CHAPTER VII
DIVIDED HOUSES
There is a tragic quietness about a town whose best and bravest have gone to a doubtful battlefield. The whole place seems hushed and on tiptoe as if listening for some sound from the field. The cry of a cricket shivers the silence into splinters of sound, and each one pierces the ear with a sharpness which is almost pain. It was under such a pall of stillness that Dorbury lay immediately after the departure of the troops. It was not altogether the torpor that succeeds an upheaval. Part of it was the breathless silence of expectancy, as when from a height some one hurls a boulder into space and waits to hear it fall. Of course, it would be some time before they could expect to hear from the new soldiers, and yet, Dorbury listened, expectant hand to ear.
The spring sunshine, not yet strong nor violent enough to destroy its own sweetness, fell with a golden caress on the quiet streets. To some, who went to and fro, bowed with anxiety, it seemed strange that in such a time, nature should go on performing her processes as she had always done. Their hearts seemed to stand still, but time went on, the flowers bloomed, the grasses sprung and the restless river sang to the silent town.
The tension of suspense had told greatly upon Bradford Waters' character. From being a gentle father, he had grown to be short, almost harsh to Mary. His love and fear for his soldier son had made him blind to the pain his daughter suffered.
He was so far gone in the earnestness of his views that he could see nothing but a perverse disloyalty in his daughter's feeling towards Robert Van Doren. His friendship for the young fellow had changed with the changing of the times, and he could not understand that a woman's love may be stronger than her polities; her heart truer to its affections than her head to its principles.
It can hardly be said of Mary that she felt more than she thought, but her emotions were stronger than her convictions. It was the worse for her state of mind that for two widely different reasons, the taking of her brother and the estrangement from her lover, she was placed in a resentful position against the cause that she naturally would have espoused.
Still, at first, she kept a certain appearance of loyalty, and when some of the girls with impet uous enthusiasm, started a sewing circle for the soldiers, she joined with them, and began to ply her needle in the interest of the Union troops. But among these friends of undivided interests, it was not always pleasant for Mary. All about her, she heard sentiments that did not comport with the feelings of one who had loved ones on both sides of the great question. Over the lint and flannels that passed through the sewers' hands, were made several hot and thoughtless speeches that seared the very soul of one poor girl. They were not intentional. Most of them, had they known that one among them suffered from their unthinking remarks, would have held their tongues. Others, not more than one or two, be it said, knew that every sneer they cast at the army of the South, every hard wish they expressed, tore like an arrow through the tender heart of the pale sad girl in the corner who bent so silently over her work.
"I do wish," said little Martha Blake one day, "that the whole Southern army was drowned in the depths of the sea. They are so troublesome."
"What would their sisters do?" asked Mary quietly.
"Oh, really, they seem such monsters to me that I never thought of their having sisters." Mary smiled.
"And yet they have," she said, "some of them, perhaps, making just as foolish a wish about our brothers as you have made about. them."
"I know it's foolish," Martha pursued, "but it has never seemed to me that those people down there who have done so much to tempt the Northern government are quite the same as we are."
Unconsciously, Mary took the defensive and stepped over into the point of view of the man whom in her heart she was defending.
"But why," she exclaimed, "do you say the Northern government? The very mention of the word denies the principle for which we claim we are fighting that there is no North, no South, but one country inseparable into sections."
"I had never thought of that," said Martha.
"I don't think any of us have thought of it," put in Anice Crowder, "except those who have very dear friends among the traitors." Mary turned deadly pale for she knew that Bob Van Doren's decision had just become generally known. She turned a pair of flashing eyes on Anice as she replied,
"No man is a traitor who fights for what he believes to be right."
"Any man is a traitor who lives under one flag and leaves it to fight under another."
"A man is accountable only to his conscience and his God."
"Yes, when he has proved traitor to every other tie, only then."
The words cut Mary like a knife. She rose, work in hand and stood quivering with passion as she looked down on her insulter.
"Then the woman who cares for such a man, who dares stand up for him is a traitor too?" she cried as she flung her work to the floor.
"Yes," said Anice acidly.
Mary started towards the door, but a chorus of girls' voices checked her.
"Don't go, Mary," they cried, "we know, we don't blame you." But the girl's heart was overburdened, and bursting into tears, she fled from the room. She heard the hubbub of voices as she went hastily out of the house, and even in that moment of grief she was glad that some of the girls there would be quick to defend her. She knew who must have been foremost in this defence when she heard a light step behind her and felt Nannie Woods' arm about her waist.
"Don't cry, Mary," said Nannie soothingly. "No one minds Anice Crowder or anything she says. Anyway, I gave her a good piece of my mind before I left there, and so did some of the rest of the girls. I just told her right to her face that she'd have more feeling for people if she had a lover on either side."
Mary was forced to smile a little at her friend's impetuosity. But from her heart she thanked the girl, and drew her arm tighter about her waist.
"I suppose Anice thinks that I can send my love where I will, and that I am to blame if it does not go in the right, or what she thinks, the right direction."
"She's a cat," was the emphatic rejoinder, "and I for one, will never go to their old sewing-circle. We'll sew together, just you and I, Mary, and while I'm making things for Tom, there's no reason why you shouldn't make a keepsake for Bob to take with him."
Mary gasped.
"Oh, that's all right, I know if I lived down South and it was Tom, I'd———"
"Hush, Nannie," said Mary hurriedly, "you mustn't say those things."
"I will say them and I don't care."
They reached the Waters' gate and the girls parted. There, for Nannie, the incident closed, but it was destined to cause Mary Waters even more suffering.
Women's sewing circles are not usually noted for their reticence, and the institution at Dorbury was no exception. Within an hour after it happened, the whole affair was out to the town, and the story in a highly embellished form reached Bradford Waters' ears.
He went home in a white passion. Mary had got supper and was sitting idly by the window when her father burst into the room. She looked up and saw on the instant that he had heard.
"What is this I hear of you at the sewing-circle?"
"I suppose you have heard the truth or part of it."
"So it has come to the pass where my daughter must defend a former copperhead and now an avowed rebel!"
"The man whom I defended, if defence it could be called, was to me neither copperhead nor rebel. He was my lover. I have nothing to do with his politics. The war has nothing to do with my love."
She was calmer than usual, and her very quietness exasperated her father the more.
"I'll have no more of it," he cried passionately, "I'll have no more of it. Love or no love, a house divided against itself cannot stand. My house must be with me. And if my daughter feels called upon to go over to the enemy's side, she must go over to the enemy's house. My house shall not shelter her."
"Father———"
"Enough, I have said my say. You must abide by it. I'll have no more such stories as I have heard to-day poured into my ears. Either give up that renegade or take your love for him to another roof."
He flung himself petulantly into a chair and fell to his supper. Mary did not answer him, only a look of hard defiance came into her gentle eyes. It might have struck Bradford Waters had he seen it, but he did not look at her again.
A little kindness might have done much to soften the rigor of Mary's feelings, and so changed the course of events; for she was easily swayed through her affections. She would not have given up Van Doron, his hold upon her was too strong. But she would have repressed herself even to the hiding of her feelings, had she not been driven into the open revolt to which her father's harsh treatment goaded her. Now the determination to be true to her lover at all hazards came upon her so strongly that her attitude really became one of aggression.
It was now that the remembrance of Nannie's thoughtless words came to her, and she asked herself, "Why not?" Why should she not make and give Van Doren a keepsake to take into the ranks with him? She had suffered sorrow for his sake; in effect, she had been forcibly, almost involuntarily, cast on his side. She had to withstand contempt and reviling. Would this one show of affection be so much more?
That evening, Mary was very busy sewing, and so part of the next day, until the time when her father came home. Then she hastened to leave her stitching to go about her supper, for in the absorption of her new idea, she had neglected it.
Bradford Waters looked at the work which had stood between him and his meals with an ill-concealed exasperation. Why couldn't women sew at the proper time and leave off properly? Maybe, though, it was something for her brother Tom. If that were so, he did not care. He would go without his meals any time, that Tom might have a single comfort. Bless the brave boy. His face softened, and he looked with filling eyes as his mind dwelt on tender memories of the soldier son. Suddenly the bit of embroidery there on the shelf seemed to take on a new interest for him.
Mary was crossing the floor with a plate in her hand, when he rose and going to the shelf, picked up the work. She made an involuntary motion as if to stop him and take it away, then she paused rigid.
He stood smiling down on the sewing. "Something for Tom," he began, and then the smile froze and the words died on his lips as he turned it over. It was only a little maroon housewife such as any soldier might need in the emergencies of camp life, but on its front were embroidered the letters, "R. V. D."
He stood gazing at them for a moment as if they were cabalistic, and the mystery was just filtering through his mind. Then, with trembling hands, he threw it across the room.
"My God," he cried, "and I thought it was for her brother! And it is for the comfort of the enemy!"
"It is only a keepsake," said Mary faintly. She was frightened and weakened by his agitation.
He looked at her as if he saw her but dimly, then he said in a hard voice, "This is the end of all. Pick it up," pointing to the housewife. "Now go. Take the visible evidence of your treason and go, and may God and your poor brother forgive you. I never shall."
At another time, Mary might have pleaded with him, but she was dazed, and before she had recovered her presence of mind, her father had left the house. Then she too, as if still in a dream, picked up the offending gift and went out.
She could not understand her father. She did not know what the gift to the enemy meant to him. How he felt as if a serpent had stung him from his own hearth.
She went mechanically, at first, scarce knowing which way she tended. Then thought came to her, and with the keepsake still in her hand, she turned dry-eyed towards Nannie Woods' house.
"It was such a little thing," she murmured as she went into the house, and then suddenly, unconsciousness came to her.