They passed into a room where a number of tables were placed, and from this into another where several women were arranging articles on broad wooden shelves. "If you will wait here, I will go slip on my outdoor dress." One of the women turned. "Judith!—Cousin Cary!—come look at these quilts which have been sent from over in Chesterfield!" She was half laughing, half crying. "Rising Suns and Morning Stars and Jonah's Gourds! Oh me! oh me! I can see the poor souls wrapped in them! The worst of it is, they'll all be used, and we'll be thankful for them, and wish for more! Look at this pile, too, from town! Tarletan dresses cut into nets, and these surgeons' aprons made from damask tablecloths! And the last fringed towels that somebody was saving, with the monogram so beautifully done!" She opened a closet door. "Look! I'll scrape lint in my sleep every night for a hundred years! The young girls rolled all these bandages—" Another called her attention. "Will you give me the storeroom key? Mrs. Haxall has just sent thirty loaves of bread, and says she'll bake again to-morrow. There's more wine, too, from Laburnum."
The first came back. "The room seems full of things, and yet we have seen how short a way will go what seems so much! And every home gets barer and barer! The merchants are as good as gold. They send and send, but the stores are getting bare, too! Kent and Paine gave bales and bales of cotton goods. We made them up into these—" She ran her hand over great piles of nightshirts and drawers. "But now we see that we have nothing like enough, and the store has given as much again, and in every lecture room in town we are sewing hard to get more and yet more done in time. The country people are so good! They have sent in quantities of bar soap—and we needed it more than almost anything!—and candles, and coarse towelling, and meal and bacon—and hard enough to spare I don't doubt it all is! And look here, Cousin Cary!" She indicated a pair of crutches, worn smooth with use. To one a slip of paper was tied with a thread. Her kinsman bent forward and read it: "I kin mannedge with a stick."
Judith returned, in her last year's muslin, soft and full, in the shady Eugénie hat which had been sent her from Paris two years ago. It went well with the oval face, the heavy bands of soft dark hair, the mouth of sweetness and strength, the grave and beautiful eyes. Father and daughter, out they stepped into the golden, late afternoon.
Main Street was crowded. A battery, four guns, each with six horses, came up it with a heavy and jarring sound over the cobblestones. Behind rode a squad or two of troopers. The people on the sidewalk called to the cannoneers cheerful greetings and inquiries, and the cannoneers and the troopers returned them in kind. The whole rumbled and clattered by, then turned into Ninth Street. "Ordered out on Mechanicsville pike—that's all they know," said a man.
The two Carys, freeing themselves from the throng, mounted toward the Capitol Square, entered it, and walked slowly through the terraced, green, and leafy place. There was passing and repassing, but on the whole the place was quiet. "I return to the lines to-morrow," said Warwick Cary. "The battle cannot be long postponed. I know that you will not repeat what I say, and so I tell you that I am sure General Jackson is on his way from the Valley. Any moment he may arrive."
"And then there will be terrible fighting?"
"Yes; terrible fighting—Look at the squirrels on the grass!"
As always in the square, there were squirrels in the great old trees, and on the ground below, and as always there were negro nurses, bright turbaned, aproned, ample formed, and capable. With them were their charges, in perambulators, or, if older, flitting like white butterflies over the slopes of grass. A child of three, in her hand a nut for the squirrel, started to cross the path, tripped and fell. General Cary picked her up, and, kneeling, brushed the dust from her frock, wooing her to smiles with a face and voice there was no resisting. She presently fell in love with the stars on his collar, then transferred her affection to his sword hilt. Her mammy came hurrying. "Ef I des' tuhn my haid, sumpin' bound ter happen, 'n' happen dat minute! Dar now! You ain' hut er mite, honey, 'n' you's still got de goober fer de squirl. Come mek yo' manners to de gineral!"
Released, the two went on. "Have you seen Edward?"
"Yes. Three days ago—pagan, insouciant, and happy! The men adore him. Fauquier is here to-day."