the unburied remains of two soldiers,--two skeletons side by side, two
skulls almost touching each other, like the cheeks of sleepers! I came
upon them unawares as I picked my way among the scrub oaks. I knew that
scores of such sights could be seen here a few weeks before; but the
United States Government had sent to have its unburied dead collected
together in the two national cemeteries of the Wilderness; and I had
hoped the work was faithfully done.
"They was No'th-Carolinians; that's why they didn't bury 'em," said
Elijah, after a careful examination of the buttons fallen from the
rotted clothing.
The ground where they lay had been fought over repeatedly, and the dead
of both sides had fallen there. The buttons may, therefore, have told a
true story: North-Carolinians they may have been: yet I could not
believe that the true reason why they had not been decently interred. It
must have been that these bodies, and others we found afterwards, were
overlooked by the party sent to construct the cemeteries. It was
shameful negligence, to say the least.
The cemetery was near by,--a little clearing in the woods by the
roadside, thirty yards square, surrounded by a picket-fence, and
comprising seventy trenches, each containing the remains of I know not
how many dead. Each trench was marked with a headboard, inscribed with
the invariable words,--
"Unknown United States soldiers, killed May, 1864."
Elijah, to whom I read the Inscription, said, pertinently, that the
words, _United States soldiers_ indicated plainly that it had not been
the intention to bury Rebels there. No doubt: but these might at least
have been buried in the woods where they fell.
As a grim sarcasm on this neglect, somebody had flung three human
skulls, picked up in the woods, over the paling, into the cemetery,
where they lay blanching among the graves.
Close by the southeast corner of the fence were three or four Rebel
graves, with old headboards. Elijah called my attention to them, and
wished me to read what the headboards said. The main fact indicated was,
that those buried there were North-Carolinians. Elijah considered this
somehow corroborative of his theory derived from the buttons. The graves
were shallow, and the settling of the earth over the bodies had left the
feet of one of the poor fellows sticking out.
The shadows which darkened the woods, and the ominous thunder-growls,
culminated in a shower. Elijah crawled under his wagon; I sought the
shelter of a tree: the horse champed his fodder, and we ate our
luncheon. How quietly upon the leaves, how softly upon the graves of the
cemetery, fell the perpendicular rain! The clouds parted, and a burst of
sunlight smote the Wilderness; the rain still poured, but every drop was
illumined, and I seemed standing in a shower of silver meteors.
The rain over and luncheon finished, I looked about for some solace to
my palate after the dry sandwiches, moistened only by the drippings from
the tree,--seeking a dessert in the Wilderness. Summer grapes hung their
just ripened clusters from the vine-laden saplings, and the chincapin
bushes were starred with opening burrs. I followed a woodland path,
embowered with the glistening boughs, and plucked, and ate, and mused.
The ground was level, and singularly free from the accumulations of
twigs, branches, and old leaves, with which forests usually abound. I
noticed, however, many charred sticks and half-burnt roots and logs.
Then the terrible recollection overtook me: these were the woods that
were on fire during the battle. I called Elijah.
"Yes, all this was a flame of fire while the fight was go'n' on. It was
full of dead and wounded men. Cook and Stevens, farmers over hyer, men I
know, heard the screams of the poor fellahs burnin' up, and come and
dragged many a one out of the fire, and laid 'em in the road."
The woods were full of Rebel graves, with here and there a heap of
half-covered bones, where several of the dead had been hurriedly buried
together.
I had seen enough. We returned to the cemetery. Elijah hitched up his
horse, and we drove back along the plank road, cheered by a rainbow
which spanned the Wilderness and moved its bright arch onward over
Chancellorsville towards Fredericksburg, brightening and fading, and
brightening still again, like the hope which gladdened the nation's eye
after Grant's victory.
THE BELLS OF LYNN, HEARD AT NAHANT.
O curfew of the setting sun! O Bells of Lynn!
O requiem of the dying day! O Bells of Lynn!
From the dark belfries of yon cloud-cathedral wafted,
Your sounds aerial seem to float, O Bells of Lynn!
Borne on the evening wind across the crimson twilight,
O'er land and sea they rise and fall, O Bells of Lynn!
The fisherman in his boat, far out beyond the headland,
Listens, and leisurely rows ashore, O Bells of Lynn!
Over the shining sands the wandering cattle homeward
Follow each other at your call, O Bells of Lynn!
The distant lighthouse hears, and with his flaming signal
Answers you, passing the watchword on, O Bells of Lynn!
And down the darkening coast run the tumultuous surges,
And clap their hands, and shout to you, O Bells of Lynn!
Till from the shuddering sea, with your wild incantations,
Ye summon up the spectral moon, O Bells of Lynn!
And startled at the sight, like the weird woman of Endor,
Ye cry aloud, and then are still, O Bells of Lynn!
THE HIGH TIDE OF DECEMBER.
Breakfast was ready. Captain Lufflin, who, like most retired old salts,
had a healthy stomach, and humored it, crossed and uncrossed his stumpy
little legs, and pulled his gray moustache complacently, when he caught
the first sniff of the hot coffee and broiling beefsteak.
He had been down on the foggy beach, (for the high winter tides were
worth watching on that lonely coast,) and was now quietly drying his
feet before the crackling wood-fire in the dining-room grate; but even
Ann, (the clam-digger's daughter, promoted to cook,) as she bustled in
and out, had seen the Captain was out of temper, as he waited, frowning
portentously, and wagging his bald head now and then as if a wasp stung
it.
Lufflin, who aboard ship would have risked a thousand lives on his own
cool judgment, had been uneasy and irritable for two months back, ever
since Mrs. Jacobus had written to him about buying this house for her.
"It was to be a Christmas gift from her to her husband," she wrote.
"She wanted it, therefore, kept a secret from him. Any quiet corner
along the coast which they could make into a home." Adding something
about M. Jacobus "being fagged out with work, and needing rest," at
which Lufflin shook his head. The Captain knew, that, bookworm and
picture-maniac though he might be, Jacobus had managed to squander, in
some unaccountable way, his own and his wife's fortune. So much of their
history had got back to the fishing-town where she had lived when a
child. People even hinted that they had been almost starving latterly in
New York. However that might be, Old Lufflin knew that the sum she
remitted to him was the last they had left; and beyond this, he had a
shrewd suspicion that in the shipwreck the Jacobuses had made of life,
something of more worth than money had been lost, and that this home she
talked of was most probably a last effort to bury some shameful secret.
The Captain, in his disgust at the unknown bookworm, fretted under the
whole affair. "It's not in my line," he would growl. "It's a cursed
bore. Poor Charlotte! she used to swim like a frog in the inlet there,
when she was only eleven. She's little heart for swimming now, it's
likely!" And would begin his search with re-doubled vigor.
This house, a gray stone cottage of five or six rooms, in the most
solitary part of the lee-coast, had been vacant for some time, and was
to be sold cheap. Lufflin bought and furnished it in his own name; and
then, as she directed, asked the Professor and his wife down to spend
the Christmas holidays with him. He was anxious and awkward as a
school-boy when they arrived the night before.
"It was too tough a job for you to set me, Charlotte," he grumbled. "How
was I to choose a home for a man that lives, they say, by the sight of
his eyes and the hearing of his ears? Water's water to me, and rocks
rocks,"--trotting after her as she went through the house in silence,
ending the survey with two or three sharp, decisive nods, and a quick,
pleased little laugh.
"Satisfied? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We've had a good many houses, Jerome
and I; but this is home."
The Captain understood her.
In the morning, however, he felt all his doubts return. Mrs. Jacobus's
quick, firm step sounded above, below him; presently she came in with a
jug of yellow cream, and set it on the table, adjusting the dishes,
putting a glass of holly in the middle, opening the window-curtains to
let the cold, gray, wintry light fall on the white cloth and pretty blue
china service.
"Those oysters now?" said the Captain, anxiously. "Ann's a poor cook."
"She's clean as a Shaker, though. But I broiled them myself,"--laughing
to herself to see his relieved face.
"They're all right, then, Charlotte?"
"Yes."
She would give her mind to the oysters, he knew. It had been her way to
put a little of her brains and blood into all her jobs in life,
finishing each with a self-satisfied little nod. No wonder that she was
worn, now that she was a middle-aged woman.
"She's lost something, Lotty has since I knew her," he thought, watching
the light figure in its dark blue dress moving about; "but she's the
right stuff for home use,"--with some vague idea in his old salt-water
brain of delicate, incomplete faces suiting best with moonlight and
country strolls, and of the sparkle of dinner-lights and brilliant eyes
agreeing together, but that a face like Charlotte's was the one for the
breakfast-table. The shrewd, kindly eyes, the color on her face, and the
laugh came on you as fresh as a child's,--if her hair was a bit gray.
She had gone to the bay-window that overlooked the stretch of coast on
which the heavy winter tide was coming in, and grown silent watching it.
The Captain called to her; he wanted nothing to put the breakfast back
this morning. And he fancied that to a woman who had been a leader in
the world of culture and refinement yonder this sky and loud foreboding
surf might have some meaning of which he knew nothing.
"Nature's voices, eh?" coming to her side.
Some expression that had held her face suddenly escaped it.
"I am watching for Jerome. Yonder he comes with your fisherman, by the
inlet,"--pointing to two dark figures in the mist crossing the sands
below.
The house stood on a ledge, facing the sea: ramparts of rock, gray and
threatening in this light, running down on either side, and shutting out
all outlook but that of the dull, obstinate stretch of sand on which the
sea had beaten and fallen back for centuries, with the same baffled,
melancholy cry. Behind the house were clumps of pines and cedars. Nature
had done all she could in wringing out whatever green and lusty life was
left in rocks and sand to make the place home-like and cheerful. Beside
the trees, there was a patch of kitchen-garden back of the house, a
grape-vine or two on the walls, trailing moss hanging to its eaves,--the
delicate web-like moss that grows along this coast out of dead wood;
even the beach rocks glowed into colors,--dark browns, purples, and
reds.
But for all these it needed summer and sunshine. On this, the day before
Christmas, the house and the land about it were smothered in a cold
mist: only the shivering sea beyond had voice or motion.
"It's a dull, uncanny place, Mrs. Jacobus," said Lufflin, anxiously. "It
looks like a prison to me to-day. What if we've made a mistake?"
"We have made no mistake," calmly.
"Indoors," he persisted, "the house is cheerful enough. But it's a rough
coast, and the oyster-dredgers and wrackers hint that the house be n't
above highest water-mark. They're a wild pack, them wrackers. I doubt
it's a gloomy home I've picked for M. Jacobus, after all his"--
Something in her face silenced him.
"You did right, Uncle George," she answered, cheerfully.
But the pleasant eyes he had liked so much last night he noticed were
turned to the sea now with a hard look, new to him, begotten both of
great pain and obstinate endurance.
"Of course you know, Charlotte,--of course. God knows I want to do
what's for the best."
He hesitated, then went on briskly, taking courage.
"See now, Lotty, I'm an old fellow. I've walked you to sleep many's the
night, being your father's chum, and living in his house till the day of
his death. I'd like you to know I'm a true friend. If so be as you're in
trouble, you must tell me. If this house is a sort of hiding, as I've
thought once or twice, speak the word, and there's nobody shall get
below Barnegat, to disturb it, or"--
Mrs. Jacobus faced him suddenly,--the nerves in her body seeming to
stiffen, her half-shut eyes fixed on his. The Captain's quailed.
"You mean Jerome?" in a low voice.
He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the
window,--holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused
in her.
"You mean well," she said, quietly, after a pause. "But you do not know
my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect
it,"--remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she
had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old
Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given.
"How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the
Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague
whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone
which both you and he wished forgotten."
She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it
lost color, and that the delicate jaws closed with the firmness of a
steel spring.
"There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two.
The old man came close to her after a while, and put his hand gently on
her hair; streaked with gray as it was, she seemed nothing but a child
to him still.
"You're growing like your mother, Lotty," he said.
After a long while she spoke again, but under her breath, as if half
talking to herself.
"We had a child once, Jerome and I," she said.
"I know," the Captain rejoined, quickly turning his eyes from her face,
and, after waiting for her to go on, added, "Never but the one,--I
know."
"It was a boy,--little Tom."
There was a sudden choking gulp in the mother's throat; she had
overrated her strength a little. The old man looked steadily out to sea,
and took no notice.
"They never were apart, Jerome and the boy," she went on at last,
firmly; "and when I would see them at work with their play-tools, or
romping together, I used to wonder which of the two had the most simple,
affectionate nature, or knew less of the ways of the world."
Lufflin said nothing to this defence. He was annoyed at himself for
having vexed her,--conscious and remorseful for any wrong he had done M.
Jacobus, but with a stronger suspicion than before that he had galled
some old wound in her memory. Whatever the secret might be, it had made
her feeling for her husband, he saw, as tender and keen with pain as
that for the little child she had lost, and whose place none had ever
come to fill.
"I've often thought, too, that when the time comes"--
She stopped abruptly.
"Yes, Charlotte,"--to hide her effort to control herself.
"He's gone, Tom is, you know,--eleven years ago, now. But when the time
comes for Jerome to see his boy again, I've often thought _he_ would
have no reason to dread the child's eyes. It's different with me. But
they may say of my husband what they will, my baby need not be afraid to
lay his head upon his father's breast. He needn't be afraid."
The Captain took up the cold hand that was nervously thrumming on the
window-sill, and held it quiet, averting his eyes from her face,
distorted with dry, silent weeping.
"It's different with me," she cried, "Sometimes I think, Uncle George,
it would be better if I'd never see my boy again. I'm sharper and
coarser than other women. I've had to rub with the world."
Lufflin was a queer old fellow. He did not tell her these were but the
morbid fancies of an hysterical woman, or blame himself for rousing
them. He muttered something about low tide and George Cathcart, and
bustled off down the stairs. She had a stronger mind than he, he
suspected; silence and her own will would bring her to herself quicker
than any comfort of his could do.
He proved to be right. She did not notice his going; stood at first
looking into the dark bank of sea-horizon, as if she would have forced
out of that vague Beyond where her child had gone the truth of all that
had hurt her in her life. The dull thud of the retreating tide kept time
to her thoughts,--finally came into them: it was so natural for her mind
to swing back into whatever was real and at hand.
Not that she forgot the little fellow whose restless feet and hands were
quiet at last in the graveyard at Salem: she never forgot him; since
they laid him there, the thought of him had sounded in every day of her
busy life like a faint hymn sung by lips far away, holy and calm,--a
story of God in it.
But she held it down; watched the tide go out, measuring each sullen
sweep with calculating eyes: the old swimming and fishing education in
the inlet had not worn out its effect on her.
"The wreckers talk folly," she said; "no tide could touch the
house,"--leaning farther out to see the two approaching figures go into
the doorway beneath.
One man looked up, waving his hat as he passed, and she drew in her
head with a sudden blush and a dewy light in her eyes, catching her
breath.
"I have made no mistake," she thought, vehemently. "Look in his face! It
is the right home for Jerome."
As she listened to the footsteps coming up the stairway, she moved
uneasily about the room, touching almost every article in it with the
eager fondness of a child: she knew what it had cost her; for the house
had been paid for by money she had earned; it seemed as if she could
remember now every seam she had stitched, every page she had
copied,--the days of heat and sickness and weariness, when she had
almost given up in despair.
That was all over now; she could put her hand on the result in actual
stone and mortar; and as she thanked God for it, she went about,
woman-like, touching and looking for the hundredth time to enjoy it more
utterly. Nothing was too trivial to give her pleasure: she measured the
depth of the window-frames with her arm, tested the grain of the doors,
felt the texture of the curtains; how warm and clear a crimson they
were!--remembering how becoming they would be, and touching her worn
cheeks with a quick smile.
She peered through into the open door from the dining-room into the room
beyond: she meant that for the library; planning rapidly where on the
gray walls their one or two pictures could hang,--how Jerome's old desk
would fit into one corner, and her work-table in the other: the
book-shelves were below, and the books and what other home treasures she
had been able to smuggle with her; she would arrange them all to-night,
after he was in bed.
In New York they lived in a crowded tenement-house, out of which Old
Jacobus, as the boys called him, went to give his daily lessons. How he
had argued and prosed for weeks as to whether they could afford these
few days! although it was vacation, and Lufflin had sent free passes for
the road. To-morrow he would know that the holiday would last always,
and that the book could be finished which was to bring them bread.
Madame Jacobus knitted her brows, counting for the twentieth time how
many months the money she had would last: long enough for the book to be
done, provisions were so cheap here.
So would they start afresh, thank God! There would be nothing here to
tempt him to----The old look of defiance flashed over her face.
"It was no crime," she said, half aloud; and just then the door-knob
turned.
Captain Lufflin, who had left her with conscience and grief both at work
with her a few minutes before, opened the door with a half-scared look,
pushing Jacobus before him, whose sleeve she caught eagerly, bidding him
good-morning with a laugh.
"God bless us all!" said Lufflin. "The ways of women!"
M. Jacobus had a fisherman's corduroy trousers and red shirt hung on
him, as one might say. He made a formal apology to Madame for sitting
down to breakfast in them.
"But I like to clothe myself according to my occupation," he said to
Lufflin, gravely. "I have begun at dawn to make my holiday, the time is
so short; I feel myself quite of the sea already."
The clothes being too small for him, his gaunt legs and bony neck
protruded above and below, capped by a brown, honest, homely face, over
which thin, iron-gray hairs straggled.
"A younger man than I expected to see," thought the Captain; "but that's
one of the faces that never grows old."
M. Jacobus munched his breakfast in silence, and then, clearing a space
on the table, dragged out of his pocket one or two crabs, a sea-horse
finger-length, and a general mess of slimy legs and tails.
"_Cancer pagurus! Cirripedes!_" triumphantly spreading them on the
table-cloth. "The fruits of my morning's labor, except _Hippcampus
brevirostris_, vulgarly called Sea-Horse, which stood to me in the sum
of forty cents: it shall be saved in other modes of expenditure,--say
shoes,"--with a deprecating glance at his wife.
"Yes, Jerome," her eyes fixed, hungrily, on the childish delight in his
face.
Lufflin began to perceive now for what she had worked; he chafed his
whiskers, and entered into the spirit of the thing with zest.
"You'd call me a happy man, now, Mounchere, to be the owner of this bit
of ground, eh?"
"I can conceive," said the Professor, gravely, catching his squirming
prey, and tying them up in a handkerchief,--"I can conceive no better
abode than this for a man of _esprit_,--of what you call stamina in
mind. His wants are little; he rests, he works, he studies books,
Nature. She is greatly good to him in this place; she opens her most
delicate secrets; she gives to him grandeur, beauty, from full hands."
"She fills his stomach, too," said the Captain, hastily. "No better
fishing on the coast, not to mention clams and oysters. Yes, Mounchere,"
after a pause, as they rose from table, "Nature's grand here, as you
say,--or God, which is the same thing. If a man don't come nearer to Him
by a day's outlook on yon sea than by years of town-life, it's because
his eyes aren't worth the having."
M. Jacobus stretched his long neck to look out at the dull, creeping,
moaning waste without, his warm Gallic blood shivering with a vague idea
that the relentless, inexorable Thing was no bad symbol of the Puritan's
God.
"Ah, _le bon Dieu!_" he muttered. "All that is best in men's nature has
been given to make up that image,--and all that is most cruel."
"Eh? yes," said the Captain, not understanding, but wagging his bald
head wisely.
"I will go now and preserve my specimens," said the Professor, "and then
join our friend George below,--with your permission, Madame? He is but a
fisher for the oyster, but I find in him a man of many facts."
When he had mounted to his chamber and secured his prey in a jar,
however, he did not return to George Cathcart, but stood irresolute, his
hands clasped behind his back, the shiny boatman's hat he wore pulled
over his eyes.
Twelve years ago the poor Frenchman and his son had planned this coming
to the sea: the boy used to get into his father's bed by dawn to talk it
over snugly. It came to be their grand scheme and hope for the future;
for neither the father nor little Tom had intellects of a high achieving
order. Jacobus had never, I suppose, considered whether his son had
genius or not, or what he was to do in the world: to get the boy out of
the poisonous city, to see his first look at the ocean, to watch the
sturdy little rogue fight the breakers, fish, swim, net for crabs, was
about the highest pleasure which the simple old man had ever pictured
for them. Now the holiday had come for him; and Tom----
He walked about the room, glancing unsteadily from side to side, as if
in search of something lost. The sick, intolerable loneliness of those
first days after Tom died came back to him.
"_Mon fils! mon fils!_" he muttered once, holding his hand to his side.