AUNT MARTHA.
There were two halls on the upper floor of our house, one long and wide
and running from north to south, the other, shorter and narrower, turned
off at right angles, running east and west. Opening from this hall was
Charlie’s room in which no change had been made since The Boy died.
Three or four times a year Phyllis washed the linen and made the bed up
fresh and clean, while Fan and I swept and dusted the unused chamber,
which had become a kind of Bethel to us. If Mrs. Hathern had attacked it
during the upheaval we were prepared to do battle. But she did not, and
with no suspicion of the danger threatening it we were going down the
narrow hall to an outside piazza when we saw the door open and heard
voices inside, Mrs. Hathern’s and Phyllis’s, the latter pitched high as
if in fierce altercation, and the former low but very determined.
Crossing the threshold we found Phyllis, straightened back with her
hands on her hips, her usual attitude of defiance, and her turban nearly
off her head.
“You can’t have dis yer room,” she was saying. “It’s Mas’r Charlie’s,
and whar the Boy died; dems de berry piller slips he died on; nobody has
done slep here since and neber will till de day of judgment. Thar’s
’nuff oder rooms plenty good for July or any other white truck from de
norf.”
“What is all this?” Fanny asked, addressing Mrs. Hathern, who replied,
“I am glad you have come to teach this insolent negro her place. I am
not accustomed to such opposition from a servant, and cannot allow it. I
am wanting a room for Julina, who will be here in a few days. This suits
me. But when I told Phyllis to clear it up and remove those old soldier
clothes, which are only gathering moths, she refused outright and
commenced a rigmarole about Mas’r Charlie and some _Boy_ which I cannot
comprehend. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”
Turning to Phyllis Fan said, “You can go. I will explain to Mrs.
Hathern.” Then to the latter, “I am sorry that Phyllis should be
disrespectful to you, but she is right about the room. No one can occupy
it. It was my brother Charlie’s and the Boy’s, whose memory is almost as
dear to us as my brother’s. These which you call old clothes were
Charlie’s. You know, perhaps, that he was killed in the war.”
She had crossed the room and was standing by the uniforms of blue and
grey, one with the stars and bars above it, the other with the stars and
stripes. Mrs. Hathern bowed stiffly and said, “I have heard so, yes; but
if he was a confederate how did he happen to wear the blue, too? Did he
turn traitor to his cause?”
Her manner was exasperating, and her words insulting, and I knew by the
fire in Fan’s eyes that she would spare no detail in the story she meant
to tell.
“Traitor! Never!” she answered, hotly. “The blue belonged to the Boy.”
“And who was he? the Boy is so very indefinite,” Mrs. Hathern asked in
the same offensive tone, which made Fan furious.
“I don’t know who he was; not even his name. Let me tell you how he came
to us, blood-stained and worn and frightened, and how we cared for him
till he died, and then you will know why this room is doubly sacred to
us,” Fan said.
“Certainly, if you like; it must be interesting; but please be brief as
possible, as I am in a hurry,” was Mrs. Hathern’s provoking remark, and
seating herself upon the bed, she prepared to listen, with a bored
expression upon her face.
Fan’s blood was up, and the sight of the woman whom she believed to be
Aunt Martha sitting so serene and unconcerned on the bed, where thoughts
of her had terrorized the dying boy, roused her beyond quiet endurance.
“Mrs. Hathern,” she said, “please do not sit there. It hurts me as much
as if you were sitting on the Boy’s grave.”
Mrs. Hathern smiled derisively. “I am very comfortable and not at all
superstitious. So I think I’ll stay, as I am rather tired. I shall not
hurt your Boy,” she said, putting the pillow under her head and leaning
back against the headboard.
I wish I could paint a picture of Fan’s white face and dark gleaming
eyes, as in words more eloquent than I can write she told the story of
the Boy, beginning at Fredericksburg and coming down to the day when he
came to Phyllis’s cabin, bedraggled and worn, with a hunted look in his
eyes and pathetic entreaty in his voice as he begged us sometimes not to
let the soldiers get him, and again not to let his Aunt Martha know
where he was, as he could not go back to her. Fan had taken the boy’s
letter from the blue coat pocket where it was kept and had read it,
while Mrs. Hathern’s face softened as I did not suppose it could soften,
and there was something like moisture in her eyes. But she kept her
place upon the bed until Fan told of the few hints the boy had given of
his antecedents.
“In his delirium,” she said, “he talked of Carlyle, who, I think, was
his cousin,—of a dog whose name was Don,—and of an Aunt Martha, who
could not have been kind to him, he seemed so afraid of her and so
anxious that she should not know where he was. If you could have seen
his poor wasted face and sunken eyes upon the pillow on which you are
lying, you would know why this room is like a grave and why we cannot
let a stranger occupy it.”
At the mention of the wasted face and sunken eyes which had lain upon
the pillow Mrs. Hathern started as if she had been stung, or had felt
the cold touch of the dead face Fan described so vividly. Crossing the
room she put one hand caressingly upon the blue coat, and wiping the
tears from her eyes with the other she said, “I thank you for your
kindness to the northern boy, and shall not forget it. Did you never
learn his name?”
“Never,” Fan replied. “We asked him what it was, and he said he was one
of the Apostles. That is all we know for sure. We advertised and wrote
to the town in Maine which he mentioned in his delirium, but nothing
definite could be learned except that a strange boy calling himself
Joseph Wilde had enlisted in that place early in the war and had not
been heard of since. Charlie called him _the Boy_. We have called him
_the Boy_ ever since, and it is so engraved upon his tombstone. After he
died Phyllis and I cut two or three curls from his head for his friends,
if we ever found them, and I put them in Charlie’s letter. He had soft
brown hair, with a reddish tinge in some lights, and it had grown very
long for a boy. See——?” and she held up the rings of hair which twined
around and clung to her fingers.
“Yes, I see,” Mrs. Hathern said in a trembling voice, and I fancied that
she recoiled from the hair as if it had been a living thing confronting
her with reproaches. “I understand now your feelings with regard to this
room and respect them. It shall not be disturbed. I can find another for
Julina,” she continued; “and now, if you will excuse me, I will go. I
think I hear your father.”
She was herself again, cold, dignified and stiff, but gave no sign that
she was the Aunt Martha we had been anxious to find. We were sure of it,
however, and if anything had been wanting to confirm us in our
suspicions we had it the next morning, which was Sunday. As was our
custom on that day we went after breakfast with flowers to the cemetery,
and found a small bouquet on Charlie’s grave, and on the boy’s a larger
one, while the grass which was long had been trampled down by some one
kneeling or sitting upon it.
“Aunt Martha has been here,” Fan said. “I really think she has something
human about her after all, but I should like her better if she’d say
square out ‘I am Aunt Martha.’ I hate concealments.”
On our return to the house we passed the cabin where Phyllis sat on a
wash-bench in the shade, shelling peas for dinner.
“Mrs. Hathern done got ahead of you,” she said, running her hands
through the peas and letting them drop back into the pan. “She was out
before sun up, pickin’ de flowers, and went holdin’ her white petticoats
mos’ up to her knees cross de lot to de cemetry, whar she went down face
fo’most on de Boy’s grave, an’ when she coined back her eyes was all red
and watery. Like ’nuff she’s some of his kin.”
It was scarcely possible that Phyllis suspected anything. If she did,
she kept it to herself. Neither did Mrs. Hathern give any sign that she
knew aught of the boy, whom, to each other, we began to speak of as
Paul, while she was always Aunt Martha.