A short time before his death, just before he was taken to Mount McGregor, he dictated a note to me, sending his kind regards to my General, and saying he remembered with pleasure his talk with me over a cup of tea.
But we must return (and I am sure I am pardoned for this digression) to the weary life of enforced idleness at the cottage.
I had no garments to mend or to make, no household to manage. The sultry days were begun and rounded by hours of listless endurance, followed by troubled sleep. A bag of army "hardtack" stood in a corner, so the children were never hungry. Presently they, too, sat around us, too listless to play or talk. A great army of large, light brown Norway rats now overran the farm. They would walk to the corner before our eyes and help themselves to the army ration. We never moved a finger to drive them away. After a while Alick appeared with an enormous black-and-white cat.
"Dis is jest a leetle mo'n I can stand," said Alick. "De Yankees has stole ev'rything, and dug up de whole face o' the yearth—and de Jews comes all de time and pizens de well, droppin' down chains an' grapplin'-irons to see ef we all has hid silver—but I ain' obleedged to stan' sassyness fum dese outlandish rats."
Alick had to surrender. The very first night after the arrival of his valiant cat there was a scuffle in the room where the crackers were kept, a chair was overturned, and a flying cat burst through the hall, pursued by three or four huge rats. The cat took refuge in a tree, and, stealthily descending at an opportune moment, stole away and left the field to the enemy.
Of course there could be but one result from this life. Malaria had hung over us for weeks, and now one after another of the children lay down upon the "pallets" on the floor, ill with fever. Then I succumbed and was violently ill. Our only nurse was my dear General; and not in all the years when he never shirked duty, or lost a march, or rode on his own horse when his men had a toilsome march or if one of them failed by the way, and never lost one of the battles into which he personally led them,—not in all those trying times was he nobler, grander, than in his long and lonely vigils beside his sick family. And most nobly did the aged negress in the kitchen stand by us. My one fevered vision was of an ebony angel!
After we recovered, my dear husband was ill—ague and fever had fastened on him. When he, too, grew better, he would sit for days in hopeless despair, looking out on the desolate landscape.
General Hartsuff and his wife often visited us. They were terribly afraid of fever, and would send in messages from the gate while we were all so ill. But after we had recovered, General Hartsuff came himself—and finally sent Captain Gregory, the commissary-general, to see me, and to reason seriously with me about the necessity of sending General Pryor away. He had never been pardoned. There were men in power who constantly hinted at punishment and retribution. General Pryor would die here. He should go to New York, go by sea, shake off the chills that shook him so relentlessly every third day, meet friends (many Southerners were in New York), and something might result for his benefit.
This idea grew in our minds as feasible, if only we had the money. It had never occurred to me to make a second attempt (one had failed) to sell my watch. I now took it to a banker in Petersburg, added to it a cherished antique cameo set in diamonds which had never left my finger since it was given me, like Shylock's turquoise from his Leah, when my husband "was a bachelor." Leaving these in pledge, I received three hundred dollars. I bought some quinine forthwith, ordered a suit of clothes to replace the threadbare Confederate gray, and sent Roger A. Pryor, the sometime "rebel," to New York, upon an experiment of which the most sanguine imagination could not have foreseen the successful result.
A difficult task lay before him. Ruined in fortune, his occupation gone, his friends dead or impoverished, his health impaired, his heart broken, he had yet to win support for a wife and seven children, and that in a hostile community. Only two things were left to him—the ability to work and the willingness to work. With what courage he commenced the study of his profession, what difficulties he surmounted, what rebuffs he bore with fortitude, I can give here no adequate idea. He labored incessantly, often breaking down and fainting, at his task. In one of his early letters he says, "Sometimes I sink in despair; but then I rally and press on. Don't you think heaven will prosper me for your sake? The obstacles to the success of 'a rebel' in this city are almost insurmountable."