two, and then took up the thread of his discourse where he had left off
describing his sending Priscilla Thorburn home. "I brought her, with
my man's help, into the house, and had her put in bed. It was plainly
nothing but a faint; but she went from one fainting spell into another,
and when I had finally brought her round, the fainting spell changed
into convulsions. For hours I worked with her. At last I stopped them,
and got her under the influence of an opiate. I was tired myself, and
went to bed to get a few hours' sleep, leaving word for Curtis to be
called. In the middle of the night I was waked by Jane standing by my
bedside, looking frightened out of her wits. 'Do, pray, Dr. Forman,
come to the strange lady.' When I got to the room she was lying in the
bed, weak, but perfectly conscious. She intimated to me that she wished
to say something to me privately. Of course I tried to induce her to
put it off, but she was determined.
"I saw that she was no ordinary woman--she had been beautiful--and
she was still comely. And she had that air of melancholy command that
those who are in the crisis of tremendous misfortunes only have. So I
sent Jane out of the room. Then she said, in the calmest possible way,
'Doctor, I am the first wife of Edmund Thorburn.' I was incredulous,
and thought her crazy, the more so that the next thing she told was
that she had been for the last six years in a lunatic asylum. But when
she told me her story I saw that she was at that moment as sane as I
was. And such a story!" Dr. Forman, a stolid man usually, took out his
handkerchief and buried his face in it, and an occasional sob escaped
from him. Dr. Sunbury put his hand to his eyes, as the doctor gasped
out at intervals. "They were so happy! She had given up everything to
marry him, and wanted him to give up his parish because it did not
suit him, and to take some such charge as East Harrowby, and to share
his poverty with him--she, delicately nurtured and finely bred. And
then came the terrible illness, and a still more terrible blank; and
then, after years which are as nothing in her mind, a return, an
awakening, a resurrection to life and the most perfect felicity, so
she thought--poor thing, poor thing!--and when she got here, to East
Harrowby, she was so overcome with the happiness in store for them,
that she felt her heart would burst if she saw him too suddenly--she
wandered about, waiting until dusk to go to his house, and to throw
herself in her husband's arms--"
Dr. Forman paused for a long time. Then presently recovering himself,
he suddenly fell into his calm, professional tone.
"No family taint--violent fever, followed by more violent insanity,
and likely to result in a cure." After a moment he continued: "She, of
course, remembered nothing of her first attack. She called it insanity;
nothing insane in her way of speaking of it, using just the same terms
you or I would, without evasion, and supposes now that from certain
faint recollections her cure had begun about the time of the asylum
fire. She remembers something of the scene, and the next thing finding
herself shivering and half clad in a railway train. She remembers
nothing more until she became an inmate of the Central Lunatic Asylum.
There were no means of identifying her for a long time. She had been
supplied with clothes by charitable people on the train. No inquiries
were made about her, which she could not understand until I told her of
her supposed death. She was called Mrs. March, because it was in the
month of March that she was brought to the asylum. Her recovery was
gradual, but it is a common experience with such persons that their own
names and individuality is the last for the restored mind to grasp.
About six months ago she became perfectly herself. She felt an entirely
sane and rational doubt of herself, until time had tested it; but about
a month ago she gave such information of herself as led to a letter
being written to Brightwood, where Thorburn had a church at the time of
her illness. Thorburn was not there, but an answer was received saying
he was at East Harrowby. They wrote again. That letter could never
have been delivered, and, after waiting four weeks for an answer, Mrs.
Thorburn persuaded the superintendent to allow her to come here with an
attendant to find her friends. The attendant found some acquaintances,
and began to gossip with them. Mrs. Thorburn tells me that she felt
shame and horror at returning to her husband's house accompanied by a
keeper; so she slipped off, and met Priscilla. You know the rest."
Dr. Sunbury sat looking like a man paralyzed. "Well?"
"You must send Thorburn here to-night."
Dr. Sunbury rose and walked restlessly about the little office.
"To-night," repeated Dr. Forman; "for I don't think she'll last beyond
to-morrow."
"Why, what's the matter with her?" asked Dr. Sunbury, pausing in his
troubled walk.
"Nothing but death," answered Dr. Forman. "Skill can do nothing for
that woman. She ought to have rallied from the fainting spells;
instead, she went off into convulsions. She ought to have rallied from
the convulsions; instead, she is sinking as fast as any mortal I ever
saw. Poor thing, so pretty, so gentle!"
It was arranged that Mr. Thorburn was to be sent for; and to Dr.
Sunbury was left the dreadful task of telling him the truth.
An hour after that, Dr. Sunbury, thinking miserably of poor Priscilla
and the unhappy creature up-stairs, heard the wheels of Dr. Forman's
buggy grinding on the gravel outside, and Mr. Thorburn's quick, firm
step as he entered the house. Dr. Sunbury met him with a sinking heart,
and a cold tremor that shook him like an aspen.
"I came at once, as you see, my friend," began Thorburn cheerily. And
then looking closer at Dr. Sunbury's white face, said, "Why, what is
the matter?"
Dr. Sunbury, without a word, led him back into the little office, and
carefully closed the door. "Thorburn," he said, "I believe you to be a
man and a Christian. Call up, therefore, all your manhood, and all your
dependence on God, to bear what I have to tell you."
Mr. Thorburn's dark skin grew a shade darker at these words, but he
made no reply, only looking Dr. Sunbury full in the eye.
"Priscilla told you, perhaps--of a woman fainting--in the road--Tuesday
afternoon," Dr. Sunbury got his words out in gasps.
"Yes, yes."
"She is now in this house. Thorburn, she is--the wife you supposed
dead."
Mr. Thorburn took in as quickly what had been told him as his dying
wife had done. He rose from his chair; the strong man reeled and fell,
with a deep groan, and his arms outstretched over the doctor's study
table. Dr. Sunbury made no offer of consolation. He covered his face
with his hands and wept.
After a pause, Thorburn said: "We must do what is right. My poor
Priscilla!"
He suddenly checked himself. Ah, it was but a little while since he had
known Priscilla--and the woman up-stairs was the wife of his youth. And
he had loved her well. But which one of us would rejoice at having the
dead to rise from their graves?
"Will you not see--" said Dr. Sunbury, after a short silence, pointing
overhead, where the dying Mrs. Thorburn lay.
"Now? Not yet, not yet. Give me a moment, for God's sake."
"But she is dying; she has not long that she can wait for you."
Thorburn rose at once. "Tell me how it was, before I see her," he asked.
In a few words Dr. Sunbury told him.
Just then Dr. Forman appeared. "You had best go now," he said to
Thorburn.
Dr. Sunbury took Mr. Thorburn's arm and led him up-stairs. Dr. Forman
preceded them. As they reached the door, Thorburn caught Dr. Forman's
wrist, his face quite ashy and his eyes wild, as if to ask for a
moment's grace; but it was too late, the door was open, and Dr. Forman
had beckoned to the nurse to leave the bedside. Thorburn closed the
door after him, and walking to the bed, found himself alone with the
woman that to him had risen from the dead.
"Forgive me! Forgive me!" was all that Thorburn could say.
"Forgive you?" asked the wife, in her old sweet voice. "Why should I
not forgive you? Only, you must pity me. Think! six years of agony, to
return and find--I thought until now that it was easier to die than
live," she continued, feebly. "It would save so much misery if death
should free you from me."
"Eleanor! Eleanor!"
"And in one moment--in the twinkling of an eye, I was dashed from the
most perfect happiness into the most terrible misery. I thought my home
was waiting for me; I thought my husband's heart yearned for me--and
without one word of warning--I beheld myself an outcast on the face of
the earth--a being whose death would bless the man she loved!"
Her voice grew strong in its intensity as she spoke. Thorburn leaned on
the bed, his arm around her, and great drops upon his pallid face. A
groan burst from him. The dying can not weep, but there was a terrible
and piercing pity for herself and for him in Mrs. Thorburn's uncertain
voice and her misty eyes. Thorburn tried to tell her that he had not
forgotten her--that he loved her when he thought her dead--but it was
only half expressed, and Mrs. Thorburn checked him gently.
"We have only a little while to be together," she said. "I felt myself
to be dying the instant I felt myself to be alive. I have been dying
for three days--and I tried to die without seeing you--but I could
not--I could not!"
Down-stairs Dr. Sunbury and Dr. Forman conversed in whispers, Dr.
Forman holding his watch in his hand. On the stroke of the half-hour he
went up-stairs. As he entered the room he saw Thorburn half leaning on
the bed, while Mrs. Thorburn's head rested on his breast. The doctor
took one keen look at his patient, and suddenly whipping out his
lancet, called, loudly:
"Jane! Jane! come at once. I want to give Mrs. Thorburn a hypoderm of
brandy."
Dr. Sunbury heard the call, and came too. He obeyed a look from the
doctor, and taking Thorburn by the arm, almost dragged him from
the room. Jane came with the brandy, with salts, with the doctor's
electrical appliances; but it was too late. Mrs. Thorburn breathed
an hour or two longer, and then, without a word, a look, or a sigh,
stopped breathing.
"It is all over," said Dr. Forman, going out on the landing to speak to
Dr. Sunbury.
Thorburn went away the night of his wife's death.
To Dr. Sunbury was intrusted the terrible task of telling Priscilla. He
came forth from that interview ten years older, and tottering as he
walked.
The affair was hushed up, and the world at large was no wiser about it.
Thorburn and Priscilla left East Harrowby, ostensibly on account of
Thorburn's breaking down. Before they left, a marriage ceremony, the
most painful that could be imagined, was performed between them in Dr.
Sunbury's study, with Dr. Forman for a witness.
But never afterward were Thorburn and Priscilla happy. They were
good, they loved each other, they were thrown upon each other for
comfort--but between them sat the ghost of the dead woman, who had come
to claim her happiness, and found another woman in possession of it.
KAINTUCK.
The sergeant's ruddy, handsome face was the only cheerful object
within the prison yard as he walked up and down, crossing the sentry's
beat. The yard was small--it was at the back of the gloomy brick
building--and only one narrow window looked out upon it. The day was
dark and dull. The soldier marching up and down, clutching his musket,
looked sulky and cold, and he wondered why a man like Sergeant Heywood,
who didn't have to do sentry duty, should be pacing back and forth for
two hours at a stretch.
The sight of a prisoner's face at the barred window did not add to the
cheerfulness of the surroundings. The face was curiously twisted and
distorted by a shot that had torn through the jaw. It would have been
repulsive but for the eyes--eyes pathetic, curious, patient, almost the
color of the faded "butternut" clothes of the prisoner. As soon as the
sergeant saw the poor face at the window he halted in his walk, and
called out, cheerily, "Hello, Kaintuck!"
"Hello!" responded Kaintuck, with equal cheeriness, but in a thin,
soft voice, such as might be expected to come out of his narrow chest.
"How are you to-day?" continued the sergeant.
"Purty well, considerin'," answered Kaintuck. "Las' night I didn't
sleep very well. This here old jaw got to achin'; an', by golly,
sergeant, she kin everlastin' ache when she starts in! Ef it hadn't ben
for that terbacker you give me yesterday, I'll 'low I'd had a sorter
onpleasant time. But it was a comfort, cert'n'y. Before I lit my pipe
it seemed like I never was goin' ter see Polly an' the kid no more,
that you blarsted Yankees was a-goin' ter whip us, spite o' General
Lee, an' that this here jaw was a-goin' ter come all ter pieces. But I
hadn't hardly lighted that pipe, sir, before I seen Polly an' the kid
right before me, lookin' peart an' gay, an' Marse Bob had done licked
you all like the devil, an' my jaw was all right, an' goin' ter stay
so. That's what terbacker does for a man."
The sergeant accepted these indications of the prisoner's sympathies
with great good-humor.
"I've got some more of that same brand," said he; "it affects me
kinder the same way too. When I smoke, it seems to me General Grant is
marchin' into Richmond, and the bands is playin' 'Yankee Doodle,' and
I'm a colonel ridin' at the head of my regiment."
Kaintuck smiled at this. His smile was a mere contortion, but his deep
strange eyes smiled luminously.
"I reckon it's a kinder universal comforter. Did it bring your wife and
your kids right up before you?"
The sergeant was a great strapping fellow, six feet high; but at this
pleasantry he blushed like a girl.
"I ain't got a wife, nor kids either; but--"
"You've got a girl, hain't you? Come, sergeant, let's hear 'bout it.
It's mighty lonesome somehow in this Government hotel."
The sergeant laughed, and came closer to the window. Just then a streak
of sunlight fell upon him, as he stood with one foot advanced and his
stalwart arms crossed; but the prison window and Kaintuck remained
in the gloom. The sergeant pulled his cap down over his eyes quite
bashfully, and cleared his throat.
"Now, I'm talking confidential, Kaintuck--"
"An' you don't want me to tell the agreeable an' amusin' companions I
have in here," continued Kaintuck, in the same soft, slow voice. "Fac'
is, when a man's been in prison fur eighteen months, an' never had a
soul but them doctors ter take no more notice of him ner a dog, excep'
yourself, sergeant--"
Kaintuck stopped. The retrospect struck him unpleasantly.
"Well, I'm goin' to tell you what I ain't told even to my folks at
home. I've got a girl--an' she's only twenty-one years old, an' a
widder--an' the biggest rebel, b'gosh--"
The sergeant brought all this out in jerks, intermingled with
suppressed laughter; and when he announced the last fact, Kaintuck
joined in his hilarity.
"Blamed if women ain't the queerest lot," remarked Kaintuck, chuckling.
"You bet," assented the sergeant, still laughing. "You oughter heard
that gal sass me. There she was, all by herself in a little house, with
a kid about two years old, an' when I come politely to tell her I'd
take care the men didn't milk her cow or take her chickens, and told
her she needn't be afraid of anything, she stood in her door, with that
baby in her arms, and fairly poured hot shot into me. 'I'm a soldier's
widow,' she says, her eyes blazing. 'Do you think I know what it is
to be afraid of _you_? Oh, if this child only was a man to shoulder
his dead father's musket!' Now, you know, Kaintuck, that kind o' talk
from a poor young thing all dressed in black breaks a man all up. So I
just kep' my cap in my hand, and I says, 'Madam, I respect a soldier's
widow, no matter which side the soldier fought on, and whether you'll
agree or not, I'll make it my business to see that you'll have some
kind of protection.' We was in winter quarters then, about a mile from
her house. You know, men is hard to manage sometimes, and if I hadn't
spoke to some of the officers, the poor thing's little all in the way
of chickens and such would have gone. But I told my cap'n about it, and
that her husband was killed in the rebel army, and he settled it so
that not a man dared to be seen near that hen roost and cow pasture.
But I don't know what she'd 'a done for wood if I hadn't looked out for
her. I'd drop an armful, and knock at the door, and she'd open it. Then
I'd say, 'Will you please to tell me where to put this?' 'Anywhere you
like,' she'd say, and go on with her knittin' an' sewin'. It kinder
nettled me at first, but she looked so young and pitiful, I couldn't
get mad with her. Then somehow that young one got almighty fond of me.
Every time I'd pass by that little house--and I got to goin' by purty
often--he'd come toddlin' out--he was a handsome youngster--and he'd
howl like tarnation if I didn't take him up in my arms. At first his
mother--her name's Mary--would look black at me; but one day the little
feller took my cap out of my hand, and tried to put it on his own head.
'No, sir,' says I. 'The lady yonder'll think you're poisoned if you put
a blue cap on your head.' At that she laughed. I never seen her laugh
before."
Kaintuck had pressed his face close to the bars of the window to hear
the sergeant's story by this time, and the sergeant had advanced a step
or two so that they could talk in a low voice.
"Go on," said Kaintuck. "How did you git the better of her at last?"
"I don't know," answered the sergeant, pulling his cap down a little
farther yet, and showing his white teeth in a smile. "First time I told
her she was pretty--by George!"
The sergeant stopped short, completely overcome by the recollection.
"Kaintuck, she don't more'n come up to my shoulder, an' she weighs
about a hundred pounds, but I thought she was going to whip me then and
there. I've been scared nearly to death two or three times during this
unpleasantness, but I swear, Kaintuck, if that little widder wasn't
the first rebel that started me on the dead run, without makin' some
sort of a show of fightin'. However, I felt so mean about showing the
white feather that I just determined I wasn't going to be stampeded
that way again. So I braced up, an' put on my best uniform, an' went to
see her again. She says, 'I'm a rebel, and I'm bound to be one always.'
'That's all right,' says I, 'bein' you're nothin' but a woman, and a
mighty little one at that, and ma'am,' says I, 'this thing's goin' to
be decided without the slightest reference to which side you are on.'
She laughed, and then, without any sort o' warning, she turned her
pretty face to the wall and begun to cry. After a while I talked to her
sensible like. I says, 'Here you are alone and unprotected. How are you
going to bring up that boy? What'll you do when I go away?' She turned
white, and held the child in her arms. I said, 'I'll not only do for
you, but I'll do for the boy besides. I've got a little money saved up,
and he'll have his share of it. He shan't never know what it is not
to have a father if you'll marry me, Mary.' So after a while, between
crying and kissing the baby, and looking mournfully at the fire, she
agreed to marry me if I'd wait till the spring, and in May I'm going
to get leave--my cap'n knows all about it--and there'll be one rebel
less, I believe, before long, though she does swear she'll never be
anything but a rebel."
"Sergeant," said Kaintuck, "how did she take the partin'? Since you've
been so free, you won't mind my askin' the question."
The sergeant hesitated, but there was something so strangely
sympathetic in poor Kaintuck's humid eyes, and in the ghost of a smile
that haunted his patient face, that the sergeant could not but tell.
"She behaved like a little soldier till the last. I didn't half like
her being so brave. But when she knew she was seein' me for the last
time--well--er--I couldn't exactly tell another feller. Anyhow, she had
been makin' out all along she was thinkin' about the boy, but I swear I
believe she forgot all about the blessed kid. She never told me in so
many words, but I kinder suspect she didn't care so much about the dead
feller as she thought. It leaked out in little things, that he was kind
to her, and she wasn't out of her teens, and I don't believe she was
really grown up until she heard he was dead in prison, and she had to
look out for herself. Howsomever," said the sergeant, pulling himself
together, and laughing again--he was a good-natured fellow--"I've told
you a durned sight of spooney stuff."
"An' I won't mention it to the rats, neither," answered Kaintuck.
"It's time for me to be goin'," remarked the sergeant, with a sudden
accession of shamefacedness following his confidences.
"And I'm thinkin'," called out Kaintuck after him as he strode away,
"that little rebel widder is goin' to git a mighty good feller for a
husband!"
For four or five days the sergeant was too busy to go near the prison,
but one evening at nightfall, as he was trudging along to his quarters,
some one hailed him. It was the chaplain, a small, meek man, as brave
as a lion. He and the sergeant had seen service together.
"Is that Sergeant Heywood?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," answered the sergeant, touching his cap.
"There's a poor fellow down at the jail"--everybody called Kaintuck a
poor fellow--"who has been asking for you. He's going to die, I think."
The sergeant started. Who ever bestowed kindness and care on a prisoner
that did not come to love him finally? "Why, sir?" asked the sergeant,
after a pause. "What's the matter with him, sir?"
"Nothing--but death. He is rather an extraordinary fellow. His
determination to live brought him through enough to kill ten men. A day
or two ago he got a letter, and since then he seems equally determined
to die. These cases are not so uncommon, after all. Did you never hear
how easily a great strapping Russian soldier dies of homesickness or
disappointment--any little thing that takes away the desire of living?"
"May be it's the Russian doctors, sir," replied the sergeant quite
gravely. Fear of shot and shell he knew not, but he had been seen to
turn pale at the sight of the surgeon's scalpel, and to have crawled
out to parade with a shaking ague on him rather than encounter a visit
from that same surgeon.
The chaplain smiled. "It's not the doctors this time, though Heaven
knows I fear some of these army surgeons myself."
"I didn't think you was afraid of anything, sir, after that day at
Cedar Mountain, when the officers kep' ordering you to the rear, and
you wouldn't budge a peg."
A faint color crept into the chaplain's sallow face. This humble and
unstudied tribute pleased him.
The sergeant was a strict disciplinarian, and knew better than to stand
too long talking with his officer, so he touched his cap and moved on.
When he reached the prison, it was already dark. He walked through the
long corridor until he reached Kaintuck's cell, in which a lamp--a rare
luxury--was burning. To the sergeant's surprise, Kaintuck was up and
dressed and sitting on the narrow bed. On his knees was a large new
Bible which the chaplain had given him, but which he was not reading.
His strange eyes were fixed on the door, and when the sergeant's big
figure filled up the doorway, something like joy flashed into his
maimed face. He got up and shuffled over to meet the sergeant.
"Why, sergeant," he cried, "I thought you had forgot me!"
"No, I ain't forgot you," answered the sergeant kindly; "but the
chaplain told me you was goin' to give us the slip. You don't look like
it, though."
The shadow of a smile showed itself in Kaintuck's eyes. He had a sort
of primitive humor that delighted in surprises. "Well, I am," he
remarked, after a moment; "I feel it. I felt it the minute I got--her
letter." Something in his slow soft tone struck the sergeant and
stopped the protest on his lips. Kaintuck's life had hung on a thread
for the best part of two years, and since he continued to live with
great obstinacy in spite of the doctors, he might now die in defiance
of them. "I'll tell you," he said, coming up closer to the sergeant
and speaking in a distressed and hurried voice; "I ain't told none
of 'em--not even the preacher, and he is a good man if he _is_ a
preacher. You see, Mary--that's her name--I just called her Polly for
a nickname--she's heard down in Jo Daviess County, Kaintucky, that I
warn't dead, and she wrote me a letter sayin' she was comin' to me as
soon as she was able--for the news kinder upset her, and she always
was one of the high-strung kind--and she's goin' to bring my boy--he's
named William, and that's my name--but, sergeant--"
Kaintuck seized the sergeant's arm and gripped it hard. Meanwhile at
the mention of Jo Daviess County the sergeant had turned a little pale,
and he grew paler and paler as Kaintuck kept on.