"To Mrs. Ward Heathcote:
"My name given in list a mistake. Am here, wounded, but not dangerously. Will write. W. H."
It was sent from Harper's Ferry. And two hours later, Mrs. Heathcote, accompanied by Bagshot, was on her way to Harper's Ferry.
It was a wild journey. If any man had possessed authority over Helen, she would never have been allowed to make it; but no man did possess authority. Mrs. Heathcote, having money, courage, and a will of steel, asked advice from no one, did not even wait for Miss Teller, but departed according to a swift purpose of her own, accompanied only by Bagshot, who was, however, an efficient person, self-possessed, calm, and accustomed to travelling. It was uncertain whether they would be able to reach Harper's Ferry, but this uncertainty did not deter Helen: she would go as far as she could. In her heart she was not without hope that Mrs. Heathcote could relax the rules and military lines of even the strictest general in the service. As to personal fear, she had none.
At Baltimore she was obliged to wait for an answer to the dispatch she had sent on starting, and the answer was long in coming. To pass away the time, she ordered a carriage and drove about the city; many persons noticed her, and remembered her fair, delicate, and impatient face, framed in its pale hair. At last the answer came. Captain Heathcote was no longer at Harper's Ferry; he had been sent a short distance northward to a town where there was a better hospital, and Mrs. Heathcote was advised to go round by the way of Harrisburg, a route easier and safer, if not in the end more direct as well.
She followed this advice, although against her will. She travelled northward to Harrisburg, and then made a broad curve, and came southward again, within sight of the green hills later to be brought into unexpected and long-enduring fame—the hills around Gettysburg. But now the whole region was fair with summer, smiling and peaceful; the farmers were at work, and the grain was growing. After some delays she reached the little town, with its barrack-like, white-washed hospital, where her husband was installed under treatment for a wound in his right arm, which, at first appearing serious, had now begun to improve so rapidly that the surgeon in charge decided that he could soon travel northward, and receive what further care he needed among the comforts of his own home.
At the end of five days, therefore, they started, attended only by Bagshot, that useful woman possessing, in addition to her other qualifications, both skill and experience as a nurse.
They started; but the journey was soon ended. On the 11th of June the world of New York was startled, its upper circles hotly excited, and one obscure young teacher in a little suburban home paralyzed, by the great headings in the morning newspapers. Mrs. Heathcote, wife of Captain Ward Heathcote,—— New York Volunteers, while on her way homeward with her husband, who was wounded in the Shenandoah Valley, had been found murdered in her room in the country inn at Timloesville, where they were passing the night. And the evidence pointed so strongly toward Captain Heathcote that he had been arrested upon suspicion.
The city journals appended to this brief dispatch whatever details they knew regarding the personal history of the suspected man and his victim. Helen's beauty, the high position of both in society, and their large circle of friends were spoken of; and in one account the wife's wealth, left by will unconditionally to her husband, was significantly mentioned. One of the larger journals, with the terrible and pitiless impartiality of the great city dailies, added that if there had been a plan, some part of it had signally failed. "A man of the ability of Captain Heathcote would never have been caught otherwise in a web of circumstantial evidence so close that it convinced even the pastoral minds of the Timloesville officials. We do not wish, of course, to prejudge this case; but from the half-accounts which have reached us, it looks as though this blunder, whatever it may have been, was but another proof of the eternal verity of the old saying, Murder will out."
It was the journal containing this sentence which Anne read. She had heard the news of Heathcote's safety a few hours after her visit to Helen. Only a few days had passed, and now her eyes were staring at the horrible words that Helen was dead, and that her murderer was her own husband.