Part 89 (1/2)
She looked about her, still with an intent and narrowed gaze. ”The lone tree hill. It is a good place to see it from. There is nothing to be done but to join this day to a day last June--the day of Port Republic.”
Raising her hands she pressed them to her eyes as though to shut out a veritable lightning glare, then dropped them. She stood very straight, young, slender, finely and strongly fibred. ”He said he would do the worst he could, and he has done it. And I said, 'At your peril!' and at his peril it shall be! And the harm that he has done, he shall undo it!”
She turned. ”Richard! he shall undo it.”
Cleave stood beside her. ”Love, love! how beautiful the light is over Greenwood! I thought, sitting here, 'I will not wait for the suns.h.i.+ne; I will go while all things are in shadow.' And I turned to go. And then came the suns.h.i.+ne. I must go now--away from the suns.h.i.+ne. I had but an hour, and half of it was gone before the suns.h.i.+ne came.”
”How shall I know,” she said, ”if you are living? There is a battle coming.”
”Yes. Judith, I will not write to you. Do not ask me; I will not. But after each battle I have managed somehow to get a line to my mother. She will tell you that I am living, well and living. I do not think that I shall die--no, not till Maury Stafford and I have met again!”
”He is in prison. They say so many die there.... Oh, Richard, write to me--”
But Cleave would not. ”No! To do that is to say, 'All is as it was, and I let her take me with this stain!' I will not--I will not. Circ.u.mstance has betrayed us here this hour. We could not help it, and it has been a glory, a dream. That is it, a dream. I will not wake till I have said good-bye!”
They said good-bye, still in the dream, as lovers might, when one goes forth to battle and the other stays behind. He released her, turned short and sharp, and went down from the lone tree hill, down the side from Greenwood, to the country road. A piece of woods hid him from sight.
Judith stood motionless for a time, then she sat down upon the bench.
She sat like a sibyl, elbows on knees, chin in hands, her gaze narrowed and fixed. She spoke aloud, and her voice was strange in her own ears.
”Maury Stafford in prison. Where, and how long?”
CHAPTER XLVI
FREDERICKSBURG
Snow lay deep on the banks of the Rappahannock, in the forest, up and down the river, on the plain about the little city, on the bold heights of the northern sh.o.r.e, on the hills of the southern, commanding the plain. The snow was deep, but somewhat milder weather had set in.
December the eleventh dawned still and foggy.
General Burnside with a hundred and twenty thousand blue troops appointed this day to pa.s.s the Rappahannock, a stream that flowed across the road to Richmond. He had been responsible for choosing this route to the keep of the fortress, and he must make good his reiterated, genial a.s.surances of success. The Rappahannock, Fredericksburg, and a line of hills masked the onward-going road and its sign, _This way to Richmond_.
”Well, the Rappahannock can be bridged! A brigade known to be occupying the town? Well, a hundred and forty guns admirably planted on Stafford Heights will drive out the rebel brigade! The line of hills, bleak and desolate with fir woods?--hares and snow birds are all the life over there! General Lee and Stonewall Jackson? Down the Rappahannock below Moss Neck. At least, undoubtedly, Stonewall Jackson's down there. The balloon people say so. General Lee's got an idea that Port Royal's our point of attack. The ma.s.s of his army's there. The gunboat people say so. Longstreet may be behind those hills. Well, we'll crush Longstreet!
We'll build our bridges under cover of this fortunate fog, and go over and defeat Longstreet and be far down the road to Richmond before a man can say Jack Robinson!”
”Jack Robinson!” said the brigade from McLaws's division--Barksdale's Mississippians--drawn up on the water edge of Fredericksburg. They were tall men--Barksdale's Mississippians--playful bear-hunters from the cane brakes, young and powerfully made, and deadly shots. ”Old Barksdale”
knew how to handle them, and together they were a handful for any enemy whatsoever. Sixteen hundred born hunters and fighters, they opened fire on the bridge-builders, trying to build four bridges, three above, one below the town. Barksdale's men were somewhat sheltered by the houses on the river brink; the blue had the favourable fog with which to cover operations. It did not wholly help; the Mississippians had keen eyes; the rifles blazed, blazed, blazed! Burnside's bridge-builders were gallant men; beaten back from the river they came again and again, but again and again the eyes of the swamp hunters ran along the gleaming barrels and a thousand bronzed fingers pulled a thousand triggers. Past the middle of the day the fog lifted. The town lay defined and helpless beneath a pallid sky.
The artillery of the Army of the Potomac opened upon it. One hundred and forty heavy guns, set in tiers upon the heights to the north, fired each into Fredericksburg fifty rounds. Under that terrible cover the blue began to cross on pontoons.
A number of the women and children had been sent from the town during the preceding days. Not all, however, were gone. Many had no place to go to; some were ill and some were nursing the ill; many had husbands, sons, brothers, there at hand in the Army of Northern Virginia and would not go. Now with the beginning of the bombardment they must go. There were grey, imperative orders. ”At once! at once! Go _where_? G.o.d knows!
but go.”
They went, almost all, in the snow, beneath the pallid sky, with the sh.e.l.ls shrieking behind them. They carried the children, they half carried the sick and the very old. They stumbled on, between the frozen hills by the dark pointed cedars, over the bare white fields. Behind them home was being destroyed; before them lay desolation, and all around was winter. They had perhaps thought it out, and were headed--the various forlorn lines--for this or that country house, but they looked lost, remnant of a world become glacial, whirled with suddenness into the sidereal cold, cold! and the loneliness of cold. The older children were very brave; but there were babes, too, and these wailed and wailed.
Their wailing made a strange, futile sound beneath the thundering of the guns.
One of these parties came through the snow to a swollen creek on which the ice cakes were floating. Cross!--yes, but how? The leaders consulted together, then went up the stream to find a possible ford, and came in sight of a grey battery, waiting among the hills. ”Oh, soldiers!--oh, soldiers!--come and help!”
Down hastened a detachment, eager, respectful, a lieutenant directing, the very battery horses looking anxious, responsible. A soldier in the saddle, a child in front, a child behind, the old steady horses planting their feet carefully in the icy rus.h.i.+ng stream, over went the children.
Then the women crossed, their hands resting on the grey-clad shoulders.
All were over; all thanked the soldiers. The soldiers took off their caps, wished with all their hearts that they had at command fire-lit palaces and a banquet set! Having neither, being themselves without shelter or food and ordered not to build fires, they could only bare their heads and watch the other soldiers out of sight, carrying the children, half carrying the old and sick, stumbling through the snow, by the dark pointed cedars, and presently lost to view among the frozen hills.
The sh.e.l.ls rained destruction into Fredericksburg. Houses were battered and broken; houses were set on fire. Through the smoke and uproar, the explosions and detonations and tongues of flame, the Mississippians beat back another attempt at the bridges and opened fire on boat after boat now pus.h.i.+ng from the northern sh.o.r.e. But the boats came bravely on, bravely manned; hundreds might be driven from the bridge-building, but other hundreds sprang to take their places--and always from the heights came the rain of iron, smas.h.i.+ng, s.h.i.+vering, setting afire, tearing up the streets, bringing down the walls, ruining, wounding, slaying! McLaws sent an order to Barksdale, Barksdale gave it to his brigade.