XXXIX
“THE LAST THROUGH TRAIN FOR FOUR YEARS”
I copy in substance, and sometimes verbatim, the account written in 1861, and published later, of our journey northward in the last train that went through to Washington before the outbreak of hostilities.
I preface the narrative by saying that, by the merciful provision of the Divine Father, Who will not try us beyond our strength, we, one and all, kept up to our own hearts the sanguine incredulity in the possibility of the worst coming to pass, which was characteristic of Union lovers at the South, up to the battle of Manassas.
After that, the scales fell from all eyes. Had not my mother hoped confidently that the war-cloud would blow over, and that, before long, she would not have allowed Alice to go back to Newark with us? My place was with my husband, but this young daughter she had the right to keep with her.
Had I not hoped for a peaceful solution of the national problem, if only through the awakening of the fraternal love of those whose fathers had fought, shoulder to shoulder, to wrest their country from a common oppressor, I could not have said “Good-bye” smilingly to home and kindred. When I said to my mother: “We shall have you with us at the seashore, this summer,” it was not in bravado, to cheat her into belief in my cheerfulness.
Our party of Mr. Terhune, Alice, our boy and baby Christine, with their nurse and myself, was comfortably bestowed in the train that was to meet the boat at Acquia Creek. Luggage and luncheon were looked after as sedulously as if there were no superior interest in our minds. The very commonplaceness of the details of getting ready and sending us off, exactly as had been done, time and time again, were in themselves heartening. What had been, would be. To-morrow should be as to-day.
When we and our appurtenances were comfortably bestowed in the ladies’ car (there were no parlor cars or sleepers, as yet), I had leisure to note what was passing without. The scene should be that which always attends the departure of a passenger train from a provincial city. Yet I felt, at once, that there was a difference.
I noticed, and not without an undefined sense of uneasiness, the unusual number of strollers that lounged up and down the sidewalks, and loitered about the train, and that some of these were evidently listening to the guarded subtones to which the voices of all—even the rudest of the loungers—were modulated. With this shade of uneasiness there stole upon me a strange, indescribable sense of the unreality of all that I saw and heard. The familiar streets and houses were seen, as through the bewildering vapors of a dream; men and women glided by like phantoms, and there was a shimmer of red-and-orange light in the air—the reflection of the glowing west—that was vague and dazing, not dazzling.