As I struck my front-door-bell, I heard Lucy still screaming out her assurance of a heavenly home; but the chanting had lost its irritating sound, and I listened to it, if not with pleasure, at least with patience: even the Skye, Ton-Ton was so improved in temper by the walk as to coil up its little silky gray body in the basket with perfect indifference to the domestic music. While I was dining, the watchful ears of my dogs detected the steps of strangers on the terrace-steps of the entrance, which news they announced in shrill barks.
"Some Spring-Town visitors to Lucy," I thought, as I heard the steps pass under the side window, which supposition was confirmed by the ceasing of the hopeful hymn.
There was a profound silence for a little while in the back part of the house; and the dogs resumed their slumbers, dreaming pleasantly of their nice walk and good meal. I pushed the little dinner-table away, lighted the spirit-lamp under the tea, which was on a small tray on the library-table, and leaned back in the easy-chair to read a comforting page or two in De Quincey's Cæsars. I would not disturb Lucy and her guests for a little while at least, I thought. I had just reached,—
"Peace, then, rhetoricians! false threnodists of false liberty! hollow chanters over the ashes of a hollow republic! Without Cæsar we affirm a thousand times that there would have been no perfect Rome; and but for Rome there could have been no such man as Cæsar"—
—when I heard Lucy crossing the anteroom. The library-door opened, and in the poor girl tottered, sobbing bitterly as if her heart would surely burst. She crouched down on the floor, and moaned so like a poor wounded animal, that the dogs, who are very fond of her, ran up and commenced whining and licking her. To my repeated inquiries as to the cause of her weeping, she could only sob out,—
"Oh! I can't tell, Ma'am, I can't tell you!"
At last she summoned enough courage to say,—
"He's dead now real! No mistake this time,—real, real dead! He died in the 'ospital three weeks ago,—and never, never got none of them 'ere letters!"
Yes, the poor fellow was, as his wife said, "dead real"; and I found, on inquiry, that, at the very time the false rumor of his death reached us, he was then actually dying of a fever at a hospital in Florida!
She was right, too, about the ill-luck of the letters. He had not received one of them! Not knowing of his change of place, we had addressed the letters to the regiment station, where I suppose they went, while he was far off in a distant hospital, tossing on a sick-bed; and when he died, he had added to his physical sufferings the anguish of thinking himself forgotten by the wife and friends he loved so tenderly.