Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

Tom, too, had sent thanks to Annie Graham for the needle-book made for him, but he did not write to her, though every letter had in it more or less of “Mrs. Graham,” and Mrs. Carleton, while saying to herself: “Both my boys have fallen under the spell,” felt her pride gradually giving way and her heart growing warmer toward the woman whom she missed so much during the weeks spent at Isaac’s bedside.

They were not many, for when the dry days of August came on, and the grass withered by the door, and the flowers drooped for want of rain, and the sun rose each morning redder, hotter, than on the previous day, the sick boy began to fail rapidly, and one night, just as the wind was beginning to blow from the west, where a bank of dark clouds was lying, he whispered to Annie:

“Call mother and Susan, for I know I am going now.”

The widow was in the back yard, putting out the barrels and tubs to catch the rain if it came, for the well and the cistern were nearly dry, just as her dim eyes were, when a few minutes after she bent over her boy, and saw the change coming so rapidly. She could not weep, and Susan’s sobs annoyed her. “’Twas like them Ruggleses to go into hysterics and make a fuss,” she thought, with a kind of bitter scorn for her daughter-in-law, who loved Isaac as a brother, and wept that he was leaving them. Perhaps the dying boy detected the feeling, for he said, feebly:

“Go out, Susan and Mrs. Graham both. I want to be alone with mother a minute.” Then when they were alone, he said: “I am dying, mother, and I know you won’t be angry at what I say. I want you to be kind to Susan, and pet her some and love her for John’s sake. She is a good girl, and Mr. Carleton’s good too, the one they call Jimmie, I mean. Don’t say harsh things of him because he was once a rebel. Don’t speak against him to Mrs. Graham. Maybe she will like him sometime, and if so, help her, mother, instead of hindering it.”

Jimmie Carleton, on his lone picket-watch that night on the banks of the Potomac, and thinking, alas! more of a black-robed figure, with braids of pale brown hair, than of a lurking foe, little dreamed of the good word spoken for him by the dying boy, whose eyes turned lovingly to Annie when she came back to him, and held his clammy hand.

“It is not dark; it is not hard; I am not afraid, for the Saviour is with me,” he kept repeating, and then he sent messages to his absent brothers,—to Captain Tom Carleton, who had been so kind to him in prison, and to Jimmie, too, and all the boys who had been with him in battle; and then, just as the wind began to roar down the chimney, and the refreshing rain to beat against the windows, Isaac’s spirit went out into the great unknown expanse beyond this life, and only the pale, emaciated body was left in the humble room, where the lone women stood looking upon the boyish face, which seemed so young in death.

The widow uttered no sound when she knew he was dead, and it was her hand which drew the covering decently about him, and then picked up from the floor a loose feather, which had dropped from the worn pillow.

Susan must speak to their next-door neighbors, she said, and ask them to care for the body. Then, when the men came in, she remembered an open window in the back chamber where the rain must be driving in, and stole up there on the pretence of shutting it; but she did not return till the men were gone, and Isaac was lying on the calico-covered lounge with a look of perfect peace upon his face, and the damp night air blowing softly across his light hair.

Kneeling at his side, and laying her hard cheek against the icy face of her last-born, the mother gave vent to her grief in her own peculiar way. There were no tears, or sobs; but loving, tender, cooing words whispered over the boy, as if he had been a living baby, instead of a soldier dead. And yet the fact that it was a soldier, lying there before her, was never lost sight of, and the bitter part of the woman’s nature was stirred to its very depths as she remembered what had brought her boy to this. It was the war. And fierce were the mental denunciations against those who had stirred up the strife, while with the bitterness came pitying thoughts of the poor boys who died in the lonely hospitals, or on the battle-fields; and with her cheek still resting against the pale, clammy one, and her fingers threading the light hair, the widow vowed that all she was, and all she had, should henceforth be given to the war. She would work for the soldiers, give to the soldiers, deny herself food and raiment for the soldiers; aye, even die for them, if need be; and whispering the vow into her dead boy’s ear, she left him there alone, just as the early summer dawn was breaking. And when, next morning, her friends came in to see her, they found her sitting by the body, and working upon the shirt she had a few days before taken from the Aid Society to make for some poor wretch.