Rose Mather: A tale

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Dear Mother: We’ve met the rascals, and been as genteelly licked as ever a pack of fools could ask to be. How it happened nobody knows. I was fitin’ like a tiger, when all on a sudden I found us a-runnin’ like a flock of sheep; and what is the queerest of all, is that while we were takin’ to our heels one way the Rebels were goin’ it t’other, and for what I know, we should of been runnin’ from each other till now if they hadn’t found out the game, and so turned upon us.

“But wust of all is to come. Hal is dead,—shot right through the forehead, and the ball that struck him down took off Ike Simmses cap, so if Ike had been only a little taller, Hal would of lived to been hung most likely.”

“Oh, I wish he had, I wish he had!” poor Mrs. Baker moaned, still waving back and forth and kissing the lock of hair, while the widow involuntarily thanked her Heavenly Father that the two inches she once so earnestly coveted for her boy had wisely been withheld.

Then followed Bill’s account of cutting away the hair he inclosed, of his flight into the woods, his sleep by the brook, and his waking just in time to see Capt. Carleton and Isaac Simms disappear beneath the trees, in charge of rebel soldiers.

Now that she knew the worst the widow sat like one stunned by a heavy blow, uttering no sound, as Annie read Bill’s account of capturing his prisoner. Ere she reached this point, however, she had another auditor, Rose Mather, who had come with a second letter from her husband, and who, passing the weeping woman in the door, came and stood by Annie, and listened with strange interest to the story of that captive parting so willingly with everything save the picture.

“Poor young man!” she sighed, when Annie finished reading. “I don’t suppose it’s right, but I do feel sorry for him. What if it had been Jimmie? Perhaps he has a sister somewhere weeping for him just as I cried for Tom. Dear Tom, Will writes he is a prisoner with Isaac Simms. I’m glad they are together. Tom will take care of Isaac. He had a quantity of gold tied around his waist,” and Rose’s soft hand smoothed caressingly the widow’s thin, light hair.

The widow had not wept before, but at the touch of those little fingers the flood gates opened wide, and her tears fell in torrents. They were bound together now by a common bond of sympathy, those four women, each so unlike to the other, and for a time they wept in silence, one for her wounded husband, one for a child deceased, one for a captured brother, the other for a son.

Now, as ever, Annie was the first to speak of hope, and her words were fraught with comfort to all save Harry’s mother. She could not comfort her, for from reckless, misguided Harry’s grave, there came no ray of consolation, but to the others she spoke of One who would not desert the weary captives. Neither bolt nor bar could shut Him out. God was in Richmond as well as there at home, and none could tell what good might spring from this seeming great evil. For a long time they talked together, and the afternoon was half spent when at last they separated, Rose going back to her luxurious home where she wrote to her mother the sad news concerning Tom, blurring with great tears the line in which she spoke of Jimmie, wondering what his fate had been.

Slowly, disconsolately poor Mrs. Baker returned to her day’s work so long neglected, but the suds she left so hot two hours before had grown cold, the fire burned out, and with that weary, discouraged feeling which poverty alone can prompt, she was setting herself to the task of bringing matters up again, when her employer, touched with the sight of the white, anguished face, kindly bade her leave the work until another day, and seek the quiet she so much needed. Poor old woman! How desolate it was going back to the squalid house where everything, even to the bootjack he had once hurled at her head, reminded her of the Harry who would come back no more! She did not think of his unkindness now. That was all forgotten, and motherlike, she remembered only the times when he was good and treated her like something half way human. He was her boy,—her first-born, and as she lay with her tear-stained face buried in the scanty pillows of her humble bed, she recalled to mind the time when first he lisped the sweet word mother, and twined his baby arms about her neck.

He was a bright, pretty child, easily influenced for good or evil, and the rude mother shuddered as she felt creeping over her the conviction that she had helped to make him what he grew to be, laughing at his fierce temper and at times provoking him on purpose, just to see him bump his little round, hard head against the oaken floor. Then, as he grew older, it was fun to hear him imitate the oaths his father used, and she had laughed at that until the habit became so firmly fixed that neither threats nor punishment could break it. And when the Sabbath bells were pealing forth their summons to the house of prayer, she had suffered him to stay away, offering but slight remonstrance when the robin’s nest just without the door was pilfered of its unfledged occupants, the mother-bird moaning over its murdered young, just as she was moaning now over her ruined boy. Poor Harry! There was some excuse for him, some apology found in the nature of his early training, but for her who reared him,—none. She might have taught him better. She might have sent him to the Sunday school across the way, where Sunday after Sunday she had heard the hymns the children sang swelling on the Sabbath air, Harry sometimes joining in as he sat in the cottage door, adjusting the bait with which to tempt the unsuspecting fish playing in the brook nearby. A mother’s fearful responsibility had been hers. She had not fulfilled it, and it rolled back upon her now, stinging as only remorse can sting, and making her wish amid her pain that the boy, once so earnestly desired, had never been given her, or else had died in its cradle bed, and so gone where she knew the hardened in sin never could find entrance.