When he was gone Richard laughed. Unity, the log in her hands with which she was about to replenish the fire, looked over her shoulder. “That’s sadder than sighing!” she said. “Don’t!”
“What shall we do?” he asked. “Go like pieces of wood for a twelvemonth—sans care, sans thinking, sans feeling, sans heart, sans—no, not sans courage!”
“No—not sans courage.”
“I am not sad,” he said, “for myself. It would be strange if I were, would it not, to-day? I have a great, personal happiness. And even this afternoon, Unity—I am saying good-bye, as one of the generality, to despair, and pain, and wounded pride, and foreboding, and unhappiness. I have been looking it in the face. Such and so it is going to be in the South, and perhaps worse than we know—and yet the South is neither going to die nor despair!—And now if there is any broth I surely could take it!”
Going downstairs Cousin William found the library and Miss Lucy. “I got too angry, I suppose, with Richard—but to lie there talking of surrender! Surrender! I tell you, Lucy,—but there! I can’t talk about it. Better not begin.”
“Richard is a strong man, William. He’s not the weakly despairing kind.”
“I know, Lucy, I know! But it’s not so bad as he thinks. I look for a big victory any day now.... Well! let’s talk of the wedding. When’s it to be?”
“In three days. The doctor says he may come downstairs to-morrow. Corbin Wood will marry them, here in the parlour. Then, in a few days, Richard will go back to the front.... Oh, the sad and strange and happy so blended together.... We are so desperate, William, that the road has turned because we couldn’t travel it so any longer and live! There’s a strange kind of calm, and you could say that a quiet music was coming back into life.... If only we could hear from Edward!”
The sky was clear on Cleave’s and Judith’s wedding-day. The sun shone, the winds were quiet, there was a feeling in the air as of the coming spring. Her sisters cut from the house-plants flowers for Judith’s hair; there fell over her worn white gown her mother’s wedding-veil. The servants brought boughs of cedar and bright berries, and with them decked the large old parlour, where the shepherds and shepherdesses looked out from the rose wreaths on the wall as they had looked when Hamilton and Burr and Jefferson were alive. The guests were few, and all old friends and kinsfolk, and there were, beside, Mammy and Julius and Isham and Scipio and Esther and Car’line and the others, Tullius among them. A great fire warmed the room, shone in the window-panes and the prisms beneath the candles and the polished floor and the old gilt frames of the Cary portraits. Margaret Cleave sat with her hand shadowing her eyes. Her heart was here, but her heart was also with her other children, with Will and Miriam. Molly, who was Miriam’s age, kept beside her, a loving hand on her dress. Cousin William gave away the bride. An artillery commander, himself just out of hospital, stood with Cleave.—Oh, the grey uniforms, so worn and weather-stained for a wedding party!
It was over—the guests were gone. The household, tremulous, between smiles and tears, went its several, accustomed ways. There was no wedding journey to be taken. All life was fitted now to a Doric simplicity, a grave acceptance of realities without filagree adornment. There was left a certain fair quietness, limpid sincerity, faith, and truth.... There was a quiet, cheerful supper, and afterwards a little talking together in the library, the reading of the Richmond papers, Unity singing to her guitar. Then at last good-nights were said. Judith and Cleave mounted the stairs together, entered hand in hand their room. The shutters were all opened; it lay, warmed by the glowing embers on the hearth, but yet in a flood of moonlight. His arm about her, they moved to the deep window-seat above the garden, knelt there and looked out. Valley and hill and distant mountains were all washed with silver.