Charlie paused a moment, and when he spoke again, it was of Tom, who had been so kind to him.
“He is like a brother to me, Maude, and I am glad you are to be his wife. And Maude, don’t wait after I am dead, but marry Captain Carleton at once. You will be happier then.”
With tears and kisses Maude bent over her brother, who after that confession seemed so much brighter and more cheerful, that hope sometimes whispered to Maude that he would live. Annie was almost constantly with him now. He felt better and stronger with her, he said, and death was not so terrible. So, just as she had soothed, and comforted, and nursed many a poor fellow from Andersonville, Annie comforted and nursed Charlie De Vere, until that dreadful Saturday when the telegraphic wires brought up from the South the appalling news that our President was dead,—murdered by the assassin’s hand.
“No, no, not that. We did not do that,” Charlie cried, with a look of horror in his blue eyes when he heard the dreadful story, and that the Southern leaders were suspected of complicity in the murder.
“It would make me a Unionist, if I believed my people capable of that; but they are not,—it cannot be,” Charlie kept repeating to himself, while the great drops of sweat stood upon his white forehead, and his pulse and heart beat so rapidly, that Maude summoned the attending physician, who shook his head doubtfully at the great change for the worse in his patient.
“I had hoped at least to keep him till the warm weather, but, I am afraid those bells will be the death of him,” he said, as he saw how Charlie shivered and moaned with each sound of the tolling bells.
“Perhaps they would stop if you were to ask them, and tell them why,” Annie suggested to Maude; but Charlie, who heard it, exclaimed,
“No, let them toll on. It is proper they should mourn for him. The South would do the same if it was our President who had been murdered.”
So the bells tolled on, and the public buildings were draped in mourning, and the windows of Charlie’s room were festooned with black, and he watched the sombre drapery as it swayed in the April wind, and talked of the terrible deed, and the war which was ended, and the world to which so many thousands had gone during the long four years of strife and bloodshed.
“I shall be there to-morrow,” he said, “and then perhaps I shall know why all this has been done, and if we were so wrong.”