"Yes, I! If Carlton Brand is lying wounded in a Virginia hospital, I know my duty; and if I must miss that, to him, or Heaven, henceforward, I shall be among the lost!" Strange, wild, mad words; but how much they conveyed!
"God bless you, my daughter!" "My dear, dear sister!" And somehow three people managed to be included in one embrace immediately after. This was all, worth recording, that the grape trellis saw.
That evening when the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train left Broad and Prime, it bore Robert Brand and Margaret Hayley, going southward on that singular quest which might end in so sad and final a disappointment.
CHAPTER XXIV.
In the Hospital at Alexandria—The Wounded Man and his Nurse—Sad Omens—A Reunion of Three—Brave Man or Coward?—Who was Horace Townsend?—A Mystery Explained—How Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's—One word more of the Comanche Rider—Conclusion.
Glimpses now, only glimpses—with great breaks between, which the imagination may fill at pleasure. Events, few in number, not less strange, perhaps, than those which have already occurred, but less enwrapped in mystery, and gradually shaping themselves towards the inevitable end.
The military hospital at Alexandria. Outside, dingy and yet imposing, fit type of the State that held it, in the days before secession was any thing more than a crime in thought. Within, a wilderness of low-ceilinged rooms, comfortable enough but all more or less dingy like the exterior. Nine out of ten of them filled with cot-bedsteads arranged in long rows with aisles between; sacred at once to two of the most incongruous exhibitions of human propensity—the blood-thirsty cruelty which can kill and maim,—the angelic kindness which can make a dear child or brother out of the merest stranger and bind up the hurts of a rough, hard-handed, blaspheming ruffian, of blood unknown and lineage uncared for, with all that tender care which could be bestowed upon the gentlest and loveliest daughter of a pampered race when sick or disabled. One of the many places scattered over the loyal States and many portions of the disloyal, made terrible to recollection by the suffering that has been endured within them and the lives that have gone out as a sacrifice to the Moloch of destructive war,—but made holy beyond all conception, at the same time, by the patriotic bravery with which many of their lives have been surrendered to the great Giver for a glorious cause; by the patience with which agony has been endured and almost reckoned as pleasure for the nation's sake; and by the footsteps of the nobler men and if possible still nobler women of America, who have given up ease and comfort and domestic happiness and health and even life itself, to minister to those stricken down in the long conflict.
No need to draw the picture: nothing of war or its sad consequences remains a mystery in this age and to this people. Too many eyes have looked upon the wards of our hospitals, the forms stretched there in waiting for death or recovery, the figures moving around and among them in such ministration as the Good Samaritan may have bestowed upon the bruised and beaten Jew of the parable;—too many ears have listened to the moans of suffering rising up continually like a long complaint to heaven, the sharp screams of agony under temporary pang or fearful operation, the words of content under any lot, blending like an undertone with all, and the words of prayer and Christian dependence crowning and hallowing all;—too many of the men of this time have seen and heard these things, and too many more may yet have the duty of looking upon them and listening to them, to make either wise or necessary the closer limning of the picture that might otherwise be presented. We have to do with but a little corner of the great building that had been made so useful in the care of the sick and wounded, just as this narration holds involved the interests of a poor half-dozen among the many millions affected by the colossal struggle.
A small room, on the second floor of the building, the walls once white and even now scrupulously clean but dingy from smoke and use. Two windows in it, opening to the west, the tops shaded by paper curtains with muslin inside, while at the bottoms streamed in the soft September afternoon sunlight that lay like a glory over the Virginian woods, so fair to the eye but so foul and treacherous within, stretching away towards the bannered clouds before many hours to shroud the setting of the great luminary. Not one of the common rooms in which, perforce from their number, sick and wounded soldiers must be more or less closely huddled together,—but one devoted to the care of wounded officers, with four beds of iron, neatly made and draped, and at this time only one of them occupied.