"Judith, say that it was not you and I, but some other disgraced soldier and one of your sisters—"
"You are not a disgraced soldier. The innocent cannot be disgraced."
"Who knows that I was innocent? My mother, and you, Judith, know it; my kinspeople and certain friends believe it; but all the rest of the country—the army, the people—they don't believe it. Let my name be known to-morrow, and by evening a rougher dismissal than before! Do you not see, do you not see, Judith?"
"I see partly. I see that you must serve. I see that you walk with dangers. I see that—that you could not even write. I see that I must possess my soul in patience. I see that we must wait—Oh, God, it is all waiting, waiting, waiting! But I do not see—and I refuse to see, Richard—anything at the end of it all but love, happiness, union, home for you and me!"
He held her close. "Judith, I do not know the right. I am not sure that I see the right, my soul is so tempest-tossed. That day at White Oak Swamp. If I could cleanse that day, bring it again into line with the other days of my life, poor and halting though they may have been, though they may be, if I could make all men say 'His life was a whole—one life, not two. He had no twin, a disobedient soldier, a liar and betrayer, as it was said he had.'—If I could do that, Judith! I do not see how I will do it, and yet it is my intention to do it. That done, then, darling, darling! I will make true love to you. If it is not done—but I will not think of that. Only—only—how to do it, how to do it! That maddens me at times—"
"Is it that? Then we must think of that. They are not all dead who could tell?—"
"Maury Stafford is not dead."
"Maury Stafford!—What has he to do with it?"
Cleave laughed, a sound sufficiently grim. "What has he not to do with it?—with that order which he carried from General Jackson to General Winder, and from General Winder—not, before God! to me! Winder is dead, and the courier who could have told is dead, and others whom I might have called are dead—dead, I will avow, because of my choice of action, though still—given that false order—I justify that choice! And now we hear that Major Stafford was among those taken prisoner at Sharpsburg."
Judith stood upright, her hand at her breast, her eyes narrowed. "Until this hour I never knew the name of that officer. I never thought to ask. I never thought of the mistake lying there. The mistake! All these months I have thought of it as a mistake—as one of those misunderstandings, mishappenings, accidental, incomprehensible, that wound and blister human life! I never saw it in a lightning flash for what it was till now!"