"But for what should you ask pardon, if the North was in the right?"
"For myself; for not understanding--for being so dull all these years that I have lived with a wife faithful in her heart to the South and too loyal to me to speak. We in the North have forgiven, and we think that the South should forget. It has come over me to-day how easy it is for the conquerors to forgive and how hard that must be for the conquered."
"You do not understand even now," she said, her voice low with feeling.
"Because we are conquered we can forgive; but we should be less than human to forget."
The room was very still for a little, and then, following out her thought, she said as if in wonder: "And you, a Northerner, have felt all this!"
He shook his head, with a little smile.
"It is perhaps too much to ask," returned he, "that you Southern women should realize that even a Northerner is still human."
"Yes, yes; but to feel our suffering, to see--"
"It has always been facing me, I understand now, in my wife"s eyes--the immeasurable pathos of a people beaten in a struggle they felt to be right; but she had been so happy otherwise, and she never spoke of it."
"In the heart of every Southern woman," she said solemnly, though now without bitterness, "is always the anguish of our Lost Cause. We cover the surface, we accept, and G.o.d knows we have been patient; but each of us has deep down a sense of the blood that was poured out in vain, of the agony of the men we loved, of how they were humiliated--humiliated, and of the great cause of liberty lost--lost!"
For long, bitter years she had not spoken even to her nearest friends as she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner. The consciousness of this brought her back to the remembrance that he was the husband of her daughter.
"Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you understand how we Southern women must feel?" she asked.
He grew instantly colder.
"I have never seen her Southern relatives."
"Pardon the curiosity of an old woman," she went on, watching him keenly; "may I ask why?"
"My wife"s mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter married."
"And you?"
"I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on sufferance," he answered crisply. "I was aware of no wrong, and I did not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner."
She knew that in her heart she was already accepting this strong, fine man, alien as he was to all the traditions of her life, and she was not ill pleased at his pride.
"But have you ever considered what it must have cost the mother to give up her daughter?"
"Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the North and the South have been common enough without any family breach."
She was utterly sure that he knew neither to whom he was talking nor what had been the real cause of her separation from her daughter. She experienced a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had come the moment when she might justify herself; when she might tell the whole dreadful story which had been as eating poison in her veins. She raised her head proudly, and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes.
"If you have patience to listen," she said, feeling her cheeks warm, "and will pardon my being personal, I should like to tell you what has happened to me. My husband was a colonel in the Confederate army. We were married when I was seventeen, in a brief furlough he won by being wounded at the battle of the Wilderness. I saw him, in the four years of the war before he fell at Five Forks, less than a dozen times, and always for the briefest visits--poor sc.r.a.ps of fearful happiness torn out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my only child, was born after her father"s death. Our fortune had gone to the Cause. My father and my husband both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it disloyal, and they put everything into Confederate securities even after they felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too loyal to withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril."
She paused, but he did not speak, and with swelling breast and parching throat she went on:--
"At Five Forks my husband was killed in a hand-to-hand fight with a Northern officer. He struck his enemy down after he had received his own death-wound. I pray G.o.d he did not know the day was lost. He had gone through so much, I hope that was spared him. On the other side of death he must have found some comfort to help him bear it. G.o.d must have had some comfort for our poor boys when he permitted the cause of liberty to be lost."
She pressed her clenched hand against her bosom, and as she did so her eyes met those of her companion. She felt the sympathy of his look, but something recalled her to the sense that she was speaking to one from the North.
"It is not the cause of liberty to you," she said. "I have forgotten again. I have not spoken of all this for so long. I have not dared; but to-day--to-day I must speak, and you must forgive me if I use the old language."
He dropped his glance as if he felt it an intrusion to see her bitter emotion, and said softly: "I think I understand. You need not apologize."
"After the war," she went on hurriedly and abruptly, "I lived for my daughter. I worked for her. She--she was like her father."
She choked, but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.
"When she was a woman--she was still a child to me; over twenty, but I was not twice her age--she went North, and there she fell in love. She wrote me that she was to marry a Northerner, and when she added his name--it was the son of the man who killed her father."
"It is not possible!" the other exclaimed. "You imagined it. Such things happen in melodramas--"
She put up her hand and arrested his words.
"This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy--in my life," she said. "I need not go into details. She married him, and I have never seen her since."
"Did he know?"
"No. It was my wedding gift to my daughter--that I kept her secret. That was all I had strength to do. You think I was an unnatural mother, of course; but--"
She saw that his eyes were moist as he raised them in answering.
"I should have said so yesterday without any hesitation; to-day--"
"To-day?" she echoed eagerly, as he paused.
"To-day," he answered, letting his glance sweep over the pathetic memorials so thick about them--"to-day at least I understand, and I do not wonder."
She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes, trying to read his most hidden feeling. Then she touched his arm lightly with the tips of her slender black-gloved fingers.
"Come," she said.
She led him across the room, and pointed to a colonel"s sash and pistols which lay in one of the cases under a faded card.
"Those were my husband"s."
"Those!" he cried. "You Louise"s mother? It is impossible!"
"It may be impossible; but, as I said of the other thing, it is true."
"The other thing?" he repeated. "What--do you mean the thing you said--that my father and he-- That cannot be true. I should surely have known!"
"It is true," she insisted. "At the moment it happened they were surrounded by our soldiers, and his own men probably did not realize just what happened. But I--I know every minute of that fight! One of my husband"s staff had been at West Point with them both, and he told me.
He saw it, and tried to come between them. Your wife married you, knowing you to be the son of the man who killed her father."
The Northerner pa.s.sed his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away the confusion of his mind. His eyes were cast down, but she saw that their lids were wet.
"Poor Louise!" he murmured, seemingly rather to himself than to her; "how she must have suffered over that secret. Poor Louise!"