Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung herself upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a momentary inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down on the frozen earth floor and took his head upon her lap.
“Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!” she commanded me, hurriedly. “Or, no—wait—open the door—that’s it—walk ahead with the light!”
The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced against the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she carried the senseless form of the soldier into the living-room, and held it without rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction, wildly tore off quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed and heaped them up on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had spread them to her liking, she bent and gently laid him down.
“Now get the hartshorn,” she said.. I heard her putting more wood on the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with the stranger’s head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine, waving brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking dreamily at far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a smile about her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all.
“Come here, Ira,” I heard her say at last, after a long time had been spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking down upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress. The blue veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the delicately turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact that his breathing was gently regular once more—these are what I saw. But my Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more.
“Well?” she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. “Don’t you—don’t you see who it is?”
I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember that I shook my head.
My Aunt positively did smile this time. “The Perkins girls were wrong,” she said; “there isn’t the least smitch of a ‘wise child’ about you!”
There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in the emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s shoulder. The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus for some minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family party.
Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run over to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my mission oppressed me.