House Divided (156 page)

“Longstreet's men?”

“Yes, General Anderson commanding. Then after the First Corps was up, we heard that Sheridan had gone around our right toward Richmond, so we rode to catch them. We were in the saddle most of the time from Sunday afternoon till today—most of three days and nights. We got in front of them at Yellow Tavern. They hit us about noon yesterday. That was when I got this.”

Cinda bade him rest. Burr wished to know how Stuart did, and Vesta volunteered to go and ask. Stuart died that night. The rumble of guns a few miles away, where his men still fought Sheridan's, tolled
the hours of the death watch till dawn. Next day word came that the Yankees had withdrawn.

“They might as well,” Burr said sorrowfully. “Short of capturing Richmond, killing General Stuart is the greatest victory they could hope to win.”

He insisted on going to the funeral services in St. James's Church, and on following his old commander's body to Hollywood. All Richmond mourned, that day; and Cinda, thinking of the hundreds of others dying or dead in the hospitals, and on the battlefields to the northward, wondered that any one man's death could summon from eyes drained dry by grief so many tears.

Yet Stuart was more than a man. Yes, he was more than a thousand men. Jackson was gone, and Cousin Jeems was wounded, and Stuart was dead. Of the great men only Lee remained. For these who were gone, where would a worthy substitute be found?

It was from an officer with an amputated leg that she heard how Longstreet had been wounded, shot by his own men just as Jackson had been, and not far from the same spot. “The woods were full of smoke,” the officer explained. “He and some others rode right across the front of our advance and our men gave them a volley. Before that, he had flanked the Union line and broken it. If he hadn't been hurt I think we'd have driven them back across the Rapidan that night.”

So this was another of those mischances which sometimes made it seem that God Himself did not intend the Confederacy to win! It was bitter to come again and again to the very threshold of victory, only to be turned back; bitter and terrible to feel that they must go wearily on into the black valley of despair.

 

Sunday she was too tired to go to church; but Anne and Julian, Anne still pale but very lovely, came to dinner and brought the baby; and before Vesta and Burr returned from church, Rollin Lyle rang the bell. He had come north with Trenholm's squadron of the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry, assigned to Hampton's Division.

“We're in camp on the Chickahominy, with headquarters at Drewry's Bluff,” he said. “We've been busy picketing, and scouting Butler's Yankees. We gave them a licking last Monday, just for practice.”

Julian said an exultant word, but Cinda heard the heaviness in Rollin's tones. “Is something wrong?”

“Why—my father's dead,” he said reluctantly.

“Oh, Rollin!”

“He'd been working too hard, Mama thinks. He died in his sleep.” He hesitated. “I had a chance to go home. She was glad to see me.”

Cinda knew Mrs. Lyle from occasional meetings in Charleston; a delicate little woman, seeming as utterly helpless as she was charming. “Where is she?”

“At Fallow Fields. That's up on the Peedee, in North Carolina. We've had to give up the plantations nearer the coast.”

“What will she do?”

“Manage Fallow Fields.” He added proudly: “Mama's strong, you know. She's little, but nothing can beat her down.”

Before they could say more, Vesta appeared; and his eyes turned to her and never left her. Cinda decided it was for him to tell Vesta of his father's death, and she was glad when Julian and Anne did not speak of it at dinner. Afterward, to give Rollin and Vesta a chance to be together, she sent Vesta on an unnecessary errand to Tilda, sent Rollin to keep her company. When they were gone, Burr looked at her with a smile.

“That looked like some of your managing, Mama.”

“Why not?” she demanded. Anne laughed softly and asked whether Burr was blind, and he said in a puzzled tone:

“I thought Rollin never looked at anyone but Dolly!”

“But Dolly's married, Burr!”

He had not known that, so Cinda told him what there was to tell, and Julian said Bruce Kenyon was a fine boy, and Burr said that if that was true he was much too good for Dolly. He asked where Darrell was.

“No one seems to know,” Julian said, and Cinda added:

“And except Tilda, I don't suppose anyone cares.”

When Vesta and Rollin returned, Rollin's quiet sadness was gone. These two wore happiness so openly that the others caught the infection, and they were all ridiculously jolly, laughing easily at nothing. Cinda thought how young they were, and how fine it was to be young and to be able to turn to laughter for a while. They could even laugh
at the stories that began to be told about Butcher Grant, who seemed ready to give the lives of five of his soldiers to kill one Southerner.

“In the fight at the Wilderness,” Julian told them, “they say he just sat under a tree smoking a cigar, and whenever the couriers told him a lot of his men were being killed he'd just say: ‘Put in another regiment!' ”

They laughed at that, and Burr had a tale to match it. “After he crossed the Rapidan we captured his pontoons, but he said: ‘That's all right. If I beat General Lee I won't need them, and if he beats me, I can take all the men I'll have left by that time back across the river on a log!'”

Cinda could not share their relish for these jests at death. There was something inexorable and frightening about General Grant; and besides, she had seen the wounded. But let these youngsters laugh! If Julian could laugh, maimed as he was, and if Burr could laugh and forget his mutilated hands, why, so much the better! Her thoughts turned to Brett. Somewhere in the north he and his fellows still faced Butcher Grant day by day. “Send in another regiment.” Brett must meet those fresh regiments, coming on in an endless procession, new ones to take the place of those destroyed. General Grant could afford to pay five lives for one; but Lee dared not accept the bargain. Lee—thank God for it!—Lee must be frugal of his men. Of men like Brett.

 

Burr, his hands well healed, went off to Raleigh to join Barbara; and for Cinda the days ran together. Talk touched her, but she heard without attention. Mr. Memminger had shipped the women clerks who signed the new currency as fast as it was printed off to Columbia to do their work there. Perhaps he expected Richmond's fall. Flour was five hundred dollars the barrel. A wounded man with a bullet through his shoulder and a bayonet wound in his chest swore to her that a Yankee had given him that bayonet thrust while he lay helpless from the bullet wound. Pyaemia struck the officers' hospital in the Baptist Female College and so many died that the wounded there had to be removed to the Almshouse; but Chimborazo Hospital was not affected. Butler's troops on the Peninsula and at Bermuda Hundred made it impossible for fishermen to bring their catch to Richmond,
and Sheridan's cavalry cut off the flow of provisions from the farms, so food was increasingly expensive and hard to find at any price. Of the drugs needed at the hospital there was never enough, so the agony of hurt men could not always be eased. General Lee was ill. General Grant's hosts, checked again and again, nevertheless forever sought new avenues of approach and drew steadily nearer.

One day she was watching an ambulance being unloaded at the door of her ward when, among the wounded laid upon the ground where the grass was long since matted with dried brown blood, Cinda saw Rollin Lyle. His eyes were closed, and he was white as marble; but when she knelt and spoke to him he answered. She called the driver of the ambulance and bade him take Rollin to Fifth Street.

“Tell my daughter I'll find a doctor as soon as I can,” she directed. “Where did you get him?”

“Freight cars brought a load of them from the Chickahominy.”

She nodded. “He's a friend of ours. Take him to our house,” she repeated. The pain of being moved again drove Rollin senseless. Cinda, ruthlessly releasing herself from her work here, found Dr. McCaw and insisted that he come home with her.

When they arrived, Vesta and June had laid Rollin on the bed in the room that had been Mrs. Currain's, and had bathed him and pressed a pad of lint upon the small empurpled wound. Vesta stood by, unflinching while the surgeon's probe slipped into Rollin's body so far that even Cinda thought it must come out through his back. The probe touched the bullet, but could not move it. Dr. McCaw, when he had done what he could, drew Cinda from the room.

“I'm afraid bladder and kidney are pierced,” he confessed. “I see little chance for him. There's nothing to do but let the wound suppurate and heal if it will.”

“What was that smoky-smelling stuff you washed the wound with?”

“Creosote.”

“Of course. That sooty smell. But for goodness' sake, why?” It was a relief to fasten one's thoughts on things that didn't matter.

“Why, Dr. Dunn of Petersburg suggested it. Dr. Spencer always used it when he operated for stone in the bladder. He's dead now, but he was marvelously successful, probably operated for stone as often as any man in the United States. He was a great believer in soap and
water first, and then creosote dissolved in alcohol. I'm sure there's no harm in it. The boy really has very little chance anyway.”

Cinda nodded. “I will stay with him,” she said.

“Of course, Mrs. Dewain. Of course. And I will come when I can, if only to ease him a little.”

Vesta, with a decision Cinda could not shake, kept uninterrupted watch by Rollin's side, never leaving him for more than a moment, day or night. When Cinda pleaded with her to rest, to spare herself, Vesta smiled and shook her head.

“No, Mama,” she said. “No. I'm going to get him well. I'm not going to let him die.”

So she kept her post. Dr. McCaw returned late that first night and again in the morning, and the next day and the next. On that third day he was ready to smile.

“It's amazing what a healthy young warrior's body will endure,” he said. “There's no suppuration. The wound has healed as neatly as a cut with a sharp knife. I'll keep drawing off blood and water every day, but I'll be much surprised if a week from now this young man isn't walking around.”

At that incredible deliverance from dread, Cinda herself, to her own disgust, took to her bed. Her thankfulness was more than she could bear. Friday at dawn they heard for an hour or two the roar of massed guns not far away; and that night came word of Grant's bloody repulse at Cold Harbor. Saturday and again on Sunday, while rain swept the city, Cinda slept the day away. Julian came after church to say that on the field of Cold Harbor there was a truce to bury the Union dead. “The wounded had all died since the battle,” he reported. “The slopes in front of our entrenchments were crawling with them, but Butcher Grant wouldn't ask for a truce till yesterday. One of their deserters said Grant had threatened to let the wounded die and rot to stink us out of our lines.”

Rollin was strong enough that day to talk a little. He had been wounded in a fight with Custer's cavalry, a few companies of South Carolinians throwing themselves against overwhelming force to hold open Lee's road to Cold Harbor. “After I was hurt, my horse didn't want to carry me,” he told Julian. “He threw me off; but they caught him and twisted his ear and that quieted him enough so they could
make him carry me to Deep Bottom Bridge. There were a lot of us there. I think we were there all night before they loaded us on the train to bring us to Richmond. After that I don't remember much.”

Vesta said in a low tone: “You were lucky, Rollin. One bullet nicked your cheek, and one smashed itself on your sword, and there were two or three bullet holes in your clothes, besides the one that hit you.”

“It was pretty hot,” he admitted. “I guess there's not much left of our squadron.”

Cinda saw his lip begin to pale with fatigue, and she led Julian away; but Vesta stayed. In the hall Julian said in affectionate amusement: “Mama, those two don't know there's anyone else in the room, do they?” She smiled contentedly.

 

The day when Rollin for the first time put on his uniform, he and Vesta came to Cinda together. “I guess you'll be pretty surprised at what I'm going to say, Mrs. Dewain,” he began, and Cinda laughed and kissed him.

“Do you think I'm blind?”

So they all laughed together; and Vesta said happily: “Well then, that's all right! But, Mama, I want us to be married before Rollin goes back to duty.”

Cinda remembered Tommy Cloyd, who so soon after he and Vesta were married had ridden away never to return. Must Vesta face that bitter sorrow again? But her courage returned. No, Vesta's love had saved this boy and it would shield him now. Vesta deserved a bountiful happiness. If there were justice in the world, and there must be, then she should have it.

“That won't be soon,” she suggested. “It will be a long time before he's well; weeks perhaps. Will you wait a while? With the armies so near Richmond, Papa's sure to come soon. He'd want to be here.”

 

They would wait, but that waiting was not to be long. After Cold Harbor, Grant, like McClellan two years ago, moved toward the river and crossed to face Petersburg; and in mid-June Brett came home for two or three days.

Cinda was at the hospital when he arrived. Vesta sent Diamond to
fetch her, and she came in flushed haste. Brett was in the hall to meet her; and she clung to him, pressing in his arms, smelling the strong man smell of garments long unchanged, of grime and sweat and powder smoke, of stress and weariness and strain. Her arms encircling him told her he was thin; but they told her too that he was all bone and sinew with no waste flesh at all. She made inarticulate sounds of joy and love, and wept her tears and swallowed her sobs and looked up into his loved and smiling eyes, touching his lined cheeks, touching his temples where the hair had thinned and was turning gray, pressing her lips to his. Even his beard now was gray. Oh, he was changed, changed, changed; but he was whole, and strong with health, and above all, he was alive.