The Eye of Dread Part 4

But what if her mother should forget! So she put on her new white dress and gathered a few small parcels which she had carefully tied up the night before, and her hat and little white linen cape, and taking her shoes in her hand, softly descended the stairs.

"Betty, Betty," her mother spoke in a sleepy voice from her own room as the child crept past her door; "why, my dear, it isn't time to get up yet. We shan't start for hours."

"I heard Peter Junior say they were going to strike camp at daybreak, and I want to see them strike it. You don't need to get up. I can go over there alone."

"Why, no, child! Mother couldn't let you do that. They don't want little girls there. Go back to bed, dear. Did you wake Martha?"

"Oh, mother. Can't I go downstairs? I don't want to go to bed again.

I'll be very still."

"Will you lie on the lounge and try to go to sleep again?"

"Yes, mother."

Mary Ballard turned with a sigh and presently fell asleep, and Betty softly continued her way and obediently lay down in the darkened room below; but sleep she could not. At last, having satisfied her conscience by lying quietly for a while, she stole to the open door, for in that peaceful spot the Ballards slept with doors and windows wide open all through the warm nights. Oh, but the world was cool and mysterious, and the air was sweet! Little rustling noises made her feel as if strange beings were stirring; above her head were soft chirpings, and somewhere a bird was calling an undulating, long-drawn note, low and sweet, like a tone drawn from her father's violin.

Betty sat on the edge of the porch and put on her shoes, and then walked down the path to the gate. The white peonies and the iris flowers were long since gone, and on the Harvest apple trees and the Sweet Boughs the fruit hung ripening. All Betty's life long she never forgot this wonderful moment of the breaking of day. She listened for sounds to come to her from the camp far away on the river bluff, but none were heard, only the restless moving of her grandfather's team taking their early feed in the small pasture lot near by.

How fresh everything smelled! And the sky! Surely it must be like this in heaven! It must be heaven showing through, while the world slept. She was glad she had awakened early so she might see it,--she and G.o.d and the angels, and all the wild things of earth.

Slowly everything around her grew plainer, and long rays of color, faintly pink, streamed up into the sky from the eastern horizon; then suddenly some pale gray, floating clouds above her head blossomed into a wonderful rose laid upon a sea of gold, then gradually turned sh.e.l.l-pink, then faded through changing shades to daytime clouds of white. She wondered if the soldiers saw it, too. They were breaking camp now, surely, for it was day. Still she swung on the gate and dreamed, until a voice roused her.

"So Betty sleeps all night on the gate like a chicken on the fence." A pair of long arms seized her and lifted her high in the air to a pair of strong shoulders. Then she was tossed about and her cheeks rubbed red against grandfather Clide's stubby beard, until she laughed aloud.

"What are you doing here on the gate?"

"I was watching the sky. I think G.o.d looked through and smiled, for all at once it blossomed. Now the colors are gone."

Grandfather Clide set her gently on her feet and stood looking gravely down on her for a moment. "So?" he said.

"The soldiers are striking camp over there, and then they are going to march to the square, and then every one is to see them form and salute--and then they are to march to the station, and--and--then--and then I don't know what will be--I think glory."

Her grandfather shook his head, his thoughtful face half smiling and half grave. He took her hand. "Come, we'll see what Jack and Jill are up to." He led her to the pasture lot and the horses came and thrust their heads over the fence and whinnied. "See? They want their oats."

Then Betty was lifted to old Jack's bare back and grandfather led him by the forelock to the barn, while Jill followed after.

"Did Jack ever 'fall down and break his crown,' grandfather?"

"No, but he ran away once on a time."

"Oh, did Jill come running after?"

"That she did."

The sun had but just cast his first glance at High k.n.o.b, where the camp was, and Mary Ballard was hastily whipping up batter for pancakes, the simplest thing she could get for breakfast, as they were to go early enough to see the "boys" at the camp before they formed for their march to the town square. The children were to ride over in the great carriage with grandfather and grandmother Clide, while father and mother would take Bobby with them in the carryall. It was an arrangement liked equally by the three small children and the well-content grandparents.

Betty came to the house, clinging to her grandfather's hand. He drew the large rocking-chair from the kitchen--where winter and summer it occupied a place by the window, that Bertrand in his moments of rest and leisure might sit and read the war news aloud to his wife as she worked--out to a cool gra.s.s plot by the door, so that he might still be near enough to chat with his daughter, while enjoying the morning air.

Betty found tidy little Martha, fresh and clean as a rosebud, stepping busily about, setting the table with extra places and putting the chairs around. Filled with self-condemnation at the sight of her sister's helpfulness, she dashed upstairs to do her part in getting all neat for the day. First she coaxed naughty little Jamie, who, in his nightshirt, was out on the porch roof fishing, dangling his shoe over the edge by its strings tied to his father's cane, to return and be hustled into his trousers--funny little garments that came almost to his shoe tops--and to stand still while "sister" washed his face and brushed his curly red hair into a state of semi-orderliness.

Then there was Bobby to be kissed and coaxed, and washed and dressed, and told marvelous tales to beguile him into listening submission.

"Mother, mayn't I put Bobby's Sunday dress on him?" called Betty, from the head of the stairs.

"Yes, dear, anything you like, but hurry. Breakfast is almost ready;"

then to Martha, "Leave the sweeping, deary, and run down to the spring for the cream." To her father, Mary explained: "The little girls are a great help. Betty manages to do for the boys without irritating them.

Now we'll eat while the cakes are hot. Come, Bertrand."

It was a grave mission and a sorrowful one, that early morning ride to say good-by to those youthful volunteers. The breakfast conversation turned on the subject with subdued intensity. Mary Ballard did not explain herself,--she was too busy serving,--but denounced the war in broad terms as "unnecessary and iniquitous," thus eliciting from her husband his usual exclamation, when an aphorism of more than ordinary daring burst from her lips: "Mary! why, Mary! I'm astonished!"

"Every one regards it from a different point of view," said his wife, "and this is my point." It was conclusive.

Grandfather Clide turned sideways, leaned one elbow on the table in a meditative way he had, and spoke slowly. Betty gazed up at him in wide-eyed attention, while Mary poured the coffee and Martha helped her mother by pa.s.sing the cakes. Bobby sat close to his comfortable grandmother, who seemed to be giving him all her attention, but who heard everything, and was ready to drop a quiet word of significance when applicable.

"If we bring the question down to its primal cause," said grandfather, "if we bring it down to its primal cause, Mary is right; for the cause being iniquitous, of course, the war is the same."

"What is 'primal cause,' grandfather?" asked Betty.

"The thing that began it all," said grandfather, regarding her quizzically.

"I don't agree with your conclusion," said Bertrand, pausing to put sirup on Jamie's cakes, after repeated demands therefor. "If the cause be evil, it follows that to annihilate the cause--wipe it out of existence--must be righteous."

"In G.o.d's good time," said grandmother Clide, quietly.

"G.o.d's good time, in my opinion, seems to be when we are forced to a thing." Grandfather lifted one s.h.a.ggy eyebrow in her direction.

"At any rate, and whatever happens," said Bertrand, "the Union must be preserved, a nation, whole and undivided. My father left England for love of its magnificent ideals of government by the people. Here is to be the vast open ground where all nations may come and realize their highest possibilities, and consequently this nation must be held together and developed as a whole in all its resources, and not cut up into small, ineffective, quarrelsome factions. To allow that would mean the ruin of a colossal scheme for universal progress."

Mary brought her husband's coffee and put it beside his plate, as he was too absorbed to take it, and as she did so placed her hand on his shoulder with gentle pressure and their eyes met for an instant. Then grandfather Clide took up the thread.

"Speaking of your father makes me think of my father, your old grandfather Clide, Mary. He fought with his father in the Revolutionary War when he was a lad no more than Peter Junior's age--or less. He lived through it and came to be a judge of the supreme court of New York, and helped to frame the const.i.tution of that State, too. I used to hear him say, when I was a mere boy,--and he would bring his fist down on the table with an emphasis that made the dishes rattle, for all he averred that he never used gesticulation to aid his oratory,--he used to say,--I remember his words, as if it were but yesterday,--'Slavery is a crime which we, the whole nation, are accountable for, and for which we will be held accountable. If we as a nation will not do away with it by legislation or mutual compact justly, then the Lord will take it into his own hands and wipe it out with blood. He may be patient for a long while, and give us a good chance, but if we wait too long,--it may not be in my day--it may not be in yours,--he will wipe it out with blood!' and here was where he used to make the dishes rattle."

"Maybe, then, this is the Lord's good time," said grandmother.

"I believe in preserving the Union at any cost, slavery or no slavery," said Bertrand.

"The bigger and grander the nation, the more rottenness, if it's rotten at heart. I believe it better--even at the cost of war--to wipe out a national crime,--or let those who want slavery take themselves out of it."

Betty began to quiver through all her little system of high-strung nerves and sympathies. The talk was growing heated, and she hated to listen to excited arguments; yet she gazed and listened with fascinated attention.

Bertrand looked up at his father-in-law. "Why, father! why, father!

I'm astonished! I fail to see how permitting one tremendous evil can possibly further any good purpose. To my mind the most tremendous evil that could be perpetrated on this globe--the thing that would do more to set all progress back for hundreds of years, maybe--would be to break up this Union. Here in this country now we are advancing at a pace that covers the centuries of the past in leaps of a hundred years in one. Now cut this land up into little, caviling factions, and where are we? Why, the very motto of the republic would be done away with--'In Union there is strength.' I tell you slavery is a sort of Delilah, and the nation--if it is divided--will be like Sampson with his locks shorn."

"Well, war is here," said Mary, "and we must send off our young men to the shambles, and later on fill up our country with the refuse of Europe in their stead. It will be a terrible blood-letting for both North and South, and it will be the best blood on both sides. I'm as sorry for the mothers down there as I am for ourselves. Did you get the apples, Bertrand? We'd better start, to be there at eight."

"I put them in the carryall, my dear, Sweet Boughs and Harvest apples.

The boys will have one more taste before they leave."

"Father, we want to carry some. Put some in the carriage too," said Martha.

"Yes, father. We want to eat some while we are on the way."