CHAPTER LXXX.
For a moment Mary stood with downcast eyes; then, looking up, gave a start.
“Oh—I beg your pardon! I was told I should find Captain Smith in this room,” said she, making for the door.
Just then the evening sun, which was slowly sinking in the west, burst from behind a cloud, and poured a stream of light in the room. She looked again. A clean-shaven face of chiselled marble, as clear-cut and as pale. Could it be he?
“I am Captain Smith—or was—”
“I did not know you without your beard.”
“The doctor had it taken off to get at the wound in my cheek.”
“I can hardly believe you are the same person. But for your eyes, I— They tell me you are the same. I had hoped—”
Mary sank into a chair.
“I beg your pardon. In my surprise, I forgot the courtesy due a lady.”
“I am not come as a lady, but as a woman. Turn away your eyes if you will; but hear me. Why do you hate me so? What have I done? You loved me once. At least you told me so; and as for myself—but I shall not trouble you with that. We plighted our faith. I broke my word, I acknowledge that. But do you deny the claims of conscience? Not if you are the man you have always seemed. Did it cost me nothing? It broke my heart, and—you-ou—know-ow-ow—it. You need not sneer! Alice knows it, and my mother, too, if you do not know—or care. Look at me, and remember the fresh-hearted young girl you knew four years ago—and told her—you would—love her—al-al-al-always!”
Mary covered her face with her hands, and the tears streamed down her cheeks, but with a supreme effort she suppressed her sobs.
The captain of the Myrmidons was silent.
At last, Mary, drying her eyes, arose, tottering, from her seat.
“And so I have come in vain! Once before I humbled myself in the dust before you—and you spurned me—”
The captain shook his head wearily.
“Yes, spurned me, and in the presence of others; so that even that poor dying man found it in his heart to pity me. And you, too, are dying, yet have not the mercy of a stranger and an enemy. You bade me read Homer, and taught me to admire Achilles, yet even his flinty heart was melted by the tears of Priam.”
The adamantine lips trembled.
“I have read the passage again and again, and wondered how you, as brave in battle, could be so much more pitiless than he. And Priam was a man, I a woman; Priam was his enemy, while I—”
A slight tremor shook his frame.
“At least, I am not that!”
She bowed her head for a moment; then, lifting her clasped hands and impassioned and despairing eyes to heaven:
“Merciful Father, have I not suffered enough! Must it be that from this time forth I shall know no peace,—haunted forever by the cold glitter of those implacable eyes, that were once—”
“Mary!”
She started. Had she heard aright?
“Mary, my beloved!”
She gave two cries; for she had heard—and she saw—one of exultant joy, the other of frenzied despair.
Found—and lost!
Falling upon her knees by the bedside, she buried her face in her hands.
He laid his hand upon her head.
Then the great sobs, long pent up, burst forth,—
“Mary!”
His words were too precious to be lost, and she mastered herself to listen.
“Mary, I have been a monster!”
She seized his hand.
“Can you ever forgive me?”
She covered it with tearful kisses.
“I don’t deserve this; but oh, how I have loved you all these years!”
“Oh, don’t tell me that, don’t tell me that!” And a moan burst forth from her very heart.
“I am too weak to talk. Charley will tell you why I was so bitter. He knows all. Ask him.”
She drew up a chair, and, sitting beside him, tried to smile, as she stroked back the chestnut hair from his forehead.
“Wonderful!” said she.
He looked up.
“I wish Lucy could see you without your beard, you are so much like her. And Edmund, too. Wonderful!” repeated she, drawing back for a better look. “And Mr. Poythress, too! Father and son were never more alike. Look!” And she handed him a little broken mirror that hung upon the wall.
She looked at him to see what he thought. And a thrill of terror shot through her heart. She had nursed men before who had been shot through the lungs. She pressed her handkerchief to his lips.
It was soaked with blood.
The door opened softly. “A lady and a gentleman from Richmond,” said the surgeon. “Will you see them now? Yes?”
Charley entered first. As soon as she saw him Mary threw herself upon his breast, and hung upon his neck with convulsive, half-suppressed sobs, then greeted Mrs. Poythress in the same way. Then she ran back to Charley. “He has forgiven me!”
“No, Charley; she has forgiven me. And you came! I knew you would. And she, too!”
Mrs. Poythress, sitting on the edge of the bed, held one of his hands, Charley the other. Mary sat stroking back the chestnut hair. The room was dark; for a little cloud floated across the face of the sun, whose lower edge was just kissing the rim of the hill that rises between Massanetta and the west.
“How is the baby?” asked he, with a faint smile, and gently pressing Charley’s hand. “What did—Alice—name him?”
“Alice left that to me. He was christened—Theodoric.”
“True as steel! I die happy! Charley—my Mary has—forgiven me my selfish anger. If there is any other person—that I have wronged—tell her—my last breath—”
The cloud passed on, and the last soft rays of that setting October sun flashed upon his pallid face.
Mrs. Poythress sprang to her feet. Bending over him with clasped hands, she poured upon him one long look of passionate interrogation.
He tried to speak. His eyes glanced from face to face, as though beseeching help. Mrs. Poythress turned to Charley. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor. She sprang in front of him, and placing a hand upon either shoulder, and drawing him close to her, with wide-staring, eager eyes, that would wring an answer from him, looked into his:
“Charley?”
“Yes,” said he.
She turned to the bed.
He had heard; and an ineffable tenderness had come into his face, softening, sweeping away, with the rush of unspeakable love, the hard lines that years of suffering had wrought. ’Twas a boy’s face once more—’twas Edmund’s—’twas—?
She stood before him with outstretched arms, eager with certainty,—held motionless by a slender thread of doubt.
He tried to speak. And again—
At last, with one supreme effort, and borne upon his last breath, a murmured word broke the stillness of the room. One little word,—but that the sweetest, tenderest, that tongue of man can utter,—
“Mother!”
“My Dory!” and she fell upon his neck. And the snowy hair and the chestnut, intermingled, lay, motionless, on one pillow!
And which of the two shall we pity?
He seemed to hear that name. At any rate, a beaming look—a serenely exultant smile—
I remember hurrying, once, to the roar of a battle which was over before our command reached the field. The combatants were gone. The wounded, even, had been removed. Only the Silent lay there, upon their gory bed. Wandering a little way from the road, while our troops halted, I saw a fair young boy (he was not over sixteen years of age) seated upon the ground, and leaning back against a young white oak, with his rifle across his lap. Struck with his rare beauty, I drew nearer.
The boy sat still.
I spoke to him.
He did not move.
I stooped and touched his damask cheek.
’Twas cold!
Kneeling in front of him, I saw a bullet-hole in his coat, just over his heart!
But, even then I could hardly believe. His head, thrown back, rested naturally against the tree. His parted lips showed two rows of pearly teeth. His uplifted eyes, which seemed to have drawn their azure from that sky upon which they were so intently fixed, wide open, were lit with a seraphic smile—
As though, peering, with his last look, into that blue abyss, he saw beckoning angels there!
Such a smile illumined poor Dory’s face. The heroic spirit had fled. The tumultuous, high-beating heart was still!
And who among us all—who, at least, from whom the sweet bloom—the rosy hopes of youth are gone—who among us, knowing what life really is, would dare awaken its fierce throbbings again?
And the seraphic smile lingered, lit up by the farewell rays of that October sun.
And the sun went down behind Massanetta’s hill!
THE END.