Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete; and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never before connected with any military organization, had the night before determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm, and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so ungraciously received.
They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the school-children—from the moment when she had observed his military cap and pants—had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest amount of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal—not to say imperial. To his explanations she had been worse than the traditional "deaf"—insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling, coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!
It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose, that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a tone corresponding to her own:
"Well, I will go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing about it."
"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.
"Nobody need to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to let me go out!'"
Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time, and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases. Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent, the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an absolute quarrel.
"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from the beginning—the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with me."
"I don't prefer it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a false position.
But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a hiccough: