[VI.]
ONE YEAR AFTER.
“A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread;
Through it a level river slowly drawn:
He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head
Streamed banners like the dawn.”
A bare room, the dead whiteness of whose plastered wall is only relieved by a coarsely colored print of the Virgin Mary in blue and scarlet, which hangs in a dingy gilt frame on the wall at the head of the bed. A crack in the glass has relieved the features of the Virgin of their ordinary expression of insipidity, but has substituted therefor a look of malevolence quite unpleasant to see. Fortunately for the man who lies, heavily sleeping, upon the pallet bed, this picture is not where his eyes can rest upon it. Beside the bed are two little stools, which constitute all the furniture of the room, and, indeed, all that it is well capable of containing; for so cramped and narrow are its dimensions, that it seems to be scarcely more than a closet with a window in it. Through the half-open door-way, however, can be seen long lines of beds, with the quiet figures of nurses and physicians passing back and forth through the ward.
Two people entered carefully and noiselessly through the open door-way,—one evidently an army physician; the other, in a captain’s uniform now, was Tom, bronzed and sunburnt, but the same careless, light-hearted boy as when he left Cambridge one year before. There was a look of anxiety on his face now, however, as he bent over the sleeping figure and asked:—
“How is he to-day, doctor?”
“Improving fast, captain,” was the reply. “His sleep is splendid,—just what I’ve been hoping for. If he wakes peacefully, and is conscious, he is likely to be all right again before long; and I shouldn’t wonder if he could rejoin his regiment in a week or ten days.”
“Thank Heaven!” said Tom.
“And his physique,” said the doctor. “This colonel of yours is a tough fellow, and a brave man; yet, if he should die to-morrow, I should simply put down his name, and never think of him again. My note-book is full of dead men’s names,—just a mention and nothing more. Oh! by the way, a gentleman called here for you yesterday afternoon, and said he would come again this morning. Here is his card.”