Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

He did not improve as his sister and uncle hoped he might; and as the cold weather increased, they began to talk of taking him to a warmer climate, but Charlie said:

“I am as well here as I could be anywhere. I don’t want to be moved about. Let me stay here in quiet.”

So they made him as comfortable as possible at the hotel, and Rose and Annie came every day to see him and he learned to watch and listen for their coming, especially that of Annie, to whom he took the kindliest. She knew just how to nurse him, and as she once cared for the poor prisoners, so she now cared for the Southern boy, who, while acknowledging the kindness of the Northern people, was still as thorough a Secessionist as he had ever been. Anxiously he waited for daily news of the progress of Grant’s army, refusing to believe that Lee was so closely shut up in Richmond that escape was impossible. Blindly, like many of his older brethren, he clung to the hope, that underlying the whole was some hidden motive which would in time appear and work good to his cause. Maude never opposed or disputed with him now, but read him every little item of good for the South. But when, in the spring, the fighting at Petersburg commenced, there were no such items to read, and Charlie asked no longer for news. Then there came a never-to-be-forgotten day, when through the length and breadth of the land, the glad tidings ran that Richmond had fallen; that Lee with his army was flying from the city, with Grant in hot pursuit. The war was virtually over; and from Maine to Oregon the air was filled with the jubilant notes of victory. For three long hours the bells of Rockland rang out their merry peals, and at night they kindled bonfires in the streets; and on the grass-plat by the well in Widow Simms’ yard, they burned the box, which, four years before, poor Isaac had put away for just such an occasion as this.

All the morning of that memorable Monday, while the bells were ringing, and the crowds were shouting in the streets, Charlie De Vere had lain with his white face to the wall, and his lips quivering with the grief and mortification he felt, that it should have ended thus. Occasionally, as the shouts grew louder, he stopped his ears, so as to shut out what seemed to him like exultations over the death of so many hopes; but when Annie came in, and told Maude of the bonfire they were to have that night in Mrs. Simms’ yard, and asked her to come for the sake of the boy whose box was to be burned, Charlie began to listen. And as he listened, he grew interested in Isaac Simms and the grass-plat by the well, and the box hidden in the barn, and he expressed a wish to be present when it was burned. Maude, too, had heard of Isaac Simms before. She knew that he had been captured by Arthur Tunbridge, but she did not know the particulars of his prison life, or how generously Tom had sacrificed his chance of liberty for the sake of the poor, sick boy, until Annie told the story, to which she listened with swimming eyes and a heart throbbing with love and respect for her lover, who had been so noble and unselfish. She would go to the bonfire on the grass-plat, she said; and Charlie should go too. He had wept passionately at the recital of Isaac’s sufferings in Libby, but still found some excuse for the South generally.

“It was not the better class of people,” he said, “who did these things; it was the lower, ignorant ones, whose instincts were naturally brutal.”

And neither Maude nor Annie contradicted him, though the eyes of the former flashed indignantly, and her nostrils quivered as they always did when the sufferings of our prisoners were mentioned in her presence.

That night, when the stars came out over Rockland, a party of twelve or more was congregated at the house of the widow Simms, where, but for the sad memory of Isaac, whose soldier-coat hung on the wall, with the knapsack carried into battle, all would have been, joy and hilarity at the prospect of certain peace. But death had been in that household, just as it had crept across many and many another threshold; and mingled with the rejoicings were tears and sad regrets for the dead of our land, whose graves were everywhere, from the shadowy forests of Maine, and the vast prairies of the West, to the sunny plains of the South, where they fought and died. There were twenty-five buried in the Rockland graveyard; and others than the party assembled at Mrs. Simms, thought of the vacant chairs at home, and the sleeping dead whose ears were deaf to the notes of peace floating so musically over the land. Charlie’s face was very white, and there were tears in his eyes as he laid his thin, white hands reverently upon the box, examining its make, and bending close to the name, and date, and words cut upon it.—“Isaac Simms, Rockland, April 25th, 1861. This box to be burned——” There was a blank which the boy, who had cut the words with his jack-knife, could not supply. He did not know when the box would be burned. Then it was April, 1861; now it was April, 1865. Four years of strife and bloodshed, thousands and thousands of desolate hearth-stones, and broken hearts, and lifeless forms both North and South, and the end had come at last. But the boy Isaac was not there to see it. It was not for him to fill up that blank; but for the Southern boy, Charlie De Vere, who took his pencil from his pocket, and wrote, “April 3d, 1865, to celebrate the fall of Richmond, and the end of the Confederacy. Charles De Vere.”

“Who shall light the pile?” Tom asked, when all was ready. And Charlie answered, “Let me, please. Surely I may light the fire!”

And he did light it, and then, with the rest, looked on while the smoke and the flames curled up toward the starry heavens where the boy Isaac had gone, and where Charlie in his dreams that night saw him so distinctly, and grasped his friendly hand.

After that night, Charlie failed rapidly, and often in his sleep, he talked to some one who seemed to be Arthur, and said it was “a mistake, a dreadful mistake.” At last, as Maude sat by him one day, the fifth after the bonfire on the grass-plat, he said to her suddenly: