The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864

And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the face. The man was in no sense a coward—flinch was not in him. He came out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat Marguerite—the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion in his heart leaped up—a groan came in place of the words he had promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet. He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through clenched teeth.

'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not dead; the engagement is not broken.'

There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any right to use—harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.

There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell, and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom again. She looked into it with just the same attitude—even to the tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing—as five minutes before she had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white face—whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight—saw a look of utter, hopeless quiet settle there—such quiet as one sees in an unclosed coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving, as covers deadly wounds—settle never again to rise till Death shall sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.

Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give—the promise of lifelong love and tenderness—was itself a deadly wrong—would blast his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest realization of helplessness went over his heart.

She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up; even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek with quick, light contact, and glided away.

Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon, and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face, and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo; till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.

To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.

But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.

There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of body—not a sound or struggle testifies to pain—receiving blow after blow without hope or thought of appeal—going off by and by to die, or to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps—a passive, hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night see the sun rise with its old promise.

Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium, found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George—off on some scouting expedition—was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding finally with—

'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George! The prodigious effort ought to have kept the heart throb out of his voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months—feeling like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to retributive justice.

'I thought you knew'—flashing the diamond on his hand in the moonlight—'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion to this—or did, last spring.'

And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.

The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him, this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we are willing to admit at first thought.

This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man. Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing together of social elements—this commingling on one level of all ranks and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial, unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The man gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk. And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings allowed from those about him—now, his never-failing good nature, his flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise, and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night, after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary night-stops more endurable. Thanksgiving came and went. George went home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit, who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study, and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry, Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that day.

'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the title involuntarily.

He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one bearing half a dozen postmarks—a letter from his mother, conveyed across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be—filled with home items to the last page—there his heart stood still, to bound again furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown, came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy, not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.

Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night was duly granted.

'Just in time—the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured official, registering the necessary items.

In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a Northern city.

A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm, luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.

She came at length—it seemed to him forever first—with the rustle and shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new, proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now—honorably free—and have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside. Most gracious and sovereign lady,'—he broke into sudden, almost mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the reverent throb that came straight from his voice.

She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like death:

'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'

For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.

She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled sense; he rose feebly.

'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this—this was so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.

On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope. Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.' He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy handful into his breast.

'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.

'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut, and he was gone.

Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder, and ten times more attractive than ever.

Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim prospect.

Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting. Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.

'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.

Various items of news followed.

'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly; 'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to write to that lady 'beyond the lines'—

The voice that replied was thin and harsh:

'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married last October.'

Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face had grown—anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.

At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself. On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at length on the banks of the river stood an army, hungry, footsore, marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then march down again'—what was left of them.

An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle, that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and then—blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.

The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses. He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a magnolia, not since that evening—a life time ago, it seemed; the sight and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother—a drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs. He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's, bent over him.

'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'

He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy. Tell mother—' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother—now Lois, my Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord—' A momentary struggle for breath, and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had settled forever.

'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he was worth a generation of such as I.'

He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the stirrup.

'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.' And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever. No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly that evening when he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully, touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.

Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman. Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.

Few words were spoken—nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings. Then she said:

'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I believe,' she added, wearily.

She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.

He rose and laid a packet before her.

'A lady's handkerchief—yours, I think. I was with him when he died, though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know, and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.

She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his white, wasted left hand.

'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and, burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor to speak—wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.

The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:

'If I had known—you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer, perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you ever so little to be released from your promise—'

There was no reply.

'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth. Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her—he would have given his life for that—and turned away with a great, yearning pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to his.

'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will be your wife, if you will be any happier.'

He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'

'If not yours, then never any one's.'

His arm fell about her, his lips touched her forehead quietly; he led her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his one awkward hand.

'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'

She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.

Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has borne a charmed life—a grave, calm man, remembering always a still face, 'pathetic with dying.'

Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming—is welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful, she is 'spending' herself—waiting for the end.