"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.
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!" 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 passed 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!"
"You come here," Mrs. Desborough went on, feeling herself choke at his words, but determined not to give way to the warmer impulse of her heart, "and even you are moved by these sacred relics. What do you think they are to us?"
She was half conscious that she was appealing to the memorials around her to strengthen her in her purpose not to yield, not to make peace with the son of the man who had slain her husband, her hero, her love; she felt that in harboring for an instant such an impulse she was untrue to the Cause which, though lost, was for her forever living with the deathless devotion of love and anguish.
"These relics do move me," her son-in-law said gently. "They move me so deeply that they seem to me wrong. I confess that I was thinking, before you came in, that if I were a Southerner, with the traditions of the South behind me, and the bitter sense of failure to embitter me, they would stir me to madness; that I should feel it impossible ever to be loyal to anything but the South. The war is over. The South at last is understood. She is honored for the incredible bravery with which, under crushing odds, she fought for her conviction. Why prolong the inevitable pain? Why gather these relics to nourish a feeling absolutely untrue--the feeling that the Union is less your country than it is ours?"