March experienced a blessed letting-down of the whole system—a surcease from worrying thought, so sudden that a deep sigh escaped him that made his mother glance askance at him. Instead of admiring the brave industry of the true wife he had suffered a whimsical prejudice to poison his mind against her. He despised himself as a midnight spy and gossip hunter, in the recollection of the orchard vigil. The patient, unseasonable toil of the sisters became sublime.
“Who has not heard the story of the drummer boy of Gettysburg?” thundered the preacher, raising eagle eyes from the manuscript laid between the Bible leaves.
March jumped as if the fulmination were chain-shot. Mrs. Gilchrist, looking full at him, saw his color flicker violently, his fingers clinch hard upon the palms. Then he became so ghastly that she whispered:
“Are you ill?”
“A sharp pain in my side! It will be gone in a moment,” he whispered back, his lips contracting into a smile. Rather a sword in his heart. The light within him was darkness. How foolish not to have solved the mean riddle at a glance! Mr. Wayt’s sensational sermons were composed by his clever wife, and transcribed by her as clever sister! Here was the secret of the sense of unreality and distrust that had haunted him in this man’s presence from the beginning of their acquaintanceship. The specious divine was a fraud out and out, and through and through a cheap cheat. No wonder now, at the swift itinerancy of his ministry! His talk of midnight study was a lie, his pretense of scholarship a trick so flimsy that a child should have seen through it. He had gone to bed the evening before, and taken his rest in sleep, while his accomplices got up to order the patriotic pyrotechnics for the next day.
No wonder that Mrs. Wayt’s eyes were furtive and anxious, that there were crow’s feet in the corners, and bistre rings about them after that July night’s work!
No wonder that the less hardened and less culpable sister-in-law shunned church services!
The sword was double-edged, and dug and turned in his heart. For the girl who lent aid, willing or reluctant, to the deliberate deception practiced in the Name which is above all other names, had a face as clear as the sun, and eyes honest as Heaven, and he loved her!
The main body of the audience could not withdraw their eyes from the narrator of the telling anecdote of the drummer-boy of Gettysburg. The story was new to all there, although he had assumed their familiarity with it. It was graphic; it was pathetic to heart-break; it thrilled and glowed and coruscated with self-devotion and patriotism; it was an inimitable illustration of the point just made by the orator, who was carried clear out of himself by the theme. And not one person there—not even March Gilchrist, fiercely distrustful of the man and all his works—suspected that it was an original incident, home-grown, homespun, and home-woven. Write it not down as a sin against the popular pastor of the Fairhill First Church that the Gettysburg hero was a twenty-four-year-old child of the speaker’s brain. If the Mill of the Press, and the Foundry of Tradition cannot turn out illustrations numerous and pat enough to suit every subject and time, private enterprise must supply personal demand.
“I think young Gilchrist was ill in church to-day,” observed Mr. Wayt to his wife that afternoon, as she fed him with the dainty repast he could not go to the table to eat.