She collected her strength, which seemed to be leaving her, and forced herself to look around the room. She could not have told what she expected, or whether she most hoped or feared what she might see.
“But your son?” she asked.
The man’s face changed subtly.
“My father,” he replied, “was an officer in the Union army. I wished to see this place first, to be prepared for Desborough’s questions. It is n’t easy to answer the questions of a clever lad whose two grandfathers have been killed in the same battle, fighting on opposite sides.”
The name struck her like a blow. She leaned for support against the corner of the nearest case, and fixed her gaze on the pathetic coat of General Lee behind the glass which showed her as a faint wraith the reflection of her own face. Desborough had been her husband’s name, and this the anniversary of his death; she felt as if the dead had arisen to confront her, and that some imperative call in the blood insistently responded. Yet she could not believe that her son-in-law was before her, regarding her with that straightforward, appealingly honest gaze; she said to herself that the name was merely a coincidence, that every day in the year was the anniversary of the death of some Virginian hero, and that this could not be her daughter’s husband.
“Have you decided what to tell your son?” she heard her voice, strange and far off, asking amid the thrilling quiet of the room.
The stranger regarded her as if struck by the note of challenge in her tone. His serious eyes seemed to her to be endeavoring to probe her own in search of the cause of her sharpness.
“I can do no more,” was his answer, “than to tell him what I have always told him—the truth, as far as I can see it.”
“And the truth which you can tell him here—here, before the sacred relics of our dead, the sacred memorials of our Lost Cause—”