III.
It was June still. The laburnum path was all aglow with blossoms, and the grape-walk, just beyond, made a shadowy retreat toward evening. Sybil was sitting there with her work lying on her lap. She had not sewed three stitches. Why had not Harry come as usual that afternoon to the east window to get his cup of black coffee? Why—O dear! there are so many whys in the case, and never an answer anywhere. Why was there an indefinite air of bustle in the camp as she looked down on it from her bower? Why was there an undefined sense of stir in everything?
She watched the sun drop nearer and nearer to the distant hills. The air was full of saffron light, and heavy with the perfume of flowers. Nature was so new and fresh in her June loveliness; and life was full of a promise of coming beauty, as it had never been before to Sybil in any other of her nineteen Junes. That sense of stir was in her own soul no less than in external nature.
There came the click of an iron heel upon the gravelled path. Sybil half-rose from the bench, and then sank back again. Adair stood before her. "We are ordered off," he said. "We go in an hour. I've but one moment to stay, for I promised Harry to leave him time to come and say good-by."
In the white, scared look on Sybil's face he read the right to speak.
But it had all been so hurried, she thought, when he was gone. Oh! for one of those minutes to return, that she might express to him a tenth part of the joy and pain, the hope and terror, that filled her heart. She could remember nothing clearly or in order, and yet she would have given all the other memories of her happy life to recall each word as it was spoken. He had asked her to give him something of her own, a ring, a glove, a ribbon, no matter what. And she had taken from her neck the medallion, and laid in it a little curl of her hair, and given it to him; and she had felt his hand upon her head, and heard him say, "God keep my sweet, innocent love!" And when she lifted her head he was gone, and she had told him nothing. It could not be a dream, for on her left hand was the ring he placed there—one that she had seen him wear, and thought too beautiful a jewel for a man to have, but now she felt so glad that he had worn it. He had said this was to be the guard of the wedding-ring that he would place there as soon as he could get a furlough to come home; and she had said—yes, thank God! she did remember saying that, at least—she had said that no one but himself should take off this ring or put another in its place; yes, thank God! she had said it.
Then Harry had come, too overjoyed at the news of her engagement to feel the pain of parting. That memory was full of turmoil; mixed, too, with self-reproach that all other emotion was so lost in her new joy or pain, whichever it might be called, that Harry's going gave her no uneasiness.
The sun dropped behind the hills; star after star pierced through the darkening blue. Stillness lay on the valley below, so lately full of tramping horses, and shouting men, and shifting lights.
At last she heard her aunt's voice calling her, and roused herself to go and tell her beautiful story, old as the human race, new as that very June evening. She wondered that Aunt Mildred understood it all so well. Short-sighted Sybil! it was you who were beginning to understand Miss Mildred.
One August day, when a sultry fog held the earth in bondage, and scarlet geraniums blazed like red pools among the wilted grass, Miss Mildred pushed open the little white gate, and, with that hurried step that in old age so poorly simulates speed, hastened across the lawn. She gave a quick glance into the two parlors which were vacant, and then went up-stairs, grasping nervously the low hand-rail. In the upper hall she stopped, and leaned against the balustrade to take breath, and courage, too. Then, opening the door of Sybil's room, she stopped on the threshold to see her lying on the floor with a newspaper crushed in her hand. A bulletin in the village post-office had told her all: "Found dead on the field, Captain Robert Adair, —th Regt. Mass. Vols." They lifted Sybil up and laid her on her bed. She did not "strive nor cry," but in that first grief it pleased God to measure her power of endurance.
It was not in victory that Adair had fallen, but in one of those engagements where, humanly speaking, life seems thrown away. But such thoughts should not disturb the mourners cradled in the providence of God. He chooses the time and the occasion, and what is lost in the current of human events he gathers up and cherishes.
Weeks passed away. Letters came—precious in their recognition of Adair's high integrity, his courage, his compassion; letters, too, from his mother, far away in her summer home, acknowledging Sybil as one with her in love and bereavement. But she lay, white and listless, on her bed, taking little notice of anything except in the expression of gratitude. Harder than anything else for her aunt to bear was the pathos of Sybil's resignation.
There came a soft afternoon, early in September, when for the first time Sybil's easy-chair was placed in the open air, under a striped awning that made an out-door room on the west side of Holly Farmhouse. Here she could be sheltered from the direct rays of the sun, and yet enjoy the trees and flowers.
Great velvet bees hid their heads buzzing in the freshly-opened cups of the day-lilies; a hummingbird dipped his dainty beak into the sweet-peas, and then flashed away to hide himself among the nasturtiums pouring in a golden stream over a broken tree-trunk on the lawn.
Amid the glow of nature, Sybil looked very wan and frail. She had begun to think a little now, and her thoughts ran thus: "I am resigned to God's will. I've not the shadow of a doubt that this is all right. I am more than willing to die; I am willing to live, if only there is a thread to hold by—a stone, a stick, a straw to begin to build my life upon. Other women have borne this and lived. I've seen them going about among their fellow-creatures, talking, smiling, laughing, when others talked, and smiled, and laughed. I have no more sensibility than they. What I have lost was perfect; but what they had lost was perfect, perhaps, to them. I don't rebel, but I am dying of pain. It goes on, and on, and on; if it would stop but for ten minutes and let me take breath, I think I could catch hold of something on earth and begin to live again. There's that dear Aunt Mildred coming through the hall. Now, I will give her a free, happy smile, and lighten her burden if I cannot lighten my own."
Miss Mildred held in her two hands a great vase of spreading golden-rod, which she set down on the little garden-table. Just where she had placed it, against a background of dark-green leaves, it made so beautiful a picture that Sybil uttered an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. There was a delighted look on her aunt's sweet old face that made her think: "Here is something to hold on by; here is something to build on, if only I am generous enough to try."
Miss Mildred arranged the cushions in Sybil's chair, and then took her hand very gently.
"There is a man in the hall, dear, who brings you a little packet from Virginia. Can you see him?"
"Yes; at once, if you like. Please let him come out here. I can talk to him better in the open air."
He came—a shy, elderly man, whom Sybil remembered seeing once at the camp. He stood awkwardly, shifting his military hat from hand to hand, till she asked him to sit down near her, and said a few reassuring words. Then, seeing that he was struggling to conquer his emotion, she fixed her eyes on the vase of flowers, trying to keep down the impatience struggling within her.
"My name is Abel, lady," he said, at length. "May be you've heard the cap'n say as how I couldn't play the bugle, at the camp below there. The folks all said I couldn't learn, I was so old and dull; but he allus believed everybody was good for something, he did."
Sybil was leaning forward, breathless to hear more.
"I remember you," she said. "Oh! do go on. Tell me everything—every little thing about it all."
"Wall, you see, lady, my two boys they was all I had, and they jined the regiment, and I couldn't live without 'em; and I was hale and strong, and so I made bold for to jine, too. There was one place left in the regiment then—the bugler's place, in Company B—and I pled so hard, the cap'n he said I might try. And, lady, the plaguy thing used to seem to shut right up when I wanted to make it blow, and the men used to laugh at me, right out afore my boys. And Abner and John Henry they felt kind o' cheap, and they kept sayin' to me, 'Father,' they says, 'it makes us feel kind o' bad to hear you tryin' so hard and not learnin'; don't you think you'd better give it up?' And says I, 'No, boys,' says I, 'while there's breath in my body, I won't give it up till I've conquered that crittur.' And, lady, when the cap'n see me tryin' so hard and allus comin' to grief, what does he do but he takes hold himself, and he learns all them signals, and he teaches on 'em to me. And so I went to the war with my boys, and I nursed John Henry through a fever, and I kept Abner from fallin' into bad company; and, lady, if I could have saved the cap'n's life by givin' my skin inch by inch, I'd have done it; but I couldn't. So I just held his head against this old heart, and let him breathe his life away. And I laid him down on the sod as tender as if I'd been his mother."
"May God reward you! Did he suffer much?"
Tears, such as she had longed for, were pouring from her eyes.
"No, lady; he was gone before the surgeons came on to the field. He lay quite still, without a moan or sigh; and, now and then, he'd say a word to me. I was wounded, too, just below the knee. I dropped down about six feet off from him; and when the retreat came, and I saw as how I was left behind with the cap'n, didn't I praise the Lord!"
"What did he say to you?"
Abel took a little packet from his breast, and laid it in Sybil's hand. "He says to me, 'Abel,' says he, 'when you can get a furlough honorable,' says he—'for you mustn't go when the country needs you bad—you take this locket' (a-unhookin' it from his neck) 'to Miss Sybil Vaughan—her that lives in the stone farmhouse above our old camp at Holly Farm—and you tell her as how the poor thing tried to save my life; and she'll see it by the great dent in the gold made by a bullet. And you tell her as how she's to open it herself, and see what I put there. And you tell her '—I'm a Methodist, lady, but I'll tell you word for word what he said."
"Yes, word for word."
"'You tell her,' says he, 'how I pray that Christ and his Blessed Mother may be her comfort as they are mine; and tell her as how I've never let a thought enter my mind, since we parted, that she wouldn't have approved. And tell her,' says he, a-raisin' himself half-way up from the ground, 'you tell her I love her fond and true, and that we shall meet in heaven when she's done the work on earth she is so fit to do. And tell her to comfort my mother. Poor mother!' And then he put his arm round my neck, and kind o' stroked my cheek, and he says, soft and low, a few words, and all I heard was, 'Receive my soul,' and then I kissed him, and laid him down on the turf, and his face was like as I think it will be in heaven at the great day. And now I'm goin' to leave you, lady, 'cos I know as how you want to be alone. And, with your leave, I'll come again, and tell you how we loved him, and how we cried like babies round the ambulance that brought him to the camp; and how there was scarce anything left to send home to his mother, 'cos he used to give his things away to the sick boys—blankets, and money, and shirts, and all."
Then Abel took Sybil's delicate hand reverently on his broad, brown palm, and kissed it.
"Lady," he said, "you're the only thing ever I see that was fit to mate with him."
"You will come again," she said. "As you have no daughter, and there must be many things needed to make you comfortable during your convalescence, you will let me see to all that. And you will let me replace the many things you must have lost or worn out during these hard three months?"
She spoke beseechingly, looking up into his face like a child pleading for a toy.
"You shall just wind me round your finger like he did," said Abel. "I allus thought I'd got grit in me till I seen him, and then it seemed as though I hadn't no will but his'n."
Sybil was alone with the little packet. With trembling fingers she untied the string and removed the wrappings of paper. There lay the medallion with its twisted chain. She passionately kissed the battered enamel that had stood between him and death. Then she opened the locket. With the silky, yellow curl lay a little lock of dark-brown hair. She was touching it tenderly, wondering when he had placed it there for her consolation—whether just before the skirmish or soon after he left her—when a turn of the locket in the level rays of the sun showed two words scratched on the inner side with some rude instrument. She looked closer, and read: "Noblesse Oblige."
When Miss Mildred came to lead her into the house, there was a change in her face that filled the gentle lady's heart with gratitude. It was the look of courage that comes to those who recognize the claim of their high birth as the children of God.