Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

Maude remembered this last distinctly, because it had called forth a reproof from the teacher who had overheard it, and who asked what kind of a man “the most perfectly splendid looking” one could be. Maude had not thought of that incident in years, but it came back to her now as she stood close to the man who had been so kind and tender to his sick, dying wife. He would be all that, she knew, for his manner was so quiet and grave and gentle, and then a great throb of pain swept over Maude De Vere as she thought of Arthur and the pledge she had given him. Maude could not analyze her feelings, or understand why the knowing who Tom Carleton was, and that he was also free, should make the world so desolate all on a sudden, and blot out the brightness of the summer day which had seemed so pleasant at its beginning.

“I did it in part for him,” she said, feeling that in spite of her pain there was something sweet even in such a sacrifice.

She was still standing in the door, when Tom, turning a little more toward his host, saw her, his face lighting up at once, and the smile, which made him so handsome, breaking out about his mouth and showing his fine teeth.

“Ah, Miss De Vere, take this seat,” and with that well-bred politeness so much a part of his family, he arose and offered her his chair.

But Maude declined it, and took a seat instead upon a little camp stool near to the vine-wreathed columns of the piazza.

It was very pleasant there that morning, and Maude, sitting against that back-ground of green leaves, made a very pretty picture in her pink cambric wrapper, trimmed with white, white pendants in her ears, and a bunch of the sweet scented heliotrope in her hair, and at her throat where the smooth linen collar came together. And Tom enjoyed the picture very much, from the crown of satin hair, to the high-heeled slipper, with its bright ribbon rosette. It was not a little slipper, like those which used to be in Tom’s dressing-room in Boston, when Mary was alive, nor yet like the fairy things which Rose Mather wore. Nothing about Maude De Vere was small, but everything was admirably proportioned. She wore a seven glove and she wore a four boot. She measured just twenty-five inches around the waist, and five feet six from her head to her feet, and weighed one hundred and forty. A perfect Amazon, she called herself; but Tom Carleton did not think so. He knew she was a large type of womanhood, but she was perfect in form and feature, and he would not have had her one whit smaller than she was, neither did he contrast her with any one he had ever known. She was so wholly unlike Mary and Rose and Annie, that comparison between them was impossible. She was Miss De Vere,—Maude he called her to himself, and the name was beginning to sound sweetly to him, as he daily grew more and more intimate with the queenly creature who bore it. He had buried his pale, proud-faced, but loving Mary; he had given up the gentle Annie, and surely he might think of Maude De Vere if he chose; and the sight of her sitting there before him with the rich color in her cheek, and the Southern fire in her eyes, stirred strange feelings in his heart, and made him so forgetful of what the Judge was saying to him, that the old man at last rose and walked away, leaving the two young people alone together. Tom had never talked much to Maude except upon sick-room topics, and he felt anxious to know if her mind corresponded with her face and form. Here was a good opportunity for testing her mental powers, and in the long, earnest conversation which ensued concerning men, and books, and politics, Tom sifted her thoroughly, experiencing that pleasure which men of cultivation always experience when thrown in contact with a woman whose intelligence and endowments are equal to their own. Maude’s education had not been a superficial one, nor had it ceased with her leaving school. In her room at home there was a small library of choice books, which she read and studied each day together with her brother Charlie, whose education she superintended. Few persons North or South were better acquainted with the incidents and progress of the war, than she was. She had watched it from its beginning, and with her father, from whom she had inherited her superior mind, she had held many earnest argumentative discussions concerning the right and wrong of secession. Maude had opposed it from the first, but her father had thought differently, and carrying out his principles, had lost his life in the first battle of Bull Run. Maude spoke of him to Tom, and her fine eyes were full of tears as she told of the dark, terrible days which preceded and followed the news of his death.

“The ball which struck him down went further than that; it killed mother, too, and made us orphans,” Maude said, and something in the tone of her voice, and the expression of her face, puzzled Tom just as it had many times before, and carried him back to Bull Run, where it seemed to him he had seen a face like Maude De Vere’s.

“Was your father killed in battle?” Tom asked, and Maude replied:

“No, sir; that is, he did not die on the battle-field. He was wounded, and crawled away into the woods, where they found him dead, sitting against a tree, with a little Union drummer boy lying right beside him, and father’s handkerchief bound round the poor bleeding stumps, for the little hands were both shot away. I’ve thought of that boy so often,” Maude said, “and cried for him so much. I know father was kind to him, for the little fellow was nestled close to him, Arthur said. He was there, and found my father, though he did not at first recognize him, as it was a number of years since he had seen him.”

Tom was growing both interested and excited. He was beginning to find the key to that familiar look in Maude De Vere’s face, and, coming close to her he said: