Mechanically old Hannah, bowed and bewildered, began to do up her knitting in the fading autumnal afternoon.
“It is growing chilly,” she muttered shiveringly.
A COMEDY IN CRAPE
“For my part,” observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, “I don’t believe any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went round with all of them some, of course; but that was n’t anything—with him.”
A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs. Small continued the conversation.
“It’s awful easy for a girl to put on mourning when a man’s dead, and say she’s been engaged to him; but if any one of ’em had been engaged to Archie Lovell while he was alive, she’d have bragged enough of it at the time.”
The murmur of assent was more pronounced now, and one or two of the members of the Soldiers’ Aid Society expressed in word their entire agreement of this opinion. The ladies who made up the society usually improved the opportunities afforded by their meetings to discuss all the gossip of Tuskamuck, and the matter which they were now talking over in the corner of Dr. Wentworth’s parlor was one which had caused much excitement in the little community. It was in the days of the Civil War, and anything connected with the soldiers aroused interest, but a combination of romance and gossip with a tragedy in the field contained all the elements of the deepest sensation. News had come after the battle of Chickamauga of the death of Archie Lovell, and although this was followed by a vague rumor that he might perhaps be among the missing rather than the killed, it had never been really disproved. As time had gone on without tidings of the missing man, his death had been accepted, and even his aunt, Old Lady Andrews, whose idol he had been, and who clung to hope as long as hope seemed possible, had given him up at last. She had ordered a memorial stone to be placed in the village graveyard, and the appearance of the marble tablet seemed in a way to give official sanction to the belief that Archie Lovell would never again carry his bright face and winning smile about the village streets, and that nevermore would he drive the gossips of Tuskamuck to the verge of desperation by flirting so markedly with a dozen girls that they could by no means keep track of him or decide what his real preference—if he had one—might be.
Whatever loss the gossips sustained by his death, however, was soon made up, for no sooner was the news of his loss known than three girls, one after the other, announced their engagement to the dead hero, and one after the other donned widow’s weeds in his memory. So many girls had been the recipients of Archie’s multifarious attentions that it would have been easy for almost any one of Tuskamuck’s maidens to bring forward such a claim with some show of probability; but unfortunately, by the end of 1863 too many damsels had done this sort of thing for the posthumous announcement of an engagement to be received with entire solemnity or assured credence. A sort of fashion of going into mourning for dead soldiers had set in, and undoubtedly many a forlorn damsel by a tender fiction thus gratified a blighted passion which had never before been allowed to come to light. Cynic wits declared that it added a new terror to a soldier’s death that he could never tell who would, when he was unable to deny it, claim to have been betrothed to him; and when, as in the present case, three disconsolate maidens wore crape for the same man, the affair became too absurd even for the responsive sympathies of war-time.