Rose Mather: A tale

Great Battle at Manassas!

Total Rout of the Federal Army!

3,000 killed and as many more taken prisoners!

Fire Zouaves all cut to pieces!

Only three or four escape alive!

N. Y. 13th completely riddled!!!

Sherman’s Battery, and hosts of guns in the hands of the Rebels!

Frightful Panic at Washington!

The Capitol in imminent danger!

Gen. Scott in convulsions, the President crazy, and Seward threatened with softening of the brain!

Women and children fleeing for their lives!

Beauregard marching on with 500,000 men!

The Baltimoreans in ecstasies, and the Philadelphians in despair!

Such were some of the exaggerated reports which ran like lightning through the streets of Rockland on the first arrival of the news, throwing the people into a greater panic than was said to exist in Washington. Hints of some terrible disaster, the exact nature of which could not be known until the arrival of the evening papers, had early in the afternoon found their way from the telegraphic station into the village, creating the most intense excitement. Men left their places of business to talk the matter over, while groups of women assembled at the street corners, discussing the probabilities of the case, and each hoping that her child, her husband, her brother had been spared.

Prominent among these was Widow Simms, holding fast to Susan’s hand, and occasionally whispering a word of comfort to the poor child, whose eyes were red with weeping over the possible fate of John. Rose Mather’s carriage drove up and down, and from its window Rose herself looked anxiously out, her face indicative of the anxiety she felt to hear the worst, if worst there were. She knew her husband could not have been in battle, for he was still in Washington, but she was conscious of a feeling as if some dire calamity were impending over her, and among the crowd collected in the street there was none who waited more impatiently for the coming of the evening train than she. She had taken Annie Graham to ride with her, and the two presented a most striking contrast, for where Rose was nervous, impatient and excited, Annie, though feeling none the less concerned, was quiet, submissive and resigned, exhibiting no outward emotion until the shrill whistle was heard across the plain, when a crimson flush stole into her cheek, deepening into a purple as the carriage drew up in front of the office, where the throng was growing denser,—men pushing past each other, and elbowing their way to a stand-point near the door, where they could catch the first item of news, and scatter it among the eager crowd. The papers came at last, and the damp sheets were almost torn asunder by the excited multitude.

“Me one,—me, please,” and Rose Mather’s hand was thrust from the window in time to catch a paper destined for some one farther in the rear, but ere she had found the column sought, she heard from those around her that the worst was realized.

There had been a battle. Our troops were utterly defeated, and worse than all, disgraced.

“But the 13th?” Annie whispered faintly. “Does it speak of the 13th?”

Rose did not know. Her interest just then was centered in the “Massachusetts——,” and in her eagerness to hear from Tom, she forgot for a moment that such a regiment as the N. Y. 13th existed. But there were others who did not forget, and just as the question left Annie’s lips, the answer came in the despairing cry which rent the air as some reckless person shouted aloud,

“The 13th a total wreck! Not a man left of Company R.”

“Oh, George,” poor Annie cried, and the next moment Rose held the fainting form upon her lap.

“Drive home,—to Mrs. Graham’s I mean,” she said to Jake, who, with some difficulty made his way through the crowd, but not until the story so cruelly set afloat was contradicted by those who had more coolly read the sad intelligence.

The news was bad enough, but the Rockland company was not mentioned, and its friends had no alternative but to wait until the telegraph wires should bring some tidings of the saved. Rose was the first to be remembered. Will did his duty faithfully.

“A terrible battle,” his message ran. “Soldiers are arriving every hour, but Tom has not come yet.”

A telegram for the Widow Simms came next, the mother’s quick eye taking in at a glance that only Eli’s name and John’s were appended to it. Isaac’s was not there. Where was he then, oh where? She asked this question frantically, refusing to read the note lest it should confirm her fears.

“I’ll read it, mother. Let me see,” Susan said, wresting the paper from her hands, and reading with trembling tones,

“Eli and I are safe. Isaac was last seen leading Lieut. Graham from the field.”

Oh what a piteous wail went up to Heaven then, for Widow Simms, when she received the news, was sitting in Annie’s door, and Annie was kneeling at her side. George was wounded, of course, and if wounded, dead, else why had he not thought of her ere this? Locked in each other’s arms the two stricken women wept bitterly, the mother sobbing amid her tears, “My boy, my boy,” while Annie moaned sadly, “My George, my husband.”

Well was it for both that ere that dark hour came they had learned to follow on, even when their Father’s footsteps were in the sea, knowing the hand which guided would never lead them wrong. Annie was the first to rally.

“It might not after all be so bad,” she said. “George and Isaac were prisoners, perhaps, but even that was preferable to death. It would surely save them from danger in future battles. The Southerners would not maltreat helpless captives. There were kind people South as well as North.”

Thus Annie reasoned, and the widow felt herself grow stronger as hope whispered of a brighter day to-morrow.

To Annie it was brighter, for it brought her news of George, wounded in his right arm, an inmate of the hospital, and at present too weak to write. This was all, but it comforted the young wife. He was not dead. He might come home again, and Annie’s heart overflowed with grateful thanksgiving that while so many were bereaved of their loved ones she had been mercifully spared. The next mail brought her a second letter from Mr. Mather, more minute in its particulars than any which had preceded it. He had obtained permission to stay with George, had removed him to a private boarding-house, far more comfortable than the crowded hospital; and, at his request he wrote to Annie that her husband, though badly wounded and suffering much from the terrible excitement of the battle, was not thought dangerous, and had strong hopes of ere long receiving his discharge and returning home where she could nurse him back to life.

This was Annie’s message, read by her eagerly, while the Widow Simms, forgetting all formality in her anxiety to hear if there was aught concerning her boy, looked over her shoulder, her eye darting from line to line until she caught his name. There was something of him, and grasping Annie’s arm, she whispered,

“Read what it says of Isaac.”

And Annie read how brave Tom Carleton had generously given place to the poor wounded George, and staid behind him with Isaac, hoping to make his way to Washington in safety. They had not been heard from since, and the widow’s heart was sick as heart could be with the dread uncertainty. Anything was preferable to this suspense, and in a state of mind bordering upon distraction she walked the floor, now wringing her hands and again declaring her intention to start at once for somewhere. She knew not whither, or cared, provided she found her child.

In the midst of her excitement the gate swung open, and Mrs. Baker rushed up the walk, her sleeves above her elbows, and her hair pushed back from her bonnetless head, just as she had left her washing at a neighbor’s when she received Bill’s letter, which told of Hal’s sad fate, and unravelled the mystery of Tom Carleton’s silence.

“He’s took! The Rebels have got your Ike!” she shrieked, brandishing aloft the soiled missive, and howling dismally. Then, putting her hand into her bosom, she drew forth the lock of hair, and thrusting it almost in to the widow’s face, cried out, “Look, ’tis Harry’s hair, all there is left of Harry. That’s what I git for havin’ a boy two inches taller than Ike, who stood in front, and would of been shot instead of Harry, only he was shorter. Read it, Miss Graham,” and tossing the letter into Annie’s lap, the wretched woman sank upon the doorstep, and covering her face with her wet apron, rocked back and forth, while Annie read aloud as follows:

“Washington, July 24th, 1861.

“Dear Mother: We’ve met the rascals, and been as genteelly licked as ever a pack of fools could ask to be. How it happened nobody knows. I was fitin’ like a tiger, when all on a sudden I found us a-runnin’ like a flock of sheep; and what is the queerest of all, is that while we were takin’ to our heels one way the Rebels were goin’ it t’other, and for what I know, we should of been runnin’ from each other till now if they hadn’t found out the game, and so turned upon us.

“But wust of all is to come. Hal is dead,—shot right through the forehead, and the ball that struck him down took off Ike Simmses cap, so if Ike had been only a little taller, Hal would of lived to been hung most likely.”

“Oh, I wish he had, I wish he had!” poor Mrs. Baker moaned, still waving back and forth and kissing the lock of hair, while the widow involuntarily thanked her Heavenly Father that the two inches she once so earnestly coveted for her boy had wisely been withheld.

Then followed Bill’s account of cutting away the hair he inclosed, of his flight into the woods, his sleep by the brook, and his waking just in time to see Capt. Carleton and Isaac Simms disappear beneath the trees, in charge of rebel soldiers.

Now that she knew the worst the widow sat like one stunned by a heavy blow, uttering no sound, as Annie read Bill’s account of capturing his prisoner. Ere she reached this point, however, she had another auditor, Rose Mather, who had come with a second letter from her husband, and who, passing the weeping woman in the door, came and stood by Annie, and listened with strange interest to the story of that captive parting so willingly with everything save the picture.

“Poor young man!” she sighed, when Annie finished reading. “I don’t suppose it’s right, but I do feel sorry for him. What if it had been Jimmie? Perhaps he has a sister somewhere weeping for him just as I cried for Tom. Dear Tom, Will writes he is a prisoner with Isaac Simms. I’m glad they are together. Tom will take care of Isaac. He had a quantity of gold tied around his waist,” and Rose’s soft hand smoothed caressingly the widow’s thin, light hair.

The widow had not wept before, but at the touch of those little fingers the flood gates opened wide, and her tears fell in torrents. They were bound together now by a common bond of sympathy, those four women, each so unlike to the other, and for a time they wept in silence, one for her wounded husband, one for a child deceased, one for a captured brother, the other for a son.

Now, as ever, Annie was the first to speak of hope, and her words were fraught with comfort to all save Harry’s mother. She could not comfort her, for from reckless, misguided Harry’s grave, there came no ray of consolation, but to the others she spoke of One who would not desert the weary captives. Neither bolt nor bar could shut Him out. God was in Richmond as well as there at home, and none could tell what good might spring from this seeming great evil. For a long time they talked together, and the afternoon was half spent when at last they separated, Rose going back to her luxurious home where she wrote to her mother the sad news concerning Tom, blurring with great tears the line in which she spoke of Jimmie, wondering what his fate had been.

Slowly, disconsolately poor Mrs. Baker returned to her day’s work so long neglected, but the suds she left so hot two hours before had grown cold, the fire burned out, and with that weary, discouraged feeling which poverty alone can prompt, she was setting herself to the task of bringing matters up again, when her employer, touched with the sight of the white, anguished face, kindly bade her leave the work until another day, and seek the quiet she so much needed. Poor old woman! How desolate it was going back to the squalid house where everything, even to the bootjack he had once hurled at her head, reminded her of the Harry who would come back no more! She did not think of his unkindness now. That was all forgotten, and motherlike, she remembered only the times when he was good and treated her like something half way human. He was her boy,—her first-born, and as she lay with her tear-stained face buried in the scanty pillows of her humble bed, she recalled to mind the time when first he lisped the sweet word mother, and twined his baby arms about her neck.

He was a bright, pretty child, easily influenced for good or evil, and the rude mother shuddered as she felt creeping over her the conviction that she had helped to make him what he grew to be, laughing at his fierce temper and at times provoking him on purpose, just to see him bump his little round, hard head against the oaken floor. Then, as he grew older, it was fun to hear him imitate the oaths his father used, and she had laughed at that until the habit became so firmly fixed that neither threats nor punishment could break it. And when the Sabbath bells were pealing forth their summons to the house of prayer, she had suffered him to stay away, offering but slight remonstrance when the robin’s nest just without the door was pilfered of its unfledged occupants, the mother-bird moaning over its murdered young, just as she was moaning now over her ruined boy. Poor Harry! There was some excuse for him, some apology found in the nature of his early training, but for her who reared him,—none. She might have taught him better. She might have sent him to the Sunday school across the way, where Sunday after Sunday she had heard the hymns the children sang swelling on the Sabbath air, Harry sometimes joining in as he sat in the cottage door, adjusting the bait with which to tempt the unsuspecting fish playing in the brook nearby. A mother’s fearful responsibility had been hers. She had not fulfilled it, and it rolled back upon her now, stinging as only remorse can sting, and making her wish amid her pain that the boy, once so earnestly desired, had never been given her, or else had died in its cradle bed, and so gone where she knew the hardened in sin never could find entrance.

So absorbed was she in her grief as not to hear the sound of wheels stopping near her gate, nor the tripping footstep upon the floor. Rose Mather, restless at home and wishing for something to do, had remembered the miserable woman, and knowing how desolate her comfortless house must seem that summer night, she had conquered her aversion to the place and come to speak, if possible, a word of cheer. Mrs. Baker’s howls always had the effect of making her laugh, they seemed so forced, so unnatural; but there was something so new, so real in the stillness of that figure crouching upon the bed, that Rose for a moment was uncertain how to act. It was no feigned sorrow of which she was a witness now, and advancing at last towards the untidy bed, she laid her hand upon the disordered, uncombed hair, and whispered soothingly, “I am so sorry for you, Mrs. Baker, and I’ll do all I can to help you. I’ll give you money to make your cottage pleasanter, and by and by you won’t feel so badly, maybe.”

This was Rose’s idea of comfort. Money, in her estimation, was to the poor a panacea for nearly every evil, but all her wealth could not avail to quiet the feeling of remorse from which Mrs. Baker was suffering. With a sob she thanked the kind-hearted Rose, and then continued, “’Tain’t the poverty so much, nor the knowin’ that he’s dead, though that is bad enough. It’s the something that tells me I or’to have brung him up better. I never sent him to meetin’, never went myself, never had him baptized, though I did try once to learn him ‘Now I lay me—’ but he, that’s my man, laughed me out of it. He said there wasn’t any God, that we all come by chance, but I knew better. I had a prayin’ mother, and though I forgot what she learnt me, it ’pears to come back to me now. Oh, Harry, I wish I’d done different, I do, I do,” and the repentant woman buried her face again in the scanty pillows, while Rose looked pityingly on.

Here was a case she could not reach. Money would not cure that aching heart, or quiet that guilty conscience. “Mrs. Graham would know exactly what to say,” Rose thought, wishing more and more that she, too, possessed the wisdom which would have told her what it was poor Mrs. Baker needed. Sitting down beside her, Rose talked to her of Bill, who, her husband said, was highly complimented for having captured a rebel. Will had not seen the prisoner, she said, or heard his name; he only knew the fact, and that Bill was greatly praised. This was some consolation to Mrs. Baker, but it did not take the pain away, and as she was not inclined to converse, Rose soon bade her good-bye and left her there alone in her deep sorrow.

The following Sunday, just as the notes of the organ were dying away in the opening service, a bent, shrinking figure stole noiselessly in at the open door, and Rose Mather recognized beneath the thin black veil, the haggard face of Widow Baker, who, except on funeral occasions, had never before been seen within the walls of the church. Annie saw her, too, and while Rose, touched with the humble attempt she had made to put on something like mourning for her child, thought how she would give her an entire new suit of black, Annie thought how she would daily pray that the blow which had fallen so crushingly might result in everlasting good to the now stricken mother.

Scarcely less keen, but of a far different nature, was the grief of Widow Simms. There was no black upon her leghorn bonnet. She would not have worn it if Isaac had been dead, but every expression of her stern face told how constantly her heart was going out after her darling boy, her captured Isaac languishing in his sultry prison, sick perhaps, and pining for his mother. How savage she felt toward Beauregard and all his clan, resolving at times to start herself for Richmond, and beard the lion in his den.

“She’d tell them what was what,” she said. “She’d let them know what an injured mother could do. She’d turn a second Charlotte Corduroy, if necessary, and free the land from such vile monsters,” and she actually sharpened up her shears as a weapon of offence in case the pilgrimage were made!

This was the Widow Simms excited, but the Widow Simms when calm was a very different woman, praying then for her boy, and even asking forgiveness for the stirrers up of the rebellion. At Annie’s request she had at last come to live altogether at the cottage in the Hollow, and it was well for both that they should be together, for the widow’s stronger will upheld the weaker Annie who, in her turn, imparted much of her own trusting, childish faith to the less trusting widow.

Greatly Annie mourned as the days went on, because no line came to her from George himself, nothing in his own handwriting, when he knew how she desired it, if it were but just his name. What made him always deputize Mr. Mather to write his letters for him? Annie put this question once to Rose, but the twilight was gathering over them, and so she failed to see the heightened color on Rose’s cheek and the moisture in her eye. Rose did not now, as formerly, bring her William’s letters, and read to her every word he said of George. She only told her how cheerfully George bore his illness, and how Will read to him every day from Annie’s Bible, choosing always the passages she had marked, but the rest was all withheld and Annie never dreamed the reason, or of the effort it cost the talkative little Rose to keep back what William said she must until the worst were known.

Thus the August days glided by, one by one, until the summer light faded from the Rockland hills, and September threw over them her rich autumnal bloom, and then one day there came a note for Annie, written as of old by William Mather, but signed by George himself. Poor Annie, how she cried over and kissed that signature, to which George had added, “God bless you, darling Annie.” Every letter was unnaturally distorted, and few could have deciphered the words; but to the eye of love they were plain as noonday, and Annie’s kisses dropped upon them until they were still more blurred than when they came to her.

It was very hard for Rose to keep from telling the dreadful story of what had followed the penning of those brief words, “God bless you, darling Annie.” But Will had said she must not, so she made no sign, only her arms clung closer around Annie’s neck, and her lips lingered longer upon the snowy forehead as she said good-night, and went away with the secret which Annie must not know then.