“I will take the danger.... Oh, that is so much better than the Fusilier place!”
Two days later they left the friendly boatmen on the Mississippi side. An old family carriage which they overtook, creeping along the spring-time road, in it a lady, her little girl, and a maid, gave them a long lift upon the way. At the last they came into Natchez in an ambulance sent up from Port Hudson, in friendly company with a soldier with a bandaged leg and a soldier with a bandaged head and arm. In Natchez they were married.
Three days passed and they entered Vicksburg. His furlough would expire the next morning. She knew people in this town, old friends of her mother’s, she said. She and Edward found the house and all was well. Her mother’s friends kissed her, laughed and cried and kissed her again, and then they shook hands warmly with her husband, and then they gave the two a cool high room behind a cascade of roses, and sent them cake and sangaree.
As the evening fell, they sat together by the window, in the fair stillness, and relief of a place all their own.
“The town is full of rumours,” he said. “There is news of a bombardment of Charleston, and we have had a success in Tennessee, a great raid of Forrest’s. Longstreet is being attacked south of the James. The armies on the Rappahannock appear to be making ready—”
“And here?”
“There is a feeling that we are on the eve of events. Grant is starting some movement, but what it is has not yet developed. There will be fighting presently—” He put out his hand and drew within the room a bough of the Seven Sisters rose. “Look, how they are shaded! Pale pink, rose, crimson.”
He had letters from home which he presently took up from the table, opened, and read aloud. They were sprinkled with gracious references to his happiness and messages of love for Désirée at Cape Jessamine.
“Oh, Cape Jessamine—oh, Cape Jessamine!”
“This is from Molly. ‘Will you be able to see her before the war is over? They say it will be over this summer.’”