“Désirée, Désirée! If a man could see but ever so little of the road before him! If we are marched away in haste as we may be, you cannot go with us this time. Then to leave you here alone—”
“There is an Ursuline convent here,” she said. “They will not burn that. If you leave me and evil comes near I will go there.”
“You promise that?”
“Yes, I promise it.”
It was in the scroll of their fate that he should leave her and that evil should come nigh. She waked in a strange red dawn to hear the tramp of feet in the street below. Instantly she was at the window. Grey soldiers were passing below—a column. In the south broke suddenly a sound of cannon. She saw a shell, sent from the other side of the river, explode in the red air above the city roofs. There came a feeling of Vicksburg again.
A hand was at her door. She opened it and Edward took her in his arms. “I have but an instant,” he said. “If we go it may be better for this city than if we stayed. The mayor will surrender it peaceably, and it may be spared destruction. For you, Désirée—for you—God bless you, God keep you till we meet again!”
She smiled back at him. “That will be shortly.”
“No man can tell, nor no woman. You will go to the Ursuline convent?”
“Yes, I will go.”
He strained her to him; they kissed and parted. The soldiers went by in the red dawn, out of the town, toward Winnsboro’ to the northward. This day also Charleston was evacuated, Hardee with his men moving north to Cheraw on the Pedee. At Columbia the mayor and aldermen went out between eight and nine in the morning and, meeting the Federal advance, surrendered the town, and asked for protection for the non-combatants within its walls. How it was given let history tell. Several days later Sherman writes to Kilpatrick: “Let the whole people know that war is now against them, because their armies flee before us and do not defend their country or frontier as they should. It is pretty nonsense for Wheeler and Beauregard and such vain heroes to talk of our warring against women and children. If they claim to be men they should defend their women and children and prevent us reaching their homes.”