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Before the Dawn: A Story of the Fall of Richmond, a novel by Joseph A. Altsheler |
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Chapter 19. Night In The Wilderness |
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_ CHAPTER XIX. NIGHT IN THE WILDERNESS The two women clasped hands again and looked at each other as Harley disappeared amid the smoke. "He has left us," said Mrs. Markham. "Yes, but he has gone to his country's need," said his sister proudly. Then they were silent again. Night, smoky, cloudy and dark, thick with vapours and mists, and ashes and odours that repelled, was coming down upon the Wilderness. Afar in the east the fire in the forest still burned, sending up tongues of scarlet and crimson over which sparks flew in myriads. Nearer by, the combat went on, its fury undimmed by the darkness, its thunder as steady, as persistent and terrible as before. Helen was struck with horror. The battle, weird enough in the day, was yet more so in the darkness, and she could not understand why it did not close with the light. It partook of an inhuman quality, and that scene out there was more than ever to her an inferno because the flaming pit was now enclosed by outer blackness, completely cut off from all else--a world to itself in which all the passions strove, and none could tell to which would fall the mastery. She felt for the moment horror of both sides, North and South alike, and she wished only that the unnatural combat would cease; she did not care then--a brief emotion, though--which should prove the victor. It was a dark and solemn night that came down over the Wilderness and the two hundred thousand who had fought all day and still fought amid its thickets. Never before had that thin, red soil--redder now--borne such a crop, and many were glad that the darkness hid the sight from their enemies. The two Generals, the master minds who had propelled their mighty human machines against each other, were trying to reckon their losses--with the battle still in progress--and say to themselves whether they had won or lost. But this battlefield was no smooth and easy chessboard where the pawns might be moved as one wills and be counted as they fell, but a wilderness of thickets and forests and hills and swamps and valleys where the vast lines bent or twisted or interlaced and were lost in the shades and the darkness. Count and reckon as they would, the two Generals, equal in battle, face to face for the first time--could not give the total of the day. It was still an unadded sum, and the guns, despite the night, were steadily contributing new figures. This was the flaw in their arithmetic; nothing was complete, and they saw that they would have to begin again to-morrow. So, with this day's work yet unfinished, they began to prepare, sending for new regiments and brigades, massing more cannon, and planning afresh. But all these things were unknown to Helen as she sat there at the window with Mrs. Markham. Her thoughts wandered again to Wood, that splendid figure on horseback, and she sought to identify him there among the black marionettes that gyrated against the red background. But with the advance of night the stage was becoming more indistinct, the light shed over it more pallid and shifting, and nothing certain could be traced there. All the black figures were mixed in a confused whirl, and where stood the South and where the North neither Helen nor Mrs. Markham could tell. The night was thick and hot, rank with vapours and mists and odours that oppressed throat and nostrils. The wind seemed to have died, but the fine dust of ashes still fell and the banks of nauseous smoke floated about aimlessly. New fear assailed the two women for the first time--not so much fear of the shells and the bullets, but of the night and its mysteries and the weird combat that was still going on there where the light was so pallid and uncertain. Once again those who fought had become for them unreal--not human beings, but imps in an inferno of their own creation. They wished now that Harley was still with them. Whatever else he might be, he was brave and he would defend them. They looked around fearfully at the shadows that were encroaching upon the house. The rain of ashes and dust began to annoy them, and they moved a little closer to each other. Helen glanced back once. The inside of the house was now in total darkness, and out of it came the monotonous wailing of the black woman. It occurred suddenly to Helen that the servant had crouched there crying the whole day long. But she said nothing to her and turned her back to the window. "It is dying now," said Mrs. Markham. The dull red light suddenly contracted and then broke into intermittent flashes. The sound of the cannon and the rifles sank into the low muttering of distant thunder. The two women felt the house under them cease to tremble. Then the intermittent flashes, too, disappeared, the low rumbling died away like the echo of a distant wind, and a sudden and complete silence, mystic and oppressive in its solemnity, fell over the Wilderness. Only afar the burning forest glowed like a torch. The silence was for awhile more terrifying than the battle to which they had grown used. It hung over the forest and them like something visible that enfolded them. They breathed a hot, damp air heavy with ashes and smoke and dust, and their pulses throbbed painfully in their temples. Around them all the time was that horrible deathlike pall of silence. They spoke, and their voices, attuned before to the roar of the battle, sounded loud, shrill and threatening. Both started, then laughed weakly. "Is it really over?" exclaimed Mrs. Markham, hysterically. "Until to-morrow," replied Helen, with solemn prevision. She turned to the inner blackness of the house and lighted a candle, which she placed on the table, where it burned with an unsteady yellow light, illuminating the centre of the room with a fitful glow, but leaving the corners still in darkness. Everything lay under its veil of ashes--the table, the floor, and the bed on which Harley had slept. Helen felt a strange sort of strength, the strength of excitement and resolve. She shook the black woman by the arm and bade her bring food. "We must eat, for we shall have work to do," she said to Mrs. Markham, and nodded her head toward the outside. It was the task of but a few minutes, and then the two women prepared to go forth. They knew they would be needed on this night, and they listened to hear the ominous sounds that would be a call to them. But they heard nothing. There was the same dead, oppressive stillness. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass seemed to stir. Helen looked once more from the window. Afar in the east the forest still burned, but the light there was pallid, grayish, more of the quality of moonlight than of fire, and looked dim. Directly before her in the forest where the battle had been all was black, silent and impenetrable. It was true there were faint lights here and there as of torches that had burned badly, but they were pin-points, serving only to deepen the surrounding blackness. Once or twice she thought she saw figures moving slowly, but she was not sure. She heard nothing. Helen was in an unreal world. An atmosphere new, fiery and surcharged surrounded her, and in its heat little things melted away. Only the greater remained. That life in Richmond, bright and gay in many of its aspects, lived but a few days since, was ages and ages ago; it belonged to another world. Now she was in the forest with the battle and the dead, and other things did not count. The door stood wide open, and as Helen prepared to go another woman entered there, a woman young like herself, tall, wrapped in a long brown cloak, but bareheaded. Two or three stray locks, dark but edged with red gold, strayed down. Her face, clear and feminine though it was, seemed to Helen stronger than any other woman's face that she had ever seen. Helen knew instinctively that this was a woman of the North, or at least one with the North, and her first feeling was of hostility. So, as the two stood looking at each other, her gaze at first was marked by aversion and defiance. Who was she who had come with the other army, and why should she be there? But Lucia Catherwood knew both the women in the old house. She remembered a day in Richmond when this girl, in lilac and rose, so fair a representative of her South, welcomed a gallant general; and she remembered another, a girl of the same years, lonely, an outcast in the farthest fringe of the crowd--herself. Her first emotion, too, was hostility, mingled with another feeling closely akin to it. She had seen her with Prescott, and unwillingly had confessed them well matched. She, too, asked what this woman was doing here in the forest beside the battle; but these feelings had only a short life with her. There were certain masculine qualities in Lucia Catherwood that tended to openness and frankness. She advanced and offered her hand like a man to Helen. "We come under different flags," she said, "but we cannot be enemies here; we must be friends at least to-night, and I could wish that it should always be so." Her smile was so frank, so open, so engaging that Helen, whose nature was the same, could resist her no longer. Despite herself she liked this girl, so tall, so strong, with that clear, pure face showing a self-reliance such as she had never before seen on the face of a woman. Mrs. Markham yet hung back a little, cool, critical and suspicious, but presently she cast this manner from her and spoke as if Lucia Catherwood was her friend, one of long and approved standing. "I think that our work is to be the same," said Helen simply, and the other bowed in silent assent. Then the three went forth. The field of battle, or rather the portion of it which came nearest to them--it wound for miles through the thickets--lay a half-mile from the house under the solid black veil of a cloudy night, the forest, and the smoke that yet drifted about aimlessly. Outside the house the strange, repellent odours grew stronger, as if it were the reek of some infernal pit. They advanced over open ground, and the field of conflict was still black and soundless, though there was a little increase in the lights that moved dimly there. The smoke assailed them again, and fine ashes from the distant fire in the east now and then fell upon them. But they noticed none of these things, still advancing with steady step and unshrinking faces toward the forest. The twinkling lights increased and sounds came at last. Helen would not say to herself what they were. She hoped that her fancy deceived her; but the three women did not stop. Helen looked at the tall, straight young figure beside her, so strong, so self-reliant, and she drew strength from her companion--now she was such. They walked side by side, and Mrs. Markham came behind. Helen began to feel the influence of a personality, a will stronger than her own, and she yielded to it without further question and without reluctance, having the feeling that she had known this girl a long time. The trembling lights of the forest increased, moving about like so many fireflies in the night; the nauseous odours grew heavier, more persistent, and for a moment Helen felt ill; her head began to spin around at the thought of what she was going to see, but quickly she recovered herself and went on by the side of the girl who never faltered. Helen wondered at such courage, and wondering, she admired. The ground grew rougher, set with tiny hillocks and stones and patch after patch of scrub bushes. Once Helen stumbled against something that felt cold even through the leather of her shoe, and she shuddered. But it was only a spent cannon ball lying peacefully among the bushes, its mission ended. They reached burnt ground--spots where the scanty grass or the bushes had been set on fire by the cannon or the rifles. Many places still burned slowly and sent up languid sparks and dull smoke. In other places the ground was torn as if many ploughs had been run roughly over it, and Helen knew that the shells and the cannon balls had passed in showers. There were other objects, too, lying very quiet, but she would not look at them, though they increased fast as they went on, lying like seed sown above ground. They were at the edge of the forest now, and here the air was thicker and darker. The mists and vapours floated among the trees and lay like warm, wet blankets upon their faces. They saw now many moving figures, some bending down as if they would lift something from the earth, and others who held lights. Occasionally they passed women like themselves, but not often. Some of the men were in gray uniform and some in blue, but they passed and repassed each other without question, doing the work they had come there to do. Here in the forest the area of burnt ground was larger, and many coils of smoke rose languidly to join the banks of it that towered overhead. The still objects, too, were lying as far as one could see, in groups here, somewhat scattered there, but the continuity never broken, many with their faces upturned to the sky as if they awaited placidly the last call. Helen was struck by this peace, this seeming confidence in what was to come. The passage, then, had not been so hard! Here, when she stood in the centre of it all, the old feelings of awe returned, and the real world, the world that she had known before this day, swung farther and farther away. There was still but little noise, for those who yet lived were silent, waiting patiently, and the vast peace was more powerful in its impression upon the mind than any tumult could have been. Helen looked up once at the skies. They were black and overcast. But few stars twinkled there. It was a fit canopy for the Wilderness, the gloomy forest that bore such a burden. From a far point in the southwest came the low rumble of thunder, and lightning, like the heat-lightning of a summer night, glimmered fitfully. Then there was a faint, sullen sound, the report of a distant cannon shot. Helen started, more in anger than terror. Would they fight again at such a time? She felt blame for both, but the shot was not repeated then. A signal gun, she thought, and went on, unconsciously going where the strong young figure of Lucia Catherwood led the way. She heard presently another distant cannon shot, its solemn echoes rolling all around the horizon, but she paid no heed to it. Her mind was now for other things. An inky sky overhung the battlefield and all it held. Those nights in the Wilderness were among the blackest in both ways this country has ever known. Brigades and batteries moving in the dense scrub, seeking better places for the fresh battle on the morrow, wandered sometimes through each other's lines. Soldiers, not knowing whether they were among friends or enemies, and not caring, drank in the darkness from the same streams, and, overpowered by fatigue, North and South alike often slept a soundless sleep under trees not fifty yards from one another; but the two Generals, who were the supreme expression of the genius of either side, never slept. They had met for the first time; each nearly always a victor before, neither had now won. The result yet to come lay hidden in the black Wilderness, and by smoking camp-fires they planned for the next day, knowing well that they would meet again in a combat fiercer, longer and deadlier than ever, the one always seeking to drive on, the other always seeking to hold him back. The Wilderness enclosed many secrets that night, hiding dead and living alike. Many of the fallen lay unseen amid the ravines and hollows, and the burning forest was their funeral pyre. Never did the Wilderness more deserve its name; gloomy at any time, it had new attributes of solemn majesty. Everything seemed to be in unison with those who lay there--the pitchy blackness, the low muttering of distant thunder, the fitful glimmer of the lightning, the stems of trees twisted and contorted by the gleam of the uncertain flashes, the white faces of the slain upturned to the sky seen dimly by the same light, the banks of smoke and vapour yet floating through the forest, the strange, repellent odours, and the heavy, melancholy silence. Those who had come upon the field after the night began worked without talk, the men from either side passing and repassing each other, but showing no hostility. The three women, too, began to help them, doing the errand upon which they had come, and their service was received without question and without comment. No one asked another why he was there; his duty lay plain before him. It was Lucia Catherwood who took the lead, neither Helen nor Mrs. Markham disputing her fitness for the place, too apparent to all to be denied; it was she who never flinched, who, if she spoke at all, spoke words of cheer, whose strength and courage seemed never to fail. Thus the hours passed, and the character of the night in the Wilderness did not change. There was yet compared with the tumult of the day a heavy, oppressive silence; the smoke and the vapours did not go away, the heavy atmosphere did not thin, and at intervals the distant thunder rumbled and the fitful lightning glared over a distorted forest. The three worked in silence, like those around them, faithful, undaunted. Mrs. Markham, the cynical and worldly, was strangely changed, perhaps the most changed of the three; all her affectations were gone, and she was now only an earnest woman. And while the three worked they always watched for one man. And this man was not the same with any one of the three. It was past midnight and Helen did not know how long she had been upon the battlefield, working as she did in a kind of a dream, or rather mist, in which everything was fanciful and unreal, with her head full of strange sights and unheard sounds, when she saw two men ride side by side and silently out of the black forest--two figures, one upright, powerful, the other drooping, with head that swayed slightly from side to side. She knew them at once despite the shadows of the trees and the faint moonlight--and it was what her thoughts had told her would come true. It had never occurred to her that the one who sat in the saddle so erect and so powerful could fall; nor had he. She and Mrs. Markham advanced to meet them. Harley's head swayed slightly from side to side, and his clothing showed red in the dim moonlight. Wood held him in the saddle with one hand and guided the two horses with the other. Both women were white to the lips, but it was Helen who spoke first. "I expected you," she said to Wood. Wood replied that Harley was not hurt save by exhaustion from his previous wounds. He had come, too, at a critical moment, and his coming had been worth much to the South. But now he was half unconscious; he must rest or die. The General spoke in simple words, language that one would have called dialect, but Helen did not think of those things; his figure was grander than ever before to her, because, despite the battle, he had remembered to bring back her brother. Mrs. Markham was quiet, saying no word, but she went with them to the house, where Harley was placed on the very bed on which he had slept the night before. Lucia Catherwood did not turn back, and was left alone on the field, but she was neither afraid nor lonely. She, too, was looking for some one--one whom she was in dread lest she find and whom she wished to find nevertheless. But she had a feeling--how or whence it came she did not know--that she would find him there. Always while she helped the others, hour after hour, she looked for him, glancing into every ravine and hollow, and neglecting no thicket or clump of bushes that she passed. She believed that she would know him if she saw but the edge of his coat or his hand. At last she reached the fringe of the battlefield. The fallen forms were fewer and the ground less torn by the tramplings of men and horses and the wheels of guns, though the storm had passed, leaving its track of ruin. Here, too, were burned spots, the grass still smouldering and sending up tiny sparks, a tree or two twisted out of shape and half-consumed by flames; a broken cannon, emblem of destruction, lying wheelless on the ground. Lucia looked back toward the more populous field of the fallen and saw there the dim lights still moving, but decreasing now as the night waned. Low, blurred sounds came to her ears. As for herself, she stood in the darkness, silvered dimly by a faint moonlight, a tall, lithe young figure, self-reliant, unafraid. She began now to search every hollow, to look among the bushes and the ravines. She had heard from men of his own company that he was missing, and she would not turn back while he was unfound. It was for this that she had come, and he would need her. She was on the farthest rim of the battlefield, where the lights when she looked back were almost lost, and it seemed to be enclosed wholly by the darkness and the vapours. No voice came from it, but in the forest before her were new sounds--a curious tread as of many men together stepping lightly, the clanging of metal, and now and then a neigh coming faintly. This, she knew, were the brigades and the batteries seeking position in the darkness for a new battle; but she was not afraid. Lucia Catherwood was not thinking then of the Wilderness nor of the vast tragedy that it held, but of a flight one snowy night from a hostile capital, a flight that was not unhappy because of true companionship. Formed amid hard circumstances, hers was not a character that yielded quickly to sentiment, but when the barriers were broken down she gave much. She heard a tread in the brushwood. Some horses, saddles on and bridles hanging--their riders lost, she well knew how--galloped near her, looked at her a moment or two with wide eyes, and then passed on. Far to the right she heard a faint cannon shot. If they were going to fight again, why not wait until the next day? It could not be done in all this darkness. A blacker night she had never seen. She came to a tiny valley, a mere cup in the bleak, red ridges, well set with rich green grass as if more fertile soil had gathered there, but all torn and trampled, showing that one of the fiercest eddies of the battle had centred in this spot. At the very edge lay two horses with their outstretched necks crossed united in death. In the trampled grass lay other dark figures which she could not pass without a shudder. She paused here a moment because it seemed to be growing darker. The low rumble of thunder from the far western horizon came again, all the more threatening because of its faintness and distance. The lightning gleamed a moment and by its quick flash she saw the one she was seeking. He lay at the far edge of the little valley where the grass had grown richest and tallest, and he was almost hidden by the long stems. It was his face that she saw first, white and still in the lightning's glare, but she did not believe that he was dead. Ah! that could not happen. Raising his head in her arms, she rested it upon her knee, moistening his lips with water that she carried in a flask. She was a strong woman, both physically and mentally, far beyond the average of her sex, and now she would not yield to any emotion. No; she would do what it was necessary to do, and not until then would she even put her finger upon his wrist to find if the pulse were still beating. The wound was on the side of the head, under the hair, and she remembered afterward how glad she was that the scar would always be hidden by the hair. Strong enough to examine the nature of the injury, she judged that it had been done by a fragment of shell, and she believed that the concussion and loss of blood, rather than any fatal wound, had caused Prescott's fall. As she drew away the hair, washed the wound and bound it up with a strip from her own dress, she was filled with a divine gladness. Not only was she doing that which she wished most to do, but she was making repayment. He would have died there had she not found him, and no one else would have found him in that lone spot. Not yet did she seek to move him or to bring help. She would have him to herself for awhile--would watch over him like a mother, and she could do as much as any surgeon. She was glad Helen and the other woman had turned aside, for she alone had found him. No one else could claim a share in saving him. He was for the time hers and hers alone, and in this she rejoiced. As his pulse was growing stronger she knew that he would live. No doubt of it now occurred to her mind, and she was still happy. The battle of the day that was gone and of the day that was to come, and all the thousands, the living and the fallen, were alike forgotten. She remembered only him. Again came the tramp of riderless horses, and for a moment she was in dread--not for herself, but for him--but again they turned and passed her by. When the low, threatening note of the cannon shot came once more she trembled lest the battle be renewed in the darkness and surge over this spot; but silence only followed the report. Misty forms filed past in the thicket. They were in blue, a regiment of her own people passing in the darkness. She crouched low in the grass, holding his head upon her knees, hiding again, not for herself, but for him. She would not have him a prisoner, but preferred to become one herself, and cared nothing for it. This was repayment. His pulse was growing stronger and stronger and he uttered half-spoken words while his head moved slightly upon her knees. She did not know how long she had been there, and she looked back again toward the field. It was now wholly in darkness, then lighted dimly by a fitful flash of lightning. She must carry him to shelter, and without taking thought, she tried to lift him in her arms. He was heavy, lying like lead, and she put him down again, but very softly. She must go for help. Then she heard once more the tread of those riderless horses and feared for him. She could not leave him there alone. She made a mighty effort, lifted him in her arms, and staggered toward the battlefield. _ |
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