Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Oh, mother, mother, Willie has gone to the war! Willie has gone to the war!”

It was very strange, Rose thought, that her mother’s tears should flow so fast, and her face wear so sad an expression just because of Will, who was nothing but her son-in-law. Then it occurred to her that Tom might be the occasion of her sadness, but when she spoke of him, asking why her mother had not prevailed on him to stay at home, Mrs. Carleton answered, promptly:

“I never loved him one half so well, as on that night when he told me he had volunteered. He would be unworthy of the Carleton blood he bears, were he to hesitate a moment!” and the eye of the brave New England matron kindled as she added: “If I had twenty sons, I would rather all should die on the Federal battle-field than have one turn traitor to his country! Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie, my poor misguided boy!”

It was a piteous cry which came from the depths of that mother’s aching heart,—a cry so full of anguish that Rose was startled, and asked in much alarm what it was about Jimmie. Had she heard from him, and was he really dead?

“No, Rose,” and in the mother’s voice there was a hard, bitter tone. “No, not dead, but better so, than what he is. Oh, I would so much rather he had died when a little, innocent child, than live to bear the name he bears!”

“What name, mother? What has Jimmie done? Do tell me, you frighten me, you look so white!” and Rose clung closer to her mother, who, with quivering lip and faltering voice, told her how recreant runaway Jimmie had joined the Confederate army under Beauregard, and was probably then marching on to Washington to meet her other son, in deadly conflict, it might be; his hand, the very one, perhaps, to speed the fratricidal bullet which should shed a brother’s life-blood!

No wonder that her heart grew faint when she thought of her boy as a Rebel,—aye, a rebel of ten times deeper dye than if he had been born of Southern blood, and reared on Southern soil, for the roof-tree which sheltered his childhood was almost beneath the shadow of Bunker Hill’s monument, and many an hour had he sported at its base, playing directly above the graves of those brave men who fell that awful day when the fierce thunders of war shook the hills of Boston, and echoed across the smoky waters of the bay. Far up the lofty tower, too, as high as he could reach, his name was written with his own boyish hand, and the mother had read it there since receiving the shameful letter which told of his disgrace. Climbing up the weary, winding flight of stairs, she had looked through blinding tears upon that name,—James Madison Carleton,—half hoping it had been erased, it seemed so like a mockery to have it there on Freedom’s Monument, and know that he who bore it was a traitor to his country. Yet there it was, just as he left it years ago, and with a blush of shame the mother crossed it out, just as she fain would have crossed out his sin could that have been. But it could not. She knew that Jimmie was in the Southern army, and not wishing to speak of it at home, where he already bore no envied name, she had come for sympathy to her only daughter; and it was well for both she did, for it helped to divert Rose’s grief into a new and different channel; to set her right on many points, and gradually to obliterate all marks of what so he had called Secession.

Tom had been her pride; the brother she honored and feared, while Jimmie, nearer her age, was more a companion of her childhood; the one who teased and petted her by turns, one day putting angle worms in her bosom just to hear her scream, and the next spending all his pocket-money to buy her the huge wax doll she saw in the shop window, down on Washington street, and coveted so badly. Such were some of Rose’s reminiscences of Jimmie, and while time had softened down the horrid sensations she experienced when she felt the cold worms crawling on her neck, it had not destroyed the doll, the handsomest she had ever owned, nor made her cease to love the teasing boy. She could not feel just as her mother did about him, for she had not her mother’s strong, patriotic feeling, but her tears flowed none the less, while she, too, half wished him lying beneath the summer grass, in beautiful Mt. Auburn.

“How did you hear from him?” she asked, when her first burst of grief was over, and her mother replied by taking out a letter, on which Rose recognized her brother’s handwriting.

“He sent me this,” Mrs. Carleton said, and tearing open the letter, she read it aloud to Rose.