"Oh, I forgot; I must let you know all about it," I said, and told my Soldier of the visitor who had called before he came back. When I had finished his gray eyes filled with tears and looking at the card he said tenderly:
"Dear old Suckley—dear old fellow—so true!"
I stooped and took my Soldier's head in both my hands, and raising it up gazed searchingly into his earnest, loving eyes to see how he could possibly speak so affectionately of a Yankee.
"You, too, have that same kind of 'off-duty' feeling that this Yankee doctor spoke of having," I said with surprise, and rather disrespectfully for me, I am afraid.
"I must find the dear old fellow," my Soldier said, graciously overlooking my smallness of spirit. Excusing himself and taking leave of baby and me, he went out at once. In a little while he returned, saying:
"It is very fortunate for us, little one, that I went out when I did. Suckley goes down the river to-morrow to Norfolk in the surgeon-general's steamer, and he has kindly invited us to go with him, dear old big-hearted bug-catcher! Come, let us lose no time. Let us hurry and get our little traps together and be ready. We will not say anything about our plans to anyone till to-morrow morning, when we can announce our intentions and say our good-byes simultaneously."
Not only had this Yankee officer, in his "off-duty" feeling for my Soldier, kindly volunteered to transport us to our home, but to carry our trunks and horses, in fact, all we had, which, alas! was very, very little. Most of our worldly possessions—all of our bridal presents, linen, library, pictures, silver, furniture, harp, piano, china, everything except a few clothes—had been stored at Kent, Payne & Company's, and had been burned in the awful fire the night of the evacuation of Richmond.
The General's staff had, one by one, come in during the day from field and camp, and all breakfasted with us for the last time next morning in the old Pickett home. I observed that each wore a blue strip tied like a sash about the waist. It was the old headquarters flag, they explained, the flag of Virginia, saved from surrender and torn into strips by my Soldier to be kept in remembrance. By our door was a rose-bush full of white bloom called, because of its hardihood and early blossoming, the Frost-Rose. It had been planted by my Soldier's mother. He broke off some of the buds, put one in my hair and one in the button-hole of each of his officers. Then for the first time tears came, and the men who had been closer than brothers for four long years clasped hands in silence and parted.
The second social parting was sad, too, for they had taken me, "the child wife," into their lives twenty months before and they all loved me and called me "Sister." Their pride in each other and in their command, the perils that together they had endured, the varied experiences of good times and bad, had bound them together in links stronger than steel.