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.”
A hint he gave of being sent further south, and then hope died out of
Helen’s heart.
“I shall never see him again,” she said despairingly; and when the
message came that Mark had been removed, and that too just at the time
when an exchange was constantly expected, she gave him up as lost,
feeling almost as much widowed as Katy in her weeds.
Slowly the winter passed away, and the country was rife with stories of
our men, daily dying by hundreds, while those who survived were reduced
to maniacs or imbeciles. And Helen, as she listened, grew nearly frantic
with the sickening suspense. She did not know now where her husband was.
He had made several attempts to escape, and with each failure had been
removed to safer quarters, so that his chances for being exchanged
seemed very far away. Week after week, month after month passed on,
until came the memorable battle of the Wilderness, when Lieutenant Bob,
as yet unharmed, stood bravely in the thickest of the tight, his tall
figure towering above the rest, and his soldier’s uniform buttoned over
a dark tress of hair, and a face like Bell Cameron’s. Lieutenant Bob had
taken two or three furloughs; but the one which had left the sweetest,
pleasantest memory in his heart, was that of the autumn before, when the
crimson leaves of the maple, and the golden tints of the beech, were
burning themselves out on the hills of Silverton, where his furlough was
mostly passed, and where with Bell Cameron he scoured the length and
breadth of Uncle Ephraim’s farm, now stopping by the shore of Fairy
Point and again sitting for hours on a ledge of rocks, far up the hill,
where beneath the softly whispering pines, nodding above their heads,
Bell gathered the light-brown cones, and said to him the words he had so
thirsted to hear.
Much of Bell’s time was passed with Katy, at the farm-house, and here
Lieutenant Reynolds found her, accepting readily of Uncle Ephraim’s
hearty invitation to remain, and spending his entire vacation there with
the exception of three days, given to his family. Perfectly charmed with
quaint Aunt Betsy, he flattered and courted her almost as much as he did
Bell, but did not take her with him in his long rambles over the hills,
or sit with her at night alone in the parlor until the clock struck
twelve—a habit which Aunt Betsy greatly disapproved, but overlooked for
this once, seeing, as she said, that
“The young leftenant was none of her _kin_, and _Isabel_ only a little.”
Those were halcyon days which Robert passed at Silverton but one stood
out prominently before him, whether sitting before his camp-fire or
plunging into the battle; and that the one when, casting aside all pride
and foolish theories, Bell Cameron freely acknowledged her love for the
man to whom she had been so long engaged, and paid him back the kisses
she had before refused to give.
“I shall be a better soldier for this,” Robert had said, as he guided
her down the steep ledge of rocks, and with her hand in his, walked
slowly back to the farm-house, which, on the morrow, he left to take
again his place in the army.
There were no more furloughs for him after that; and the winter passed
away, bringing the spring again, when came that battle in the
Wilderness, where, like a hero, he fought until, becoming separated from
his comrades, he fell into the enemy’s hands; and two days after, there
sped along the telegraphic wires to New York,
“Lieutenant Robert Reynolds, captured the first day of the battle.”
Afterwards came news that Andersonville was his destination, together
with many others made prisoners that day.
“It is better than being shot, and a great deal better than being
burned, as some of the poor wretches were,” Juno said, trying to comfort
Bell, who doubted a little her sister’s word.
True there was now the shadow of a hope that he might return; but the
probabilities were against it; and Bell’s face grew almost as white as
Helen’s, while her eyes acquired that restless, watchful, anxious look
which has crept into the eyes of so many sorrowing women, looking away
to the southward, where the dear ones were dying.