"What am I, Father?"

"Absolved, child--like this poor boy, here at your feet.... What is that locket in your hand?"

"His picture.... I found it in his house when the cavalry were setting fire to it.... Oh, I am tired of it all--deathly, deathly sick!... Look at him lying here! Father, Father, is there no end to death?"

The priest rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle lightning played.

A maimed, scorched, blackened thing in the grass near by was calling on Christ; the priest went to him, turning once on his way to look back where the Special Messenger knelt beside a dead man who lay smiling at nothing through his shattered eyeglasses.

IV

ROMANCE

The Volunteer Nurse sighed and spread out her slender, iodine-stained fingers on both knees, looking down at them reflectively.

"It is different now," she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied--or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand that, dear?"

"Partly," said the Special Messenger, raising her dark eyes to her old schoolmate.

"In the beginning," said the Nurse, dreamily, "the men in their uniforms, the drums and horses and glitter, and the flags passing, and youth--_youth_--not that you and I are yet old in years; do you know what I mean?"

"I know," said the Special Messenger, smoothing out her riding gloves.

"Do you remember the cadets at Oxley? You loved one of them."

"Yes; you know how it was in the cities; and even afterward in Washington--I mean the hospitals after Bull Run. Young bravery--the Zouaves--the multicolored guard regiments--and a romance in every death!" She laid one stained hand over the other, fingers still wide.

"But here in this blackened horror they call the 'seat of war'--this festering bullpen, choked with dreary regiments, all alike, all in filthy blue--here individuals vanish, men vanish. The schoolgirl dream of man dies here forever. Only unwashed, naked duty remains; and its inspiration, man--bloody, dirty, vermin-covered, terrible--sometimes; and sometimes whimpering, terrified, flinching, base, bereft of all his sex's glamour, all his mystery, shorn of authority, devoid of pride, pitiable, screaming under the knife.--It is different now," said the pretty Volunteer Nurse.--"The war kills more than human life."

The Special Messenger drew her buckskin gloves carefully through her belt and buttoned the holster of her revolver.

"I have seen war, too," she said; "and the men who dealt death and the men who received it. Their mystery remains--the glamour of a man remains for me--because he is a man."

"I have heard them crying like children in the stretchers."

"So have I. That solves nothing."

But the Nurse went on:

"And in the wards they are sometimes something betwixt devils and children. All the weakness and failings they attribute to women come out in them--fear, timidity, inconsequence, greed, malice, gossip! And, as for courage--I tell you, women bear pain better."

"Yes, I have learned that.... It is not difficult to beguile them either; to lead them, to read them. That is part of my work. I do it. I know they _are_ afraid in battle--the intelligent ones. Yet they fight.

I know they are really children--impulsive, passionate, selfish, often cruel--but, after all, they are here fighting this war--here encamped all around us throughout these hills and forests.... They have lost none of their glamour for me. Their mystery remains."

The Volunteer Nurse looked up with a tired smile:

"You always were emotional, dear."

"I am still."

"You don't have to drain wounds and dry out sores and do the thousand unspeakable offices that we do."

"Why do you do them?"

"I have to."

"You didn't have to enlist. Why did you?"

"Why do the men enlist?" asked the Nurse. "That's why you and I did--whatever the motive may have been, God knows.... And it's killed part of me.... _You_ don't cleanse ulcers."

"No; I am not fitted. I tried; and lost none of the romance in me. Only it happens that I can do--what I am doing--better."

The Nurse looked at her a trifle awed.

"To think, dear, that you should turn out to be the celebrated Special Messenger. You were timid in school."

"I am now.... You don't know how afraid a woman can be. Suppose in school--suppose that for one moment we could have foreseen our destiny--here together, you and I, as we are now."

The Nurse looked into the stained hollow of her right hand.

"I had the lines read once," she said drearily, "but nobody ever said I'd be here, or that there'd be any war." And she continued to examine her palm with a hurt expression in her blue eyes.

The Special Messenger laughed, and her lovely, pale face lighted up with color.

"Don't you really think you are ever going to be capable of caring for a man again?"

"No, I don't. I know now how they're fashioned, how they think--how--how revolting they can be.... No, no! It's all gone--all the ideals, all the dreams.... Good Heavens, how romantic--how senseless we were in school!"

"I am still," said the Special Messenger thoughtfully. "I like men....

A man--the right one--could easily make me love him. And I am afraid there are more than one 'right one.' I have often been on the sentimental border.... But they died, or went away--or I did.... The trouble with me is, as you say, that I am emotional, and very, very tender-hearted.... It is sometimes difficult to be loyal--to care for duty--to care for the Union more than for a man. Not that there is any danger of my proving untrue----"

"No," murmured the Nurse, "loyalty is your inheritance."

"Yes, we--" she named her family under her breath--"are traditionally trustworthy. It is part of us--our race was always, will always be.... But--to see a man near death--and to care for him a little--even a rebel--and to know that one word might save him--only one little disloyal word!"

"No man would save _you_ at that expense," said the Nurse disdainfully.

"I know men."

"Do you? I don't--in that way. There was once an officer--a noncombatant. I could have loved him.... Once there was a Confederate cavalryman. I struck him senseless with my revolver-butt--and I might have--cared for him. He was very young.... I never can forget him. It is hard, dear, the business I am engaged in.... But it has never spoiled my interest in men--or my capacity for loving one of them. I am afraid I am easily moved."

She rose and stood erect, to adjust her soft riding hat, her youthfully slender figure in charming relief against the window.

"Won't you let me brew a little tea for you?" asked the Nurse. "Don't leave me so soon."

"When do you go on duty?"