CHAPTER LXVII.
[LETTER FROM CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH TO MAJOR CHARLES FROBISHER.]
Fisher’s Hill, September 21, 1864.
My dear Charley:
Many thanks to your dear wife for the frequent bulletins she has found time to send me in the intervals of nursing you, getting well herself, and worshipping King Charles II. Have you agreed upon a name yet? Or, rather, has Alice settled upon one? For I am told women claim the right of naming the first.
Old boy, when I heard that a bullet had gone clean through you I thought I had seen the last of you; and here you are on your pins again! A far slighter wound would have sufficed to make “darkness veil the eyes” of the stoutest of Homer’s heroes. What pin-scratches used to send them to Hades!
And now, Patroklus, I will tell you why I refused, at the opening of the war, to enter the same company of artillery with you. Your feelings were wounded at the time, and I wanted to tell you why I was so obstinate, but could not. To confess the honest truth, I had not the pluck to place myself where I might have to see you die before my eyes. It would have been different were we warring around Troy. There, I could have helped you, on a pinch, and you me. But these winged messengers of death, who can ward them off, even from the dearest friend!
I had a cruel trial in last week’s battle. When it became necessary to order Edmund’s company to advance, my heart sank within me. [Edmund was Mr. Poythress’s youngest child, a lad of barely sixteen summers, who had chafed and pined till he had wrung from his mother a tearful consent to his joining the army.] “If I do not come back,” he whispered in my ear, “tell mother that her ‘baby’ was man enough to do his duty,—for I am going to do it.” “Your company is moving,” I replied, in as stern a voice as I could muster; for I felt a rush of tears coming; and he bounded into his place. I have seen fair women in my day, and lovely landscapes, and noble chargers; but never have my eyes beheld anything so surpassingly beautiful as that ingenuous boy springing forward, under a rain of bullets, with a farewell to his mother on his lips, and the light of battle on his brow. I held my breath till he disappeared within the wood. Why is it that we all shudder at the dangers of those we love, and yet can be calm when our own lives hang by a thread? Is it not because, while we know that the loss of a true friend is one never to be repaired, and which casts a shadow upon our lives that can never be lifted [Charley keeps this letter, with another little note, which you will read later on, in a blue satin case, that Alice has embroidered with forget-me-nots. He showed it to me on the nineteenth of last October. The satin is all faded (and spotted, here and there) but time has not dulled the colors of the flowers], there is a profound, though veiled conviction, deep down in the heart of hearts of all of us, that, as for ourselves, it were better were we at rest? It seems to me that it is only the instinctive fear of death, which we share with the lower animals, and that conscience which makes brave men, not cowards of us all, that nerves such of us as have the cruel gift of thought to bear up to the end, against the slings and arrows of the most favored life, even. But it is a shame that I should write thus to a man with a brand-new baby!
I cannot picture to myself Alice as a mother; though, thanks to her graphic pen, I have a very clear conception of you as pater familias. I have laughed till I cried over her accounts of you sunning the youngster in the garden while the nurse was at her dinner, and the way you held him, and the extraordinary observations you see fit to make to him. I can’t blame him for smiling. The andante in Mozart’s D minor quartet is very beautiful; but never did I expect to hear of Charles Frobisher extemporizing words to it as a lullaby, while he rocked his infant to sleep!
But it is time I gave you some account of our late disastrous battle at Winchester. In order to understand it, you must have before your mind a picture of the region in which it was fought.
The valley of Virginia is a narrow ribbon of land, as it were, stretching diagonally across the State, between the Blue Ridge and Alleghany Mountains. As its fertility attracted settlers at an early date, its forests have mostly fallen years ago. This is especially true of the region around Winchester, which is situated in the midst of a broad, fertile plain, broken by rolling hills, crowned, here and there, by the fair remains of singularly noble forests. One would say, standing upon an eminence, and surveying the smiling landscape, that this lovely plain was fashioned by the hand of the Creator as the abode of plenty and eternal peace. Yet a poet, remembering that it is not peace, but war that man loves, could not, in his dreams, picture to himself a more beautiful battle-field. And if I have to fall, may it be on one of thy sunny slopes, valiant little Winchester; and may the last thing my eyes behold be the handkerchiefs waving from thy housetops. Such women are worth dying, yes, even worth living for.