Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

"I've looked a great while for you, Madam. I would never 'a' give up, though, if I'd gone to Maine or Labrador, and round by the Rocky Mountains, hunting for you. I heard you singing in the church this morning, and I knew your voice. Though it didn't sound natural right,—but I knew it was nobody else's voice,—as if the North mostly hadn't agreed with it. And I heard it yesterday somewhere,—that's what 'sured me. I was going along the street, when I heard it; but it was not this house you were in."

"And it was you, then, Julius, who betrayed me to the person who supposes himself to be your protector,—and this because you thought surely I must be glad to return, when I had lost my friends here through ill report! Is that the way your war is carried on?"

"My war, Madam?"

But Julius did not look at his mistress; he looked away, and shrugged his shoulders. The device of which he was convicted had seemed to him so good, so sure, nevertheless had failed.

She had scarcely finished speaking, when a note was brought to the door. It was from Adam von Gelhorn.

"I am making my preparations to go at nine to-morrow," said the note. "Will you come to the church before? I would like to remember having seen you there last, at the organ. There's a bit of news just reached me, said to be a secret. General Edgar's command aims at preventing the junction of our forces before Y–. He is strong enough, numerically, to overthrow either division in separate conflict, and this is his Napoleonic strategy. But he will be outwitted. There's no doubt of it. Do not despair of our cause, whatever you hear during the coming fortnight. I shall report myself immediately to McClellan, and he may make a drummer-boy of me, if he will. Henceforth I am at his service till the war ends.

Thrice she read this note; when her eyes lifted at last, Julius was still standing where she had left him. She started, seeing him, as if his presence there at the moment took a new significance; her heart fainted within her.

Had he heard this secret of which Von Gelhorn spoke? It was her husband's life that was in jeopardy!

"When are you going, Julius?" she asked.

"To-morrow. Oh, Madam, give me some word for him!"

Red horror of death, how it rises before her sight! She shuddered, cowered, sank before the blackness of darkness that followed fast on that terrific spectacle of carnage, before which a whirlwind seemed to have planted her. She heard the cries and yells, the groans and curses of bleeding, dying men; saw banners in the dust, horsemen and horses crushed under the great guns, mortality in fragments, heaps upon heaps of ruin on the field Aceldama.

Where was he? Who would search among the slain for him? Who from among the dying would rescue him? Who will stanch his bleeding wounds? Who will moisten his parched lips? Whose voice sound in the ears that have heard the roar of guns amid the crash of battle? What hand shall bathe and fan that brow? What eyes shall watch till those eyelids unlock, and catch the whisper of those lips? Nay, who will save his life from the needless sacrifice? tell him that his plans are known, warn him back, warn him of spies and of treachery? Has Julius betrayed him?

She looked at the slave. But before she looked, her heart reproached her for having doubted him.

"You will need this gold," she said. "Take it. Restore the miniature to your master. And go,—go at once. If success be in store for him , I share not the shame of it. If defeat, adversity, sickness,—your master knows his wife fears but one thing, has fled but from one thing. Her heart is with him, but she abhors the cause to which he has given himself. She will not share his crime."

Difficult as these words were to speak, she spoke them without faltering, and they admitted no discussion.

The slave lingered yet longer, but there was no more that she would say. Assured at last of that, he said,—

"I obey you," and was gone.

He was gone,—gone! and she had betrayed nothing,—had given no warning,—had uttered not a word by which the life that was of all lives most precious to her might have been saved!

By eight o'clock next morning Mrs. Edgar was in the church. Von Gelhorn preceded her by five minutes; he was walking up the aisle when she entered, impatient for her appearing, eager to be gone,—wondering, boy-like, that she came not.

He has performed a prodigious amount of labor since they last met. His pictures were all removed to the Odeon, he said. His studio, haunt of dreams, beloved of fame so long, stripped and barren, looked like any other four-walled room,—and he, a freeman, stood equipped for service.

Yes, an hour would see him speeding to the capital. In less time than it had taken him to perfect his arrangements he should be at the head-quarters of the commander-in-chief,—to be made a drummer-boy of, as he said before, or serve wherever there should be room for him.

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