“Her voice was a mere whisper, but every ear heard it, and every eye saw the crimson rise to the forehead and redden the white throat.
“For a moment there was silence, broken only by the hard breathing of the men. Then the Doctor spoke.
“‘Go out and bring him in,’ he cried. ‘Bring in this Mitchell! It seems he has other things to do,—the blockhead!’
“Two of the men hurried out.
“‘He shall not have her,’ shouted Black Andy. ‘My knife shall see to that!’ And he pressed close to the platform. A great tumult arose, men talked angrily and clinched their fists, voices rose and fell together. ‘He shall not have her,—Mitchell! Mitchell!’
“‘The truth is, each one of you wants her himself,’ said the Doctor.
“There was a sudden silence, but every man eyed his neighbor jealously. Black Andy stood in front, knife in hand, and kept guard. The Lady had not moved; she was kneeling, with her face buried in her hands.
“‘I wish to speak to her,’ said the Doctor, advancing.
“‘You shall not,’ cried Andy, fiercely interposing.
“‘You fool! I love her this moment ten thousand times more than you do. But do you suppose I would so much as touch a woman who loved another man?’
“The knife dropped; the Doctor passed on and took his place on the platform by the Lady’s side. The tumult began again, for Mitchell was seen coming in the door between his two keepers.
“‘Mitchell! Mitchell!’ rang angrily through the church.
“‘Look, woman!’ said the Doctor, bending over the kneeling figure at his side. She raised her head and saw the wolfish faces below.
“‘They have had ten months of your religion,’ he said.
“It was his revenge. Bitter, indeed; but he loved her.
“In the mean time the man Mitchell was hauled and pushed and tossed forward to the platform by rough hands that longed to throttle him on the way. At last, angry himself, but full of wonder, he confronted them, this crowd of comrades suddenly turned madmen! ‘What does this mean?’ he asked.
“‘Mean! mean!’ shouted the men; ‘a likely story! He asks what this means!’ And they laughed boisterously.
“The Doctor advanced. ‘You see this woman,’ he said.
“‘I see our Lady.’
“‘Our Lady no longer; only a woman like any other,—weak and fickle. Take her,—but begone.’
“‘Take her!’ repeated Mitchell, bewildered,—‘take our Lady! And where?’
“‘Fool! Liar! Blockhead!’ shouted the crowd below.
“‘The truth is simply this, Mitchell,’ continued the Doctor, quietly. ‘We herewith give you up our Lady,—ours no longer; for she has just confessed, openly confessed, that she loves you.’
“Mitchell started back. ‘Loves me!’
“‘Yes.’
“Black Andy felt the blade of his knife. ‘He ’ll never have her alive,’ he muttered.
“‘But,’ said Mitchell, bluntly confronting the Doctor, ‘I don’t want her.’
“‘You don’t want her?’
“‘I don’t love her.’
“‘You don’t love her?’
“‘Not in the least,’ he replied, growing angry, perhaps at himself. ‘What is she to me? Nothing. A very good missionary, no doubt; but I don’t fancy woman-preachers. You may remember that I never gave in to her influence; I was never under her thumb. I was the only man in Little Fishing who cared nothing for her!’
“‘And that is the secret of her liking,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘O woman! woman! the same the world over!’
“In the mean time the crowd had stood stupefied.
“‘He does not love her!’ they said to each other; ‘he does not want her!’
“Andy’s black eyes gleamed with joy; he swung himself up on to the platform. Mitchell stood there with face dark and disturbed, but he did not flinch. Whatever his faults, he was no hypocrite. ‘I must leave this to-night,’ he said to himself, and turned to go. But quick as a flash our Lady sprang from her knees and threw herself at his feet. ‘You are going,’ she cried. ‘I heard what you said,—you do not love me! But take me with you,—oh, take me with you! Let me be your servant—your slave—anything—anything, so that I am not parted from you, my lord and master, my only, only love!’
“She clasped his ankles with her thin, white hands, and laid her face on his dusty shoes.
“The whole audience stood dumb before this manifestation of a great love. Enraged, bitter, jealous as was each heart, there was not a man but would at that moment have sacrificed his own love that she might be blessed. Even Mitchell, in one of those rare spirit-flashes when the soul is shown bare in the lightning, asked himself, ‘Can I not love her?’ But the soul answered, ‘No.’ He stooped, unclasped the clinging hands, and turned resolutely away.
“‘You are a fool,’ said the Doctor. ‘No other woman will ever love you as she does.’
“‘I know it,’ replied Mitchell.
“He stepped down from the platform and crossed the church, the silent crowd making a way for him as he passed along; he went out into the sunshine, through the village, down towards the beach,—they saw him no more.
“The Lady had fainted. The men bore her back to the lodge and tended her with gentle care one week,—two weeks,—three weeks. Then she died.
“They were all around her; she smiled upon them all, and called them all by name, bidding them farewell. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered to the Doctor. The Nightingale sang a hymn, sang as he had never sung before. Black Andy knelt at her feet. For some minutes she lay scarcely breathing; then suddenly she opened her fading eyes. ‘Friends,’ she murmured, ‘I am well punished. I thought myself holy,—I held myself above my kind,—but God has shown me I am the weakest of them all.’
“The next moment she was gone.
“The men buried her with tender hands. Then, in a kind of blind fury against Fate, they tore down her empty lodge and destroyed its every fragment; in their grim determination they even smoothed over the ground and planted shrubs and bushes, so that the very location might be lost. But they did not stay to see the change. In a month the camp broke up of itself, the town was abandoned, and the island deserted for good and all; I doubt whether any of the men ever came back or even stopped when passing by. Probably I am the only one. Thirty years ago,—thirty years ago!”
“That Mitchell was a great fool,” I said, after a long pause. “The Doctor was worth twenty of him; for that matter, so was Black Andy. I only hope the fellow was well punished for his stupidity.”
“He was.”
“O, you kept track of him, did you?”
“Yes. He went back into the world, and the woman he loved repulsed him a second time, and with even more scorn than before.”
“Served him right.”
“Perhaps so; but after all, what could he do? Love is not made to order. He loved one, not the other; that was his crime. Yet,—so strange a creature is man,—he came back after thirty years, just to see our Lady’s grave.”
“What! Are you—”
“I am Mitchell,—Reuben Mitchell.”
FROM
RODMAN THE KEEPER:
SOUTHERN SKETCHES
Contents
“Rodman the Keeper”
“Sister St. Luke”
“Miss Elisabetha”
“Old Gardiston”
“The South Devil”
“In the Cotton Country”
“Felipa”
“King David”
Rodman the Keeper
The long years come and go,
And the Past,
The sorrowful, splendid Past,
With its glory and its woe,
Seems never to have been.
/> ——Seems never to have been?
O somber days and grand,
How ye crowd back once more,
Seeing our heroes’ graves are green
By the Potomac and the Cumberland,
And in the valley of the Shenandoah!
When we remember how they died,—
In dark ravine and on the mountain-side,
In leaguered fort and fire-encircled town,
And where the iron ships went down,—
How their dear lives were spent
In the weary hospital-tent,
In the cockpit’s crowded hive,
——it seems
Ignoble to be alive!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
“KEEPER of what? Keeper of the dead. Well, it is easier to keep the dead than the living; and as for the gloom of the thing, the living among whom I have been lately were not a hilarious set.”
John Rodman sat in the doorway and looked out over his domain. The little cottage behind him was empty of life save himself alone. In one room the slender appointments provided by Government for the keeper, who being still alive must sleep and eat, made the bareness doubly bare; in the other the desk and the great ledgers, the ink and pens, the register, the loud-ticking clock on the wall, and the flag folded on a shelf, were all for the kept, whose names, in hastily written, blotted rolls of manuscript, were waiting to be transcribed in the new red-bound ledgers in the keeper’s best handwriting day by day, while the clock was to tell him the hour when the flag must rise over the mounds where reposed the bodies of fourteen thousand United States soldiers—who had languished where once stood the prison-pens, on the opposite slopes, now fair and peaceful in the sunset; who had fallen by the way in long marches to and fro under the burning sun; who had fought and died on the many battle-fields that reddened the beautiful State, stretching from the peaks of the marble mountains in the smoky west down to the sea-islands of the ocean border. The last rim of the sun’s red ball had sunk below the horizon line, and the western sky glowed with deep rose-color, which faded away above into pink, into the salmon-tint, into shades of that far-away heavenly emerald which the brush of the earthly artist can never reproduce, but which is found sometimes in the iridescent heart of the opal. The small town, a mile distant, stood turning its back on the cemetery; but the keeper could see the pleasant, rambling old mansions, each with its rose-garden and neglected outlying fields, the empty negro quarters falling into ruin, and everything just as it stood when on that April morning the first gun was fired on Sumter; apparently not a nail added, not a brushful of paint applied, not a fallen brick replaced, or latch or lock repaired. The keeper had noted these things as he strolled through the town, but not with surprise; for he had seen the South in its first estate, when, fresh, strong, and fired with enthusiasm, he, too, had marched away from his village home with the colors flying above and the girls waving their handkerchiefs behind, as the regiment, a thousand strong, filed down the dusty road. That regiment, a weak, scarred two hundred, came back a year later with lagging step and colors tattered and scorched, and the girls could not wave their handkerchiefs, wet and sodden with tears. But the keeper, his wound healed, had gone again; and he had seen with his New England eyes the magnificence and the carelessness of the South, her splendor and negligence, her wealth and thriftlessness, as through Virginia and the fair Carolinas, across Georgia and into sunny Florida, he had marched month by month, first a lieutenant, then captain, and finally major and colonel, as death mowed down those above him, and he and his good conduct were left. Everywhere magnificence went hand in hand with neglect, and he had said so as chance now and then threw a conversation in his path.
“We have no such shiftless ways,” he would remark, after he had furtively supplied a prisoner with hard-tack and coffee.
“And no such grand ones either,” Johnny Reb would reply, if he was a man of spirit; and generally he was.
The Yankee, forced to acknowledge the truth of this statement, qualified it by observing that he would rather have more thrift with a little less grandeur; whereupon the other answered that he would not; and there the conversation rested. So now ex-Colonel Rodman, keeper of the national cemetery, viewed the little town in its second estate with philosophic eyes. “It is part of a great problem now working itself out; I am not here to tend the living, but the dead,” he said.
Whereupon, as he walked among the long mounds, a voice seemed to rise from the still ranks below: “While ye have time, do good to men,” it said. “Behold, we are beyond your care.” But the keeper did not heed.
This still evening in early February he looked out over the level waste. The little town stood in the lowlands; there were no hills from whence cometh help—calm heights that lift the soul above earth and its cares; no river to lead the aspirations of the children outward toward the great sea. Everything was monotonous, and the only spirit that rose above the waste was a bitterness for the gained and sorrow for the lost cause. The keeper was the only man whose presence personated the former in their sight, and upon him therefore, as representative, the bitterness fell, not in words, but in averted looks, in sudden silences when he approached, in withdrawals and avoidance, until he lived and moved in a vacuum; wherever he went there was presently no one save himself; the very shop-keeper who sold him sugar seemed turned into a man of wood, and took his money reluctantly, although the shilling gained stood perhaps for that day’s dinner. So Rodman withdrew himself, and came and went among them no more; the broad acres of his domain gave him as much exercise as his shattered ankle could bear; he ordered his few supplies by the quantity, and began the life of a solitary, his island marked out by the massive granite wall with which the United States Government has carefully surrounded those sad Southern cemeteries of hers; sad, not so much from the number of the mounds representing youth and strength cut off in their bloom, for that is but the fortune of war, as for the complete isolation which marks them. “Strangers in a strange land” is the thought of all who, coming and going to and from Florida, turn aside here and there to stand for a moment among the closely ranged graves which seem already a part of the past, that near past which in our hurrying American life is even now so far away. The Government work was completed before the keeper came; the lines of the trenches were defined by low granite copings, and the comparatively few single mounds were headed by trim little white boards bearing generally the word “Unknown,” but here and there a name and an age, in most cases a boy from some far-away Northern State; “twenty-one,” “twenty-two,” said the inscriptions; the dates were those dark years among the sixties, measured now more than by anything else in the number of maidens widowed in heart, and women widowed indeed, who sit still and remember, while the world rushes by. At sunrise the keeper ran up the stars and stripes; and so precise were his ideas of the accessories belonging to the place, that from his own small store of money he had taken enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the dead. This was not patriotism so called, or rather miscalled, it was not sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph; it was simply a sense of the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which had in it nothing of religion, unless indeed a man’s endeavor to live up to his own ideal of his duty be a religion. The same feeling led the keeper to spend hours in copying the rolls. “John Andrew Warren, Company G, Eighth New Hampshire Infantry,” he repeated, as he slowly wrote the name, giving “John Andrew” clear, bold capitals and a lettering impossible to mistake; “died August 15, 1863, aged twenty-two years. He came from the prison-pen yonder, and lies somewhere in those trenches, I suppose. Now then, John Andrew, don’t fancy I am sorrowing for you; no doubt you are better off than I am at this very moment. But none the less, John Andrew, shall pen, ink, and hand do their duty to you. For that I am here.”
Infinite pains and labor went
into these records of the dead; one hair’s-breadth error, and the whole page was replaced by a new one. The same spirit kept the grass carefully away from the low coping of the trenches, kept the graveled paths smooth and the mounds green, and the bare little cottage neat as a man-of-war. When the keeper cooked his dinner, the door toward the east, where the dead lay, was scrupulously closed, nor was it opened until everything was in perfect order again. At sunset the flag was lowered, and then it was the keeper’s habit to walk slowly up and down the path until the shadows veiled the mounds on each side, and there was nothing save the peaceful green of earth. “So time will efface our little lives and sorrows,” he mused, “and we shall be as nothing in the indistinguishable past.” Yet none the less did he fulfill the duties of every day and hour with exactness. “At least they shall not say that I was lacking,” he murmured to himself as he thought vaguely of the future beyond these graves. Who “they” were, it would have troubled him to formulate, since he was one of the many sons whom New England in this generation sends forth with a belief composed entirely of negatives. As the season advanced, he worked all day in the sunshine. “My garden looks well,” he said. “I like this cemetery because it is the original resting-place of the dead who lie beneath. They were not brought here from distant places, gathered up by contract, numbered, and described like so much merchandise; their first repose has not been broken, their peace has been undisturbed. Hasty burials the prison authorities gave them; the thin bodies were tumbled into the trenches by men almost as thin, for the whole State went hungry in those dark days. There were not many prayers, no tears, as the dead-carts went the rounds. But the prayers had been said, and the tears had fallen, while the poor fellows were still alive in the pens yonder; and when at last death came, it was like a release. They suffered long; and I for one believe that therefore shall their rest be long—long and sweet.”
Constance Fenimore Woolson Page 17
