University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
AT THE MATHER MANSION.

IT was very lonely at the Mather mansion after the
departure of the soldiers, and it required all
Annie's tact to keep Rose from sinking entirely
under the sense of desolation which crept over her as
she began more and more to realize what the war meant,
and to tremble for the safety of her husband and her
brothers. They were still in Washington, but they
might be ordered to advance at any moment; and, in a
tremor of distress, Rose waited and watched for every
mail which could bring her tidings of them. Next to
her husband's letters, Jimmie's did her the most good,
for Jimmie had in his nature a world of hopefulness and
humor; and his letters were full of fun, and quaint description
of the life he was leading. And still of the three
young men,—Will Mather, Tom Carleton, and Jimmie,—
the latter suffered the most acutely, for in addition to his
dislike of military life he was compelled to endure the
jokes and jeers which the coarser and more unfeeling of
his comrades heaped upon him when, from Bill Baker,
they heard that his first experience in arms-bearing had
been learned in the army of the enemy. To one of Bill's

instincts it seemed a great thing that he had captured
and brought to Washington so illustrious a prisoner as
the “Corp'ral,” as he persisted in calling him, and the
story was repeated with such wonderful additions, that
Jimmie, when once by accident he was a listener to the
tale, failed utterly to recognize himself in the “chap who
had run so many miles, from, and then fought so many
hours with, the redoubtable Bill,” who, while annoying
his quondam captive so terribly, still, under all circumstances,
evinced for him an attachment as singular as it
was sincere. Everything which he could do for Jimmie
he did, becoming literally his servant and drudge, and
thus saving him from many a hardship which, as a private,
he would otherwise have encountered. It was a
fancy of Jimmie's that by serving as a private in the
army against which his hand had once been lifted, he
should in some way expiate his sin, and, perhaps, be
surer of winning favor from Annie Graham, whose blue
eyes were constantly before him just as they had looked
when, in her dress of black, she stood in the spring sunshine,
bidding him good-bye. Soon after his arrival in
Washington, he had been offered a second lieutenancy in
Captain Carleton's company, but he steadily declined the
office, giving no explanation to any one except his
brother and his sister Rose, to whom he wrote:

This was what Jimmie wrote to Rose after he had been
gone for three or four weeks, and what Rose, with her
usual impetuous thoughtlessness, read to her mother and
Annie, who were both in her room when the letter came.
Annie had made an attempt to leave, but Rose had insisted
that there could be no secret in Jimmie's letter. If
there was, she would skip it, she said, and she read on,
stumbling dreadfully, and mispronouncing words, for
Jimmie's handwriting was never very plain; and this
letter, written with a soft lead pencil, with a bit of slatestone
for a table, was his very worst. She made out,
however, that he had declined the office of second lieutenant
because he thought he did not deserve it; that he
had named Eli Simms as a fitter person for it than himself,
and that he had called the widow a “crab-apple,”
or something like it. All this was very clear; and, after
exclaiming against Jimmie's morbid sense of justice in one
breath, and pronouncing him “perfectly splendid” in
another, she kept on till she reached the “paragon,”
which she rendered “Pequot,” making the sentence read,
“Will that Pequot of yours, Mistress Graham, think I did
right?”

“What did he call me?” Annie exclaimed, her face
turning very white, as she leaned toward Rose, who,
startled at her vehemence, tried again to make out the
word, which was strangely distorted, from the fact that

just as Jimmie was writing it, his shadow, Bill, had struck
him familiarly upon the shoulder, saying, with a laugh,

“Writin' to your gal, I s'pose? Give her Bill Baker's
regrets.”

“It looks like Pequot, and some like Patagonian,”
Rose said, deciding at last that it was paragon, and adding,
by way of an explanation to herself of Annie's evident
surprise, “you did not like the idea of his calling you a
Pequot, did you Annie? It wouldn't have meant anything
if he had, and it was natural that I should make the
blunder, for that's the name he gave the young girl at the
Pequot House,—the one he liked, and to whom he passed
himself off as Dick Lee. You remember I told you about
her.”

“Yes, I remember,” and Annie's voice was a little
husky—“the little girl who was not happy with her aunt,
and so listened the more willingly to the boy's kind winning
words.”

Annie did not know why she said that, unless it were
wrung from her by some sudden and bitter memory of
what had been a bright sun-spot in her cheerless childhood.
When the Pequot girl was mentioned in her presence
once before, she had gathered that it was mostly
Mrs. Carleton's pride which had taken the boy away from
any more rambles on the beach or moonlight sails upon
the bay, and perhaps it was a desire to defend and excuse
the girl which prompted her to advance a reason why
Dick Lee's attentions had been so acceptable. She would
have given much to recall her words, which made Mrs.
Carleton dart a quick, curious glance at her, while Rose
exclaimed: “How do you know she was not happy with
her aunt? Did Jimmie ever tell you about her?”

“Never,” Annie replied, feeling glad that a servant appeared

just at that moment, telling Rose a little girl was
in the kitchen asking to see her.

It was a daughter of one of the soldiers whose mother
was sick and had sent to Mrs. Mather for some little delicacy.
Such calls were frequent at the Mather house, for
the soldiers did not receive their pay regularly, and there
was much destitution among their families, who, but for
Rose's liberality, would have suffered far more than they
did. As freely as water, her money was used to relieve
their wants, and now, forgetting Jimmie and his Pequot,
she entered at once into the little girl's story, and when
told that the sick woman had expressed a wish to see her
she said, “I'll go now; there's Jake just come in. I'll
have him harness the horses and take you home. It must
be a mile or more to your house.”

Rose usually acted upon her impulses, and was soon
in her carriage, with a huge basket at her feet and the
little girl opposite, enjoying her ride so much, and enjoying
it the more for the unmistakable signs of envy and
wonder which she detected in the faces of her companions
as she neared her humble home in the hollow.
Rose had asked both her mother and Annie to accompany
her, but they had declined, and for a time after
Rose's departure they sat together in perfect silence,
while a curious train of thought was passing through the
minds of each. Annie's agitation when Rose read “Pequot”
for “paragon” had surprised Mrs. Carleton, while
what she had said of the girl and her aunt had awakened
a feeling of disquiet and suspicion. Mrs. Carleton
was proud of her own and her husband's family,—proud
of her wealth, and proud of her position. Not offensively
so, but in that quiet, assured kind of way so natural
to the highly bred Bostonian. It was this

pride which had prompted her to resort to so extreme
measures with the boy Jimmie, when she found
how much he was interested in the little Pequot, and
when, during Jimmie's brief stay in Rockland, she, with
a mother's quick intuition, detected in him signs of interest
in Annie Graham, her pride again took fright, and
she was half glad to have him go from the possible temptation.
Something in the nobler part of the woman's nature
told her how wrong the feeling was, while each day some
new development of Annie's gentle Christian character,
made the desolate young creature dearer to her. That
she was superior to most people in her rank of life Mrs.
Carleton knew, and she had more than once wondered
how one like her had ever become the wife of a mechanic.
She was not thinking of this, however, on the afternoon
when she was alone with Annie, while Rose was away
on her errand of mercy. She was thinking rather of the
suspicion which had just found a lodgment in her mind,
and was devising some means of testing its reality. To
this end she at last made some casual remark about Rockland
and its people, asking if Annie had always lived there.

“Only since I was married,” was the reply. And Mrs.
Carleton continued,

“You seem more like Eastern people than like a New
Yorker. Were you born in New England?”

“Yes,—in Connecticut,” Annie said. And then Mrs.
Carleton made a great blunder by asking next,

“Were you born in or near New London? I have
been there several times, and may know your family.”

At mention of New London Annie's eyes flashed upon
Mrs. Carleton with a startled look, as if she felt that
there was a deeper meaning in the questioning to which
she was being subjected than appeared on the surface,
and her voice trembled a little as she replied,

“I was born in Hartford, and lived there till I was
eight years old, when my parents both died of cholera
in one day, and I went to live with my aunt in New
Haven.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Carleton answered slowly.

Thus far there was quite as much to prove as there
was to disprove the correctness of her surmise, and
thinking to herself,

“I may as well go further now I have commenced with
being rude,” she continued, “Pardon me, Mrs. Graham,
if I seem inquisitive, but I cannot help feeling interested
in one to whom Rose is so greatly attached, and I do not
remember that I ever heard any of your history before
your husband went to war. I do not even know your
maiden name.”

Annie's heart beat almost audibly, and her cheeks were
very red, as she replied,

“My father was Dr. Howard, and I was Annie Louise
Howard. Excuse me, Mrs. Carleton, if I cannot talk
much of my girl-life after my parents died. It was not
a happy one. I was wholly dependent upon my aunt,
who, while giving me every advantage in the way of education,
kept before me so constantly the fact that I was
an object of charity that it embittered every moment of
my life, and when George offered me his love I accepted
it gladly, finding in him the only real friend I had known
since the day I was an orphan.”

Annie was crying now, and excusing herself she left
the parlor and repaired to her own room, where her excitement
spent itself in tears and sobs as she recalled all
the dreadful years when she was subject to the caprices
of the most capricious of women, who had attempted to
force her into a marriage with a millionnaire of sixty,
and had driven her to accept the love which George Graham

had offered her. George had not been her equal in
an intellectual point of view, and none knew this fact
better than Annie herself. But he was the kindest, tenderest
of husbands, and she had loved him devotedly for
the manly virtues which made him the noble, unselfish
man he was. Capt. Carleton and Jimmie both could
sympathize with her tastes and inclinations far better
than George had done; but never once during her brief
married life had she allowed herself to wonder what her
lot might have been had it been cast with people like the
Carletons. And since her husband's death anything
which looked away from that grave by the churchyard
gate seemed so terrible to her that now, as she recalled
Mrs. Carleton's questionings, and guessed what had
prompted them, every nerve quivered with pain, which
could only be soothed by a visit to George's grave.
There, on the turf which covered him, she had wept out
many a grief, and she started for it now, the villagers
watching her as she passed their doors, and curiously
speculating, as people will, upon the time to come when
the long black dress and graceful, girlish form would not
be so often seen among the Rockland dead.

Already the gossips of the town were coupling her
name with the Carletons, the majority giving her to Tom,
the elder, and more worthy of the two. A whisper of this
gossip had been borne to Mrs. Carleton, who, while pretending
to ignore it, had felt troubled as she recalled all
the incidents of Jimmie's visit at home. Then, when
the suspicion came to her that the woman whom Rose
had taken into her household was possibly identical with
the girl of New London, whose name she could not remember,
she felt for a moment greatly disturbed. There
was a fierce struggle with her pride, a close reasoning
with herself, and then her better nature triumphed, and

her heart went out very kindly toward poor Annie, at
that moment standing by her husband's grave, and wondering
why her thoughts would keep straying away to
the wayward young man who had been a traitor to his
country, but was trying to atone by voluntarily bearing
the hardships of a private's life when a better was offered
him. He had asked if she would think he did right, and
the question had shown that he cared for her good opinion.
Yes, she did think he was right, and she resolved
to send him a message to that effect when Rose wrote to
him next. There was no wrong to the dead in the
thought, and her tears dropped just as fast upon the
marble as she stooped to kiss the name cut upon it and
then left the silent graveyard.

Meantime Rose had visited her sick woman in the Hollow,—had
fed the hungry children, and dropped upon
the floor the six weeks baby which she tried to hold;
then, gathering her shawl about her and holding up her
skirts, just as she always did when in the homes of the
poor, she re-entered her carriage and bade Jake drive
her next to Widow Simms'.

Everything there was neat and clean as soap and
sand and the widow's two hands could make it, while
Susan made a very pretty picture, in her dark stuff
gown with the scarlet velvet ribbon in her black
hair. There was a saucer of English violets on the
round deal table, and their sweet perfume filled the
room into which Rose came dancing, her eyes shining
like stars, and her cheeks so brilliant a color that the
widow began directly to wonder “if there wasn't some
paint there.”

The widow was not in her best mood, for she was very
tired, having done a heavy washing in the morning before
Rose Mather had thought of opening her bright

eyes; then, after the coarser, larger pieces were dried
and ironed, she had tried to spin, a work to which she
clung as tenaciously as if on every stream in New England
there were not a cotton or woolen factory capable of doing
the work so much easier and better than herself.
The widow was fond of spinning, and she had turned
the wheel with a right good will, until Isaac had complained
that the continuous humming hurt his head, and
made him think of the wind as it howled so dismally
around the dreary prison in Richmond. Libby, they
called it now, and Isaac always shuddered when he heard
the name and thought of what he suffered there.

Isaac was very weak and pale, and his face looked like
that of some young girl as he lay among his pillows, in
the pretty dressing-gown which Rose had bought and
Annie had made for him. He was sleeping when Rose
came in, and the widow's “Hsh-sh,” came warningly as
a greeting, but came too late, for Rose's blithesome voice
had roused him, and his glad, welcoming smile more than
counterbalanced the frown which settled on the widow's
face when she saw her boy disturbed. Rose was accustomed
to the widow's ways, and throwing off her shawl and
untying her hat, she sat down on the foot of Isaac's
bed, and drawing Jimmie's letter from her pocket began:

“I've got such splendid news for you, Mrs. Simms,—at
least, I think I have. Yes, I know it's sure to come true.
Eli is going to be a lieutenant, with twelve hundred dollars
a year. Such a heap of money for him; and it's all
Jimmie's doings, too. He would not have the office because
he did not think he deserved it. Listen to what he
says.”

Both the Widow and Susan were close to Rose now,
the frown all gone from the widow's brow, and the pucker

from her mouth; but both came back in a trice, as
blundering Rose read on about “Hophni,” and “Phineas,”
and “Eli,” till she came to the “crabbed,” which
she called “crab-apple,” and then stopped short, her face
a perfect blaze, as she tried to apologize.

“'Tain't wuth while to soap it over,” the widow said,
fiercely. “I be a crab-apple, I s'pose, and a gnarly one
at that, but I am as I was made, and I'd like to know if
crabs wan't as good as Secessioners.”

“Please, mother, never mind,” Isaac said, pleadingly,
and his voice always quieted the fiery woman, who listened
while Rose read of Eli's good fortune, and made
another terrible mistake by stumbling upon Jimmie's
opinion of Isaac's sickness.

She only read, “He is not long for this world,” but
that was enough to bring a flush to his brow, and
blanch his mother's cheek; while, with a gush of tears,
Rose hid her face in Susan's lap, and sobbed:

“I wish I had not come. I'm always doing wrong
when I mean to do the best. Oh, I wish the war had
never been, and I don't believe Isaac is so sick. Jimmie
has no right to judge. He don't know.”

Rose's distress was too genuine not to touch the widow,
who tried to appear calm and unconcerned, and even
said something kind of Jimmie, who had so generously
preferred Eli to himself. But there was a restraint over
everything, and, after a few awkward attempts at something
like natural conversation, Rose bade a hasty good-bye,
and went out from the house to which she had
brought more sorrow than joy.