She had no schemes for helping the unfortunate by multitude. Possibly on that account her usefulness was less than it might have been. But I am not sure; for they say her actual words and deeds were but the seed of ultimate harvests; and that others, moreover, seeing her light shine so brightly along this seemingly narrow path, and moved to imitate her, took that other and broader way, and so both fields were reaped.
But, I say, we need not follow her steps. They would lead deviously through ill-smelling military hospitals, and into buildings that had once been the counting-rooms of Carondelet-street cotton merchants, but were now become the prisons of soldiers in gray. One of these places, restored after the war as a cotton factor’s counting-room again, had, until a few years ago, a queer, clumsy patch in the plastering of one wall, near the base-board. Some one had made a rough inscription on it with a cotton sampler’s marking-brush. It commemorates an incident. Mary by some means became aware beforehand that this incident was going to occur; and one of the most trying struggles of conscience she ever had in her life was that in which she debated with herself one whole night whether she ought to give her knowledge to others or keep it to herself. She kept it. In fact, she said nothing until the war was all over and done, and she never was quite sure whether her silence was right or wrong. And when she asked Dr. Sevier if he thought she had done wrong, he asked:—
“You knew it was going to take place, and kept silence?”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“And you want to know whether you did right?”
“Yes. I’d like to know what you think.”
He sat very straight, and said not a word, nor changed a line of his face. She got no answer at all.
The inscription was as follows; I used to see it every work-day of the week for years—it may be there yet—190 Common street, first flight, back office:
But we move too fast. Let us go back into the war for a moment longer. Mary pursued her calling. The most of it she succeeded in doing in a very sunshiny way. She carried with her, and left behind her, cheer, courage, hope. Yet she had a widow’s heart, and whenever she took a widow’s hand in hers, and oftentimes, alone or against her sleeping child’s bedside, she had a widow’s tears. But this work, or these works,—she made each particular ministration seem as if it were the only one,—these works, that she might never have had the opportunity to perform had her nest-mate never been taken from her, seemed to keep John near. Almost, sometimes, he seemed to walk at her side in her errands of mercy, or to spread above her the arms of benediction. And so even the bitter was sweet, and she came to believe that never before had widow such blessed commutation.