Anne Part 50

But instead of fainting, Anne, holding the letters in her hand, turned and looked at her.

"Well, dear, will you go to bed?" she said, solicitously.

"Why should I go to bed?"

"I thought perhaps you had heard--had heard bad news."

"On the contrary," replied Anne, slowly and gravely, "I am afraid, mademoiselle, that the news is good--even very good."

For her heart had flown out of its cage and upward as a freed bird darts up in the sky. The bond, on her side at least, was gone; she was free.

_Now_ she would live a life of self-abnegation and labor, but without inward thralldom. Women had lived such lives before she was born, women would live such lives after she was dead. She would be one of the sisterhood, and coveting nothing of the actual joy of love, she would cherish only the ideal, an altar-light within, burning forever. The cares of each day were as nothing now: she was free, free!

In her exaltation she did not recognize as wrong the opposite course she had intended to follow before the lightning fell, namely, uniting herself to one man while so deeply loving another. She was of so humble and unconscious a spirit regarding herself that it had not seemed to her that the inner feelings of her heart would be of consequence to Rast, so long as she was the obedient, devoted, faithful wife she was determined with all her soul to be. For she had not that imaginative egotism which so many women possess, which makes them spend their lives in illusion, weaving round their every thought and word an importance which no one else can discern. According to these women, there are a thousand innocent acts which "he" (lover or husband) "would not for an instant allow," although to the world at large "he" appears indifferent enough.

They go through long turmoil, from which they emerge triumphantly, founded upon some hidden jealousy which "he" is supposed to feel, so well hidden generally, and so entirely supposed, that persons with less imagination never observe it. But after all, smile as we may, it is only those who are in most respects happy and fortunate wives who can so entertain themselves. For cold unkindness, or a harsh and brutal word, will rend this filmy fabric of imagination immediately, never to be rewoven again.

Anne wrote to Rast, repeating the contents of the old letter, which had been doomed never to reach him. She asked him to return the wanderer unopened when it was forwarded to him from the island; there was a depth of feeling in it which it was not necessary now that he should see. She told him that her own avowal should lift from him all the weight of wrong-doing; she had first gone astray. "We were always like brother and sister, Rast; I see it now. It is far better as it is."

A few days later Pere Michaux wrote again, and inclosed a picture of t.i.ta. The elder sister gazed at it curiously. This was not t.i.ta; and yet those were her eyes, and that the old well-remembered mutinous expression still lurking about the little mouth. Puzzled, she took it to mademoiselle. "It is my little sister," she said. "Do you think it pretty?"

Jeanne-Armande put on her spectacles, and held it frowningly at different distances from her eyes.

"It is odd," she said at last. "Ye--es, it is pretty too. But, for a child's face, remarkable."

"She is not a child."

"Not a child?"

"No; she is married," replied Anne, smiling.

Mademoiselle pursed up her lips, and examined the picture with one eye closed. "After all," she said, "I can believe it. The _eyes_ are mature."

The little bride was represented standing; she leaned against a pillar nonchalantly, and outlined on a light background, the extreme smallness of her figure was clearly shown. Her eyes were half veiled by their large drooping lids and long lashes; her little oval face looked small, like that of a child. Her dress was long, and swept over the floor with the richness of silk: evidently Pere Michaux had not stinted the lavish little hands when they made their first purchase of a full-grown woman's attire. For the priest had taken upon himself this outlay; the "money for close," of which t.i.ta had written, was provided from his purse. He wrote to Anne that as he was partly responsible for the wedding, he was also responsible for the trousseau; and he returned the money which with great difficulty the elder sister had sent.

"She must be very small," said mademoiselle, musingly, as they still studied the picture.

"She is; she has the most slender little face I ever saw."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MISS LOIS SIGHED DEEPLY."]

t.i.ta's head was thrown back as she leaned against the pillar; there was a half-smile on her delicate lips; her thick hair was still braided childishly in two long braids which hung over her shoulders and down on the silken skirt behind; in her small ears were odd long hoops of gold, which Pere Michaux had given her, selecting them himself on account of their adaptation to her half-Oriental, half-elfin beauty. Her cheeks showed no color; there were brown shadows under her eyes. On her slender brown hand shone the wedding ring. The picture was well executed, and had been carefully tinted under Pere Michaux's eye: the old priest knew that it was Rast's best excuse.

Now that Anne was freed, he felt no animosity toward the young husband; on the contrary, he wished to advance his interests in every way that he could. t.i.ta was a selfish little creature, yet she adored her husband.

She would have killed herself for him at any moment. But first she would have killed him.

He saw them start for the far West, and then he returned northward to his island home. Miss Lois, disheartened by all that had happened, busied herself in taking care of the boys dumbly, and often shook her head at the fire when sitting alone with her knitting. She never opened the old piano now, and she was less stringent with her Indian servants; she would even have given up quietly her perennial alphabet teaching if Pere Michaux had not discovered the intention, and quizzically approved it, whereat, of course, she was obliged to go on. In truth, the old man did this purposely, having noticed the change in his old antagonist. He fell into the habit of coming to the church-house more frequently--to teach the boys, he said. He did teach the little rascals, and taught them well, but he also talked to Miss Lois. The original founders of the church-house would have been well astonished could they have risen from their graves and beheld the old priest and the New England woman sitting on opposite sides of the fire in the neat s.h.i.+ning room, which still retained its Puritan air in spite of years, the boys, and Episcopal apostasy.

Regarding Rast's conduct, Miss Lois maintained a grim silence. The foundations of her faith in life had been shaken; but how could she, supposed to be a sternly practical person, confess it to the world--confess that she had dreamed like a girl over this broken betrothal?

"Do you not see how much happier, freer, she is?" the priest would say, after reading one of Anne's letters. "The very tone betrays it."

Miss Lois sighed deeply, and poked the fire.

"Pooh! pooh! Do you want her to be _un_happy?" said the old man.

"Suppose that it had been the other way? Why not rejoice as I do over her cheerfulness?"

"Why not indeed?" thought Miss Lois. But that stubborn old heart of hers would not let her.

The priest had sent to her also one of the pictures of t.i.ta. One day, after his return, he asked for it. She answered that it was gone.

"Where?"

"Into the fire."

"She cannot forgive," he thought, glancing cautiously at the set face opposite.

But it was not t.i.ta whom she could not forgive; it was the young mother, dead long years before.

The winter moved on. Anne had taken off her engagement ring, and now wore in its place a ring given by her school-girl adorers, who had requested permission in a formal note to present one to their G.o.ddess.

As she had refused gems, they had selected the most costly plain gold circlet they could find in Weston, spending a long and happy Sat.u.r.day in the quest. "But it is a wedding ring," said the jeweller.

But why should brides have all the heavy gold? the school-girls wished to know. Other persons could wear plain gold rings also if they pleased.

So they bought the circlet and presented it to Anne with beating hearts and cheeks flushed with pleasure, humbly requesting in return, for each a lock of her hair. Then ensued a second purchase of lockets for this hair: it was well that their extravagant little purses were well filled.

To the school-girls the ring meant one thing, to Anne another; she mentally made it a token of the life she intended to lead. Free herself, he was not free; Helen loved him. Probably, also, he had already forgotten his fancy for the lonely girl whom he had seen during those few weeks at Caryl's. She would live her life out as faithfully as she could, thankful above all things for her freedom. Surely strength would be given her to do this. The ring was like the marriage ring of a nun, the token of a vow of patience and humility. During all these long months she had known no more, heard no more, of her companions of that summer than as though they had never existed. The newspapers of Weston and the country at large were not concerned about the opinions and movements of the unimportant little circle left behind at Caryl's. Their columns had contained burning words; but they were words relating to the great questions which were agitating the land from the Pen.o.bscot to the Rio Grande. Once, in a stray number of the _Home Journal_, she found the following paragraph: "Miss Katharine Vanhorn is in Italy at present. It is understood that Miss Vanhorn contemplates an extended tour, and will not return to this country for several years. Her Hudson River residence and her house in the city are both closed." Anne no longer hoped for any softening of that hard nature; yet the chance lines hurt her, and gave her a forsaken feeling all day.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"War! war! war!

A thunder-cloud in the south in the early spring-- The launch of a thunder-bolt; and then, With one red flare, the lightning stretched its wing, And a rolling echo roused a million men."

--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.

April. The sound of military music; the sound of feet keeping step exactly, and overcoming by its regularity the noise of thousands of other feet hurrying on irregularly in front of them, abreast of them, and behind them. A crowd in the square so dense that no one could pa.s.s through; the tree branches above black with boys; the windows all round the four sides filled with heads. And everywhere women pressing forward, waving handkerchiefs, some pallid, some flushed, but all deeply excited, forgetful of self, with eyes fixed on the small compact lines of military caps close together, moving steadily onward in the midst of the accompanying throng. And happy the one who had a place in the front rank: how she gazed! If a girl, no matter how light of heart and frivolous, a silence and soberness came over her for a moment, and her eyes grew wistful. If a woman, one who had loved, no matter how hard and cold she had grown, a warmer heart came back to her then, and tears rose. What was it? Only a few men dressed in the holiday uniform these towns-people had often seen; men many of whom they knew well, together with their shortcomings and weaknesses, whose military airs they had laughed at; men who, taken singly, had neither importance nor interest.

What was it, then, that made the women's eyes tearful, and sent the great crowd thronging round and after them as though each one had been crowned king? What made the groups on the steps and piazzas of each house keep silence after they had pa.s.sed, and watch them as long as they could distinguish the moving lines? It was that these men had made the first reply of this town to the President's call. It was because these holiday soldiers were on their way to real battle-fields, where b.a.l.l.s would plough through human flesh, and leave agony and death behind. The poorest, dullest, soldier who was in these ranks from a sense of loyalty, however dim and inarticulate it might be, gave all he had: martyr or saint never gave more. Not many of the gazing people thought of this; but they did think of death by bayonet and ball as the holiday ranks marched by.

Down through the main street went the little troop, and the crowd made a solid wall on the sidewalk, and a moving guard before and behind. From the high windows above, the handkerchiefs of the work-girls fluttered, while underneath from the law offices, and below from the door-ways, men looked out soberly, realizing that this meant War indeed--real and near War.

By another way, down the hill toward the railway-station, rattled the wheels of an artillery company; also a little holiday troop, with holiday guns s.h.i.+ning brightly. The men sat in their places with folded arms; the crowd, seeing them, knew them all. They were only Miller, and Sieberling, and Wagner, and others as familiar; six months ago--a month ago--they would have laughed inexhaustibly at the idea of calling Tom Miller a hero, or elevating Fritz Wagner to any other pedestal than the top of a beer barrel. But now, as they saw them, they gave a mighty cheer, which rang through the air splendidly, and raised a hue of pride upon the faces of the artillerymen, and perhaps the first feeling in some of their hearts higher than the determination not to "back out,"

which had been until then their actuating motive. The two s.h.i.+ning little guns rattled down the hill; the infantry company marched down behind them. The line of cars, with locomotive attached, was in waiting, and, breaking ranks, helter-skelter, in any way and every way, hindered by hand-shaking, by all sorts of incongruous parting gifts thrust upon them at the last moment by people they never saw before, blessed by excited, tearful women, made heart-sick themselves by the sight of the grief of their mothers and wives, the soldiers took their places in the cars, and the train moved out from the station, followed by a long cheer, taken up and repeated again and again, until nothing but a dark speck on the straight track remained for the shouters to look at, when they stopped suddenly, hoa.r.s.e and tired, and went silently homeward, pondering upon this new thing which had come into their lives. The petty cares of the day were forgotten. "War is hideous; but it banishes littleness from daily life."

Anne, brought up as she had been in a remote little community, isolated and half foreign, was in a measure ignorant of the causes and questions of the great struggle which began in America in April, 1861. Not hers the prayerful ardor of the New England girl who that day willingly gave her lover, saw him brought home later dead, buried him, and lived on, because she believed that he had died to free his brother man, as Christ had died for her. Not hers the proud loyalty of the Southern girl to her blood and to her State, when that day she bade her lover go forth and sweep their fanatical a.s.sailants back, as the old Cavaliers, from whom they were descended, swept back the crop-eared Puritans into the sea.

Jeanne-Armande was not especially stirred; save by impatience--impatience over this interference with the prosperity of the country. It might injure property (the half-house), and break up music cla.s.ses and schools! What sympathy she felt, too, was with the South; but she was wise enough to conceal this from all save Anne, since the school was burning with zeal, and the princ.i.p.al already engaged in teaching the pupils to make lint. But if Jeanne-Armande was lukewarm, Miss Lois was at fever heat; the old New England spirit rose within her like a giant when she read the tidings. Far away as she was from all the influences of the time, she yet wrote long letters to Anne which sounded like the clash of spears, the call of the trumpet, and the roll of drums, so fervid were the sentences which fell of themselves into the warlike phraseology of the Old Testament, learned by heart in her youth. But duty, as well as charity, begins at home, and even the most burning zeal must give way before the daily needs of children. Little Andre was not strong; his spine was becoming curved, they feared. In his languor he had fallen into the habit of asking Miss Lois to hold him in her arms, rock with him in the old rocking-chair, and sing. Miss Lois had not thought that she could ever love "those children"; but there was a soft spot in her heart now for little Andre.