Before the Dawn: A Story of the Fall of Richmond

by Joseph A. Altsheler

"Until to-morrow," replied Helen, with solemn prevision.

She turned to the inner blackness of the house and lighted a candle, which she placed on the table, where it burned with an unsteady yellow light, illuminating the centre of the room with a fitful glow, but leaving the corners still in darkness. Everything lay under its veil of ashes—the table, the floor, and the bed on which Harley had slept.

Helen felt a strange sort of strength, the strength of excitement and resolve. She shook the black woman by the arm and bade her bring food.

"We must eat, for we shall have work to do," she said to Mrs. Markham, and nodded her head toward the outside.

It was the task of but a few minutes, and then the two women prepared to go forth. They knew they would be needed on this night, and they listened to hear the ominous sounds that would be a call to them. But they heard nothing. There was the same dead, oppressive stillness. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass seemed to stir. Helen looked once more from the window. Afar in the east the forest still burned, but the light there was pallid, grayish, more of the quality of moonlight than of fire, and looked dim. Directly before her in the forest where the battle had been all was black, silent and impenetrable. It was true there were faint lights here and there as of torches that had burned badly, but they were pin-points, serving only to deepen the surrounding blackness. Once or twice she thought she saw figures moving slowly, but she was not sure. She heard nothing.

Helen was in an unreal world. An atmosphere new, fiery and surcharged surrounded her, and in its heat little things melted away. Only the greater remained. That life in Richmond, bright and gay in many of its aspects, lived but a few days since, was ages and ages ago; it belonged to another world. Now she was in the forest with the battle and the dead, and other things did not count.

The door stood wide open, and as Helen prepared to go another woman entered there, a woman young like herself, tall, wrapped in a long brown cloak, but bareheaded. Two or three stray locks, dark but edged with red gold, strayed down. Her face, clear and feminine though it was, seemed to Helen stronger than any other woman's face that she had ever seen.

Helen knew instinctively that this was a woman of the North, or at least one with the North, and her first feeling was of hostility. So, as the two stood looking at each other, her gaze at first was marked by aversion and defiance. Who was she who had come with the other army, and why should she be there?

But Lucia Catherwood knew both the women in the old house. She remembered a day in Richmond when this girl, in lilac and rose, so fair a representative of her South, welcomed a gallant general; and she remembered another, a girl of the same years, lonely, an outcast in the farthest fringe of the crowd—herself. Her first emotion, too, was hostility, mingled with another feeling closely akin to it. She had seen her with Prescott, and unwillingly had confessed them well matched. She, too, asked what this woman was doing here in the forest beside the battle; but these feelings had only a short life with her. There were certain masculine qualities in Lucia Catherwood that tended to openness and frankness. She advanced and offered her hand like a man to Helen.

"We come under different flags," she said, "but we cannot be enemies here; we must be friends at least to-night, and I could wish that it should always be so."