“Yes, yes, dear. It’s all over now. General Lee has surrendered, and when you are better I’ll take you home, where the sunshine and flowers will give you strength again.”
“How’s my little sis?”
“Hunting in another part of the city for you. She’s grown so tall and stately you’ll hardly know her. Your papa is at home, and don’t know yet that you are wounded.”
“And my sweetheart, Marion Lenoir?”
“The most beautiful little girl in Piedmont—as sweet and mischievous as ever. Mr. Lenoir is very ill, but he has written a glorious poem about one of your charges. I’ll show it to you to-morrow. He is our greatest poet. The South worships him. Marion sent her love to you and a kiss for the young hero of Piedmont. I’ll give it to you now.”
She bent again and kissed him.
“And my dogs?”
“General Sherman left them, at least.”
“Well, I’m glad of that—my mare all right?”
“Yes, but we had a time to save her—Jake hid her in the woods till the army passed.”
“Bully for Jake.”
“I don’t know what we should have done without him.”
“Old Aleck still at home and getting drunk as usual?”
“No, he ran away with the army and persuaded every negro on the Lenoir place to go, except his wife, Aunt Cindy.”
“The old rascal, when Mrs. Lenoir’s mother saved him from burning to death when he was a boy!”
“Yes, and he told the Yankees those fire scars were made with the lash, and led a squad to the house one night to burn the barns. Jake headed them off and told on him. The soldiers were so mad they strung him up and thrashed him nearly to death. We haven’t seen him since.”
“Well, I’ll take care of you, Mamma, when I get home. Of course I’ll get well. It’s absurd to die at nineteen. You know I never believed the bullet had been moulded that could hit me. In three years of battle I lived a charmed life and never got a scratch.”
His voice had grown feeble and laboured, and his face flushed. His mother placed her hand on his lips.
“Just one more,” he pleaded feebly. “Did you see the little angel who has been playing and singing for me? You must thank her.”
“Yes, I see her coming now. I must go and tell Margaret, and we will get a pass and come every day.”
She kissed him, and went to meet Elsie.
“And you are the dear girl who has been playing and singing for my boy, a wounded stranger here alone among his foes?”
“Yes, and for all the others, too.”
Mrs. Cameron seized both of her hands and looked at her tenderly.
“You will let me kiss you? I shall always love you.”
She pressed Elsie to her heart. In spite of the girl’s reserve, a sob caught her breath at the touch of the warm lips. Her own mother had died when she was a baby, and a shy, hungry heart, long hidden from the world, leaped in tenderness and pain to meet that embrace.
Elsie walked with her to the door, wondering how the terrible truth of her boy’s doom could be told.
She tried to speak, looked into Mrs. Cameron’s face, radiant with grateful joy, and the words froze on her lips. She decided to walk a little way with her. But the task became all the harder.
At the corner she stopped abruptly and bade her good-bye:
“I must leave you now, Mrs. Cameron. I will call for you in the morning and help you secure the passes to enter the hospital.”
The mother stroked the girl’s hand and held it lingeringly.
“How good you are,” she said softly. “And you have not told me your name?”
Elsie hesitated and said:
“That’s a little secret. They call me Sister Elsie, the Banjo Maid, in the hospitals. My father is a man of distinction. I should be annoyed if my full name were known. I’m Elsie Stoneman. My father is the leader of the House. I live with my aunt.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing her hand.
Elsie watched the dark figure disappear in the crowd with a strange tumult of feeling.
The mention of her father had revived the suspicion that he was the mysterious power threatening the policy of the President and planning a reign of terror for the South. Next to the President, he was the most powerful man in Washington, and the unrelenting foe of Mr. Lincoln, although the leader of his party in Congress, which he ruled with a rod of iron. He was a man of fierce and terrible resentments. And yet, in his personal life, to those he knew, he was generous and considerate. “Old Austin Stoneman, the Great Commoner,” he was called, and his name was one to conjure with in the world of deeds. To this fair girl he was the noblest Roman of them all, her ideal of greatness. He was an indulgent father, and while not demonstrative, loved his children with passionate devotion.
She paused and looked up at the huge marble columns that seemed each a sentinel beckoning her to return within to the cot that held a wounded foe. The twilight had deepened, and the soft light of the rising moon had clothed the solemn majesty of the building with shimmering tenderness and beauty.
“Why should I be distressed for one, an enemy, among these thousands who have fallen?” she asked herself. Every detail of the scene she had passed through with him and his mother stood out in her soul with startling distinctness—and the horror of his doom cut with the deep sense of personal anguish.
“He shall not die,” she said, with sudden resolution. “I’ll take his mother to the President. He can’t resist her. I’ll send for Phil to help me.”
She hurried to the telegraph office and summoned her brother.
CHAPTER II
The Great Heart
The next morning, when Elsie reached the obscure boarding-house at which Mrs. Cameron stopped, the mother had gone to the market to buy a bunch of roses to place beside her boy’s cot.
As Elsie awaited her return, the practical little Yankee maid thought with a pang of the tenderness and folly of such people. She knew this mother had scarcely enough to eat, but to her bread was of small importance, flowers necessary to life. After all, it was very sweet, this foolishness of these Southern people, and it somehow made her homesick.
“How can I tell her!” she sighed. “And yet I must.”
She had only waited a moment when Mrs. Cameron suddenly entered with her daughter. She threw her flowers on the table, sprang forward to meet Elsie, seized her hands and called to Margaret.
“How good of you to come so soon! This, Margaret, is our dear little friend who has been so good to Ben and to me.”
Margaret took Elsie’s hand and longed to throw her arms around