Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

Of all Paul Haverill’s comfortable buildings, house, stables, barn and negro quarters, there was left him only one cabin which the fire had not consumed. That stood a little distant from the rest, and had been occupied by Lois before her husband died. It was superior to the other cabins then; it was neat and tidy now, and there they laid the dead lieutenant, in his grey uniform, with a little flag of stars and bars across his breast. This was Charlie’s thought, and it was very mete that he who to the last had believed in the righteousness of the Confederacy should have her sign above him. There was no other spot except the cabin where Maude could stay, and the entire day and night she sat by her dead Arthur, whom, now that he was dead, she cherished in her heart as a martyr and a hero, questioning even the ground on which she had hitherto stood so firmly, and asking herself if, after all, the South was so very far out of the way, or if the Union were worth the fearful price the Southern people were paying for it. Maude did not know herself in this mood. It was so unlike all her former theories, and more than once she pressed her hot hands to her still hotter head, and asked if she was going mad.

Crouched beside Maude, with his blue eyes fixed upon her with a pitying, remorseful look, was Charlie.

“Poor Maude,—poor sister! I am so sorry. I never thought,—I did not know; you used to laugh about him so to Uncle Paul. I’d give my life to bring him back for you. Did you love him so very much?” Charlie said, in broken sentences, and then Maude shivered from head to foot, but made him no reply.

She had not loved him so very much, but his violent death and all the horrors attending it had shaken her terribly, and could he have come back to life she would have tried to love him, and with her iron will would have crushed that other love, the very knowledge of which had made her heart throb with so much joy.

But the dead come not to life again, and the next morning they buried Arthur Tunbridge in the grassy enclosure where Paul Haverill’s wife was sleeping with the infant son who, had he lived, would have been just Arthur’s age. The blue coated soldiery, who had been his deadly foes, paid him every military honor possible within their means, even marching to his grave behind the stars and bars which lay upon his coffin; but when they came back from the burial, they bore the national flag, whose folds that peaceful summer night floated in the breeze from the top of Lois’s cabin.

Very kind, and gentle, and pitiful was Tom’s demeanor toward Maude. During the day and the night, when she had sat by Arthur in Lois’s cabin, he had not been near her; but, after all was over, he went to her, and, with the authority of a friend and brother, insisted that she should take the rest she needed so much. And Maude gave way at the sound of his soothing, quieting voice, and, with a flood of tears, did what he bade her do. And then Tom sat by her, and bathed her throbbing head, and smoothed her beautiful hair, and paid back in part the services she had rendered him when he lay sick in Squire Tunbridge’s house.

Maude was not ill,—only exhausted,—both physically and mentally the exhaustion showing itself in the quiet, listless state into which she lapsed, paying but little attention to what was passing around her, and offering no suggestion or remonstrance when told of her uncle’s plan to accompany Captain Simms and his men to Knoxville.

Over Paul Haverill, too, a change had passed. The attack upon him by his old friends and neighbors, though long expected, had been sudden and terrible when it came, and as he watched the burning of the house which had been his so long, he felt that every tie which bound him to the old place was severed. Then came swiftly the fearful tragedy of the mountains, when Arthur was brought to him dead. Stunned and bewildered by the startling events which had followed each other so rapidly, Paul was hardly able to counsel for himself, and assented readily to the plan which had really originated with Captain Carleton, who had another scheme underlying that, but who suggested both so skillfully that Paul Haverill fancied they were his own ideas, and gave them as such to Maude. They would go to Knoxville with the soldiers, he said; thence to Nashville. They had some relatives living there, and, after resting for a little, they would continue their journeyings North, going, perhaps, as far as New York.

“I always wanted to travel North,” he said, “but my affairs kept me at home. Now I have no affairs. My neighbors have relieved me of such commodities and I want to get away from a spot where I have witnessed such dreadful things. We all need change. You, Maude, more than I, and Charlie more than either. I don’t know what has come over the boy. That horrible night and morning were too much for him.”

Maude knew that so far as Charlie was concerned, her uncle had spoken truly. Charlie was greatly changed, and his eyes had in them a scared look, as if every detail of the horrors of the fight on the mountain had stamped itself indelibly upon his mind, and was never for an instant forgotten.