"Katharine," she said, "were these three martyrs alive when the cowards left them?"
"Yes, mother."
"Brave spirits," cried the old lady, rising suddenly. "They were in the hands of a merciful God, and he will save them! We will not mourn David as lost till that wreck is heard from. He is wise, and had courage. Had there been no hope he would have left with the rest."
Katharine's face brightened.
"Oh, mother, if it should prove so!"
"God did not inspire that brave child and the negro to stand by him for nothing. I feel that he is alive in the return of my own strength. When a strong man dies, his mother should feel weak, though he were a thousand miles off. But I, look, am I feeble and drooping, as if the staff of my age were torn from under me. If I stand upright, it is because he was, he is a good man. If I feel a power of vitality here, it is a proof that kindred life beats somewhere in response to it."
Katharine gazed at her mother in astonishment. There was something sublime in her great faith, a grandeur in her attitude like that which we give to a prophetess of the Bible. In her language and voice she seemed lifted out of herself.
Katharine always held her mother in profound reverence, in which love and fear were so equally blended, that she was seldom quite at rest in her presence. Now these feelings arose almost to religious exaltation. With all the softening influence of love and youth about her, she possessed many of the vigorous and noble traits which gave the old woman an acknowledged superiority in the neighborhood. With her mother's faith her hopes arose, and coming out of their deep grief the two sat down together, and strove to wrest some assurance of the son and brother's safety from the news that had reached them.
"He is alive—I feel that he is alive—my noble, strong boy!" said the old woman, as she laid her head on the pillow, but a heavy fear lay at her heart all the time.
"He was alive, and while there is life we may hope," whispered Katharine, sadly, as she sank to an unquiet sleep. A heavier sorrow, alas, lay upon her; the sorrow of a corroding secret which the last few hours had rendered almost a guilty burden from the new causes of detestation that had sprung up between her mother and the man she had so rashly married.