Despite the cheerfulness of Betty's letters, there were times during the next dark years when it seemed to her that starvation must be the only end. The negroes had been freed by the Governor's will, but the girl could not turn them from their homes, and, with the exception of the few field hands who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. “It makes no difference what I eat,” she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. “I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes.”
Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting. It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major's lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. “We will rise or fall with the government,” Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle authority. “Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely.”
“Surely money is of no matter,” Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful of worldly goods. “Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have grandma's pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know.”
“If need be—let us wait, dear,” replied her mother, who, grave and pallid as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach the army.
“I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I,” she would say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.
“But I am hungry for you, mamma—take it for my sake,” the girl would beg, on the point of tears. “You are starving, that is it—and yet it does not feed the army.”
In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death to which she went with her slow and stately tread.
For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.
“Oh, mamma, do it to please me,” she entreated.
“Well, give it back, my dear,” Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always, and when Betty triumphantly declared, “You feel better now—you know you do, you dearest,” she responded readily:—
“Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait—I have grown to like to have my hands busy. Your old bonnet is almost gone, so I shall plait you one of this and trim it with a piece of ribbon Aunt Lydia found yesterday in the attic.”
“I don't mind going bareheaded, if you will only eat.”
“I was never a hearty eater. Your father used to say that I ate less than a robin. It was the custom for ladies to have delicate appetites in my day, you see; and I remember your grandma's amazement when Miss Pokey Mickleborough was asked at our table what piece of chicken she preferred, and answered quite aloud, 'Leg, if you please.' She was considered very indelicate by your grandma, who had never so much as tasted any part except the wing.”
She sat, gentle and upright, in her rosewood chair, her worn silk dress rustling as she crossed her feet, her beautiful hands moving rapidly with the straw plaiting. “I was brought up very carefully, my dear,” she added, turning her head with its shining bands of hair a little silvered since the beginning of the war. “'A girl is like a flower,' your grandpa always said. 'If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.' Things are different now—very different.”
“But this is war,” said Betty.
Mrs. Ambler nodded over the slender braid.
“Yes, this is war,” she added with her wistful smile, and a moment afterward looked up again to ask in a dazed way:—
“What was the last battle, dear? I can't remember.”
Betty's glance sought the lawn outside where the warm May sunshine fell in shafts of light upon the purple lilacs.
“They are fighting now in the Wilderness,” she answered, her thoughts rushing to the famished army closed in the death grapple with its enemy. “Dan got a letter to me and he says it is like fighting in a jungle, the vines are so thick they can't see the other side. He has to aim by ear instead of sight.”
Mrs. Ambler's fingers moved quickly.
“He has become a very fine man,” she said. “Your father always liked him—and so did I—but at one time we were afraid that he was going to be too much his father's son—he looked so like him on his wild days, especially when he had taken wine and his colour went high.”
“But he has the Lightfoot eyes. The Major, Champe, even their Great-aunt Emmeline have those same gray eyes that are always laughing.”
“Jane Lightfoot had them, too,” added Mrs. Ambler. “She used to say that to love hard went with them. 'The Lightfoot eyes are never disillusioned,' she once told me. I wonder if she remembered that afterwards, poor girl.”
Betty was silent for a moment.
“It sounds cruel,” she confessed, “but you know, I have sometimes thought that it may have been just a little bit her fault, mamma.”
Mrs. Ambler smiled. “Your grandpa used to say 'get a woman to judge a woman and there comes a hanging.'”
“Oh, I don't mean that,” responded Betty, blushing. “Jack Montjoy was a scoundrel, I suppose—but I think that even if Dan had been a scoundrel, instead of so big and noble—I could have made his life so much better just because I loved him; if love is only large enough it seems to me that all such things as being good and bad are swallowed up.”
“I don't know—your father was very good, and I loved him because of it. He was of the salt of the earth, as Mr. Blake wrote to me last year.”
“There has never been anybody like papa,” said Betty, her eyes filling. “Not even Dan—for I can't imagine papa being anything but what he was—and yet I know even if Dan were as wild as the Major once believed him to be, I could have gone with him not the least bit afraid. I was so sure of myself that if he had beaten me he could not have broken my spirit. I should always have known that some day he would need me and be sorry.”
Tender, pensive, bred in the ancient ways, Mrs. Ambler looked up at her and shook her head.
“You are very strong, my child,” she answered, “and I think it makes us all lean too much upon you.”
Taking her hand, Betty kissed each slender finger. “I lean on you for the best in life, mamma,” she answered, and then turned to the window. “It's my working time,” she said, “and there is poor Hosea trying to plough without horses. I wonder how he'll manage it.”
“Are all the horses gone, dear?”
“All except Prince Rupert and papa's mare. Peter keeps them hidden in the mountains, and I carried them the last two apples yesterday. Prince Rupert knew me in the distance and whinnied before Peter saw me. Now I'll send Aunt Lydia to you, dearest, while I see about the weaving. Mammy Riah has almost finished my linsey dress.” She kissed her again and went out to where the looms were working in one of the detached wings.
The summer went by slowly. The famished army fell back inch by inch, and at Uplands the battle grew more desperate with the days. Without horses it was impossible to plant the crops and on the open turnpike swept by bands of raiders as by armies, it was no less impossible to keep the little that was planted. Betty, standing at her window in the early mornings, would glance despairingly over the wasted fields and the quiet little cabins, where the negroes were stirring about their work. Those little cabins, forming a crescent against the green hill, caused her an anxiety before which her own daily suffering was of less account. When the time came that was fast approaching, and the secret places were emptied of their last supplies, where could those faithful people turn in their distress? The question stabbed her like a sword each morning before she put on her bonnet of plaited straw and ran out to make her first round of the farm. Behind her cheerful smile there was always the grim fear growing sharper every hour.
Then on a golden summer afternoon, when the larder had been swept by a band of raiders, she became suddenly aware that there was nothing in the house for her mother's supper, and, with the army pistol in her hand, set out across the fields for Chericoke. As she walked over the sunny meadows, the shadow that was always lifted in Mrs. Ambler's presence fell heavily upon her face and she choked back a rising sob. What would the end be? she asked herself in sudden anguish, or was this the end?
Reaching Chericoke she found Mrs. Lightfoot and Aunt Rhody drying sliced sweet potatoes on boards along the garden fence, where the sunflowers and hollyhocks flaunted in the face of want.
“I've just gotten a new recipe for coffee, child,” the old lady began in mild excitement. “Last year I made it entirely of sweet potatoes, but Mrs. Blake tells me that she mixes rye and a few roasted chestnuts. Mr. Lightfoot took supper with her a week ago, and he actually congratulated her upon still keeping her real old Mocha. Be sure to try it.”
“Indeed I shall—the very next time Hosea gets any sweet potatoes. Some raiders have just dug up the last with their sabres and eaten them raw.”
“Well, they'll certainly have colic,” remarked Mrs. Lightfoot, with professional interest.
“I hope so,” said Betty, “but I've come over to beg something for mamma's supper—eggs, chickens, anything except bacon. She can't touch that, she'd starve first.”
Looking anxious, Mrs. Lightfoot appealed to Aunt Rhody, who was busily spreading little squares of sweet potatoes on the clean boards. “Rhody, can't you possibly find us some eggs?” she inquired.
Aunt Rhody stopped her work and turned upon them all the dignity of two hundred pounds of flesh.
“How de hens gwine lay w'en dey's done been eaten up?” she demanded.
“Isn't there a single chicken left?” hopelessly persisted the old lady.
“Who gwine lef' 'em? Ain' dose low-lifeted sodgers dat rid by yestiddy done stole de las' one un 'um off de nes'?”
Mrs. Lightfoot sternly remonstrated.
“They were our own soldiers, Rhody, and they don't steal—they merely take.”
“I don' see de diffunce,” sniffed Aunt Rhody. “All I know is dat dey pulled de black hen plum off de nes' whar she wuz a-settin'. Den des now de Yankees come a-prancin' up en de ducks tuck ter de water en de Yankees dey went a-wadin' atter dem. Yes, Lawd, dey went a-wadin' wid dey shoes on.”
The old lady sighed.
“I'm afraid there's nothing, Betty,” she said, “though Congo has gone to town to see if he can find any fowls, and I'll send some over if he brings them. We had a Sherman pudding for dinner ourselves, and I know the sorghum in it will give the Major gout for a month. Well, well, this is war, I reckon, and I must say, for my part, I never expected it to be conducted like a flirtation behind a fan.”
“I nuver seed no use a-fittin' unless you is gwine ter fit in de yuther pusson's yawd,” interpolated Aunt Rhody. “De way ter fit is ter keep a-sidlin' furder f'om yo' own hen roos' en nigher ter de hen roos' er de somebody dat's a-fittin' you.”
“Hold your tongue, Rhody,” retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, and then drew Betty a little to one side. “I have some port wine, my dear,” she whispered, “which Cupid buried under the old asparagus bed, and I'll tell him to dig up several bottles and take them to you. The other servants don't know of it, so I can't get it out till after dark. Poor Julia! how does she stand these terrible days?”
Betty's lips quivered. “I have to force her to eat,” she replied, “and it seems almost cruel—she is so tired of life.”
“I know, my dear,” responded the old lady, wiping her eyes; “and we have our troubles, too. Champe is in prison now, and Mr. Lightfoot is very much upset. He says this General Grant is not like the others, that he knows him—and he's the kind to hang on as long as he's alive.”
“But we must win in the end,” said Betty, desperately; “we have sacrificed so much, how can it all be lost?”
“That's what Mr. Lightfoot says—we'll win in the end, but the end's a long way off. By the way, did you know that Car'line had run off after the Yankees? When I think how that girl had been spoiled!”
“Oh, I wish they'd all go,” returned Betty. “All except Mammy and Uncle Shadrach and Hosea—and even they make starvation that much nearer.”
“Well, we shan't starve yet awhile, dear; I'm in hopes that Congo will ransack the town. If you would only stay.”
But Betty shook her head and went back across the meadows, walking rapidly through the lush grass of the deserted pastures. Her mind was so filled with Mrs. Lightfoot's forebodings, that when, in climbing the low stone wall, she saw the free negro, Levi, coming toward her, she turned to him with a gesture that was almost an appeal for sympathy.
“Uncle Levi, these are sad times now,” she said. “I am looking for something for mamma's supper and I can find nothing.”
The old negro, shabbier, lonelier, poorer than ever, shambled up to the wall where she was standing and uncovered a split basket full of eggs.
“I'se got a pa'cel er hens hid in de woods over yonder,” he explained, “en I keep de eggs behin' de j'ists in my cabin. Sis Floretty she tole me dat de w'ite folks wuz wuss off den de niggers now, so I brung you dese.”
“Oh, Uncle Levi!” cried Betty, seizing his gnarled old hands. As she looked at his stricken figure a compassion as acute as pain brought the quick tears to her eyes. She remembered the isolation of his life, the scornful suspicion he had met from white and black, and the injustice that had set him free and sold Sarindy up the river.
“You wuz moughty good ter me,” muttered free Levi, shuffling his bare feet in the long grass, “en Marse Dan, he wuz moughty good ter me, too, 'fo' he went away on dat black night. I 'members de time w'en dat ole Rainy-day Jones up de big road (we all call him Rainy-day caze he looked so sour) had me right by de collar wid de hick'ry branch a sizzlin' in de a'r, en I des 'lowed de een had mos' come. Yes, Lawd, I did, but I warn' countin' on Marse Dan. He warn' mo'n wais' high ter ole Rainy-day, but de furs' thing I know dar wuz ole Rainy-day on de yerth wid Marse Dan a-lashin' 'im wid de branch er hick'ry.”
“We shall never forget you—Dan and I,” answered Betty, as she took the basket, “and when the time comes we will repay you.”
The old negro smiled and turned from her, and Betty, quickening her pace, ran on to Uplands, reaching the house a little breathless from the long walk.
In the chamber upstairs she found Mrs. Ambler sitting before the window with her open Bible on the sill, where a spray of musk roses entered from the outside wall.
“All well, mamma?” she asked in a cheerful voice.
Mrs. Ambler started and turned slowly from the window.
“I see a great light on the road,” she murmured wonderingly.
Crossing to where she sat, Betty leaned out above the climbing roses and glanced to the mountains huddled against the sky.
“It is General Sheridan going up the valley,” she said.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg