Before she embarked he had given the fugitive a self-addressed envelope enclosing a card, on which was written: “Arrived safely.” She pencilled below—“Alice,” and sent it back by the boatman. It was a week old when he got it, and creased and soiled by much handling.
Then fell silence, that was felt every waking hour, and lasted for four long months. On the first day of February, my husband being absent from home, I walked down to the city post-office with Mrs. Greenleaf, my eldest sister-in-law, who was visiting us, and took from our box a thin letter addressed in my mother’s hand, and stamped “Flag of Truce.”
It was but one page in length. Flag-of-truce communications were limited to that. The first line branded itself upon my brain:
“I have written to you several times since our precious Alice’s death!”
She had rallied finely in her native air, and was, apparently, on the highroad to health when smallpox broke out in Richmond military hospitals. It spread to the citizens. The town was crowded, and quarantine laws were lax. Dr. Haxall called and insisted that the entire family be re-vaccinated. He had his way with all save one. Alice put him off with a jest, and my mother bade him “call again, when she may be more reasonable.” I fancy none of them put much faith in the honest physician’s assertion that the precautionary measure was a necessity. In those days a “good vaccination scar” was supposed to last a lifetime. My sister fell ill a fortnight afterward, and the seizure was pronounced to be “varioloid.”
A girl’s wilful whim! A mother’s indulgence! These may, or may not, have been the opening acts of the tragedy. God knows!
Alice was in her twenty-second year, and in mind the most brilliant of the family. She was an ardent student for learning’s sake, and an accomplished English scholar; wrote and spoke French fluently, and was proficient in the Latin classics. The one sketch from her pen ever published appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger while she was ill. It proved what we had known already, that her talent for composition was of a high order. Had she lived, the reading world would have ratified our judgment.
On March 7th of that dark and bloody year, the low tide of hope with the nation, our home was brightened by the birth of a second daughter—our first brunette bairnie. Her brother and sister had the Terhune blue eyes and sunny hair. She came on a wild, snowy day, and brought such wealth of balm and blessing with her as seldom endows parents and home by reason of a single birth. From the hour of her advent, Baby Alice was her father’s idol. Why, we could not say then. The fact—amusing at times—always patent—of the peculiar tenderness binding together the hearts of the father and the girl-child—remained, and was gradually accepted, without comment, by us all.
It was an unspeakable comfort to be able once more to talk of “the children.” One never divines the depth of sweetness and significance in the term until one has been robbed of the right to use it, through months of missing what has been.