The Cameron pride; or, purified by suffering

by Mary Jane Holmes

With Mr. Cameron the blow struck deeper, and his Wall Street friends talked together of the old man he had grown since Wilford died, while Katy often found him bending over his long-neglected Bible, as he sat alone in his room at night. And when at last she ventured to speak to him upon the all-important subject, he put his hand in hers, and bade her teach him the narrow way which she had found, and wherein Wilford too had walked at the very last, they hoped.

For many weeks Katy lingered in New York, and the June roses were blooming when she went back to Silverton, a widow and the rightful owner of all Wilford’s ample fortune. They had found among his papers a will, drawn up and executed not long before his illness, and in which Katy was made his heir, without condition or stipulation. All was hers to do with as she pleased, and Katy wept passionately when she heard how generous Wilford had been. Then, as she thought of Marian and the life of poverty before her, she crept to Father Cameron’s side, and said to him, pleadingly,

“Let Genevra share it with me. She needs it quite as much.”

Father Cameron would not permit Katy to divide equally with Marian. It was not just, he said; but he did not object to a few thousands going to her, and before Katy left New York for Silverton, she wrote a long, kind letter to Marian, presenting her with ten thousand dollars, which she begged her to accept, not so much as a gift, but as her rightful due. There was a moment’s hesitancy on the part of Marian when she read the letter, a feeling that she could not take so much from Katy; but when she looked at the pale sufferers around her, and remembered how many wretched hearts that money would help to cheer, she said,

“I will keep it.”

CHAPTER XLVI.
PRISONERS OF WAR.

The heat, the smoke, the thunder of the battle were over, and the fields of Gettysburg were drenched with human blood and covered with the dead and dying. The contest had been fearful, and its results carried sorrow and anguish to many a heart waiting for tidings from the war, and looking so anxiously for the names of the loved ones who, on the anniversary of the day which saw our nation’s Independence, lay upon the hills and plains of Gettysburg, their white faces upturned to the summer sky, and wet with the rain=drops, which, like tears for the noble dead, the pitying clouds had shed upon them. And nowhere, perhaps, was there a whiter face or a more anxious heart than at the farm-house, where both Helen and her mother-in-law were spending the hot July days. Since the Christmas eve when Helen had watched her husband going from her across the wintry snow, he had not been back, though several times he had made arrangements to do so. Something, however, had always happened to prevent. Once it was sickness which kept him in bed for a week or more; again his regiment was ordered to advance, and the third time it was sent on with others to repel the invaders from Pennsylvanian soil. Bravely through each disappointment Helen bore herself, but her cheek always grew paler and her eye darker in its hue when the evening papers came, and she read what progress our soldiery had made, feeling that a battle was inevitable, and praying so earnestly that Mark Ray might be spared. Then, when the battle was over and up the northern hills came the dreadful story of thousands and thousands slain, there was a fearful look in her eye, and her features were rigid as marble, while the quivering lips could scarcely pray for the great fear tugging at her heart. Mark Ray was not with his men when they came from that terrific onslaught. A dozen had seen him fall, struck down by a rebel ball, and that was all she heard for more than a week, when there came another relay of news.

Captain Mark Ray was a prisoner of war, with several of his own company. An inmate of Libby Prison and a sharer from choice of the apartment where his men were confined. As an officer he was entitled to better quarters; but Mark Ray had a large, warm heart, and he would not desert those who had been so faithful to him, and so he took their fare, and by his genial humor and unwavering cheerfulness kept many a heart from fainting, and made the prison life more bearable than it could have been without him. To young Tom Tubbs, who had enlisted six months before, he was a ministering angel, and many times the poor homesick boy crept to the side of his captain, and laying his burning head in his lap, wept himself to sleep and dreamed he was at home again. The horrors of that prison life have never been told, but Mark bore up manfully, suffering less in mind, perhaps, than did the friends at home, who lived, as it were, a thousand years in that one brief summer while he remained in Richmond.

At last, as the frosty days of October came on, they began to hope he might be exchanged, and Helen’s face grew bright again, until one day there came a soiled, half-worn letter, in Mark’s own handwriting. It was the first word received from him since his capture in July, and with a cry of joy Helen snatched it from Uncle Ephraim, for she was still at the farm-house, and sitting down upon the doorstep just where she had been standing, read the words which Mark had sent to her. He was very well, he said, and had been all the time, but he pined for home, longing for the dear girl-wife never so dear as now, when separated by so many miles, with prison walls on every side, and an enemy’s line between them.

“But be of good cheer, darling,” he wrote, “I shall come back to you some time, and life will be all the brighter for what you suffer now. I am so glad my darling consented to be my wife, even though I could stay with her but a moment. The knowing you are really mine makes me happy even here, for I think of you by day, and in my dreams I always hold you in my arms and press you to my heart.”