PAUL.
The next day was Sunday, and after our one o’clock dinner Fan and I
started for the cemetery on the hillside, accompanied by Carl. We had
omitted taking flowers early in the morning, but we had them with us
now, and Carl carried them for us and asked many questions about our
brother as we went slowly across the fields.
“Shot at Fredericksburg,” he said. “That’s where a cousin of mine was
killed, if he were killed at all. We tracked him to that battle, or
thought we did, and have never heard of him since.”
Neither Fan nor I made any reply, and he went on: “He was several years
older than I, but too young to go to the war. He lived with us and I
loved him like a brother, and when I really made up my mind that he was
dead I cried myself sick, and now I am sometimes so lonesome for Paul
that I want to cry just as I did then. It is hard to believe he is dead,
with no proof of it, and every night I pray that he may come back to us,
or that we may know for sure what became of him. You pray, don’t you? I
heard Annie in church this morning, but not a peep from you. I don’t
believe you said the creed.”
He was speaking to Fan, who answered rather shortly, “I prayed so much
for the success of the south during the war, and we failed so utterly
that I have about lost faith in prayer, and have come to think that what
is to be will be, and we can’t help ourselves; so what is the use of
praying? Didn’t the north pray with all their might that their army
might be victors, and didn’t we do the same, and wern’t we just as much
in earnest as you were, and which did the Lord hear?”
“Our side, of course, because we were right, and had the most men and
money. You shouldn’t have been a Reb if you wanted the Lord to hear you.
What could you do against the Lord and such hordes as we had to fight
you with?” Carl said, while Fan tossed her head high in the air, but did
not continue the conversation.
We were in the enclosure now under the pine trees and were laying the
flowers we had brought upon the four graves, our mother’s, Katy’s
mother’s, Charlie’s and The Boy’s. Carl was reading the inscriptions on
the tombstones, first mother’s, then Katy’s mother’s, then Charlie’s,
over which he lingered. “Only nineteen; he would be twenty-three now,
that’s a little older than Paul, if he were living. Halloo! what does
this mean, ‘The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.’ That’s a queer
inscription. Who was The Boy?”
“We don’t know,” Fan said, sitting down on an iron chair near the grave
and clasping her hands at the back of her head.
Carl looked at her mystified and curious.
“He was one of your people,” she continued, “and I hated you all, until
he came to us and died, with his hand in mine, hurrahing for me. I
haven’t hated anybody since. Would you like to hear his story?”
“Yes,” Carl said, and leaning upon the stone he listened while Fan told
the story in all its details as only she could tell it.
At its close Carl was down upon the grassy mound, crushing the flowers
we had put there, and sobbing bitterly, “Paul, Paul,—it was Paul! I have
found him at last dead, and I had hoped he might come back to me alive.
Oh, Paul, I am so sorry for everything.”
We were all crying now, and surely over no soldier’s grave, north or
south, east or west, was sadder moan ever made than over that of The Boy
that summer afternoon years and years ago. Whatever of wrong there had
been in Carl’s treatment of Paul it was atoned for, if tears can atone
for a wrong done to the dead. I had never seen a man or boy cry as Carl
cried, with his face upon the grass.
“Don’t,” Fan said at last. “Don’t you remember that he bade us tell you
he liked you?”
“Yes, I know, and it’s that which hurts, and the knowing for sure that
he is dead,” Carl answered, lifting up his head and wiping away his
tears. “I have dreamed so often that he came back that I have almost
made myself believe that he would, and I have planned so many things to
do when he came. Strange, too, that he has been so often in my mind
since I came here. You told me that your woods were often full of
Federal troops, and many times at the picnic I was saying to myself,
‘Was Paul ever here? Did he see this waterfall, or sleep under that big
tree near which they said camp fires were built?’ and now I am by his
grave, and you cared for him when he died. Tell me more, if there is
more to tell.”
There was not much, except to show the letter dictated by Charlie and
written by The Boy. This, with the lock of hair and the knife and
jews-harp Fan had purposely brought with her, meaning to tell the story
to Carl just as she had told it. The writing was a scrawl, for the hand
which wrote it was throbbing with pain, but Carl identified it as Paul’s
by the capitals and the formation of some of the letters. The hair and
jews-harp and knife he remembered perfectly, and cried again as he held
them in his hand.
“If I had been beaten in his place, as I ought to have been he might not
have run away, but I was a coward and a sneak,” he said referring to a
theft of cake which had been charged to Paul and not denied because he
wished to shield his cousin.
The memory of this seemed to hurt Carl the most, and he went over the
incident again and again, ending always with the cry, “If I could only
take it back.” Then he told us briefly what there was to tell of Paul,
whose last name was also Haverleigh, as their fathers had been brothers.
Both Paul’s parents had died when he was young, and he had been, in a
way, adopted by his Aunt Martha, who was very fond of him until the
birth of Carl, when there came a change.
“I suppose my being her own naturally made a difference,” Carl said,
“and I know now there was a difference, although mother might not have
intended any. I was a spoiled child, and Paul was a lively, wide-awake
boy, who, with nothing bad about him, was constantly getting me and
himself into scrapes, which mother, with her strict notions, thought
awful. Sometimes we were sent to bed or set on hard chairs until they
must have ached; I am sure we did. She never inflicted corporal
punishment upon Paul but once, and that was about the cake which she
thought he stole and lied about. So she thrashed him, and he was nearly
as old as I am now. ‘Too big to be licked,’ he said, and ran away. Where
he went at first I do not know, and shall never know now, but after the
war broke out we traced him, or thought we did, to the army as a drummer
boy. Then mother went to Europe for two years, leaving me at school.
When she came home she did try to find him and was almost sure he was at
Fredericksburg, and that is all. Does mother know?” he asked, and Fan
replied, “I have told her the story just as I told it to you. She could
draw her own conclusions.”
For a moment Carl was silent, and then he asked, “Did she give no sign
that she understood?”
“She cried and has put flowers on his grave every Sunday since,” was
Fan’s answer, and Carl continued: “Yes, she knows, and she is
sorry,—more sorry than you think. Mother is a good woman, who means to
do right, but, unfortunately, her ideas run in a groove too narrow and
deep for her to get them out easily. She is Puritanical all
through,—great, great, great and double great something of Miles
Standish and the Mayflower. I don’t care a fig for either, but I love my
mother, and I want you to love her, too. It will be better all round.
She is quick to reciprocate, and isn’t a bad sort by a long shot,—a
little stiff, that’s all; and if she didn’t own up about Paul, it was a
kind of pride which kept her silent. If you told the Aunt Martha part
with half the _vim_ you told it to me, she could have no doubt of your
opinion of her, and it required a good deal of pluck for her to say ‘I
am that woman.’ But she will do it. She’ll tell me Paul is here, and
she’ll tell you that she is Aunt Martha, and propose a big monument for
Paul and Charlie.”
“No, no,” Fan interposed. “We knew your cousin as The Boy, and as such
he must remain. We can have no tall monument here.”
On our return to the house we found Mrs. Hathern sitting on the piazza.
Katy, to whom she had been teaching her duty towards her neighbor, had
fallen asleep with her head on her stepmother’s lap, while Mrs.
Hathern’s hand was lying lightly on the child’s yellow curls. It was a
very pretty picture of domestic happiness, and I began to think that, as
Carl had said, his mother was not a bad sort after all. There was an
anxious, worried look on her face as we came up the steps, on which we
all sat down, as the day was very hot.
“Carl,” she began, with a lump in her throat, “you have been to Paul’s
grave and have heard how kindly he was cared for by Fanny and Annie?”
Carl nodded, and she went on: “It was a shock to me to know that he was
here. You told your sisters, I hope, how we tried to trace him?”
“Yes, I told them everything,” Carl answered, and she continued: “I am
glad you did. I couldn’t tell them when I first knew about it. I simply
couldn’t, and I waited for you to come. I would give a great deal to
have Paul back alive, but as that cannot be, I am glad to know where he
is lying; and if you think best we will have him removed to our family
lot in Mt. Auburn.”
“Never, no, never,” and Fan sprang to her feet. “He is _our Boy_. He
died with us; we buried him; we loved him. He was ours, and we must keep
him here with Charlie.”
“You shall, if you feel like that,” Mrs. Hathern said, “and both Carl
and I are more thankful than we can express for the kindness he received
from you all. I told your father while you were at his grave, and it
affected him greatly. It is strange that our families should be thus
brought together, and I hope that the memory of Paul may be a bond of
sympathy and kindly feeling between us.”
She held out her hand first to Fanny and then to me, and as we took it
we felt that there had already commenced a better understanding between
us than had existed before.
“I told you she would face the music, and for her she did it
handsomely,” Carl said, when we were alone with him. “She knows she was
to blame, and if I were you, I wouldn’t _nag_ her about him any more.”
This he said to Fan, who only answered with a flash of her black eyes.
But we understood what he meant, and Paul was never mentioned by us in
her presence unless she spoke of him first, which she seldom did. A
monument, which should have both his and Charlie’s name upon it, was
suggested by her and vetoed by us all. He came to us as the _Boy_; he
died the _Boy_, and the _Boy_ he must always be to us, a sacred memory,
which united the Hatherns and Haverleighs more closely and proved a bond
of sympathy and friendship between us and our stepmother.
Looking back through a vista of years and turning some blotted pages of
Carl’s life, when temptation got the better of him, I cannot recall a
pleasanter summer than that which he spent with us at the Elms. He was
so bright and suggestive and thoughtful for every one, and so anxious to
please and make the best of everything that he carried sunshine wherever
he went. It was a rare gift he possessed of winning all hearts to him,
and Fan and I learned more than one lesson of forbearance and toleration
from him, although we laughed at him as a prig and should have called
him a _dude_, had the word then been invented.
With the townspeople he was very popular, especially with the young
girls, who seemed suddenly to have grown very fond of Fan and myself,
and who came to our house at all hours of the day. We had not supposed
that Mrs. Hathern cared much for young people, but she was very gracious
to Carl’s friends. She gave us teas on the lawn and lunches on the
piazza, and played for us to dance in the drawing room and planned
excursions for us so that the summer was one long holiday, with Carl as
the central figure.
It was September when he left us for Andover, and there were nearly as
many people at the station to see him off as there used to be when our
soldiers left us for the war. Naturally, after so much pleasant
intercourse we expected a great deal of pleasure from his letters. But
here we were disappointed. He wrote to us often at first, telling us of
his life at Andover, but evincing little interest in the people of
Lovering, who remembered him so kindly and spoke of him so often. Then
his letters grew shorter and less frequent, and when Fan berated him for
it, he gave as an excuse that he was very busy with his studies, trying
to fit himself to enter Harvard the next year.
“But whether I write often, or not at all, you may be sure that you are
always in my mind and that I love you dearly,” he wrote, and signed
himself, “Your loving brother, Carl.”
“Nonsense,” Fan said. “It is a clear case of ‘out of sight, out of
mind.’ He was pleased with us when here, but now we are like names
written on the sands of the sea which the first wave washes away. Carl
is nice, but fickle.”