"But how soon do they expect to hear again of the wounded?" Maud asked somewhat impatiently.
"The way is open now and word will come every week," replied her father. "And thank God the war will soon be over!"
Captain Morris' letter affected Maud differently to Dr. Beaumont's. It stirred the martial enthusiasm in her nature to know that he had been a hero in the fight. But the feeling changed as she thought on. He had fallen bravely, probably without a murmur, but it was weeks ago. How was he now? and in any case how intensely he must have suffered! And then to know that he had written that letter, the only one she had ever received from him, only a day or two before the fight that may have cost him his life. Over and over again she read it; every word seemed to have a new meaning. Was it not sad in tone—premonitory of coming evil? Was there not a shadow behind the hand rendering dark the future, filling his life with the elusiveness of love, and producing in his heart passionate disdain?
She shivered when she thought of what might have happened to him there, and while proud that such a man should give her his confidence, she was carried away with a passion of feeling that at the time she could neither analyze nor understand.
Would a letter reach him? If it only could? At any rate she must do her part and send him a message. This time she wrote rapidly. She seemed to be under physical obligation to do her most and her best, without a thought of anyone but the wounded captain. After a while she finished the letter and went to bed.
Notwithstanding the restless tossing and wakefulness that followed, she rose early to post it. Then her mind wandered off beyond Niagara to Penetang; and, taking out another letter which she had often read before, she thoughtfully perused it again.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The ebb and flow of battles on sea and land in the War of 1812 and '14 do not belong to this story. Sir John Sherbrooke's despatch of men fresh from the European wars to Eastport, Castine, Bangor and Machias, Maine, and the retention of the Penobscot and St. Croix by the British till the war was over, are matters of history. So also is the victory of the American General Macomb at Plattsburg, where with five ships of war and fifteen hundred men he drove back twice as many British vessels and troops under the command of their weak and incapable head. No wonder that officers broke their swords and vowed they would never fight again under such a leader. But on the war dragged, sometimes with success on one side, sometimes on the other; and if it had not been for the harassing blockade of the Atlantic seaboard, when Britain's navy, let loose from European conflict, came over to fight the battles of her colonies, it is hard to tell where the fratricidal war would have ended.
Month after month passed by. Villages were pillaged; forts were captured and recaptured; cities were bombarded and wasted; York was ransacked; Niagara was burned; Washington was stormed by shot and shell and its buildings set on fire. Even after peace was declared, the final battle of New Orleans still had to be fought, where two thousand of the flower of the British troops were lost within the trenches, their general slain and the remainder put to flight, while only a handful of the American defenders in their entrenched position were either wounded or slain.
Such is war with its mighty agony, its seas of flowing blood, its tumultuous passion, its frenzied rage, the most inhuman of all human things; and yet withal, the purifier and ennobler of the races of men, who would not do without it, and thank God that it was abolished? And yet, when rights are trampled on, when liberty is invaded, when oppression is rampant, with Empire in the van, who would not draw the sword again, and thank God that by its glitter and fury, wrong could be righted and truth made plain?