Volume 9 — Chapter V. The Sword Of The Lord And Of Gideon.

Boston, at the beginning of the war, was not a place to go to sleep in. Massachusetts politics, so long eminent in the senate, had at last taken the field; and that city, which is the brain of the State, effervesced with enthusiasm. Men the least heroic, apparently, showed themselves capable of heroism; and dreamers over the great deeds of others looked up to find that they might themselves be "the hymn the Brahmin sings."

Eager crowds surrounded the bulletin, put out by newspaper offices, or ran to gaze at mustering or departing regiments. Windows filled at the sound of a fife and drum; and it seemed that the air was fit to be breathed only when it was full of the flutter of flags.

Ceremony was set aside. Strangers and foes spoke to each other; and the most disdainful lady would smile upon the roughest uniform. From the Protestant pulpit came no more the exhortation to brotherly love, but the trumpet-call to arms; and under the wing of the Old South meeting-house rose a recruiting office, and a rostrum, with the motto, "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon."

The Lord of that time was he at the touch of whose rod the flesh and the loaves were consumed with fire; who sent for a sign a drench of dew on the fleece; at the command of whose servant all Ephraim shouted and took the waters before the flying Midianites, with the heads of Oreb and of Zeb on their spears.

Of course there was a good deal of froth; but underneath glowed the pure wine. It is true that many went because the savage instinct hidden in human nature rose from its unseen lair, and fiercely shook itself awake at the scent of blood. But others came from an honest sense of duty, and offered their lives knowing what they did; and women who loved them said amen. It was a stirring time.

It is not to be supposed that our friends were indifferent to these events. It was a doubtful point with them, indeed, whether they could be content to leave the city that summer. Mr. Southard was decidedly for remaining in town; and Mr. Granger, though less excited, was inclined to second him. But Mr. Lewis had, early in the spring, engaged a cottage at the seaside, with the understanding that the whole family were to accompany him there, and he utterly refused to release them from their promise. As if to help his arguments, the weather became intensely hot in June. Finally they consented to go.

"We owe you thanks for your persistence," Mr. Granger said, as they sat together the last evening of their stay in town. "I couldn't stand two months of this."

Mr. Lewis was past answering. Dressed in a complete suit of linen, seated in a wide Fayal chair, with a palm-leaf fan in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, he presented what his wife called an ill-tempered dissolving view. At that moment, the only desire of his heart was that one of Sydney Smith's, that he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones.

Aurelia and Margaret sat near by, flushed, smiling, and languid, trying to look cool in their crisp, white dresses.

Miss Hamilton would scarcely be recognized by one who had seen her only three months before. Happiness had done its work, and she was beautiful. Her face had recovered its smooth curves and bloomy whiteness, and her lips were constantly brightening with the smile that was ever ready to come.

Mr. Granger contemplated the two young ladies with a patriarchal admiration. He liked to have beautiful objects in his sight; and surely, he thought, no other man in the city could boast of having in his family two such girls as those who now sat opposite him. Besides, what was best, they were friends of his, and regarded him with confidence and affection.

Mrs. Lewis glanced from them to him, and back to them, and pouted her lip a little. "He is enough to try the patience of a saint!" she was thinking. "Why doesn't he marry one of those girls like a sensible man? To be sure, it is their fault. They are too friendly and frank with him, the simpletons! There they sit and beam on him with affectionate tranquillity, as if he were their grandfather. I'd like to give 'em a shaking."

Mr. Southard was walking slowly to and fro from the back-parlor to the front, and he, too, glanced frequently at the sofa where sat the two unconscious beauties. But no smile softened his pale face. It seemed, indeed, sterner than usual. The war was stirring the minister to the depths.

Mr. Lewis opened a blind near him. A beam of dusty gold came in from the west; he snapped the blind in its face.

"Seems to me it takes the sun a long time to get down," he said crossly. "I hope that none of your mighty Joshuas has commanded it to stand still."

No one answered. They sat in the sultry gloaming, and listened dreamily to the mingled city noises that came from near and far; the softened roll of a private carriage, like the touch of a gloved hand, after the knuckled grasp of drays and carts; the irritating wheeze of an inexorable hand-organ; and, through all, the shrill cry of the news-boy, the cicada of the city.

The good-breeding of the company was shown by the perfect composure of their silence, and the perfect quiescence of their minds, by the fact that their thoughts all drifted in the same direction, each one after its own mode.

Mrs. Lewis was thinking: "Those poor horses! I wish they knew enough to organize a strike, and all run away into the green, shady country."

The husband was saying relentingly to himself, "I declare I do pity the poor fellows who have to work during this infernal weather."

The others were still more in harmony with Mr. Granger when he spoke lowly, half to himself:

"If that beautiful idyl of Ruskin's could be realized; that country and government where the king should be the father of his people; where all alike should go to him for help and comfort; where he should find his glory, not in enlarging his dominion, but in making it more happy and peaceful! Will such a kingdom ever be, I wonder? Will such a golden age ever come?"

Margaret glanced with a swift smile toward Mr. Southard, and saw the twin of her thought in his face. He came and stood with his hand on the arm of her sofa.

"Both you and Mr. Ruskin are unconsciously thinking of the same thing," he said, with some new sweetness in his voice, and brightness in his face. "What you mean can only be the kingdom of God; and it will come! it will come!"

Looking up smilingly at him, Margaret caught a smile in return; and then, for the first time, she thought that Mr. Southard was beautiful. The cold purity of his face was lighted momentarily by that glow which it needed in order to be attractive.

Aurelia rose, and crossing the room, flung the blinds open. The sun had set, and a slight coolness was creeping up.

"This butchery going on at the South looks as if the kingdom of God were coming with a vengeance," said Mr. Lewis, fanning himself.

"It is coming with a vengeance!" exclaimed Mr. Southard. "God does not work in sunshine alone. Job saw him in the whirlwind. Massachusetts soldiers have gone out with the Bible as well as the bayonet."

Mr. Lewis contemplated the speaker with an expression of wondering admiration that was a little overdone.

"What did God do before Massachusetts was discovered?" he exclaimed.

"I was surprised to hear, Mr. Granger, that your cousin Sinclair had joined a New York regiment," Mrs. Lewis said hastily. "Only the day before the steamer sailed in which he had engaged passage, some quixotic whim seized him, and he volunteered. I cannot conceive what induced him."

"I think the uniform was becoming," Mr. Granger said dryly.

"I pity his wife," pursued the lady, sighing. "Poor Caroline!"

"She has acted like a fool!" Mr. Lewis broke in angrily. "It was her fault that Sinclair went off. She thorned him perpetually with her exactions. She forgot that lovers are only common folks in a state of evaporation, and that it is in the nature of things that they should get condensed after a time. She wanted him to be for ever picking up her pocket-handkerchief, and writing acrostics on her name. A man can't stand that kind of folderol when he's got to be fifty years old. We begin to develop a taste for common sense when we reach that age."

"He showed no confidence in her," Mrs. Lewis said, with downcast eyes, "He often deceived her, and therefore she always suspected him."

"I think that a man should have no concealments from his wife," said Mr. Southard emphatically.

"That's just what Samson's wife thought when her husband proposed his little conundrum to the Philistines," commented Mr. Lewis.

Margaret got up and followed Aurelia to the window.

"I am very sorry for Cousin Caroline," said Mr. Granger, in his stateliest manner, rising, also, and putting an end to the discussion.

"He is always sorry for any one who can contrive to appear abused," Mr. Lewis said to Margaret. "If you want to interest him, you must be as unfortunate as you can."

Margaret looked at her friend with eyes to which the quick tears started, and blessed him in her heart.

He was passing at the moment, and, catching the remark, feared lest she might be hurt or embarrassed.

"Don't you want to come out on to the veranda?" he asked, glancing back as he stepped from the long window.

The words were nothing; but they were so steeped in the kindness of the look and tone accompanying them that they seemed to be words of tenderness.

She followed him out into the twilight; the others came too, and they sat looking into the street, saying little, but enjoying the refreshing coolness. Other people were at their windows, or on their steps; and occasionally an acquaintance passing stopped for a word. After a while G——, the liberator, came along, and leaned on the fence a moment—a man with a ridge over the top of his bald head, that looked as if his backbone didn't mean to stop till it had reached his forehead, as probably it didn't; a soft-voiced, gently-speaking lion; but Margaret had heard him roar.

"Mr. G——," said Mr. Granger, "here is a lady with two dactyls for a name, Miss Margaret Hamilton. She will add another, and be Miriam, when your people come out through the Red Sea we are making."

"Have your cymbals ready, young prophetess," said the liberator. "The waters are lifting on the right hand and on the left."

The next day they went to the seaside, the ladies going in the morning to set things in order; the gentlemen not permitted to make their appearance till evening.

After a pleasant ride of an hour in the cars, they stepped out at a little way-station, where a carriage was awaiting them. About half a mile from this station, on a point of land hidden from it by a strip of thick woods, was their cottage.

The place was quite solitary; not a house in sight landward, though summer cottages nestled all about among the hills, hidden in wild green nooks. But across the water, towns were visible in all directions.

They drove with soundless wheels over a moist, brown road that wound and coiled through the woods. There had been a shower in the night that left everything washed, and the sky cloudless. It was yet scarcely ten o'clock; and the air, though warm, was fresh and still. The morning sunshine lay across the road, motionless between the motionless dense tree-shadows; both light and shade so still, so intense, they looked like a pavement of solid gold and amber. If, at intervals, a slight motion woke the woods, less like a breeze than a deep and gentle respiration of nature, and that leaf-and-flower-wrought pavement stirred through each glowing abaciscus, it was as though the solid earth were stirred.

A faint sultry odor began to rise from the pine-tops, and from clumps of sweet-fern that stood in sunny spots; but the rank, long-stemmed flowers and trailing vines that grew under the trees were yet glistening with the undried shower; the shaded grass at the roadside was beaded, every blade, with minute sparkles of water; and here and there a pine-bough was thickly hung with drops that trembled with fulness at the points of its clustered emerald needles, and at a touch came clashing down in a shower that was distinctly heard through the silence.

The birds were taking their forenoon rest; but, as the carriage rolled lightly past, a fanatical bobolink, who did not seem to have much common sense, but to be brimming over with the most glorious nonsense, swung himself down from some hidden perch, alighted in an utterly impossible manner on a spire of grass, and poured forth such a long-drawn, liquid, impetuous song, that it was a wonder there was anything of him left when it was over.

Three pairs of hands were stretched to arrest the driver's arm; three smiling, breathless faces listened till the last note, and watched the ecstatic little warbler swim away with an undulating motion, as if he floated on the bubbling waves of his own song.

In a few minutes a turn of the road brought them in sight of the blue, salt water spread out boundlessly, sparkling, and sail-flecked; and presently they drove up at the cottage door.

This was a long, low building, all wings, like a moth; colored, like fungi, of mottled browns and yellows; overtrailed by woodbines and honeysuckles, through which you sometimes only guessed at the windows by the white curtains blowing out.

"Why, it is something that has grown out of the earth!" exclaimed Margaret. "See! the ground is all uneven about the walls as it is about the boles of trees."

This rural domicil faced the east and the sea; and an unfenced lawn sloped down to the beach where the tide was now creeping up with bright ripples chasing each other.

The house was pleasant enough, large and airy; and, after a few hours' work, they had everything in order. Then, tired, happy, and hungry, they sat down to luncheon.

"Isn't it delightful to get rid of men a little while, when you know that they are soon to come again?" drawled Aurelia, sitting with both elbows on the table, and her rich hair a little tumbled.

Margaret glanced at her with a smile of approval. "That sweet creature!" she thought. And said aloud, "You know perfectly well, Aura, that all the time they are gone we are thinking of them and doing something for them. Whom have we been working for to-day but the gentlemen, pray?"

To her surprise, Aurelia's brown eyes dropped, and her beautiful face turned a sudden pink.

"I never could carve a fowl," said Mrs. Lewis plaintively. "But there must be a beginning in learning anything. I wish I knew where the beginning of this duck is. Aura, will you go look in that Audubon, and see how this creature is put together? We are likely to be worse off than Mr. Secretary Pepys, when the venison pasty turned out to be 'palpable mutton.' We shall have nothing."

Margaret started up. "Infirm of purpose, give me the carver!" she cried; and seizing the knife, in a moment of inspiration, triumphantly carved the mysterious duck, and betrayed its hidden articulations.

Mrs. Lewis contemplated her with great respect. "My dear," she said, "I have done you injustice. I have believed that though you could succeed admirably in the ornamental and the extraordinary, you had no faculty for common things. I acknowledge my error.'Nemesis favors genius,' as Disraeli says of Burke."

After luncheon and a siesta, they dressed and went out onto the lawn to watch for the gentlemen, who presently appeared.

Mr. Granger presented Margaret with a spike of beautiful pink arethusa set in a ring of feathery ferns. "It came from a swamp miles away," he said. "I wanted to bring you something bright the first day."

"You always bring me something bright," she said.

To Be Continued.