Chapter Eight

by Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss
Edited by Amber Moeller

When Horace presented himself at Aunt Jane's the next evening, at five o'clock, he was told that the dinner hour had been deferred till six, as the barrels destined for the army were not yet packed, and the dining-room was in confusion.

"Aunt Jane says you may come and help us, if you like," said Annie, after delivering this message. He followed her, therefore, to the dining-room, and, though it hurt him not a little, made himself very useful. The girls were in high spirits, and made themselves merry over their work: still Horace felt that Annie treated him with evident friendliness, while Maggie kept out of his way as much as possible. Indeed, he did not know what to make of Maggie: every now and then, in the midst of her gaiety, there would come over her a fit of gravity, and silence that suggested some secret source of unrest. At last, when the barrels were full, and some articles still remained on their hands, Annie said:--

"Now, Mr. Wheeler, jump into the barrels and crowd the things down: we must have room for these magazines and papers: some of the poor fellows in the hospital will be so glad of them."

Horace cast a look of despair at Aunt Jane: his jumping days were over: but must he tell these girls so, and get them to liking him out of mere pity?

Aunt Jane understood the look, and came to his rescue.

"He is not half heavy enough," she said; "I will call John; John will answer the purpose far better. Meanwhile, Horace, suppose you write the address of these barrels on cards. Maggie, dear, can you find some cards?"

"Yes, here are some," she said, " and here is the address, just as I took it down when General Walton gave it to us."

Horace almost snatched the paper from her in his eagerness to see this specimen of her handwriting: his spirits sank when he found it quite unlike that in which his own name had been written so profusely. He had been, up to this moment, so full of life and joy, that every one observed the change in him. The truth is that this trifling incident suddenly revealed to him how enchanted he had been in the bare hope that Maggie thought of him long enough at a time to write his name even once, and if she had done it for mere idleness. As to Annie--of course it was she--why, all she had done it for was to show what wonderfully graceful H's she could make!

"Mr. Wheeler is very moody, is he not, Maggie?" Annie asked the next morning, at breakfast.

"Is he?" said Maggie.

"Yes; and did you notice how he limped, last night? I have no doubt he wears tight boots."

"Very likely," said Maggie. She seemed a little pre-occupied, and unlike herself. The sudden change of manner that had come over Horace when she gave him the address, at Aunt Jane's request, had been too striking not to make an impression upon her. "What had she done to annoy him?" she asked herself, and then reproached herself for caring, and then said she did not and could not care for a man who, in this hour of his country's peril, could keep out of the army if he tried. Yet, she watched for him, evening after evening; whenever the bell rang, she fancied he had come; but he came not. Then she grew gentler and sweeter than ever, and Aunt Jane wondered that a man who had seen her, as Horace had, could help loving her; and said to herself that she had cast this pearl before swine. She had proclaimed herself as hating match-makers, and she was trying to be one as hard as she could.

"To think of his not so much as calling, after the dinner I got for him!" she thought, with secret indignation. "Does he really imagine that such girls as these grow on every bush, and can be had for the asking?" And so she let Mrs. White's great darling, good-natured Tom come where Horace should have come, and tried to fancy that he would "do" for Annie, at least. And Annie laughed at and bewildered and captivated him, and Maggie listened to his prosy talk with as much deference as if it had been all alive with gems. Thus, when Horace at last made his appearance, he found them. Annie, who made no secret of her liking for her "cousin," as she usually called him, immediately left Maggie to entertain the wearisome Tom, and began to call him to account for his neglect.

"Only to think," said she," you are our own cousin, and have not been here for ten days! What have you got to say for yourself?"

"A great deal," he returned, "if I choose to say it. But I don't intend to do so. Now, let me ask, why you haven't been to see me?"

Annie laughed, and said she had thought of it, but didn't know where he lived; whereupon, with mock gravity, he gave her his card.

"I do believe," thought Maggie, "that he is giving her his photograph! It would be just like Annie to ask him for it." And she looked at her sister reprovingly, making signs that she must behave herself. Annie subsided a little, but as soon as Tom White regained Maggie's attention, she began again, talking as if she had known him all her life, and with a friendliness, and evident liking for him, that might well have turned his head.

Aunt Jane was greatly scandalized. She had never seen Annie in such gay spirits, nor looking so attractive; it would be just like Horace to be caught by this bright girl, and just like Maggie to know so little of her own worth as to put up with Tom White. And Horace, with the firm conviction that he had made an impression upon her, and that Maggie was more than indifferent to him, wavered a little; that is to say, he acknowledged that Annie was easier to get acquainted with than Maggie, and very amusing and entertaining.

Meanwhile Tom White sat on pins and needles; he hardly heard a word of what Maggie was saying, but was trying to hear what was going on on the other side of the room. He did so envy Horace the animation with which he was able to repond to Annie's; did so wish he were as handsome, as easy and graceful!

When the young men took leave, Aunt Jane told them they might come the next evening, if they chose, as she was going to have what she called a "Busy Bee." This proved to be a host of young girls equipped with needles and thread, who were to make up material provided by her for the soldiers. Horace hardly spoke to Maggie; he did not know what he expected her to say and do, but, at any rate, he was dissatisfied with her; she on her part, scarcely look at him, but while busy with her work, let Tom White, who could not get near Annie, sit by her side and weary her with his dullness. At last it so happened that the scene changed; Tom and Horace were called upon to scrape lint, and Annie and Maggie were sent for old linen for the purpose. When they returned with it, Horace had and opportunity to vent his growing discontent on Maggie. If he had known in what an unreasonable mood he was, he would not have spoken at all; as it was, he said, with a smile, intended to cover the irritation with which he made the remark:

"You have acquired such ascendancy over Mr. White, that I wonder you have not sent him into the army."

Maggie made no reply, save but a quick glance of surprise and pain, which he misinterpreted.

"She likes him!" he thought; "I have seen it all the evening. I thought she had more sense."

"Excuse me, I entreat," he added, aloud; "if I had really dreamed that matters had gone so far---"

"What matters and how far?" asked Maggie, with some spirit, and yet not unkindly.

"I really haven't a word to say," cried Horace. "But I hope you will not let such an unintentional piece of carelessness give you pain."

"It was not unintentional," she replied, looking up to him, "you know it was not. Yet I am ashamed of myself for caring. But sometimes in some moods, we are over sensitive, and a grain of sand will then tear and rend as a mass of jagged rock could not do at another time, or in a different mood."

And the she disappeared; whether through the floor or through the door, Horace, in his confusion at what he had done, did not know. He was ashamed and angry with himself; the whole thing had sprung up in a moment, and now he stood perfectly bewildered where she had left him. He felt that he had settled it for ever, that she would dislike him; yet, never had he realized, as now, how much she had become to him. Indeed, she had raised herself in his eyes by showing that her extreme gentleness was not a mere negative charm; that she could be roused and inspirited, and made to resent a wrong without any unchristian anger.

When Maggie disappeared from his view she meant to speed to her room as fast as her feet could carry her, and have a good cry. But a horror of being cross-questioned about it by Annie, who would be sure to find it out, and just as likely as not to tell everybody that "our Mag" had been crying,--this made her control herself, and go steadily to work, as far off from Horace as she could get. She seated herself near a group of girls who were making themselves merry over a grey shirt, which somebody had apparently cut for Goliath of Gath.

"We might all get into it," said one.

"It will do for a shirt and blanket in one," said another.

"Captain Wheeler says that the great fault of the garments sent to the army is their enormous size," said the third. "Poor fellow! They said his artificial leg hurts, at times, dreadfully, and I have do doubt it does tonight, for I just saw him leaning against the wall, looking pale and haggard."

"He has never been as strong since he lost his limb as he was before," was the reply.

Maggie's heart stopped beating. How many times she had told him that she was ashamed of every young man, in good health, who was not in the army--and all the time he knew that he had given his country all he could! She was not usually impulsive; she was in the habit of taking counsel with herself before she took a decisive step. But now she rose with a quick, energetic movement, that said she must not lose an moment, crossed the room, and stood before Horace with a kindling face.

"I have misjudged you cruelly," she said, with difficulty keeping back the tears that filled her eyes. "I never knew you had been wounded; if I had I should have honored and--" loved you for it, she came near adding in her excitement.

"Don't speak to me; don't look at me!" he said. "I thought I was ashamed enough before, but you have annihilated me now."

She could not trust herself to say any more, and returned to her seat, where she found Annie had joined the group, and was listening to a detailed account of the battle in which Horace had lost his limb, and all about his heroism at the time.

"It made another man of him," said Clara Reed, biting off a thread. "He used to be so worldly and so fond of fashionable society; and now he is as good as he can be."

"I mean to go and ask him to tell me all about it," said Annie.

"Don't Annie," cried Maggie, holding her back; "you'll say something to annoy him."

"Something that will annoy you, you mean," said Annie, laughing, and breaking from her. "I'll promise not to breathe your name."

So she pumped him well, and he told his story in a manly way, that would have been brief had she allowed it.

"Well," she said, gaily, at last, "I suppose you don't mind it much. You've got the glory and the honor; and it's so nice that you don't have to go on crutches; why I promised Maggie that I wouldn't lisp her name, so I can't tell what she said, but it was something nice. Oh, it wasn't about you; you needn't think it! Don't you like our Maggie? But I forget; you do not know her; and considering how intimate you and I are, it is a little queer that you don't know her as well."

So he and Annie were intimate, were they? Putting this statement by the side of the scribbled envelope, Horace felt his blood run cold. Next news he should hear was that he was engaged to her. And he had never liked her so little as at this moment, when she could rattle on about the tragedy of his life as she would talk to a wooden doll that had lost the top of its nose.

Yet, Annie was by no means the heartless girl he was at the moment disposed to believe her to be. She was inexperienced, and thoughtless, and impulsive, and had seen very little of the world; that was all.

Aunt Jane espied Horace standing alone and apart from everybody not long after, and saw that something was amiss. She went up to him kindly, and asked him if the evening had wearied him.

"No," he said, "the evening has not."

She saw that he did not want to be questioned, so she left him, and very soon the young ladies began to prepare to take leave, and there was a deal of laughing and talking as they at last went off in twos and threes.

Horace knew he ought to go too, yet lingered. If he could only get one more look from Maggie, and could only force her to forget how rude he had been. But he got neither word nor look. She was hard at work gathering up the various articles over which the girls had been busy, folding, sorting and carrying them off in her arms, as if this had been her sole business all her life. But Annie hovered round him, full of gay talk; she had forgotten all about the loss of his limb, and only thought how handsome he was, and how nice it was to have him like her so.

Horace went home in the comfortless state of mind familiar to those who have been left to do, in one or two little sentences, what they feel they cannot undo in a lifetime. There are few warm-hearted people who do not sometimes say in their haste what nothing would tempt them to say at their leisure, and then, how they chafe under the sense of their own folly.

"How could I rally her about Tom White!" said Horace to his forlorn self. "She must have seen how horribly jealous I was. It's all up with me; she says I did it on purpose, so, of course, she thinks I deliberately went to work to annoy her. I'll keep out of her way henceforth; as for Annie, why couldn't she have taken to Tom? I'm sure she could make something of him, if she'd only take him in hand.

He held good to his resolution to keep out of Maggie's way till the following Sunday, when he went to church with his heart all in a flutter at the idea of sitting in the same pew with her. But he found only Aunt Jane and Annie there, and pretended he was glad of that, since his mind would not be withdrawn by her presence from the real object that had brought him to the house of God. And then that gladness was dispelled by Maggie's coming in a little late, and with a lovely color suffusing her cheeks as he rose to let her enter the pew. She had some books in her hand, that showed she had been to some mission school, with Tom White, no doubt but he enjoyed having her sit next to him, for all that. Indeed, he was so conscious of that enjoyment, that when the service was over he dared not look at her; he felt that everybody would know how he loved her if he gave her even so much as a glance, and so he walked away. Yes, how he loved her, for he could no longer conceal himself that she had been hardly out of his thoughts since the day he had heard her sweet and earnest words in the train, four weeks ago.

To be continued ...

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