CHAPTER XLVI—Continued
Their officers, captains and colonels, stood by them and watched the doomed city burn. A woman with her clothes on fire rushed screaming from the door of her home. Hoarse cries for help came in the darkness. A lost child called piteously, “Mother! Mother!” Drunken negroes fired pistols into the faces of the women. As they bore Bessie on, seeking for a quiet place, some drunken men, thinking they were bearing treasures, flashed their firearms in the women’s faces and cried:
“Stop—hand over your silver and gold!”
Like the spring of a tiger, a blue arm shot out and a pistol flashed. One of the men sank, stunned, on the sidewalk, and another with a shattered arm rolled backward.
“The brutes!” “Old Secesh” muttered, “and to think that these boys wear the blue!”
They were passing a graveyard, and Mrs. Corbin touched Helen’s arm. “Look!” she exclaimed, in amazement. They were opening the graves.
They laid Bessie down on the grass, not far from the old convent, and as they looked up they saw nuns and girls filing sadly out, the priest, with uplifted crucifix, leading the way. The convent had been fired.
“I must see General Sherman!” Helen cried. “Auntie, stay here. I will go for a doctor and get aid, too.”
“I will stay and guard the lady,” said “Old Secesh.”
“I’ll go wid Miss Helen.”
They turned and looked. Old Joe had found them. So they went in search of aid and a physician. They had gone scarcely a block, when Helen recognized Mandy, a neighbor’s cook. She was sitting on top of a great wagon full of furniture and household goods—mahogany chairs, china, paintings—and the coachman was driving the wagon. Thinking that Mandy had bravely rescued her mistress’s goods, Helen cried:
“Mandy, where are you going?”
“Laws a-massy,” came back the answer of the fat negress from over the top of the pearl-handled fan she was using, though it was the dead of winter. “Laws a-massy, chile, I sholy is gwine back into de Union.”
And almost simultaneously Helen heard a moaning voice call to a neighbor in the darkness:
“They have broken the chimes of St. Michael’s! What will Charleston do?”
As they went on, scenes of horror were on every side. Stores were being gutted and their contents strewn into the streets. Hose, pierced with bayonet holes, lay over the sidewalks. Flaming camphine balls were firing every house that the wind had spared. Suddenly they were stopped by a crowd of men which blocked their pathway. In their midst was a reverend gentleman, and by his side was his wife. It was Mr. Shand, pastor of the church.
“Open that box,” a soldier said.
“Gentlemen, I have not the key,” the minister replied.
“What’s the use o’ lyin’? What you got in there?”
“It is the communion service of our church.”
“Ach, mein Gott,” another broke in. “Vat a pious shentlemen!” A coarse, loud laugh followed.
“Look here, hand us that key.” One of them took him by the collar.
“I have told you I have not the key.”
“Well, your watch, then.”
“It is in the ashes of my home.”
“Search him!”
But they found nothing.
Then the Dutchman spied old Joe, dressed in his best suit.
“Hello, you tam plack nigger! Vot for you haf some fine shoes on your tam plack feet?”
Old Joe looked bewildered.
“Zhuck off dem poots.”
“Marster, sholy you ain’t gwine ter take mah onliest pair o’ boots?”
“Zhuck off dem poots, I tell you. Look at dees!” and his bayonet came alarmingly near Joe’s head. So the darky sat down regretfully and pulled his boots off.
“Ach, py tam, vot for a nigger haf zocks, dagleich? Zhuck dem off oncest!”
“Laws a-massy, you sholy ain’ gwine take mah socks, too, is you, marster?”
“Ach, you plack pup, vere did you get dem goot glozes already? Come away from the ladies already oncest. Py tam, I vants dem zoots, too!”
So he drew the reluctant darky aside, and in a few moments old Joe came back a soldier, lugubrious enough in his baggy trousers and short-armed coat. By that time the men, failing to open the chest of communion vessels, had borne it off in triumph on their shoulders.
“Mr. Shand, oh, sir, can you tell me where General Sherman is?” Helen asked.
“I saw him a moment ago, Miss Brooks, just around the corner,” the outraged pastor declared.
They fled on, and as they turned the corner they suddenly heard loud cries, and saw a group of men in front of them. A negro lay dead in the center, and General Sherman was asking of the mob:
“Men, who did this?”
“He slacked us,” one of the soldiers replied.
“Well, men, it is bad. Don’t let it occur again.”
By this time Helen reached them and stood near to the General.
“Are you General Sherman?” she asked.
“I am, madam,” he answered, stepping over the dead body of the negro to her side.
“General Sherman, I am Helen Brooks, sister of Captain Henry Brooks, whom you know.”
“I am happy to know—”
“General, this is no time for pleasantries. In the name of the lowly Jesus, I beg of you stop this horrible outrage!”
“It is not my doing, Miss Brooks. I would stop it if I could, but it is beyond my power.”
“Beyond your power, General Sherman? Do you think these men would dare to do these things without your assent? Do you mean that your captains and colonels and lieutenants would rob, and loot, and pillage, and murder, and allow their men to do it, if you said it should not be done? Is this the power you have over your army? Look at those men throwing their firebrands on that house here under your very eyes! Do they fear Sherman’s anger or court Sherman’s favor?”
“Do you want a guard, Miss Brooks?”
“Want a guard! What mockery! General, I have just come from a house where the guards you sent set fire to the house they were guarding and burnt it down over the head of a young mother while she was giving birth to her first-born. Shame, shame on you, sir, and yours!”
“Madam, this is war! We did not commence it.”
“General Sherman, you know my family, or you would not have listened to me so far. You know how my father has sacrificed half his fortune for the Union cause, and how my brother well-nigh gave his life. And now—mark my words, sir—this is not a deed of war or necessity, but of infamous, vindictive hate, and the time will come when even in our loved Northland men will repudiate your deeds!”
There was a crash as a house near by fell in. A great mass of sparks and smoke belched upwards.
They passed through the burning streets, past squads of drunken soldiers, and at last found the little group gazing sadly at the sick woman.
“How is Bessie?” Helen asked.
“She—is—dead.”
“And the child?”
“It is unborn.”
The gleam of the burning houses lit up her pale face and tinged the brown locks with gold. Helen knelt and kissed the lips cold in death, and “Old Secesh” turned away with a groan.