"O eloquent and mightie Death! thou hast drawn together all the
farre-stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition
of men, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic
jacet!"--SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
A month passed. Anne saw nothing more, heard nothing more, but toiled on
in her daily round. She taught and sang. She answered Miss Lois's
letters and those of Père Michaux. There was no longer any danger in
writing to Weston, and she smiled sadly as she thought of the blind,
self-important days when she had believed otherwise. She now wrote to
her friends there, and letters came in return. Mrs. Barstow's pages were
filled with accounts of hospital work, for Donelson had been followed by
the great blood-shedding of Shiloh, and the West was dotted with
battle-fields.
She had allowed herself no newspapers, lest she should come upon his
name. But now she ordered one, and read it daily. What was it to her
even if she should come upon his name? She must learn to bear it, so
long as they trod the same earth. And one day she did come upon it; but
it was merely the two-line announcement that he had returned to the
front.
The great city had grown used to the war. There were few signs in its
busy streets that a pall hung over the borders of the South. The music
teacher on her rounds saw nothing save now and then the ranks of a
regiment passing through on its way to a train. Traffic went on
unchanged; pleasure was rampant as ever. The shrill voice of the newsboy
calling the details of the last battle was often the only reminder of
the dread reality. May moved onward. The Scheffels began to make those
little excursions into the country so dear to the German heart; but they
could not persuade the honored Fräulein to accompany them. For it was
not the real country to which they went, but only that suburban
imitation of it which thrives in the neighborhood of New York, and
Anne's heart was back on her island in the cool blue Northern straits.
Miss Lois was now at home again, and her letters were like a breath of
life to the homesick girl. Little André was better, and Père Michaux
came often to the church-house, and seemed glad to be with them again.
With them again! If she could but be with them too!--stand on the
heights among the beckoning larches, walk through the spicy aisles of
the arbor vitæ, sit under the gray old pines, listening to the wash of
the cool blue water below, at rest, afar, afar from all this weariness
and sadness and pain!
During these days Stonewall Jackson was making one of his brilliant
campaigns in the Valley, the Valley of Virginia, the beautiful valley of
the Shenandoah. On the last morning in May, while reading the war news,
Anne found in one corner a little list of dead. And there, in small
letters, which grew to great size, and inscribed themselves on the walls
of the room, one succeeding the other like a horrible dream, was the
name, Ward Heathcote. "Captain Ward Heathcote,---- New York Volunteers."
She turned the sheet; it was repeated in the latest news column, and
again in a notice on the local page. "Captain Ward Heathcote,---- New
York Volunteers, is reported among the slain," followed by those brief
items of birth, age, and general history which appall our eyes when we
first behold them on the printed page, and realize that they are now
public property, since they belong only to the dead.
It was early. She was at home in the half-house. She rose, put on her
bonnet and gloves, walked to the station, took the first train to the
city, and went to Helen.
She reached the house, and was denied entrance. Mrs. Heathcote could see
no one.
Was any one with her? Miss Teller?
Miss Teller, the man answered, was absent from the city; but a
telegraphic dispatch had been sent, and she was on her way home. There
was no relative at present with Mrs. Heathcote; friends she was not able
to see. And he looked with some curiosity at this plainly dressed young
person, who stood there quite unconscious, apparently, of the atmosphere
of his manner. And yet Mr. Simpson had a very well regulated manner,
founded upon the best models--a manner which had never heretofore failed
in its effect. With a preliminary cough, he began to close the door.
"Wait," said this young person, almost as though she had some authority.
She drew forth a little note-book, tore out a leaf, wrote a line upon
it, and handed him the improvised card. "Please take this to Mrs.
Heathcote," she said. "I think she will see me."
See her--see _her_--when already members of the highest circles of the
city had been refused! With a slight smile of superior scorn, Simpson
took the little slip, and leaving the stranger on the steps, went
within, partially closing the door behind him. But in a few minutes he
hastily returned, and with him was a sedate middle-aged woman, whom he
called Mrs. Bagshot, and who, although quiet in manner, seemed decidedly
to outrank him.
"Will you come with me, if you please?" she said deferentially,
addressing Anne. "Mrs. Heathcote would like to see you without delay."
She led the way with a quiet unhurrying step up a broad stairway, and
opened a door. In the darkened room, on a couch, a white form was
lying. Bagshot withdrew, and Anne, crossing the floor, sank down on her
knees beside the couch.
"Helen!" she said, in a broken voice; "oh, Helen! Helen!"
The white figure did not stir, save slowly to disengage one hand and
hold it out. But Anne, leaning forward, tenderly lifted the slight form
in her arms, and held it close to her breast.
"I could not help coming," she said. "Poor Helen! poor, poor Helen!"
She smoothed the fair hair away from the small face that lay still and
white upon her shoulder, and at that moment she pitied the stricken wife
so intensely that she forgot the rival, or rather made herself one with
her; for in death there is no rivalry, only a common grief. Helen did
not speak, but she moved closer to Anne, and Anne, holding her in her
arms, bent over her, soothing her with loving words, as though she had
been a little child.
The stranger remained with Mrs. Heathcote nearly two hours. Then she
went away, and Simpson, opening the door for her, noticed that her veil
was closely drawn, so that her face was concealed. She went up the
street to the end of the block, turned the corner, and disappeared. He
was still standing on the steps, taking a breath of fresh air, his
portly person and solemn face expressing, according to his idea, a
dignified grief appropriate to the occasion and the distinction of the
family he served--a family whose bereavements even were above the level
of ordinary sorrows, when his attention was attracted by the appearance
of a boy in uniform, bearing in his hand an orange-brown envelope. In
the possibilities of that well-known hue of hope and dread he forgot for
the moment even his occupation of arranging in his own mind elegant
formulas with which to answer the inquiries constantly made at the door
of the bereaved mansion. The boy ascended the steps; Bagshot, up stairs,
with her hand on the knob of Mrs. Heathcote's door, saw him, and came
down. The dispatch was for her mistress; she carried it to her. The next
instant a cry rang through the house. Captain Heathcote was safe.
The message was as follows:
* * * * *
"_To Mrs. Ward Heathcote:_
"My name given in list a mistake. Am here, wounded, but not dangerously.
Will write.
W. H."
* * * * *
It was sent from Harper's Ferry. And two hours later, Mrs. Heathcote,
accompanied by Bagshot, was on her way to Harper's Ferry.
It was a wild journey. If any man had possessed authority over Helen,
she would never have been allowed to make it; but no man did possess
authority. Mrs. Heathcote, having money, courage, and a will of steel,
asked advice from no one, did not even wait for Miss Teller, but
departed according to a swift purpose of her own, accompanied only by
Bagshot, who was, however, an efficient person, self-possessed, calm,
and accustomed to travelling. It was uncertain whether they would be
able to reach Harper's Ferry, but this uncertainty did not deter Helen:
she would go as far as she could. In her heart she was not without hope
that Mrs. Heathcote could relax the rules and military lines of even the
strictest general in the service. As to personal fear, she had none.
At Baltimore she was obliged to wait for an answer to the dispatch she
had sent on starting, and the answer was long in coming. To pass away
the time, she ordered a carriage and drove about the city; many persons
noticed her, and remembered her fair, delicate, and impatient face,
framed in its pale hair. At last the answer came. Captain Heathcote was
no longer at Harper's Ferry; he had been sent a short distance northward
to a town where there was a better hospital, and Mrs. Heathcote was
advised to go round by the way of Harrisburg, a route easier and safer,
if not in the end more direct as well.
She followed this advice, although against her will. She travelled
northward to Harrisburg, and then made a broad curve, and came southward
again, within sight of the green hills later to be brought into
unexpected and long-enduring fame--the hills around Gettysburg. But now
the whole region was fair with summer, smiling and peaceful; the farmers
were at work, and the grain was growing. After some delays she reached
the little town, with its barrack-like, white-washed hospital, where her
husband was installed under treatment for a wound in his right arm,
which, at first appearing serious, had now begun to improve so rapidly
that the surgeon in charge decided that he could soon travel northward,
and receive what further care he needed among the comforts of his own
home.
At the end of five days, therefore, they started, attended only by
Bagshot, that useful woman possessing, in addition to her other
qualifications, both skill and experience as a nurse.
They started; but the journey was soon ended. On the 11th of June the
world of New York was startled, its upper circles hotly excited, and one
obscure young teacher in a little suburban home paralyzed, by the great
headings in the morning newspapers. Mrs. Heathcote, wife of Captain Ward
Heathcote,---- New York Volunteers, while on her way homeward with her
husband, who was wounded in the Shenandoah Valley, had been found
murdered in her room in the country inn at Timloesville, where they were
passing the night. And the evidence pointed so strongly toward Captain
Heathcote that he had been arrested upon suspicion.
The city journals appended to this brief dispatch whatever details they
knew regarding the personal history of the suspected man and his victim.
Helen's beauty, the high position of both in society, and their large
circle of friends were spoken of; and in one account the wife's wealth,
left by will unconditionally to her husband, was significantly
mentioned. One of the larger journals, with the terrible and pitiless
impartiality of the great city dailies, added that if there had been a
plan, some part of it had signally failed. "A man of the ability of
Captain Heathcote would never have been caught otherwise in a web of
circumstantial evidence so close that it convinced even the pastoral
minds of the Timloesville officials. We do not wish, of course, to
prejudge this case; but from the half-accounts which have reached us, it
looks as though this blunder, whatever it may have been, was but another
proof of the eternal verity of the old saying, Murder will out."
It was the journal containing this sentence which Anne read. She had
heard the news of Heathcote's safety a few hours after her visit to
Helen. Only a few days had passed, and now her eyes were staring at the
horrible words that Helen was dead, and that her murderer was her own
husband.