The Sword of Antietam: A Story of the Nation's Crisis Part 29

The night came down, and d.i.c.k still sped southward with no one appearing to stop him. He did not know just where the Southern army lay, but he did not believe that he would come in contact with any of its flankers.

His horse was so good and true, that earlier than he had hoped, he was approaching Pendleton. The moon was up now, and every foot of the ground was familiar. He crossed brooks in which he and Harry Kenton and other boys of his age had waded--but he had never seen them so low before--and he marked the tree in which he had shot his first squirrel.

It had not been so many months since he had been in Pendleton, and yet it seemed years and years. Three great battles in which seventy or eighty thousand men had fallen were enough to make anybody older.

d.i.c.k paused on the crest of a little hill and looked toward the place where his mother's house stood. He had come just in this way in the winter, and he looked forward to another meeting as happy. The moonlight was very clear now and he saw no smoke rising from the chimneys, but this was summer, and of course they would not have a fire burning at such an hour.

He rode on a little further and paused again at the crest of another hill. His view of Pendleton here was still better. He could see more roofs, and walls, but he noticed that no smoke rose from any house.

Pendleton lay very still in its hollow. On the far side he saw the white walls of Colonel Kenton's house s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight. Something leaped in his brain. He seemed to have been looking upon such white walls only yesterday, white walls that stood out in a fiery haze, white walls that he could never forget though he lived to be a hundred.

Then he remembered. The white walls were those of the Dunkard church at Antietam, around which the blue and the gray had piled their bodies in ma.s.ses. The vast battlefield ranged past him like a moving panorama, and then he was merely looking at Pendleton lying there below, so still.

d.i.c.k was sensitive and his affections were strong. He loved his mother with a remarkable devotion, and his friends were for all time. Highly imaginative, he felt a powerful stirring of the heart, at his second return to Pendleton since his departure for the war. Yet he was chilled somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he loved so well. It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the sky. A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and danced, yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.

He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house. Then he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more loudly.

No answer came and d.i.c.k's heart sank within him like a plummet in a pool. He went to the edge of the walk, gathered up some gravel and threw it against a window in his mother's room on the second floor. That would arouse her, because he knew that she slept lightly in these times, when her son was off to the wars. But the window was not raised, and he could hear no sound of movement in the room.

Alarmed, he went back to the front door, and he noticed that while the door was locked the keyhole was empty. Then his mother was gone away.

The sign was almost infallible. Had any one been at home the key would have been on the inside.

His heart grew lighter. There had been no violence. No roving band had come there to plunder. He whistled and shouted through the keyhole, although he did not want anyone who might possibly be pa.s.sing in the road to hear him, as this town was almost wholly Southern in its sympathies.

There was still no answer, and leading his horse behind one of the pine trees on the lawn, where it would not be observed, he went to the rear of the house, and taking a stick pried open a kitchen window. He had learned this trick when he was a young boy, and climbing lightly inside he closed the window behind him and fastened the catch.

He knew of course every hall and room of the house, but the moment he entered it he felt that it was deserted. The air was close and heavy, showing that no fresh breeze had blown through it for days. It was impossible that his mother or the faithful colored woman could have lived there so long a time with closed doors and shuttered windows.

When he pa.s.sed into the main part of his home, and touched a door or chair, a fine dust grated slightly under his fingers. Here was confirmation, if further confirmation was needed. Dust on chairs and tables and sofas in the house in which his mother was present.

Impossible! Such a thing could not occur with her there. It was not the white dust of the road or fields, but the black dust that gathers in closed chambers.

He went up to his mother's room, and, opening one of the shutters a few inches, let in a little light. It was in perfect order. Everything was in its place. Upon the dresser was a little vase containing some shrivelled flowers. The water in the vase had dried up days ago, and the flowers had dried up with it.

In this room and in all the others everything was arranged with order and method, as if one were going away for a long time. d.i.c.k drew a chair near the window, that he had opened slightly, and sat down. Much of his fear for his mother disappeared. It was obvious that she and her faithful attendant, Juliana, had gone, probably to be out of the track of the armies or to escape plundering bands like Skelly's.

He wondered where she had gone, whether northward or southward. There were many places that would gladly receive her. Nearly all the people in this part of the state were more or less related, and with them the tie of kins.h.i.+p was strong. It was probable that she would go north, or east.

She might have gone to Lexington, or Winchester, or Richmond, or even in the hills to Somerset.

Well, he could not solve it. He was deeply disappointed because he had not found her there, but he was relieved from his first fear that the guerillas had come. He closed and fastened the window again, and then walked all through the house once more. His eyes had now grown so used to the darkness that he could see everything dimly. He went into his own room. A picture of himself that used to hang on the wall now stood on the dresser. He knew very well why, and he knew, too, that his mother often pa.s.sed hours in that room.

Below stairs everything was neatness and in order. He went into the parlor, of which he had stood in so much awe, when he was a little child. The floor was covered with an imported carpet, mingled brown and red. A great Bible lay upon a small marble-topped table in the center of the room. Two larger tables stood against the wall. Upon them lay volumes of the English cla.s.sics, and a cl.u.s.ter of wax flowers under a gla.s.s cover, that had seemed wonderful to d.i.c.k in his childhood.

But the room awed him no more, and he turned at once to the great squares of light that faced each other from wall to wall.

A famous portrait painter had arisen at Lexington when the canebrake was scarcely yet cleared away from the heart of Kentucky. His work was astonis.h.i.+ng to have come out of a country yet a wilderness, and a century later he is ranked among the great painters. But it is said that the best work he ever did is the pair of portraits that face each other in the Mason home, and the other pair, the exact duplicates that face each other in the same manner in the Kenton house.

d.i.c.k opened a shutter entirely, and the light of the white moon, white like marble, streamed in. The sudden inpouring illuminated the room so vividly that d.i.c.k's heart missed a beat. It seemed, for a minute, that the two men in the portraits were stepping from the wall. Then his heart beat steadily again and the color returned to his face. They had always been there, those two portraits. Men had never lived more intensely than they, and the artist, at the instant his genius was burning brightest, had caught them in the moment of extraordinary concentration. Their souls had looked through their eyes and his own soul looking through his had met theirs.

d.i.c.k gazed at one and then at the other. There was his great grandfather, Paul Cotter, a man of vision and inspiration, the greatest scholar the west had ever produced, and there facing him was his comrade of a long life-time, Henry Ware, the famous borderer, afterward the great governor of the state. They had been painted in hunting suits of deerskin, with the fringed borders and beaded moccasins, and racc.o.o.n skin caps.

These were men, d.i.c.k's great grandfather and Harry's. An immense pride that he was the great-grandson of one of them suddenly swelled up in his bosom, and he was proud, too, that the descendants of the borderers, and of the earlier borderers in the east, should show the same spirit and stamina. No one could look upon the fields of s.h.i.+loh, and Mana.s.sas and Antietam and say that any braver men ever lived.

He drew his chair into the middle of the room and sat and looked at them a long time. His steady gazing and his own imaginative brain, keyed to the point of excitement, brought back into the portraits that singular quality of intense life. Had they moved he would not have been surprised, and the eyes certainly looked down at him in full and ample recognition.

What did they say? He gazed straight into the eyes of one and then straight into the eyes of the other, and over and over again. But the expression there was Delphic. He must choose for himself, as they had chosen for themselves, and remembering that he was lingering, when he should not linger, he closed and fastened the window, slipped out at the kitchen window and returned to his horse.

He remounted in the road and rode a few paces nearer to Pendleton, which still lay silent in the white moonlight. He had no doubt now that many of the people had fled like his mother. Most of the houses must be closed and shuttered like hers. That was why the town was so silent.

He would have been glad to see Dr. Russell and old Judge Kendrick and others again, but it would have been risky to go into the center of the place, and it would have been a breach, too, of the faith that Colonel Winchester had put in him.

He crushed the wish and turned away. Then he saw the white walls of Colonel Kenton's house s.h.i.+ning upon a hill among the pines beyond the town. He was quite sure that it would be deserted, and there was no harm in pa.s.sing it. He knew it as well as his own home. He and Harry had played in every part of it, and it was, in truth, a second home to him.

He rode slowly along the road which led to the quiet house. Colonel Kenton had all the instincts so strong in the Kentuckians and Virginians of his type. A portion of his wealth had been devoted to decoration and beauty. The white, sanded road led upward through a great park, splendid with oak and beech and maple, and elms of great size. Nearer the house he came to the cedars and clipped pines, like those surrounding his mother's own home.

He opened the iron gate that led to the house, and tied his horse inside. Here was the same desolation and silence that he had beheld at his own home. The gra.s.s on the lawn, although withered and dry from the intense drought that had prevailed in Kentucky that summer, was long and showed signs of neglect. The great stone pillars of the portico, from the shelter of which Harry and his father and their friends had fought Skelly and his mountaineers, were stained, and around their bases were dirty from the sand and earth blown against them. The lawn and even the portico were littered with autumn leaves.

d.i.c.k felt the chill settling down on him again. War, not war with armies, but war in its results, had swept over his uncle's home as truly as it had swept over his mother's. There was no sign of a human being.

Doubtless the colored servants had fled to the Union armies, and to the freedom which they as yet knew so little how to use. He felt a sudden access of anger against them, because they had deserted a master so kind and just, forgetting, for the moment that he was fighting to free them from that very master.

All the windows were dark, but he walked upon the portico and the dry autumn leaves rustled under his feet. He would have turned away, but he noticed that the front door stood ajar six or eight inches. The fact amazed him. If a servant was about, he would not leave it open, and if robbers were in the house, they would close it in order not to attract attention. It was a great door of ma.s.sive and magnificent oak, highly polished, with heavy bands of glittering bronze running across it. But it was so lightly poised on its hinges, that, despite its great weight, a child could have swung it back and forth with his little finger.

Henry Ware, who built the house after his term as governor was over, was always proud of this door.

d.i.c.k ran his hand along one of the polished bronze bars as he had often done when he was a boy, enjoying the cool touch of the metal. Then he put his thumb against the edge of the door, and pushed it a little further open. Something was wrong here, and he meant to see what it was.

He had no scruples about entering. He did not consider himself in the least an intruder. This was his uncle's house, and his uncle and his cousin were far away.

The door made no sound as it swung back, and soundless, too, was d.i.c.k as he stepped within. It was dark in the big hall, but as he stood there, listening, he became conscious of a light. It proceeded from one of the rooms opening into the hall on the right, and a door nearly closed only allowed a narrow band of it to fall upon the hall floor.

d.i.c.k, believing now that a robber had indeed come, drew a pistol from his pocket, stepped lightly across the hall and looked in at the door.

He checked a cry, and it was his first thought to go away as quietly as he had come. He had seen a man in the uniform of a Confederate colonel, sitting in a chair, and staring out at one of the little side windows which d.i.c.k could not see from the front, and which was now open. It was his own uncle, Colonel George Kenton, C. S. A., his gold braided cap on the window sill, and his sword in its scabbard lying across his knees.

But d.i.c.k changed his mind. His uncle was a colonel on one side, and he was a lieutenant on the other, and from one point of view it was almost high treason for them to meet there and talk quietly together, but from another it was the most natural thing in the world, commanded alike by duty and affection.

He pushed open the door a little further and stepped inside.

"Uncle George," he said.

Colonel Kenton sprang to his feet, and his sword clattered upon the floor.

"Good G.o.d!" he cried. "You, d.i.c.k! Here! To-night!"

"Yes, Uncle George, it's no other."

"And I suppose you have Yankees without to take me."

"Those are hard words, sir, and you don't mean them. I'm all alone, just as you were. I galloped south, sir, to see my mother, whom I found gone, where, I don't know, and then I couldn't resist the temptation to come by here and see your house and Harry's, which, as you know, sir, has been almost a home to me, too."

"Thank G.o.d you came, d.i.c.k," said the colonel putting his arms around d.i.c.k's shoulders, and giving him an affectionate hug. "You were right. I did not mean what I said. There is only one other in the world whom I'd rather see than you. d.i.c.k, I didn't know whether you were dead or alive, until I saw your face there in the doorway."

It was obvious to d.i.c.k that his uncle's emotions were deeply stirred.

He felt the strong hands upon his shoulders trembling, but the veteran soldier soon steadied his nerves, and asked d.i.c.k to sit down in a chair which he drew close beside his own at the window.