Margaret laid the rose from her hand. “I know that somewhere there was treachery. I know that my son was guiltless of that charge. I know little more except that—except that, either you, also, were strangely misled, involved in that dreadful web of error—or that—or that you swore falsely.”
“I swore falsely.”
There was a silence. She sat looking at him with parted lips. He kept the quietness with which from his entrance he had moved and spoken, but as he stood there there grew a strange feeling in his face, and suddenly he raised his hand and covered his eyes. The clock in the hall ticked, ticked. Far out in the night a whip-poor-will was calling. The walls of the room seemed to expand. There came a sense of armies, of camp-fires stretching endlessly, of movements here and there beneath the canopy of night, of a bugle’s distant shrilling, of the wheels of cannon, of a dim, high-borne flag.
At last it grew intolerable. Margaret broke it with a thrilling voice. “And you come here to tell this to me?”
“I came,” said Stafford, “to tell it to Richard Cleave. I have written it to General Lee and my brigade commanders—and to others. By now it is in their hands.”
The silence fell again, while the mother’s heart and brain dealt with the action and its consequences. At last she put her hands before her face.
“I am joyful,” she said, and her voice was thrillingly so, “but I am sorrowful too—” and her voice veiled and darkened. “Unhappy man that you are—!”
“If you will believe me,” said Stafford, “I am not unhappy. It was not, I think, until I ceased to be unhappy that I could see clearly either the way that I had travelled or the way that I am to travel. I will not speak of what is past, nor of remorse for what is past. I am not sure that what I feel is remorse. I have seen the ocean when, lashed by something in itself or out of itself, it wrecked and ruined, and I have seen the ocean when it carried every bark in safety. It was the same ocean, and what is the use of words? But I will take now the blame and double blame of White Oak Swamp. I wished to say this to him, face to face—”
“He took another name, and rejoined before Second Manassas. He joined Pelham’s Battery, of the horse artillery. He called himself Philip Deaderick.”
“Deaderick! The rain and Pelham’s guns ... I remember.”