Chapter Five

by Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss
Edited by Amber Moeller

Aunt Jane was not surprised to see Horace march in the very next evening. She knew that she had touched, though she had not charged, his heart.

He began abruptly, with, "Suppose a man could bring his mind to get married on his poverty, where is he to find a girl willing to share it with him?"

"A good wife is from the Lord," she returned.

"But do you know where mine is?" he persisted. "If I am ever to marry, of course there is somebody in the world waiting for me. Now where is she? Who is she?"

"If I knew I would not tell you. I hate matchmaking. You might as well ask me, where are my clients? Who are they? And I should reply, wait till they come to you and you will see and know."

"All I have to do, then, is to be ready for her when she comes! Really, I begin to feel quite curious."

"Yes, to be ready," said Aunt Jane, emphatically, "For if you are not, an angel might come to you and go away unrecognized."

"But ready, how?"

"In moral worth and purity, Horace." And after a pause she added: "If I were talking to some men, I should say: Ask God to make you fit for her when she comes, and then to send her."

"But why not to me?" he asked, with a comical look.

"Because I know you wouldn't do it. You feel perfectly capable of choosing for yourself, and besides, you are not in the habit of taking counsel of Him in worldly matters."

"That's true, though how you found it out I can't venture to guess. You have the oddest faculty of seeing through a man. I shouldn't wonder if you knew just what I am thinking of at this moment!"

"Very well," she said, quickly, "you are thinking, how you can get away gracefully from what you fear is an impending sermon."

The blood flew into his face; he started up quickly, and cried:

"I beg to go before you read any more of my thoughts. You are next door to a witch."

"I wish I could stay away," he thought, as he ran down the steps. "She'll get round me somehow till she had me in some dismal little hole with one of her pious little girls, and then I shall have to black my own boots, and go to market and buy cheap pieces of meat, and I shall lead about as prosaic a life as it is possible to conceive of."

But when he reached his room he could not help confessing that looked prosaic, too. It had once been handsomely furnished, but everything had now a shabby-genteel aspect; and worst of all, there was nobody there to run to meet and welcome him. He felt unusually out of sorts, and wondered what ailed him, but on the whole laid the blame on Aunt Jane. Whom he determined not to get to see again, since she had such a knack at unsettling him. This turned out to be an easily kept resolution, for the next he heard of her was that she was very ill. He did not see her again that winter, and early in the spring she went away to her countryseat and spent a long summer there.

Meanwhile everybody, young and old, had been aroused and shaken by the civil war, that sprang up as in a night, but would not cease till it had devoured in its cruel jaws thousands of youthful lives, and left behind it thousands of broken hearts.

Horace Wheeler was one of the first to volunteer to go to the defense of his country. The true man in him, hitherto buried under much rubbish, now came bravely forth in the light.

"Few could go as well as I," he said to Aunt Jane, when he went to take leave of her. "I have no mother or sister to weep for me if I fall, and I have my father's full consent and blessing. It is true I am his only son, but then I haven't been of much comfort to him, and we have lived apart so long that it could not make much difference to him either way. However, I expect to come back strong in life and limb."

"And suppose you do not? What then?" she asked, tearfully.

"Why, then, I make you my heir!" he returned, gaily, "and you will come into possession of all my law books."

"Let us be serious in these last moments," she said. "I take a mother's place to you, in a certain sense, and if you never come back, if we never meet again in this world, where shall I look for you in the next, dear Horace?"

"In such a remote corner of heaven that you never will take the trouble to search me out," he replied. "Dear Aunt Jane, if I ever get there at all, it will be through your own and my father's prayers, and not from any goodness of mine. You two have found more fault with me than anybody else in the world; it happens to be your own peculiar way of showing your love; but you pray for me far more than I deserve--and I'm not going away quite as thoughtless as you fancy."

This was the very most she could get out of him, and he rushed off as if ashamed and frightened that he had said so much.

So the great tide swept him away, and with him many and many a young husband, an idolized son, and only brother. And there were no wounds on the battlefield so ghastly as those that hewed down the hearts which bade them Godspeed, and to this day there are no scars like those that many a woman is now patiently concealing. The havoc of life and limb caused by war is indeed fearful. But what of the havoc of human affections; what of the suspense, the sleeplessness, the unwritten anguish that turned many a sweet, peaceful home into the battlefield whose conquests and whose defeats were witnessed by no mortal eye?

The few friends Horace left at home watched anxiously for news from him, he wrote occasional letters, brief, sharp, and unsatisfactory. But he was distinguishing himself, and winning laurels, and when he came forth from battle after battle unharmed, he began to think that he wore a charmed life. He had entered intelligently upon this sphere of action; he was not fighting for his country and enduring the privations of camp life under a mere impulse, but from a high and sacred purpose such as inspired many another soul, and armed many another right hand.

Newsboys were crying papers all about the streets, and Aunt Jane, sitting alone, and lost in thought, at last heard the sounds. She rang for a servant.

"What are they crying, tonight?" she asked, as he entered.

"There has been an awful battle," he answered. "I've got the paper, and Jim's one of ‘em; mowed right down, and killed in the twinkling of an eye; see, here it is in the paper; there's no mistake about it. And I hope you won't take it unkindly, ma'am, but I'm going to fill his place."

"I am shocked and grieved at this news," she said, "and, Robert, you are not strong as Jim was. Is it wise in you to go?"

"I don't know whether it is or not, but I promised him that if he was killed I'd just go and fill his place. Them was his last words before he went: ‘Fill up the places as fast as they're empty.' And besides, I couldn't settle down quiet, now Jim's gone. He was all I had." And the poor fellow broke down, and retreated, leaving the paper behind him.

Almost the first words her eyes fell upon were these:--

"Captain Wheeler of the New York 82nd, missing." She had not heard of Horace's promotion, and at first hoped this might not be he. She felt sick and faint for a moment, for what horrors might not this word "missing" conceal? And then she began to pray for him mightily--no other word can do justice to the strength with which this woman laid hold on the Devine promises. She asked that if he lay wounded and overlooked upon the battlefield, aid might speedily be sent him; if taken captive that he might be rescued, and spared the wasting terrors of imprisonment. And then she waited patiently to see what God would do, and this is what she afterwards heard He did.

"The battle had been a terrible one, and Horace, at the head of his company, had been in the heart of it all day; one of the most fearful and one of the most decisive days of the whole war. And while Aunt Jane was kneeling before God, pleading for his safety, as if he had been her own son, he lay wounded upon the field where he had fallen nearly twenty-four hours before. Who can tell the horrors of those hours? Or how many lives he lived, how many deaths he died in them. At first his bodily sufferings benumbed his faculties; then they became absorbed in the eager hope of rescue; and when that hope gradually died out, and he knew that he must die there in all the flush of his strength and manhood, and die alone, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. He almost lost the sense of pain as the questions forced themselves upon him, "Am I ready to die? How do I know that I ever made my peace of God? What has there been in my life to prove it?" And a dismal answer came back to him, declaring that it was now too late to decide such momentous questions; too late! too late! And then he gave himself up to the fever and the pain and the exhaustion that claimed him as their own, and resigned to his fate.

"Come this way, doctor, here are half a dozen still living," said a voice near him.

"Oh, doctor, save me, save me!" cried a boyish voice close at Horace's ear. The doctor stooped over the youthful figure, and let the light of his lantern fall upon the face already becoming rigid in death. His lip trembled, as he replied, "My poor boy, it is too late. I can only take away those for whom there is yet hope. God bless and stand by you to the last!" he added, as he turned from him to Horace and examined his wound.

"I think this poor fellow may pull through," he said, "take hold gently, Barnes, gently now; once safely in the ambulance we will do something for his immediate relief."

Horace felt himself lifted, and it caused him such an agony of pain that he wished they had passed him by.

"Leave me to die," he said, faintly. "I have no mother, no wife to lament me, and hundreds of these poor fellows have."

"We will save you, if we can, to gain in the future what you have not had in the past," was the cheerful answer. And then, amid untold anguish, Horace was jolted in a crowded ambulance, over a rough road, to the hospital; that is to say, to a church improvised for the time for that purpose. When his turn came, he was stretched upon the sacramental table (he remembered it afterwards with a sort of pleasure), and a surgeon clad in an apron hastily torn from the pulpit curtain, amputated the limb that had been mangled and crushed and neglected till it was past cure. He cared little what they did with him; as far as he had any thoughts about it at all, he fancied that the loss of a limb was a small affair, and wondered at himself that he was so indifferent about it.

But as the days of convalescence approached, indifference gave place to insupportable anguish; he said to himself that death would have been a thousand times better. And then he yearned for his mother as he had never done since the first weeks after her death; he wanted to weep away his despair on a woman's breast, instead of hiding it in the pew where he lay alone.

"Have you no friends, Captain Wheeler?" asked the chaplain, on day; "no one to whom you would wish me to write?"

"Yes, I have two," he answered bitterly. "My father ought to hear, I suppose, and there is a friend of my mother's who would like a line, perhaps."

Four days later, he had been removed to more comfortable quarters, there came to his bedside a gray-haired, bright-eyed woman; and a wounded comrade, looking enviously on, said on the chaplain, who sat writing by his side:

"The Captain's mother had come to nurse him, and they have both been crying and hugging and kissing enough to kill a fellow who ha'n't got any."

"I had the impression that he had no mother," replied the chaplain, musingly; "but it seems I was mistaken."

"Oh, Aunt Jane!" said Horace, "what made you come?"

"I came because I came," she said, smiling through her tears. "And now you must forget that I am not your very mother; I might have had my boy lying here wounded in your place, if God had not wanted him for some other purpose, and taken him from me long years ago."

And then his father came, and for the first time within his remembrance, Horace felt that here was a heart that loved him.

Those were wonderful days in the hospital. He did not now repel the wise, Christian words spoken to him by the two who watched beside him; this world was for ever changed for him, and he was thankful to have his thoughts turned from it. A great deal of the time he was as docile as a little child, drinking in the teachings his soul craved as if he sat really at his mother's knee; at other times the sense of what had befallen him would come in upon him in such great waves of distress that his two watchers could only weep with him.

"Death would have been so much better, so much better!" he would cry at such times; and then the tide, which can't be always coming in, thanks be to God, would flow back, leaving a shore behind it on which the form of His Son might be almost visibly seen walking.

As soon as it was possible to move him, they took him home; that is, they took him to Aunt Jane's home; and the sorrowful-looking father returned to his more distant one. As he took leave, he uttered these parting-words, with a tenderness that was the offspring of a remarkable union to Him who spoke them:

"It is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, my son."

"Yes, it is better!" said Horace.

And so he had his baptism of fire, and had come out of it another man.

They had many pleasant talks together after this, he and Aunt Jane, and she had reminded him of the sympathy Jesus showed when on earth for the "maimed," how often he healed them, what comforting words he spoke to them, and how He charged His disciples to remember them especially, when they made their feasts.

"Yes, I had thought of it," he said, " and it has been a source of unspeakable consolation. The time has been when I should have scorned to go to a feast as an object of pity, but now I long for human sympathy."

But with all the sympathy he received, and it was not a little, he had to have his dark and sorrowful days; yes, there were times when "neither sun nor stars in many days appear," and no man came unto him, for he would let no one come.

But at last he emerged from this great tribulation into the light.

"I am at peace now, Aunt Jane," he said. "I have done fighting with the Lord, and have put myself, just as I am, maimed and halt, into His hands. I could not have believed they were such tender hands."

There was one source of pain connected with his loss, of which he never spoke. But he had assumed, almost at the outset, that he never could marry. He fancied he should never have the face to ask a woman to limp through life with him: and yet there never was a time when he so longed for the home and the wife Aunt Jane had often pictured to him. His worldly ambition was gone now; if there was only somebody who was patriotic and unselfish enough to take him, just as he was, he would marry, and have his own fireside, and gather about it those who had rallied round him in his sore straits, and such waifs as were floating about as he had done.

In due time he was established once more in a boardinghouse, as artificial limb partially supplied the loss of his own, and he reopened his office under favorable circumstances, The Young Men's Christian Association opened its arms to him; he became interested in the once-despised Mission School, and once or twice his voice was heard at the weekly prayer meeting, which he never used to attend. He felt, at times, that he had gained through loss: that he was a happier, better man; and yet a voice often whispered in his ear, that next to the love of God he needed the love of a Christian woman.

To be continued ...

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