“Dear,” he said, “do you understand that I can never marry you?”
“Yes,” she said steadily. “I am not afraid.”
In the silence the wooden shutter outside the window swung to with a slam in the rising breeze which had become a wind blowing fitfully under a wet gray sky. From above the roof there came a sudden tearing sound, which at first he believed to be the wind. It increased to a loud, confusing, swishing whistle, as though hundreds of sabres were being whirled in circles overhead.
Berkley rose, looking upward at the ceiling as the noise grew in volume like a torrent of water flowing over rocks.
Ailsa also had risen, laying one hand on his arm, listening intently.
“What is it?” she breathed.
“It is the noise made by thousands of bullets streaming through the air above us. It sounds like that in the rifle-pits. Listen!”
The strange, bewildering sound filled the room. And now, as the wind shifted, the steady rattle of musketry became suddenly audible. Another sound, sinister, ominous, broke on their ears, the clang of the seminary bell.
“Is it an attack on this place?” she asked anxiously. “What can we do? There are no troops here! I — I must go to my sick boys — —”
Her heart stood still as a cannon thundered, followed by the fearful sound of the shell as it came tearing toward them. As it neared, the noise grew deafening; the air vibrated with a rushing sound that rose to a shriek.
Ailsa’s hands grasped his arm; her ears seemed bursting with the abominable sound; pain darted through her temples, flashing into agony as a heavy jar shook the house, followed by a dazzling light and roar.
Boom! Boom! came the distant, sullen thunder, followed by the unmistakable whir of a Parrott shell. Suddenly shrapnel shells began to come over, screaming, exploding, filling the air with the rush and clatter of bullets.
“Lie down,” he said. “You can’t go out in this. It will veer off in a few moments, when they find out that they’re shelling our hospitals.”
“I’ve got to go,” she repeated; “my boys won’t understand why I don’t come.”
She turned and opened the door; he caught her in his arms, and she looked up and kissed him.
“Good-bye, dear,” she whispered. “You mustn’t detain me — —”
“You shall not go outside — —”
“I’ve got to. Be reasonable, dear. My sick are under fire.”
The bugle was sounding now; his arms fell from her waist; she smiled at him, stepped outside, and started to run; and found him keeping pace between her and the west.
“You should not do that!” she panted, striving to pass him, but he kept his body in line with the incoming missiles. Suddenly he seized her and dropped flat with her as a shell plunged downward, exploding in a white cloud laced with flame through which the humming fragments scattered.
As they rose to their knees in the dust they saw men gathering — soldiers of all arms, infantry, dismounted cavalrymen, hospital guards, limping convalescents, officers armed’ with rifles, waggon drivers, negroes.
“They’re attacking our works at Cedar Springs,” said an officer wearing one hand in a sling. “This hospital is in a bad place.”
Ailsa clapped both hands over her ears as a shell blew up at the angle of an outhouse and the ground rocked violently; then, pale but composed, she sprang inside the hospital door and ran for her ward.
It was full of pungent smoke; a Parrott shell had passed through a window, carrying everything away in its path, and had burst, terrifying the sick men lying there, but not injuring anybody.
And now a flare of light and a crash outside marked the descent of another shell. The confusion and panic among the wounded was terrible; ward-masters, nurses, surgeons, ran hither and thither, striving to quiet the excited patients as shell after shell rushed yelling overhead or exploded with terrific force, raining its whirring iron fragments over roof and chimney.
Ailsa, calm and collected in the dreadful crisis, stood at the end of the ward, directing the unnerved stretcher bearers, superintending the carrying out of cots to the barns, which stood in the shelter of the rising ground along the course of the little stream.
Letty appeared from the corridor behind her; and Ailsa smiled and kissed her lightly on the cheek; and the blood came back to the girl’s face in a passion of gratitude which even the terror of death could not lessen or check.
“Ailsa — darling—” she whispered; then shuddered in the violence of an explosion that shattered the window-glass beside her,
“We’re taking them to the old barns, Letty,” said Ailsa, steadying her voice. “Will you take charge here while I go to Colonel Arran?”
“They’ve taken him out,” whispered Letty. “That ward is on fire. Everybody is out. W-what a cruel thing for our boys! Some of them were getting well! Can you come now?”
“As soon as they carry out young Spencer. He’s the last. . . . Look from the window! They’re trying to put out the fire with water in buckets. O — h!” as a shell struck and the flame flashed out through a geyser of sand and smoke.
“Come,” murmured Letty. “I will stay if there is anything to stay for — —”
“No, dear; we can go. Give me your hand; this smoke is horrible.
Everything is on fire, I think. . . . Hurry, Letty!”
She stumbled, half suffocated, but Letty kept her hand fast and guided her to the outer air.
A company of cavalry, riding hard, passed in a whirlwind of dust. After them, clanking, thudding, pounding, tore a battery, horses on a dead run,
The west wing of the seminary was on fire; billows of sooty smoke rolled across the roof and blew downward over the ground where the forms of soldiers could be seen toiling to and fro with buckets.
Infantry now began to arrive, crowding the main road on the double quick, mounted officers cantering ahead. Long lines of them were swinging out east and west across the country, where a battery went into action wrapped in torrents of smoke.
Bullets swarmed, singing above and around in every key, and the distracting racket of the shrapnel shells became continuous.
Ailsa and Letty ran, stooping, into the lane where the stretchers were being hurried across the little footbridge. As they crossed they saw a dead artilleryman lying in the water, a crimson thread wavering from his head to the surface. It was Arthur Wye; and Letty knew him, and halted, trembling; but Ailsa called to her in a frightened voice, for, confused by the smoke, they had come out in the rear of a battery among the caissons, and the stretchers had turned to the right, filing down into the hollow where the barns stood on the edge of a cedar grove.
Already men were hard at work erecting hospital tents; the wounded lay on their stretchers, bloodless faces turned to the sky, the wind whipping their blankets and uncovering their naked, emaciated bodies. The faces of the dead had turned black.
“Good God!” said Dr. Benton as Letty and Ailsa came up, out of’breath, “we’ve got to get these sick men under shelter! Can you two girls keep their blankets from blowing away?”
They hurried from cot to cot, from mattress to mattress, from one heap of straw to another, from stretcher to stretcher, deftly replacing sheet and blanket, tucking them gently under, whispering courage, sometimes a gay jest or smiling admonition to the helpless men, soothing, petting, reassuring.
The medical director with his corps of aides worked furiously to get up the big tents. The smoke from the battery blew east and south, flowing into the hollow in sulphurous streams; the uproar from the musketry was terrific.
Ailsa, kneeling beside a stretcher to tuck in the blankets, looked up over her shoulder suddenly at Letty.
“Where did they take Colonel Arran?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
Ailsa rose from her knees and looked around her through the flying smoke; then she got wearily to her feet and began to make inquiries. Nobody seemed to know anything about Colonel Arran.
Anxious, she threa
ded her way through the stretchers and the hurrying attendants, past the men who were erecting the tents, looking everywhere, making inquiries, until, under the trees by the stream, she saw a heap of straw on which a man was dying.
He died as she came up — a big, pallid, red-headed zouave, whose blanket, soaked with blood, bore dreadful witness of his end.
A Sister of Charity rose as though dazed.
“I could not stop the hemorrhage,” she said in her soft, bewildered voice.
Together they turned back toward the mass of stretchers, moving with difficulty in the confusion. Letty, passing, glanced wanly at the Sister, then said to Ailsa:
“Colonel Arran is in the second barn on the hay. I am afraid he is dying.”
Ailsa turned toward the barns and hurried across the trampled sod.
Through the half light within she peered about her, moving carefully among the wounded stretched out on the fragrant hay.
Colonel Arran lay alone in the light of a window high under the eaves.
“Oh, here you are!” she said gaily. “I hear most most splendid things about you. I—” she stopped short, appalled at the terrible change that was coming over his face.
“I want to see — Phil—” he whispered.
“Yes — yes, I will find him,” she said soothingly; “I will go immediately and find him.”
His head was moving slowly, monotonously, from side to side.
“I want to see my boy,” he murmured. “He is my son. I wish you to know it — my only son.”
He lifted his brilliant eyes to Ailsa.
Twice he strove to speak, and could not, and she watched him, stunned.
He made the supreme effort.
“Philip!” he gasped; “our son! My little son! My little, little boy! I want him, Ailsa, I want him near me when I die!”
CHAPTER XX
They told her that Berkley had gone up the hill toward the firing line.
On the windy hill-top, hub deep in dry, dead grass, a section of a battery was in action, the violent light from the discharges lashing out through the rushing vapours which the wind flattened and drove, back into the hollow below so that the cannoneers seemed to be wading waist deep in fog.
The sick and wounded on their cots and stretchers were coughing and gasping in the hot mist; the partly erected tents had become full of it. And now the air in the hollow grew more suffocating as fragments of burning powder and wadding set the dead grass afire, and the thick, strangling blue smoke spread over everything.
Surgeons and assistants were working like beavers to house their patients; every now and then a bullet darted into the vale with an evil buzz, rewounding, sometimes killing, the crippled. To add to the complication and confusion, more wounded arrived from the firing line above and beyond to the westward; horses began to fall where they stood harnessed to the caissons; a fine, powerful gun-team galloping back to refill its chests suddenly reared straight up into annihilation, enveloped in the volcanic horror of a shell, so near that Ailsa, standing below in a clump of willows, saw the flash and smoke of the cataclysm and the flying disintegration of dark objects scattering through the smoke.
Far away on the hillside an artilleryman, making a funnel of his hands, shouted for stretchers; and Ailsa, repeating the call, managed to gather together half a dozen overworked bearers and start with them up through the smoke.
Deafened, blinded, her senses almost reeling under the nerve-shattering crash of the guns, she toiled on through the dry grass, pausing at the edge of charred spaces to beat out the low flames that leaped toward her skirts.
There was a leafy hollow ahead, filled with slender, willow-trees, many of them broken off, shot, torn, twisted, and splintered. Dead soldiers lay about under the smoke, their dirty shirts or naked skin visible between jacket and belt; to the left on a sparsely wooded elevation, the slope of which was scarred, showing dry red sand and gravel, a gun stood, firing obliquely across the gully into the woods. Long, wavering, irregular rings of smoke shot out, remaining intact and floating like the rings from a smoker’s pipe, until another rush and blast of flame scattered them.
The other gun had been dismounted and lay on its side, one wheel in the air, helpless, like some monster sprawling with limbs stiffened in death. Behind it, crouched close, squatted some infantry soldiers, firing from the cover of the wreckage. Behind every tree, every stump, every inequality, lay infantry, dead, wounded, or alive and cautiously firing. Several took advantage of the fallen battery horses for shelter. Only one horse of that gun-team remained alive, and the gunners had lashed the prolonge to the trail of the overturned cannon and to the poor horse’s collar, and were trying to drag the piece away with the hope of righting it.
This manoeuvre dislodged the group of infantry soldiers who had taken shelter there, and, on all fours, they began crawling and worming and scuffling about among the dead leaves, seeking another shelter from the pelting hail of lead.
There was nothing to be seen beyond the willow gully except smoke, set grotesquely with phantom trees, through which the enemy’s fusillade sparkled and winked like a long level line of fire-flies in the mist.
The stretcher bearers crept about gathering up the wounded who called to them out of the smoke. Ailsa, on her knees, made her way toward a big cavalryman whose right leg was gone at the thigh.
She did what she could, called for a stretcher, then, crouching close under the bank of raw earth, set her canteen to his blackened lips and held it for him.
“Don’t be discouraged,” she said quietly, “they’ll bring another stretcher in a few moments. I’ll stay here close beside you until they come.”
The cavalryman was dying; she saw it; he knew it. And his swollen lips moved.
“Don’t waste time with me,” he managed to say.
“Then — will you lie very still and not move?”
“Yes; only don’t let the horse step on me.”
She drew her little note-book and pencil from the pocket of her gown and gently lowered her head until one ear was close to his lips.
“What is your name and regiment?”
His voice became suddenly clear.
“John Casson — Egerton’s Dragoons. . . . Mrs. Henry Casson, Islip, Long Island. My mother is a widow; I don’t — think she — can — stand — —”
Then he died — went out abruptly into eternity.
Beside him, in the grass, lay a zouave watching everything with great hollow eyes. His body was only a mass of bloody rags; he had been shot all to pieces, yet the bleeding heap was breathing, and the big sunken eyes patiently watched Ailsa’s canteen until she encountered his unwinking gaze. But the first swallow he took killed him, horribly; and Ailsa, her arms drenched with blood, shrank back and crouched shuddering under the roots of a shattered tree, her consciousness almost deserting her in the roaring and jarring and splintering around her. She saw more stretcher bearers in the smoke, stooping, edging their way — unarmed heroes of many a field who fell unnoted, died unrecorded on the rolls of glory.
A lieutenant of artillery, powder-blackened, but jaunty, called down to her from the bank above:
“Look out, little lady. We’re going to try to limber up, and we don’t want to drop six horses and a perfectly good gun on top of you!”
Somebody seized her arm and dragged her across the leaves; and she struggled to her knees, to her feet, turned, and started to run.
“This way,” said Berkley’s voice in her ear; and his hand closed on hers.
“Phil — help me — I don’t know where I am!”
“I do. Run this way, under the crest of the hill. . . . Dr. Connor told me that you had climbed up here. This isn’t your place! Are you stark mad?”
They ran on westward, panting, sheltered by the grassy crest behind which soldiers lay firing over the top of the grass — long lines of them, belly flattened to the slope, dusty blue trousers hitched up showing naked ankles and big feet pendant. Behind them, swords drawn, stood or walked
their officers, quietly encouraging them or coolly turning to look at Ailsa and Berkley as they hurried past.
In a vast tobacco field to their left, just beyond a wide cleft in the hills, a brigade of cavalry was continually changing station to avoid shell fire. The swallow-tailed national flags, the yellow guidons with their crossed sabres, the blue State colours, streamed above their shifting squadrons as they trotted hither and thither with the leisurely precision of a peaceful field day; but here and there from the trampled earth some fallen horse raised its head in agony; here and there the plain was dotted with dark heaps that never stirred.
The wailing flight of bullets streamed steadily overhead, but, as they descended, the whistling, rushing sound grew higher and fainter. They could see, on the plain where the cavalry was manoeuvring, the shells bursting in fountains of dirt, the ominous shrapnel cloud floating daintily above.
Far away through the grassy cleft, on wooded hillsides, delicately blue, they could see the puff of white smoke shoot out from among the trees where the Confederate batteries were planted, then hear the noise of the coming shell rushing nearer, quavering, whistling into a long-drawn howl as it raced through the gray clouds overhead.
While he guided her among the cedars at the base of the hill, one arm around her body to sustain her, he quietly but seriously berated her for her excursion to the firing line, telling her there was no need of it, no occasion for anybody except the bearers there; that Dr. Connor was furious at her and had said aloud that she had little common-sense.
Ailsa coloured painfully, but there was little spirit left in her, and she walked thankfully and humbly along beside him, resting her cheek, against his shoulder.
“Don’t scold me; I really feel half sick, Phil. . . . From where did you come?” she added timidly.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 514