Some weeks ago Charley’s wife left to live with her sister; her cousin still remained with us. It was the latter who was sent for to the telephone that evening when the shadow of death rolled up suddenly and hung over the little house.
An unforgettable moment when she turned from the instrument, crying in accents that pierced one: “Charley tué! Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, Charley tué!”
It was when we afterwards learnt the details of the tragedy, which were piteous in the extreme as far as it affected the wife, that the noble consolations of our religion emerged in all their beauty.
The officer had announced an approaching leave, and the joyful anticipation of his little family was commensurate to the love they bore him. As one instance of that love, let it be noted here that his small son, only six years old, could never hear the name of his absent father without tears.
The wife was alone in the garden, resting from the fatigues of a morning spent in preparing for that visit, when a telegram arrived, badly transcribed, in French. She could at first only make out her husband’s name, her brother’s signature, and the words, “Shall be at Calais to-day.”
She danced into the house in ecstasy, crying to the children: “Papa is coming; papa and Uncle Robert are coming.”
And it was only on the stairs that a second glance at the sheet in her hand revealed the fatal word “tué.”
A cousin—another young exiled wife and mother—who lived in close proximity, was summoned by the distracted maid, and writes in simple language of the scene of agony: “As soon as I got into the little house,” she says, “I heard her dreadful sobs; I ran to her. ‘Charley is killed, Charley is killed!’ she cried to me. I have never seen anyone in such a state. She was almost in convulsions. I put my arms about her. ‘Make your sacrifice; offer it up for the good of his soul,’ I said to her. ‘No, no! I cannot,’ she said. At first she could not, but I held her close, and after a little I said to her: ‘Say the words after me: “O my God, I accept your will for the good of his soul.”’ And once she had said it she did not go back on it. From that moment she was calm.”
So calm, indeed, that the unhappy young creature had the strength of mind to go in to her children, terrified at the sound of her weeping, and smilingly reassure them, talk and play with them, till their bedtime. She meant to start that night for Calais, and did not wish her little ones to know of their loss till her return.