"I can really help, I think. You will need money for your expenses. You must have it in sufficient supply to meet all emergencies, so that you may never be delayed or baffled in any purpose for want of it. And it may easily happen that you shall need a considerable sum at once. Money is the pass-key to many difficult doors. It so happens that I have a very considerable sum invested in railroad and other securities, in the hands of a very close friend of mine in New York. I have written to him to sell out the whole of them and place the proceeds at your disposal in any banks that may be most convenient to you."
"But, Marshall, you are impoverishing yourself—"
"In the which case," he responded, with his gentle, half-mocking smile, "I should be doing no more than all the rest of us Virginians are doing in this struggle. But I am doing nothing of the kind. I have a plantation, you know, and absolutely nobody dependent upon me. If I survive the war I shall have some land, at any rate, out of which to dig a living. These investments of mine at the North were made long before the war, and I should have sold them out at the beginning of the trouble if I hadn't been too lazy to attend to my affairs. I'm glad now that I was lazy. It enables me to help the two best friends I ever had in this rather lonely world,—Baillie Pegram and you. A man may do as he likes with his own, you know, and this is precisely what I like to do with my securities. Fortunately my friend who has them in charge is a blue-blooded Virginian, who would be fighting with us out there on the lines, if he were not a helpless cripple, fit for nothing, as he wrote to me when the trouble came, but to manage his banking-house. But how are you to get these papers through with you, without risk of discovery?"
"I'll make Sam carry them," she responded. "Nobody will ever think of searching him, particularly as his connection with my affairs will be known to nobody except my friends and co-conspirators."
"What a strategist you are, Agatha! What a general you would have made if you'd happened to be a man!" exclaimed the young man in admiration.
"No," she answered, hesitating for a moment, and then resolutely going on to speak truthfully the thought that was in her. "No, Marshall, for then I should not have had the impulse that teaches me now what to do. Tell me now, about the war. Shall I find Willoughby occupied as a Federal general's headquarters when I get back to Virginia?"
"I don't know. I cannot even guess what the officials at Richmond mean. I only know we have thrown away an opportunity that will never come back to us. The army was full of enthusiasm after Manassas—it is discouraged and depressed now. Then it was strong with the hope and confidence that are born of victory; now it sits there wondering when the enemy will be ready for it to fight again. It was fit for any enterprise then, and the enemy was utterly unfit to resist anything it might have undertaken. But it was not permitted to undertake anything. It was made to lie still, like a pointer in a turkey blind, quivering with eagerness to be up and doing, but restrained by the paralysis of misdirected authority. While we have been doing nothing, the Federal enemy has been swollen to more than twice our numbers. More important still, it has been fashioned by McClellan's skilled hand into as fine a fighting-machine as any general need wish for his tool. The officers have been instructed in their profession, and the men have been taught their trade. Their organisation is perfect, their discipline is almost as good as that of regulars, and their confidence in themselves and their commanders is daily and hourly increasing. Our men have abundant confidence in themselves, but none at all in generals who throw away their opportunities or in a government that touches nothing without paralysing it. Moreover, the Federal army has supply departments behind it that could not be bettered, while ours seem wholly imbecile and incapable. It should have been obvious to every intelligent man at the outset, that with our vastly inferior material resources, our best chance of winning in this war was by bringing to bear from the first all we could of dash and ceaseless activity. We should have taken the aggressive at once and all the time, knowing that every day of delay must strengthen the enemy and weaken us. Instead of that, after winning a great battle in such fashion as well-nigh to destroy for a time the enemy's capacity of resistance, we have taken up a defensive attitude and let the precious opportunity slip from our grasp. It will never return. I do not say that we shall be beaten in the end; I say only that our task is immeasurably more difficult now than it was three months ago, and it is growing more and more difficult every day."
"You are discouraged then?"
"No. I am only depressed. As for courage, we must all of us keep that up to the end. We must be brave to endure as well as to fight,—if we are ever graciously permitted to fight again. But I did not mean to talk of these things. I am only a battery captain. I have no business to think. But unfortunately our army is largely composed of men who can't help thinking. Tell me now, for I must ride presently, is there anything that I can do for you—any way in which I can help you?"
"You will be helping me all the time, just by letting me feel that the old boy and girl friendship is mine again. That is more precious to me than you can imagine. Good-bye, now. Your horse is at the door. Thank you for all, and God bless you."