Part 7

"No, of course—_Now you stop it!_—but it looked kind o' curious to me, your pikin' off like that, without waitin' to say 'How-d'-do?' Of course, I never had no relation by marriage that was stuck-up at all, or looked down on me—_Stiddy there now!_—but I guess I can reelize pretty much how you feel about it. I'm a good deal of a hand at that. It's what they call imagination. It's a gift, you know, like good looks, or preachin', or the knack o' makin' money. But you can't help what you're born with, can you? I'd been a heap better off if my gift 'd be'n in some other direction; but, as I tell 'em, it ain't my fault. And my imagination—_Hi, there! git over, will ye?_—it's downright cur'ous sometimes, how it works. Now I could tell, you see, that you 'n S'reny didn't pull together. I s'pose she never writ a line to you, when your husband was killed?"

"Why should she?" demanded Em. "We never did correspond. What'd be the sense of beginning then? She minds her affairs, 'n I mind mine. Who wanted her to write?"

"Oh, of course not," said Si, lightly. "Prob'ly you'll get along better together, though, now that you'll see more of one another. I s'pose S'reny's figurin' on stayin' here right along now, her 'n' her little girl. Well, it'll be nice for the old folks to have somebody they're fond of. They jest worshipped the ground Alvy walked on—and I s'pose they won't be anything in this wide world too good for that little girl of his. Le's see, she must be comin' on three now, ain't she?"

"I don't know anything about her!" snapped Aunt Em, with emphasis.

"Of course, it's natural the old folks should feel so—she bein' Alvy's child. I hain't noticed anything special, but does it—_Well, I swan! Hyst there!_—does it seem to you that they're as good to Marcellus, quite, as they used to be? I don't hear 'em sayin' nothin' about his goin' to school next winter."

Aunt Em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. Si told her about the thickness and profusion of Serena's mourning, guardedly hinted at the injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the others, speculated on the likelihood of the Wadsworths' contributing to their daughter's support, and generally exhibited his interest in the family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but Aunt Em made no response whatever.

When the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the door—Marcellus and I had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as their individual share in the milking ended—Si and Em saw old Arphaxed wending his way across from the house to the red barn. He appeared more bent than ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of reluctance even more than of infirmity.

"Well, now," mused Si, aloud, "Brother Turnbull an' me's be'n friends for a good long spell. I don't believe he'd be mad if I cut over now to the red barn too, seem' the milkin's all out of the way. Of course I don't want to do what ain't right—what d'you think now, Em, honest? Think it 'ud rile him?"

"I don't know anything about it!" my aunt replied, with increased vigor of emphasis. "But for the land sake go somewhere! Don't hang around botherin' me. I got enough else to think of besides your everlasting cackle."

Thus rebuffed, Si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as he came. Seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward us, and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for him to sit also. But Marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, "Oh! wheeled the milk over to the house, already, Si?" and at this the doleful man lounged off again in new despondency, got out the wheelbarrow, and, with ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon it and started off.

"He's takin' advantage of Arphaxed's being so worked up to play 'ole soldier' on him," said Marcellus. "All of us have to stir him up the whole time to keep him from takin' root somewhere. I told him this afternoon 't' if there had to be any settin' around under the bushes an' cryin', the fam'ly 'ud do it."

We talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. I recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it jars now upon my maturer nerves. The individual man looks back upon his boyhood with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in contemplating the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. What strange savages we were! In those days Marcellus and I used to find our very highest delight in getting off on Thursdays, and going over to Dave Bushnell's slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from as close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of barnyard animals—the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up minds. In the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised old Arphaxed's meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the men-folks were coming in final contact with the "pride of the family." Some of the cows wandering toward us began to "moo" with impatience for the pasture, but Marcellus said there was no hurry.

All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away from us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we sat by only turning a little—a motionless, stout, upright figure, with a pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too, had her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was full in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly, straight ahead.

Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that a black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, had come up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus nudged me, and whispered, "It's S'reny. Look out for squalls!" And then we listened in silence.

"Won't you speak to me at all, Emmeline?" we heard this new voice say.

Aunt Em's face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never moved. Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes on the barn.

"If there's anything I've done, tell me," pursued the other. "In such an hour as this—when both our hearts are bleeding so, and—and every breath we draw is like a curse upon us—it doesn't seem a fit time for us—for us to——" The voice faltered and broke, leaving the speech unfinished.

Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had failed. Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a few ungracious words as it were over her shoulder, "If I had anything special to say, most likely I'd say it," she remarked.

We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head, and for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind, apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other.

"See here, Emmeline," she said, in a more confident tone. "Nobody in the world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself for them, day or night. I have said often to—to him who has gone—that I didn't believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted woman than you, his sister. And—now that he is gone—and we are both more sisters than ever in affliction—why in Heaven's name should you behave like this to me?"

Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. "I don't know as I've done anything to you," she said in defence. "I've just let you alone, that's all. An' that's doin' as I'd like to be done by." Still she did not turn her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.

"Don't let us split words!" entreated the other, venturing a thin, white hand upon Aunt Em's shoulder. "That isn't the way we two ought to stand to each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. Can't it be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, on our way up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for you, and——"

Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. "Yes, 'n' what did _he_ say? Come, don't make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?" She shook off the hand on her shoulder as she spoke.

Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons of black, like the fabulous countenance of "The Lady Iñez" in my mother's "Album of Beauty." She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began stammering, "Well, he said—Let's see—he said——"

"Oh, yes!" broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, "I know well enough what he said! He said I was a good worker—that they'd never had to have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an' they wouldn't known what to do without me. I know all that; I've heard it on an' off for twenty years. What I'd like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down South to bring back _your_ husband, an' that he never so much as give a thought to fetchin' _my_ husband, who was just as good a soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I'd like to know—did he tell you that?"

What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this bitter gale of words?

"An' tell me this, too," Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice mercilessly, "when you was settin' there in church this forenoon, with the soldiers out, an' the bells tollin' an' all that—did he say 'This is some for Alvy, an' some for Abel, who went to the war together, an' was killed together, or within a month o' one another?' Did he say that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I'll bet he didn't!"

Serena's head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. "But why blame _me_?" she asked.

Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to intoxicate her. "No!" she shouted. "It's like the Bible. One was taken an' the other left. It was always Alvy this, an' Alvy that, nothin' for any one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob'ly he deserved it all; at any rate, we didn't begrudge him any of it, while he was livin'. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man's dead, he's pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. But it ain't so. One man gets hunted after when he's shot, an' there's a hundred dollars for embalmin' him an' a journey after him, an' bringin' him home, an' two big funerals, an' crape for his widow that'd stand by itself. The _other_ man—he can lay where he fell! Them that's lookin' for the first one are right close by—it ain't more'n a few miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, an' he was all over the ground two years ago—but nobody looks for this other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They ain't no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin' _him_! No—_he_ could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain't no funeral for him—no bells tolled—unless it may be a cowbell up in the pasture that he hammered out himself. An' _his_ widow can go around, week days an' Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever mentions the word 'mournin' crape' to her, or asks her if she'd like to put on black. I 'spose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin' I'd buy _candy_ with it instead!"

With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again.

Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer or to be thrust forward more. When she spoke, it was in a colder voice—almost mincing in the way it cut off the words.

"All this is not my doing," she said. "I am to blame for nothing of it. As I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief ought to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle and soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of friendship. I—I think I will go back to the house now—to my little girl."

Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a shrill, creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I stood up, and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors, yelping as they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open.

IV.

The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that something out of the ordinary had happened.

We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations, "He did, eh!" "Is that so?" and "I expected as much." Listening and watching, I formed the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena's feelings.

Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her sister-in-law, and remarked, "P'rhaps you don't quite follow what he's sayin'?"

"Not a word!" said Serena, eagerly. "Tell me, please, Emmeline!"

Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. "He was shot through the mouth at Gaines's Mills, you know—that's right near Cold Harbor and—the Wilderness," she said, obviously making talk.

"That isn't what he's saying," broke in Serena. "What _is_ it, Emmeline?"

"Well," rejoined the other, after an instant's pause, "if you want to know—he says that it ain't Alvy at all that they've got there in the barn."

Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.

"He says it's some strange man," continued Em, "a yaller-headed man, all packed an' stuffed with charcoal, so't his own mother wouldn't know him. Who it is nobody knows, but it ain't Alvy."

"They're a pack of robbers 'n' swindlers!" cried old Arphaxed, shaking his long gray beard with wrath.

He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly deferred to the old man's principal right to speak. It was a relief to hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.

"They ought to all be hung!" he cried, in a voice to which the excess of passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. "I paid 'em what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o' my money—an' they ain't sent me _him_ at all! There I went, at my age, all through the Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an' that, too, gittin up from a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin' for the box at New York an' Albany, an' all the way back, an' holdin' a funeral over it only this very day—an' here it ain't _him_ at all! I'll have the law on 'em though, if it costs the last cent I've got in the world!"

Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage with everything and everybody.

"If there's any justice in the land," put in Si Hummaston, "you'd ought to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn't wonder if you could, too, if you sued 'em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours."

"Why, the man's a fool!" burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a snort. "I don't want the hundred dollars—I wouldn't 'a' begrudged a thousand—if only they'd dealt honestly by me. I paid 'em their own figure, without beatin' 'em down a penny. If it'd be'n double, I'd 'a' paid it. What _I_ wanted was _my boy_! It ain't so much their cheatin' _me_ I mind, either, if it 'd be'n about anything else. But to think of Alvy—_my boy_—after all the trouble I took, an' the journey, an' my sickness there among strangers—to think that after it all he's buried down there, no one knows where, p'raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!"

The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt Em lifted her head at this.

"If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in," she said, vehemently, "it's good enough for the best man in the army. On Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps 'll be called fust an' given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an' the best man that ever stepped couldn't do no more."

Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling exclamations to his auditors at large.

"Makin' me the butt of the whole county!" he cried. "There was that funeral to-day—with a parade an' a choir of music an' so on: an' now it 'll come out in the papers that it wasn't Alvy at all I brought back with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the War's a jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin' an' robbin' of honest men! They wa'n't no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor anyway—everybody admits that! It was murder an' massacre in cold blood—fifty thousand men mowed down, an' nothin' gained by it! An' then not even to git my boy's dead body back! I say hangings too good for 'em!"

"Yes, father," said Myron, soothingly; "but do you stick to what you said about the—the box? Wouldn't it look better——"

"_No!_" shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. "Let Dana do what I told him—take it down this very night to the poor master, an' let him bury it where he likes. It's no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There won't be no funeral held here!"

It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but she held up her hand.

"Yes, I heard it all," she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. "I am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of learning—our mistake—and it gives me the chance now to say something which I—I feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say, a private soldier. Well, isn't this a good time to remember that there was a private soldier who went out from this farm—belonging right to this family—and who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as General Sedgwick or General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one else? I never met Emmeline's husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke to me often of him. Men who fall in the ranks don't get identified, or brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as the others—just as much. Now, this is my idea: let us feel that the mistake which has brought this poor stranger to us is God's way of giving us a chance to remember and do honor to Abel Jones. Let him be buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay Alva, and let us do it reverently, in the name of Emmeline's husband, and of all others who have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the North, are mourning, just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn."

Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the moisture gathering in his old eyes. "I could e'en a'most 'a' thought it was Alvy talkin'," was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, but we all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was to be done.

The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A minute of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt Em's side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by little, until its palm rested against Aunt Em's further cheek. We heard the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow melting into one.

"Come on, Sid!" said Marcellus Jones to me; "let's start them cows along. If there's anything I hate to see it's women cryin' on each other's necks."

The Eve of the Fourth

THE EVE OF THE FOURTH

It was well on toward evening before this Third of July all at once made itself gloriously different from other days in my mind.

There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos Ingersoll's grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying heights above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might be ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting it. Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he should remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all around the ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until he was grown up.