“See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself for them, day or night. I have said often to—to him who has gone—that I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted woman than you, his sister. And—now that he is gone—and we are both more sisters than ever in affliction—why in Heaven’s name should you behave like this to me?”
Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done anything to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s all. An’ that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.
“Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand to each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. Can’t it be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, on our way up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for you, and—”
Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did he say? Come, don’t make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off the hand on her shoulder as she spoke.
Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my mother’s “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began stammering, “Well, he said—Let’s see—he said—”
“Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough what he said! He said I was a good worker—that they’d never had to have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on an’ off for twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down South to bring back your husband, an’ that he never so much as give a thought to fetchin’ my husband, who was just as good a soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know—did he tell you that?”
What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this bitter gale of words?
“An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that—did he say, ‘This is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he didn’t!”
Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame me?” she asked.
Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken an’ the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’ for any one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he deserved it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he was livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead, he’s pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. But it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ there’s a hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ bringin’ him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d stand by itself. The other man—he can lay where he fell! Them that’s lookin’ for the first one are right close by—it ain’t more’n a few miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, an’ he was all over the ground two years ago—but nobody looks for this other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They ain’t no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ him! No—he could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no funeral for him—no bells tolled—unless it may be a cowbell up in the pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ his widow can go around, week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever mentions the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to put on black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin’ I’d buy candy with it instead!”