Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

James Carleton had never been heard from since that letter sent to her so long ago, and hope had died out of Annie’s heart, when at last, with Widow Simms, she stood by the cot where lay the insensible form of which the physician had spoken so discouragingly.

It was the figure of a young man, who must once have been finely formed, with handsome face and hair and eyes. The latter were closed now, and only the lids moved with a convulsive motion, as Annie bent over him. The dark hair, matted and coarse and filthy, had curled in rings about the bony forehead, but had been cut away when the bath was given, and the closely shorn head was like many other heads which Annie Graham’s hands had touched, gently, tenderly, as they now moved over this one, trying to infuse some life into the breathing skeleton. He was to be her charge,—he was in her division and Mrs. Simms’ keen grey eyes scanned Annie curiously as she bent over the poor fellow.

He was helpless as an infant, and Annie nursed him much as she would have nursed a baby whose life hung on a thread. He had been there four days, and only a faint, moaning sound had given token of life or consciousness. But at the close of the fourth day, as Annie sat chafing the pulseless fingers where the grey skin hung so loosely, the eyes opened for a moment and were fixed upon her face. There was no consciousness in them,—no recognition of her presence, nothing but the strained, hungry, despairing look Annie had seen in the eyes of so many of our prisoners, and which to a greater or less degree was peculiar to them all. Annie saw this look, and then underneath it all she saw something more,—what it was she could not tell, but it brought back to her those moonlight nights upon the beach at New London, and that other night of more recent date, when she sat with Jimmie Carleton beneath the Rockland sky and heard his passionate words of love, and saw his soft, black eyes kindle with earnestness and then grow sad and sorrowful with disappointment. There was no kindling in them now,—no ardent passion or heat of love,—but a certain softness and brightness, and even sauciness, lingered still and told Annie at last who it was.

“Oh, merciful Father! it is Jimmie!” she said, and unmindful of any who might be looking on, she bent down and kissed the sunken cheeks from which the flesh was gone.

She had expected him so long, and grown so weary and hopeless with expectations unfulfilled, that she could scarcely believe it now, or realize that the half dead wretch before her was once the lively, humorous, teasing Jimmie Carleton. How she pitied him, and how her heart throbbed as she thought of the suffering he must have endured ere he reached this state of apparent imbecility. Then, as she remembered what the physician said about his mind, she dropped upon her knees, and clasping her hands over her face, prayed earnestly that God would remove the darkness and wholly restore the man whom she loved so dearly.

“Do you think he will die?” she asked Mrs. Simms, who had come for a moment to her side.

“You know him, then. I was wondering that an old woman like me should see clearer than you. I mistrusted from the first,” Mrs. Simms answered, and then to Annie’s eager questioning she replied, “It will be almost a miracle if we do get any sense into that brain, or flesh upon these bones, but we’ll do the best we can.”

Her words were not very encouraging, and Annie’s tears fell like rain upon the face of the man who gave no sign that he knew where he was, or who was bending over him. Oh! how he had longed for the air of the North, as his face daily grew thinner, greyer, and more corpse-like, while his flesh seemed shrivelling and drying on his bones. Bill Baker had done what he could to ameliorate his condition,—done too much in fact, and as the result he suddenly found himself shorn of his privileges, and an inmate again of the dreadful prison. Even then he clung to and cared for Jimmie, until the pangs of starvation and the pains of sickness made him forgetful of all but himself. And there they pined and wept and waited until the day of their release, when Bill was too ill to be removed, and was left in charge of a humane family, who kindly promised to care for him until he was better. From a Rockland soldier who had been taken prisoner at the battle of the Wilderness, Jimmie had heard that Mrs. Graham was at Annapolis, and then! oh, how he longed for the time when it might be his fate to be tended and nursed by her. She would do it so gently, and so kindly and in his dreams the walls of his pestilential prison stretched away to the green fields of the North, where he walked again with Annie, and felt the clasp of her little hand, and the light of her blue eyes. She was always present with him,—she or the little Lulu, of Pequot memory. Somehow these two were strangely mixed, and when his mind began to totter as the physical strain on it became too great, the two faces were united in one body, and both bent lovingly over him, just as Annie Graham was doing now when he was past knowing or caring who ministered to him. A vague suspicion he had at intervals that in some respects there was a change, that his bed was not the filthy sand bank, nor his covering the pitiless sky. Gradually, too, there came a different look upon his face; the color was changing from the dingy gray, to a more life-like hue; flesh was showing a little beneath the skin, and the dark hair began to grow, and Annie watered the tiny curls with bitter tears, for, as proof of the terrible life whose horrors will never half be written, the once black hair was coming out streaked with grey. They knew in Rockland that he was at Annapolis, but Annie had peremptorily forbidden either Mrs. Carleton or Rose to come. “They could do no good,” she wrote. “Jimmie would not know them; and they might be in the way.”

They were constantly expecting Tom from Tennessee, with Maude De Vere and her friends, and so they remained at home the more willingly, enjoining it upon Annie to write them every day, just a line to tell how Jimmie was.

The summer rain was falling softly upon the streets of Annapolis, and the cool evening air came stealing into the room, where Annie Graham sat by her patient. There were not so many now in her ward, and she had more time for Jimmie, by whose bedside every leisure moment was passed. She was sitting by him now, watching him as he slept, and listening breathlessly to his low murmurings as he seemed to be talking of her and the dreadful prison life. Then he slept more soundly, and she arranged the light so that it left his face in shadow, but fell full upon her own.