'It's all over between us,' he sighed; 'even if I were ungenerous enough to ask it, she wouldn't receive me now.' My face spoke my scorn. 'Don't blame her,' he said, pathetically; 'it isn't natural she should, poor little thing! This for what she might have been to me.' Then, he kissed the pictured face, and sorrowfully laid it back again upon his heart. 'I thought to go back to her a colonel at least—a general, perhaps,' he went on, with a piteous smile; 'to be crowned with laurels, loaded with honors and proudly claim her as my bride: I little thought that this would be the end!' It was a man's grave comment on a boy's wild dream. He had buried his youth in those two weeks of anguish. It was a man's face that looked upon me, and I read in it a man's strong endurance and stern resolve. That, and the smile with which he said it, moved me more than any emotion, however hopeless or despairing, could have done. My grief burst forth anew.
Dearer, a thousand times dearer, now that love had left him, and youthful friends turned coldly away. Ah! thank God! bless God! There are none so dear to each other, so inexpressibly dear, as those whom sorrow joins; no tie that binds so closely as the sacred bond of suffering. I said so brokenly, sobbing out my love and sorrow, as I held him to my heart. His longing for home had been intense; now that he had seen me, it became wellnigh insupportable. To go away from this his place of suffering—from the myriad eyes bent upon him here, and creep back broken-hearted to that sacred sheltering haven, and hide his great grief there—this wish absorbed him quite. 'I want to go home, Maggie,' he said, in a broken-hearted whisper, clinging to me the while; 'I want to go home and die.' Die! I wouldn't hear the word; I stopped its half-formed utterance with tears and kisses. The doctor shook his head at the suggestion and counselled delay; but he was burning with impatience, and I was resolute. We started the very next day. We travelled by easy stages, but he grew weaker all the time: toward the last, with his head upon my breast, he would sleep for hours, peacefully as a little child. Reduced to almost infant weakness when we reached our journey's end, they took him in their arms tenderly as they would have taken an infant, and laid him on my bed. There, in that darkened room, I nursed him night and day, striving to win him back to thoughts of life, and love of it. 'It's too late, Maggie,' he would say, with placid resignation; 'life has nothing for me, dear; I want to go to sleep—to that long, dreamless sleep, where memory never wakes to haunt us!' But I couldn't bear it—I wouldn't have it so. I bade him think of how my heart would break if he, too, died and left me! In my earnest love, I called Heaven to witness that I was ready not only to die for him, if need be, but to do a better, nobler thing, God helping me—to live for him; eschewing other ties, to devote my life and heart to this one affection. We had wealth, thank God! (I never thanked God for that before.) We would go to far-off lands as soon as he was able—away from old sights and scenes, where no familiar object would recall the past, and where, cut off from all association, we could be all and all to each other; and, with ardent hope, I commenced immediate preparations for our voyage. I read him books of travel; showed him the half-finished garments intended for our journey; purchased all things needful, even to the books we would read upon the way—richly paid for toilsome endeavor, for days of patient waiting, if I but roused in him even a passing interest in the subject, won from him but the shadow of a smile. Ah! even those days had their gleams of sunshine. I was his only nurse, his sole dependence, his all; there was exquisite happiness in that! I said to myself, he is mine now, and always will be; and then I thought of the fair face so lovingly resting against the weary heart, and grew exultant, Heaven forgive me! and said, 'Nothing will take him from me now.' One day he rallied very suddenly. A portion of his old vigor seemed to animate his frame; something of the old look was in his face. He took my hand and laid it tenderly against his cheek; he smiled twice during the morning; I kissed him and said, 'We shall be able to start soon now, my darling!' The doctor gravely watched us both, but I would not let his gravity disturb me. He called me to him as he left the room. As I went out, the dear brown eyes were watching me. I turned to nod and smile to him, saying blithely, as I joined the doctor, 'Don't you think we shall be able to start in three weeks, doctor?' 'Shut the door, my dear,' he said; I had left it ajar. The tone startled me. There was compassion in it; and I noticed now that he was walking up and down the room in an agitated way. 'My dear,' he said again, 'you had better take a seat farther from the door.' His voice was hoarse this time—his tone, his air, his unwonted tenderness, were ominous. 'What is the matter?' I said, in sudden fear; 'can't we go as soon as we have intended?'
He did not answer me at first; he walked to the window and looked out; he turned to me again after a little:
'He is bound on a longer voyage,' he said, with a tremor in his voice; 'he is going to a more distant country.'
I did not start or cry; I did not comprehend the meaning of his words. I sat silent, looking at him. He came to me, took both my hands in his: 'Hush!' he said; 'don't cry aloud—it would disturb him. But I must tell you the truth: he won't live three days.' I understood it all now—took in the full meaning of his dreadful words. I did not cry or faint; I did not even weep; I thought my heart was bleeding—that the blood was actually oozing from it drop by drop. I clung to the doctor as I would to the strong arm of an earthly saviour with wild entreaty, with passionate appeal. I prayed him to save my darling, as if he held within his grasp the keys of life and death. I offered all my wealth; I made unheard-of vows—promised impossible things. In the anguish of my supplication, I fell at his very feet. 'My dear,' he said, as he raised me tenderly up again, 'even in this world there is a limit to wealth's potent power; it is always powerless in a time like this.' I had sunk into a chair, exhausted by emotion, and chill with dread, my face buried in my hands despairingly. He laid his hand upon my head in fatherly compassion: 'It's what we've all got to come to, sooner or later,' he went on, tremulously. 'As life goes on, our hopes die out one by one; and, one after another, death claims our treasures. Bow to what is inevitable; pray for resignation.'
I couldn't—I wouldn't. I prayed for his life, yet in a hopeless, despairing way. To the All-powerful my soul went out continually in one wild, desperate cry. I battled fiercely with that stern impending fate, yet I felt from the first how vainly. Around my poor, wounded, dying boy, night and day I hovered constantly—I would not leave him for an instant. Every hour was bearing him away from me—drifting him farther and farther out into an unknown sea. I crept to his side when I could do nothing more for him, and laid my head beside his on the pillow. Sometimes I slept there for very sorrow, grasping him instinctively the while, seeking even in sleep, with fierce, rebellious will, to stem the invisible tide of that dark river, and bear him back to life. 'He would not live three days,' the doctor had said: he did live just three days. It was on the evening of the third, just as the day was fading, that he called me softly to him. I had opened the window and put back the curtain, to admit the air and the waning light.
The wind rose as the twilight deepened, waking at intervals in the gloomy stillness, as if from sleep. It filled the room every now and then with a sad, sighing sound, then died out slowly, again to swell, again to fall, sad as the tolling of a funeral knell. He lay listening to it when I went to him, with parted lips and strange solemnity of face. Too heart-broken for speech, I knelt beside him with a stifled moan. 'Magsie,' (that was his pet name for me,) 'I thought it was your notion, dear, but there is a voice in the wind to-night, and it is calling me.' I made an effort to answer him, to speak; to tell him at the last how precious he had always been to me—how inexpressibly dear; to win from him some parting word of fond endearment that I might remember always; but the words died out in hoarse, inarticulate murmurs. 'Yes, a voice is calling to me, and it falls through miles and miles of air; then the wind takes it up and brings it to me. They want me up there, and I am going, Magsie; kiss me, dear.' The one arm stole around my neck; the chilled lips met mine in a lingering farewell pressure. He went on, feebly: 'I have been wild and wayward, Magsie, in the times gone by; I have grieved your great love sometimes, by giving you a cross word or look, not meaning it, dear, never meaning it, but because a perverse mood seized me. Forgive me, dear; don't remember it against me, sister!' Words came at last; they burst forth in a low moan of anguish: 'My darling! my darling! you break my heart!' Then my poor boy crept closer to me, in a last fond effort at endearment, and laid his cold cheek close against my own. The gloom deepened. The form within my clasp grew cold, became a lifeless weight. I knew it, but I could not lay it down. I still chafed the pulseless hand, and kissed it, and still I pressed the poor, maimed, lifeless form closer and closer to my heart, till reason fled, and I remember nothing. They unwound the chilled arm from about my neck; they thought I, too, was dead.... With muffled drumbeat and martial music, with horrid pomp of war, they buried my darling as soldiers are buried that die at home; but on the grave over which was fired the parting volley there fell no kindred's tear: I, the only mourner, lay raving in my room.
Wintry winds have piled the dreary snow above that grave; spring has kissed it into bloom and verdure; summer skies have smiled above it; and the maimed form they laid there has melted into nothing now! Time has softened the despair of my grief—the worst bitterness is past.
Through the gloomy portals of that dark gate of suffering, an unseen Hand has led me out into a broader and a higher life; and the heart that held darling only, purged from its selfishness by the fierce fire of affliction, beats now for all humanity. Hearts whose love and gratitude God has given me the power to win, say, out of the fulness of their love for me, that a ministering angel is among them in woman's guise; that no hand is half so lavish in its gifts, no heart so full of sympathy, no watcher's form so constant beside the couch of pain. The sick follow me with murmured prayer and blessing; and wounded soldiers turn to kiss my shadow as I pass. Yet ever as the twilight falls I steal away to listen to the night wind's moaning, and ever in the gloom I feel an unseen presence—an arm about my neck—a cheek laid close to mine. Journeying on the lonely, rugged path of duty, 'following meekly where His footsteps lead,' I work and wait, and patiently abide my time—content if, when the welcome summons come, when life's day is fading, I may feel my darling's face pressed close to my own. He may not come to me, but I shall go to him, where he may wear his glorified body forever!