| |
[Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, her second husband, William Foushee, and their home in Richmond in this short story published in 1906 by her protégée, Marion Harland.]
A WAR-TIME EVANGELINE
by Marion Harland
AT eighteen, if one has had a normal childhood and
girlhood, life is still so new that a Party is an Occasion. At twenty-five, The Party to which I was bound on that particular
evening in early April deserved a capital letter on its own account. Mrs. William Foushee Ritchie, who, as Anna Cora
Mowatt, had had an international reputation as actress and beautiful woman,
held her modest salon in conservative old Richmond. There was always something
to do, and to hear, and to see when she summoned friends to be her guests. Her
winning personality and gracious hospitality made her tasteful cottage in a
quiet cross-street a popular resort for aristocratic citizens and distinguished
visitors to the mid-Southern town. There would be celebrities there to-night, imported
and native. Among the former were Edward Everett and the philanthropic banker,
Corcoran, of Washington; among the latter, Governor Wise, of Virginia, and
Thomas Lowndes Yancey, of Alabama, all to become notable names in a struggle of
which nobody, save far-seeing and scheming politicians, had begun to talk or
dream. When one is eighteen and provincial, a Celebrity also demands a capital
letter. I was later in arriving than I would have been had I
known more of the world and its by-laws. Being, as I have confessed,
provincial, I dreaded being an early arrival, and overshot the conventional
golden mean Society-wise, I had much to learn. Slipping up the stairs to the dressing-room to lay
off my wraps, and slipping noiselessly down, fan and bouquet in hand, I stood
on the threshold of the drawing-room when I was arrested by the measured
cadence of a familiar voice. The hostess gave no public readings after her
marriage except for charities, and recitations nowhere except in her own house
and at historic Lower Brandon, the home of her husband's sister. To-night, at
Mr. Everett's request, she was reading selections from the then new poem,
"Evangeline." I stepped back out of the range of the eyes of those
who crowded the parlors and waited. Often as I had heard her recite, and well
as I knew the lines now upon her lips, I listened with keen delight to the rich
music of her modulated tones and the exquisite elocution that brought out every
shade of the poet's meaning. It was not then the caprice of an inattentive spirit
that moved me to take a framed picture from the table against which I leaned
and to look at it. It was an ambrotype, marvelously well done, and the
likeness of a marvelously handsome young man. I thought it then, and for many years
thereafter, the handsomest face my eyes ever rested upon. The features were
regular, clear-cut, and fine; the eyes, full of life and light, looked
straight, fearlessly, and kindly into mine; the beautiful lips, the spirited
poise of the head—all were instinct with the very joy of being. Daily Bible-reading from my babyhood had interfused
my mind with Scriptural imagery and language. The words which sprang to my lips
at my first sight of Charley Carter's picture were,- “Rejoice, oh young man, in
thy youth!" Strength, youth, and beauty such as vivified form
and face-were matter for rejoicing. He looked like one who gloried in the
superb triumvirate. With the full intentness of my subconscious self I
hearkened to the melodious waves of speech flowing out to me from the inner
room: “Daughter, thy words are not idle, nor are
they to me without meaning. Feeling is deep
and still; and the word that floats on the surface Is as the
tossing buoy that betrays where the anchor is hidden; Therefore, trust
to thy heart and to what the world calls illusions." My eyes still studied the pictured face, the
rhythmic melody, “keeping time! time! time!" with the rise and fall of my
heart, when a young girl glided from the crowd that hung upon the reader's
lips, moved, swiftly and soundlessly, up to me and held out her hand. Without a word I took it and met her smiling welcome
with responsive recognition. I had laid the ambrotype down at her approach and
she did not seem to notice that I had been looking at it. Side by side we
stood, neither speaking, until the reading ceased, and the clamor of voices,
praiseful and congratulatory, filled the rooms. Then she said : “We should know each other without a formal
introduction. I am Belle Douthat. Mrs. Ritchie has often spoken to me of you. I
am spending a few days with her.” Two hours later, the older guests having dispersed,
the hostess would have us two girls sit down by the fire and “talk it over.” We
were in the full flow of chat when Mr. Ritchie came in from the hall, the
framed ambrotype in his hand.
I grew absurdly hot all over. My cheeks flamed into
silly scarlet.” My laugh was awkward as I took the picture and
feigned to inspect it as for the first time. Not until two o'clock next morning did I reflect
upon the probability that Belle Douthat had seen me with it in my hand when she
came out into the hall. “Who is it?" I asked as awkwardly as I had
laughed. Mr. Ritchie answered: “The best fellow in the State of Virginia! Charley
Carter, the son of my very dear old friend, Bob Carter, of Lancaster County-and
an especial pet with Mrs. Ritchie. He brought her that picture to-day. “I was not so fortunate!" I gave another sickly
little laugh and something stuck queerly in my throat. I had a preposterous
sense of personal loss. A good that I ought to have had eluded me. I had never considered myself a susceptible young
person, albeit addicted to the pursuit and worship of ideals. The sight of that
picture had moved me unaccountably. It was not only that the eyes gazed directly and
with subtle meaning into mine, awakening vague, thrilling memories of former
meetings which reason said had never been; not merely because the face bespoke
soul and intellect and was as perfect in feature as that of the Olympian
Hermes. It was very like that, in fact, as I reminded myself in the wakeful
small hours of that memorable night. Mrs. Ritchie had an engraving of the
statue. I wondered I had not thought sooner why the ambrotype reminded me of
someone I had known intimately. Thirty years afterwards, when I beheld the famous
marble, a flash of thought bore me from Greece to Virginia, and I cried out as
at a stab—so exact was the resemblance to the University boy I had just missed
meeting upon the steps of my friend's house. Something more than all that, and something occult
and intense, appealed to heart and fancy in the face I could not make strange.
The execution of the sun-picture was admirable. There were suggestions of
flesh-tints, and eyes and hair were brown. The effect was of the clear shining
of inward light through alabaster. All this time I have not told you what a pretty and
altogether engaging creature Belle Douthat was. When I grew to know her
better-even intimately, I did not always remember that she was a popular beauty
in my appreciation of the crystalline purity of her soul, her sound, sweet
heart, her fidelity to noble aims, the fortitude which was sublimity, and her
capacity for love, passing the love of any other woman upon God's earth of whom
I have ever had any knowledge. When, at last, I laid the picture upon her lap, with
a jesting tribute to the comeliness of the subject and the excellence of the
workmanship, she smiled, and with the slightest of glances at the face, turned it
over and revealed a ring at the back for hanging it. “That would be a good light,” she said, nodding at
the opposite wall and rising Half-way across the room she paused and cast an arch
glance at the hostess,- "Perhaps” -in the pure, round intonations that lent
charm to her lightest utterance—“Mrs. Ritchie would prefer to have it in her
own room?" The husband protested threateningly; the wife
disclaimed half-heartedly. They were still making merry over the proposition,
Belle Douthat standing with the picture between her hands, and not once looking
down at it, when I was told that the carriage was waiting for me. I was ashamed that I dreamed of Charley Carter that
night. Yet I laughed, while dressing, in recalling that he was enthroned upon a
marble pedestal in one corner of Mrs. Ritchie's drawing-room and declaimed
“Evangeline” to Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, and Nathan Hale. This was in February. Early in May I went down the
river to visit Belle Douthat. It is not practicable to impart to this generation
any other than the most elementary conception of what “Down the River” meant to
pleasure-loving young people in ante-bellum days. I have not the space or the
time or the patience to attempt the impossible here and now. Shirley, Westover, Maycox, the Brandons, Upper and
Lower, Wyanoke —are names to conjure with to those who have sat at the knees of
mothers and granddames who recollected days when, as they tell you, proudly and
sadly, Old Virginia life was worth living. We had never heard of "house
parties,” but a bevy of merry-makers, sweeping up recruits wherever it
alighted, floated from plantation to plantation from Monday morning until
Sunday night, week after week, feasting, driving, riding, singing, and playing
upon the piano, violin, and banjo, dancing every night and sometimes by day, often
on the green sward in the moonlight like veritable fairies, while yellow
jessamine and magnolia perfumed the bland air--always and everywhere
love-making as innocently and naturally as children playing
“Ring-around-a-rosey." Wherever we went, that halcyon and altogether
idyllic fortnight, I heard of Charley Carter. Everybody knew him; the women,
young and old, loved him in one fashion or another; the men voted him the prince
of good fellows, and absolutely unspoilable by popularity that had no drawback.
He was expected daily by his kinspeople, the Carters of Shirley, and lamentable
were the bemoanments as one bright day slid after another and still he did not
appear. There was a likeness of him at Shirley—a clever pencil-sketch made by a
New York artist who has since become famous. He had been a fellow-guest with
Charley at the old Colonial homestead last Christmas. It was framed handsomely,
and hung in the dining-room exactly opposite to my seat when Belle and I spent
a day and a night there. The smile lurking in the eyes gathered meaning as I
looked into them from my coign of vantage until the significance of the steady
gaze startled me. “We know each other by now,” they seemed to say.
“When we meet face to face we shall be friends and more than friends. For meet
we shall! Until then I shall haunt you!" There was something positively eerie in the
fascination in which my fancy was held by a man whom I had never seen. I found
myself listening for his name, wondering with my first waking thought in the
morning and the last at night if he would come that day or on the morrow,
rehearsing a dozen times each day our meeting, the gradual growth of our acquaintanceship
into intimacy. The mystic bond strengthened hourly, until the phantasy obsessed
my soul—the soul that, under the weirdly sweet magnetism of a stubborn idea,
was preparing to melt into his as drops become one in touching. All this time I was as gay in seeming as the
merriest human mote swimming beside me in the sunshine. My delicious dream was
my own. What was to be, would be. Until then I was
haunted." I liked the word. It repeated itself over and over to me
whenever I was confronted by pictures of my modern Hermes. Thus I had named him
to myself. The neighborhood was peopled by his blood-kindred, and they were a
clannish folk, who kept in touch with others of the ilk unto the fourth and
sixteenth generation. In every homestead I was sure to find some presentment of
Charley Carter. Some were better likenesses than others. All looked enough like
the rest to help fix his face and figure in my mind. Moreover, his bon mots were family property, freely
exploited; girl cousins sang his favorite songs, regretting the absence of his
splendid baritone, without which the ballads were tuneless and tame; the boys
had tales of his hunting, fishing, and riding feats, magnified by every
repetition into colossal prodigies. “And I am going home without having a glimpse of
your Admirable Crichton!” said I to Belle with feigned lightness, while a party
of girls and attendant beaux awaited with me upon the Westover wharf the
appearance of the boat which was to take me back to Richmond. “I am very sorry," she uttered in frank
concern. “It is not like him to disappoint his friends. I am especially anxious
to have him meet you. I know you would be friends at sight.” “Friends!” I felt my absurd color flicker. How
little she knew of the mysterious sympathy that had overleaped the bounds of
absolute strangerhood in daring inconceivable to coarser souls. As the phrase recurred to me, a young girl near me
began to hum the air of a popular song—then to sing some words of it -sotto
voce: There is an hour
when angels keep Familiar watch
o'er men; When coarser
souls are wrapped in sleep, Sweet spirit,
meet me then!” I turned sharply upon her: “What put that into your head?” said I, unjustly
suspicious. The coincidence was uncanny. We had never heard the word
“telepathy" then. She looked surprised. “Oh, I don't know! It just came to me, so!” And to rivet the coincidence, a man observed as
carelessly as she had spoken: “You ought to hear Charley Carter sing that on the
river of a moonlight night! It is one of his best songs." At least a dozen passengers landed from the boat and
half as many embarked. There was hustling to and fro over trunks and
hand-luggage, and a child lent variety to the hubbub by tumbling from the
gang-plank into the river. A negro sailor jumped into the muddy, weedy tide and
fished him out, and his mother had hysterics on the deck. Thus it came about
that I paid little attention to the group I had left on the dock until the boat
was too far upstream for me to distinguish one from another of those who shook
handkerchiefs and waved parasols and hats in frantic farewells. In another fortnight I had a letter from Belle
Douthat. After telling me of the final breakup of our merry company, she went
on to say: “You must have brushed against Charley Carter as he
was coming off and you were going on the boat the day you left us. His coming was unexpected and took us all by
surprise. I tried my very best to catch your eye that I might introduce him to
you in dumb show, but you would not see us. He was sadly disappointed. You and he have played
hide and seek for so long that his desire to meet you is whetted by delays. It
is like a new edition of Gabriel and Evangeline. I am sorry to say that there
is little hope of his seeing you for some time to come. He left us this morning
for New York en route for Liverpool.
He will spend six months in travelling abroad." The six months were up and I was arranging for a
foreign trip of my own when my dear Mrs. Ritchie invited me to a “At last I am positive that you will meet my very
great favorite, Charley Carter. He has promised faithfully to be with us on
Wednesday, and unless you object I shall send you in to dinner with him." I shall never array myself for another social
function with the solemn scrupulousness that marked my every preparation for
that dinner-party. I had a new gown, silver-gray, with a sheen that gave it the
effect of moonlighted waters. It was trimmed with white lace and pink ribbons.
I carried a great bunch of pink roses given to me by a young fellow for whom I
cared nothing. I had never looked better. I had never been happier, with a sort of holy
exaltation. The Turks have a proverb about touching heaven with one finger. My
whole hand laid hold of the lintel of Paradise as I stepped from the carriage
at Mrs. Ritchie's gate, my full skirt a mass of billowy moonbeams as I rustled
up the walk and front steps. On my way down from the dressing-room, the billows
flooding the stairs, I said a little prayer of thankfulness, coupled with a
petition for strength to keep a steady head and cool judgment, now that the
momentous interview was an assured bliss. Mrs. Ritchie met me with both hands extended; her
sweet face was serious. “I am sorry to tell you, dear, that Mr. Carter was
summoned, fifteen minutes ago, to his father's death-bed! The telegram reached him
after he was actually in our house. You must have met his carriage at the
corner.” I said some civil nothings instead of the “Kismet!”
that was upon my tongue, and accepted respectfully the introduction of
ex-Governor Floyd to myself. He was old enough to be my father, and he talked all
dinner-time about the Mount Vernon Association for the purchase of Washington's
homestead and bones, and the Washington monument slowly rising in the Capitol
Square to the memory of the Father of his Country and his colleagues. Well! I went abroad, and before I saw my native land
again the Civil War had ploughed a moat between the South and the rest of the world,
and filled it with blood drawn by brother from brother's veins and brother's
heart. Five years separated the idyllic visit “Down the
River” from the mournful day on which Belle Douthat and I drove from Westover
to Shirley for a morning call. She was in mourning, as were most Virginia
women, and she was thinner and paler than as I recollected her in our halcyon
days. Her beautiful eyes and teeth and the ready smile which brought color as
well as brightness to her face made her lovely still. The abomination of
desolation that rested upon homesteads and soil tried men's souls in that
dreadful transition period. It proved to the triumphant utmost of what stuff
the hearts, spirits, and bodies of Southern women were made. Among the bravest
of these Belle Douthat shone like a steady planet above a sullen cloud. I had
been with her now for three days, and her steadfast heroism had not ceased to
be a miracle to my wondering eyes. She led the conversation at Shirley that
forenoon and made it optimistic. The darkest hour had come and passed, she
maintained, and the dawn must be at hand. With inimitable tact she diverted the
current of chat from depressing or dangerous channels and made the most of
everything hopeful. We were stepping into the carriage to return when an
elderly gentlewoman, a visitor in the hospitable mansion, said to me: “You must recollect poor Charley Carter? You know he
was never heard of after the battle of Spottsylvania Court-House?” “Killed?” I gasped. I had no strength for more than
the one word. Belle answered steadily-almost cheerfully: "No, only missing. That means that he may come home
yet. Such things have been. I heard last week of the return of a man who was in
a Northern military prison for two years. He was ill for a long time after his
release, then had to work his way by slow stages home. She never omitted one of the small, sweet courtesies
that round life's ragged edges with grace. It was she who made talk as we drove
through plantations that were like the shriveled, livid face of age by
comparison with the bloom and vigor of other days. “The days that are no more !'” quoted I dismally at
last. “The days that can never come again!" “Just the same days never come again,” said Belle
cheerily. “Do you really believe that Charley Carter is alive?”
I jerked out, from a sore heart, abruptly. I was no longer a dreamy girl with a turn for
mysticism. The hard realities of human existence had taught me common-sense and
some perception of relative values. It is, nevertheless, true that throughout
my wanderings and vicissitudes I had carried in one small chamber of my imagery
the memory of that girlish romance. The picture of the lover that might have
been still visited dreams of the night and day-reveries. What I had heard had
hurt me to the quick. "It seems so unreasonable,” I continued, “to
fancy that for three years he should make no sign if he is still living. All
the war prisons are emptied and done away with. Where can he be?” “I have the feeling that he is not dead,"
answered Belle slowly and thoughtfully. While she spoke she looked at the
horizon, not at the landscape or at me. I could have believed that she saw a
figure drawn clearly against the blue curtain the sunset was beginning to
fringe with gold. Then she began to tell me of reading in a Northern
paper of a man -a husband and father —who had come back from Australia after an
absence of nine years, during seven of which they had not heard from or of him.
He had received an injury on the head that affected his memory and was cared
for by strangers as a semi-imbecile upon a sheep-farm. Coming gradually to
himself, he made his way down to the coast and thence to his native land. Another man had been cast away upon a desert island
and lived there for three years. A third had been snow-bound for a year in the
Arctic regions, etc., etc. One would have thought she had made a special study
of “Lost, Strayed, and Missing" literature. It was entertaining from her
lips, but not convincing to me. She seemed to express satisfaction from the
relation. But Charley Carter was only her friend and in some sort a
kinsman-never the hero of a unique love-drama. Whatever might be her motive in
hunting out and treasuring such tales, hers was an impersonal interest. “And there was Evangeline!” interrupted I, half in
mockery, when the many-windowed roof of Westover came in sight. “Don't forget
her! “'Fair was she
and young, when in hope began the long journey: Faded was she
and old, when in disappointment it ended.'
The reply came in sweet seriousness that shamed my
petulance,- “Yes! there is Evangeline! But disappointment was
not the last word in her story. She found Gabriel! He knew her!
'And Evangeline,
kneeling beside him,
Kissed his dying
lips, and laid his head on her bosom.' That was worth
waiting for!” But a new idea had been born in my brain. That night
I found a “Was there ever any talk of a love-affair between
Belle Douthat and Charley Carter?” “Plenty of talk, but no more than about a dozen
other young men. They were very intimate friends, you know. If matters ever
went further, I never heard of it.” Engagements were not announced in Virginia in the
days that are no more. Still, Belle’s dear friend and kinswoman, in whose house
we were now staying, would have been in the secret of this one had it ever
existed. The suspicion died in my mind as soon as it was born. Another year of heroic patience, of suffering,
clamorous and silent, of privation and labor —all hard and complex elements that
went into the work of Reconstruction - rolled by. One afternoon in leafy May I was on my way from
Norfolk to Richmond. My escort was a Virginian by birth and education, but now
a resident of Chicago. He had fought for three years of the Civil War, and we
fell into talk of that disastrous epoch in our country's history while passing
Malvern Hills. “I was taken prisoner at Spottsylvania Court-House,”
he told me presently. “A tremendous event for me. A trifle in small type in the
history of the Rebellion. I looked up the battle yesterday in a New York
Encyclopædia. It was disposed of in two lines. I got them by heart: “’The Second Corps (Hancock's) carried a salient by
surprise, capturing a division and twenty cannon.' "I was in that division! The capture meant a
year in Fort Delaware and the Oath of Allegiance after Lee's surrender. A year
taken clean out of a young man's life! Think of it!" Both of us thought of it hard until he began to
speak again. “One minute of the engagement that ended in defeat
and Fort Delaware for me is impressed more strongly upon my memory than all the
rest of the hurly-burly. Hancock made an ungenerously early start, before he,
or any other gentleman, should think of having his breakfast! The field in which we lay was full of mist, and when
the alarm was given we could hardly tell blue from gray. It was a hand-to-hand
fight after the Federals tumbled down upon us over our breastworks. I was on horseback, and doing my best with the rest
of the division to hold our ground, yet falling back steadily all the time,
when I saw, by the flash of the guns, a fellow I knew looking up at me from the
ground with that hell raging over him. The life was trampled out of him while I
had that one glance. But he recognized me and I recognized him. Nobody who knew
Charley Carter was likely to forget him." I have never swooned in my life. I suppose I came
nearer to it then than ever before or since. Shore and horizon exchanged places
suddenly, blended, and both went out of my sight before a paroxysm of blind
suffocation. The half-death must have been without sound or motion, for when
hearing returned my companion was not much further on in his story. “The most stupendous blunder in the history of
nations!” he was growling. “If the politicians who brought it about had been
blown from the cannon's mouth at Sumter, there would have been an end of it!” “You are sure you were not mistaken in the identity
of the -- man! you saw on the ground?” I faltered, not daring to let him see my
face. I knew the muscles were twitching and that my lips
were bloodless. “I couldn't be! The poor boy was in my corps, and I
had known him ever since he was born. A finer fellow and a braver soldier never
lived.” “His friends cling to the hope that he may still be
alive." I formed the words with care; my lips and throat were dry. “He was
reported 'missing,' not ‘killed.'” “They mean the same thing by this time!” he retorted
curtly, because sadly. My father said the same thing when I told him the
story next day. There was not a shadow of doubt that Charley
Carter's beautiful young life went out for all time in that sickening turmoil
of bloody hoofs and fiery hail. I made the recital brief in the letter I wrote
to Belle Douthat. We were not regular correspondents. So many weeks elapsed
before I heard directly from her that her next letter was in no sense an answer
to mine, and so full of other things that no allusion was made to the
communication which had been full of woe for me. The omission was an added pain to the dull ache at
the bottom of my heart. Yet, as I reasoned in an effort to be charitable, it
was hardly to be wondered at. Belle had lived in the heart of war for the four
years I had spent out of the country. She was in black still for an uncle and a
brother. A cousin had fallen at Manassas, another at Gettysburg. Confirmation
of the death of a favorite playfellow and chum imported comparatively little to
her. The horror that had held my eyes waking for many a night after that sail
up the river between battle-blighted shores was too familiar to her imagination
to be more than a passing shock. It passed with me after a while. But the passage was
slow and the time long. I am an old woman now—sixty-eight my last birthday; old
enough to have outlived romance, and to avoid the memory of such unsubstantial
folly as sentimental devotion to the dear memory of a man who was personally a
stranger. A rattle-pate girl asked me in so many words, the
other day, why I had never married. She was pleased to add that I must have
possessed attractions of no mean order when I was young. Why was I still
single? I answered promptly, gravely, and truthfully,- “Because I never saw the man whom I felt I could
love and marry.” That night before I went to bed I unlocked a drawer
and took from the back of it a box wrapped in a clean handkerchief. This, in
unfolding, showed a morocco case, rubbed and rusty. I bought it surreptitiously
in a daguerrean gallery in Richmond. The picture is still clear when one holds
it to the light. When I die it will be thrown into a waste-basket with other
rubbish. I have no right to keep it. How little right I ever had to own and treasure it
will be proved by the last scene in a story that is true from title to “finish.” Twelve years ago, a few days after I read in a
Richmond paper the notice of Belle Douthat's death, I sat next a Southern woman
at a New York luncheon-party. Like hundreds of other natives of Virginia, she
lives north of Mason and Dixon's line—the invisible boundary that once implied
so much, and which, thank God! signifies less than nothing now. Our speech betrayed us one to the other. The
indefinable, unmistakable something that is not accent, nor yet pronunciation,
which we never outlive. “You are a Virginian!" I said, after she had
spoken one sentence. “And so are you!" she retorted, and we were
friends. By and by, after she had heard that I used to live
in Richmond, and I had guessed truly that she was from Lynchburg, she spoke of
Belle Douthat's death. “Seeing the notice brought back the recollection of
a sad, strange little story that came to me while I was on a visit to my cousin
in Baltimore five or six years ago," she went on to say. “Her mother was
Mrs. Carter” -bringing out the “Cuarter" in true Virginia style. “One of her sons - Charley Carter, -a splendid fellow,
I have been told, I never saw him,--was reported 'missing' after some battle. A
year after the war some people in Fredericksburg, in whose house he had left
his trunk when the march began, found out that his mother was living in
Baltimore and sent it on to her. She shut herself up in her room with it for a
day. Nobody knows whether she opened it or not, or if she ever had the key. She
dragged it with her own hands into a large closet adjoining her chamber, and
there it stayed until she died. Charley was her idol, and she could not speak
of him even to the daughter with whom she lived. "After her death they broke the lock and opened
the trunk. All the linen was yellow and the woollen clothes were riddled by
moths. At the very bottom was a bundle of letters, tied
with blue ribbon, and with them in a velvet case was Belle Douthat's
likeness—an ambrotype in excellent preservation. The letters were all from her.
The last was written three days before the battle in which he was killed. It
seems they had been engaged for months, perhaps for years. My cousin thinks his
mother knew of it. Nobody else--not even his sisters -suspected it. “They burned the letters, of course. My cousin has
the picture still. I saw it. She must have been very beautiful. With wonderful,
wistful eyes-poor girl!” She nibbled a salted almond, and put out her hand in
an absent-minded way for a chocolate bonbon before adding: “Something in the eyes and in the story as my cousin
told it made me think of Evangeline. You knew Belle, I suppose ?" “Not very well," I answered. Harland, Marion. “A Wartime Evangeline.” Lippencott
Monthly Magazine: A Popular Journal of Literature, Volume 75. (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippencott Co., 1905.) Pages 215-227.
|
|
|
For more in-depth
information and analysis |
one
alludes to it as a Function.
“My dear wife, you show generous confidence in the
honesty of your guests in leaving this on the table out there, where a dozen
appreciative young maidens must have passed it. Have you seen it?” he added
abruptly, holding it before my eyes.
dinner-party, adding
to the note:
