Part 61 (1/2)
Miriam started up with a cry. Outside the window a hoa.r.s.e and loud voice called to some one across the street. ”That's beyond Meadow Bridge! D'
ye know what I believe? I believe it's Stonewall Jackson!” The name came back like an echo from the opposite pavement. ”Stonewall Jackson!
Stonewall Jackson! He thinks maybe it's Stonewall Jackson!”
_Boom--Boom--Boom--Boom, Boom!_
Miriam rose, threw off the muslin sacque and began to dress. Her eyes were narrowed, her fingers rapid and steady. Christianna opened the window-blinds. The sound of the hurrying feet came strongly in, and with it voices. ”The top of the Capitol!--see best from there--I think the hills toward the almshouse--Can you get out on the Brook turnpike?--No; it is picketed--The hill by the President's House--try it!” Christianna, turning, found Miriam taking a hat from the closet shelf. ”Oh, Miss Miriam, you mustn't go--”
Miriam, a changed creature, steady and sure as a fine rapier, turned upon her. ”Yes, I am going, Christianna. If you like, you may come with me. Yes, I am well enough.--No, mother wouldn't keep me back. She would understand. If I lay there and listened, I should go mad. Get your bonnet and come.”
The cannon shook the air. Christianna got her sunbonnet and tied the strings with trembling fingers. All the wild rose had fled from her cheeks, her lips looked pinched, her eyes large and startled. Miriam glanced her way, then came and kissed her. ”I forgot it was your first battle. I got used to them in Winchester. Don't be afraid.”
They went out into the hot suns.h.i.+ne. By now the greater part of the stream had hurried by. They saw that it flowed eastward, and they followed. The sun blazed down, the pavement burned their feet. The mountain girl walked like a piece of thistledown; Miriam, light and quick in all her actions, moved beside her almost as easily. It was as though the hot wind, rus.h.i.+ng down the street behind them, carried them on with the dust and loosened leaves. There were other women, with children clinging to their hands. One or two had babes in their arms.
There were old men, too, and several cripples. The lighter-limbed and unenc.u.mbered were blown ahead. The dull sound rocked the air. This was a residence portion of the city, and the houses looked lifeless. The doors were wide, the inmates gone. Only where there was illness, were there faces at the window, looking out, pale and anxious, asking questions of the hurrying pale and anxious folk below. The cannonading was not yet continuous. It spoke rather in sullen thunders, with s.p.a.ces between in which the heart began to grow quiet. Then it thundered again, and the heart beat to suffocation.
The wind blew Miriam and Christianna toward the President's House. Tall, austere, white-pillared, it stood a little coldly in the heat. Before the door were five saddle horses, with a groom or two. The staff came from the house, then the President in grey Confederate cloth and soft hat. He spoke to one of the officers in his clear, incisive voice, then mounted his grey Arab. A child waved to him from an upper window. He waved back, lifted his hat to the two girls as they pa.s.sed, then, his staff behind him, rode rapidly off toward the sound of the firing.
Miriam and Christianna, turning a little northward, found themselves on a hillside thronged with people. It was like a section of an amphitheatre, and it commanded a great stretch of lowland broken here and there by slight elevations. Much of the plain was in forest, but in some places the waist-deep corn was waving, and in others the wheat stood in shocks. There were marshes and boggy green meadows and old fields of pine and broom sedge. Several roads could be seen. They all ran into a long and low cloud of smoke. It veiled the northern horizon, and out of it came the thunder. First appeared dull orange flashes, then, above the low-lying thickness, the small white expanding cloud made by the bursting sh.e.l.l, then to the ear rushed the thunder. On the plain, from the defences which rimmed the city northward to the battle cloud, numbers of grey troops were visible, some motionless, some marching. They looked like toy soldiers. The sun heightened red splashes that were known to be battle-flags. Hors.e.m.e.n could be seen galloping from point to point. In the intervals between the thunders the hillside heard the tap of drum and the bugles blowing. The moving soldiers were going toward the cloud.
Miriam and Christianna sank down beneath a little tree. They were on a facet of the hill not quite so advantageous as others. The crowded slopes were beyond. However, one could see the smoke cloud and hear the cannon, and that was all that could be done anyhow. There were men and women about them, children, boys. The women were the most silent,--pale and silent; the men uttered low exclamations or soliloquies, or talked together. The boys were all but gleeful--save when they looked at the grown people, and then they tried for solemnity. Some of the children went to sleep. A mother nursed her babe. Near the foot of this hill, through a hollow, there ran a branch,--Bacon Quarter Branch. Here, in the seventeenth century, had occurred an Indian ma.s.sacre. The heavy, primeval woods had rung to the whoop of the savage, the groan of the settler, the scream of English woman and child. To-day the woods had been long cut, and the red man was gone. War remained--he had only changed his war paint and cry and weapons.
Miriam clasped her thin brown hands about her knee, rested her chin on them, and fastened her great brown eyes on the distant battle cloud.
Christianna, her sunbonnet pushed back, looked too, with limpid, awe-struck gaze. Were Pap and Dave and Billy fighting in that cloud? It was thicker than the morning mist in the hollow below Thunder Run Mountain, and it was not fleecy, pure, and white. It was yellowish, fierce, and ugly, and the sound that came from it made her heart beat thick and hard. Was he there--Was Allan Gold there in the cloud? She felt that she could not sit still; she wished to walk toward it. That being impossible, she began to make a little moaning sound. A woman in black, sitting on the gra.s.s near her, looked across. ”Don't!” she said.
”If you do that, all of us will do it. We've got to keep calm. If we let go, it would be like Rachel weeping. Try to be quiet.”
Christianna, who had moaned as she crooned, hardly knowing it, at once fell silent. Another woman spoke to her. ”Would you mind holding my baby? My head aches so. I must lie down here on the gra.s.s, just a minute.” Christianna took the baby. She handled it skilfully, and it was presently cooing against her breast. Were Pap and Dave over there, shooting and cutting? And Billy--Billy with a gun now instead of the spear the blacksmith had made him? And Allan Gold was not teaching in the schoolhouse on Thunder Run....
The woman took the baby back. The sun blazed down, there came a louder burst of sound. A man with a field-gla.s.s, standing near, uttered a ”Tchk!” of despair. ”Impenetrable curtain! The ancients managed things better--they did not fight in a fog!”
He seemed a person having authority, and the people immediately about him appealed for information. He looked through the gla.s.s and gave it, and was good, too, about lending the gla.s.s. ”It's A. P. Hill, I'm sure--with Longstreet to support him. It's A. P. Hill's brigades that are moving into the smoke. Most of that firing is from our batteries along the Chickahominy. We are going undoubtedly to cross to the north bank--Yes. McClellan's right wing--Fitz John Porter--A good soldier--Oh, he'll have about twenty-five thousand men.”
A boy, breathing excitement from top to toe, sent up a shrill voice.
”Isn't Jackson coming, sir? Aren't they looking for Jackson?”
The soldier who had drunk the milk was discovered by Miriam and Christianna, near their tree. He gave his voice. ”Surely! He'll have come down from Ashland and A. P. Hill is crossing here. That's an army north, and a big lot of troops south, and Fitz John Porter is between like a nut in a nut cracker. The cracker has only to work all right, and crush goes the filbert!” He raised himself and peered under puckered brows at the smoke-draped horizon. ”Yes, he's surely over there--Stonewall.--Going to flank Fitz John Porter--Then we'll hear a h.e.l.l of a fuss.”
”There's a battery galloping to the front,” said the man with the gla.s.s.
”Look, one of you! Wipe the gla.s.s; it gets misty. If it's the Purcell, I've got two sons--”
The soldier took the gla.s.s, turning it deftly with one hand. ”Yes, think it is the Purcell. Don't you worry, sir! They're all right. Artillerymen are hard to kill--That's Pender's brigade going now--”
Christianna clutched Miriam. ”Look! look! Oh, what is it?”
It soared into the blue, above the smoke. The sunlight struck it and it became a beautiful iridescent bubble, large as the moon. ”Oh, oh!” cried the boy. ”Look at the balloon!”
The hillside kept silence for a moment while it gazed, then--”Is it ours?--No; it is theirs!--It is going up from the hill behind Beaver Dam Creek.--Oh, it is lovely!--Lovely! No, no, it is horrible!--Look, look!
there is another!”