The talk of war was everywhere—monitors, the draft, buying substitutes. Between North and South, they felt pressure from both sides. Mr. Brown was ridden on a rail by masked men—which side were they on? No one knew. Cousin Willie, supposed to have southern sympathies, was threatened with tarring and feathering, but so was that violent Yankee, Mr. Farley. The war charged the air, changing everything, giving everything an excitement, an emotional tensity. Wellington Carter was being stupid at the store, breaking the candles and dropping the change on the floor—and before the candles all were burned he was being buried at Mount Pleasant with military honors. Sorrow was the common state, and boys who had marched away to fife and drum came home by the streets of silence.
“Thank God, Victor is a baby!” Mamma cried, listening to the church bell tolling. “And after all the suffering this one has brought, surely, surely, there’ll never be another war!”
The war was like distant thunder; threatening, warning, although the sun shone on the still garden. But it was Maggie in whose heart it echoed loudest.
Aunt Priscilla bought one of the new green-grey Rogers’ groups, and put it in the bay window along with the draggled lace curtains, the hanging baskets of sick ferns, and the parrot in his dirty cage; and Maggie would steal in to look at it, aflame with pity for the wounded scout, wandering in the swamp supported by a ragged negro. So sick, so sick, the veins standing out terribly on his arm under a tourniquet. Once, when no one was near, she touched her lips softly, quickly to that tortured hand, while a wordless passion flooded her to help—she didn’t know how, she didn’t know who—just to help. It was only her adoration of her little brother that kept her from running away and trying to enter the army disguised as a drummer boy.
Then one April day, when Caesar was showing the children a nest of blue eggs in a hawthorn tree and Mamma was admiring her tulips, Uncle Willie rode over to tell them President Lincoln had been assassinated.
It was like a sad, exciting story in a book to them, it was not reality. Their world was The Maples; and the road, the river, the yellow day-lilies in the tall wet grass along the meadow fence, marked the world’s ends.
Year after year, the frogs thrilled out their song, the ferns uncurled their woolly balls, the sweet rain fell, and summer came, just as if Papa had not died. Mamma was so happy with the children, the garden, the lawn, gold-green in the summer sunshine, the golden lazy days. She would never admit, never even realize consciously that his death meant a strain removed; but even his loss, dimmed by a few years, added to the perfection and harmony of her days like minor chords of music.
Her black crêpes melted into violet muslins; less and less often she said to the awed and solemn little girls, “You do remember dear Papa, don’t you, darlings?” More and more often the cornucopia, held before his picture by a bronze hand in a neatly fluted cuff, was empty of its pansies (for thoughts). Nothing was left of his passion, his jokes, his funny songs, his sudden flashing tempers, his love—nothing but a sigh, and a few tears from Mamma on a wet day, when the children or the servants had been tiresome or when she had a headache; his watch-pocket still hanging over the big bed in her room; and Maggie’s missing him.
Sometimes it seemed as if Maggie were the only one who ever thought of Papa now. But someone else remembered.
Poor Aunt Priscilla needed matches and cheese from the store, so she stood at her back door and feebly called towards the stable:
“Washington! Oh, Washington!”
But Washington, fat and black as a blackbird too fat and old to fly, felt the afternoon was over-hot for a drive, and remained where he was, comfortably hidden, mimicking his mistress under his breath:
“Wash’n’ton! Oh, Wash’n’ton!”
So Aunt Priscilla started on foot for the store, trailing her magenta draperies through the dust, her face turning from mauve to purple as she plodded along. She was thinking she would have to give up and sit down in the ditch in the shade by the side of the road, when Cousin Lizzie Blow in her little low pony carriage came rolling along in a cloud of dust, and picked her up.
“You’ll have a stroke if you don’t take care,” she said, her eyes slipping over Priscilla’s wet purple face, the point lace collar pinned on all crooked, and the lunch crumbs nested in the folds of her bodice. She herself was exquisitely neat. Her black and scarlet looked as impossible to disarrange or dim as the black and scarlet of a ladybug; and she was cool-looking, too, except for her red cheeks, one a little redder than the other, almost as red as the poppy-colored Cashmere of her Garibaldi bodice.
“What on earth are you walking for on such a day, with your stable full of horses?”
“I wanted some cheese—the mice are so bad and Willie likes it, too—me, but it’s hot!” She mopped her face with a worked collar she had snatched up, mistaking it for a handkerchief. “I couldn’t find Washington—I guess he was busy somewhere, and I don’t like to stop him. He says the work’s almost too much for him anyway. Wasn’t last night awful? I couldn’t stay in bed—I sat by the window and fanned myself until after
