Part 7 (1/2)
Then, wis.h.i.+ng to know more of the secret springs of his little daughter's life, he asked: ”Why do you love that stanza best, Betty, my dear?”
Betty blushed crimson to the roots of her hair, for what she carried in her heart was too precious to tell, but she meant to be a poet.
Even then, in the pocket of her calico dress lay a little book and a stubbed lead pencil, and in the book was already the beginning of her great epic. Her father had said the epic was a thing of the past, that in the future none would be written, for that it was a form of expressions that belonged to the world's youth, and that age brought philosophy and introspection, but not epics.
She meant to surprise her father some day with this poem. The great world was so full of mystery--of seductive beauty and terror and of strange, enticing charm! She saw and felt it always. Even now, in the driving, whirling storm without, in the darkness of her chamber, or when she looked through the frosted panes into the starry skies at midnight, always it was there all about her,--a something unexpressed, unseen, but close--close to her,--the mystery which throbbed through all her small being, and which she was one day to find out and understand and put into her great epic.
She thought over her father's question, hardly knowing why she liked that last stanza best. She slowly wound up her ball of yarn and thrust the needles through it, and dropped it into her mother's workbasket before she replied; then, taking up her candle, she looked shyly in her father's eyes.
”Because I like where it says: 'This pleasure more sharp than pain, That baffles and lures me so.'” Then she was gone, hurrying away lest they should question her further and learn about the little book in her pocket.
Thus time pa.s.sed with the Ballards, many days swiftly flying, laden with a fair share of sweetness and pleasure, and much of hara.s.sment and toil, but in the main bringing happiness.
CHAPTER VI
THE END OF THE WAR
It was three years after the troops marched away from High k.n.o.b encampment before either Peter Junior or Richard Kildene were again in Leauvite, and then only Peter returned, because he was wounded, and not that he was unwilling to enlist again, as did Richard and many of the boys, when their first term of service was ended. He returned with the brevet of a captain, for gallant conduct in the encounter in which he received his wound, but only a shadow of the healthy, earnest boy who had stood in the ranks on the town square of Leauvite three years before; yet this very fact brought life and hope to his waiting mother, now that she had the blessed privilege of nursing him back to strength.
It seemed as though her long period of mourning ended when Peter Junior, pallid in his blue uniform, his hair darkened and matted with the dampness caused by weakness and pain, was borne in between the white columns of his father's house. When the news reached him that his son was lying wounded in a southern hospital, the Elder had, for the first time in many, many years, followed an impulse without pausing to consider his act beforehand. He left the bank on the instant and started for the scene of battles, only hurrying home to break the news first to his wife. Yielding to a rare tenderness, he touched her hair as he kissed her, and enjoined on her to remember that their son was not slain, but by a merciful Providence was only wounded and might be spared to them. She must thank the Lord and be ready to nurse him back to life.
Why Providence should be thus merciful to their son rather than to many another son, the good Elder did not pause to consider. Possibly he thought it no more than just that the prayers of the righteous should be answered by a supernatural intervention between their sons and the bullets of the enemy. His ideas on this point were no doubt vague at the best, but certain it is that he returned from his long and difficult journey to the seat of strife after his boy, with a clearer notion of what war really was, and a more human sympathy for those who go and suffer, and, as might be antic.i.p.ated with those of his temperament, an added bitterness against those whom he felt were to blame for the conflict.
When Peter Junior left his home, his father had enjoined on him to go, not in the spirit of bitterness and enmity, but as an act of duty, to teach a needed lesson; for surely the Lord was on the side of the right, and was using the men of the North to teach this needed lesson to those laboring in error. Ah! it is a very different point of view we take when we suffer, instead of merely moralizing on the suffering of others; especially we who feel that we know what is right, and lack in great part the imagination to comprehend the other man's viewpoint.
To us of that cast of mind there is only one viewpoint and that is our own, and only a bodily departure to the other man's hilltop or valley, as the case may be, will open the eyes and enlarge the understanding to the extent of even allowing our fellows to see things in another light from our own.
In this instance, while the Elder's understanding had been decidedly enlarged, it had been in but one direction, and the effect had not been to his spiritual benefit, for he had seen only the suffering of his own side, and, being deficient in power to imagine what might be, he had taken no charitable thought for the other side. Instead, a feeling of hatred had been stirred within him,--a feeling he felt himself justified in and therefore indulged and named: ”Righteous Indignation.”
The Elder's face was stern and hard as he directed the men who bore his boy on the litter where to turn, and how to lift it above the banister in going up the stair so as not to jar the young man, who was too weak after the long journey to do more than turn his eyes on his mother's face.
But that mother's face! It seemed to him he had never seen it so radiant and charming, for all that her hair had grown silvery white in the three years since he had last kissed her. He could not take his eyes from it, and besought her not to leave his side, even when the Elder bade her go and not excite him, but allow him to rest.
No sooner was her son laid on his own bed in his old room than she began a series of gentle ministrations most sweet to the boy and to herself. But the Elder had been told that all he needed now was rest and absolute quiet, and the surgeon's orders must be carried out regardless of all else. Hester Craigmile yielded, as always, to the Elder's will, and remained without, seated close beside her son's door, her hands, that ached to serve, lying idle in her lap, while the Elder brought him his warm milk and held it to his lips, lifting his head to drink it, and then left him with the command to sleep.
”Don't go in for an hour at least,” he enjoined on his wife as he pa.s.sed her and took his way to the bank, for it was too early for closing, and there would still be time for him to look into his affairs a bit. Thus for the banker the usual routine began.
Not so for Hester Craigmile. Joy and life had begun for her. She had her boy again--quite to herself when the Elder was away, and the tears for very happiness came to her eyes and dropped on her hands unchecked. Had the Elder been there he would have enjoined upon her to be controlled and she would have obeyed, but now there was no need, and she wept deliciously for joy while she still sat outside the door and listened. Intense--eager--it seemed almost as if she could hear him breathe.
”Mother!” Hark! Did he speak? ”Mother!” It was merely a breath, but she heard and went swiftly to him. Kneeling, she clasped him, and her tears wet his cheek, but at the same time they soothed him, and he slept. It was thus the Elder found them when he returned from the bank, both sweetly sleeping. He did not take his wife away for fear of waking his son, nevertheless he was displeased with her, and when they met at table that evening, she knew it.
The whole order of the house was changed because of Peter Junior's return. Blinds, windows, and doors were thrown open at the direction of the physician, that he might be given all the air and sunlight it was possible to admit; else he would never gain strength, for so long had he lived in the open air, in rain and sun, that he had need now of every help nature could give.
A bullet had struck him in the hip and glanced off at a peculiar angle, rendering his recovery precarious and long delayed, and causing the old doctor to shake his head with the fear that he must pa.s.s the rest of his life a cripple. Still, normal youth is buoyant and vigorous and mocks at physicians' fears, and after a time, what with heart at rest, with loving and unceasing care on his mother's part, and rigorous supervision on his father's, Peter Junior did at length recover sufficiently to be taken out to drive, and began to get back the good red blood in his veins.
During this long period of convalescence, Peter Junior's one anxiety was for his cousin Richard. Rumors had reached him that his comrade had been wounded and taken prisoner, yet nothing definite had been heard, until at last, after much writing, he learned Richard's whereabouts, and later that he had been exchanged. Then, too ill and prison-worn to go back to his regiment, he appeared one day, slowly walking up the village street toward the banker's house.
There he was welcomed and made much of, and the two young men spent a while together happily, the best of friends and comrades, still filled with enthusiasm, but with a wider knowledge of life and the meaning of war. These weeks were few and short, and soon Richard was back in the army. Peter Junior, envying him, still lay convalescing and only able with much difficulty to crawl to the carriage for his daily drive.