CHAPTER XVII
CLEAVE AND JUDITH
The hospital at Charlottesville, unlovely and lovely, ghastly and vital, brutal, spiritual, a hell of pain and weakness, another region of endeavour and helpfulness, a place of horror, and also of strange smiling, even of faint laughter, a country as chill as death and as warm as love—the hospital at Charlottesville saw the weary morning grow to weary noon, the weary noon change toward the weary latter day. The women who nursed the soldiers said that it was lovely outside, and that all the peach trees were in bloom. "We'll raise you a little higher," they said, "and you can see for yourself. And look! here is your broth, so good and strengthening! And did you hear? We won on the Peninsula to-day!"
At four o'clock Judith Cary gave to another her place beside a typhoid pallet and came out into the emerald and rose, the freshness and fragrance of the spring. The Greenwood carriage was waiting. "We'll go, Isham," said Judith, "by the University for Miss Lucy."
Isham held open the door. "No'm, Miss Judith. Miss Lucy done sont wuhd dat de ladies'll be cuttin' out nuniforms clean 'twel dark. She say don' wait fer her—Mrs. Carter'll bring her home."
Judith entered the carriage. An old acquaintance, passing, paused to speak to her. "Isn't there a greater stir than usual?" she asked.
"Some of General Ewell's men are over from Gordonsville. There goes General Dick Taylor now—the one in grey and white! He's a son, you know, of Zachary—Old Rough and Ready. General Jackson, too, has an officer here to-day, checking the stores that came from Richmond.—How is it at the hospital?"
"It is very bad," said Judith. "When the bands begin to play I laugh and cry like all the rest, and I wave and clap my hands, and I would fight on and on like the rest of you, and I do not see that, given people as they are, the war could have been avoided, and I would die to win, and I am, I hope, a patriot—and yet I do not see any sense in it! It hurts me as I think it may hurt the earth. She would like, I believe, something better than being a battlefield.—There is music again! Yesterday a man died, crying for the band to hush. He said it drowned something he needed to hear."
"Yes, yes," replied her friend, nodding his head. "That is perfectly true. That is very true, indeed!—That band's coming from the station. They're looking for a regiment from Richmond.—That's a good band! What are they playing—?"
| "Bright flowers spring from the hero's grave, The craven knows no rest,— Thrice cursed the traitor and the knave, The hero thrice is blessed—" |