, of how to get gutta-percha, of how
to get paper, of how to get salt for the country at large; or he was
running sawmills, building tanneries, felling oak and gum for artillery
carriages, working old iron furnaces, working lead mines, busy with
foundry and powder mill.... If he was old he was enlisted in the City
Guard, a member of the Ambulance Committee, a giver of his worldly
substance. All the South was at work, and at work with a courage to
which were added a certain colour and _elan_ not without value on her
page of history. The men, not in uniform, here to-night were doing their
part, and it was recognized that they were doing it. The women, no less;
of whom there were a number at the President's House this evening. With
soft, Southern voices, with flowers banded in their hair, with bare
throat and arms, with wide, filmy, effective all-things-but-new dresses,
they moved through the rooms, or sat on the rosewood sofas, or walking
on the portico above the roses looked out to the flare in the east. Some
had come from the hospitals,--from the Officer's, from Chimborazo,
Robinson's, Gilland's, the St. Charles, the Soldier's Rest, the South
Carolina, the Alabama,--some from the sewing-rooms, where they cut and
sewed uniforms, shirts, and underclothing, scraped lint, rolled
bandages; several from the Nitre and Mining Bureau, where they made
gunpowder; several from the Arsenal, where they made cartridges and
filled shells. These last would be refugee women, fleeing from the
counties overrun by the enemy, all their worldly wealth swept away, bent
on earning something for mother or father or child. One and all had come
from work, and they were here now in the lights and flowers, not so much
for their own pleasure as that there might be cheer, music, light,
laughter, flowers, praise, and sweetness for the men who were going to
battle. Men and women, all did not come or go at once; they passed in
and out of the President's House, some tarrying throughout the evening,
others but for a moment. The violins left "Il Trovatore," began upon
"Les Huguenots."
The President stood between the windows, talking with a little group of
men,--Judge Campbell, R. M. T. Hunter, Randolph the Secretary of War,
General Wade Hampton, General Jeb Stuart. Very straight and tall, thin,
with a clear-cut, clean-shaven, distinguished face, with a look half
military man, half student, with a demeanour to all of perfect if