CHAPTER XXXII

LOVE

Into Frederick rode Dad, astride the erstwhile runaway.

Since passing the Union outposts he had let the tired horse take its own gait. At his heels trotted Emp. There was no hurry. And Dad was tired.

From the sentry at the outposts whom he questioned he had learned of Jimmie’s whirlwind passage down the road, and at the head of the main street of Frederick another query to a goober-vender elicited the fact that Jimmie had entered the town at a gallop nearly an hour earlier.

Satisfied thus in his mind as to the safety of his grandson and of the paper’s delivery to McClellan, he slowed his weary mount to a walk and turned into a bystreet which formed a shorter route toward the Federal camps.

It was a pretty lane into which he turned. Wide-branched trees met above its winding center. Golden glow and asters and phlox bordered the little gardens along either side.

A plump gray kitten in the middle of the byway was valorously stalking a covey of sparrows that flew away in bored annoyance as she crept near.

Emp proceeded to pursue the pursuer, who, after scratching his nose with unnecessary virulence, ran up a tree.

Emp returned sulky, yet relieved, to his post at the horse’s heels. The lane was deserted of traffic. Somewhere in the arched trees above a late-season mocking-bird was piping its clamorous sweet call.

The afternoon sun shone benignantly through a yellow dust-haze. Peace lay everywhere. Peace, flowers, bird-song--and the brooding hush of afternoon--in the very heart of a great war.

A white cottage, set somewhat back from the lane behind its own patch of green lawn, bore across its porch-front the sign:

+--------------------------+ | THIRD AMBULANCE CORPS | | Army of the Potomac | | Temporary Headquarters | +--------------------------+

On the lawn two or three uniformed nurses sat in rocking chairs, scraping lint and sewing. On cots along the narrow porch lay several gaunt-faced, partly dressed convalescents.

Dad instinctively drew his horse to a standstill as he read the sign. The sewing nurses on the lawn glanced up as he halted.

One of them--silvery-haired little woman in gray--gave a joyous exclamation and, springing to her feet, ran across to the open gate and out into the lane to greet the rider.

On the instant Dad was off his horse and advancing with gladly outstretched hands toward her.

“Emily!” was all he could find voice to say just at first.

“Oh, I was so hoping you’d find where we were, James!” she hailed him. “And that you’d come to see me before I left.”

“Left? The corps is moved again?”

“No. But I’m detailed at one of the Washington hospitals. I’m to start first thing in the morning.”

Dad had passed one arm through his horse’s bridle. Now, with a very proprietary air, he tucked the little woman’s hand under his other arm.

“Walk a way down the lane with me,” he begged. “Now that you’re going to Washington, I don’t know when I’ll ever see you again.”

Eagerly she assented.

Followed by the amused smiles of the group of nurses on the lawn, the two elderly lovers sauntered down the deserted lane together, arm in arm, the tired horse following; the mocking-bird calling to them from the interlaced green branches above.

For a space neither of them spoke. Dad forgot his weariness; forgot everything except the strangely sweet new sense of content; of reaching at last a safe and perfect haven after long years of storm-tossed misery.

The little old lady smiled up at him.

“It’s--it’s kind of like _home_ to be walking with you, James,” she said shyly.

Then, her housewifely eye beginning to take in details, she exclaimed:

“Land sakes, James Brinton, if you haven’t gone and torn a great rent in the shoulder of your coat! Such a careless man I never did see! And you haven’t even noticed it.”

Dad looked down at the cut made by the Confederate captain’s saber when, in the early stages of the encounter, it had grazed his upper arm.

“That’s so!” he admitted shamefacedly. “I never noticed it. It was shiftless of me. I’ll get it mended as soon as I go back to camp. You aren’t ashamed to be seen walking with a man who’s got a torn coat, are you, Emily?” he finished anxiously. “Because--”

She interrupted him with another exclamation as she looked more keenly at the rent.

“And the shoulder of your shirt, right under it, is torn, too,” she said. “How could you ever get both of them torn like that and never know it?”

She stood still, disengaged her arm from his, and, with the air of a dressmaking expert, drew the sides of the coat’s rent together.

“Why, this isn’t a tear,” she went on, “it’s a cut! A clean cut! How ever did you do it?”

She loosed her hold on the sides of the cut and the released sections of cloth opened again.

So did the cut shirt-sleeve beneath them, revealing the angry red welt, like a whiplash mark, on the hard, bronzed flesh of Dad’s upper arm.

“James Brinton!” she accused sternly. “You’ve been fighting again!”

“Yessum!” he confessed, hanging his head.

Once more, this time in swift solicitude, she was parting the rents in coat and shirt, and her cool, light fingers were on the burning hot flesh of the welt.

With the true nurse’s deftness she explored the injury, sighing with happy relief on finding it so trivial.

“Tell me about it,” she demanded.

Briefly, he told her; keen shame possessing him as he related, as modestly as possible, his exploit. She had taken his arm again, and as he talked they resumed their sauntering stroll.

When his recital was finished she pressed his arm tightly for an instant in silence. Then--

“Oh, I thank the dear Lord!” she breathed. “He brought you back safe!”

Dad’s other hand closed over hers as it lay on his arm.

“Back to--to you,” he said softly. And for a space they fell silent once more. But their walk waxed slower and his hand did not release hers.

“Emily,” said Dad, at last, speaking with a rush, as one who fears his courage may desert him at any moment, “I guess you know how much I care. It’s--it’s just everything. I can’t put it in any prettier words, because it means so much. Will--will you marry me?”

She looked up at him, her eyes big and dewy.

“Why, of course, James,” she made answer in gentle wonder. “I thought you knew that.”

Regardless of the distant nurses, regardless of possible onlookers from the scattered wayside houses, Dad stopped stock-still, gathered her into his arms, then stooped and kissed her.

She raised her lips to his and smiled tenderly up at him.

Then of a sudden she drew back in ostentatious haste.

“There!” she declared vehemently. “It’s true there’s no fool like an old fool. Here I am, a woman with a married daughter, making a spectacle of myself in a public street. Shame on me! And shame on you, too, Jim Brinton!”

“I never dreamed,” said Dad, “that shame could be such a nice thing. But you’re wrong about one thing, dearie. About our being old. For a lot of years I’ve been looking on myself as an old man. And now I know I’m not. I’m just a man. And as for you, Emily--why, I don’t believe you’d know how to be old if you lived to be a million.”

She laughed gayly, in dainty, old-world coquetry.

“I guess you’ve had plenty of practise in making cute speeches like that, James,” she said, “You do it awful easy.”

A momentary vision of nausea came to him of the barren stretch of years at Ideala, when he had believed that all good women shunned him as a drunkard; of his pitiful efforts to make friends with his son’s wife; his avoidance of her social-climber women friends.

“No,” he said shortly. “I’ve had no practise, dear. None.”

She understood.

“I’ll--I’ll make it up to you, Jim!” she whispered tremulously. “All of it, dear man. All the horrid lonely years, and everything. I promise.”

Another divine silence, broken only by the mocking-bird among the treetops.

“Emily,” he said, “the tide is going to turn in this war. The next move will be the turning-point. And it’ll turn hard. I’ll be in the thickest of it, dear.

“But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I’ll get through it safe. Because your love will be taking me through it. And after that--”

“I’ll be waiting, Jim,” she said.