The old man was quieter after his children's death. One day the machinery at the mill, being old and rotten, broke; the hands were at work in it, underneath the beams which fell. An hour after, just as Ellen and Joe had put the chairs about the supper-table, and sat waiting for their father and Jim, the door was pushed open, and two heaps, shapeless, and covered closely with a quilt, were brought in upon a door. Whatever was the pain or loss of the widow or Joe, they had no time to indulge it; Ellen needed all their care after that for a year or two. She was "troubled," was all the satisfaction they gave to the neighbors' curiosity, who never saw her in that time.
In the second autumn, however, she began to go about again through the village; and Joe, after watching her anxiously for some time, found work as a hand on a schooner running to Sandusky, Ohio. This was in the autumn of 1860. Once in a while, during the winter, he came home to stay over-night. "Often," Ellen said, "when Joe came, we hadn't seen anybody cross the doorstep since he went out of it, mother and I lived alone so much; but mother, in her worst days with pain, had a joking, laughing way with her that kept it pleasant in-doors."
The Carrols were noted as being a scrupulously clean folk; so it is probable that the little kitchen and bed-room were still the best idea Joe had of the world,—knowing nothing beyond, indeed, but the schooner and the deck of the wharf-boat in Sandusky. To understand what follows, you must remember the utter ignorance dominant in such fishing-stations as Coldwater. The poorer inhabitants, who stared at Ellen as she went down to the beach for water, were Irish and Dutch emigrants, forwarded there like cattle, who had settled down, sold their fish to the trading-vessels, and never had looked outside of that to know they were not naturalized. Ellen was little better; I do not suppose she ever had read a newspaper in her life; yet, curiously enough, her language was tolerably correct, her manner quiet and thorough-bred,—even the inflections of her voice were low, and as composed as if she had learned self-poise in the hurly-burly of society. That belonged to her character, however, as much as to the solitude in which she had been brought up.
The mother sank rapidly this winter; but the two children, accustomed to her illness, were blind to the change.
When the States one by one seceded during that winter and spring, and the country was rife with war and the terror of it, the Coldwater people fished on dully as ever. Joe brought home stories of "fighting beyond there," and of men he had met on the Sandusky wharf who had gone, and then whittled and whistled as usual: the tale sounding to the two women fearful and far-off, as if it had been in the Crimea. "Though I had heard of the Virginians," said Ellen simply, when she told the story. "There was Mr. Barker, a Methodist preacher, told us once of the 'man-hunters,' as he called them, and how they chained their slaves and burned them alive, and hunted men with dogs. But I took him up wrong. I thought they all were black." Ellen's idea of them was as vague as ours is of the cannibals, and not very different, I suspect.
So far off did this country of the man-hunters seem, where "there was fighting," that, when Joe wandered about uneasily in one of his weekly visits, and told again and again, with furtive glances at his mother, how half the deckhands on the schooner had gone into a regiment forming in Sandusky, and how it was a good chance to see the world, Ellen sewed quietly on, scarcely looking up. That Joe could have any interest in this dim horror of a war never crossed her poor brain.
The next day after the schooner sailed her mother grew suddenly worse, and began to sink, going faster every day for a week. It was the first time Ellen had been left alone to face danger. "If Joe was here!" the two poor creatures cried, through all their fright and pain. If Joe were there, Ellen thought all would be well again. But Thursday, his usual day for coming, passed without him. That night the mother died. Two women of the village, hearing the story from the doctor, came to the house in time to make the body ready for burial,—the "natural," as they called Ellen, sitting quietly by the bed, her face hid, not answering when they spoke.
There was a letter brought to her that night from Joe, a few lines only, written to his mother, saying he had enlisted and would not come back to say good-bye; he was going to do better for her and Ellen than he ever had done before. "I do not remember about that time," Ellen said afterward, when questioned. "My trouble came back when Joe left me." It brought the wild, wandering look into her eyes, even to refer to it in this way, I do not know if I spoke of the curious affection between this brother and sister. Father and brothers and sister had watched and cared for the girl, because of the great trouble which God had sent to her; and now all the love and gratitude she had given to them all, when living, was centred on this boy Joe. Joe absorbed all the world which her weak mind knew,—just at the age, too, when women's hearts open and are filling with thoughts of love and marriage. No matter how long Ellen had lived, "my brother," as she gravely, respectfully called him, would have been all, I think, she would ever have loved, and he would have satisfied all her cravings.
Her mother was buried before she became conscious again; then her reason came back to her; and when the woman who had stayed in the house returned, after a few hours' gossiping, she found Ellen, her old quiet self, going gently about the house, packing her clothes in a carpet-bag, and putting with great care in a little hand-basket, such as ladies carry knitting in, her Testament, their two or three silver spoons, Joe's box of Sunday collars, and what little money was left.
"Where are you going?" asked the woman, in some trepidation.