Before the Dawn Part 40

A sudden tongue of flame shot up in the east above the forest, but unlike the others did not go out again; it hung there a red spire, blood-red against the sky, and grew taller and broader.

"The forest burns!" murmured Harley.

"In May?" said Helen.

"What a cannonade it must be to set green trees on fire!" continued Harley.

The varying and shriller notes heard through the steady roar of the great guns now grew more numerous and louder; and most persistent among them was a nasty buzz, inconceivably wicked in its cry.

"The rifles! A hundred thousand of them at least!" murmured Harley, to whose ear all these sounds were familiar.

New tongues of fire leaped above the trees and remained there, blood-red against the sky; sparks at first fugitive and detached, then in showers and millions, began to fly. Columns of vapour and smoke breaking off from the main cloud floated toward the house and a.s.sailed those at the window until eyes and nostrils tingled. The strange, nauseous odour, the mingled reek of blood and dust, powder and human sweat grew heavier and more sickening.

Helen shuddered again and again, but she could not turn away. The whole look of the forest had now changed to her. She saw it through a red mist: all the green, the late green of the new spring, was gone. All things, the trees, the leaves, the gra.s.s and the bushes, seemed burnt, dull and dead.

"Listen!" cried Harley. "Don't you hear that--the beat of horses' feet!

A thousand, five thousand of them! The cavalry are charging! But whose cavalry?"

His soul was with them. He felt the rush of air past him, the strain of his leaping horse under him, and then the impact, the wild swirl of blood and fire and death when foe met foe. Once more he groaned and struck the window-sill with an angry hand.

Nearer and nearer rolled the battle and louder and shriller grew its note. The crackle of the rifles became a crash as steady as the thunder of the great guns, and Helen began to hear, above all the sound of human voices, cries and shouts of command. Dark figures, perfectly black like tracery, began to appear against a background of pallid smoke, or ruddy flame, distorted, shapeless even, and without any method in their motions. They seemed to Helen to fly back and forth and to leap about as if shot from springs like jumping-jacks and with as little of life in them--mere marionettes. The great pit of fire and smoke in which they fought enclosed them, and to Helen it was only a pit of the d.a.m.ned. For the moment she had no feeling for either side; they were not fellow beings to her--they who struggled there amid the flame and the smoke and the falling trees and the wild screams of the wounded horses.

The coloured woman cowering in the corner continued to cry softly, but with deep sobs drawn from her chest, and Helen wished that she would stop, but she could not leave the window to rebuke her even had she the heart to do so.

The smoke, of a close, heavy, lifeless quality, entered the window and gathered in the rooms, penetrating everything. The floor and the walls and the furniture grew sticky and damp, but the three at the window did not notice it. They had neither eyes nor heart now save for the tremendous scene pa.s.sing before them. No thought of personal danger entered the mind of either woman. No, this was a somber but magnificent panorama set for them, and they, the spectators, were in their proper seats. They were detached, apart from the drama which was of another age and another land, and had no concern with them save as a picture.

Helen could not banish from her mind this panoramic quality of the battle. She was ashamed of herself; she ought to draw from her heart sympathy for those who were falling out there, but they were yet to her beings of another order, and she remained cold--a spectator held by the appalling character of the drama and not realizing that those who played the part were human like herself.

"The battle is doubtful," said Harley.

"How do you know?"

"See how it veers to and fro--back and forth and back and forth it goes again. If either side were winning it would all go one way. Do you know how long we have been here watching?"

"I have no idea whatever."

He looked at his watch and then pointed upward at the heavens where in the zenith a film of light appeared through the blur of cloud and smoke.

"There's the sun," he said; "it's noon. We've been sitting here for hours. The time seems long and again it seems short. Ah, if I only knew which way fortune inclined! Look how that fire in the forest is growing!"

Over in the east the red spires and pillars and columns united into one great sheet of flame that moved and leaped from tree to tree and shot forth millions of sparks.

"That fire will not reach us," said Harley. "It will pa.s.s a half-mile to the right."

But they felt its breath, far though hot, and again Helen drew her handkerchief across her burning face. The deadly, sickening odour increased. A light wind arose, and a fine dust of ashes, borne on its breath, began to enter the window and sweep in at every possible crevice and cranny of the old house. It powdered the three at the window and hung a thin, gray and pallid veil over the floor and the scanty furniture. The faint jarring of the wood, so monotonous and so persistent, never ceased. And distinctly through the sounds they heard the voice of the coloured woman, crying softly from her chest, always the same, weird, unreal and chilling.

The struggle seemed to the three silent watchers to swing away a little, the sounds of human voices died, the cries, the commands were heard no more; but the volume of the battle grew, nevertheless. Harley knew that new regiments, new brigades, new batteries were coming into action; that the area of conflict was spreading, covering new fields and holding the old. He knew by the rising din, ever swelling and beating upon the ear, by the vast increase in the clouds of smoke, the leaping flashes of flame and the dust of ashes, now thick and drifting, that two hundred thousand men were eye to eye in battle amid the gloomy thickets and shades of the Wilderness, but G.o.d alone knew which would win.

Some of the awe that oppressed the two women began to creep over Harley and to chill the blood in his veins. He had gone through many battles; he had been with Pickett in that fiery rush up Cemetery Hill in the face of sixty thousand men and batteries heaped against each other; but there he was a part of things and all was before him to see and to hear: here he only sat in the dusk of the smoke and the ashes and the clouds, while the invisible battle swung to and fro afar. He heard only the beat of its footsteps as it reeled back and forth, and saw only the mingled black and fiery mists and vapours of its own making that enclosed it.

The dun clouds were still rolling up from both heavens toward the zenith, shot now and then with yellow streaks and scarlet gleams.

Sometimes they threw back in a red glare the reflection of the burning forest, and then again the drifting clouds of smoke and ashes and dust turned the whole to a solid and dirty brown. It was now more than a battle to Harley. Within that cloud of smoke and flashing flame the fate of a nation hung--the South was a nation to him--and before the sun set the decree might be given. He was filled with woe to be sitting there looking on at so vast an event. Vain, selfish and superficial, depths in his nature were touched at last. This was no longer a scene set as at a theatre, upon which one might fight for the sake of ambition or a personal glory. Suddenly he sank into insignificance. The fortunes or the feelings of one man were lost in mightier issues.

"It's coming back!" exclaimed Mrs. Markham.

The battle again approached the old house, the clouds swept up denser and darker, the tumult of the rifles and the great guns grew louder; the voices, the cries and the commands were heard again, and the human figures, distorted and unreal, reappeared against the black or fiery background. To Helen's mind returned the simile of a huge flaming pit in which mult.i.tudes of little imps struggled and fought. She was yet unable to invest them with human attributes like her own, and the mystic and unreal quality in this battle which oppressed her from the first did not depart.

"It is all around us," said Mrs. Markham.

Helen looked up and saw that her words were true. The battle now made a complete circuit of the house, though yet distant, and from every point came the thunder of the cannon and the rifles, the low and almost rhythmic tread of great armies in mortal struggle, and the rising clouds of dust, ashes and smoke shot with the rapid flame of the guns, like incessant sheet-lightning.

The clouds had become so dense that the battle, though nearer, grew dimmer in many of its aspects; but the distorted and unreal human figures moved like shadows on a screen and were yet visible, springing about and crossing and recrossing in an infinite black tracery that the eye could not follow. But to neither of the three did the thought of fear yet come. They were still watchers of the arena, from high seats, and the battle was not to take them in its coils.

The flame, the red light from the guns, grew more vivid, and was so rapid and incessant that it became a steady glare, illuminating the vast scene on which the battle was outspread; the black stems of the oaks and pines, the guns--some wheelless and broken now, the charging lines, fallen horses scattered in the scrub, all the medley and strain of a t.i.tanic battle.

The sparks flew in vast showers. Bits of charred wood from the burning forest, caught up by the wind, began to fall on the thin roof of the old house, and kept up a steady, droning patter. The veil of gray ashes upon the floor and on the scanty furniture grew thicker. The coloured woman never ceased for a moment to cry drearily.

"It is still doubtful!" murmured Harley.

His keen, discerning eye began to see a method, an order in all this huge tumult--signs of a design, and of another design to defeat it--the human mind seeking to achieve an end. One side was the North and another the South--but which was his own he could not tell. For the present he knew not where to place his sympathies, and the fortunes of the battle were all unknown to him.

He looked again at his watch. Mid-afternoon. Hours and hours had pa.s.sed and still the doubtful battle hung on the turning of a hair; but his study of it, his effort to trace its fortune through all the intricate maze of smoke and flame, did not cease. He sought to read the purposes of the two master minds which marshaled their forces against each other, to evolve order from chaos and to read what was written already.

Suddenly he uttered a low cry. He could detect now the colour of the uniforms. There on the right was the gray, his own side, and Harley's soul dropped like lead in water. The gray were yielding slowly, almost imperceptibly, but nevertheless were yielding. The blue ma.s.ses were pouring upon them continually, heavier and heavier, always coming to the attack.

Harley glanced at the women. They, too, saw as he saw. He read it in the deathly pallor of their faces, their lips parted and trembling, the fallen look of their eyes. It was not a mere spectacle now--something to gaze at appalled, not because of the actors in it, but because of the spectacle itself. It was beginning now to have a human interest, vital and terrible--the interest of themselves, their friends and the South to which they belonged.

Helen suddenly remembered a splendid figure that had ridden away from her window that morning--the figure of the man who alone had come to bid her good-by, he who had seemed to her a very G.o.d of war himself; and she knew he must be there in that flaming pit with the other marionettes who reeled back and forth as the master minds hurled fresh legions anew to the attack. If not there, one thing alone had happened, and she refused to think of that, though she shuddered; but she would not picture him thus. No; he rode triumphant at the head of his famous brigade, sword in hand, bare and shining, and there was none who could stand before its edge. It was with pride that she thought of him, and a faint blush crept over her face, then pa.s.sed quickly like a mist before sunshine.

The battle shifted again and the faces of the three who watched at the window reflected the change in a complete and absolute manner. The North was thrust back, the South gained--a few feet perhaps, but a gain nevertheless, and joy shone on the faces where pallor and fear had been before. To the two women this change would be permanent. They could see no other result. The North would be thrown back farther and farther, overwhelmed in rout and ruin. They looked forward to it eagerly and in fancy saw it already. The splendid legions of the South could not be beaten.

But no such thoughts came to Harley. He felt all the joy of a momentary triumph, but he knew that the fortune of the battle still hung in doubt.

Strain eye and ear as he would, he could see no decrease in the tumult nor any decline in the energy of the figures that fought there, an intricate tracery against the background of red and black. The afternoon was waning, and his ears had grown so used to the sounds without that he could hear everything within the house. The low, monotonous crying of the coloured woman was as distinct as if there were no battle a half-mile away.

The dense fine ashes crept into their throats and all three coughed repeatedly, but did not notice it, having no thought for anything save for what was pa.s.sing before them. They were powdered with it, face, hair and shoulders, until it lay over them like a veil, but they did not know nor care.

The battle suddenly changed again and the South was pressed back anew.

Once more their faces fell, and the hearts of the women, raised to such heights, sank to the depths. It was coming nearer, too. There was a fierce hiss, a shrill scream and something went by.

"A sh.e.l.l pa.s.sed near us then," said Harley, "and there's another. The battle is swinging close."

Still the element of fear did not enter into the minds of any of the three, not even into those of the women, although another sh.e.l.l pa.s.sed by and then others, all with a sharp, screaming note, full of malignant ferocity. Then they ceased to come and the battle again hovered in the distance, growing redder and redder than ever against a black background as the day darkened and the twilight approached. Its sound now was a roar and a hum--many varying notes blending into a steady clamour, which was not without a certain rhythm and music--like the simultaneous beating of a million mighty ba.s.s drums.

"They still press us back," murmured Harley; "the battle is wavering."

With the coming of the twilight the light in the forest of scrub oaks and pines, the light from so many cannon and rifles, a.s.sumed vivid and unearthly hues, tinged at the edges with a yellow glare and shot through now and then with blue and purple streaks. Over it hung the dark and sullen sky.

"It comes our way again," said Harley.