The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866. Various
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and alleviatives set off in four wagons for the railroad station, and Colonel Lunt himself went on with them to Washington to see that they were properly and safely delivered. That was a Sunday service for us!
I had been sitting in my little keeping-room, knitting at soldiers' stockings, (what would Deacon Hall's wife and my mother have thought of my doing this on a Sunday!) and with the tea ready for drawing, when Percy came to make her promised visit. She too brought her basket of gray yarn and knitting-needles. We were not afraid of becoming atheists, if we did work on a Sunday. Our sheep had all fallen into ditches on the Sabbath-day, and we should have been worse than Jews not to have laid hold to get them out. So Percy kept on knitting until after our tea was ready, and then helped me with the teacups. When we were seated at the west window on the wide seat together, she put her arm round my neck and kissed me.
"You will forgive me all, Aunt?"
"O, you know that beforehand!"
"But I shall not tell you very much, and what I do tell is so unpleasant and mortifying to reveal, that it was only when I told papa my great reason he was willing I should tell you."
"Tell me just as much, and just as little, as you like, my dear; I am willing to believe in you without a word," I said. And so it was; and philosophers may tell, if they can, why it was.
"You remember my governess, Madame Guyot?"
"O, yes, of course, perfectly. Her dreadfully pale face and great black eyes."
"She was so good to me! I loved her dearly. But after she died, you remember, they sent me to Paris to a school which she recommended, and which was really a very good one, and where I was very happy; and it was after that we travelled so much, and I met—"
"Never mind, my poor dear!" I said, seeing that she was choked with her sorrowful remembrances, "I can guess,—you saw there the person,—the young man—"
"I was only seventeen, Aunt Marian! and he was the first man I ever saw that really interested me at all,—though papa had several proposals for me from others. But this young man was so different. He really loved me, I am sure,—or rather I was sure at the time. He was not in good health, and I think his tall, fragile, spiritual person interested all the romance of my nature. Look at his picture, and tell me if that is the face of a bad or a treacherous man!"
Percy opened a red morocco case and handed it to me. I gazed on the face with deep interest. The light, curling hair and smooth face gave an impression of extreme youth, and the soft blue eyes had the careless, serene expression which is often seen in foreigners' eyes, but scarcely ever in those of Americans. There was none of the keen, business look apparent in almost every New England face, but rather an abstracted, gentle expression, as of one interested in poetry or scientific pursuits,—objects that do not bring him in conflict with his race.
I expressed something of this to Percy, and she said I was right about the poetry, and especially the gentleness. But he had, in fact, only been a student, and as yet but little of a traveller. They were to have travelled together after their marriage.
"It was only six weeks after that, when Charles was obliged to go to the West Indies on business for his father. It was the sickly season, and he would not let me go with him. He was to be back in England in five or six weeks at farthest."
"And—he wasn't lost?"
"Lost to me. Papa heard at one time that he was living at the West Indies, and after a time he went there to search for him—in vain. Then, months after, we heard that he had been seen in Fayal. Sometimes I think—I almost hope he is dead. For that he should be willing to go away and live without me is so dreadful!"
"You are dressed like a widow?"
"Yes,—I desired it myself, after two years had passed, and not a word came from Charles. But papa says he has most likely met with a violent death, and that these rumors of his having been seen in Fayal and in the West Indies, as we heard once, are only got up to mislead suspicion. You know papa's great dislike—nay, I may call it weakness—is being talked about and discussed. And he thought the best way was to say nothing about the peculiarity or mystery attending my marriage, but merely say I was a widow. Somebody in Barton said Charles died of a fever, and as nobody contradicted it, so it has gone; but, Aunt Marian, it is often my hope, and even belief, that I shall see him again!"
She stopped talking, and hid her face, sobbing heavily, like a grieved child. Poor thing! I pitied her from my heart. But what could I say? People are not lost, now-a-days. The difficulty is to be able to hide, try they ever so much. It looked very dark for this Charles Lunt; and, by her own account, they had not known much about him. He was a New York merchant, and I had not much opinion of New York morals myself. From their own newspapers, I should say there was more wickedness than could possibly be crammed into their dailies going on as a habit. However, I said nothing of this sort to poor Percy, whose grief and mortification had already given her such a look of suffering as belongs only to the gloomiest experience of life. I soothed and comforted her as well as I might, and it doesn't always take a similar experience to give consolation. She said it was a real comfort to tell me about her trouble, and I dare say it was.
When Colonel Lunt got back from Washington, he had a great deal to tell us all, which he did, at our next soldiers' meeting, of the good which the Barton boxes had done. But he said it was a really wonderful sight to see the amount of relief contributed on that Lord's day, from all parts of the North, for the wounded. Every train brought in hundreds and thousands of packages and boxes, filled with comforts and delicacies. If the boys had been at home, they could not have been cared for more tenderly and abundantly. And the nurses in the hospitals! Colonel Lunt couldn't say enough about them. It was a treat to be watched over and consoled by such ministering angels as these women were! We could believe that, if they were at all like Anna Ford, who went, she said, "to help the soldiers bear the pain!" And I know she did that in a hundred cases,—cases where the men said they should have given up entirely, if she hadn't held their hands, or their heads, while their wounds were being dressed. "It made it seem so like their own mother or sister!"
That fall, I think, Barton put up eighty boxes of blackberry jam. This wasn't done without such a corresponding amount of sympathy in every good word and work as makes a community take long leaps in Christian progress. Barton could not help improving morally and mentally while her sons were doing the country's work of regeneration; and her daughters forgot their round tires like the moon, their braidings of hair, and their tinkling ornaments, while they devoted themselves to all that was highest and noblest both in thought and action. I was proud of Barton girls, when I saw them on the hills, in their sun-bonnets, gathering the fruit that was to be for the healing of the nations.
Soon after Colonel Lunt's return, he told me one day, in one of his cautious whispers, that he and Mrs. Lunt proposed to take me over to Swampy Hollow, if it would be agreeable to me. Of course it was; but I was surprised, when we were fairly shut up in the carriage, to find no Percy with us.
"We left her at home purposely," said Colonel Lunt, in a mysterious way, which he was fond of, and which always enraged me.
I don't like mysteries or whisperings, and yet, from an unfortunate "receptivity" in my nature, I am the unwilling depositary of half the secrets of Barton. I knew now that I was to hear poor Percy's story over again, with the Colonel's emendations and illustrations. I was in the carriage, and there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Lunt was used to him, and, I do believe, would like nothing better than to hear his old stories over and over, from January to December. But I wasn't of a patient make.
Colonel Lunt was a gentleman of the old school, which means, according to my experience, a person who likes to spend a long time getting at a joke or telling a story. He was a long time telling this, with the aid of Mrs. Lunt, who put in her corrections now and then, in a gentle, wifely way all her own, and which helped, instead of hindering him.
"And now, may I ask, my dear Colonel," said I, when he had finished, "why don't you, or rather why didn't you tell Percy the whole story?"
The Colonel pulled the check-string. "Thomas! drive slowly home now, and go round by the Devil's Dishful."
This is one of the loveliest drives about Barton. I knew that the Colonel's mind was easy.
"What