House Divided (39 page)

July–August, 1861

 

 

F
OR Cinda that day was a time of good-bys, and good-bys were ter- rible and frightening; for if a loved one departed, when would he return? Clayton and Faunt left at dawn, by the northbound train. They would part at Gordonsville, Clayton proceeding to Manassas Junction, Faunt bound west to Staunton and on to rejoin General Wise and his Legion. When Mama and Enid and the children had been bestowed in the big carriage to set out for Great Oak, Brett and Tony and Julian mounted to ride with them; and Trav went to meet General Longstreet for the business of the day.

So the big house was left frighteningly empty, for only Jenny and Vesta remained; but in this hour of Clayton's departure Jenny needed her, so Cinda forgot herself till an hour before dinner Mrs. Brownlaw came wringing her hands. “Oh dear, oh dear! The most terrible thing!” She waited for no question. “I put the ladies in the church to making undergarments for our soldiers, some to cut them out and some to sew them up; and the stupid, stupid women cut them all for the right leg! I'm simply distracted to know what to do. Oh, Mrs. Dewain, what can I do?”

“Get some more material and cut it up for the other leg!”

Mrs. Brownlaw's eyes widened. “Why, my dear, that's a wonderful idea! How did you ever think of it? I declare, you're as clever as your sister! Mrs. Streean is just a tower of strength. I can always rely on her.” Cinda thought anyone who relied on Tilda risked disappointment, but she did not say so. “You know, my dears,” Mrs. Brownlaw told them, “we need every pair of hands in our work. There's to be a big battle at Manassas any day now!” Cinda saw Jenny, her head
bowed over her needlework—she was making a shirt for Clayton, every loved stitch by hand—lean a little lower as though to hide the expression in her eyes. “Mrs. Clay has told Mrs. Davis exactly what the Yankees mean to do.”

“Really?” Cinda's tone was dry. “How did Mrs. Clay know?”

“Why, Mrs. Phillips told her. Mrs. Phillips brought from Washington the complete Yankee plans. She had them sewed into her corsets. Wasn't that wonderful of her? A Federal officer gave them to her!”

“She needn't have troubled,” Cinda commented. “The Northern papers come through every day and tell us all they're doing—just as our papers print everything we even wish we could do! If I were a general I'd keep my plans to myself!”

“Well, anyway, Mrs. Clay says they intend to march right down here to Richmond, so General Beauregard will have to fight them.” Mrs. Brownlaw became again the organizer, the leader. “So we must all just work our fingers to the bone, mustn't we? Because there will be thousands of wounded, and we'll need yards and yards of bandages, and lots of lint and things like that. Now I want to tell you just what you can be doing. You see—–”

“If there's so much to do, you shouldn't waste time on us,” Cinda suggested, and Vesta coughed loudly; but Mrs. Brownlaw said:

“Oh, I must! It's the only way I can help.” She talked on and on. The door bell rang and Anne Tudor came in, and they all submitted to the droning torrent of Mrs. Brownlaw's words. They must do this; they must do that. “You, Mrs. Dewain! You, Miss Dewain! And Miss Tudor, too!” Till at last she took herself away.

“Well!” said Cinda, in frank exasperation. “If there's one sort of person I despise more than another it's people who're always so sure what other people should do!”

Jenny smiled, and Vesta frankly giggled. “I declare, Mama, I thought you were going to just simply bust!”

“I had a notion to! As if we didn't have enough to do for our own menfolks!” She relented, laughing at her own wrath. “Anne, honey, I'm so glad you came in before you started home.”

“We're not going home,” Anne told her. “Papa's going to buy a house, or rent one, or something. He hates leaving our home, but he
says sooner or later there'll be Yankee patrols on the Neck, and Yankee boats in the river; and he thought we'd better find a place to live here before Richmond was too crowded.”

“Why, that's nice,” Cinda said. “We'll want to see a lot of you.” She smiled. “Specially Julian, my dear.” She and Jenny went upstairs, leaving Anne and Vesta laughing together, Anne as pink as a rose, and Cinda said to Jenny: “That's a sweet child.”

“She seems older than she is.”

“I suppose that's because she's been so much alone with her father. And of course she and Faunt—” She hesitated, troubled by her own thoughts. “Faunt ought to be ashamed of himself. I suppose he thinks of her as still a baby.”

She left Jenny and went to her room; and a little later Vesta came to her there. Cinda saw distress in Vesta's eyes. “Where's Anne?” she asked. “You should have kept her for dinner.”

“She's gone home. Her father's alone.” Vesta hesitated. “Mama, she thinks she's in love with Uncle Faunt.”

“Nonsense!” Cinda pretended disbelief.

“Yes, she does. She said so.” And Vesta explained: “She asked how long he'd be here, and I said he'd gone, and she looked so disappointed, and I said he only came for the wedding, and she said he needed a rest, said he looked terribly tired.” Vesta smiled. “She might have been you talking about Julian, Mama. I said she liked Uncle Faunt pretty well, didn't she; and her eyes got big and she said: ‘I guess you'll think I'm silly, Vesta; but I love him awfully!'”

“I hope you didn't laugh at her.”

“I certainly didn't! I said we all loved Uncle Faunt, and she said that wasn't what she meant, and I said I knew, and she said she'd always love him, and I wanted to cry, but I just told her she was a darling girl, and—oh, Mama, what could I say? What could I do?”

Cinda shook her head. “Nothing, of course.” She said in sharp exasperation: “I wish Faunt weren't so utterly absorbed in himself!”

“In himself?” Vesta was astonished. “I never thought that! He's so—gentle and so kind.”

“Faunt's a dear man,” Cinda assented. “But he's—well, he's the most important person in the world—to Faunt! For years now he's been living away off at Belle Vue, alone with his grief, petting it and
coddling it, taking it out of safekeeping every morning to bathe it and brush its hair and feed it and give it its daily exercise and tell it sad stories all day and put it tenderly to bed at night!” Her own words fed her rising indignation. “Oh, we've all humored him, thought he was a romantic figure, so sad and so gallant. We've been fools and so has he. People have to let scars heal! He's just teased his wound, kept it open. He's thoroughly wrapped up in himself. He ought to be slapped. I'd like to give him a piece of my mind!”

Vesta laughed. “You're always doing that to somebody, Mama!”

“Well, he makes me simply furious!” Cinda shook her head. “The thing that happened to him is the worst thing that ever happened to anyone—he thinks! Why, land alive, other men have loved their wives and lost them without mooning around for the rest of their lives with faces a foot long!”

“Now, Mama, you know you're fond of him.”

“Of course I am! What of it! I love you, too; and I love Clayton, and Burr, and Julian. But if one of you needed a good talking-to you always got it!” Her eyes darkened with her own thoughts. “This war is going to hurt and grieve thousands of people. If we all turned crybaby like Faunt, the world would be a mess.”

Vesta laughed. “You always get red as a beet when you're mad! It's not a bit becoming!” So Cinda smiled, her anger gone; and then Vesta said, in a different tone: “Mama, Darrell is paying Anne some attentions.” Cinda looked at her in sharp attention, and Vesta said hurriedly: “He can be—interesting, when he wants to be, you know. But she doesn't—well, I think he scares her.”

“She surely doesn't like him!”

“I don't believe she knows what to think of him.” Vesta asked: “Did you ever hear Uncle Tony say anything about Miss Mary Meynell. Darrell called out her father and killed him.”

Cinda shook her head. “Now, now, Vesta, you're imagining things!” She thought again of Julian, with no eyes for anyone but Anne. Faunt ought to be ashamed of himself, and as for Darrell——But she could not discuss such matters with Vesta.

 

That evening Tommy Cloyd unexpectedly appeared, and there was something shamefaced in his bearing. Vesta in the high happiness of
seeing him did not notice this; but Cinda did, and wondered; and Vesta cried: “But Tommy, if you could come today why couldn't you have come for the wedding?”

His reply was an answer to Cinda's unspoken question as well as to Vesta's spoken one. Colonel Gregg's regiment of South Carolinians was being disbanded. “You remember some of the companies refused to come to Richmond in April,” he reminded them. “Colonel Gregg promised the men who did come that when their enlistments expired—they're up now—they would be released and could go home or anywhere, and he's keeping his word.” So instead of asking leave to come to the wedding he had waited to travel to Richmond with the regiment, and to face with them the angry derision which met them at every station and in Richmond when the train stopped on Broad Street to let them descend from the cars. “There was a crowd of girls and women there,” Tommy said miserably. “Calling us renegades and cry-babies. Miss Dolly Streean was there. Rollin tried to speak to her and she said if there was anything she hated worse than an ugly man it was a man who was afraid.”

Cinda said some angry word, and Vesta cried: “Why, Rollin got his scar fighting for her!”

“Well, plenty of ladies were calling us cowards,” Tommy admitted. “I didn't think South Carolina men would back out of the army when we're going to have a battle any day, just because their time was up. Rollin and I—well, of course we enlisted for three months the same as the others, but we're going to stick to it as long as it lasts.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Why, President Davis has told Colonel Gregg he can raise a new regiment. It will have the same regimental number, probably, but I don't want to be in it. Having something to be ashamed of is a bad way for a regiment to start. Rollin and I thought we might go into Boykin's Rangers. I don't know. We'll go home to South Carolina first, I guess, and see.”

 

Tommy and Rollin departed, and Trav and General Longstreet. Trav with his commission as a captain, went off to Manassas Junction; and the days quickened with a tightening expectation. Soon or late the Yankees would march; then Beauregard must fight them. Meanwhile
there was action in the Valley. Turner Ashby killed six Yankees in a fight at Romney, and Dolly, though she had never seen him, boasted of his exploit as though he were her possession. “They'd killed his brother, and he was just wild!” she cried. “Of course it was sad about his brother, but I guess he taught them a lesson they won't forget in a hurry.” From the Valley too came word that Colonel Jackson had whipped the enemy in an affray at Falling Waters. Burr was with Stuart's cavalry in Jackson's command, and Vesta when they heard of that fight said:

“Oh, I hope Burr's all right!”

But Cinda exclaimed: “Stop it! After all, our men are going to be in danger for months, maybe years. We've no strength to waste in worrying.”

General Wise and his Legion, far away in Western Virginia, had inconclusive skirmishes. The news of disaster at Rich Mountain—General Garnett killed, Colonel Pegram and hundreds of his men captured—came with a sickening shock; but everyone found quick reassurance in the fact that General Garnett had died gallantly, the retreat had been a stubborn one, three thousand Confederates had fought twenty thousand Yankees. The odds were a little too heavy, that was all. Seven to one was too much! Five to one was nearer an even thing. Wait a while; wait and see!

Tommy and Rollin presently returned, and Tommy had decided to enlist in a Virginia regiment. “Everyone's saying down home that they won't fight for Virginia,” Tommy told Vesta and Cinda. “They claim they'll fight like a bag full of wildcats if the Yankees ever come as far as South Carolina, but till that happens they'll stay at home!” He spoke with a frank anger rare in the boy, named one after another whom they knew. “All looking for commissions, or trying to raise their own companies. Everybody wants to be an officer, but an army's got to have some privates in it! And the best way to fight for South Carolina is to fight for Virginia!”

Cinda said: “Ham Boykin called the other day. His Rangers are at Ashland, if you want to find them.”

Julian was at home for that Sunday; and he said cheerfully: “If you want some fighting, you'd better join a North Carolina regiment. We're the best fighters in the army. Any Tar Heel will tell you so.
That's why they call us Tar Heels, because our heels stick to the ground and we never run away.”

“I suppose yours is the best North Carolina regiment, too,” Tommy said teasingly.

“Of course it's the best,” Julian assured him. “And Colonel Hill's the best Colonel! We're only a six-months regiment, so we'll be disbanded in November; but there are plenty of other North Carolina regiments!” And he cried in sudden eagerness: “I know. The Fifth North Carolina went through Richmond to Manassas Thursday and Friday, and I know Colonel MacRae is still here, because Colonel Hill came up to see him today. I'll bet he'll let you go on to Manassas with him.”

His enthusiasm in the end infected Tommy. “I'll talk to Rollin, see what he thinks,” he promised. Vesta asked where Rollin was, and Tommy said: “Gone to call on Miss Dolly.”

“I should think he'd have more pride!” Vesta flushed with anger.

“Well, he likes her pretty well.” Tommy hesitated. “I'll see what he says. He really wants to be in the cavalry.”