Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession Part 21

But I did not do it, Moll, by my lost soul, I did not!" He started to his feet with a convulsive effort. The hot blood spurted from his wound with the exertion and spattered upon the face and breast of his mother--but she felt it not, for she was dead. The last glimmering ray of reason seemed to drive away the phantoms. He turned toward those sharp and withered features, he saw the fallen jaw and l.u.s.treless glazed eye. A shudder shook his frame at every point, and with a groan of pain and terror, he fell forward upon the corpse--a corpse himself.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The Federal troops, with successive charges, had now pushed the enemy from their first position, and the torn battalions were still being hurled against the batteries that swept their ranks. The excellent generalship of the Confederate leaders availed itself of the valor and impetuosity of their a.s.sailants to lure them, by consecutive advance and backward movement, into the deadly range of their well planted guns. It was then that, far to the right, a heavy column could be seen moving rapidly in the rear of the contending hosts. Was it a part of Hunter's division that had turned the enemy's rear? Such was the thought at first, and with the delusion triumphant cheers rang from the parched throats of the weary Federals. They were soon to be undeceived. The stars and bars flaunted amid those advancing ranks, and the constant yells of the Confederates proclaimed the truth. Johnston was pouring his fresh troops upon the battle-field. The field was lost, but still was struggled for in the face of hope. It was now late in the afternoon, and the soldiers, exhausted with their desperate exertions, fought on, doggedly, but without that fiery spirit which earlier in the day had urged them to the cannon's mouth. There was a lull in the storm of carnage, the brief pause that precedes the last terrific fury of the tempest. The Confederates were concentrating their energies for a decisive effort. It came. From the woods that skirted the left centre of their position, a squadron of hors.e.m.e.n came thundering down upon our columns. Right down upon Carlisle's battery they rode, slashing the cannoneers and capturing the guns. Then followed their rushing ranks of infantry, and full upon our flank swooped down another troop of cavalry, dashing into the road where the baggage-train had been incautiously advanced. Our tired and broken regiments were scattered to the right and left. In vain a few devoted officers spurred among them, and called on them to rally; they broke from the ranks in every quarter of the field, and rushed madly up the hillsides and into the shelter of the trees.

The magnificent army that had hailed the rising sun with hopes of victory was soon pouring along the road in inextricable confusion and disorderly retreat. Foot soldier and horseman, field-piece and wagon, caisson and ambulance, teamster and cannoneer, all were mingled together and rushing backward from the field they had half won, with their backs to the pursuing foe. That rout has been traced, to our shame, in history; the pen of the novelist shuns the disgraceful theme.

Harold, although faint with loss of blood, which oozed from a flesh-wound in his shoulder, was among the gallant few who strove to stem the ebbing current; struck at last by a spent ball in the temple, he fell senseless to the ground. He would have been trampled upon and crushed by the retreating column, had not a friendly hand dragged him from the road to a little mound over which spread the branches of an oak. Here he was found an hour afterward by a body of Confederate troops and lifted into an ambulance with others wounded and bleeding like himself.

While the vehicle, with its melancholy freight, was being slowly trailed over the scene of the late battle, Harold partially recovered his benumbed senses. He lay there as in a dream, striving to recall himself to consciousness of his position. He felt the dull throbbing pain upon his brow and the stinging sensation in his shoulder, and knew that he was wounded, but whether dangerously or not he could not judge.

He could feel the trickling of blood from the bosom of a wounded comrade at his side, and could hear the groans of another whose thigh was shattered by the fragment of a sh.e.l.l; but the situation brought no feeling of repugnance, for he was yet half stunned and lay as in a lethargy, wishing only to drain one draught of water and then to sleep.

The monotonous rumbling of the ambulance wheels sounded distinctly upon his ear, and he could listen, with a kind of objectless curiosity, to the casual conversation of the driver, as he exchanged words here and there with others, who were returning upon the same dismal errand from the scene of carnage. The shadows of night spread around him, covering the field of battle like a pall flung in charity by nature over the corpses of the slain. Then his bewildered fancies darkened with the surrounding gloom, and he thought that he was coffined and in a hea.r.s.e, being dragged to the graveyard to be buried. He put forth his hand to push the coffin lid, but it fell again with weakness, and when his fingers came in contact with the splintered bone that protruded from his neighbor's thigh, and he felt the warm gushing of the blood that welled with each throb of the hastily bound artery, he puzzled his dreamy thoughts to know what it might mean. At last all became a blank upon his brain, and he relapsed once more into unconsciousness.

And so, from dreamy wakefulness to total oblivion he pa.s.sed to and fro, without an interval to part the real from the unreal. He was conscious of being lifted into the arms of men, and being borne along carefully by strong arms. Whither? It seemed to his dull senses that they were bearing him into a sepulchre, but he was not terrified, but careless and resigned; or if he thought of it at all, it was to rejoice that when laid there, he should be undisturbed. Presently a vague fancy pa.s.sed athwart his mind, that perhaps the crawling worms would annoy him, and he felt uneasy, but yet not afraid. Afterward, there was a sensation of quiet and relief, and his brain, for a s.p.a.ce, was in repose. Then a bright form bent over him, and he thought it was an angel. He could feel a soft hand brushing the dampness from his brow, and fingers, whose light touch soothed him, parting his clotted hair. The features grew more distinct, and it pleased him to look upon them, although he strove in vain to fix them in his memory, until a tear-drop fell upon his cheek, and recalled his wandering senses; then he knew that Oriana was bending over him and weeping.

He was in the cottage where Beverly had last parted from his sister; not in the same room, for they feared to place him there, where Miranda was lying in a shroud, with a coffin by her bed-side, lest the sad spectacle should disturb him when he woke. But he lay upon a comfortable bed in another room, and Beverly and Oriana stood beside, while the surgeon dressed his wounds.

CHAPTER XXIV.

No need to say that Harold was well cared for by his two friendly foes.

Beverly had given his personal parole for his safe keeping, and he was therefore free from all surveillance or annoyance on that score. His wounds were not serious, although the contusion on the temple, which, however, had left the skull uninjured, occasioned some uneasiness at first. But the third day he was able to leave his bed, and with his arm in a sling, sat comfortably in an easy-chair, and conversed freely with his two excellent nurses.

"Did Beverly tell you of Arthur's imprisonment?" he asked of Oriana, breaking a pause in the general conversation.

"Yes," she answered, looking down, with a scarcely perceptible blush upon her cheek. "Poor Arthur! Yours is a cruel government, Harold, that would make traitors of such men. His n.o.ble heart would not harbor a dangerous thought, much less a traitorous design."

"I think with you," said Harold. "There is some strange mistake, which we must fathom. I received his letter only the day preceding the battle.

Had there been no immediate prospect of an engagement, I would have asked a furlough, and have answered it in person. I have small reason to regret my own imprisonment," he added, "my jailers are so kind; yet I do regret it for his sake."

"You know that we are powerless to help him," said Beverly, "or even to shorten your captivity, since your government will not exchange with us.

However, you must write, both to Arthur and to Mr. Lincoln, and I will use my best interest with the general to have your letters sent on with a flag."

"I know that you will do all in your power, and I trust that my representations may avail with the government, for I judge from Arthur's letter that he is not well, although he makes no complaint. He is but delicate at the best, and what with the effects of his late injuries, I fear that the restraint of a prison may go ill with him."

"How unnatural is this strife that makes us sorrow for our foes no less than for our friends?" said Oriana. "I seem to be living in a strange clime, and in an age that has pa.s.sed away. And how long can friendship endure this fiery ordeal? How many scenes of carnage like this last terrible one can afflict the land, without wiping away all trace of brotherhood, and leaving in the void the seed of deadly hate?"

"If this repulse," said Beverly, "which your arms have suffered so early in the contest, will awaken the North to a sense of the utter futility of their design of subjugation, the blood that flowed at Mana.s.sas will not have been shed in vain."

"No, not in vain," replied Harold, "but its fruits will be other than you antic.i.p.ate. The North will be awakened, but only to gird up its loins and put forth its giant strength. The shame of that one defeat will be worth to us hereafter a hundred victories. The North has been smitten in its sleep; it will arouse from its lethargy like a lion awakening under the smart of the hunter's spear. Beverly, base no vain hopes upon the triumph of the hour; it seals your doom, for it serves but to throw into the scale against you the aroused energies that till now have been withheld."

"You count upon your resources, Harold, like a purse-proud millionaire, who boasts his bursting coffers. We depend rather upon our determined hearts and resolute right hands. Upon our power to endure, greater than yours to inflict, reverse. Upon our united people, and the spirit that animates them, which can never be subdued. The naked Britons could defend their native soil against Caesar's legions, the veterans of a hundred fights. Shall we do less, who have already tasted the fruits of liberty so dearly earned? Harold, your people have a.s.sumed an impossible task, and you may as well go cast your treasures into the sea as squander them in arms to smite your kith and kin. We are Americans, like yourselves; and when you confess that _you_ can be conquered by invading armies, then dream of conquering us."

"And we will startle you from your dream with the crack of our Southern rifles," added Oriana, somewhat maliciously, while Harold smiled at her enthusiasm.

"There is a great deal of romance in both your natures," he replied.

"But it is not so good as powder for a fighting medium. The spirit you boast of will not support you long without the aid of good round dollars."

"Thank heaven we have less faith in their efficacy than you Northern gold-worshippers," observed Oriana, with playful sarcasm. "While our soldiers have good round corn-cakes, they will ask for no richer metals than lead and steel. Have you never heard of the regiment of Mississippians, who, having received their pay in government certificates, to a man tore up the doc.u.ments as they took up the line of march, saying 'we do not fight for money?'"

Harold smiled, thinking perhaps that nothing better could have been done with the currency in question.

"I think," said Beverly, "you are far out of the way in your estimate of our resources. The South is strictly an agricultural country, and as such, best able to support itself under the exhaustion consequent upon a lengthened warfare, especially as it will remain in the att.i.tude of resistance to invasion. From the bosom of its prolific soil it can draw its natural nourishment and retain its vigor throughout any period of isolation, while you are draining your resources for the means of providing an active aggressive warfare. The rallying of our white population to the battle field will not interrupt the course of agricultural pursuit, while every enlistment in the North will take one man away from the tillage of the land or from some industrial avocation."

"Not so," replied Harold. "Our armies for the most part will be recruited from the surplus population, and abundant hands will remain behind for the purposes of industry."

"At first, perhaps. But not after a few more such fields as were fought on Sunday last. To carry out even a show of your project of subjugation, you must keep a million of men in the field from year to year. Your manufacturing interests will be paralyzed, your best customers shut out.

You will be spending enormously and producing little beyond the necessities of consumption. We, on the contrary, will be producing as usual, and spending little more than before."

"Can your armies be fed, clothed, and equipped without expense?"

"No. But all our means will be applied to military uses, and our operations will be necessarily much less expensive than yours. In other matters, we will forget our habits of extravagance. We will become, by the law of necessity, economists in place of spendthrifts. We will gather in rich harvests, but will stint ourselves to the bare necessities of life, that our troops may be fed and clothed. The money that our wealthy planters have been in the habit of spending yearly in Northern cities and watering places, will be circulated at home. Some fifty millions of Southern dollars, heretofore annually wasted in fashionable dissipation, will thus be kept in our own pockets and out of yours. The spendthrift sons of our planters, and their yet more extravagant daughters, will be found studying economy in the rude school of the soldier, and plying the needle to supply the soldiers' wants, in place of drawing upon the paternal estates for frivolous enjoyments. Our spending population will be on the battle-field, and the laborer will remain in the cotton and corn-field. There will be suffering and privation, it is true, but rest a.s.sured, Harold, we will bear it all without a murmur, as our fathers did in the days of '76. And we will trust to the good old soil we are defending to give us our daily bread."

"Or if it should not," said Oriana, "we can at least claim from it, each one, a grave, over which the foot of the invader may trample, but not over our living bodies."

"I have no power to convince you of your error," answered Harold. "Let us speak of it no more, since it is destined that the sword must decide between us. Beverly, you promised that I should go visit my wounded comrades, who have not yet been removed. Shall we go now? I think it would do me good to breathe the air."

They prepared for the charitable errand, and Oriana went with them, with a little basket of delicacies for the suffering prisoners.

CHAPTER XXV.

It was a fair morning in August, the twentieth day after the eventful 21st of July. Beverly was busy with his military duties, and Harold, who had already fully recovered from his wounds, was enjoying, in company with Oriana, a pleasant canter over the neighboring country. They came to where the rolling meadow subsided into a level plain of considerable extent on either side of the road. At its verge a thick forest formed a dark background, beyond which the peering summits of green hills showed that the landscape was rugged and uneven. Oriana slackened her pace, and pointed out over the broad expanse of level country.

"You see this plain that stretches to our right and left?"

"Of course I do," replied Harold.

"Yes; but I want you to mark it well," she continued, with a significant glance; "and also that stretch of woodland yonder, beyond which, you see, the country rises again."

"Yes, a wild country, I should judge, like that to the left, where we fought your batteries a month ago."

"It is, indeed, a wild country as you say. There are ravines there, and deep glens, fringed with almost impenetrable shrubbery, and deep down in these recesses flows many a winding water-course, lined and overarched with twisted foliage. Are you skillful at threading a woodland labyrinth?"

"Yes; my surveying expeditions have schooled me pretty well. Why do you ask? Do you want me to guide you through the wilderness, in search of a hermit's cave."

"Perhaps; women have all manner of caprices, you know. But I want you to pay attention to those landmarks. Over yonder, there are some nooks that would do well to hide a runaway. I have explored some of them myself, for I pa.s.sed some months here formerly, before the war. Poor Miranda's family resided once in the little cottage where we are stopping now.

That is why I came from Richmond to spend a few days and be with Beverly. I little thought that my coming would bring me to Miranda's death-bed. Look there, now: you have a better view of where the forest ascends into the hilly ground."

"Why are you so topographical to-day? One would think you were tempting me to run away," said Harold, smiling, as he followed her pointing finger with his eyes.