Other words, too, were spoken—words of guileless, pure affection, too sacred even for Guy to breathe to Maddy; and then Lucy had left him, her bounding step echoing through the hall and up the winding stairs, down which she never came again alive, for when Guy next looked upon her, she was lying white and still, her neck and dress and golden hair stained with the pale life-blood oozing from her livid lips. A blood-vessel had been suddenly ruptured, the physician said, adding that it was what he had been fearing for some time, and now it had come—and there was no hope. They told her she must die, for the mother would have them tell her. Once, for a few moments, there was on her face a frightened look, such as a harmless bird might wear when suddenly caught in a snare. But that soon passed away as from beneath the closed eyelids the great tears came gushing, and the stained lips whispered faintly:
“God knows best what is right. Poor Guy!—break it gently to him.”
At this point in the story Guy broke down entirely, sobbing as only strong men can sob.
“Maddy,” he said, “I felt like a heartless wretch—a most consummate hypocrite—as, standing by Lucy’s side, I met the fond, pitying glance of her blue eyes, and suffered the poor little hand to part my hair as she tried to comfort me, even though every word she uttered was shortening her life; tried to comfort me, the wretch who was there so unwillingly, and who at this prospect of release hardly knew at first whether he was more sorry than glad. You may well start from me in horror, Maddy. I was just the wretch I describe; but I overcame it, Maddy, and Heaven is my witness that no thought of you intruded itself upon me afterwards as I stood by my dying Lucy. I saw how good, how sweet she was, and something of the old love came back to me, as I held her in my arms, where she wished to be. I would have saved her if I could: and when I called her ‘my darling Lucy’ they were not idle words. I kissed her many times for myself, and once, Maddy, for you. She told me to do so. She whispered, ‘Kiss me, Guy, for Maddy Clyde. Tell her I’d rather she should take my place than anybody else—rather my Guy should call her wife—for I know she would not be jealous if you sometimes talked of your dead Lucy, and I know she will help lead you to that blessed home where sorrow never comes.’ That was the last she ever spoke, and when the sun went down death had claimed my bride. She died in my arms, Maddy. I felt the last fluttering of her pulse, the last beat of her heart. I laid her back upon her pillows. I wiped the blood from her lips and from her golden curls. I followed her to her early grave. I saw her buried from my sight, and then, Maddy, I started home; thoughts of you and thoughts of Lucy blended equally together until Aikenside was reached. I talked with Mrs. Noah; I heard all of you there was to tell, and then I talked with Agnes, who was not greatly surprised, and did not oppose my coming here to-night. I could not remain there, knowing you were here alone, even though some old fogies might say it was not proper—God knows what is in my heart. In the bridal chamber I found your bouquet, with its ‘Welcome to the Bride.’ Maddy, you must be that bride. Lucy sanctioned it, and the doctor, too, for I told him all. His own wedding was, of course, deferred, and he did not come home with me, but he said ‘Tell Maddy not to wait. Life is too short to waste any happiness. She has my blessing.’ And, Maddy, it must be so. Aikenside needs a mistress; you are all alone. You are mine—mine forever!”
The storm had died away, and the moonbeams stealing through the window told that morning was breaking, but neither Guy nor Maddy heeded the lapse of time. Theirs was a sad kind of happiness as they sat talking together, and could Lucy have listened to them she would have felt satisfied that she was not forgotten. One long bright curl, cut from her head by his own hand, was all there was left of her to Guy save the hallowed memories of her purity and goodness—memories which would yet mold the proud, impulsive man into the earnest, consistent Christian which Lucy in her life had desired that he should be and which Maddy rejoiced to see him.
CHAPTER XXIV.
FINALE.
It is the close of a calm September afternoon, and the autumnal sunlight falls softly upon Aikenside, where a gay party is now assembled. For four years Maddy Clyde has been mistress there, and in looking back upon them she wonders how so much happiness as she has known could be experienced in so short a time. Never but once has the slightest ripple of sorrow shadowed her heart, and that was when her noble husband, Guy, said to her, in a voice she knew was earnest and determined, that he could no longer remain deaf to his country’s call—that where the battle storm was raging he was needed, and he must not stay at home. Then for a brief season her bright face was overcast, and her brown eyes dim with weeping. Giving him to the war seemed like giving him up to death. But women can be as true heroes as men; and stifling her own grief, Maddy sent him away with smiles and prayers and cheering words of encouragement, turning herself for consolation to the source from which she never sued for peace in vain; and, save that she missed her husband terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful dark-eyed boy, whom they called Guy, junior, kept her busy, while not many weeks after her husband’s departure, Guy read with moistened eyes of a little golden-haired daughter, whom Maddy had named Lucy Atherstone, and gazed upon a curl of hair she inclosed, asking if it were not like some other hair now moldering back to dust within an English churchyard. “Maggie says it is,” she wrote, alluding to the wife of Dr. Holbrook, who had come to Aikenside to stay, while her husband also did his duty as surgeon in the army. That little daughter is a year-old baby now, and in her short white dress and coral bracelets sits neglected on the nursery floor, while her mother and Jessie and Maggie Holbrook hasten out into the yard, to welcome the returning soldier, Major Guy whose arm is in a sling, and whose face is very pale from the effects of wounds received at Gettysburg, where his daring courage had well-nigh won for Maddy a widow’s heritage. For the present the arm is disabled, and so he has been discharged, and has come back to the home where warm words of welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling wife, who can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and kisses her beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad, for she had hoped her husband would come with Guy, but his humanity would not permit him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care. Loving messages he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she heard from Guy how greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the beds of pain, and how much he was doing to relieve their anguish.
Jessie, grown to be a most beautiful girl of nearly sixteen, is still a child in actions, and, wild with delight at seeing her brother again, throws her arms around his neck, telling, in almost the same breath, how proud she is of him, how much she wished to go to him when she heard he was wounded, how she wished she was a boy, so she could enlist, how nicely Flora is married and settled at the cottage in Honedale, and then asks if he knows anything of the Confederate Colonel to whom just before the war broke out her mother was married, and whose home was in Richmond.
Guy knows nothing of him, except that he is still fighting for the Confederacy, but from exchanged prisoners, who had come in from Richmond, he has heard of a beautiful lady, an officer’s wife, and as rumor said, a Northern woman, who visited them in prison, speaking kind words of sympathy to all, and once binding up a drummer boy’s aching head with a handkerchief, which he still retained as a memento of her, and on whose corner could be faintly traced the name of “Agnes Remington.”