Weeks went by, and there was no letter from the absent McNeill. Ann wrote often herself, tying the missives in wrapping paper with stout string, sealing them securely, and giving them to Lincoln to mail. Cheerful at first, her face grew wistful, her colour fled, her singing voice fell silent. Too loyal to suspect, too proud to complain, what fears possessed the lonely watches of the night, what hope awoke with each dawn, those who loved her best could only dimly guess. Her head held high in the pride of a faith unshaken, she asked for her letter only with a look, but such a look as one could scarce endure and the heart must ache to deny. Afterward she said she thought of her lover as dead. Steamboats often blew up in those days; there were swamps along the Wabash and the Ohio where men died of malarial fever; there were treacherous places in the mountains where a stumbling horse could end, in unrecorded tragedy, the sweetest human drama. In her heart she set up a shrine to a consecrated memory. For the one blow fate held for her she was unprepared.
In early summer there was a letter. Lincoln must have leaped on the nearest saddled horse and galloped out to the farm to give it to her. He slipped it into her hand unseen, saw the happy colour flood her face, and watched her speed away to the riverbank to read it. It was evening when she crept home again, in the radiance of the harvest moon, across the stubble of the wheat, like a dazed ghost.
It was not a letter that Ann could speak of to her father and mother with confidence and pride. McNeill had been ill on the journey—not so ill, however, that he could not have written. And his name was not McNeill, but McNamar. Family misfortunes had caused him to change his name out West so dependent relatives could not find him, thus giving the lie to his excuse for going back. He said nothing about returning, showed no remorse for his neglect, did not speak of her tender letters to him. Perhaps, in the old home, he had not cared to claim them under the name by which she knew him. It was a strange letter, heartless and without a spark of honour. But Ann had loved the man for four years, plighting her troth with him at seventeen. Although he had wounded her inrooted affections and faith, apparently deserted her without a pang, placed her in an intolerable position before a censorious world, she could not put him out of her mind and heart. She wrote to him again, with no reproaches, and she kept her own counsel.
Two more letters came at long intervals. Then they ceased altogether. In every sparsely settled community there is much curiosity about the unusual event, and some malice toward misfortune. Here offensive gossip ran about. It was reported that McNamar was a fugitive from justice—a thief, a murderer, that he already had a wife in the East. The talk enraged her father, and enveloped sweet Ann Rutledge in an atmosphere of blight. The truth—that he had tired of her—was surely not so bad as these rumours of criminal acts. With that element of the maternal that underlies the love of women for men, she came to the defence of his good name. She showed her father the letters, laying the sacrifice of her rejected self on the altar of a lost, unworthy love.
But it had the opposite effect she intended. In James Rutledge’s Southern code this was the blackest thing a man could do. A thousand miles of wilderness separated him from the scoundrel who had broken the heart of his daughter! Was John McNamar to go unpunished? Not an old man, he seemed to break up physically under the blow. Public sympathy was with him and with the deserted girl. Her father was her lover now, surrounding her with every attention and tender care. It was remarked in a day and place when family affection was not demonstrative. Again, in the country parlance, it was said: “James Rutledge is just wrapped up in Ann.”
A new element was added to this absorbing drama when Lincoln began to pay open court to Ann, publishing it far and wide that he would be proud to win what McNamar had not cared to keep. A wave of enthusiastic admiration swept over the country-side. Nothing else was talked of in the town and around the mill. His chivalrous love may well have played its part in his spectacular campaign for the legislature, and his triumphant election in August.
Ann gave no encouragement to his suit. To Lincoln, who was reading Jack Kelso’s precious copy of Shakespeare’s plays at the time, his love must have seemed another Ophelia, crushed by unkindness, bewildered by a world in which men could break faith. As she shrank from the blunt perception of curious neighbours she came to lean more and more on Lincoln’s devotion. It had in it, permeating its human quality, that divine compassion which, enlarged, was afterward to free a race. He wanted to free her spirit from bonds of the past. In the early days of his wooing his personal feeling and hopes were put in the background.
He persuaded Ann to study with him again. All that long autumn, while the walnuts turned to gold, the maples flamed across the world, and the oaks poured their cascades of red wine over the bluffs, they were together. Often the two were seen under a giant sycamore, on a hill below the town and overlooking the river, Ann puzzling over conjugations, Lincoln sprawled at her feet reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. It was such an extraordinary thing in that unlettered region that it was remarked ever after by those who saw it. It was an affair of public interest, and now of publicly expressed satisfaction at the happier turn of events. The world not only loves a lover, but it loves wedding bells at the end of the story. The first frost touched the forests with a magic wand, then Indian summer lay its bloomy haze over the landscape like the diaphanous veil that parts a waiting soul from Paradise. With the gales and snows of December Lincoln rode away for his winter of lawmaking at Vandalia.
Now, indeed, letters came for Ann across the white silence that lay in the valley of the Sangamon. Dated from the state capital they were, written with the quill pens and out of the cork inkstands the commonwealth provided. Not one of these letters is in existence to-day. They could not have been love-letters in the conventional sense, but eloquent of that large comradeship love holds for men and women of rare hearts and minds. For the first time he had come into contact with the men who were shaping the destinies of his state, measuring his capacities with theirs, and finding that he did not differ from them much in kind or degree. His ambition took definite shape. He saw a future of distinction and service such as he would be proud to ask Ann to share.
What pictures of men and the times he must have drawn for her! In those pioneer days only a few of the public men were backwoods lawyers like himself. Some, indeed, and many of the best, expressed the native genius and crude force that were transforming the wilderness. But there were old-world aristocrats, to whom the English language even was exotic, from Kaskaskia and the French mission towns, more than a century old, on the Mississippi. And there were Southern planters of wealth, whose fiery code always held for Lincoln an element of the absurd. Eastern men too, were there, with traditions of generations of learning and public service, and some “Yankees” with an over-developed shrewdness that the others agreed in detesting. Chicago was only an upstart village; northern Illinois just opened up to emigration from the East; southern Illinois was of the South, in population and sentiment, with the added grace of French manners. The capital was a tiny city, but it had high-bred society into which Ann would fit so well. There would be humorous anecdotes in those letters, too, to restore the gaiety of her heart, for, much as he loved men, their foibles and failings furnished him infinite amusement.