The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

"That's a case in point, I think, Laura; but what a jolly little boy! he ought to have a week to be naughty in, directly."

"He never will, while his mother owns a rod!" said she, emphatically.

I had beguiled Laura from her subject; for, to tell the truth, it was one I did not dare to contemplate; it oppressed and distressed me too much.

After Laura went home, we stayed in Dartford only a week, and then followed the regiment to Washington. We had been there but a few days, before it was ordered into service. Frank came into my room one night to tell me.

"We must be off to-morrow, Sue,—and you must take her back to Ridgefield at once. I can't have her here. I have told Mr. Bowen. If we should be beaten,—and we may,—raw troops may take a panic, or may fight like veterans,—but if we should run, they will make a bee-line for Washington. I should go mad to have her here with a possibility of Rebel invasion. She must go; there is no question."

He walked up and down the room, then came back and looked me straight in the face.

"Susan, if I never come back, you will be her good friend, too?"

"Yes," said I, meeting his eye as coolly as it met mine: I had learned a lesson of Josey. "I shall see you in the morning?"

"Yes"; and so he went back to her.

Morning came. Josephine was as bright, as calm, as natural, as the June day itself. She insisted on fastening "her Captain's" straps on his shoulders, purloined his cumbrous pin-ball and put it out of sight, and kept even Mrs. Bowen's sobs in subjection by the intense serenity of her manner. The minutes seemed to go like beats of a fever-pulse; ten o'clock smote on a distant bell; Josephine had retreated, as if accidentally, to a little parlor of her own, opening from our common sitting-room. Frank shook hands with Mr. Bowen; kissed Mrs. Bowen dutifully, and cordially too; gave me one strong clasp in his arms, and one kiss; then went after Josephine. I closed the door softly behind him. In five minutes by the ticking clock he came out, and strode through the room without a glance at either of us. I had heard her say "Good bye" in her sweet, clear tone, just as he opened the door; but some instinct impelled me to go in to her at once: she lay in a dead faint on the floor.

We left Washington that afternoon, and went straight back to Ridgefield. Josey was in and out of my small house continually: but for her father and mother, I think she would have stayed with me from choice. Rare letters came from Frank, and were always reported to me, but, of course, never shown. If there was any change in her manner, it was more steadily affectionate to her father and mother than ever; the fitful, playful ways of her girlhood were subdued, but, except to me, she showed no symptom of pain, no show of apprehension: with me alone she sometimes drooped and sighed. Once she laid her little head on my neck, and, holding me to her tightly, half sobbed,—

"Oh, I wish—I wish I could see him just for once!"

I could not speak to answer her.

As rumors of a march toward Manassas increased, Mr. and Mrs. Bowen took her to Dartford: there was no telegraph-line to Ridgefield, and but one daily mail, and now a day's delay of news might be a vital loss. I could not go with them; I was too ill. At last came that dreadful day of Bull Run. Its story of shame and blood, trebly exaggerated, ran like fire through the land. For twenty-four long hours every heart in Ridgefield seemed to stand still; then there was the better news of fewer dead than the first report, and we knew that the enemy had retreated, but no particulars. Another long, long day, and the papers said Colonel –'s regiment was cut to pieces; the fourth mail told another story: the regiment was safe, but Captains Addison, Black, and—Jones, I think, were missing. The fifth day brought me a letter from Mr. Bowen. Frank was dead, shot through the heart, before the panic began, cheering on his men; he had fallen in the very front rank, and his gallant company, at the risk of their lives, after losing half their number as wounded or killed, had brought off his body, and carried it with them in retreat, to find at last that they had ventured all this for a lifeless corpse! He did not mention Josephine, but asked me to come to them at once, as he was obliged to go to Washington. I could not, for I was too ill to travel without a certainty of being quite useless at my journey's end. I could but just sit up. Five days after, I had an incoherent sobbing sort of letter from Mrs. Bowen, to say that they had arranged to have the funeral at Ridgefield the next day but one,—that Josephine would come out, with her, the night before, and directly to my house, if I was able to receive them. I sent word by the morning's mail that I was able, and went myself to the station to meet them.

They had come alone, and Josey preceded her mother into the little room, as if she were impatient to have any meeting with a fresh face over. She was pale as any pale blossom of spring, and as calm. Her curls, tucked away under the widow's-cap she wore, and clouded by the mass of crape that shrouded her, left only a narrow line of gold above the dead quiet of her brow. Her eyes were like the eyes of a sleep-walker: they seemed to see, but not to feel sight. She smiled mechanically, and put a cold hand into mine. For any outward expression of emotion, one might have thought Mrs. Bowen the widow: her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, her nose was red, her lips tremulous, her whole face stained and washed with tears, and the skin seemed wrinkled by their salt floods. She had cried herself sick,—more over Josephine than Frank, as was natural.

It was but a short drive over to my house, but an utterly silent one. Josephine made no sort of demonstration, except that she stooped to pat my great dog as we went in. I gave her a room that opened out of mine, and put Mrs. Bowen by herself. Twice in the night I stole in to look at her: both times I found her waking, her eyes fixed on the open window, her face set in its unnatural quiet; she smiled, but did not speak. Mrs. Bowen told me in the morning that she had neither shed a tear nor slept since the news came; it seemed to strike her at once into this cold silence, and so she had remained. About ten, a carriage was sent over from the village to take them to the funeral. This miserable custom of ours, that demands the presence of women at such ceremonies, Mrs. Bowen was the last person to evade; and when I suggested to Josey that she should stay at home with me, she looked surprised, and said, quietly, but emphatically, "Oh, no!"

After they were gone, I took my shawl and went out on the lawn. There was a young pine dense enough to shield me from the sun, sitting under which I could see the funeral-procession as it wound along the river's edge up toward the burying-ground, a mile beyond the station. But there was no sun to trouble me; cool gray clouds brooded ominously over all the sky; a strong south-wind cried, and wailed, and swept in wild gusts through the woods, while in its intervals a dreadful quiet brooded over earth and heaven,—over the broad weltering river, that, swollen by recent rain, washed the green grass shores with sullen flood,—over the heavy masses of oak and hickory trees that hung on the farther hill-side,—over the silent village and its gathering people. The engine-shriek was borne on the coming wind from far down the valley. There was an air of hushed expectation and regret in Nature itself that seemed to fit the hour to its event.

Soon I saw the crowd about the station begin to move, and presently the funeral-bell swung out its solemn tones of lamentation; its measured, lingering strokes, mingled with the woful shrieking of the wind and the sighing of the pine-tree overhead, made a dirge of inexpressible force and melancholy. A weight of grief seemed to settle on my very breath: it was not real sorrow; for, though I knew it well, I had not felt yet that Frank was dead,—it was not real to me,—I could not take to my stunned perceptions the fact that he was gone. It is the protest of Nature, dimly conscious of her original eternity, against this interruption of death, that it should always be such an interruption, so incredible, so surprising, so new. No,—the anguish that oppressed me now was not the true anguish of loss, but merely the effect of these adjuncts; the pain of want, of separation, of reaching in vain after that which is gone, of vivid dreams and tearful waking,—all this lay in wait for the future, to be still renewed, still suffered and endured, till time should be no more. Let all these pangs of recollection attest it,—these involuntary bursts of longing for the eyes that are gone and the voice that is still,—these recoils of baffled feeling seeking for the one perfect sympathy forever fled,—these pleasures dimmed in their first resplendence for want of one whose joy would have been keener and sweeter to us than our own,—these bitter sorrows crying like children in pain for the heart that should have soothed and shared them! No,– there is no such dreary lie as that which prates of consoling Time! You who are gone, if in heaven you know how we mortals fare, you know that life took from you no love, no faith,—that bitterer tears fall for you to-day than ever wet your new graves,—that the gayer words and the recalled smiles are only like the flowers that grow above you, symbols of the deeper roots we strike in your past existence,—that to the true soul there is no such thing as forgetfulness, no such mercy as diminishing regret!

Slowly the long procession wound up the river,—here, black with plumed hearse and sable mourners,—there, gay with regimental band and bright uniforms,—no stately, proper funeral, ordered by custom and marshalled by propriety, but a straggling array of vehicles: here, the doctor's old chaise,—there, an open wagon, a dusty buggy, a long, open omnibus, such as the village-stable kept for pleasure-parties or for parties of mourning who wanted to go en masse.

All that knew Frank, in or about Ridgefield, and all who had sons or brothers in the army, swarmed to do him honor; and the quaint, homely array crept slowly through the valley, to the sound of tolling bell and moaning wind and the low rush of the swollen river,—the first taste of war's desolation that had fallen upon us, the first dark wave of a whelming tide!

As it passed out of sight, I heard the wheels cease, one by one, their crunch and grind on the gravelled road up the slope of the grave-yard. I knew they had reached that hill-side where the dead of Ridgefield lie calmer than its living; and presently the long-drawn notes of that hymn-tune consecrated to such occasions—old China—rose and fell in despairing cadences on my ear. If ever any music was invented for the express purpose of making mourners as distracted as any external thing can make them, it is the bitter, hopeless, unrestrained wail of this tune. There is neither peace nor resignation in it, but the very exhaustion of raving sorrow that heeds neither God nor man, but cries out, with the soulless agony of a wind-harp, its refusal to be comforted.

At length it was over, and still in that same dead calm Josephine came home to me. Mrs. Bowen was frightened, Mr. Bowen distressed. I could not think what to do, at first; but remembering how sometimes a little thing had utterly broken me down from a regained calmness after loss, some homely association, some recall of the past, I begged of Mr. Bowen to bring up from the village Frank's knapsack, which he had found in one of his men's hands,—the poor fellow having taken care of that, while he lost his own: "For the captain's wife," he said. As soon as it came, I took from it Frank's coat, and his cap and sword. My heart was in my mouth as I entered Josephine's room, and saw the fixed quiet on her face where she sat. I walked in, however, with no delay, and laid the things down on her bed, close to where she sat. She gave one startled look at them and then at me; her face relaxed from all its quiet lines; she sank on her knees by the bedside, and, burying her head in her arms, cried, and cried, and cried, so helplessly, so utterly without restraint, that I cried, too. It was impossible for me to help it. At last the tears exhausted themselves; the dreadful sobs ceased to convulse her; all drenched and tired, she lifted her face from its rest, and held out her arms to me. I took her up, and put her to bed like a child. I hung the coat and cap and sword where she could see them. I made her take a cup of broth, and before long, with her eyes fixed on the things I had hung up, she fell asleep, and slept heavily, without waking, till the next morning.

I feared almost to enter her room when I heard her stir; I had dreaded her waking,—that terrible hour that all know who have suffered, the dim awakening shadow that darkens so swiftly to black reality; but I need not have dreaded it for her. She told me afterward that in all that sleep she never lost the knowledge of her grief; she did not come into it as a surprise. Frank had seemed to be with her, distant, sad, yet consoling; she felt that he was gone, but not utterly,—that there was drear separation and loneliness, but not forever.

When I went in, she lay there awake, looking at her trophy, as she came to call it, her eyes with all their light quenched and sodden out with crying, her face pale and unalterably sad, but natural in its sweetness and mobility. She drew me down to her and kissed me.

"May I get up?" she asked; and then, without waiting for an answer, went on,—"I have been selfish, Sue; I will try to be better now; I won't run away from my battle. Oh, how glad I am he didn't run away! It is dreadful now, dreadful! Perhaps, if I had to choose if he should have run away or—or this, I should have wanted him to run,—I'm afraid I should. But I am glad now. If God wanted him, I'm glad he went from the front ranks. Oh, those poor women whose husbands ran away, and were killed, too!"

She seemed to be so comforted by that one thought! It was a strange trait in the little creature; I could not quite fathom it.

After this, she came down-stairs and went about among us, busying herself in various little ways. She never went to the grave-yard; but whenever she was a little tired, I was sure to find her sitting in her room with her eyes on that cap and coat and sword. Letters of condolence poured in, but she would not read them or answer them, and they all fell into my hands. I could not wonder; for, of all cruel conventionalities, visits and letters of condolence seem to me the most cruel. If friends can be useful in lifting off the little painful cares that throng in the house of death till its presence is banished, let them go and do their work quietly and cheerfully; but to make a call or write a note, to measure your sorrow and express theirs, seems to me on a par with pulling a wounded man's bandages off and probing his hurt, to hear him cry out and hear yourself say how bad it must be!

Laura Lane was admitted, for Frank's sake, as she had been his closest and dearest relative. The day she came, Josey had a severe headache, and looked wretchedly. Laura was shocked, and showed it so obviously, that, had there been any real cause for her alarm, I should have turned her out of the room without ceremony, almost before she was fairly in it. As soon as she left, Josey looked at me and smiled.

"Laura thinks I am going to die," said she; "but I'm not. If I could, I wouldn't, Sue; for poor father and mother want me, and so will the soldiers by-and-by." A weary, heart-breaking look quivered in her face as she went on, half whispering,—"But I should—I should like to see him!"

In September she went away. I had expected it ever since she spoke of the soldiers needing her. Mrs. Bowen went to the sea-side for her annual asthma. Mr. Bowen went with Josephine to Washington. There, by some talismanic influence, she got admission to the hospitals, though she was very pretty, and under thirty. I think perhaps her pale face and widow's-dress, and her sad, quiet manner, were her secret of success. She worked here like a sprite; nothing daunted or disgusted her. She followed the army to Yorktown, and nursed on the transport-ships. One man said, I was told, that it was "jes' like havin' an apple-tree blow raound, to see that Mis' Addison; she was so kinder cheery an' pooty, an' knew sech a sight abaout nussin', it did a feller lots of good only to look at her chirpin' abaout."

Now and then she wrote to me, and almost always ended by declaring she was "quite well, and almost happy." If ever she met with one of Frank's men,—and all who were left reënlisted for the war,—he was sure to be nursed like a prince, and petted with all sorts of luxuries, and told it was for his old captain's sake. Mr. and Mrs. Bowen followed her everywhere, as near as they could get to her, and afforded unfailing supplies of such extra hospital-stores as she wanted; they lavished on her time and money and love enough to have satisfied three women, but Josey found use for it all—for her work. Two months ago, they all came back to Dartford. A hospital had been set up there, and some one was needed to put it in operation; her experience would be doubly useful there, and it was pleasant for her to be so near Frank's home, to be among his friends and hers.

I went in, to do what I could, being stronger than usual, and found her hard at work. Her face retained its rounded outline, her lips had recovered their bloom, her curls now and then strayed from the net under which she carefully tucked them, and made her look as girlish as ever, but the girl's expression was gone; that tender, patient, resolute look was born of a woman's stern experience; and though she had laid aside her widow's-cap, because it was inconvenient, her face was so sad in its repose, so lonely and inexpectant, she scarce needed any outward symbol to proclaim her widowhood. Yet under all this new character lay still some of those childish tastes that made, as it were, the "fresh perfume" of her nature: everything that came in her way was petted; a little white kitten followed her about the wards, and ran to meet her, whenever she came in, with joyful demonstrations; a great dog waited for her at home, and escorted her to and from the hospital; and three canaries hung in her chamber;—and I confess here, what I would not to Laura, that she retains yet a strong taste for sugar-plums, gingerbread, and the "Lady's Book." She kept only so much of what Laura called her vanity as to be exquisitely neat and particular in every detail of dress; and though a black gown, and a white linen apron, collar, and cuffs do not afford much room for display, yet these were always so speckless and spotless that her whole aspect was refreshing.

Last week there was a severe operation performed in the hospital, and Josephine had to be present. She held the poor fellow's hand till he was insensible from the kindly chloroform they gave him, and, after the surgeons were through, sat by him till night, with such a calm, cheerful face, giving him wine and broth, and watching every indication of pulse or skin, till he really rallied, and is now doing well.

As I came over, the next day, I met Doctor Rivers at the door of her ward.

"Really," said he, "that little Mrs. Addison is a true heroine!"

The kitten purred about my feet, and as I smiled assent to him, I said inwardly to myself,—

"Really, she is a true woman!"

ABOUT WARWICK

Between bright, new Leamington, the growth of the present century, and rusty Warwick, founded by King Cymbeline in the twilight ages, a thousand years before the mediaeval darkness, there are two roads, either of which may be measured by a sober-paced pedestrian in less than half an hour.

One of these avenues flows out of the midst of the smart parades and crescents of the former town,—along by hedges and beneath the shadow of great elms, past stuccoed Elizabethan villas and wayside ale-houses, and through a hamlet of modern aspect,—and runs straight into the principal thoroughfare of Warwick. The battlemented turrets of the castle, embowered half-way up in foliage, and the tall, slender tower of St. Mary's Church, rising from among clustered roofs, have been visible almost from the commencement of the walk. Near the entrance of the town stands St. John's School-House, a picturesque old edifice of stone, with four peaked gables in a row, alternately plain and ornamented, and wide, projecting windows, and a spacious and venerable porch, all overgrown with moss and ivy, and shut in from the world by a high stone fence, not less mossy than the gabled front. There is an iron gate, through the rusty open-work of which you see a grassy lawn, and almost expect to meet the shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past generations, peeping forth from their infantile antiquity into the strangeness of our present life. I find a peculiar charm in these long-established English schools, where the school-boy of to-day sits side by side, as it were, with his great-grandsire, on the same old benches, and often, I believe, thumbs a later, but unimproved edition of the same old grammar or arithmetic. The new-fangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would madden many a pedagogue, and shake down the roof of many a time-honored seat of learning, in the mother-country.

At this point, however, we will turn back, in order to follow up the other road from Leamington, which was the one that I loved best to take. It pursues a straight and level course, bordered by wide gravel-walks and overhung by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and there a villa, on one side a wooded plantation, and on the other a rich field of grass or grain, until, turning at right angles, it brings you to an arched bridge over the Avon. Its parapet is a balustrade carved out of freestone, into the soft substance of which a multitude of persons have engraved their names or initials, many of them now illegible, while others, more deeply cut, are illuminated with fresh green moss. These tokens indicate a famous spot; and casting our eyes along the smooth gleam and shadow of the quiet stream, through a vista of willows that droop on either side into the water, we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick Castle, uplifting itself among stately trees, and rearing its turrets high above their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being Shakspeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the bank a little on the hither side of the castle, has the effect of making the scene appear more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the middle of the stream,—so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably open at certain hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half a crown or so towards the support of the Earl's domestics. The sight of that long series of historic rooms, full of such splendors and rarities as a great English family necessarily gathers about itself, in its hereditary abode, and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, or ten times as much, if indeed the value of the spectacle could be reckoned in money's-worth. But after the attendant has hurried you from end to end of the edifice, repeating a guide-book by rote, and exorcising each successive hall of its poetic glamour and witchcraft by the mere tone in which he talks about it, you will make the doleful discovery that Warwick Castle has ceased to be a dream. It is better, methinks, to linger on the bridge, gazing at Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower in the dim English sunshine above, and in the placid Avon below, and still keep them as thoughts in your own mind, than climb to their summits, or touch even a stone of their actual substance. They will have all the more reality for you, as stalwart relics of immemorial time, if you are reverent enough to leave them in the intangible sanctity of a poetic vision.