Christianna took the wooden bucket and the tin dipper. For all she looked like a wild rose she was strong, and she had a certain mountain skill and light certainty of movement. She went down the long room, giving water to all who moaned for it. They lay very thick, the wounded, side by side in the heat, the glare of the room, where all the light possible must be had. Some lay outstretched and rigid, some much contorted. Some were delirious, others writhed and groaned, some were most pathetically silent and patient. Nearly all were thirsty; clutched the dipper with burning fingers, drank, with their hollow eyes now on the girl who held it, now on mere space. Some could not help themselves. She knelt beside these, raised the head with one hand, put water to the lips with the other. She gained her mountain steadiness and did well, crooning directions in her calm, drawling voice. This bucket emptied, she found where to fill it again, and pursued her task, stepping lightly between the huddled, painful rows, among the hurrying forms of nurses and surgeons and coloured helpers.
At the very end of the long lane, she came upon a blanket spread on the blood-stained floor. On it lay a man, blond and straight, closed eyes with a line between them, hand across his breast touching his shirt where it was stiff with dried blood. "Air you thirsty?" began Christianna, then set the bucket suddenly down.
Allan opened his eyes. "Very thirsty.... I reckon I am light-headed. I'm not on Thunder Run, am I?"
The frightful day wore on to late afternoon. No guns shook the air in these hours. Richmond understood that, out beyond the entrenchments, there was a pause in the storm. McClellan was leaving his own wonderful earthworks. But would he retreat down the Peninsula by the way he had come, or would he strike across and down the James to his gunboats by Westover? The city gathered that General Lee was waiting to find out. In the meantime the day that was set to the Dead March in "Saul" passed somehow, in the June heat and the odour of flowers and blood.
Toward five o'clock Judith left the Stonewall Hospital. She had not quitted it for twenty-four hours, and she came now into the light and air like a form emerging from Hades, very palely smiling, with the grey of the underworld, its breath and its terror still about her. There was hardly yet a consciousness of fatigue. Twelve hours before she had thought, "If I do not rest a little, I shall fall." But she had not been able to rest, and the feeling had died. For the last twelve she had moved like an automaton, swift, sure, without a thought of herself. It was as though her will stood somewhere far above and swayed her body like a wand. Even now she was going home, because the will said she must; must rest two hours, and come back fresher for the night.
As she came out into the golden light, Cleave left the group of young and old about the door and met her. In the plane along which life now moved, nothing was unnatural; certainly Richmond did not find it so, that a lover and his beloved should thus encounter in the street, a moment between battles. Her dark eyes and his grey ones met. To find him there seemed as natural as it had been in her dream; the street was no more to her than the lonely beach. They crossed it, went up toward the Capitol Square, and, entering, found a green dip of earth with a bench beneath a linden tree. Behind them rose the terraced slope to the pillared Capitol; as always, in this square children's voices were heard with their answering nurses, and the squirrels ran along the grass or upon the boughs above. But the voices were somewhat distant and the squirrels did not disturb; it was a leafy, quiet nook. The few men or women who passed, pale, distrait, hurrying from one quarter of the city to another, heeded as little as they were heeded. Lovers' meetings—lovers' partings—soldiers—women who loved them—faces pale and grave, yet raised, hands in hands, low voices in leafy places—man and woman together in the golden light, in the breathing space before the cannon should begin again—Richmond was growing used to that. All life was now in public. For the most part a clear altruism swayed the place and time, and in the glow smallness of comment or of thought was drowned. Certainly, it mattered not to Cleave and Judith that it was the Capitol Square, and that people went up and down.
"I have but the shortest while," he said. "I came this morning with Allen's body—the colonel of the 2d. I ride back directly. I hope that we will move to-night."
"Following McClellan?"
"To get across his path, if possible."
"There will be another battle?"