Part 5

After a separation of ten years the greetings were naturally warm, but the Southers were not a folk given to demonstrativeness, and it was not to the surprise of Mrs. Souther that before many minutes had passed her son said abruptly:--

"Where is she?"

"There, there," his mother said, in a tone in which were oddly mingled pride, remonstrance, and fondness, "ain't you got over that yet?"

"No," he responded briefly, but laying his hand fondly on that of his mother. "Where is she?"

"Like as not she won't see you," his mother ventured.

"She sent for me."

The two women stared at him in amazement.

"Sent for you?" they echoed in unison, their voices raised in pitch.

"Yes," he said, rising and throwing back his strong shoulders in a gesture his mother remembered well. "I don't know why I should n't tell you, mother. She said she had been proud as long as she could bear it."

The situation was too overwhelmingly surprising for the women to grasp it at once. Their knitting lay neglected in their laps while they tried to take in the full meaning of this wonderful thing.

"It is n't her pride," old Sarah said softly. "'T 's his; but she would n't say nothin' against her father if she was to be killed for it."

"Is she in the house?" he asked.

"No; she 's down to the shore," his mother answered, with a gasp.

At that moment sounded from the house the tinkle of a bell. The two women started like guilty things surprised.

"Oh, my good gracious!" ejaculated Hannah under her breath.

"What is that?" demanded George.

"That's his bell," Mrs. Souther answered. "He wants me. You need n't mind."

"But he must have heard--" began Hannah breathlessly. Then she stopped abruptly.

"Do you think he heard me?" George asked.

"Oh, he 'd wake up about this time anyway," his mother said. "Besides," she added, with a novel note of rebellion in her voice, "what if he did? You have a right to come to see me, I should hope."

Again the bell tinkled. Old Sarah turned to go into the house.

"You'll find her down to the shore," she repeated.

He turned away at her word, and with long, rapid strides took the path which Miss Edith had taken earlier. The mother paused to look at him from the threshold. Hannah knitted on with a feverish haste and a frightened countenance. For a third time the bell called, now more imperatively, and Sarah mounted the crooked stairway followed by the frightened gaze of her sister.

In the cool and shaded chamber into which Sarah went, a chamber fitted with high-shouldered old mahogany furniture, the youngest piece of which had known the grandfathers of the withered old man who lay in the carved bed, the air seemed to her electric with dreadful possibilities. Mr. Grayman was sitting up in bed, his scant white locks elfishly disheveled about the pale parchment of his face, his eyes unnaturally bright.

"Where have you been?" he demanded, with fierce querulousness. "Why did n't you come when I rang?"

She did not at first reply, but busied herself with the medicine which it was time for him to take.

"Whose voice did I hear?" the old man demanded, as soon as he had swallowed the teaspoonful of liquid she brought him.

"Hannah is here," she answered briefly.

"But I heard a man's voice," he continued, his excitement steadily mounting. "I know who it was! I know who it was!"

"Lie down," his nurse said sternly. "You know the doctor said your heart would n't stand excitement."

"It was George!" he exclaimed shrilly. "He's an impudent--" A fit of gasping choked him, but he struggled fiercely to go on. "If she speaks to him, if she looks at him even, I'll curse her! I'll curse her! I'll come back from my grave to--"

A convulsive gasping ended the sentence. He tore at his throat, at his breast, he struggled dreadfully. Old Sarah supported him in her arms, and tried to aid him, but nothing could save him from the effect of that paroxysm. With one tremendous final effort, the old man threw back his head, drew in his breath with a frightful gasp, then forced it out again in the attempt to utter a last malediction.

"Curse--" The shrill word rang through the chamber, but it was followed by no other. A strong, wrinkled hand, a hand that for a lifetime had worked faithfully for him and his, was pressed over his mouth. He choked, gasped, and then the male line of the Grayman family was extinct.

In the meantime Hannah had been sitting on the porch, knitting like an automaton, and staring at the yellow cat with eyes full of dazed terror. She heard the disturbance in the chamber above, but it came to her very faintly until that last shrill word rang down the ancient stairway. Then she dropped her knitting in complete consternation.

"Oh, goodness!" she said aloud. "Oh, goodness gracious me!"

She was swept away completely by the sudden turmoil which had come to trouble the peaceful afternoon. With the leveling tendencies of modern days Hannah had become in a way familiar, as she had for a time lived at a distance in a town of some size, and of late years in the village, where the unruffled existence of the old Grayman place might almost seem as remote as the life of another century. But Hannah never made any application of modern principles to "the family." The Graymans were an exception to any rules of social equality or democratic tendency. The presumption of her nephew in raising his eyes to Miss Edith had always been all but incredible to the simple old soul; and to understand that a lady of the Grayman stock could for a moment have entertained feelings warmer than those of patronage for a Souther was utterly beyond Hannah's power. She had heard George say that Miss Edith had sent for him; but she had understood it no more than she would have understood a vision of the Apocalypse. The slow steps by which the girl had come to be in revolt against the family traditions, to be ready to abandon her heart-breaking resolutions, and to summon her lover, could have been made credible to old Hannah only on the theory of madness. She sat there in the silence which had followed that shrill cry from the chamber of death, dazed and half cowering, unable to think or to move.

At last she saw George Souther returning alone by the river-path. The brightness was gone from his face, and his lips were contracted sternly.

"She 's sent him away again," Hannah West said within herself. "She had to."

The universe seemed to her to be righting itself again. Some monstrous aberration might for a moment have come upon Miss Grayman, but the stars in their courses were not more steadfast than the principles of the blood. Hannah breathed more freely at the sight of her nephew's drawn face. She wished him no ill, but she could not regard this desire of his as not unlike that of a madman who would pluck the moon from the sky. She instinctively accepted his evident failure as a proof that sanity still existed in the world, and that the moral foundations of society were still undestroyed.

"Where is mother?" George asked abruptly, as he came upon the porch.

"She ain't come down yet," Hannah answered, her thin hands going on with the knitting like a machine.

"I don't think I'll wait," he said simply. "She'll understand."

But at that instant the figure of his mother appeared on the stairway. She came out upon the porch, bent, gray, cowering. As her eye caught the face of her son, however, she straightened herself and a new look came into her eyes.

"Where is Miss Edith?" she asked abruptly.

George came to her and took her hand gently.

"Mother," he said, "you must n't blame her. She can't break her father's heart. She has sent me away again."

His mother looked at him quietly, but with eyes that shone wildly.

"You need n't go," she announced calmly. "He is dead."

"Dead!" echoed her son.

"Dead!" cried Hannah shrilly.

"Yes," Sarah responded, with increasing calmness. "He had one of his paroxysms. The doctor said he'd go off in one of them. You'd better go to Miss Edith and tell her."

Hannah rose from her chair as if the feebleness of age had come upon her suddenly.

"The doctor said he must n't be excited," she quavered. "Did he know George was here?"

The son, who had half turned away, wheeled back again.

"Was that what killed him?" he demanded.

Old Sarah straightened herself with a supreme effort. The very strain of uttering a falsehood and of the dreadful secret which must darken her soul for the rest of her life gave to her words an added air of sincerity.

"He did n't know," she said. "He went off as peaceful as a child."

Her son waited for nothing more, but once more hastened down the river-path. Hannah stood as if transfixed.

"But, Sarah," she said, "I heard--"

Sarah looked at her with a wild regard. For a moment was silence.

"No," she said, "you heard nothing. He did not say it!"

She leaned against the doorpost and looked at her right hand strangely, as if she expected to see blood on it. Then she stood erect again, squaring her shoulders as if to a burden accepted.

"Be still," she said. "They're coming."

Mechanically old Hannah, bowed and bewildered, began to do up her knitting in the fading autumnal afternoon.

"It is growing chilly," she muttered shiveringly.

A COMEDY IN CRAPE

"For my part," observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, "I don't believe any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went round with all of them some, of course; but that was n't anything--with him."

A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs. Small continued the conversation.

"It's awful easy for a girl to put on mourning when a man's dead, and say she's been engaged to him; but if any one of 'em had been engaged to Archie Lovell while he was alive, she'd have bragged enough of it at the time."

The murmur of assent was more pronounced now, and one or two of the members of the Soldiers' Aid Society expressed in word their entire agreement of this opinion. The ladies who made up the society usually improved the opportunities afforded by their meetings to discuss all the gossip of Tuskamuck, and the matter which they were now talking over in the corner of Dr. Wentworth's parlor was one which had caused much excitement in the little community. It was in the days of the Civil War, and anything connected with the soldiers aroused interest, but a combination of romance and gossip with a tragedy in the field contained all the elements of the deepest sensation. News had come after the battle of Chickamauga of the death of Archie Lovell, and although this was followed by a vague rumor that he might perhaps be among the missing rather than the killed, it had never been really disproved. As time had gone on without tidings of the missing man, his death had been accepted, and even his aunt, Old Lady Andrews, whose idol he had been, and who clung to hope as long as hope seemed possible, had given him up at last. She had ordered a memorial stone to be placed in the village graveyard, and the appearance of the marble tablet seemed in a way to give official sanction to the belief that Archie Lovell would never again carry his bright face and winning smile about the village streets, and that nevermore would he drive the gossips of Tuskamuck to the verge of desperation by flirting so markedly with a dozen girls that they could by no means keep track of him or decide what his real preference--if he had one--might be.

Whatever loss the gossips sustained by his death, however, was soon made up, for no sooner was the news of his loss known than three girls, one after the other, announced their engagement to the dead hero, and one after the other donned widow's weeds in his memory. So many girls had been the recipients of Archie's multifarious attentions that it would have been easy for almost any one of Tuskamuck's maidens to bring forward such a claim with some show of probability; but unfortunately, by the end of 1863 too many damsels had done this sort of thing for the posthumous announcement of an engagement to be received with entire solemnity or assured credence. A sort of fashion of going into mourning for dead soldiers had set in, and undoubtedly many a forlorn damsel by a tender fiction thus gratified a blighted passion which had never before been allowed to come to light. Cynic wits declared that it added a new terror to a soldier's death that he could never tell who would, when he was unable to deny it, claim to have been betrothed to him; and when, as in the present case, three disconsolate maidens wore crape for the same man, the affair became too absurd even for the responsive sympathies of war-time.

"The way things are going on," observed Mrs. Drew, a stern woman with a hard eye, "the men are getting so killed off that the only satisfaction a girl can get anyway is to go into mourning for some of 'em; and I don't blame 'em if they do it."

The quality of the remark evidently did not please her hearers, who could hardly bear any slightest approach to light speaking concerning the tragedy in which the nation was involved.

"If it was any one of the three," Mrs. Cummings declared, after a brief silence, "it was Delia Burrage. He used to go round with her all the time."

"No more 'n he did with Mattie Seaton," another lady observed. "He used to see Mattie home from singing-school most of the time that winter before he enlisted."

"Well, anyway, when Delia presented the flag to the company the night before they went off, he was with her all the evening. Don't you remember how we had a supper in the Academy yard, and----"

"Of course I remember. I guess I was on the committee; but he used to go with Mattie lots."

"He sent Mary Foster that wooden chair he carved in camp," spoke up another lady, coming into the field as a champion of the third of the mourners who were so conspicuously advertising their grief to an unbelieving world.

"Well, that was a philopena; so that don't count. She told me so herself."

The case was argued with all the zeal and minuteness inseparable from a discussion at the Tuskamuck Soldiers' Aid Society, and at last, when everybody else began to show signs of flagging, a word was put in by Aunt Naomi Dexter. She had throughout sat listening to the dispute, now and then throwing in a dry comment, wagging her foot and chewing her green barège veil after her fashion, and looking as if she could tell much, if she were but so disposed. Aunt Naomi scorned sewing, and was the one woman who was privileged to sit idle while all the others were busy. She never removed her bonnet on these occasions, the fiction being that she had only dropped in, and did not really belong to the society; but gossip was to Aunt Naomi as the breath of her nostrils, and she would have died rather than to absent herself from a company where it might be current.

"I don't know how many girls Archie Lovell was engaged to," she now remarked dryly. "I dare say he did n't himself; and for all I know, he was engaged to all three of those geese that are flying the black flag for him. But I can tell you the girl he really wanted to marry, and she is n't in black, either."

The ladies all regarded her with looks of lively curiosity and interrogation; but she rolled the sweet morsel of gossip under her tongue, and evidently had no intention of being hurried.

"Who is it?" Mrs. Cummings demanded at length, in a tone which indicated that no more trifling would be endurable.

Aunt Naomi moistened her lips with an air like that of a cat in contemplation of a plump young sparrow.

"I don't see who there is that's any more likely to have been engaged to him than Mattie," the champion of that young lady asserted combatively.

"He'd no more have married her than he would me," Aunt Naomi asserted contemptuously.

"Who was it, then?" Mrs. Smith demanded impatiently.

Aunt Naomi looked about on the eager faces, and seemed to feel that interest had been brought up to its culmination point so that it was time to speak.

"Nancy Turner," she pronounced briefly.

The name was received with varying expressions of face, but few of the ladies had any especial comment to offer in word. Some scorned the idea, and the champions of the three mourners still stood by their guns; but the new theory plainly had in it some force, for the women were all evidently impressed that in this suggestion might lie the real solution to the vagaries of Archie Lovell's multitudinous wooing. As Mrs. Cummings said, however, Nancy Turner was a girl who kept her own counsel, and if she had indeed been engaged to the missing soldier, nobody would ever be the wiser for it. It was discouraging to the gossips to be confronted with a mystery which they could have so little hope of ever solving, and the talk gradually turned to other topics, this one remaining as available as ever to be taken up whenever conversation might languish.

The Sunday following this meeting of the Soldiers' Aid Society was a warm and beautiful spring day, which invited to the open air. Public morality in Tuskamuck was narrow in its interpretations, and among other restrictions it imposed was the impropriety of walking on Sunday except by strolling in the village graveyard. The theory, if carefully investigated, would have been found, in all probability, to have its roots in some Puritan notion that youth in its thoughtlessness would be sobered and religiously inclined by the sight of the grassy mounds, the solemnly clumsy mortuary inscriptions, and the general reminders of death. In practice the fact did not entirely justify such a theory, for the graceless young people instinctively sought for amusement rather than for spiritual enlightenment, chatted and laughed as loudly as they dared, examined the epitaphs for those that might by any distortion of their original intent be made ludicrous, and exchanged jokes in most unsabbatical fashion. They even indulged thoughtlessly, in the very midst of these grim reminders of a life wherein is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, in little rustic flirtations, and eagerly picked up morsels of gossip by sharp observation of young couples strolling oblivious of watching eyes among the graves.

To-day the desire to see the newly set stone which had been placed over the empty mound which was to preserve the memory of Archie Lovell attracted an unusually large number of village folk to turn into the graveyard after afternoon service, and an exciting whisper had gone about that the three disconsolate betrothed damsels had all come to church with flowers. The little groups drifted slowly through the weatherbeaten gate behind the church, but the very first of them were deterred by seeing a black-robed figure laying already her bunch of geraniums on the grave. Delia Burrage, who sang in the choir, had, as was afterward told from one end of the town to the other, slipped down the gallery stair without waiting for the benediction, and so had managed to be first in the field.

The gathering groups of villagers had hardly time to note with what tender care the bereft Delia arranged her bunch of scarlet blossoms at the foot of the still snowy marble slab than they were set aquiver with delicious excitement by the sight of a second crape-enshrouded figure that came to the spot, also bearing flowers. Mary Foster carried in her black-gloved hands a cluster of white pyrethrums, a favorite house-plant in Tuskamuck. Miss Foster came up on the side of the mound opposite to the first comer, and humbly laid her offering below the red geraniums; but although she was thus forced to place her flowers farther from the stone than the other, she was evidently determined not to be outdone in devotion. She fell on her knees, and bowed her face in her handkerchief in a grief so dramatic that Miss Burrage was left far behind, and had no resource but to come to her knees in turn, in a weak imitation of her rival.

The spectators were by this time in a sort of twitter of gratified excitement, and exchanged many significant looks and subdued comments. Those boldest pressed nearer to the scene of action, keenly curious to hear if word passed between the bereaved ladies. Excitement rose to its highest when slowly down the long path came Martha Seaton, more voluminously draped in sable weeds than either of the others. She carried a wreath of English ivy, and a sort of admiring shudder ran through the neighbors as they saw that to this funeral wreath Miss Seaton had sacrificed the growth of years of careful window gardening.

"My! She 's cut her ivy!" one of them gasped.

"Why, so she has! Well, for the land's sake!" responded another, too much overwhelmed to speak coherently.

"Trust Mattie Seaton for not letting anybody get ahead of her!" a third commented, in accents of admiration.

Human curiosity could not keep aloof at a moment such as this, and as Mattie advanced toward the Lovell lot, the neighbors followed as if irresistibly impelled. They closed in a ring around the spot when she reached it, and they looked and listened with an eagerness so frank as almost to be excusable. They could see that the earlier comers were watching from behind the handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes, and with the approbation which belongs to a successful dramatic performance the audience noted also the entire coolness with which Miss Seaton ignored them until she stood close to the drooping pair. Then she flung back her long veil of crape with a sweeping gesture, and with a regal glance of her gypsyish black eyes looked first at them and then at the flowers.

"Oh, thank you so much for bringing flowers," she said, in a voice evidently so raised that her words should be distinctly heard by the ring of spectators. "Archie was so fond of them!"

The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top, and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was "boss of that grave and the others did n't count." As if in a carefully planned _tableau vivant_, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe.

"Well, if that ain't the beatin'est!" chuckled old Ichabod Munson, puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. "Gosh, I wish Archie Lovell could see that. He'd be 'most willin' to get kilt for a sight o' his three widders, an' that Seaton girl comin' it so over t' others."

"He'd think he was a Mormon or a Turk," observed Miss Charlotte Kendall, with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the graveyard could subdue. "He'd see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did love a joke."

The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:--

"Thank you so much for your sympathy;" and before they could reply she had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving swiftly away up the path to the gate.