FINALE.
It is the close of a calm September afternoon, and the autumnal sunlight
falls softly upon Aikenside, where a gay party is now assembled. For
four years Maddy Clyde has been mistress there, and in looking back upon
them she wonders how so much happiness as she has known could be
experienced in so short a time. Never but once has the slightest ripple
of sorrow shadowed her heart, and that was when her noble husband, Guy,
said to her, in a voice she knew was earnest and determined, that he
could no longer remain deaf to his country’s call—that where the battle
storm was raging he was needed, and he must not stay at home. Then for a
brief season her bright face was overcast, and her brown eyes dim with
weeping. Giving him to the war seemed like giving him up to death. But
women can be as true heroes as men; and stifling her own grief, Maddy
sent him away with smiles and prayers and cheering words of
encouragement, turning herself for consolation to the source from which
she never sued for peace in vain; and, save that she missed her husband
terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful dark-eyed boy, whom they
called Guy, junior, kept her busy, while not many weeks after her
husband’s departure, Guy read with moistened eyes of a little
golden-haired daughter, whom Maddy had named Lucy Atherstone, and gazed
upon a curl of hair she inclosed, asking if it were not like some other
hair now moldering back to dust within an English churchyard. “Maggie
says it is,” she wrote, alluding to the wife of Dr. Holbrook, who had
come to Aikenside to stay, while her husband also did his duty as
surgeon in the army. That little daughter is a year-old baby now, and in
her short white dress and coral bracelets sits neglected on the nursery
floor, while her mother and Jessie and Maggie Holbrook hasten out into
the yard, to welcome the returning soldier, Major Guy whose arm is in a
sling, and whose face is very pale from the effects of wounds received
at Gettysburg, where his daring courage had well-nigh won for Maddy a
widow’s heritage. For the present the arm is disabled, and so he has
been discharged, and has come back to the home where warm words of
welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling wife, who
can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and kisses her
beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad, for she had
hoped her husband would come with Guy, but his humanity would not permit
him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care. Loving messages
he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she heard from Guy how
greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the beds of pain, and
how much he was doing to relieve their anguish.
Jessie, grown to be a most beautiful girl of nearly sixteen, is still a
child in actions, and, wild with delight at seeing her brother again,
throws her arms around his neck, telling, in almost the same breath, how
proud she is of him, how much she wished to go to him when she heard he
was wounded, how she wished she was a boy, so she could enlist, how
nicely Flora is married and settled at the cottage in Honedale, and then
asks if he knows anything of the Confederate Colonel to whom just before
the war broke out her mother was married, and whose home was in
Richmond.
Guy knows nothing of _him_, except that he is still fighting for the
Confederacy, but from exchanged prisoners, who had come in from
Richmond, he has heard of a beautiful lady, an officer’s wife, and as
rumor said, a Northern woman, who visited them in prison, speaking kind
words of sympathy to all, and once binding up a drummer boy’s aching
head with a handkerchief, which he still retained as a memento of her,
and on whose corner could be faintly traced the name of “Agnes
Remington.”
Jessie’s eyes are full of tears as she says:
“Dear mamma. It’s months since I heard from her direct. Of course it was
she who was so good to the drummer boy. She cannot be so very bad,” and
Jessie glances triumphantly at Mrs. Noah, who, never having quite
overcome her dislike of Agnes, had sorely tried Jessie by declaring that
her mother “had found her level at last, and was just where she wanted
to be.”
Good Mrs. Noah! The ancient man, whose name she bore, would as soon have
thought of leaving the Ark, as she of turning traitor to her country,
and when she heard of the riotous mob raised against the draft, she
talked seriously of going in person to New York “to give ’em a piece of
her mind,” and for one whole day refused to speak to Flora’s husband,
because he was a “dum dimocrat,” and she presumed wanted the south to
beat. With the exception of Maddy, no one was more pleased to see Guy
than herself. He was _her boy_, the one she brought up, and with a
mother’s fervor she kissed his bronzed cheek, and told him how glad she
was to have him back.
With his boy on his sound arm, Guy disengaged himself from the noisy
group and went with Maddy to where the child he had never seen was just
beginning to show signs of resentment at being left so long alone.
“Lulu, sissy, papa’s come; this is papa,” the little boy cried, assuming
the honor of the introduction.
Lulu, as they called her, was not afraid of the tall soldier, and
stretching out her fat, white hands, went to him readily. Blue-eyed and
golden-haired, she bore but little resemblance to either father or
mother, but there was a sweet, beautiful face, of which Maddy had often
dreamed, but never seen, and whether it were fancy or not, Guy thought
it beamed upon him again in the infantile features of his little girl.
Parting lovingly her yellow curls and kissing her fair cheek, he said to
Maddy softly, just as he always spoke of _that_ dead one:
“Yes, darling, Margaret Holbrook is right—our baby daughter is very much
like our dear lost Lucy Atherstone.”
THE END.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.