"For my part," observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the
flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, "I don't believe
any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went
round with all of them some, of course; but that was n't anything--with
him."
A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her
point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs.
Small continued the conversation.
"It's awful easy for a girl to put on mourning when a man's dead, and
say she's been engaged to him; but if any one of 'em had been engaged to
Archie Lovell while he was alive, she'd have bragged enough of it at the
time."
The murmur of assent was more pronounced now, and one or two of the
members of the Soldiers' Aid Society expressed in word their entire
agreement of this opinion. The ladies who made up the society usually
improved the opportunities afforded by their meetings to discuss all the
gossip of Tuskamuck, and the matter which they were now talking over in
the corner of Dr. Wentworth's parlor was one which had caused much
excitement in the little community. It was in the days of the Civil
War, and anything connected with the soldiers aroused interest, but a
combination of romance and gossip with a tragedy in the field contained
all the elements of the deepest sensation. News had come after the
battle of Chickamauga of the death of Archie Lovell, and although this
was followed by a vague rumor that he might perhaps be among the missing
rather than the killed, it had never been really disproved. As time had
gone on without tidings of the missing man, his death had been accepted,
and even his aunt, Old Lady Andrews, whose idol he had been, and who
clung to hope as long as hope seemed possible, had given him up at
last. She had ordered a memorial stone to be placed in the village
graveyard, and the appearance of the marble tablet seemed in a way to
give official sanction to the belief that Archie Lovell would never
again carry his bright face and winning smile about the village streets,
and that nevermore would he drive the gossips of Tuskamuck to the
verge of desperation by flirting so markedly with a dozen girls that
they could by no means keep track of him or decide what his real
preference--if he had one--might be.
Whatever loss the gossips sustained by his death, however, was soon made
up, for no sooner was the news of his loss known than three girls, one
after the other, announced their engagement to the dead hero, and one
after the other donned widow's weeds in his memory. So many girls had
been the recipients of Archie's multifarious attentions that it would
have been easy for almost any one of Tuskamuck's maidens to bring
forward such a claim with some show of probability; but unfortunately,
by the end of 1863 too many damsels had done this sort of thing for the
posthumous announcement of an engagement to be received with entire
solemnity or assured credence. A sort of fashion of going into mourning
for dead soldiers had set in, and undoubtedly many a forlorn damsel by a
tender fiction thus gratified a blighted passion which had never before
been allowed to come to light. Cynic wits declared that it added a new
terror to a soldier's death that he could never tell who would, when he
was unable to deny it, claim to have been betrothed to him; and when, as
in the present case, three disconsolate maidens wore crape for the same
man, the affair became too absurd even for the responsive sympathies of
war-time.
"The way things are going on," observed Mrs. Drew, a stern woman with a
hard eye, "the men are getting so killed off that the only satisfaction
a girl can get anyway is to go into mourning for some of 'em; and I
don't blame 'em if they do it."
The quality of the remark evidently did not please her hearers, who
could hardly bear any slightest approach to light speaking concerning
the tragedy in which the nation was involved.
"If it was any one of the three," Mrs. Cummings declared, after a brief
silence, "it was Delia Burrage. He used to go round with her all the
time."
"No more 'n he did with Mattie Seaton," another lady observed. "He used
to see Mattie home from singing-school most of the time that winter
before he enlisted."
"Well, anyway, when Delia presented the flag to the company the night
before they went off, he was with her all the evening. Don't you
remember how we had a supper in the Academy yard, and----"
"Of course I remember. I guess I was on the committee; but he used to go
with Mattie lots."
"He sent Mary Foster that wooden chair he carved in camp," spoke up
another lady, coming into the field as a champion of the third of the
mourners who were so conspicuously advertising their grief to an
unbelieving world.
"Well, that was a philopena; so that don't count. She told me so
herself."
The case was argued with all the zeal and minuteness inseparable from a
discussion at the Tuskamuck Soldiers' Aid Society, and at last, when
everybody else began to show signs of flagging, a word was put in by
Aunt Naomi Dexter. She had throughout sat listening to the dispute, now
and then throwing in a dry comment, wagging her foot and chewing her
green barège veil after her fashion, and looking as if she could tell
much, if she were but so disposed. Aunt Naomi scorned sewing, and was
the one woman who was privileged to sit idle while all the others were
busy. She never removed her bonnet on these occasions, the fiction being
that she had only dropped in, and did not really belong to the society;
but gossip was to Aunt Naomi as the breath of her nostrils, and she
would have died rather than to absent herself from a company where it
might be current.
"I don't know how many girls Archie Lovell was engaged to," she now
remarked dryly. "I dare say he did n't himself; and for all I know, he
was engaged to all three of those geese that are flying the black flag
for him. But I can tell you the girl he really wanted to marry, and she
is n't in black, either."
The ladies all regarded her with looks of lively curiosity and
interrogation; but she rolled the sweet morsel of gossip under her
tongue, and evidently had no intention of being hurried.
"Who is it?" Mrs. Cummings demanded at length, in a tone which indicated
that no more trifling would be endurable.
Aunt Naomi moistened her lips with an air like that of a cat in
contemplation of a plump young sparrow.
"I don't see who there is that's any more likely to have been engaged to
him than Mattie," the champion of that young lady asserted combatively.
"He'd no more have married her than he would me," Aunt Naomi asserted
contemptuously.
"Who was it, then?" Mrs. Smith demanded impatiently.
Aunt Naomi looked about on the eager faces, and seemed to feel that
interest had been brought up to its culmination point so that it was
time to speak.
"Nancy Turner," she pronounced briefly.
The name was received with varying expressions of face, but few of the
ladies had any especial comment to offer in word. Some scorned the idea,
and the champions of the three mourners still stood by their guns; but
the new theory plainly had in it some force, for the women were all
evidently impressed that in this suggestion might lie the real solution
to the vagaries of Archie Lovell's multitudinous wooing. As Mrs.
Cummings said, however, Nancy Turner was a girl who kept her own
counsel, and if she had indeed been engaged to the missing soldier,
nobody would ever be the wiser for it. It was discouraging to the
gossips to be confronted with a mystery which they could have so little
hope of ever solving, and the talk gradually turned to other topics,
this one remaining as available as ever to be taken up whenever
conversation might languish.
The Sunday following this meeting of the Soldiers' Aid Society was a
warm and beautiful spring day, which invited to the open air. Public
morality in Tuskamuck was narrow in its interpretations, and among
other restrictions it imposed was the impropriety of walking on Sunday
except by strolling in the village graveyard. The theory, if carefully
investigated, would have been found, in all probability, to have its
roots in some Puritan notion that youth in its thoughtlessness would be
sobered and religiously inclined by the sight of the grassy mounds, the
solemnly clumsy mortuary inscriptions, and the general reminders of
death. In practice the fact did not entirely justify such a theory, for
the graceless young people instinctively sought for amusement rather
than for spiritual enlightenment, chatted and laughed as loudly as they
dared, examined the epitaphs for those that might by any distortion of
their original intent be made ludicrous, and exchanged jokes in most
unsabbatical fashion. They even indulged thoughtlessly, in the very
midst of these grim reminders of a life wherein is neither marriage nor
giving in marriage, in little rustic flirtations, and eagerly picked
up morsels of gossip by sharp observation of young couples strolling
oblivious of watching eyes among the graves.
To-day the desire to see the newly set stone which had been placed
over the empty mound which was to preserve the memory of Archie Lovell
attracted an unusually large number of village folk to turn into the
graveyard after afternoon service, and an exciting whisper had gone
about that the three disconsolate betrothed damsels had all come to
church with flowers. The little groups drifted slowly through the
weatherbeaten gate behind the church, but the very first of them were
deterred by seeing a black-robed figure laying already her bunch of
geraniums on the grave. Delia Burrage, who sang in the choir, had, as
was afterward told from one end of the town to the other, slipped down
the gallery stair without waiting for the benediction, and so had
managed to be first in the field.
The gathering groups of villagers had hardly time to note with what
tender care the bereft Delia arranged her bunch of scarlet blossoms at
the foot of the still snowy marble slab than they were set aquiver with
delicious excitement by the sight of a second crape-enshrouded figure
that came to the spot, also bearing flowers. Mary Foster carried in her
black-gloved hands a cluster of white pyrethrums, a favorite house-plant
in Tuskamuck. Miss Foster came up on the side of the mound opposite to
the first comer, and humbly laid her offering below the red geraniums;
but although she was thus forced to place her flowers farther from the
stone than the other, she was evidently determined not to be outdone in
devotion. She fell on her knees, and bowed her face in her handkerchief
in a grief so dramatic that Miss Burrage was left far behind, and had
no resource but to come to her knees in turn, in a weak imitation of her
rival.
The spectators were by this time in a sort of twitter of gratified
excitement, and exchanged many significant looks and subdued comments.
Those boldest pressed nearer to the scene of action, keenly curious to
hear if word passed between the bereaved ladies. Excitement rose to
its highest when slowly down the long path came Martha Seaton, more
voluminously draped in sable weeds than either of the others. She
carried a wreath of English ivy, and a sort of admiring shudder ran
through the neighbors as they saw that to this funeral wreath Miss
Seaton had sacrificed the growth of years of careful window gardening.
"My! She 's cut her ivy!" one of them gasped.
"Why, so she has! Well, for the land's sake!" responded another, too
much overwhelmed to speak coherently.
"Trust Mattie Seaton for not letting anybody get ahead of her!" a third
commented, in accents of admiration.
Human curiosity could not keep aloof at a moment such as this, and as
Mattie advanced toward the Lovell lot, the neighbors followed as if
irresistibly impelled. They closed in a ring around the spot when she
reached it, and they looked and listened with an eagerness so frank as
almost to be excusable. They could see that the earlier comers were
watching from behind the handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes, and with
the approbation which belongs to a successful dramatic performance the
audience noted also the entire coolness with which Miss Seaton ignored
them until she stood close to the drooping pair. Then she flung back her
long veil of crape with a sweeping gesture, and with a regal glance of
her gypsyish black eyes looked first at them and then at the flowers.
"Oh, thank you so much for bringing flowers," she said, in a voice
evidently so raised that her words should be distinctly heard by the
ring of spectators. "Archie was so fond of them!"
The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the
listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other
mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the
headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top,
and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she
had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the
young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was "boss of that grave
and the others did n't count." As if in a carefully planned _tableau
vivant_, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two
had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe.
"Well, if that ain't the beatin'est!" chuckled old Ichabod Munson,
puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. "Gosh, I wish
Archie Lovell could see that. He'd be 'most willin' to get kilt for a
sight o' his three widders, an' that Seaton girl comin' it so over t'
others."
"He'd think he was a Mormon or a Turk," observed Miss Charlotte Kendall,
with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the
graveyard could subdue. "He'd see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did
love a joke."
The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be
effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to
appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead
bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in
a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening
neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:--
"Thank you so much for your sympathy;" and before they could reply she
had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving
swiftly away up the path to the gate.
Never was exit more dramatically effective. The pair left behind
exchanged angry glances, then with a simultaneous impulse started to
their feet, and as quickly as possible got away from the sight of their
fellow townsfolk. They might be silly, but they were not so foolish as
not to know how ridiculous they had been made to look that afternoon.
It was only a few days after this that the village was stirred by the
news that Old Lady Andrews, who so mourned for Archie, who had adored
the handsome, good-natured, selfish, flirtatious dog all his life, had
gone South in the hope of recovering his remains, and of bringing them
home to rest beneath the stone she had erected. The village pretty
generally sympathized with the desire, but thought the chance of success
in such a quest made the undertaking a piece of hopeless sentiment. The
time since the news of Archie's death was already considerable, his fate
from the first had been uncertain, and the chances of the identification
of his grave seemed exceedingly small.
"I figure Ol' Lady Andrews would 'a' done better to stay to hum,"
'Siah Appleby expressed the sentiment of the town in saying. "Like's
not 'f she finds out anythin' certain,--which 't ain't all likely she
will,--she'll find Archie was just hove into a trench 'long with a lot
more poor fellers, an' no way o' sortin' out their bones short o' the
Day o' Judgment. She'd sot up a stone to him, 'n' she'd a nawful sight
better let it go at that."
The sentiment of the matter touched some, but the years of war had
brought so much of grief and suffering that most had settled into a sort
of dull acquiescence unless the woe were personal and immediate. The
neighbors sympathized with the feeling of grief-stricken Old Lady
Andrews, but so many husbands and fathers, brothers and sons and lovers,
had vanished in unidentified graves that the nerves of feeling were
benumbed. It would in the early years of the war have been unbearable to
think of a friend as lying in an unnamed grave in the South; now it
seemed simply a part of the inevitable misery of war.
The "three widows," as the village folk unkindly dubbed them, were less
in evidence after the episode in the graveyard. They avoided each other
as far as possible, and were evidently not unaware that they were not
taken very seriously by their neighbors. They perhaps knew that jests at
their expense were in circulation, like the grim remark of Deacon Daniel
Richards, that he did not see how any one of them could claim more than
a "widow's third" of Archie's memory. They kept rather quiet, at least;
and the weeks went by uneventfully until the departure of Old Lady
Andrews again drew attention to the story.
The old lady went alone, and once gone she sent no word back to tell
how she fared on her quest. Now that her nephew was missing, she had
no immediate family; and she wrote to none of her townsfolk. The spring
opened into summer as a bud into a flower, and life at Tuskamuck went
on with its various interests, but no one was able to do more than to
speculate upon her movements or her success.
One afternoon in June the Soldiers' Aid Society came together for its
weekly gathering in the vestry. The meeting had been appointed at the
house of the Widow Turner, but Nancy Turner had been suddenly called out
of town, and her mother, somewhat of an invalid, had not felt equal to
the task of entertaining without her. The bare room, with its red pulpit
and yellow settees, had a forlorn look, despite the groups of busy women
and girls scattered over it; but its chilling influence could not check
the flow of conversation.
"Did you hear where Nancy Turner's gone?" one woman asked of the group
in which she sat. "She must have gone very suddenly."
"I understood there was sickness somewhere," another responded vaguely.
"Maybe it's her aunt over at Whitneyville," a third suggested. "Mis'
Turner told me in the spring she was real feeble."
"Mis' Turner herself 's real frail. She did n't feel well enough to come
this afternoon."
"Where 's Aunt Naomi?" inquired Mrs. Cummings. "It's 'most five
o'clock, and she almost always comes about three."
"Oh," responded Mrs. Wright, with a laugh and her quick, bright glance,
"you may depend upon it she's getting news somewhere. She'll come in
before we go home, with something wonderful to tell."
As if in intentional confirmation of the words, Aunt Naomi at that
moment appeared in the doorway. Her shrewd old face showed satisfaction
in every wrinkle, and from beneath the unfailing veil of green barège
draped from her bonnet over the upper left-hand corner of her face her
eyes positively twinkled. She took a deliberate survey of the room, and
then with her peculiar rocking gait moved to the group which had been
discussing her absence.
"Good afternoon, Aunt Naomi," Mrs. Cummings greeted her. "We were just
wondering what had become of you."
"And I said," put in Mrs. Wright audaciously, "that you must be getting
some wonderful piece of news."
Aunt Naomi hitched up her shawl behind with a grasshopper-like motion of
her elbows, and sat down with a wide grin.
"Well, this time you were right," she said. "I was hearing Old Lady
Andrews tell about her trip."
"Old Lady Andrews?" echoed the ladies. "Has she got home?"
"Yes; she got here this noon."
"And nobody but you knew it!" ejaculated Mrs. Cummings.
They all regarded Aunt Naomi with undisguised admiration, in every look
acknowledging her cleverness in discovering what had been hid from the
rest of the village. She smiled broadly, and seemed to drink in the
sweet odor of this surprise and their homage as an idol might snuff up
grateful fumes of incense.
"Did she bring home the body?" Mrs. Cummings asked after a moment, in a
voice becomingly lowered.
"Yes, she did," Aunt Naomi answered, with a chuckle of levity which
seemed almost indecent. "She had a dreadful time finding out anything;
but she had friends at Washington--her husband had cousins there, you
know--and at last she got on the track."
"Where was he buried?"
Aunt Naomi paused to wag her foot and to nibble at the corner of her
green veil in a way common to her in moments of excitement. She looked
around in evident enjoyment of the situation.
"He was n't buried anywhere," she said, with a grin.
"Why not?" demanded Mrs. Wright excitedly.
"Because he was n't dead."
"Was n't dead?"
"No; only taken prisoner. He was wounded, and he's been in Libby."
"How is he now?"
"Oh, he's all right now. He's coming over here to show himself, and see
his friends."
The words were hardly spoken when in the doorway appeared the well-known
figure of Archie Lovell. He wore the uniform of a lieutenant, he was
pale and worn, but handsomer than ever. On his arm was a blushing damsel
in a hat with a white feather, her face all smiles and dimples. An
exclamation went up from all over the room.
"Why, it's Archie Lovell!"