"We are going to have a hard time then," said Thorold; with a wilful presuming on his privileges.
"But what have you done with your battery?" I asked.
"Taken it to pieces - as you see."
"Pray, what for? I thought something was the matter."
"Nothing was the matter, I am glad to know," Thorold said looking at me. "It is sometimes necessary to do this sort of thing in a hurry; and the only way to do it then in a hurry, is to practise now when there is no hurry. You shall see how little time it will take to get ready for another order to fire. But Miss Randolph had better be out of the way first. Are you going farther?"
The major said he hoped so, and I answered certainly.
"I shall fire no more while you are here," Thorold said as he touched his cap, and he gallopped back to his place. He sat like a rock; it was something pretty to see. Then came an order, which I could not distinguish; and in an incredibly short time wheels were geared, guns were mounted, and the dismantled condition of everything replaced by the most alert order. The major said it was done very well, and told me how quick it could be done; I forget, but I think he said in much less than a minute; and then I know he wanted to move; but I could not. I held my place still, and the battery manoeuvred up and down the ground in all manner of directions, forming in various forms of battery; which little by little I got the major partially to explain. He was not very fluent; and I did not like his explanations; but nevertheless it was necessary to give him something to do, and I kept him busy, while the long line of artillery wagons rushed over the ground, and skirted it, and trailed across it in diagonal lines; walking sometimes, and sometimes going at full speed of horses and wheels. It stirred me, it saddened me, it fascinated me, all at once; while the gray horse and his rider held my eye far and near with a magnet hold. Sometimes in one part of the line, sometimes in another, the moving spirit and life of the whole. I followed and watched him with eye and heart, till my heart grew sick and I turned away.
CHAPTER VI.
IN THE FIRE
My ride with Major Fairbairn made me unsettled. Or else it was my seeing Mr. Thorold at his drill. A certain impatience seized me; an impatience of the circumstances and position in which I found myself privately, and of the ominous state and position of affairs in public. The horizon black with clouds, the grumble of the storm, and yet the portentous waiting and quiet which go before the storm's burst. It irked me to see Mr. Thorold as I had seen him yesterday; knowing ourselves united, but standing apart as if it were not so, and telling a lie to the world. It weighed on me, and I half felt that Christian was right and that anything openly acknowledged was easier to bear. And then Major Fairbairn's talk had filled me with fears. He represented things as being so very threatening, and the outbreak of the storm as being so very near; I could not regain the tranquillity of the days past, do what I would. I did a very unwise thing, I suppose, for I went to reading the papers. And they were full of Northern preparations and of Southern boastings; I grew more and more unsettled as I read. Among other things, I remember, was a letter from Russell, the Times correspondent, over which my heart beat wearily. For Mr. Russell, I thought, being an Englishman, and not a party to our national quarrel, might be expected to judge more coolly and speak more dispassionately than our own writers, either South or North. And the speeches he reported as heard from Southern gentlemen, and the feelings he observed to be common among them, were most adverse to any faint hope of mine that the war might soon end, or end advantageously for the North, or when it ended, leave my father and mother kindly disposed for my happiness. All the while I read, a slow knell seemed to be sounding at my heart. "We could have got on with those fanatics if they had been either Christians or gentlemen" - "there are neither Christians nor gentlemen among them." "Nothing on earth shall ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal, bigoted blackguards of the New England States, who neither comprehend nor regard the feelings of gentlemen." That was like what Preston said. I recognised the tone well. And when it was added, "Man, woman, and child, we'll die first" - I thought it was probably true. What chance then for Christian and me? "There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion," Mr. Russell wrote, "so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees." The end of the letter contained a little comfort in the intimation of more moderate counsels just then taking favour; but I went back to my father and mother, and aunt, and Preston, and others; and comfort found no lodgment with me. Then there was an extract from a Southern paper, calling Yankees "the most contemptible and detestable of God's creation" - speaking of their "mean, niggardly lives - their low, vulgar and sordid occupations" - and I thought, How can peace be? or what will it be when it comes?