“Could not General Beauregard bring troops from Charleston?”
“General Hampton thinks he might.—Evacuate Charleston—concentrate before Columbia. But I don’t know—I don’t know! There are not many thousands even at Charleston.”
“It’s the end.”
“Yes. I suppose so. But fight on till the warder drops!”
There were the young girls and young married women in the great old house. There was a polished floor, and negro fiddlers had not left the plantation. Cavalry and infantry officers were, with some exceptions, young men—and this was South Carolina. “Yes, dance!” said the old gentleman, the head of the house. “To-morrow you may have neither fiddlers nor floor.”
They danced till almost midnight, and at the last they danced the Virginia Reel. The women were not in silks or fine muslins, they were in homespun. The men were not dressed like the young bloods, the University students, the dandies of five years back. Their grey uniforms were clean, but very worn. Bars upon the collar, or sash and star took the place of the old elaboration of velvet waistcoat and fine neckcloth. Spurs that would have caught in filmy laces did not harm the women’s skirts of linsey. The fiddlers fiddled, the lights burned. Up and down and up again, and around and around....
Edward and Désirée, resting by a window, regarded the room, at once vivid and dreamy. “We were dancing,” he said, “the Virginia Reel at Greenwood the night there came news of the secession of Virginia.”
“Much has happened since then.”
“Much.”
The fiddlers played, the lights burned, they took their places. At midnight the revel closed, and they slept in the chamber with the mirrors and the fire, until the winter day showed, smoked-pearl, without the windows. At breakfast-time came a courier from Columbia, ordering the ——th Virginia back to that place.