An Echo Of Antietam by Edward Bellamy (free ebooks for android txt) 📖

am to waste these last moments staring at you when I might be kissing you, my love, my love!" And clasping her in his arms, he covered her face with kisses.

She began to sob convulsively.

"Don't, darling; don't! Don't make it so hard for me," he whispered hoarsely.

"Oh, do let me cry," she wailed. "It was so hard for me to hold back all the time we were at table. I must cry, or my heart will break. Oh, my own dear Phil, what if I should never see you again! Oh! Oh!"

"Nonsense, darling," he said, crowding down the lump that seemed like iron in his throat, and making a desperate effort to keep his voice steady. "You will see me again, never doubt it. Don't I tell you I am coming back? The South cannot hold out much longer. Everybody says so. I shall be home in a year, and then you will be my wife, to be God's Grace to me all the rest of my life. Our happiness will be on interest till then; ten per cent, a month at least, compound interest, piling up every day. Just think of that, dear; don't let yourself think of anything else."

"Oh, Phil, how I love you!" she cried, throwing her arms around his neck in a passion of tenderness. "Nobody is like you. Nobody ever was. Surely God will not part us. Surely He will not. He is too good."

"No, dear, He will not. Some day I shall come back. It will not be long. Perhaps I shall find you waiting for me in this same little summer-house. Let us think of that. It was here, you know, we found out each other's secret that day."

"I had found out yours long before," she said, faintly smiling.

"Time 's up, Phil." It was Mr. Morton's voice calling to them from the piazza.

"I must go, darling. Good-by."

"Oh, no, not yet; not quite yet," she wailed, clinging to him. "Why, we have been here but a few moments. It can't be ten minutes yet."

Under the influence of that close, passionate embrace, those clinging kisses and mingling tears, there began to come over Philip a feeling of weakness, of fainting courage, a disposition to cry out, "Nothing can be so terrible as this. I will not bear it; I will not go." By a tyrannical effort of will, against which his whole nature cried out, he unwound her arms from his neck and said in a choked voice:--

"Darling, this is harder than any battle I shall have to fight, but this is what I enlisted for. I must go."

He had reached the door of the summer-house, not daring for honor's sake to look back, when a heartbroken cry smote his ear.

"You have n't kissed me good-by!"

He had kissed her a hundred times, but these kisses she apparently distinguished from the good-by kiss. He came back, and taking her again in his embrace, kissed her lips, her throat, her bosom, and then once more their lips met, and in that kiss of parting which plucks the heart up by the roots.

How strong must be the barrier between one soul and another that they do not utterly merge in moments like that, turning the agony of parting to the bliss of blended being!

Pursued by the sound of her desolate sobbing, he fled away.

The stable-boy held the dancing horse at the gate, and Mr. Morton and his sister stood waiting there.

"Good-by, Phil, till we see you again," said Miss Morton, kissing him tenderly. "We 'll take good care of her for you."

"Will you please go to her now?" he said huskily. "She is in the summer-house. For God's sake try to comfort her."

"Yes, poor boy, I will," she answered. He shook hands with Mr. Morton and jumped into the buggy.

"I 'll get a furlough and be back in a few months, maybe. Be sure to tell her that," he said.

The stable-boy stood aside; the mettlesome horse gave a plunge and started off at a three-minute gait. The boy drew out his watch and observed: "He hain't got but fifteen minutes to git to camp in, but he 'll do it. The mare 's a stepper, and Phil King knows how to handle the ribbons."

The buggy vanished in a cloud of dust around the next turn in the road. The stable-boy strode whistling down the street, the minister went to his study, and Miss Morton disappeared in the shrubbery in the direction of the summer-house.


II


Early next morning the country roads leading into Waterville were covered with carts and wagons and carriages loaded with people coming into town to see the regiment off. The streets were hung with flags and spanned with decorated arches bearing patriotic inscriptions. Bed, white, and blue streamers hung in festoons from building to building and floated from cornices. The stores and places of business were all closed, the sidewalks were packed with people in their Sunday clothes, and the windows and balconies were lined with gazers long before it was time for the regiment to appear. Everybody--men, women, and children --wore the national colors in cockades or rosettes, while many young girls were dressed throughout in red, white, and blue. The city seemed tricked out for some rare gala-day, but the grave faces of the expectant throng, and the subdued and earnest manner which extended even to the older children, stamped this as no ordinary holiday.

After hours of patient waiting, at last the word passes from mouth to mouth, "They are coming!" Vehicles are quickly driven out of the way, and in a general hush all eyes are turned towards the head of the street. Presently there is a burst of martial music, and the regiment comes wheeling round the corner into view and fills the wide street from curb to curb with its broad front. As the blue river sweeps along, the rows of polished bayonets, rising and falling with the swinging tread of the men, are like interminable ranks of foam-crested waves rolling in upon the shore. The imposing mass, with its rhythmic movement, gives the impression of a single organism. One forgets to look for the individuals in it, forgets that there are individuals. Even those who have brothers, sons, lovers there, for a moment almost forget them in the impression of a mighty whole. The mind is slow to realize that this great dragon, so terrible in its beauty, emitting light as it moves from a thousand burnished scales, with flaming crest proudly waving in the van, is but an aggregation of men singly so feeble.

The hearts of the lookers-on as they gaze are swelling fast. An afflatus of heroism given forth by this host of self-devoted men communicates itself to the most stolid spectators. The booming of the drum fills the brain, and the blood in the veins leaps to its rhythm. The unearthly gayety of the fife, like the sweet, shrill song of a bird soaring above the battle, infects the nerves till the idea of death brings a scornful smile to the lips. Eyes glaze with rapturous tears as they rest upon the flag. There is a thrill of voluptuous sweetness in the thought of dying for it. Life seems of value only as it gives the poorest something to sacrifice. It is dying that makes the glory of the world, and all other employments seem but idle while the regiment passes.

The time for farewells is gone by. The lucky men at the ends of the ranks have indeed an opportunity without breaking step to exchange an occasional hand-shake with a friend on the sidewalk, or to snatch a kiss from wife or sweetheart, but those in the middle of the line can only look their farewells. Now and then a mother intrusts her baby to a file-leader to be passed along from hand to hand till it reaches the father, to be sent back with a kiss, or, maybe, perched aloft on his shoulder, to ride to the depot, crowing at the music and clutching at the gleaming bayonets. At every such touch of nature the people cheer wildly. From every window and balcony the ladies shower garlands upon the troops.

Where is Grace? for this is the Upton company which is passing now. Yonder she stands on a balcony, between Mr. Morton and his sister. She is very pale and the tears are streaming down her cheeks, but her face is radiant. She is smiling through her tears, as if there was no such thing on earth as fear or sorrow. She has looked forward to this ordeal with harrowing expectations, only to find herself at the trying moment seized upon and lifted above all sense of personal affliction by the passion of self-devotion with which the air is electric. Her face as she looks down upon her lover is that of a priestess in the ecstasy of sacrifice. He is saluting with his sword. Now he has passed. With a great sob she turns away. She does not care for the rest of the pageant. Her patriotism has suddenly gone. The ecstasy of sacrifice is over. She is no longer a priestess, but a brokenhearted girl, who only asks to be led away to some place where she can weep till her lover returns.


III


There was to be a great battle the next day. The two armies had been long manoeuvring for position, and now they stood like wrestlers who have selected their holds and, with body braced against body, knee against knee, wait for the signal to begin the struggle. There had been during the afternoon some brisk fighting, but a common desire to postpone the decisive contest till the morrow had prevented the main forces from becoming involved. Philip's regiment had thus far only been engaged in a few trifling skirmishes, barely enough to stir the blood. This was to be its first battle, and the position to which it had been allotted promised a bloody baptism in the morning. The men were in excellent heart, but as night settled down, there was little or no merriment to be heard about the camp-fires. Most were gathered in groups, discussing in low tones the chances of the morrow. Some, knowing that every fibre of muscle would be needed for the work before them, had wisely gone to sleep, while here and there a man, heedless of the talk going on about him, was lying on his back staring up at the darkening sky, thinking.

As the twilight deepened, Philip strolled to the top of a little knoll just out of the camp and sat down, with a vague notion of casting up accounts a little in view of the final settlement which very possibly might come for him next day. But the inspiration of the scene around him soon diverted his mind from personal engrossments. Some distance down the lines he could see the occasional flash of a gun, where a battery was lazily shelling a piece of woods which it was desirable to keep the enemy from occupying during the night. A burning barn in that direction made a flare on the sky. Over behind the wooded hills where the Confederates lay, rockets were going up, indicating the exchange of signals and the perfecting of plans which might mean defeat and ruin to him and his the next day. Behind him, within the Federal lines, clouds of dust, dimly outlined against the glimmering landscape, betrayed the location of the roads along which artillery, cavalry, infantry were hurrying eagerly forward to take their assigned places for the