Part 15 (2/2)
”Your reward will not be in accordance with your sufferings. It will be based on the efficiency with which you obey my orders. Read that----”
He handed to him a piece of paper on which he had scrawled his secret instructions.
Another he gave to Lynch.
”Hand them back to me when you read them, and I will burn them. These instructions are not to pa.s.s the lips of any man until the time is ripe--four bare walls are not to hear them whispered.”
Both men handed to the leader the slips of paper simultaneously.
”Are we agreed, gentlemen?”
”Perfectly,” answered Howle.
”Your word is law to me, sir,” said Lynch.
”Then you will draw on me personally for your expenses, and leave for the South within forty-eight hours. I wish your reports delivered to me two weeks before the meeting of Congress.”
As Lynch pa.s.sed through the hall on his way to the door, the brown woman bade him good-night and pressed into his hand a letter.
As his yellow fingers closed on the missive, his eyes flashed for a moment with catlike humour.
The woman's face wore the mask of a sphinx.
CHAPTER II
SWEETHEARTS
When the first shock of horror at her husband's peril pa.s.sed, it left a strange new light in Mrs. Cameron's eyes.
The heritage of centuries of heroic blood from the martyrs of old Scotland began to flash its inspiration from the past. Her heart beat with the unconscious life of men and women who had stood in the stocks, and walked in chains to the stake with songs on their lips.
The threat against the life of Doctor Cameron had not only stirred her martyr blood: it had roused the latent heroism of a beautiful girlhood. To her he had ever been the lover and the undimmed hero of her girlish dreams. She spent whole hours locked in her room alone. Margaret knew that she was on her knees. She always came forth with s.h.i.+ning face and with soft words on her lips.
She struggled for two months in vain efforts to obtain a single interview with him, or to obtain a copy of the charges. Doctor Cameron had been placed in the old Capitol Prison, already crowded to the utmost. He was in delicate health, and so ill when she had left home he could not accompany her to Richmond.
Not a written or spoken word was allowed to pa.s.s those prison doors. She could communicate with him only through the officers in charge. Every message from him was the same. ”I love you always. Do not worry. Go home the moment you can leave Ben. I fear the worst at Piedmont.”
When he had sent this message, he would sit down and write the truth in a little diary he kept:
”Another day of anguish. How long, O Lord? Just one touch of her hand, one last pressure of her lips, and I am content. I have no desire to live--I am tired.”
The officers repeated the verbal messages, but they made no impression on Mrs. Cameron. By a mental telepathy which had always linked her life with his her soul had pa.s.sed those prison bars. If he had written the pitiful record with a dagger's point on her heart, she could not have felt it more keenly.
At times overwhelmed, she lay prostrate and sobbed in half-articulate cries. And then from the silence and mystery of the spirit world in which she felt the beat of the heart of Eternal Love would come again the strange peace that pa.s.seth understanding. She would rise and go forth to her task with a smile.
In July she saw Mrs. Surratt taken from this old Capitol Prison to be hung with Payne, Herold, and Atzerodt for complicity in the a.s.sa.s.sination. The military commission before whom this farce of justice was enacted, suspicious of the testimony of the perjured wretches who had sworn her life away, had filed a memorandum with their verdict asking the President for mercy.
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