“For three weeks longer I stayed up in that loft, and in that time three more escaped prisoners were brought there, and one Union refugee from North Carolina. We left in company one wild, rainy night, when the storm and darkness must have been sent for our special protection, and Jack Jennings cried like a little child when he bade me good-bye, promising, if he survived the war, to find his way to the North and visit me in New York.
“We found these Unionists everywhere, and especially among the mountains of Tennessee, where, but for their timely aid, we had surely been recaptured. With blistered feet and bruised limbs we reached the lines at last, when fever attacked me for the second time and brought me near to death. Somebody wrote to you, but you never received it, and when I grew better I would not let them write again, as I wanted to surprise you. As soon as I was able I started North, my thoughts full of the joyful meeting in store—a meeting which I dreaded too, for I knew you must think me dead, and I felt so sorry for you, my darling, knowing, as I did, you would mourn for your soldier husband. That my darling has mourned is written on her face, and needs no words to tell it; but that is over now,” Mark said, folding his wife closer to him, and kissing the pale lips, while he told her how, arrived at Albany, he had telegraphed to his mother, asking where Helen was.
“In Silverton,” was the reply, and so he came on in the morning train, meeting his mother in Springfield as he had half expected to do, knowing that she could leave New York in time to join him there.
“No words of mine,” he said, “are adequate to describe the thrill of joy with which I looked again upon the hills and rocks so identified with you that I loved them for your sake, hailing them as old, familiar friends, and actually growing sick and faint with excitement when through the leafless woods I caught the gleam of Fairy Pond, where I gathered the lilies for you. There is a wedding in progress at the farm-house, I learned from mother, and it seems very meet that I should come at this time, making, in reality, a double wedding when I can truly claim my bride,” and Mark kissed Helen passionately, laughing to see how the blushes broke over her white face, and burned upon her neck.
Those were happy moments which they passed together upon that ledge of rocks, happy enough to atone for all the dreadful past, and when at last they rose and slowly retraced their steps to the farm-house, it seemed to Mark that Helen’s cheeks were rounder than when he found her, while Helen knew that the arm on which she leaned was stronger than when it first encircled her an hour or two before.
CHAPTER LI.
THE WEDDING.
On the same train with Mrs. Banker and Mark, Bell Cameron came with Bob, but father Cameron was not able to come; he would gladly have done so if he could, and he sent his blessing to Katy with the wish that she might be very happy in her second married life. This message Bell gave to Katy, and then tried to form some reasonable excuse for her mother’s and Juno’s absence, for she could not tell how haughtily both had declined the invitation, Juno finding fault because Katy had not waited longer than two years, and Mrs. Cameron blaming her for being so very vulgar as to be married at home, instead of in church. On this point Katy herself had been a little disquieted, feeling how much more appropriate it was that she be married in the church, but shrinking from standing again a bride at the same altar where she had once before been made a wife. She could not do it, she finally decided; there would be too many harrowing memories crowding upon her mind, and as Morris did not particularly care where the ceremony was performed, it was settled that it should be at the house, even though Mrs. Deacon Bannister did say that “she had supposed Dr. Grant too High Church to do anything so Presbyterianny as that.”
Bell’s arrival at the farm-house was timely; for the unexpected appearance in their midst of one whom they looked upon as surely dead had stunned and bewildered the family to such an extent that it needed the presence of just such a matter-of-fact, self-possessed woman as Bell, to bring things back to their original shape. It was wonderful how the city girl fitted into the vacant niches, seeing to everything which needed seeing to, and still finding time to steal away alone with Lieutenant Bob, who kept her in a painful state of blushing, by constantly wishing it was his bridal night as well as Dr. Grant’s, and by inveighing against the weeks which must intervene, ere the day appointed for the grand ceremony, to take place in Grace Church, and which was to make Bell his wife.
“Come in here, Helen, I have something to show you,” Mrs. Banker said, after she had again embraced and wept over her long lost son, whose return was not quite real yet; and leading her daughter-in-law to her bedroom, she showed her the elegant, white silk which had been made for her just after her marriage, two years before, and which, with careful forethought, she had brought with her, as more suitable now for the wedding, than Helen’s mourning weeds.