She
was engaged to marry young, Tom Carter, who had nothing to marry
on, it is true, but who was sure to have, some time or other.
Then the war broke out. Tom enlisted at the first call. Up to
that time Jane had loved him with a quiet, friendly sort of
affection, and had given her country a mild emotion of the same
sort. But the strife, the danger, the anxiety of the time, set
new currents of feeling in motion. Life became something other
than the three meals a day, the round of cooking, washing,
sewing, and churchgoing. Personal gossip vanished from the
village conversation. Big things took the place of trifling ones,
--sacred sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and
husbands, self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one
another's burdens. Men and women grew fast in those days of the
nation's trouble and danger, and Jane awoke from the vague dull
dream she had hitherto called life to new hopes, new fears, new
purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a year when one never
looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense,
came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so
much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started
for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours
of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England
girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about
him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;--
all, but it served.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25