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_ In the full beams of the sun the wagon turned into the drive between the
lilacs and drew up before the Doric columns. Mr. Bill and the two old
ladies came out upon the portico, and the Governor was lifted down by Uncle
Shadrach and Hosea and laid upon the high tester bed in the room behind the
parlour.
As Betty entered the hall, the familiar sights of every day struck her eyes
with the smart of a physical blow. The excitement of the shock had passed
from her; there was no longer need to tighten the nervous strain, and
henceforth she must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest--in
the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories. While
there was something for her hands to do--or the danger of delay in the long
watch upon the road--it had not been so hard to brace her strength against
necessity, but here--what was there left that she must bring herself to
endure? The torturing round of daily things, the quiet house in which to
cherish new regrets, and outside the autumn sunshine on the long white
turnpike. The old waiting grown sadder, was begun again; she must put out
her hands to take up life where it had stopped, go up and down the shining
staircase and through the unchanged rooms, while her ears were always
straining for the sound of the cannon, or the beat of a horse's hoofs upon
the road.
The brick wall around the little graveyard was torn down in one corner,
and, while the afternoon sun slanted between the aspens, the Governor was
laid away in the open grave beneath rank periwinkle. There was no minister
to read the service, but as the clods of earth fell on the coffin, Mrs.
Ambler opened her prayer book and Betty, kneeling upon the ground, heard
the low words with her eyes on the distant mountains. Overhead the aspens
stirred beneath a passing breeze, and a few withered leaves drifted slowly
down. Aunt Lydia wept softly, and the servants broke into a subdued
wailing, but Mrs. Ambler's gentle voice did not falter.
"He, cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a
shadow, and never continueth in one stay."
She read on quietly in the midst of the weeping slaves, who had closed
about her. Then, at the last words, her hands dropped to her sides, and she
drew back while Uncle Shadrach shovelled in the clay.
"It is but a span," she repeated, looking out into the sunshine, with a
light that was almost unearthly upon her face.
"Come away, mamma," said Betty, holding out her arms; and when the last
spray of life-everlasting was placed upon the finished mound, they went out
by the hollow in the wall, turning from time to time to look back at the
gray aspens. Down the little hill, through the orchard, and across the
meadows filled with waving golden-rod, the procession of white and black
filed slowly homeward. When the lawn was reached each went to his
accustomed task, and Aunt Lydia to her garden.
An hour later the Major rode over in response to a message which had just
reached him.
"I was in town all the morning," he explained in a trembling voice, "and I
didn't get the news until a half hour ago. The saddest day of my life,
madam, is the one upon which I learn that I have outlived him."
"He loved you, Major," said Mrs. Ambler, meeting his swimming eyes.
"Loved me!" repeated the old man, quivering in his chair, "I tell you,
madam, I would rather have been Peyton Ambler's friend than President of
the Confederacy! Do you remember the time he gave me his last keg of brandy
and went without for a month?"
She nodded, smiling, and the Major, with red eyes and shaking hands,
wandered into endless reminiscences of the long friendship. To Betty these
trivial anecdotes were only a fresh torture, but Mrs. Ambler followed them
eagerly, comparing her recollections with the Major's, and repeating in a
low voice to herself characteristic stories which she had not heard before.
"I remember that--we had been married six months then," she would say, with
the unearthly light upon her face. "It is almost like living again to hear
you, Major."
"Well, madam, life is a sad affair, but it is the best we've got,"
responded the old gentleman, gravely.
"He loved it," returned Mrs. Ambler, and as the Major rose to go, she
followed him into the hall and inquired if Mrs. Lightfoot had been
successful with her weaving. "She told me that she intended to have her old
looms set up again," she added, "and I think that I shall follow her
example. Between us we might clothe a regiment of soldiers."
"She has had the servants brushing off the cobwebs for a week," replied the
Major, "and to-day I actually found Car'line at a spinning wheel on the
back flagstones. There's not the faintest doubt in my mind that if Molly
had been placed in the Commissary department our soldiers would be living
to-day on the fat of the land. She has knitted thirty pairs of socks since
spring. Good-by, my dear lady, good-by, and may God sustain you in your
double affliction."
He crossed the portico, bowed as he descended the steps, and, mounting in
the drive, rode slowly away upon his dappled mare. When he reached the
turnpike he lifted his hat again and passed on at an amble.
During the next few months it seemed to Betty that she aged a year each
day. The lines closed and opened round them; troops of blue and gray
cavalrymen swept up and down the turnpike; the pastures were invaded by
each army in its turn, and the hen-house became the spoil of a regiment of
stragglers. Uncle Shadrach had buried the silver beneath the floor of his
cabin, and Aunt Floretta set her dough to rise each morning under a loose
pile of kindling wood. Once a deserter penetrated into Betty's chamber, and
the girl drove him out at the point of an old army pistol, which she kept
upon her bureau.
"If you think I am afraid of you come a step nearer," she had said coolly,
and the man had turned to run into the arms of a Federal officer, who was
sweeping up the stragglers. He was a blue-eyed young Northerner, and for
three days after that he had set a guard upon the portico at Uplands. The
memory of the small white-faced girl, with her big army pistol and the
blazing eyes haunted him from that hour until Appomattox, when he heaved a
sigh of relief and dismissed it from his thoughts. "She would have shot the
rascal in another second," he said afterward, "and, by George, I wish she
had."
The Governor's wine cellar was emptied long ago, the rare old wine flowing
from broken casks across the hall.
"What does it matter?" Mrs. Ambler had asked wearily, watching the red
stream drip upon the portico. "What is wine when our soldiers are starving
for bread? And besides, war lives off the soil, as your father used to
say."
Betty lifted her skirts and stepped over the bright puddles, glancing
disdainfully after the Hessian stragglers, who went singing down the drive.
"I hope their officers will get them," she remarked vindictively, "and the
next time they offer us a guard, I shall accept him for good and all, if he
happens to have been born on American soil. I don't mind Yankees so
much--you can usually quiet them with the molasses jug--but these
foreigners are awful. From a Hessian or a renegade Virginian, good Lord
deliver us."
"Some of them have kind hearts," remarked Mrs. Ambler, wonderingly. "I
don't see how they can bear to come down to fight us. The Major met General
McClellan, you know, and he admitted afterwards that he shouldn't have
known from his manner that he was not a Southern gentleman."
"Well, I hope he has left us a shoulder of bacon in the smokehouse,"
replied Betty, laughing. "You haven't eaten a mouthful for two days,
mamma."
"I don't feel that I have a right to eat, my dear," said Mrs. Ambler. "It
seems a useless extravagance when every little bit helps the army."
"Well, I can't support the army, but I mean to feed you," returned Betty
decisively, and she went out to ask Hosea if he had found a new hiding
place for the cattle. Except upon the rare mornings when Mr. Bill left his
fishing, the direction of the farm had fallen entirely upon Betty's
shoulders. Wilson, the overseer, was in the army, and Hosea had gradually
risen to take his place. "We must keep things up," the girl had insisted,
"don't let us go to rack and ruin--papa would have hated it so," and, with
the negro's aid, she had struggled to keep up the common tenor of the old
country life.
Rising at daybreak, she went each morning to overlook the milking of the
cows, hidden in their retreat among the hills; and as the sun rose higher,
she came back to start the field hands to the ploughing and the women to
the looms in one of the detached wings. Then there was the big storehouse
to go into, the rations of the servants to be drawn from their secret
corners, the meal to be measured, and the bacon to be sliced with the care
which fretted her lavish hands. After this there came the shucking of the
corn, a negro frolic even in war years, so long as there was any corn to
shuck, and lastly the counting of the full bags of grain before the heavy
wagon was sent to the little mill beside the river. From sunrise to sunset
the girl's hands were not idle for an instant, and in the long evenings, by
the light of the home-made tallow dips, which served for candles, she would
draw out a gray yarn stocking and knit busily for the army, while she
tried, with an aching heart, to cheer her mother. Her sunny humour had made
play of a man's work as of a woman's anxiety.
Sometimes, on bright mornings, Mr. Bill would stroll over with his rod upon
his shoulder and a string of silver perch in his hand. He had grown old and
very feeble, and his angling had become a passion mightier than an army
with bayonets. He took small interest in the war--at times he seemed almost
unconscious of the suffering around him--but he enjoyed his chats with
Union officers upon the road, who occasionally capped his stories of big
sport with tales of mountain trout which they had drawn from Northern
streams. He would sit for hours motionless under the willows by the river,
and once when his house was fired, during a raid up the valley, he was
heard to remark regretfully that the messenger had "scared away his first
bite in an hour." Placid, wide-girthed, dull-faced, innocent as a child, he
sat in the midst of war dangling his line above the silver perch. _
Read next: BOOK FOURTH - THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED: Chapter VI - The Peaceful Side of War -
Read previous: BOOK FOURTH - THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED: Chapter IV - In the Silence of the Guns
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