Chapter XI: Annie’s Story Continued

AUNT MARTHA.

There were two halls on the upper floor of our house, one long and wide and running from north to south, the other, shorter and narrower, turned off at right angles, running east and west. Opening from this hall was Charlie’s room in which no change had been made since The Boy died. Three or four times a year Phyllis washed the linen and made the bed up fresh and clean, while Fan and I swept and dusted the unused chamber, which had become a kind of Bethel to us. If Mrs. Hathern had attacked it during the upheaval we were prepared to do battle. But she did not, and with no suspicion of the danger threatening it we were going down the narrow hall to an outside piazza when we saw the door open and heard voices inside, Mrs. Hathern’s and Phyllis’s, the latter pitched high as if in fierce altercation, and the former low but very determined. Crossing the threshold we found Phyllis, straightened back with her hands on her hips, her usual attitude of defiance, and her turban nearly off her head.

“You can’t have dis yer room,” she was saying. “It’s Mas’r Charlie’s, and whar the Boy died; dems de berry piller slips he died on; nobody has done slep here since and neber will till de day of judgment. Thar’s ’nuff oder rooms plenty good for July or any other white truck from de norf.”

“What is all this?” Fanny asked, addressing Mrs. Hathern, who replied, “I am glad you have come to teach this insolent negro her place. I am not accustomed to such opposition from a servant, and cannot allow it. I am wanting a room for Julina, who will be here in a few days. This suits me. But when I told Phyllis to clear it up and remove those old soldier clothes, which are only gathering moths, she refused outright and commenced a rigmarole about Mas’r Charlie and some _Boy_ which I cannot comprehend. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

Turning to Phyllis Fan said, “You can go. I will explain to Mrs. Hathern.” Then to the latter, “I am sorry that Phyllis should be disrespectful to you, but she is right about the room. No one can occupy it. It was my brother Charlie’s and the Boy’s, whose memory is almost as dear to us as my brother’s. These which you call old clothes were Charlie’s. You know, perhaps, that he was killed in the war.”

She had crossed the room and was standing by the uniforms of blue and grey, one with the stars and bars above it, the other with the stars and stripes. Mrs. Hathern bowed stiffly and said, “I have heard so, yes; but if he was a confederate how did he happen to wear the blue, too? Did he turn traitor to his cause?”

Her manner was exasperating, and her words insulting, and I knew by the fire in Fan’s eyes that she would spare no detail in the story she meant to tell.

“Traitor! Never!” she answered, hotly. “The blue belonged to the Boy.”

“And who was he? the Boy is so very indefinite,” Mrs. Hathern asked in the same offensive tone, which made Fan furious.

“I don’t know who he was; not even his name. Let me tell you how he came to us, blood-stained and worn and frightened, and how we cared for him till he died, and then you will know why this room is doubly sacred to us,” Fan said.

“Certainly, if you like; it must be interesting; but please be brief as possible, as I am in a hurry,” was Mrs. Hathern’s provoking remark, and seating herself upon the bed, she prepared to listen, with a bored expression upon her face.

Fan’s blood was up, and the sight of the woman whom she believed to be Aunt Martha sitting so serene and unconcerned on the bed, where thoughts of her had terrorized the dying boy, roused her beyond quiet endurance.

“Mrs. Hathern,” she said, “please do not sit there. It hurts me as much as if you were sitting on the Boy’s grave.”

Mrs. Hathern smiled derisively. “I am very comfortable and not at all superstitious. So I think I’ll stay, as I am rather tired. I shall not hurt your Boy,” she said, putting the pillow under her head and leaning back against the headboard.

I wish I could paint a picture of Fan’s white face and dark gleaming eyes, as in words more eloquent than I can write she told the story of the Boy, beginning at Fredericksburg and coming down to the day when he came to Phyllis’s cabin, bedraggled and worn, with a hunted look in his eyes and pathetic entreaty in his voice as he begged us sometimes not to let the soldiers get him, and again not to let his Aunt Martha know where he was, as he could not go back to her. Fan had taken the boy’s letter from the blue coat pocket where it was kept and had read it, while Mrs. Hathern’s face softened as I did not suppose it could soften, and there was something like moisture in her eyes. But she kept her place upon the bed until Fan told of the few hints the boy had given of his antecedents.

“In his delirium,” she said, “he talked of Carlyle, who, I think, was his cousin,—of a dog whose name was Don,—and of an Aunt Martha, who could not have been kind to him, he seemed so afraid of her and so anxious that she should not know where he was. If you could have seen his poor wasted face and sunken eyes upon the pillow on which you are lying, you would know why this room is like a grave and why we cannot let a stranger occupy it.”

At the mention of the wasted face and sunken eyes which had lain upon the pillow Mrs. Hathern started as if she had been stung, or had felt the cold touch of the dead face Fan described so vividly. Crossing the room she put one hand caressingly upon the blue coat, and wiping the tears from her eyes with the other she said, “I thank you for your kindness to the northern boy, and shall not forget it. Did you never learn his name?”

“Never,” Fan replied. “We asked him what it was, and he said he was one of the Apostles. That is all we know for sure. We advertised and wrote to the town in Maine which he mentioned in his delirium, but nothing definite could be learned except that a strange boy calling himself Joseph Wilde had enlisted in that place early in the war and had not been heard of since. Charlie called him _the Boy_. We have called him _the Boy_ ever since, and it is so engraved upon his tombstone. After he died Phyllis and I cut two or three curls from his head for his friends, if we ever found them, and I put them in Charlie’s letter. He had soft brown hair, with a reddish tinge in some lights, and it had grown very long for a boy. See——?” and she held up the rings of hair which twined around and clung to her fingers.

“Yes, I see,” Mrs. Hathern said in a trembling voice, and I fancied that she recoiled from the hair as if it had been a living thing confronting her with reproaches. “I understand now your feelings with regard to this room and respect them. It shall not be disturbed. I can find another for Julina,” she continued; “and now, if you will excuse me, I will go. I think I hear your father.”

She was herself again, cold, dignified and stiff, but gave no sign that she was the Aunt Martha we had been anxious to find. We were sure of it, however, and if anything had been wanting to confirm us in our suspicions we had it the next morning, which was Sunday. As was our custom on that day we went after breakfast with flowers to the cemetery, and found a small bouquet on Charlie’s grave, and on the boy’s a larger one, while the grass which was long had been trampled down by some one kneeling or sitting upon it.

“Aunt Martha has been here,” Fan said. “I really think she has something human about her after all, but I should like her better if she’d say square out ‘I am Aunt Martha.’ I hate concealments.”

On our return to the house we passed the cabin where Phyllis sat on a wash-bench in the shade, shelling peas for dinner.

“Mrs. Hathern done got ahead of you,” she said, running her hands through the peas and letting them drop back into the pan. “She was out before sun up, pickin’ de flowers, and went holdin’ her white petticoats mos’ up to her knees cross de lot to de cemetry, whar she went down face fo’most on de Boy’s grave, an’ when she coined back her eyes was all red and watery. Like ’nuff she’s some of his kin.”

It was scarcely possible that Phyllis suspected anything. If she did, she kept it to herself. Neither did Mrs. Hathern give any sign that she knew aught of the boy, whom, to each other, we began to speak of as Paul, while she was always Aunt Martha.