She smiled, the ghost of the old gay smile, and her listless arms moved.
Weldon, riding on the other side, nodded to me in quiet content: "Now all she lacked she may have, Renault," he said, smiling. "All will be well, thank God! Let her sleep!"
She heard him, watching me as I rode beside her.
"It was only you I lacked, Carus," she murmured dreamily; and, smiling, fell into a deep, sweet sleep.
Then, as we rode into the first outlying farms, men and women came to their gates, calling out to us in their Low Dutch jargon, and at first I scarce heeded them as I rode, so stunned with joy was I to see her sleeping there in the sunlight, and her white, cool skin and her mouth soft and moist.
Gun on gun shook the air with swift concussion. The pleasant Dutch bells swung aloft in mellow harmony. Suddenly, far behind where our infantry moved in column, I heard cheer on cheer burst forth, and the horns and fifes in joyous fanfare, echoed by the solid outbreak of the drums.
"What are they cheering for, mother?" I asked an old Dutch dame who waved her kerchief at us.
"For Willett and for George the Virginian, sir," she said, dimpling and dropping me a courtesy.
"George the Virginian?" I asked, wondering. "Do you mean his Excellency?"
And still she dimpled and nodded and bobbed her white starched cap, and I made nothing of what she said until I heard men shouting, "Yorktown!" and "The war ends! Hurrah!"
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" shouted a mounted officer, spurring past us up the hill; "Butler's dead, and Cornwallis is taken!"
"Taken?" I repeated incredulously.
The booming guns were my answer. High against the blue a jeweled ensign fluttered, silver, azure and blood red, its staff and halyards wrapped in writhing jets of snow-white smoke flying upward from the guns.
I rode toward it, cap in hand, head raised, awed in the presence of God's own victory! The shouting streets echoed and reechoed as we passed between packed ranks of townspeople; cheers, the pealing music of the bells, the thunderous shock of the guns grew to a swimming, dreamy sound, through which the flag fluttered on high, crowned with the golden nimbus of the sun!
"Carus!"
"Ah, sweetheart, did they wake you? Sleep on; the war is over!" I whispered, bending low above her. "Now indeed is all well with the world, and fit once more for you to live in."