Anne Part 62

At last, worn out with weariness, she went homeward to the half-house as twilight fell. In the morning the ground was white with snow again, and the tumultuous winds of March were careering through the sky, whipping the sleet and hail before them as they flew along; the strange halcyon suns.h.i.+ne was gone, and a second winter upon them. And Anne felt that a winter such as she had never known before was in her heart also.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

"O eloquent and mightie Death! thou hast drawn together all the farre-stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of men, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!"--SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

A month pa.s.sed. Anne saw nothing more, heard nothing more, but toiled on in her daily round. She taught and sang. She answered Miss Lois's letters and those of Pere Michaux. There was no longer any danger in writing to Weston, and she smiled sadly as she thought of the blind, self-important days when she had believed otherwise. She now wrote to her friends there, and letters came in return. Mrs. Barstow's pages were filled with accounts of hospital work, for Donelson had been followed by the great blood-shedding of s.h.i.+loh, and the West was dotted with battle-fields.

She had allowed herself no newspapers, lest she should come upon his name. But now she ordered one, and read it daily. What was it to her even if she should come upon his name? She must learn to bear it, so long as they trod the same earth. And one day she did come upon it; but it was merely the two-line announcement that he had returned to the front.

The great city had grown used to the war. There were few signs in its busy streets that a pall hung over the borders of the South. The music teacher on her rounds saw nothing save now and then the ranks of a regiment pa.s.sing through on its way to a train. Traffic went on unchanged; pleasure was rampant as ever. The shrill voice of the newsboy calling the details of the last battle was often the only reminder of the dread reality. May moved onward. The Scheffels began to make those little excursions into the country so dear to the German heart; but they could not persuade the honored Fraulein to accompany them. For it was not the real country to which they went, but only that suburban imitation of it which thrives in the neighborhood of New York, and Anne's heart was back on her island in the cool blue Northern straits.

Miss Lois was now at home again, and her letters were like a breath of life to the homesick girl. Little Andre was better, and Pere Michaux came often to the church-house, and seemed glad to be with them again.

With them again! If she could but be with them too!--stand on the heights among the beckoning larches, walk through the spicy aisles of the arbor vitae, sit under the gray old pines, listening to the wash of the cool blue water below, at rest, afar, afar from all this weariness and sadness and pain!

During these days Stonewall Jackson was making one of his brilliant campaigns in the Valley, the Valley of Virginia, the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah. On the last morning in May, while reading the war news, Anne found in one corner a little list of dead. And there, in small letters, which grew to great size, and inscribed themselves on the walls of the room, one succeeding the other like a horrible dream, was the name, Ward Heathcote. "Captain Ward Heathcote,---- New York Volunteers."

She turned the sheet; it was repeated in the latest news column, and again in a notice on the local page. "Captain Ward Heathcote,---- New York Volunteers, is reported among the slain," followed by those brief items of birth, age, and general history which appall our eyes when we first behold them on the printed page, and realize that they are now public property, since they belong only to the dead.

It was early. She was at home in the half-house. She rose, put on her bonnet and gloves, walked to the station, took the first train to the city, and went to Helen.

She reached the house, and was denied entrance. Mrs. Heathcote could see no one.

Was any one with her? Miss Teller?

Miss Teller, the man answered, was absent from the city; but a telegraphic dispatch had been sent, and she was on her way home. There was no relative at present with Mrs. Heathcote; friends she was not able to see. And he looked with some curiosity at this plainly dressed young person, who stood there quite unconscious, apparently, of the atmosphere of his manner. And yet Mr. Simpson had a very well regulated manner, founded upon the best models--a manner which had never heretofore failed in its effect. With a preliminary cough, he began to close the door.

"Wait," said this young person, almost as though she had some authority.

She drew forth a little note-book, tore out a leaf, wrote a line upon it, and handed him the improvised card. "Please take this to Mrs.

Heathcote," she said. "I think she will see me."

See her--see _her_--when already members of the highest circles of the city had been refused! With a slight smile of superior scorn, Simpson took the little slip, and leaving the stranger on the steps, went within, partially closing the door behind him. But in a few minutes he hastily returned, and with him was a sedate middle-aged woman, whom he called Mrs. Bagshot, and who, although quiet in manner, seemed decidedly to outrank him.

"Will you come with me, if you please?" she said deferentially, addressing Anne. "Mrs. Heathcote would like to see you without delay."

She led the way with a quiet unhurrying step up a broad stairway, and opened a door. In the darkened room, on a couch, a white form was lying. Bagshot withdrew, and Anne, crossing the floor, sank down on her knees beside the couch.

"Helen!" she said, in a broken voice; "oh, Helen! Helen!"

The white figure did not stir, save slowly to disengage one hand and hold it out. But Anne, leaning forward, tenderly lifted the slight form in her arms, and held it close to her breast.

"I could not help coming," she said. "Poor Helen! poor, poor Helen!"

She smoothed the fair hair away from the small face that lay still and white upon her shoulder, and at that moment she pitied the stricken wife so intensely that she forgot the rival, or rather made herself one with her; for in death there is no rivalry, only a common grief. Helen did not speak, but she moved closer to Anne, and Anne, holding her in her arms, bent over her, soothing her with loving words, as though she had been a little child.

The stranger remained with Mrs. Heathcote nearly two hours. Then she went away, and Simpson, opening the door for her, noticed that her veil was closely drawn, so that her face was concealed. She went up the street to the end of the block, turned the corner, and disappeared. He was still standing on the steps, taking a breath of fresh air, his portly person and solemn face expressing, according to his idea, a dignified grief appropriate to the occasion and the distinction of the family he served--a family whose bereavements even were above the level of ordinary sorrows, when his attention was attracted by the appearance of a boy in uniform, bearing in his hand an orange-brown envelope. In the possibilities of that well-known hue of hope and dread he forgot for the moment even his occupation of arranging in his own mind elegant formulas with which to answer the inquiries constantly made at the door of the bereaved mansion. The boy ascended the steps; Bagshot, up stairs, with her hand on the k.n.o.b of Mrs. Heathcote's door, saw him, and came down. The dispatch was for her mistress; she carried it to her. The next instant a cry rang through the house. Captain Heathcote was safe.

The message was as follows:

"_To Mrs. Ward Heathcote:_

"My name given in list a mistake. Am here, wounded, but not dangerously.

Will write.

W. H."

It was sent from Harper's Ferry. And two hours later, Mrs. Heathcote, accompanied by Bagshot, was on her way to Harper's Ferry.

It was a wild journey. If any man had possessed authority over Helen, she would never have been allowed to make it; but no man did possess authority. Mrs. Heathcote, having money, courage, and a will of steel, asked advice from no one, did not even wait for Miss Teller, but departed according to a swift purpose of her own, accompanied only by Bagshot, who was, however, an efficient person, self-possessed, calm, and accustomed to travelling. It was uncertain whether they would be able to reach Harper's Ferry, but this uncertainty did not deter Helen: she would go as far as she could. In her heart she was not without hope that Mrs. Heathcote could relax the rules and military lines of even the strictest general in the service. As to personal fear, she had none.

At Baltimore she was obliged to wait for an answer to the dispatch she had sent on starting, and the answer was long in coming. To pa.s.s away the time, she ordered a carriage and drove about the city; many persons noticed her, and remembered her fair, delicate, and impatient face, framed in its pale hair. At last the answer came. Captain Heathcote was no longer at Harper's Ferry; he had been sent a short distance northward to a town where there was a better hospital, and Mrs. Heathcote was advised to go round by the way of Harrisburg, a route easier and safer, if not in the end more direct as well.

She followed this advice, although against her will. She travelled northward to Harrisburg, and then made a broad curve, and came southward again, within sight of the green hills later to be brought into unexpected and long-enduring fame--the hills around Gettysburg. But now the whole region was fair with summer, smiling and peaceful; the farmers were at work, and the grain was growing. After some delays she reached the little town, with its barrack-like, white-washed hospital, where her husband was installed under treatment for a wound in his right arm, which, at first appearing serious, had now begun to improve so rapidly that the surgeon in charge decided that he could soon travel northward, and receive what further care he needed among the comforts of his own home.

At the end of five days, therefore, they started, attended only by Bagshot, that useful woman possessing, in addition to her other qualifications, both skill and experience as a nurse.

They started; but the journey was soon ended. On the 11th of June the world of New York was startled, its upper circles hotly excited, and one obscure young teacher in a little suburban home paralyzed, by the great headings in the morning newspapers. Mrs. Heathcote, wife of Captain Ward Heathcote,---- New York Volunteers, while on her way homeward with her husband, who was wounded in the Shenandoah Valley, had been found murdered in her room in the country inn at Timloesville, where they were pa.s.sing the night. And the evidence pointed so strongly toward Captain Heathcote that he had been arrested upon suspicion.

The city journals appended to this brief dispatch whatever details they knew regarding the personal history of the suspected man and his victim.

Helen's beauty, the high position of both in society, and their large circle of friends were spoken of; and in one account the wife's wealth, left by will unconditionally to her husband, was significantly mentioned. One of the larger journals, with the terrible and pitiless impartiality of the great city dailies, added that if there had been a plan, some part of it had signally failed. "A man of the ability of Captain Heathcote would never have been caught otherwise in a web of circ.u.mstantial evidence so close that it convinced even the pastoral minds of the Timloesville officials. We do not wish, of course, to prejudge this case; but from the half-accounts which have reached us, it looks as though this blunder, whatever it may have been, was but another proof of the eternal verity of the old saying, Murder will out."

It was the journal containing this sentence which Anne read. She had heard the news of Heathcote's safety a few hours after her visit to Helen. Only a few days had pa.s.sed, and now her eyes were staring at the horrible words that Helen was dead, and that her murderer was her own husband.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

"All her bright hair streaming down, And all the coverlid was cloth of gold Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white All but her face, and that clear-featured face Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled."

--TENNYSON.

EXTRACT FROM THE NEW YORK "MARS."

"The following details in relation to the terrible crime with whose main facts our readers are familiar will be of interest at the moment. They were collected by our special reporter, sent in person to the scene of the tragedy, for the purpose of gathering reliable information concerning this case, which promises to be one of the _causes celebres_ of the country, not only on account of the high position and wealth of the parties concerned, but also on account of the close net of purely circ.u.mstantial evidence which surrounds the accused man.

"TIMLOESVILLE

is a small village on the border-line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Legally in Pennsylvania, it possesses personally the characteristics of a Maryland village, some of its outlying fields being fairly over the border. It is credited with about two thousand inhabitants; but the present observer did not see, during his stay, more than about one thousand, including women and children. Timloesville is on a branch railway, which connects with the main line at a junction about thirty miles distant. It possesses two churches and a saw-mill, and was named from a highly esteemed early settler (who may perhaps have marched with our great Was.h.i.+ngton), Judge Jeremiah Timloe. The agricultural products of the surrounding country are princ.i.p.ally hay and maize--wrongly called corn. The intelligence and morality of the community are generally understood to be of a high order. A low fever prevails here in the spring.