The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

"'Tell her,' he breathed, 'that she sent me to my death so that she might become only a bird in a gilded cage. But tell her also that I wish her happiness in her new life.' Madame, he died there, while weeping soldiers clustered about with hats off and heads bowed—died with your name on his pale lips---'My Pearl of great price,' he whispered, and all was over. I bring you this photograph, which to the last he wore above his heart. Observe the bullet hole and those dark stains that discolour your proud features."

Whereupon Mrs. Lyman Teaford would fall fainting to the floor and never again be the same woman, bearing to her grave a look of unutterable sadness, even amid the splendours of the newly furnished Latimer residence on North Oak Street.

Winona's drama was less depressing. Possibly Winona at thirty-two had developed a resilience not yet achieved by Wilbur at twenty. She was not going to die upon a field of battle for any Lyman Teaford. She would brave dangers, however. She saw herself in a neat uniform, searching a battlefield strewn with the dead and wounded. To the latter she administered reviving cordial from a minute cask suspended at her trim waist by a cord. Shells burst about her, but to these she paid no heed. It was thus the French officer—a mere lieutenant, later promoted for gallantry under fire—first observed her. He called her an angel of mercy, and his soldiers—rough chaps, but hearty and outspoken—cheered her as La Belle Americaine.

So much for the war. But the French officer—a general now, perhaps with one arm off—came to Newbern to claim his bride. He had been one of the impetuous sort that simply would not take no for an answer. The wedding was in the Methodist church, and was a glittering public function. The groom was not only splendidly handsome in a French way, but wore a shining uniform, and upon his breast sparkled a profusion of medals. A vast crowd outside the church waited to cheer the happy couple, and slinking at the rear of this was a drab Lyman Teaford—without medals, without uniform, dull, prosaic, enduring at this moment pangs of the keenest remorse for his hasty act of a year before. He, too, would never be the same man again.

In truth, the beginning Teaford ménage lay under the most unfavourable portents. Things looked dark for it.

Yet despite the forebodings of Wilbur and Winona, it began to be suspected, even by them, that the war would wear itself out, as old Doctor Purdy said, by first intention. And in spite of affecting individual dramas they began to feel that it must wear itself out with no help from them. It seemed to have settled into a quarrel among foreign nations with which we could rightfully have no concern. Winona learned, too, that her picture of the nurse on a battlefield administering cordial to wounded combatants from the small keg at her waist was based upon an ancient and doubtless always fanciful print.

Wilbur, too, gathered from the newspapers that, though he might die upon a battlefield, there was little chance that a French general would be commissioned to repeat his last words to Mrs. Lyman Teaford of Newbern Center. He almost decided that he would not become a soldier. Some years before, it is true, he had been drawn to the life by a government poster, designed by one who must himself have been a capable dramatist.

"Join the Army and See the World," urged the large-lettered legend above the picture.

The latter revealed an entrancing tropical scene with graceful palms adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the background two officers consulted with a private above an important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking old colonel seemed to be entreating a couple of spruce young privates to drop round for tea that afternoon and meet the ladies.

Had Wilbur happened upon this poster in conjunction with the resolve of Miss Pearl King to be sensible, it is possible his history might have been different. But its promise had faded from his memory ere his life was wrecked. He felt now merely that he ought to settle down to something. Even Sharon Whipple plainly told him so. He said it was all right to knock about from one thing to another while you were still in the gristle. Up to twenty a boy's years were kind of yeasty and uncertain, and if he was any way self-headed he ought to be left to run. But after twenty he lost his pinfeathers and should begin to think about things.