Chapter VII

It was nearly a year before Tom told Celia the whole story of the two portraits. The temptation and the effects of his paltering with it were so real in his mind that he could not bring himself to confess until he had made such effort as lay in his power at reparation. He finished the original picture without more sittings, for Ralph, much to the artist's relief, kept away from the studio. Then he left Salem, saying to himself that his presence there might drive Ralph from home, where Tom wished him to remain, that the influence of the face, if it really existed, might help him.

"I do not know," Celia said thoughtfully, "whether the changes in Ralph came from the pictures or from his disappointment; but in either case I can see how real the whole was to you, and I am glad you stood the test; although," she added, smiling fondly upon her husband, "I should have known from the first that you would n't fail."

"But you must acknowledge," Tom responded, replying to the latter portion of her remark by a caress, "that Ralph has come out splendidly in the last year--since he has had that portrait to look at."

"Yes," she replied musingly, "and he is fast growing up to the picture."

THE KNITTERS IN THE SUN

_The spinsters and the knitters in the sun._
_Twelfth Night_, ii, 4.

The mellow light of the October sun fell full upon the porch of the stately old Grayman house, and the long shadows of the Lombardy poplars pointed to the two silvery haired women who sat there placidly knitting.

The mansion dated back to colonial times. That it had been erected before public sentiment was fully settled in regard to the proper site of the village might be inferred from its lonely position on the banks of the river which flowed through the little town a mile away. The funereal poplars, winter-killed and time-beaten now in their tops, had been in their prime half a century ago, yet they were young when compared to the house before which they stood sentinel. From the small-paned windows of this dwelling Graymans whose tombstones where long sunken and rusted with patient moss had seen British vessels sailing up the river with warlike intent, and on the porch where the women sat knitting peacefully, Captain Maynard Grayman had stood to review his little company of volunteers before leading them against the redcoats, and had spoken to them in fiery words of the patriots whose blood had but a week before been shed at Lexington. The place had still the air of pre-Revolutionary dignity and self-respect.

As the poplars had steadily cast their sombre shadows upon the Graymans, father and son and son's son, as generation after generation they lived and died in the old mansion, so had the Southers no less constantly remained the faithful servants of the family. They had seen the greatness of the masters wane sadly from its original splendors, the family pride alone of all the pristine glories remaining unimpaired; they had striven loyally against the fate which trenched upon the wealth and power of the house; and they had seen money waste, reputation fade, until now even the name was on the verge of extinction, and the family reduced to a bed-ridden old man querulously dwelling in futile dreams of vanished importance and the lovely and lonely daughter who wore out her life beside him.

As the Graymans diminished, the Southers, perhaps from the very energy with which they strove to aid the fallen fortunes of their masters, had waxed continually. The change which keeps from stagnation republican society, abasing the lofty and exalting the lowly, could not have had better illustration than in the two families. It was from no necessity that old Sarah was still the servant of the house; a servant, in truth, with small wage, and one who secretly helped out the broken revenues of her master. Dollar for dollar, she could have out-counted the entire property of her employers; and might have lived where and as she pleased, had she been minded to have servants of her own. In old Sarah's veins, however, flowed the faithful Souther blood, transmitted by generations of traditionary adherents of the Grayman family; and neither the persuasions of her children, who felt the quickening influence of the new order of things, nor the amount of her snug account in the village savings bank, could tempt the steadfast creature from her allegiance. When long ago she had married her cousin, an inoffensive, meek man, dead now a quarter of a century, she had made it a condition that she should not abandon her service; and her position in the Grayman mansion, like her name, had remained practically unchanged by matrimony.

She was a not uncomely figure as she sat in the October sunlight knitting steadily, her hair abundant although silvery, and her figure still alert and erect. From her dark print gown to the tips of her snowy cap-strings she was spotlessly neat, while an air of mingled energy and placidity imparted a certain piquancy to her bearing. Her active fingers plied the bright needles with the deftness of long familiarity, and from time to time her quick glance swept in unconscious inspection over the row of shining tin pans ranged along the porch wall, over the beehives in their shed not far away, robbed now of their honey, over the smooth-flowing river beyond, and over her sister who knitted beside her. She had the air of one accustomed to responsibility and used to watching sharply whatever went on about her. She bestowed now and then a brief look upon the yellow cat asleep at her feet with his paws doubled under him, and one instinctively felt that were he guilty of any derelictions in relation to the dairy, her sharp eye would have detected it in some tell-tale curl of his whiskers. She scanned with a passing regard of combined suspicion and investigation the ruddy line of tomatoes gaining their last touch of red ripeness on the outside of the window-ledge, her expression embodying some vague disapproval of any fruit of which the cultivation was so manifestly an innovation on good old customs. In every movement she displayed a repressed energy contrasting markedly with the manner of the quiet knitter beside her in that strange fashion so often to be found in children of the same parents.

The second woman was little more than a vain shadow from which whatever substance it had ever possessed had long since departed. Hannah West was one of those ciphers to which somebody else is always the significant figure. In her youth she had been the shadow of her sister, and when her husband departed this life, she had merely returned to her first allegiance in becoming the shadow of Sarah Souther once more. She was a tiny, faded creature, who came from her home in the village to visit her sister upon every possible occasion, much as a pious devotee might make a pilgrimage to a shrine. She believed so strongly and so absolutely in Sarah that the belief absorbed all the energy of her nature and left her without even the power of having an especial interest in anything else. What Sarah Souther did, what she thought, what she said, what were the fortunes and what the opinions of her children, with such variations as could be rung on these themes, formed the subject of Mrs. West's conversation, as well as of such transient and vague mental processes as served her in place of thought. The afternoons which she passed in aimless, placid gossip with her sister were the only bits of light and color in her monotonous existence, to be dwelt upon in memory with joy as they were looked forward to with delight.

"I d' know," Hannah remarked, after an unusually long interval of silence this afternoon, "what's set me thinkin' so much 'bout George and Miss Edith as I hev' lately. Seems ef things took hold o' me more the older I get."

A new look of intelligence and alertness came into Sarah's face. She knit out the last stitches upon her needle, and looked down over the river, where a little sail-boat was trying to beat up to the village with a breeze so light as to seem the mere ghost of a wind. The story of the hapless loves of her son and Edith Grayman was sure to be touched upon some time in the course of every afternoon when she and Hannah sat together, and she was conscious of having to-day a fresh item to add to the history.

"I had a letter from George yesterday," she said, approaching her news indirectly that the pleasure of telling it might last the longer.

"Did you?" asked Hannah, almost with animation. "I want to know."

"Yes," Sarah answered, a softer look coming into her bright gray eyes. "Yes, and a good letter it was."

"George was always a master hand at writin'," Hannah responded. "He is a regular mother's son. He would n't tell a lie to save his right hand."

"No," Sarah responded, understanding perfectly that this apparently irrelevant allusion to the veracity of her son had a direct bearing upon the difficulties which had beset his wooing; "when Mr. Grayman asked him if he had been makin' love to Miss Edith, he never flinched a mite. He spoke up like a man. There never was a Souther yet that I ever heard of that 'u'd lie to save himself."

She laid her knitting down upon her lap and fixed upon the little boat a regard which seemed one of the closest attention, yet which saw not the white sloop or the dingy sail with its irregular patch of brown. Some tender memory touched the eternally young motherhood in her aged bosom, and some vision of her absent son shut out from her sense the view of the realities before her.

"He would n't 'a' been his mother's son if he had 'a' lied," Hannah remarked, with a sincerity so evident that it took from the words all suspicion of flattery.

"Or his father's either," Sarah said. "I never set out that Phineas had much go to him, but he was a good man, and he was as true as steel."

"Yes," her sister assented, as she would have assented to any proposition laid down by Mrs. Souther, "yes, he was that."

They sat for a moment in silence. Sarah resumed her knitting, and once more became conscious of the lagging sloop.

"That's likely Ben Hatherway's boat," she remarked. "If he don't get on faster, he'll get caught in the turn of the tide and carried out again."

Hannah glanced toward the boat in a perfunctory way, but she was too deeply interested in the theme upon which the talk had touched to let it drop, and her mind was hardly facile enough to change so quickly from one subject to another.

"What did George say?" she asked. "You said it was a good letter."

"Yes," the mother answered, "it was a regular good letter, if I do say it that had n't ought. He's comin' home."

"Comin' home?" echoed Hannah, in a twitter of excitement. "I want to know! Comin' home himself?"

"I dunno what you mean by comin' home himself," Sarah replied, with a mild facetiousness born of her joy at the news the letter had brought; "but 't ain't at all likely he'll come home nobody else. He's comin', 't any rate. It'll be curious to see how him and Miss Edith 'll act. It'll be ten years since they said good-by to one another, and ten years is considerable of a spell."

"Happen he'll be changed," Hannah observed. "Ten years does most usually change folks more or less."

"Happen," Sarah responded, in a graver and lower tone, "he'll find her changed."

As if to give opportunity for the testing of the truth of this remark, the slight figure of Edith Grayman at that moment appeared at the head of the steep and crooked stairway which led from the chambers of the old house into the kitchen close by the porch door. She was a woman whose face had lost the first freshness of youth, although her summers counted but twenty-seven. Perhaps it was that the winters of her life had been so much the longer seasons. There was in her countenance that expression of mild melancholy which is the heritage from generations of ancestors who have sadly watched the wasting of race and fortune, and the even more bitter decay of the old order of things to which they belong. She was slender and graceful in shape, with a stately and gracious carriage, and the air of the patrician possibly a faint shade too marked in her every motion.

As she came slowly down the time-stained stairway, her fair hair twisted high upon her shapely head, her lips slightly pressed together, and her violet eyes pensive and introspective, Edith might have passed for the ghost of the ancestress whose rejuvenated gown of pale blue camlet she wore.

The long shadows of the lugubrious Lombardy poplars had already begun to stretch out in far-reaching lines, as if laying dusky fingers on the aged mansion, and the sun shone across the river with a light reddened by the autumn hazes. The knitters, as they turned at the sound of Edith's footfall, shone in a sort of softened glory, and into this they saw her descend as she came down the winding stair.

"Father is asleep," Miss Grayman said, stepping into the porch with a light tread. "I am going down to the shore for a breath of air before the night mist rises. You will hear father's bell if he wakes."

She moved slowly down the path which led toward the river, and the regards of the two old women followed her as she went.

"She is a born lady," Sarah said, not without a certain pride as of proprietorship.

"She is that," Hannah acquiesced. "Does she know he's comin'?"

"I just ain't had the sconce to tell her," was the response. "Sometimes 't seems just as though I'd ought to tell her, and then agen 't seems if 't would n't do no kind or sort of good. Two or three times she's sort of looked at me 's if she had an idea something was up, but even then I could n't bring it out."

"When 's he comin'?"

"Any day now. He was in Boston when he wrote, and he's likely to be on the boat 'most any day."

Hannah laid down her knitting for a moment in the breathless excitement of this announcement. The romance of young George Souther and Edith Grayman had thrilled her as nothing in her own experience could have done, so much more real and so much more important were these young people to her mind than was her own personality. For ten years the tale, brief and simple though it was, had for her been the most exciting of romances, and the possibility of the renewal of the broken relations between the lovers appealed to her every sense.

The story of the ill-starred loves of the young couple was really not much, although the two gossips knitting in the sun had spun its length over many a summer's afternoon. Young, lovely, and lonely, Edith Grayman had responded to the love of the manly, handsome son of her nurse as unconsciously and as fervently as if the democratic theories upon which this nation is founded had been for her eternal verities. She had been as little aware of what was happening as is the flower which opens its chalice to the sun, and the shock of discovery when he dared to speak his passion was as great as if she had not felt the love she scorned. Indeed, it is probable that the sudden perception of her own feelings aroused her to a sense of the need she had to be determined, if she hoped to hold her own against her lover's pleading. She was beset within and without, and had need of all her strength not to yield.

"She gave in herself ten years ago," Sarah commented, following the train of thought which was in the mind of each of the sisters as they watched Edith's graceful figure disappear behind a thicket of hazel bushes, turning russet with the advance of autumn. "She stood out till that night George was upset in that sail-boat of his and we thought he was never comin' to. It makes me kind o' creepy down my back now to recollect the screech she give when she see him brought in; an' mercy knows I felt enough like screechin' myself, if it had n't 'a' been for knowin' that if I did n't get the hot blankets, there wa'n't nobody to do it. She could n't deny that she was in love with him after that."

"But she sent him off," interposed Hannah, in the tone of one repeating an objection which persistently refused to be explained to her satisfaction.

"Yes," Sarah returned; "that's what you always say, when you know as well 's I do that that was to please her father; and there he lies bed-rid to-day just as he did then, and just as sot in his way as ever he was."

The pair sighed in concert and shook their gray heads. Of the real significance of the romance which lay so near them they were almost as completely ignorant as was the great yellow cat, who opened his eyes leisurely as Hannah let fall her ball of yarn, and then, considering that upon the whole the temptation to chase it was not worth yielding to, closed the lids over the topaz globes again with luxurious slowness. Themselves part of the battle between the old order and the new, the good creatures were hardly aware that such a struggle was being waged.

"She said," Sarah murmured, bringing forward another scrap of the story, "that she never 'd marry him 's long 's her father objected, and if I don't know that when once Leonard Grayman 's sot his mind on a thing to that thing he 'll stick till the crack o' doom, then I don't know nothin' about him; that's all. She won't go back on her word, and he won't let her off, and that's just the whole of it."

"No," Hannah agreed, sniffing sympathetically, "they won't neither of 'em change their minds; that you may depend upon."

"He'd object if he was in his coffin, I do believe," Sarah continued, with a curious mixture of pride in the family and of personal resentment. "The Graymans are always awful set."

"George must be considerable rich," Hannah observed, in a tone not without a note of reverence; "he's sent you a power o' money, first and last, ain't he?"

"Considerable," the other replied, with conscious elation. "I never used none of it. He kept sendin' till I told him it wa'n't no manner o' mortal use; the family would n't let me use it for them, and I had more 'n I knew what to do with anyway. I've got more 'n 'nough to bury me decenter 'n most folks."

"Yes, I s'pose y' have," Hannah assented.

The knitters sat silent a little time, perhaps reflecting upon the thoughts which the mention of the last rites for the dead called up in their minds. The shadows were growing longer very fast now, and already the afternoon had grown cooler.

Suddenly a step sounded on the graveled walk, and a firmly built, handsome man of thirty-two or three came around the house and neared the porch where the old women sat.

"George!" cried old Sarah, so suddenly that the cat sprang up, startled from his dreams of ancestral mice. "Where on earth did you come from?"

"I want to know!" Hannah exclaimed, rather irrelevantly, in her excitement dropping a stitch in her knitting.

She was instantly aware of the misfortune, however, and while the mother and son exchanged greetings after their ten years' separation, Hannah occupied herself in endeavors to pick up the loop of blue yarn which her purblind eyes could scarcely see in the dimming light. When the stitch had been secured, she proffered her own welcome in sober fashion, being, in truth, somewhat overcome by this stalwart and bearded man whom she remembered as a stripling. The two women twittered about the robust newcomer, who took his seat upon the porch steps, pouring out each in her way a flood of questions or exclamations to which he could hardly be expected to pay very close attention.

After a separation of ten years the greetings were naturally warm, but the Southers were not a folk given to demonstrativeness, and it was not to the surprise of Mrs. Souther that before many minutes had passed her son said abruptly:--

"Where is she?"

"There, there," his mother said, in a tone in which were oddly mingled pride, remonstrance, and fondness, "ain't you got over that yet?"

"No," he responded briefly, but laying his hand fondly on that of his mother. "Where is she?"

"Like as not she won't see you," his mother ventured.

"She sent for me."

The two women stared at him in amazement.

"Sent for you?" they echoed in unison, their voices raised in pitch.

"Yes," he said, rising and throwing back his strong shoulders in a gesture his mother remembered well. "I don't know why I should n't tell you, mother. She said she had been proud as long as she could bear it."

The situation was too overwhelmingly surprising for the women to grasp it at once. Their knitting lay neglected in their laps while they tried to take in the full meaning of this wonderful thing.

"It is n't her pride," old Sarah said softly. "'T 's his; but she would n't say nothin' against her father if she was to be killed for it."

"Is she in the house?" he asked.

"No; she 's down to the shore," his mother answered, with a gasp.

At that moment sounded from the house the tinkle of a bell. The two women started like guilty things surprised.

"Oh, my good gracious!" ejaculated Hannah under her breath.

"What is that?" demanded George.

"That's his bell," Mrs. Souther answered. "He wants me. You need n't mind."

"But he must have heard--" began Hannah breathlessly. Then she stopped abruptly.

"Do you think he heard me?" George asked.

"Oh, he 'd wake up about this time anyway," his mother said. "Besides," she added, with a novel note of rebellion in her voice, "what if he did? You have a right to come to see me, I should hope."

Again the bell tinkled. Old Sarah turned to go into the house.

"You'll find her down to the shore," she repeated.

He turned away at her word, and with long, rapid strides took the path which Miss Edith had taken earlier. The mother paused to look at him from the threshold. Hannah knitted on with a feverish haste and a frightened countenance. For a third time the bell called, now more imperatively, and Sarah mounted the crooked stairway followed by the frightened gaze of her sister.

In the cool and shaded chamber into which Sarah went, a chamber fitted with high-shouldered old mahogany furniture, the youngest piece of which had known the grandfathers of the withered old man who lay in the carved bed, the air seemed to her electric with dreadful possibilities. Mr. Grayman was sitting up in bed, his scant white locks elfishly disheveled about the pale parchment of his face, his eyes unnaturally bright.

"Where have you been?" he demanded, with fierce querulousness. "Why did n't you come when I rang?"

She did not at first reply, but busied herself with the medicine which it was time for him to take.

"Whose voice did I hear?" the old man demanded, as soon as he had swallowed the teaspoonful of liquid she brought him.

"Hannah is here," she answered briefly.

"But I heard a man's voice," he continued, his excitement steadily mounting. "I know who it was! I know who it was!"

"Lie down," his nurse said sternly. "You know the doctor said your heart would n't stand excitement."

"It was George!" he exclaimed shrilly. "He's an impudent--" A fit of gasping choked him, but he struggled fiercely to go on. "If she speaks to him, if she looks at him even, I'll curse her! I'll curse her! I'll come back from my grave to--"

A convulsive gasping ended the sentence. He tore at his throat, at his breast, he struggled dreadfully. Old Sarah supported him in her arms, and tried to aid him, but nothing could save him from the effect of that paroxysm. With one tremendous final effort, the old man threw back his head, drew in his breath with a frightful gasp, then forced it out again in the attempt to utter a last malediction.

"Curse--" The shrill word rang through the chamber, but it was followed by no other. A strong, wrinkled hand, a hand that for a lifetime had worked faithfully for him and his, was pressed over his mouth. He choked, gasped, and then the male line of the Grayman family was extinct.

In the meantime Hannah had been sitting on the porch, knitting like an automaton, and staring at the yellow cat with eyes full of dazed terror. She heard the disturbance in the chamber above, but it came to her very faintly until that last shrill word rang down the ancient stairway. Then she dropped her knitting in complete consternation.

"Oh, goodness!" she said aloud. "Oh, goodness gracious me!"

She was swept away completely by the sudden turmoil which had come to trouble the peaceful afternoon. With the leveling tendencies of modern days Hannah had become in a way familiar, as she had for a time lived at a distance in a town of some size, and of late years in the village, where the unruffled existence of the old Grayman place might almost seem as remote as the life of another century. But Hannah never made any application of modern principles to "the family." The Graymans were an exception to any rules of social equality or democratic tendency. The presumption of her nephew in raising his eyes to Miss Edith had always been all but incredible to the simple old soul; and to understand that a lady of the Grayman stock could for a moment have entertained feelings warmer than those of patronage for a Souther was utterly beyond Hannah's power. She had heard George say that Miss Edith had sent for him; but she had understood it no more than she would have understood a vision of the Apocalypse. The slow steps by which the girl had come to be in revolt against the family traditions, to be ready to abandon her heart-breaking resolutions, and to summon her lover, could have been made credible to old Hannah only on the theory of madness. She sat there in the silence which had followed that shrill cry from the chamber of death, dazed and half cowering, unable to think or to move.

At last she saw George Souther returning alone by the river-path. The brightness was gone from his face, and his lips were contracted sternly.

"She 's sent him away again," Hannah West said within herself. "She had to."

The universe seemed to her to be righting itself again. Some monstrous aberration might for a moment have come upon Miss Grayman, but the stars in their courses were not more steadfast than the principles of the blood. Hannah breathed more freely at the sight of her nephew's drawn face. She wished him no ill, but she could not regard this desire of his as not unlike that of a madman who would pluck the moon from the sky. She instinctively accepted his evident failure as a proof that sanity still existed in the world, and that the moral foundations of society were still undestroyed.

"Where is mother?" George asked abruptly, as he came upon the porch.

"She ain't come down yet," Hannah answered, her thin hands going on with the knitting like a machine.

"I don't think I'll wait," he said simply. "She'll understand."

But at that instant the figure of his mother appeared on the stairway. She came out upon the porch, bent, gray, cowering. As her eye caught the face of her son, however, she straightened herself and a new look came into her eyes.

"Where is Miss Edith?" she asked abruptly.

George came to her and took her hand gently.

"Mother," he said, "you must n't blame her. She can't break her father's heart. She has sent me away again."

His mother looked at him quietly, but with eyes that shone wildly.

"You need n't go," she announced calmly. "He is dead."

"Dead!" echoed her son.

"Dead!" cried Hannah shrilly.

"Yes," Sarah responded, with increasing calmness. "He had one of his paroxysms. The doctor said he'd go off in one of them. You'd better go to Miss Edith and tell her."

Hannah rose from her chair as if the feebleness of age had come upon her suddenly.

"The doctor said he must n't be excited," she quavered. "Did he know George was here?"

The son, who had half turned away, wheeled back again.

"Was that what killed him?" he demanded.

Old Sarah straightened herself with a supreme effort. The very strain of uttering a falsehood and of the dreadful secret which must darken her soul for the rest of her life gave to her words an added air of sincerity.

"He did n't know," she said. "He went off as peaceful as a child."

Her son waited for nothing more, but once more hastened down the river-path. Hannah stood as if transfixed.

"But, Sarah," she said, "I heard--"

Sarah looked at her with a wild regard. For a moment was silence.

"No," she said, "you heard nothing. He did not say it!"

She leaned against the doorpost and looked at her right hand strangely, as if she expected to see blood on it. Then she stood erect again, squaring her shoulders as if to a burden accepted.

"Be still," she said. "They're coming."

Mechanically old Hannah, bowed and bewildered, began to do up her knitting in the fading autumnal afternoon.

"It is growing chilly," she muttered shiveringly.

A COMEDY IN CRAPE

"For my part," observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, "I don't believe any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went round with all of them some, of course; but that was n't anything--with him."

A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs. Small continued the conversation.

"It's awful easy for a girl to put on mourning when a man's dead, and say she's been engaged to him; but if any one of 'em had been engaged to Archie Lovell while he was alive, she'd have bragged enough of it at the time."

The murmur of assent was more pronounced now, and one or two of the members of the Soldiers' Aid Society expressed in word their entire agreement of this opinion. The ladies who made up the society usually improved the opportunities afforded by their meetings to discuss all the gossip of Tuskamuck, and the matter which they were now talking over in the corner of Dr. Wentworth's parlor was one which had caused much excitement in the little community. It was in the days of the Civil War, and anything connected with the soldiers aroused interest, but a combination of romance and gossip with a tragedy in the field contained all the elements of the deepest sensation. News had come after the battle of Chickamauga of the death of Archie Lovell, and although this was followed by a vague rumor that he might perhaps be among the missing rather than the killed, it had never been really disproved. As time had gone on without tidings of the missing man, his death had been accepted, and even his aunt, Old Lady Andrews, whose idol he had been, and who clung to hope as long as hope seemed possible, had given him up at last. She had ordered a memorial stone to be placed in the village graveyard, and the appearance of the marble tablet seemed in a way to give official sanction to the belief that Archie Lovell would never again carry his bright face and winning smile about the village streets, and that nevermore would he drive the gossips of Tuskamuck to the verge of desperation by flirting so markedly with a dozen girls that they could by no means keep track of him or decide what his real preference--if he had one--might be.

Whatever loss the gossips sustained by his death, however, was soon made up, for no sooner was the news of his loss known than three girls, one after the other, announced their engagement to the dead hero, and one after the other donned widow's weeds in his memory. So many girls had been the recipients of Archie's multifarious attentions that it would have been easy for almost any one of Tuskamuck's maidens to bring forward such a claim with some show of probability; but unfortunately, by the end of 1863 too many damsels had done this sort of thing for the posthumous announcement of an engagement to be received with entire solemnity or assured credence. A sort of fashion of going into mourning for dead soldiers had set in, and undoubtedly many a forlorn damsel by a tender fiction thus gratified a blighted passion which had never before been allowed to come to light. Cynic wits declared that it added a new terror to a soldier's death that he could never tell who would, when he was unable to deny it, claim to have been betrothed to him; and when, as in the present case, three disconsolate maidens wore crape for the same man, the affair became too absurd even for the responsive sympathies of war-time.

"The way things are going on," observed Mrs. Drew, a stern woman with a hard eye, "the men are getting so killed off that the only satisfaction a girl can get anyway is to go into mourning for some of 'em; and I don't blame 'em if they do it."

The quality of the remark evidently did not please her hearers, who could hardly bear any slightest approach to light speaking concerning the tragedy in which the nation was involved.

"If it was any one of the three," Mrs. Cummings declared, after a brief silence, "it was Delia Burrage. He used to go round with her all the time."

"No more 'n he did with Mattie Seaton," another lady observed. "He used to see Mattie home from singing-school most of the time that winter before he enlisted."

"Well, anyway, when Delia presented the flag to the company the night before they went off, he was with her all the evening. Don't you remember how we had a supper in the Academy yard, and----"

"Of course I remember. I guess I was on the committee; but he used to go with Mattie lots."

"He sent Mary Foster that wooden chair he carved in camp," spoke up another lady, coming into the field as a champion of the third of the mourners who were so conspicuously advertising their grief to an unbelieving world.

"Well, that was a philopena; so that don't count. She told me so herself."

The case was argued with all the zeal and minuteness inseparable from a discussion at the Tuskamuck Soldiers' Aid Society, and at last, when everybody else began to show signs of flagging, a word was put in by Aunt Naomi Dexter. She had throughout sat listening to the dispute, now and then throwing in a dry comment, wagging her foot and chewing her green barège veil after her fashion, and looking as if she could tell much, if she were but so disposed. Aunt Naomi scorned sewing, and was the one woman who was privileged to sit idle while all the others were busy. She never removed her bonnet on these occasions, the fiction being that she had only dropped in, and did not really belong to the society; but gossip was to Aunt Naomi as the breath of her nostrils, and she would have died rather than to absent herself from a company where it might be current.

"I don't know how many girls Archie Lovell was engaged to," she now remarked dryly. "I dare say he did n't himself; and for all I know, he was engaged to all three of those geese that are flying the black flag for him. But I can tell you the girl he really wanted to marry, and she is n't in black, either."

The ladies all regarded her with looks of lively curiosity and interrogation; but she rolled the sweet morsel of gossip under her tongue, and evidently had no intention of being hurried.

"Who is it?" Mrs. Cummings demanded at length, in a tone which indicated that no more trifling would be endurable.

Aunt Naomi moistened her lips with an air like that of a cat in contemplation of a plump young sparrow.

"I don't see who there is that's any more likely to have been engaged to him than Mattie," the champion of that young lady asserted combatively.

"He'd no more have married her than he would me," Aunt Naomi asserted contemptuously.

"Who was it, then?" Mrs. Smith demanded impatiently.

Aunt Naomi looked about on the eager faces, and seemed to feel that interest had been brought up to its culmination point so that it was time to speak.

"Nancy Turner," she pronounced briefly.

The name was received with varying expressions of face, but few of the ladies had any especial comment to offer in word. Some scorned the idea, and the champions of the three mourners still stood by their guns; but the new theory plainly had in it some force, for the women were all evidently impressed that in this suggestion might lie the real solution to the vagaries of Archie Lovell's multitudinous wooing. As Mrs. Cummings said, however, Nancy Turner was a girl who kept her own counsel, and if she had indeed been engaged to the missing soldier, nobody would ever be the wiser for it. It was discouraging to the gossips to be confronted with a mystery which they could have so little hope of ever solving, and the talk gradually turned to other topics, this one remaining as available as ever to be taken up whenever conversation might languish.

The Sunday following this meeting of the Soldiers' Aid Society was a warm and beautiful spring day, which invited to the open air. Public morality in Tuskamuck was narrow in its interpretations, and among other restrictions it imposed was the impropriety of walking on Sunday except by strolling in the village graveyard. The theory, if carefully investigated, would have been found, in all probability, to have its roots in some Puritan notion that youth in its thoughtlessness would be sobered and religiously inclined by the sight of the grassy mounds, the solemnly clumsy mortuary inscriptions, and the general reminders of death. In practice the fact did not entirely justify such a theory, for the graceless young people instinctively sought for amusement rather than for spiritual enlightenment, chatted and laughed as loudly as they dared, examined the epitaphs for those that might by any distortion of their original intent be made ludicrous, and exchanged jokes in most unsabbatical fashion. They even indulged thoughtlessly, in the very midst of these grim reminders of a life wherein is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, in little rustic flirtations, and eagerly picked up morsels of gossip by sharp observation of young couples strolling oblivious of watching eyes among the graves.

To-day the desire to see the newly set stone which had been placed over the empty mound which was to preserve the memory of Archie Lovell attracted an unusually large number of village folk to turn into the graveyard after afternoon service, and an exciting whisper had gone about that the three disconsolate betrothed damsels had all come to church with flowers. The little groups drifted slowly through the weatherbeaten gate behind the church, but the very first of them were deterred by seeing a black-robed figure laying already her bunch of geraniums on the grave. Delia Burrage, who sang in the choir, had, as was afterward told from one end of the town to the other, slipped down the gallery stair without waiting for the benediction, and so had managed to be first in the field.

The gathering groups of villagers had hardly time to note with what tender care the bereft Delia arranged her bunch of scarlet blossoms at the foot of the still snowy marble slab than they were set aquiver with delicious excitement by the sight of a second crape-enshrouded figure that came to the spot, also bearing flowers. Mary Foster carried in her black-gloved hands a cluster of white pyrethrums, a favorite house-plant in Tuskamuck. Miss Foster came up on the side of the mound opposite to the first comer, and humbly laid her offering below the red geraniums; but although she was thus forced to place her flowers farther from the stone than the other, she was evidently determined not to be outdone in devotion. She fell on her knees, and bowed her face in her handkerchief in a grief so dramatic that Miss Burrage was left far behind, and had no resource but to come to her knees in turn, in a weak imitation of her rival.

The spectators were by this time in a sort of twitter of gratified excitement, and exchanged many significant looks and subdued comments. Those boldest pressed nearer to the scene of action, keenly curious to hear if word passed between the bereaved ladies. Excitement rose to its highest when slowly down the long path came Martha Seaton, more voluminously draped in sable weeds than either of the others. She carried a wreath of English ivy, and a sort of admiring shudder ran through the neighbors as they saw that to this funeral wreath Miss Seaton had sacrificed the growth of years of careful window gardening.

"My! She 's cut her ivy!" one of them gasped.

"Why, so she has! Well, for the land's sake!" responded another, too much overwhelmed to speak coherently.

"Trust Mattie Seaton for not letting anybody get ahead of her!" a third commented, in accents of admiration.

Human curiosity could not keep aloof at a moment such as this, and as Mattie advanced toward the Lovell lot, the neighbors followed as if irresistibly impelled. They closed in a ring around the spot when she reached it, and they looked and listened with an eagerness so frank as almost to be excusable. They could see that the earlier comers were watching from behind the handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes, and with the approbation which belongs to a successful dramatic performance the audience noted also the entire coolness with which Miss Seaton ignored them until she stood close to the drooping pair. Then she flung back her long veil of crape with a sweeping gesture, and with a regal glance of her gypsyish black eyes looked first at them and then at the flowers.

"Oh, thank you so much for bringing flowers," she said, in a voice evidently so raised that her words should be distinctly heard by the ring of spectators. "Archie was so fond of them!"

The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top, and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was "boss of that grave and the others did n't count." As if in a carefully planned _tableau vivant_, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe.

"Well, if that ain't the beatin'est!" chuckled old Ichabod Munson, puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. "Gosh, I wish Archie Lovell could see that. He'd be 'most willin' to get kilt for a sight o' his three widders, an' that Seaton girl comin' it so over t' others."

"He'd think he was a Mormon or a Turk," observed Miss Charlotte Kendall, with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the graveyard could subdue. "He'd see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did love a joke."

The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:--

"Thank you so much for your sympathy;" and before they could reply she had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving swiftly away up the path to the gate.

Never was exit more dramatically effective. The pair left behind exchanged angry glances, then with a simultaneous impulse started to their feet, and as quickly as possible got away from the sight of their fellow townsfolk. They might be silly, but they were not so foolish as not to know how ridiculous they had been made to look that afternoon.

It was only a few days after this that the village was stirred by the news that Old Lady Andrews, who so mourned for Archie, who had adored the handsome, good-natured, selfish, flirtatious dog all his life, had gone South in the hope of recovering his remains, and of bringing them home to rest beneath the stone she had erected. The village pretty generally sympathized with the desire, but thought the chance of success in such a quest made the undertaking a piece of hopeless sentiment. The time since the news of Archie's death was already considerable, his fate from the first had been uncertain, and the chances of the identification of his grave seemed exceedingly small.

"I figure Ol' Lady Andrews would 'a' done better to stay to hum," 'Siah Appleby expressed the sentiment of the town in saying. "Like's not 'f she finds out anythin' certain,--which 't ain't all likely she will,--she'll find Archie was just hove into a trench 'long with a lot more poor fellers, an' no way o' sortin' out their bones short o' the Day o' Judgment. She'd sot up a stone to him, 'n' she'd a nawful sight better let it go at that."

The sentiment of the matter touched some, but the years of war had brought so much of grief and suffering that most had settled into a sort of dull acquiescence unless the woe were personal and immediate. The neighbors sympathized with the feeling of grief-stricken Old Lady Andrews, but so many husbands and fathers, brothers and sons and lovers, had vanished in unidentified graves that the nerves of feeling were benumbed. It would in the early years of the war have been unbearable to think of a friend as lying in an unnamed grave in the South; now it seemed simply a part of the inevitable misery of war.

The "three widows," as the village folk unkindly dubbed them, were less in evidence after the episode in the graveyard. They avoided each other as far as possible, and were evidently not unaware that they were not taken very seriously by their neighbors. They perhaps knew that jests at their expense were in circulation, like the grim remark of Deacon Daniel Richards, that he did not see how any one of them could claim more than a "widow's third" of Archie's memory. They kept rather quiet, at least; and the weeks went by uneventfully until the departure of Old Lady Andrews again drew attention to the story.

The old lady went alone, and once gone she sent no word back to tell how she fared on her quest. Now that her nephew was missing, she had no immediate family; and she wrote to none of her townsfolk. The spring opened into summer as a bud into a flower, and life at Tuskamuck went on with its various interests, but no one was able to do more than to speculate upon her movements or her success.

One afternoon in June the Soldiers' Aid Society came together for its weekly gathering in the vestry. The meeting had been appointed at the house of the Widow Turner, but Nancy Turner had been suddenly called out of town, and her mother, somewhat of an invalid, had not felt equal to the task of entertaining without her. The bare room, with its red pulpit and yellow settees, had a forlorn look, despite the groups of busy women and girls scattered over it; but its chilling influence could not check the flow of conversation.

"Did you hear where Nancy Turner's gone?" one woman asked of the group in which she sat. "She must have gone very suddenly."

"I understood there was sickness somewhere," another responded vaguely.

"Maybe it's her aunt over at Whitneyville," a third suggested. "Mis' Turner told me in the spring she was real feeble."

"Mis' Turner herself 's real frail. She did n't feel well enough to come this afternoon."

"Where 's Aunt Naomi?" inquired Mrs. Cummings. "It's 'most five o'clock, and she almost always comes about three."

"Oh," responded Mrs. Wright, with a laugh and her quick, bright glance, "you may depend upon it she's getting news somewhere. She'll come in before we go home, with something wonderful to tell."

As if in intentional confirmation of the words, Aunt Naomi at that moment appeared in the doorway. Her shrewd old face showed satisfaction in every wrinkle, and from beneath the unfailing veil of green barège draped from her bonnet over the upper left-hand corner of her face her eyes positively twinkled. She took a deliberate survey of the room, and then with her peculiar rocking gait moved to the group which had been discussing her absence.

"Good afternoon, Aunt Naomi," Mrs. Cummings greeted her. "We were just wondering what had become of you."

"And I said," put in Mrs. Wright audaciously, "that you must be getting some wonderful piece of news."

Aunt Naomi hitched up her shawl behind with a grasshopper-like motion of her elbows, and sat down with a wide grin.

"Well, this time you were right," she said. "I was hearing Old Lady Andrews tell about her trip."

"Old Lady Andrews?" echoed the ladies. "Has she got home?"

"Yes; she got here this noon."

"And nobody but you knew it!" ejaculated Mrs. Cummings.

They all regarded Aunt Naomi with undisguised admiration, in every look acknowledging her cleverness in discovering what had been hid from the rest of the village. She smiled broadly, and seemed to drink in the sweet odor of this surprise and their homage as an idol might snuff up grateful fumes of incense.

"Did she bring home the body?" Mrs. Cummings asked after a moment, in a voice becomingly lowered.

"Yes, she did," Aunt Naomi answered, with a chuckle of levity which seemed almost indecent. "She had a dreadful time finding out anything; but she had friends at Washington--her husband had cousins there, you know--and at last she got on the track."

"Where was he buried?"

Aunt Naomi paused to wag her foot and to nibble at the corner of her green veil in a way common to her in moments of excitement. She looked around in evident enjoyment of the situation.

"He was n't buried anywhere," she said, with a grin.

"Why not?" demanded Mrs. Wright excitedly.

"Because he was n't dead."

"Was n't dead?"

"No; only taken prisoner. He was wounded, and he's been in Libby."

"How is he now?"

"Oh, he's all right now. He's coming over here to show himself, and see his friends."

The words were hardly spoken when in the doorway appeared the well-known figure of Archie Lovell. He wore the uniform of a lieutenant, he was pale and worn, but handsomer than ever. On his arm was a blushing damsel in a hat with a white feather, her face all smiles and dimples. An exclamation went up from all over the room.

"Why, it's Archie Lovell!"

It was followed almost immediately by another:--

"And Nancy Turner's with him!"

"No; it's Nancy Lovell," announced Aunt Naomi, in a voice audible all over the vestry. "They were married in Boston."

The bridal couple advanced. All about the room the ladies rose, but instead of greeting the newcomers, they looked at the "three widows," and waited as if to give them first an opportunity of accosting their mate, thus returned as if from the very grave, and so inopportunely bringing another mate with him. Miss Burrage and Miss Foster shrank from sight behind the backs of those nearest to them; but Mattie Seaton swept impulsively forward with her hand extended cordially. Her crisp black hair curled about her temples, her eyes shone, and her teeth flashed between her red lips.

"Why, Archie, dear," she said, in her clear, resonant voice, "we thought we had lost you forever. We all supposed you were dead, and here you are only married. Let me congratulate you, though after being engaged to so many girls, it must seem queer to be married to only one!--and you, Nancy," she went on, before Archie could make other reply than to shake hands; "to think you got him after all, just because you went ahead and caught him! I congratulate you with all my heart; only look out for him. He'll make love to every woman he sees."

She bent forward and kissed the bride before Mrs. Lovell could have known her intention, and turned quickly.

"Come, Delia," she called across the vestry; "come, Mary! There's nothing for us to do but to go home and take off our black. We may have better luck next time!"

With this ambiguous observation, which might have been construed to cast rather a sinister reflection upon the return to life of the young lieutenant, she swept out of the vestry, complete mistress of the situation; and although Archie Lovell always strenuously denied that he had ever been engaged to any woman besides the one he married, a general feeling prevailed in Tuskamuck that no girl could have carried it off with a high hand as Mattie did, if she had not had some sort of an understanding to serve her as a support.

But never again while the Civil War lasted did a girl in Tuskamuck put on black for a lover unless the engagement had been publicly recognized before his death.

A MEETING OF THE PSYCHICAL CLUB