Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Were any prisoners taken near your father, Miss De Vere? Union prisoners, I mean?”

“Yes,” Maude replied. “Arthur was a private, then, and, with another soldier, was prowling through the woods when they came upon father, and two Union soldiers near him,—one a boy, Arthur said, and one an officer, whose ankle had been sprained. In their eagerness to capture somebody they forgot my father, and carried off the man and boy. Then they went back, and Arthur found, by some papers in the dead soldier’s pocket, that it was father, and he had him decently buried at Manassas, with the little boy. I liked Arthur for that. I would never have forgiven him if he left that child in the woods. When the war is over, I am going to find the graves.”

She was not weeping now, but her eyes had in them a strange glitter as they looked far off in the distance, as if in quest of those two graves.

“Maude De Vere,” Tom Carleton said, and at the sound, Maude started and blushed scarlet, “you must forgive me if I call you Maude this once. It’s for the sake of your noble father, by whose side I stood when the spirit left his body, and went after that of the little drummer boy, whose bleeding stumps were bound in your father’s handkerchief. I remember it well. I had sprained my ankle, and, with a lad of my company was trying to escape, when I heard the sound of some one singing that glorious chant of our church, ‘Peace on earth, good will toward men.’ It sounded strangely there, amid the dead and dying, who had killed each other; but there was peace between the Confederate captain and the Federal boy, as they sang the familiar words. As well as we could, we cared for him. I wiped the blood from your father’s wound, and the boy brought him water from the brook, while he talked of his home in North Carolina; of his children who would never see him again; and of Nellie, his wife. It comes back to me with perfect distinctness, and it is your father’s look in your eyes and face which has puzzled me so much. Two soldiers wearing the Southern grey came up and captured us, and we were taken to Richmond. Surely, Miss De Vere, it is a special providence which has brought me at last to you, the daughter of that man, and made you the guardian angel, who has stood between me and recapture. There is a meaning in it, if we could only find it.”

Tom’s fine eyes were bent upon Maude, and in his excitement he had grasped her hand, which did not lie as cold and pulseless in his as an hour before it had lain in Arthur’s. It throbbed and quivered now, but clung to Tom’s with a firm hold, which was not relaxed even when Arthur came up, his face growing dark and threatening as he saw the position of the two.

Maude did not care for Arthur then, or think what that look in Tom’s kindling eyes might mean. She only remembered that the man whose hand held hers so firmly, had ministered to her dying father, had held the cup of water to his parched lip, had wiped the flowing blood from his face, and spoken to him kindly words of sympathy.

Here was the answer to her prayer, that God would send her somebody who could tell her of her father’s last minutes. The somebody had come, and, in her gratitude to him, she could almost have knelt and worshiped him.

“Oh, Arthur!” she cried, “Captain Carleton is the very man you and Joe Newell captured at Bull Run. He was with father when he died; he took care of him, and was so kind until you came and took him.”

And Maude’s eyes flashed with anything but affection upon her lover, who for a moment could not speak for his surprise.

Curiously he looked at Tom, seeking for something on which to fasten a doubt, for he did not wish Maude to have a cause for gratitude to the Northern officer. But the longer he gazed the less he doubted. The face of the lame officer in the Virginia woods came up distinctly before him, and was too much like the face confronting him to admit of a mistake, especially after Maude repeated the substance of what she had heard from Captain Carleton. Arthur was convinced, and as Maude dropped Tom’s hand, he took it in his, and said: