CHAPTER XLVI.PRISONERS OF WAR.
The heat, the smoke, the thunder of the battle were over, and the fields of Gettysburg were drenched with human blood and covered with the dead and dying. The contest had been fearful, and its results carried sorrow and anguish to many a heart waiting for tidings from the war, and looking so anxiously for the names of the loved ones who, on the anniversary of the day which saw our nation’s Independence, lay upon the hills and plains of Gettysburg, their white faces upturned to the summer sky, and wet with the rain=drops, which, like tears for the noble dead, the pitying clouds had shed upon them. And nowhere,perhaps, was there a whiter face or a more anxious heart than at the farm-house, where both Helen and her mother-in-law were spending the hot July days. Since the Christmas eve when Helen had watched her husband going from her across the wintry snow, he had not been back, though several times he had made arrangements to do so. Something, however, had always happened to prevent. Once it was sickness which kept him in bed for a week or more; again his regiment was ordered to advance, and the third time it was sent on with others to repel the invaders from Pennsylvanian soil. Bravely through each disappointment Helen bore herself, but her cheek always grew paler and her eye darker in its hue when the evening papers came, and she read what progress our soldiery had made, feeling that a battle was inevitable, and praying so earnestly that Mark Ray might be spared. Then, when the battle was over and up the northern hills came the dreadful story of thousands and thousands slain, there was a fearful look in her eye, and her features were rigid as marble, while the quivering lips could scarcely pray for the great fear tugging at her heart. Mark Ray was not with his men when they came from that terrific onslaught. A dozen had seen him fall, struck down by a rebel ball, and that was all she heard for more than a week, when there came another relay of news.
Captain Mark Ray was a prisoner of war, with several of his own company. An inmate of Libby Prison and a sharer from choice of the apartment where his men were confined. As an officer he was entitled to better quarters; but Mark Ray had a large, warm heart, and he would not desert those who had been so faithful to him, and so he took their fare, and by his genial humor and unwavering cheerfulness kept many a heart from fainting, and made the prison life more bearable than it could have been without him. To young Tom Tubbs, who had enlisted six months before, he was a ministering angel, and many times the poor homesick boy crept to the side of his captain, and laying his burning head in his lap, wept himself to sleep and dreamed he was at home again. The horrors of that prison life have never been told, but Markbore up manfully, suffering less in mind, perhaps, than did the friends at home, who lived, as it were, a thousand years in that one brief summer while he remained in Richmond.
At last, as the frosty days of October came on, they began to hope he might be exchanged, and Helen’s face grew bright again, until one day there came a soiled, half-worn letter, in Mark’s own handwriting. It was the first word received fromhimsince his capture in July, and with a cry of joy Helen snatched it from Uncle Ephraim, for she was still at the farm-house, and sitting down upon the doorstep just where she had been standing, read the words which Mark had sent to her. He was very well, he said, and had been all the time, but he pined for home, longing for the dear girl-wife never so dear as now, when separated by so many miles, with prison walls on every side, and an enemy’s line between them.
“But be of good cheer, darling,” he wrote, “I shall come back to you some time, and life will be all the brighter for what you suffer now. I am so glad my darling consented to be my wife, even though I could stay with her but a moment. The knowing you are really mine makes me happy even here, for I think of you by day, and in my dreams I always hold you in my arms and press you to my heart.”
A hint he gave of being sent further south, and then hope died out of Helen’s heart.
“I shall never see him again,” she said despairingly; and when the message came that Mark had been removed, and that too just at the time when an exchange was constantly expected, she gave him up as lost, feeling almost as much widowed as Katy in her weeds.
Slowly the winter passed away, and the country was rife with stories of our men, daily dying by hundreds, while those who survived were reduced to maniacs or imbeciles. And Helen, as she listened, grew nearly frantic with the sickening suspense. She did not know now where her husband was. He had made several attempts to escape, and with each failure had been removed to safer quarters, so that his chances for being exchanged seemed very far away. Week after week, month after monthpassed on, until came the memorable battle of the Wilderness, when Lieutenant Bob, as yet unharmed, stood bravely in the thickest of the tight, his tall figure towering above the rest, and his soldier’s uniform buttoned over a dark tress of hair, and a face like Bell Cameron’s. Lieutenant Bob had taken two or three furloughs; but the one which had left the sweetest, pleasantest memory in his heart, was that of the autumn before, when the crimson leaves of the maple, and the golden tints of the beech, were burning themselves out on the hills of Silverton, where his furlough was mostly passed, and where with Bell Cameron he scoured the length and breadth of Uncle Ephraim’s farm, now stopping by the shore of Fairy Point and again sitting for hours on a ledge of rocks, far up the hill, where beneath the softly whispering pines, nodding above their heads, Bell gathered the light-brown cones, and said to him the words he had so thirsted to hear.
Much of Bell’s time was passed with Katy, at the farm-house, and here Lieutenant Reynolds found her, accepting readily of Uncle Ephraim’s hearty invitation to remain, and spending his entire vacation there with the exception of three days, given to his family. Perfectly charmed with quaint Aunt Betsy, he flattered and courted her almost as much as he did Bell, but did not take her with him in his long rambles over the hills, or sit with her at night alone in the parlor until the clock struck twelve—a habit which Aunt Betsy greatly disapproved, but overlooked for this once, seeing, as she said, that
“The young leftenant was none of herkin, andIsabelonly a little.”
Those were halcyon days which Robert passed at Silverton but one stood out prominently before him, whether sitting before his camp-fire or plunging into the battle; and that the one when, casting aside all pride and foolish theories, Bell Cameron freely acknowledged her love for the man to whom she had been so long engaged, and paid him back the kisses she had before refused to give.
“I shall be a better soldier for this,” Robert had said, as he guided her down the steep ledge of rocks, and with her hand in his, walked slowly back to the farm-house,which, on the morrow, he left to take again his place in the army.
There were no more furloughs for him after that; and the winter passed away, bringing the spring again, when came that battle in the Wilderness, where, like a hero, he fought until, becoming separated from his comrades, he fell into the enemy’s hands; and two days after, there sped along the telegraphic wires to New York,
“Lieutenant Robert Reynolds, captured the first day of the battle.”
Afterwards came news that Andersonville was his destination, together with many others made prisoners that day.
“It is better than being shot, and a great deal better than being burned, as some of the poor wretches were,” Juno said, trying to comfort Bell, who doubted a little her sister’s word.
True there was now the shadow of a hope that he might return; but the probabilities were against it; and Bell’s face grew almost as white as Helen’s, while her eyes acquired that restless, watchful, anxious look which has crept into the eyes of so many sorrowing women, looking away to the southward, where the dear ones were dying.