Now the parson’s wife made her welcome, and after a small supper sat with her in a clean bedroom before a fire. The parson’s wife was full of sighs, and “Ah, my dears!” and ominous shakings of the head. “South Carolina’s bound down,” she said, “and going to be tormented. What you tell me about that dead woman and her daughter is but the beginning. It’s but a leaf before the storm. We’re going to hear of many whirled and trodden leaves.”
“Yes,” said Désirée, her eyes upon the fantastic shapes in the hollow of the fire. “Whirled and trodden leaves.”
“I have a sister,” said the parson’s wife, “in Georgia. She got away, but will you listen to some of the things she writes?”
She got the letter and read. Désirée, listening, put her hands over her eyes and shivered a little for all the room was warm. “I should not have said such things could happen in a Christian land,” she said.
“They happen,” said the parson’s wife. “War is a horror, and a horror to women. It has always been so and always will be so. And now I must go see that there is covering enough on the beds.”
At cock-crow the regiment was up and away. Still the same pearly sky, the same quietude, the same stretches of water crept under the trees, the same heavy road, and halts and going on. The regiment took dinner beneath live oaks on a little rise of ground beside a swamp become a lake. Officers’ mess dined a little to one side beneath a monster tree. All wood was wet and the fires smoked, but soldiers grow skilful and at last a blaze was got. Sherman was yet to the southward; this strip of country not yet overrun and provisions to be had. Officers’ mess to-day sat down under the live oaks to what, compared to many and many a time in its existence, appeared a feast for kings. There were roasted ducks and sweet potatoes, rice and milk and butter. Officers’ mess said grace devoutly.
Désirée said grace with her friends, for they had sent back to urge her wagon forward and to say they had a feast and to beg her company. She sat with Edward over against the Colonel, and the captains and lieutenants sat to either side the board. They made a happy dinner, jesting and laughing, while off in the grove of oaks was heard the laughter of their grey men. When dinner was over, and half an hour of sweet rest was over, into column came all, and took again the swampy road.
That evening headquarters was a fine old pillared house, set in a noble garden, surrounded in its turn by the fields and woods of a great plantation. Here there was a large family, an old man and his married daughters and their daughters and little sons. These made the men welcome where they camped beside fires out under the great trees of the place, and the grey officers welcome indoors, and Désirée welcome and gave her and Edward a room with mirrors and chintz curtains and a great four-poster bed and a light-wood fire. A little after the regiment, came up also a small troop of grey cavalry returning from a reconnoissance to the southward. Infantry and the plantation alike were eager for Cavalry’s news. Its news was ravage and ruin, the locusts of Egypt and a grudge against the land. There were sixty thousand of the foe and it seemed determined now that Sherman meant Columbia.
“What are the troops at Columbia?”
“Stevenson’s twenty-six hundred men, a few other scattering commands, Wheeler’s cavalry—say five thousand in all.”