She filled the aching void with lovers. One was a society man in her husband’s set, and one other was a big, dark, much-married actor. She broke her husband’s heart, she broke the heart of his adoring mother, and she grew more wretched herself every year. She then took to drink, and soon after to drugs. Coming home one night from a party she fell on the icy pavement and broke both lower limbs. She never saw a well day after the accident, and died at the age of thirty-four. She had starved her heart for wealth and position. She went without love to a high position and found it a bitter mockery. She had outraged her own soul. Then began the work of turning to ruin the palace in which she tried to live without love.
THE SOLDIER’S DIARY
In an old trunk, up in the garret where the family letters were deposited for more than half a century, I found the diary of a soldier, in which the following notes attracted my attention: “August 14, 1864. Yesterday was a terrible day for me. The battle at Deep Bottom, near Richmond, took the last of my messmates. Andrew Brown was wounded early in the engagement—shot through the thigh. Comrade Charles Pepperman assisted him to the rear. While they were gone, the man at my side, Amos Friedel was shot through the head and died instantly. Thus three of my messmates left my side within fifteen minutes. Pepperman joined the ranks an hour later, and a few minutes after was shot and fatally wounded. This morning Henry Traveler was found on the battle field, with his arm shattered horribly, and was taken to the hospital.
“In noting these fatalities and injuries, I cannot help but recall Comrade Shoemaker, the first of my messmates to pass out. His was the most pitiable death of all. He died three months ago of nostalgia. This is simply a melancholy growing out of homesickness. Shoemaker had married a pretty girl only a few weeks before he enlisted and went to the front. The army lay in supine idleness for several weeks, and Shoemaker had nothing to do but brood over his separation from the one he loved so fondly. A deep melancholia settled down upon his soul and we could not awaken an interest in his heart. Hour after hour his mind dwelt upon the scenes of his Pennsylvania home, and his deserted wife’s sad face looked out of the shadows and smiled the lonely smile of a forsaken woman.
“They took him to the hospital, but the doctors could find no organic disease in his body. He was simply dying of loneliness and a longing, longing to be with the people he loved. He was a large man, standing six feet in his bare feet, and this made his death all the more pathetic. We tried to get him a furlough and send him to his family at home, for thirty days, but the officers laughed at us, and said the man would come out of his melancholia in a few days and go to eating hard-tack. They were men without heart or sentiment, and they did not know the depth of Shoemaker’s gloom.
“Three weeks after being taken to the hospital, he died, and was buried in Virginia, and the longing wife never saw his face again.
“August 25th. Was to see Comrade Brown today, before they removed him to the hospital at Washington. He is very badly wounded, the bone being shattered and there is danger of gangrene. He gave me a letter to read which he received the previous day from home, written by his sister, Barbara. Among the many things she wrote was this: ‘On the night of the 15th and about two o’clock in the morning I dreamed that you came home. I could see you walking up to the door as plainly as I ever saw your familiar face. Your knock on the door wakened me out of a troubled sleep, and so sure was I that you were down at the door waiting to be admitted, that I insisted on some one going down to let you in. Of course it was all a dream, but so realistic, that I was sorely troubled until father read in the Tribune that you were wounded. Surely you must have been thinking of home at that hour.’”
There the diary ended. For it was only a portion of the book in which this unknown comrade had been jotting down the events of his army life. The hand that put those written pages in the old trunk has been dead for many years, and we can only guess who the writer was. He, too, may have left his bones to decay in Virginia soil, and his diary sent back to Northern friends. But I knew this Samuel Shoemaker, and I still remember of hearing my parents talking about his sad death. No doubt there were many thousands of young men taken from their mountain homes and rushed to the front, and the change was so great that they could not prevent their hearts from longing for the dear old scenes of home—for the dear old mother, wife or sweetheart. And then came the hopelessness and melancholia and the loss of courage, and finally death.
And yet that war settled nothing. The negro question is still the overshadowing problem calling for a solution. Burning negroes at the stake marks America as one of the barbarous nations.