"I never thought of it till this instant," said Colonel Lunt, "and I don't know how I knew it; but it was written in your face. She never told me who it was!"
"But she wrote to me about you, and about the child. I have watched your comings and goings these many years. I knew I should meet you where I did. You may guess my feelings at seeing my beautiful child,at seeing how lovely in mind and person she is, and at being unable to call her my own! I was well punished the first hour after I met you. But my next hope and desire was to interest you all enough in my own family to induce you to come here. In fact, I did think you were the depositary of my secret. But I see I was wrong there."
"Yes," the Colonel said, "Madame Guyot simply informed me the child's father would never claim her, and that the name was an assumed one. I saw how it probably was, but I respected her too much to ask anything which she did not herself choose to reveal. I think she was one of the loveliest and most superior women I ever saw, though, at the time I first met her, she showed that her health was fatally undermined. It was much on her account that I left Maryland for the more equable climate of Barton."
"You were everything to her that the most tender and noble friends could be!" said the Earl, warmly. "She wrote me of all your kindness. Now let me tell you a little about her. She was my sister's governess, and I saw her in my college vacations. I need not tell you how lovely she was in her youth. She was no French girl, but a country curate's daughter in Hampshire. Now, Colonel Lunt, it would have been as impossible for me to marry that girlno matter how beautiful, refined, and goodas if she had been a Hottentot. How often I have wished to throw birth, connections, name, title, everything, to the winds, that I might take Amy Percival to my heart and hold her there legally! How I have envied the Americans, who care nothing for antecedents, to whom birth and social position are literally nothing,often not even fortunate accidents! How many times I have read your papers, and imagined myself thrown on my own resources only, like so many of your successful men, and making my own way among you, taking my Amy with me and giving her a respectable and happy home! But these social cobwebs by which we poor flies are caught and held,it is very hard to break them! I was always going to do right, and always did wrong. After my great wrong to Amy, which was a pretended marriage, she left me,she had found out my villany,and went to America. She did not write to me until she knew she must die, and then she related every particular,all your great kindness to both her and the child, and the motherly tenderness with which Mrs. Lunt had endeavored to soften her sufferings. In twenty years I have changed very much every way, but I have never ceased to feel self-contempt for my conduct to Amy Percival."
Now a new question arose.
Was it best to reveal this last secret to Charles? He had been content to take Percy, nameless and illegitimate. The Earl was extremely unwilling to extend his confidence further than Colonel Lunt. It seemed to him unnecessary. He said he desired to give Percy the same share of his property that his other two daughters would receive on their marriage, but that he could not openly do this without exciting remarks and provoking unpleasant feelings. Colonel Lunt considered that the secret was not his to keep or reveal. So nothing was said, and the marriage took place at the house of the Earl; Colonel Lunt receiving from Percy's father ten thousand pounds, as some atonement by a wounded conscience.
"Now," said the Colonel, as he finished his long story, and we drove up to his house, "I say it was a mean cowardice that kept that man from doing his daughter justice. But then he was a scoundrel all through. And now for my reason for telling you. I have my doubts, after all, about the first marriage. There are the certificate and all the papers safe in my desk. Earls may die, and worms may eat them,and so with their sons and daughters. It isn't among the impossibilities that my little Percy may be a countess yet! Any way, if an advertisement should appear calling for heirs to the Earl of Blank, somebody besides me and my little woman would know all about it."
Mrs. Lunt insisted on my stopping to tea with them, and I had a strange curiosity to look at Percy Lunt again, surrounded with this new halo, thrice circled, of mystery. If she only knew or guessed what she really was!
She sat by the fire, for the evening was a little cool, and, as we came in, roused herself from her sad posture to give me welcome. How white her face was! It was grievous to see such a young spirit so blanched,so utterly unelastic. If she could receive tidings of his death, she would reconcile herself to the inevitable; but this wearing, gnawing pain, this grief at his desertion, this dread of meeting him again after he had been willing to leave her so long,death itself would be less bitter! But there were no words to console her with.
"You have had letters from Robert?" she inquired.
"Only a telegram came saying that the Barton boys were safe. It must have been a dreadful battle! They say twelve thousand were killed on each side."
"But you will hear very soon?"
"O, yes," I said, "but Robert must have his hands very full. He will write as soon as he has a minute of leisure."
Robert was colonel now, and we were very proud of him. He had not yet received a scratch, and he had been in eleven battles. We felt as if he bore a charmed life.
After tea, we four sat round the sparkling wood-fire, knitting and talking, (people in war-time have enough to talk about,) when a loud, sudden knock at the door startled us. The old knocker thumped again and again. The servant hurried to the door, and a moment after a man rushed by him, with swift and heavy steps into the parlor, caught up Percy as if she had been a feather, and held her tight to his heart and mouth.
He had not taken off his army cap, nor his blue great coat. We all sprang up at his entrance, of course, but I hadn't a thought who it could be, until Colonel Lunt called out "Charles!"
There he was, to be sure, as alive as he could be, with his great red beard, and his face tanned and burnt like a brick! He took no notice of us whatever, only kept kissing Percy over and over, till her face, which was white as death, was covered with living crimson, and her heavy-lidded eyes turned to stars for brightness!
After her fashion, Percy still continued undemonstrative, so far as words went; but she clung most eloquently to his neck with both her hands, the joyful light from her eyes streaming silently into his. O, it was fair to see,this might of human love,this mystery that needed no solving! His face shedding fidelity and joyfulness, and her heart accepting it with a trust that had not one question!
In a few but most eloquent words he told us his adventures. But that would make a story by itself. A shipwreck,and capture by Japanese pirates,prison,escape,landing at Mobile,pressed into the Rebel service,battle,prisoner to the Union forces,glad taking of the oath of allegiance,interview with General Banks, and service at last for the North. It was a wild, strange story of suffering, hardships, and wonderful escapes. Colonel Lunt said he never should have known the man, nor guessed at him, but for his eyes, he was so altered in every way,so rough and strong-looking, with his complexion tanned and weather-beaten; and he had always been such a delicate, curled darling of indulgent parents! However, he looked twice the man he was before, Mrs. Lunt whispered me; and Percy could not take her eyes off him, he looked so strong and noble, and his face so full of high thoughts.
He had been in several battles, and had been wounded twice. After his first wound he had been some time in a Southern hospital. "And now I think of it, Percy," he said, turning suddenly to her, and taking her on his knee as if she had been a baby, "it was in a hospital that I found out where you were. You must know that I hadn't the least clew to your whereabout, and thought of you as most likely still in London. You know our plan was to travel together for some months, and I could not guess where you might be, if indeed you were alive. After the battle the other day, I went into one of the improvised hospitals to look after some brave fellows of mine, when one of the nurses asked me for directions as to the burial of some men who had just been brought in. They had officers' uniforms on, and it was ascertained that they were really dead. As I turned to give the necessary directions, a man at my side, who was smoothing down the limbs of one who had just ceased to breathe, handed me a photograph from the man's breast, all rumpled and bloody. I recognized it in a moment as yours, Percy,though how it should have been in that man's breast, I couldn't see."
Percy and I looked at each other. But we dared not think. He went on.
"I could not recognize him. But he was one of so many who were brought in on that terrible day after the battle, and except my own company I scarcely knew any of the officers. But I saw by the photograph where you were, at least the name on the back was a guide. It was Barton, Mass., and the date of April, 1861. So, as I had worked pretty well at Antietam, Little Mac gave me a week's furlough, and I thought I would try it!"
"Do you remember at all how he looked?" Mrs. Lunt asked, for I could not speak.
"The young officer? Yes, Madam, I looked keenly at him, you may be sure. He was tall and fine-looking, with dark, curling hair, and his regular features were smiling and peaceful. They mostly look so who are shot dead at once. And this one had not suffered. He had died at the moment of triumph."
I went home to fear and to weep. It seemed too certain. And time brought us the truth. Robert had fallen as he would have chosen to fall, leading on his men. He was so tall, and he was such a shining mark for death! But I knew that no din of cannon or roar of battle was loud enough to overcome the still, small voices of home, and that his last thought was, as he wrote me it would be, "of you all."
O beautiful, valiant youth! O fearful ploughshare, tearing thy way through so many bleeding hearts! O terrible throes, out of which a new nation must be born!
IN THE HEMLOCKS
Most people receive with incredulity a statement of the number of birds that annually visit our climate. Very few even are aware of half the number that spend the summer in their own immediate vicinity. We little suspect, when we walk in the woods, whose privacy we are intruding upon,what rare and elegant visitants from Mexico, from Central and South America, and from the islands of the sea, are holding their reunions in the branches over our heads, or pursuing their pleasure on the ground before us.
I recall the altogether admirable and shining family which Thoreau dreamed he saw in the upper chambers of Spaulding's woods, which Spaulding did not know lived there, and which were not put out when Spaulding, whistling, drove his team through their lower halls. They did not go into society in the village; they were quite well; they had sons and daughters; they neither wove nor spun; there was a sound as of suppressed hilarity.
I take it for granted that the forester was only saying a pretty thing of the birds, though I have observed that it does sometimes annoy them when Spaulding's cart rumbles through their house. Generally, however, they are as unconscious of Spaulding as Spaulding is of them.
Walking the other day in an old hemlock wood, I counted over forty varieties of these summer visitants, many of them common to other woods in the vicinity, but quite a number peculiar to these ancient solitudes, and not a few that are rare in any locality. It is quite unusual to find so large a number abiding in one forest,and that not a large one,most of them nesting and spending the summer there. Many of those I observed commonly pass this season much farther north. But the geographical distribution of birds is rather a climatical one. The same temperature, though under different parallels, usually attracts the same birds; difference in altitude being equivalent to the difference in latitude. A given height above the sea level under the parallel of 30° may have the same climate as places under that of 35°, and similar Flora and Fauna. At the head-waters of the Delaware, where I write, the latitude is that of Boston, but the region has a much greater elevation, and hence a climate that compares better with the northern part of the State and of New England. Half a day's drive to the southeast brings me down into quite a different temperature, with an older geological formation, different forest timber, and different birds,even with different mammals. Neither the little Gray Rabbit nor the little Gray Fox is found in my locality, but the great Northern Hare and the Red Fox are seen here. In the last century a colony of beavers dwelt here, though the oldest inhabitant cannot now point to even the traditional site of their dams. The ancient hemlocks, whither I propose to take the reader, are rich in many things beside birds. Indeed, their wealth in this respect is owing mainly, no doubt, to their rank vegetable growths, their fruitful swamps, and their dark, sheltered retreats.
Their history is of an heroic cast. Ravished and torn by the tanner in his thirst for bark, preyed upon by the lumberman, assaulted and beaten back by the settler, still their spirit has never been broken, their energies never paralyzed. Not many years ago a public highway passed through them, but it was at no time a tolerable road; trees fell across it, mud and limbs choked it up, till finally travellers took the hint and went around; and now, walking along its deserted course, I see only the footprints of coons, foxes, and squirrels.
Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them. Here she shows me what can be done with ferns and mosses and lichens. The soil is marrowy and full of innumerable forests. Standing in these fragrant aisles, I feel the strength of the vegetable kingdom and am awed by the deep and inscrutable processes of life going on so silently about me.
No hostile forms with axe or spud now visit these solitudes. The cows have half-hidden ways through them, and know where the best browsing is to be had. In spring the farmer repairs to their bordering of maples to make sugar; in July and August women and boys from all the country about penetrate the old Barkpeeling for raspberries and blackberries; and I know a youth who wonderingly follows their languid stream casting for trout.
In like spirit, alert and buoyant, on this bright June morning go I also to reap my harvest,pursuing a sweet more delectable than sugar, fruit more savory than berries, and game for another palate than that tickled by trout.
June, of all the months, the student of ornithology can least afford to lose. Most birds are nesting then, and in full song and plumage. And what is a bird without its song? Do we not wait for the stranger to speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest to me. I have met the Gray-cheeked Thrush (Turdus aliciæ) in the woods, and held him in my hand; still I do not know him. The silence of the Cedar-Bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks nor his petty larcenies in cherry time can dispel. A bird's song contains a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy, an understanding, between itself and the admiring listener.