Part 2

A. D. 1639.' Do you recognize the verse? Robert Greene's. The choice of it was so significant it must have been the Lord Richard's doing. You will notice that the epitaph is sensitively worded; it is pure fact, and nothing else; and it has, too, an affectionate sound which has always been a sort of satisfaction to me." "How immensely dramatic the upshot might have been if he had lived!" I said. "The poor little fellow, _infelix natu, felicior morte_." I was astonished to find a slight mist over my eyes. "Tell me of these others next him, Nasmith: a knight and his lady side by side, recumbent, and therefore pre-Reformation." Nasmith's slow, radiant, indulgent smile was upon me, as he moved forward from the light to where I stood. "No," he said. "Look at the armor and the fashion of the dress, not at the attitude, which is unusual, of course, for the Caroline period. Those are the blessed twain of whom I have been telling you. See!" He pointed to the discolored raised Latin text which ran around the wide slabs beneath. I traced it out. "Pray for the souls of Richard Esme Vivian Langham, Viscount Gaynes, and of Eleanor his adored wife, neither of them ripe in years, who together, in this venerable sanctuary, suffered calamity, and sought repose in Christ." There were no dates. I waited for Nasmith to go on. He did so, in that tone of grave personal interest which he reserves for these "old, unhappy, far-off things."

"They had to lead very private lives, on account of their proscribed creed; a constraint which to them was not unwelcome. Their good works, however, were known over the whole countryside, which is loyal to their memory. She was the first to die, in 1640, contracting a fever, and fading gradually away. There were two young children to remember her and take pattern after her, (would that they had done so!) Vivian and Joan. When the civil wars began, the old Earl was feeble and near his end; and the Lord Richard, whose principles and natural sympathies were all for King Charles, joined the unanimous Catholic gentry, and sought with eagerness the only use that seemed left to him. His bright beloved presence graced the camp but a little while, for in his thirty-seventh year he was killed at the second battle of Newbury, while carrying the royal standard. They brought him back to the old chapel where he wished to be buried, and where none of his house have been buried since. Both these figures were made under his own eye, when his wife's dust was laid below. Are they not nobly and delicately wrought, and full of rest? His hand holds hers; he had always said they should lie so, as his namesake king and Anne of Bohemia, long ago, lay in the Abbey at Westminster. The ruin has taken its traditional distinctive name of Lovers' Saint Ruth's from them. All my parish maids steal in on Hallowe'en to kiss these joined hands, and wish themselves good fortune, and hundreds of ----shire sweethearts have plighted their troth here, under the stars. It has always been a place of pilgrimage, though its full history is not even guessed at. Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill, my friend, can never buy or borrow such a charm as this."

As he paused, we heard the plaintive interruptive note of a pair of wood-doves in the ash. He looked at me again. "I forgot to say that they were content to die, my martyr hero and heroine of Orrinleigh, for they had won four years, at the end, of absolute unbroken bliss. They used to come down here every evening for a talk, or a hymn to Our Lady, arm in arm, and happy as children all the way. Their day of storms was brief, and it had a lovely sunset." "Ah, Nasmith," I exclaimed, like a sentimental girl, "I am glad of that. How did you know?" He drew his foot idly through the soft sward as he spoke. "I had the whole story in the Lord Richard's own hand. He wrote it out during the last night he spent at the manor, with his spurs and sword lying by him ready for the morrow: the whole tender, tragic story, with his curious mental struggles laid bare. He thought the truth due to his father, and to his dead stainless Eleanor, to clear her memory from erring rumor which had early got abroad. The manuscript was put away under a seal; and as soon as his son's will was opened, the Earl knew where to find it; I have seen it all scorched and stained with the old man's tears. No eye, from his to mine, has read it since. You see, the next and fourth Earl, Vivian, grew up a graceless cynic reprobate in London, never visited his estates, and cared nothing for his lineage. His sister was little better. I ought to spare her and her second husband any vituperations, since they did me the courtesy of becoming my great-great-great-great-grandparents! Did I never tell you? The Langhams, bad enough in the beginning, have been a worse crew than before, since the Lord Richard's time. Almost 'every inch that is not fool is rogue,' as Dryden says of his giant. Francis, the ninth of the line, lately dead, and his Countess, being my very distant relatives, and impressed with my virtues, which were then being wasted on the desert air, offered me the benefice. The first thing I did, after setting Saint Ruth's in order, was to look about for materials for a history of the parish from a period before the Conquest. During the summer, they put a world of papers, grants, charters, registries, and so on, into my way, which had been heaped in some old chests in the tool-house. One of these papers was that letter, a pearl in sea-kelp. I took it promptly over to Orrinleigh. The Earl was in his hunting-coat, swearing, over his glasses, at some excellent Liberal news in his morning journal. 'Read this,' I said; 'it is one of your ancestral romances, and ought to be reverently preserved.' He laid it by. A few days afterwards, while I was gathering fruit and vines for a Harvest Sunday, he pulled it from his pocket, and threw it at me over the garden wall, remarking that as my reverend appetite was for musty parchments, he did not know but what I had best have this one, especially as his wife and niece, having glanced at it, would not give it house-room! So I had the keepership of that mournful secret of the Lord Richard's wonderful love and patience, which came near altering the local annals I was to write. It was like the unburied dead; it tormented me. Not one of those vulgarians to whom it really belonged was fit to touch it, much less understand it; and I did not wish to add it to any collection, mine or another's. I hesitated a good bit, and then I stole off, on a chilly Martinmas eve, and piously burned it here in Lovers' Saint Ruth's, on this tomb, and scattered the ashes into the grass." A gust of wind came into the choir, and the clock half a mile away struck one. At the sound, we reached for our hats, which we had instinctively laid aside, and crossed the little transept to the door, Nasmith first, I following, as we had entered. Once more, as we left the porch, dark with ivy and weather-stains, we heard the wood-doves, over our heads in the nave, utter a slow musical moan, one to the other. "Their souls," I whispered suddenly. "Peace to all such, after pain," said poetic Cyril. "_Amen_," I answered. We both smiled. How we two were enjoying our renewed society, back in a bygone England!

Hardly had we gained the road, when a carriage rolled by, with a single figure on horseback clattering alongside. A black-bonneted girl in mourning, handsome, if furtive, under her parasol, and both her companions, the younger of whom sat beside her, saluted Nasmith in what I thought to be a cold, perfunctory manner. I guessed something, for his honest cheek flushed. "I fear these are the great folk of Orrinleigh," I remarked. "The men have selfish, stupid faces, more's the pity." "Yes," he replied; "you have seen some of the Lord Richard's degenerate descendants. I once meant to give his manuscript to Audrey--to the young lady in the carriage. I hoped she might value it. But, as I said, I destroyed it instead. You are the only person to whom I ever repeated the tale, and almost in the original words. Go put it in a book, if you like, Holden; make what you can of it; develop and proportion it; I trust your handling." I thanked him. "No. Your chivalrous Cavalier is too complex a subject for me," was my frank reply; "I feel safer with a history than with a mystery." I was a hardened republican novelist even then, and his senior, and not blind to the "human document," neither of the seventeenth century, nor of the nineteenth. "Nasmith," I began cunningly, "you were in love with the Honorable Audrey, and she refused you. How fortunate for you! Yours was the neatest and most spiritual revenge I ever heard of: to keep from her what might have helped transform her woman's nature, stifled in an ill atmosphere,--the knowledge that she was of the blood of the saints,

'Tho' fallen on evil days, On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues.'"

He gave my hand a half-humorous pressure, his head turning neither to right nor to left, dear old Nasmith! He must be past forty now, and they tell me, moreover, that he is a Benedictine monk at Downside: he will care nothing what I say of him. And thus we climbed the balmy downs, back to our lunch at the vicarage, without another word.

OUR LADY OF THE UNION.

THE Surgeon and the Chaplain had been bidden to roast beef and mashed potatoes in the great tent; and the former, leaving its pleasant firelight, had come out through the night air a little before taps, to spread himself and his triumphs in the eyes of the officers' mess. The Surgeon was a widower in his early prime, and tenderly condescending to the known ways of women. He talked much of the two who in that camp represented all inscrutable womankind, Miss Cecily Carter and Mrs. Willoughby. They had come from New York on a visit, Braleton being just then in profound quiet. The Surgeon adored Miss Cecily, in which mood he was by no means alone; but he had his own opinion of her sister, the Colonel's wife. "The Sultan has hinges in him, and can unbend," he would say; "but the Sultana--O Jerusalem, my Happy Home!" He had also discovered that the train of trunks at the sutler's, objects of deep and incessant objurgation, were hall-marked "A. W.," and that Miss Cecily came to the war with one hand-bag. His auditors sat long astride their chairs, each in his hood of good government tobacco-smoke. The Adjutant's silver-coated hound was asleep on the boards, still as a little mountain-tarn among thunder-clouds. The gusts of genial mirth were suddenly interrupted from without by the even voice of the orderly: "Sergeant Blanchard is wanted at the Colonel's quarters."

A young man playing chess in the corner arose at once, and followed. All along the company streets, the lamp-light streamed through the chinks in the tents; charming tenors and basses, at the far end, were laying them down and deeing for Annie Laurie; and from the long sheds nigh, in the grove, came the subdued pawing and tossing of the horses. Robert Blanchard saluted, and stood outside in the dark, for the Colonel was in his doorway. "They have sent another commission for you," he said shortly. "You deserve it; your behavior has been admirable, a source of immense pride to me, and to all my men." The Sergeant looked at him with a visible gladness. "I thank you. You know I prefer not to be promoted." "I have humored you no fewer than three times before," resumed the Colonel, in an altered tone; "I can't do it always. You are known; the General has complimented you. The rise of a man of your stamp can't be prevented, even by himself. You are meant, if you live, to move rapidly, and go high. This second-lieutenantship is the lowest step; mount it, in Heaven's name, and don't maunder."

The other hesitated, silent. Then he said: "May I have my condition, if I accept,--may I remain color-bearer?" "I can promise nothing of the kind. I fear it would be unusual, to say the least; it has no precedent in any service that I ever heard of. Don't ask me that again." Blanchard, in sober fashion, brought his hand to his cap. "Good-evening, Colonel." The superior officer was exasperated. "Bob," he exclaimed discursively, "you're a fool. God bless you!"

The drums began, quick and light; it was nine o'clock. The Sergeant went back, cheerful as Cincinnatus refusing empery. Before he confided himself to his blanket, lumped on boughs, he made sure that a fold of old bunting on a provisionary stick was slanted securely against the canvas; for he had a sentimental passion for the flag. When it was hauled down at sunset, it went into his hands until daybreak. He had borne it in the van since his first bloody day at Little Bethel; it had been riddled, stained, smoke-blackened, snapped from its support; but he had never dropped it, not when a minie-ball fizzed through his shoulder, not when, fresh from the hospital, he had fallen face downward from his dying horse, in Beauregard's plunging fire of shell. In this lad of twenty-two there burned a formal loyalty so intense, so rooted in every fibre of his grave character, that his comrades, for whom military routine had lost much of its glamour, loved him for it, envied him, and consistently nagged the life out of him with the nickname of Our Colored Brother, and other nicknames based on other puns more or less felicitous. Because in New York, they had several dear friends in common, the Colonel, on the morning of the ladies' arrival at Braleton, had asked him to lunch with them. "My Sergeant, Adela," so James Willoughby, in his eagles, presented him to the wife of his bosom, "my Sergeant; and such a Sergeant!" For he read in her tacticianary social eye that a Sergeant was a minnow indeed for a Colonel's friend and guest, even if he were a gentleman, a cousin of the Windhursts, and the hero of his corps. And she wondered at him the more that he should be a mere color-bearer; a spirited able-bodied creature two years in the army, with nothing to show for it! He had no explanation to give her, but he had an unaccountable hunger, from the first, to confide his secret to Cecily. He had seen her from a distance, and his heart stood still there in the grass; when he came nearer, it gave him, for a certain reason, the veriest wrench in all his life, such as True Thomas may have felt when the sweet yet awful call came to him at last in the market-place, that it was time to say good-bye to earth, and go back to fairyland; to leave for the things which can never be the things that are. He often found her sewing on a silken tri-color, and working its correct number of stars in a pattern. She had begun it in her father's house, for her brother-in-law's regiment, and none too soon, for the flag in use was aging fast. Robert Blanchard never saw her head bent over that bright glory, filling her lap and falling around her feet, without a tightening of the throat. And when she nodded to him going by, with that candid, affectionate grace which never changed, it reminded him inevitably of something which made him happy and unhappy. He could not remember, he said to himself, when he had not loved her, and yet they had never met until this Virginian winter of 1863.

Cecily had taken up her abode in a wee log-house built for her as an ell from the Colonel's tent, delighting much in its frugalities and small hardships. She was becoming attached to the sights and sounds of camp-life: the tags and tassels, the shining accoutrements, and the endless scouring and brushing thereof; the rosy drummer-boy; the company drills in the rain; the hollow pyramids of the stacked short bayonets; the muddy wells on the bluish and reddish lowlands; the loud sing-song of the little bearded Corporal interruptedly reading _David Copperfield_ to a ring of enraptured privates; the welcome drone of the cook announcing his menu; the arrival of despatches, with the thundering and jingling of the cavalry heard a mile away; even the occasional alarms. The long inactions under McClellan, hateful to her mettlesome brother-in-law and to his men, proved pleasant enough to Cecily; she never lacked entertainment. While Adela was at her accurate toilets, and the Colonel, a severe disciplinarian, busy with his troops, she, active and curiously adventurous, walked or rode about alone.

The nine-hundred-acred Brale house topped the hill not far away; the owner, a fine old planter, lived there with the survivors of his family. Six months before, an infantry regiment had bivouacked on the place. A lieutenant, sent on the reasonable suspicion that a number of escaped Confederates were harbored on the premises, clattered up, with an escort, to demand them. The eldest son, with true sullen Confederate pluck, refused him admission. After no long parley, the infantry lieutenant, losing control of himself, shot him dead: a proceeding, which, when it came to the ears of the authorities, cost the bully his commission. The two other sons, Julian and Stephen, were then in the Southern army; the younger had since perished from fever. To this doomed and outraged household, shut in from the world, hopelessly embittered against the Government in whose name murder and devastation stalked, Colonel Willoughby appeared as a new and strange being. He made it his business to see that there were no trespassings, and that the Brales lived not only in peace, but in comfort. He rode out repeatedly to the picket-lines, where a goodly quantity of commissary supplies, spirits, flour, tobacco, tea, and coffee, and divers other necessaries difficult to obtain, were handed over to the slaves in exchange for the chickens, milk, and eggs. On several occasions, he had ridden as far as the door, once to give the married daughter her pass through the lines; once to bring her little girl, who was ill, some delicacies sent in a hamper from his own home. These things broke the proud Brale hearts. They barely thanked him; his Federal uniform was like a dagger in their eyes. But a while ago, when they heard that his wife and his sister were coming to Braleton from the north, the stately old squire had sent him a royal gift, with a short letter in the style of the last century. The gift was Molly, the beautiful black, famous all over the country for her strength and speed; and on her back was a saddle of magnificent workmanship, with a movable pommel, which might be adjusted to suit the ladies. While these were in camp, therefore, the Colonel rode Messenger, his stocky sorrel, and Adela or Cecily sat majestically enthroned upon the majestic Molly. The former was a horsewoman of experience, erect, neat, orthodox, approved of connoisseurs everywhere. But the regiment was in this, as in other things, all for the favorite; and when she came in sight, (with the dare-devil mare going it, six leaps to a mile,) lying flat forward, like her own cavalrymen, with breathless, laughing face, and hair shaken loose along Molly's mane like the sun on a torrent,--such a cheer as would go up from the distracted Eleventh! Cecily and Molly, in the tingling pine-odorous Braleton air, made a familiar and joyful spectacle.

South from the mansion lay an Episcopal chapel, now dismantled, with a squat, broad, mossy roof pulled down over its eaves like a garden-hat; and around it spread the small old churchyard, with its stones neck-deep in freshening grass and clover. From this point there was a most lovely view over the melancholy landscape, silvered midway with a winding stream. Hither Cecily loved to climb, tying Molly in the copse below, to lie upon the shaded escutcheoned tomb of one Reginald Brale, "borne in Salop in olde Ingland," and to muse long and happily, forgetful of battles, on

"The great good limpid world, so still, so still!"

She and Robert Blanchard had had much constant companionship; it was natural that these musings should turn much, and indeed more and more, upon him. Surely, he was like no one else; and his presence gave Cecily a sense of infinite rest. She, too, had her obedient energies and controlled fervors. A great crisis like this, holding great issues, brought the two so sensitive to it very near together. She felt under her, even as he did, the tide-wave of patriotic emotion, sweeping the more generous spirits from all our cities out upon its fatal crest. She had seen the companies marching to the front through awe-stricken crowds, watched for the bulletins, worked for the hospitals, heard the triumphal never-to-be-forgotten eloquence and music sacred to the returning dead at home, and felt to the full the heartache and enthusiasm of all the early war. These things had formed her, pervaded her, projected her out of herself, and brought her, lingeringly a child, into thought and womanhood. Before she knew herself for an abolitionist, the day of Sumter swept over her like a flood, and diverted all the little idle streams of her being. Her brothers found her against the old tree in the garden, the newspaper in her hand, like one entranced; and one of them, soon to devote his youth to the cause of Michael against Lucifer, forbade her being teased to account for her mood. Unlike Robert, Cecily came of a soldier race, and from swords drawn, each in its generation, at Naseby, at Brandywine, at Monterey. That fortune seemed good to her which had led her to Virginia, a ground balancing in the scales of fate, and rich already with hallowed graves. To the living men about her, she was as march-music never out of their ears, to hold them to their vows. Subdued from common cares, Cecily was in the current of the national peril, inspiring and inspired, and open to every warmth and chill of it as if it were indeed her own.

She was on the hills, reading, in balmy February weather, when she became aware of a low whinny at her ear. The Brale paddocks were on the other side of the fence. A young colt was there, startled and timid, stretching towards her; then another came as near, and another, and the heads of the older horses, confiding, appealing, crowded over these. She patted their tremulous nostrils, divining instantly that something had occurred to alarm them. She raised herself from Reginald Brale's venerable slab, and listened; the sharp ping! ping! of blank cartridges struck the oak-leaves on her left. Standing, and peering down the steeper side of the incline, she saw the familiar moving glitter of gold braid, far below; and, stripping a bough, and knotting her handkerchief, she made a signal of distress, and waved it vigorously. The shout that followed told her that danger was over, both for the gentle intelligent creatures in the enclosure, and for her; the reports ceased. A moment after, a man sprang over the churchyard wall from the road. It was the Sergeant, more excited than he dared show.

"Miss Carter!" His heart-thuds made it hard for him to be punctilious. "Are you hurt? Idiots that we were to choose this place! We might have known. Tell me you're not hurt, Miss Carter." "I am not hurt at all," she answered gayly, "nor even frightened. It was these dear four-legged 'rebs' who were frightened." She slipped her book in her pocket, and took up her gloves and the dainty whip which Molly had never felt, save when it flicked a fly from her ear. "You are a brave soul!" the Sergeant said. Cecily took refuge in the significant flippancy of gamins: "You're another!" which was so apposite that they both laughed. As they descended the rough foot-path, the Sergeant longed to offer his arm; but he knew her stoicisms, her natural physical _savoir-faire_, and he chivalrously refrained. How nimble and graceful, how fawn-like she was! He noted the wide lace collar and the brooch at her chin; the sober Gordon plaid gown, not too long; the firm little wrist; the beautiful hair parted, and looped low.

"What were you doing just now?"

"A party of us were enjoying ourselves, shooting."

"Birds?" in a cold, regretful tone.