University of Virginia Library

LUCRETIA SMITH'S SOLDIER.

I AM an ardent admirer of those nice,
sickly war stories which have lately
been so popular, and for the last
three months I have been at work upon one of
that character, which is now completed. It can
be relied upon as true in every particular, inasmuch
as the facts it contains were compiled
from the official records in the War Department
at Washington. It is but just, also, that
I should confess that I have drawn largely on
Jomini's Art of War, the Message of the President
and Accompanying Documents, and sundry
maps and military works, so necessary for
reference in building a novel like this. To the
accommodating Directors of the Overland Telegraph
Company I take pleasure in returning
my thanks for tendering me the use of their
wires at the customary rates. And finally, to
all those kind friends who have, by good deeds

or encouraging words, assisted me in my labors
upon this story of “Lucretia Smith's Soldier,”
during the past three months, and whose names
are too numerous for special mention, I take
this method of tendering my sincerest gratitude.

1. CHAPTER I.

On a balmy May morning in 1861, the little
village of Bluemass, in Massachusetts, lay
wrapped in the splendor of the newly-risen sun.
Reginald de Whittaker, confidential and only
clerk in the house of Bushrod & Ferguson, general
drygoods and grocery dealers and keepers
of the post-office, rose from his bunk under
the counter, and shook himself. After yawning
and stretching comfortably, he sprinkled
the floor and proceeded to sweep it. He had
only half finished his task, however, when he
sat down on a keg of nails and fell into a reverie.
“This is my last day in this shanty,” said
he. “How it will surprise Lucretia when she
hears I am going for a soldier! How proud
she will be, the little darling!” He pictured

himself in all manner of warlike situations; the
hero of a thousand extraordinary adventures;
the man of rising fame; the pet of Fortune at
last; and beheld himself, finally, returning to
his own home, a bronzed and scarred brigadier-general,
to cast his honors and his matured and
perfect love at the feet of his Lucretia Borgia
Smith.

At this point a thrill of joy and pride suffused
his system; but he looked down and saw
his broom, and blushed. He came toppling
down from the clouds he had been soaring
among, and was an obscure clerk again, on a
salary of two dollars and a half a week.

2. CHAPTER II.

At eight o'clock that evening, with a heart
palpitating with the proud news he had brought
for his beloved, Reginald sat in Mr. Smith's
parlor awaiting Lucretia's appearance. The
moment she entered, he sprang to meet her, his
face lighted by the torch of love that was blazing
in his head somewhere and shining through,

and ejaculated, “Mine own!” as he opened his
arms to receive her.

“Sir!” said she, and drew herself up like an
offended queen.

Poor Reginald was stricken dumb with astonishment.
This chilling demeanor, this angry
rebuff, where he had expected the old, tender
welcome, banished the gladness from his heart
as the cheerful brightness is swept from the
landscape when a dark cloud drifts athwart
the face of the sun. He stood bewildered a
moment, with a sense of goneness on him like
one who finds himself suddenly overboard upon
a midnight sea, and beholds the ship pass into
shrouding gloom, while the dreadful conviction
falls upon his soul that he has not been missed.
He tried to speak, but his pallid lips refused
their office. At last he murmured:

“O Lucretia! what have I done; what is the
matter; why this cruel coldness? Don't you
love your Reginald any more?”

Her lips curled in bitter scorn, and she replied,
in mocking tones:

“Don't I love my Reginald any more? No,
I don't love my Reginald any more! Go back
to your pitiful junk-shop and grab your pitiful

yard-stick, and stuff cotton in your ears, so that
you can't hear your country shout to you to
fall in and shoulder arms. Go!” And then,
unheeding the new light that flashed from his
eyes, she fled from the room and slammed the
door behind her.

Only a moment more! Only a single moment
more, he thought, and he could have told
her how he had already answered the summons
and signed his name to the muster-roll, and all
would have been well; his lost bride would
have come back to his arms with words of
praise and thanksgiving upon her lips. He
made a step forward, once, to recall her, but
he remembered that he was no longer an effeminate
drygoods student, and his warrior soul
scorned to sue for quarter. He strode from
the place with martial firmness, and never
looked behind him.

3. CHAPTER III.

When Lucretia awoke next morning, the
faint music of fife and the roll of a distant drum

came floating upon the soft spring breeze, and
as she listened the sounds grew more subdued,
and finally passed out of hearing. She lay absorbed
in thought for many minutes, and then
she sighed and said: “Oh! if he were only
with that band of fellows, how I could love
him!”

In the course of the day a neighbor dropped
in, and when the conversation turned upon the
soldiers, the visitor said:

`Reginald de Whittaker looked rather
down-hearted, and didn't shout when he
marched along with the other boys this morning.
I expect it's owing to you, Miss Loo,
though when I met him coming here yesterday
evening to tell you he'd enlisted, he thought
you'd like it and be proud of— Mercy!
what in the nation's the matter with the girl?”

Nothing, only a sudden misery had fallen
like a blight upon her heart, and a deadly
pallor telegraphed it to her countenance. She
rose up without a word and walked with a
firm step out of the room; but once within the
sacred seclusion of her own chamber, her
strong will gave way and she burst into a flood
of passionate tears. Bitterly she upbraided

herself for her foolish haste of the night before,
and her harsh treatment of her lover at the
very moment that he had come to anticipate the
proudest wish of her heart, and to tell her that
he had enrolled himself under the battle-flag,
and was going forth to fight as her soldier.
Alas! other maidens would have soldiers in
those glorious fields, and be entitled to the
sweet pain of feeling a tender solicitude for
them, but she would be unrepresented. No
soldier in all the vast armies would breathe her
name as he breasted the crimson tide of war!
She wept again—or, rather, she went on weeping
where she left off a moment before. In her
bitterness of spirit she almost cursed the precipitancy
that had brought all this sorrow upon
her young life. “Drat it!” The words were
in her bosom, but she locked them there, and
closed her lips against their utterance.

For weeks she nursed her grief in silence,
while the roses faded from her cheeks. And
through it all she clung to the hope that some
day the old love would bloom again in Reginald's
heart, and he would write to her; but
the long summer days dragged wearily along,
and still no letter came. The newspapers

teemed with stories of battle and carnage, and
eagerly she read them, but always with the
same result: the tears welled up and blurred
the closing lines—the name she sought was
looked for in vain, and the dull aching returned
to her sinking heart. Letters to the other girls
sometimes contained brief mention of him, and
presented always the same picture of him—a
morose, unsmiling, desperate man, always in
the thickest of the fight, begrimed with powder,
and moving calm and unscathed through tempests
of shot and shell, as if he bore a charmed
life.

But at last, in a long list of maimed and
killed, poor Lucretia read these terrible words,
and fell fainting to the floor: “R. D. Whittaker,
private soldier, desperately wounded!”

4. CHAPTER IV.

On a couch in one of the wards of a hospital
at Washington lay a wounded soldier; his head
was so profusely bandaged that his features
were not visible; but there was no mistaking
the happy face of the young girl who sat beside

him—it was Lucretia Borgia Smith's. She
had hunted him out several weeks before, and
since that time she had patiently watched by
him and nursed him, coming in the morning as
soon as the surgeon had finished dressing his
wounds, and never leaving him until relieved
at nightfall. A ball had shattered his lower
jaw, and he could not utter a syllable; through
all her weary vigils she had never once been
blessed with a grateful word from his dear lips;
yet she stood to her post bravely and without
a murmur, feeling that when he did get well
again she would hear that which would more
than reward her for all her devotion.

At the hour we have chosen for the opening
of this chapter, Lucretia was in a tumult of
happy excitement; for the surgeon had told her
that at last her Whittaker had recovered sufficiently
to admit of the removal of the bandages
from his head, and she was now waiting
with feverish impatience for the doctor to come
and disclose the loved features to her view. At
last he came, and Lucretia, with beaming eyes
and fluttering heart, bent over the couch with
anxious expectancy. One bandage was removed,
then another and another, and lo! the

poor wounded face was revealed to the light of
day.

“O my own dar—”

What have we here! What is the matter!
Alas! it was the face of a stranger!

Poor Lucretia! With one hand covering her
upturned eyes, she staggered back with a moan
of anguish. Then a spasm of fury distorted
her countenance as she brought her fist down
with a crash that made the medicine bottles on
the table dance again, and exclaimed:

“Oh! confound my cats, if I haven't gone
and fooled away three mortal weeks here, snuffling
and slobbering over the wrong soldier!”

It was a sad, sad truth. The wretched but
innocent and unwitting impostor was R. D., or
Richard Dilworthy Whittaker, of Wisconsin,
the soldier of dear little Eugenie Le Mulligan,
of that State, and utterly unknown to our unhappy
Lucretia B. Smith.

Such is life, and the tail of the serpent is
over us all. Let us draw the curtain over this
melancholy history—for melancholy it must
still remain, during a season at least, for the
real Reginald de Whittaker has not turned up
yet.