The close of a calm September afternoon, and the autumnal sunlight
falls softly upon Aikenside, where a gay party is now assembled. For
four years Maddy Clyde has been mistress there, and in looking back
upon them she wonders how so much happiness as she has known could be
experienced in so short a time. Never but once has the slightest
ripple of sorrow shadowed her heart, and that was when her noble
husband, Guy, said to her, in a voice she knew was earnest and
determined that he could no longer remain deaf to his country's
call--that where the battle storm was raging he was needed, and like a
second Sardanapalus he must not stay at home. Then for a brief season
her bright face was overcast, and her brown eyes dim with weeping.
Giving him to the war seemed like giving him up to death. But women
can be as true heroes as men. Indeed, it oftentimes costs more courage
for a weak, confiding woman to bid her loved ones leave her for the
field of carnage than it costs them to face the cannon's mouth. Maddy
found it so, but Christian patriotism triumphed over all, and stifling
her own grief, she sent him away with smiles, and prayers, and
cheering words of encouragement, turning herself for consolation to
the source from which she never sued for peace in vain. Save that she
missed her husband terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful
dark-eyed boy, whom they called Guy, Jr., kept her busy, while not
very many weeks afterward, Guy, Sr., sitting in his tent, read with
moistened eyes of a little golden-haired daughter, whom Maddy named
Lucy Atherstone, and gazed upon a curl of hair she inclosed to the
soldier father, asking if it were not like some other hair now
moldering back to dust within an English churchyard. "Maggie" said it
was, Aunt Maggie, as Guy, Jr., called the wife of Dr. Holbrook, who
had come to Aikenside to stay, while her husband did his duty as
surgeon in the army. That little daughter is a year-old baby now, and
in her short white dress and coral bracelets she sits neglected on the
nursery floor, while mother and Jessie, Maggie and everybody hasten
out into the yard to welcome the returning soldier, Major Guy, whose
arm is in a sling, and whose face is very pale from the effects of
wounds received at Gettysburg, where his daring courage had well-nigh
won for Maddy a widow's heritage. For the present the arm is disabled,
and so he has been discharged, and comes back to the home where warm
words of welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling
wife, who can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and
kisses her beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad,
she had so wanted her husband to come with Guy, but his humanity would
not permit him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care.
Loving messages he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she
heard from Guy how greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the
beds of pain, and how much he was doing to relieve their anguish.