CHAPTER XXVII
JUDITH AND STAFFORD
The cortège bearing Ashby to his grave wound up and up to the pass in the Blue Ridge. At the top it halted. The ambulance rested beside a grey boulder, while the cavalry escort dismounted and let the horses crop the sweet mountain grass. Below them, to the east, rolled Piedmont Virginia; below them to the west lay the great Valley whence they had come. As they rested they heard the cannon of Cross Keys, and with a glass made out the battle smoke.
For an hour they gazed and listened, anxious and eager; then the horsemen remounted, the ambulance moved from the boulder, and all went slowly down the long loops of road. Down and down they wound, from the cool, blowing air of the heights into the warm June region of red roads, shady trees and clear streams, tall wheat and ripening cherries, old houses and gardens. They were moving toward the Virginia Central, toward Meechum's Station.
A courier had ridden far in advance. At Meechum's was a little crowd of country people. "They're coming! That's an ambulance!—Is he in the ambulance? Everybody take off their hats. Is that his horse behind? Yes, it is a horse that he sometimes rode, but the three stallions were killed. How mournful they come! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead, and Old Joe may die, he is so badly hurt—and Bee is dead, and Ashby is dead." Three women got out of an old carryall. "One of you men come help us lift the flowers! We were up at dawn and gathered all there were—"
The train from Staunton came in—box cars and a passenger coach. The coffin, made at Port Republic, was lifted from the ambulance, out of a bed of fading flowers. It was wrapped in the battle-flag. The crowd bowed its head. An old minister lifted trembling hand. "God—this Thy servant! God—this Thy servant!" The three women brought their lilies, their great sprays of citron aloes. The coffin was placed in the aisle of the passenger coach, and four officers followed as its guard. The escort was slight. Never were there many men spared for these duties. The dead would have been the first to speak against it. Every man in life was needed at the front. The dozen troopers stalled their horses in two of the box cars and themselves took possession of a third. The bell rang, slowly and tollingly. The train moved toward Charlottesville, and the little crowd of country folk was left in the June sunshine with the empty ambulance. In the gold afternoon, the bell slowly ringing, the train crept into Charlottesville.
In this town, convenient for hospitals and stores, midway between Richmond and the Valley, a halting place for troops moving east and west, there were soldiers enough for a soldier's escort to his resting place. The concourse at the station was large, and a long train followed the bier of the dead general out through the town to the University of Virginia, and the graveyard beyond.
There were no students now at the University. In the white-pillared rotunda surgeons held council and divided supplies. In the ranges, where were the cell-like students' rooms, and in the white-pillared professors' houses, lay the sick and wounded. From room to room, between the pillars, moved the nursing women. To-day the rotunda was cleared. Surgeons and nurses snatched one half-hour, and, with the families from the professors' houses, and the men about the place and the servants, gathered upon the rotunda steps, or upon the surrounding grassy slopes, to watch the return of an old student. It was not long before they heard the Dead March.
For an hour the body lay between the white columns before the rotunda that Jefferson had built. Soldiers and civilians, women and children, passing before the bier, looked upon the marble face and the hand that clasped the sword. Then, toward sunset, the coffin lid was closed, the bearers took the coffin up, the Dead March began again, and all moved toward the graveyard.
Dusk gathered, soft and warm, and filled with fireflies. The Greenwood carriage, with the three sisters and Miss Lucy, drew slowly through the scented air up to the dim old house. Julius opened the door. The ladies stepped out, and in silence went up the steps. Molly had been crying. The little handkerchief which she dropped, and which was restored to her by Julius, was quite wet.