Neither Fan nor I could repress a smile at the energy with which he asserted his loyalty to his cause, and neither liked him the less for it. Fan, too, must have been “some reconstructed,” for she cared for him to the last as tenderly as if he had been her brother, and when he was dead, she with Phyllis made him ready for the grave, crying over him as she had not cried when Charlie died. Then her tears would not come, but now they fell in torrents as she brushed his wavy hair, which had grown rather long and lay in soft rings about his forehead, giving him the look of a young girl, rather than a boy, whose age we could not guess. We cut off two or three of his curls and put them, with the letter he had written for Charlie, into the pocket of the blue uniform which, with the grey, we left hanging on the wall in Charlie’s room.
We buried him on Easter day, and he had the largest funeral ever seen in the neighborhood, for everybody came, and his coffin, over which we hung the Federal flag, was heaped with lilies, which were afterwards dropped into his grave. Then we tried to find his friends, but with only Aunt Martha and Carlyle and the little town in Maine to guide us, it proved a fruitless task.
Fan wrote to the postmaster of the town in Maine, giving all the particulars, and after two months or more she received an answer from the postmaster’s wife, who said that during the first year of the war a company had gone from an adjoining town and in it was a boy, who gave his name as Joseph Wilde. He was a comparative stranger in town and had been for a short time in the employ of a grocer, who spoke very highly of him. But where he came from no one knew, or if he had any friends. And that was all we could learn of “The Boy,” whom we buried on the hillside beside our brother. At the head of his grave is a plain marble slab, and on it “The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.” This was Fan’s idea, and every Decoration Day after the war was over she used to hang the Stars and Bars over Charlie’s grave and the Stars and Stripes over the grave of The Boy, who has slept there now for many a year and will sleep there until from the North and the South, the East and the West, the boys in blue and the boys in grey will come together, a vast army, and what was crooked to them here will be made plain and we, who now see through a glass darkly, will then see face to face in the light of the Resurrection morning.
Chapter III.
AFTER THE WAR.
We had done our best to win and had failed. We were conquered, but in Lovering at least we accepted the situation and rejoiced for the peace and quiet which came to us with the disappearance of the soldiers from our soil. Even Fan was glad to go to bed feeling sure that her sleep would not be disturbed by the tramp of horses’ feet or the clamor of hungry men for food and shelter. Our little town had been visited so often by both armies and levied on so frequently for means to carry on the war that its people were greatly impoverished. Whether it were that our house was larger and our accommodations generally more ample, or that our father’s manner of receiving an unwelcome visitor was different from our neighbors, we seemed to have suffered most. Our horses and cows and sheep were gone. Our negroes were gone with the exception of Phyllis, who, after her first attempt to leave, stood firmly by us, refusing wages after she knew she was free.
Only poor white truck work for pay, and she wasn’t one of them, she said.
Our timber was damaged for the soldiers had cut down the trees in our woods for their camp fires, and worst of all our father’s patients were mostly gone. Belonging to the old school, in which he believed as he did in his religion, he adhered strictly to his morphine and calomel, and when a young physician from Richmond opened an office in town, with little bottles and little pills, and prices to correspond, the people flocked to him, and father was left with only a few patients and a long list of uncollectible bills against some of the deserters. Both Fan and I inclined to homeopathy and urged him to adopt it to some extent, but he shook his head. He had sat on the fence during the war, he said, and received only kicks from either side, and now he should stick to his principles and allopathy if he starved. We did not starve, but we were at times in great straits. Fan and I made over our old dresses for ourselves and little Katy, and we brushed and mended father’s clothes, which, in spite of our care grew more and more threadbare and shabby until his dress coat was the only garment which was not shiny and had not more or less darns in it. This he always wore to dinner, partly from habit, partly to please us, and more I think to please old Phyllis, who felt that the glory of the family had not quite departed so long as the swallow tail appeared at dinner, even if it were laid aside the moment the meal was over. There was no denying the fact that grim poverty was staring us in the face, and no one felt it more keenly than Phyllis, who, although she would take nothing from us, offered to hire out for wages which she would give to us. This we would not allow, and we struggled on through the summer, raising and selling what we could from our land, which we all worked together, and living on as little as it was possible for five people to live upon. Fan suffered the most, she was so proud and so luxurious in her tastes and so averse to any thing like economy.
“I’d do anything for money,” she said one day to Jack Fullerton, who was helping us pick our grapes, which he was to sell for us in Petersburg.
Jack had won his shoulder-straps and was a lieutenant when the war closed, but he dropped the title with his uniform and was only Jack to us,—a handsome, honest-hearted young man, whom everybody liked, whom I adored in secret, and whom Fan worried and teased and flirted with outrageously. She knew he loved her, and I believed she loved him in return. But she encouraged him one day and repelled him the next, saying often in his presence that she should never marry unless the man had money and it would be useless for one without it to offer himself to her.
“Then I’d better not do it,” Jack would say, jokingly, with the most intense love burning in his eyes and sounding in his voice.