University of Virginia Library

39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHARLIE.

HE did not improve as his sister and uncle hoped
he might; and as the cold weather increased,
they began to talk of taking him to a warmer
climate, but Charlie said:

“I am as well here as I could be anywhere. I don't
want to be moved about. Let me stay here in quiet.”

So they made him as comfortable as possible at the

hotel, and Rose and Annie came every day to see him;
and he learned to watch and listen for their coming,
especially that of Annie, to whom he took the kindliest.
She knew just how to nurse him, and as she once cared
for the poor prisoners, so she now cared for the Southern
boy, who, while acknowledging the kindness of the
Northern people, was still as thorough a Secessionist as
he had ever been. Anxiously he waited for daily news of
the progress of Grant's army, refusing to believe that
Lee was so closely shut up in Richmond that escape was
impossible. Blindly, like many of his older brethren, he
clung to the hope, that underlying the whole was some
hidden motive which would in time appear and work
good to his cause. Maude never opposed or disputed
with him now, but read him every little item of good for
the South. But when, in the spring, the fighting at Petersburg
commenced, there were no such items to read,
and Charlie asked no longer for news. Then there came a
never-to-be-forgotten day, when through the length and
breadth of the land, the glad tidings ran that Richmond
had fallen; that Lee with his army was flying from the city,
with Grant in hot pursuit. The war was virtually over;
and from Maine to Oregon the air was filled with the
jubilant notes of victory. For three long hours the bells
of Rockland rang out their merry peals, and at night
they kindled bonfires in the streets; and on the grass-plat
by the well in Widow Simms' yard, they burned
the box, which, four years before, poor Isaac had put
away for just such an occasion as this.

All the morning of that memorable Monday, while the
bells were ringing, and the crowds were shouting in the
streets, Charlie De Vere had lain with his white face to
the wall, and his lips quivering with the grief and mortification
he felt, that it should have ended thus. Occasionally,

as the shouts grew louder, he stopped his
ears, so as to shut out what seemed to him like exultations
over the death of so many hopes; but when Annie
came in, and told Maude of the bonfire they were to have
that night in Mrs. Simms' yard, and asked her to come
for the sake of the boy whose box was to be burned,
Charlie began to listen. And as he listened, he grew
interested in Isaac Simms and the grass-plat by the
well, and the box hidden in the barn, and he expressed a
wish to be present when it was burned. Maude, too, had
heard of Isaac Simms before. She knew that he had been
captured by Arthur Tunbridge, but she did not know the
particulars of his prison life, or how generously Tom had
sacrificed his chance of liberty for the sake of the poor,
sick boy, until Annie told the story, to which she listened
with swimming eyes and a heart throbbing with
love and respect for her lover, who had been so noble
and unselfish. She would go to the bonfire on the
grass-plat, she said; and Charlie should go too. He had
wept passionately at the recital of Isaac's sufferings in
Libby, but still found some excuse for the South generally.

“It was not the better class of people,” he said, “who
did these things; it was the lower, ignorant ones, whose
instincts were naturally brutal.”

And neither Maude nor Annie contradicted him,
though the eyes of the former flashed indignantly, and
her nostrils quivered as they always did when the sufferings
of our prisoners were mentioned in her presence.

That night, when the stars came out over Rockland,
a party of twelve or more was congregated at the house
of the widow Simms, where, but for the sad memory of
Isaac, whose soldier-coat hung on the wall, with the knapsack
carried into battle, all would have been joy and hilarity

at the prospect of certain peace. But death had
been in that household, just as it had crept across many
and many another threshold; and mingled with the rejoicings
were tears and sad regrets for the dead of our
land, whose graves were everywhere, from the shadowy
forests of Maine, and the vast prairies of the West, to the
sunny plains of the South, where they fought and died.
There were twenty-five buried in the Rockland graveyard;
and others than the party assembled at Mrs.
Simms, thought of the vacant chairs at home, and the
sleeping dead whose ears were deaf to the notes of peace
floating so musically over the land. Charlie's face was
very white, and there were tears in his eyes as he laid his
thin, white hands reverently upon the box, examining its
make, and bending close to the name, and date, and
words cut upon it.—“Isaac Simms, Rockland, April 25th,
1861. This box to be burned—” There was a blank
which the boy, who had cut the words with his jack-knife,
could not supply. He did not know when the box would
be burned. Then it was April, 1861; now it was April,
1865. Four years of strife and bloodshed, thousands and
thousands of desolate hearth-stones, and broken hearts,
and lifeless forms both North and South, and the end
had come at last. But the boy Isaac was not there to see
it. It was not for him to fill up that blank; but for the
Southern boy, Charlie De Vere, who took his pencil from
his pocket, and wrote, “April 3d, 1865, to celebrate the fall
of Richmond, and the end of the Confederacy. Charles
De Vere.”

“Who shall light the pile?” Tom asked, when all was
ready. And Charlie answered, “Let me, please. Surely I
may light the fire!”

And he did light it, and then, with the rest, looked on
while the smoke and the flames curled up toward the

starry heavens where the boy Isaac had gone, and where
Charlie in his dreams that night saw him so distinctly,
and grasped his friendly hand.

After that night, Charlie failed rapidly, and often in
his sleep, he talked to some one who seemed to be Arthur,
and said it was “a mistake, a dreadful mistake.”
At last, as Maude sat by him one day, the fifth after the
bonfire on the grass-plat, he said to her suddenly:

“Maude, if a man kills another and didn't mean to, is
it murder?”

“No, it is manslaughter. Why do you ask?” Maude
said; and Charlie continued:

“Don't hate me, Maude, nor tell any body, for I killed
Arthur, myself. I shot him right through the head,
and—Maude, he thought it was you!”

“Oh! Charlie! Charlie!” and Maude shrieked aloud as
she bent over her brother, who continued:

“Not when he died, but at first, when he lay there on
the grass, moaning and looking at you so sorry and
grieved like, don't you remember?”

“Yes!” Maude gasped; and Charlie went on:

“You know that one of the ruffians fired at Captain
Carleton and hit you, and then I could not help paying
him back. He was taller than Arthur, who stood behind
him, and knocked him down in time to take the ball himself.
He knew you had a revolver, and he thought it
was you, though an accident, of course, and it made him
so sorry that you should be the one to kill him. But I
told him different; when I whispered to him, you know.
I said it was I, and his eyes put on such a happy look.
I know he forgave me, for he said so; but my heart has
ached ever since with thinking about it. I could not forget
it; and I've asked God to forgive me so many times.
I think he has; and that when I die, I shall go where

Isaac Simms has gone. I like him, Maude, if he was a
Yankee, and fought against us; and I like Mrs. Graham
so much; and Mr. James Carleton, and the Mathers, and
Mrs. Simms, some; but I can't like that dreadful Bill Baker,
with his slang words and vulgar ways; he makes me
so sick, and I feel so ashamed that we should be beaten
by such as he.”

“You were not beaten by such as he! You are mistaken,
Charlie! The Northern army was composed of
many of the noblest men in the world. There are Bill
Bakers everywhere, as many South as North. It is foolish
to think otherwise.”

Maude was growing hot and eloquent in her defense
of the Northern army, but Charlie's gentle, low-spoken
reply, stopped her:

“Perhaps it is. I got terribly perplexed thinking it
all over, and how it has turned out. I think—yes, I
know I am glad the negroes are free. We never abused
them. Uncle Paul never abused them. But there were
those who did; and if slavery is a Divine institution, as
we are taught to believe, it was a broken down and
badly conducted institution, and not at all as God meant
it to be managed.”

Charlie paused a moment, and when he spoke again,
it was of Tom, who had been so kind to him.

“He is like a brother to me, Maude, and I am glad you
are to be his wife. And Maude, don't wait after I am
dead, but marry Captain Carleton at once. You will be
happier then.”

With tears and kisses Maude bent over her brother,
who after that confession seemed so much brighter
and more cheerful, that hope sometimes whispered to
Maude that he would live. Annie was almost constantly
with him now. He felt better and stronger with her, he

said, and death was not so terrible. So, just as she had
soothed, and comforted, and nursed many a poor fellow
from Andersonville, Annie comforted and nursed Charlie
De Vere, until that dreadful Saturday when the telegraphic
wires brought up from the South the appalling
news that our President was dead,—murdered by the
assassin's hand.

“No, no, not that. We did not do that,” Charlie
cried, with a look of horror in his blue eyes when he
heard the dreadful story, and that the Southern leaders
were suspected of complicity in the murder.

“It would make me a Unionist, if I believed my people
capable of that; but they are not,—it cannot be,”
Charlie kept repeating to himself, while the great drops
of sweat stood upon his white forehead, and his pulse
and heart beat so rapidly, that Maude summoned the attending
physician, who shook his head doubtfully at the
great change for the worse in his patient.

“I had hoped at least to keep him till the warm weather,
but, I am afraid those bells will be the death of him,”
he said, as he saw how Charlie shivered and moaned with
each sound of the tolling bells.

“Perhaps they would stop if you were to ask them,
and tell them why,” Annie suggested to Maude; but
Charlie, who heard it, exclaimed,

“No, let them toll on. It is proper they should mourn
for him. The South would do the same if it was our
President who had been murdered.”

So the bells tolled on, and the public buildings were
draped in mourning, and the windows of Charlie's room
were festooned with black, and he watched the sombre
drapery as it swayed in the April wind, and talked of the
terrible deed, and the war which was ended, and the
world to which so many thousands had gone during the
long four years of strife and bloodshed.

“I shall be there to-morrow,” he said, “and then perhaps
I shall know why all this has been done, and if we
were so wrong.”

Maude and Annie, Paul Haverill and Tom Carleton
watched with him through the night, and just as the
beautiful Easter morning broke, and the sunlight fell
upon the Rockland hills, the boy who to the last had remained
true to the Southern cause, lay dead among the
people who had been his foes.

At Maude's request they buried him by the side of
Isaac Simms, and Capt. Carleton ordered a handsome
monument, on which the names of both the boys were cut,
Isaac Simms, who had died for the North, and Charlie
De Vere, who, if need be, would have given his life for
the South, each holding entirely different political sentiments,
but both holding the same living faith which
made for them an entrance to the world where all is perfect
peace, and where we who now see through a glass
darkly shall then see face to face, and know why these
things are so.

Six months had passed since Charlie De Vere died.
Paul Haverill, Will Mather, and Captain Carleton had
been together on a pilgrimage to Paul's old neighborhood,
where the people, wiser grown, welcomed back
their old friend and neighbor, and strove in various ways
to atone for all which had been cruel and harsh in their
former dealing toward him. The war had left them
destitute, so far as negroes and money were concerned;
but such as they had they freely offered Paul, entreating
him to stay in their midst and rebuild the homestead,
whose blackened ruins bore testimony to what men's
passions will lead them to do when roused and uncontrolled.

But Paul said no; he could never again live
where there was so much to remind him of the past. A
little way out of Nashville was a beautiful dwelling-house,
which, with a few acres of highly cultivated land, was
offered for sale.

Maude had spoken of the place when she was in the
city, and had said:

“I should like to live there.”

And Tom had remembered it; and when he found it
for sale, he suggested to Mr. Haverill that they buy it as
a winter residence for Maude. And so what little
property Paul Haverill had left was invested in Fair Oaks,
as the place was called; and Tom gave orders that the
house should be refurnished and ready for himself and
bride as early as the first of November.

As far as was possible, Will and Tom found and generously
rewarded those who had so kindly befriended them
in their perilous journey across the mountains.

But some were missing, and only their graves remained
to tell the story of their wrongs.

This trip was made in June, and early in August, the
whole Carleton family went to New London, where
Jimmie improved so fast that few would have recognized
the pale, thin invalid, of Andersonville notoriety, in the
active, red-cheeked, saucy-eyed young man, who became
the life of the Pequot House, and for whom the gay belles
practiced their most bewitching coquetries.

But these were all lost on Jimmie, who was seldom
many minutes away from the fair, blue-eyed woman,
who, the girls had learned, was a widow, and of whom
they at first had no fears. But they changed their minds
when day after day saw the “handsome Carleton” at
her side, and night after night found him walking with
her along the road, or sitting on the rocks and watching

the tide come in, just as he had done years ago, when
both were younger than they were now. They lived
those days over again, and, in their perfect happiness,
almost forgot the sorrow and pain which had come to
them both since they first looked out upon the waters of
New London bay.

Tom and Maude were there, too, together with Rose
Mather and Will, and Susan Simms and John.

A well-timed investment in oil stock,—a lucky turn of
the wheel,—and Captain John Simms awoke, one morning,
with one hundred thousands dollars! He did not
believe it at first, and Susan did not believe it either.
But when John, who, with all his good sense, was a little
given to show, or, as his mother expressed it, “to making
a fool of himself,” brought her a set of diamonds,
handsomer than Rose Mather's, and bought her a new
carriage, and took her to Saratoga, with an English
nurse for little Ike, she began to realize that something
had happened to her which brought Rose Mather's envied
style of living within her means.

She soon grew tired of Saratoga. She was too much
alone in that great crowd, and when she heard that the
Carletons were at New London she went there with her
diamonds and horses, and, patronized by Rose, who
took her at once under her protection, she made a few
pleasant acquaintances, and ever after talked confidently
of her “summer at the sea-side.” She did not
care to go again, however. “She and John were not
exactly like people born to high life,” she said, and so
she settled quietly down in her pretty home, and made,
as the Widow Simms said, “quite a decent woman, considerin'
that she was one of them Ruggleses.”

Bill Baker was astir very early one bright, October
morning, his face indicating that some important event

was pending in which he was to act a part. It was a
double wedding at St. Luke's, and Maude and Annie were
the brides. There was a great crowd to witness the ceremony,
and Annie's “boys” whom she had nursed at Annapolis,
were the first to offer their congratulations to Mrs.
James Carleton, who looked so fair and pure and lovely,
while Maude, whose beauty was of a more brilliant order,
seemed to sparkle and flash as she bent her stately head
in response to the greetings given to her.

Upon Bill, who had turned hack-driver, devolved the
honor of taking the bridal party to and from the church,
and his horses were covered with the Federal flag, while
conspicuous in his button-hole was a small one made of
white silk and presented to him by a girl whom he called
“Em,” and who blushed every time she heard Bill's
voice ordering the crowd to stand back and his horses
to “show their oats,” as he drove from the church with
the newly-married people.

Their destination was Nashville, where, in Maude's
beautiful home, Jimmie and Annie passed a few delightful
weeks, and then returned to Boston to the old Carleton
house on Beacon Street, which had been fitted up for
their reception.

Mrs. Carleton, senior, divides her time between her
three childrem, Tom, Jimmie and Rose, but her home
proper is with Annie, in Boston, where there is now a
little “Lulu Graham,” six months old, and where Rose
and Will often go, while each summer Tom Carleton
comes up from Fair Oaks with his beautiful Maude, the
heroine of the Cumberland Mountains.