Part 7 — THE STORY OF AN ALGERINE LOCKET.

I.

In the sunshine of a May morning stood an old gray house, with a porch draped in woodbine and sweetbrier. A mass of wisteria climbed to the very chimneys, and on the lawn a bed of red and golden tulips swayed with the soft breeze. A wren was building in an acacia and singing, while a young girl watched his work and sang also, trying with her fresh soprano voice to catch his melody.

The old house was the homestead of Holly Farm, and the young girl was Sybil Vaughan, the heroine of a very short story.

"Sybil looks charming in white," thought Miss Mildred, sitting at the window of the green parlor with her mending-basket beside her; "and the locket is quite becoming."

It was before the day when every one began to wear medallions, and the one that hung by a quaint twisted chain from Sybil's neck was a locket of rich enamel, brought to her from Algeria by a midshipman cousin, and quite unlike our gewgaw from the Palais Royal.

As we have said, Miss Mildred sat at the window of the green parlor, raising her eyes now and then from her work to watch her pretty niece, her adopted daughter. During the seventy years of her life, she had sat at that same window almost every morning since she was old enough to work a sampler, or to read a paper in the Spectator or a chapter of Evelina to her mother and younger sisters.

In her girlhood, Holly Farm had been a lonely place, remote from town and village. The trees, now rising luxuriantly around the house, were then, like her, in their youth, and revealed whatever might be passing in the lane below the lawn. At a period of life when young people gaze abroad in vague expectation of some wonderful arrival or event that shall alter the current of existence, Mildred Vaughan had turned longing eyes toward this lawn hour after hour, and she had thought her morning's watch well rewarded if the old doctor had trundled by in his high-topped chaise and nodded to her in friendly greeting.

With a capacity for painting that in these days of potichomania, decalcomania, and the rest would have passed for originality, if not genius, she had received one quarter's lessons in oil-painting, and by dint of studying a few beautiful family portraits had acquired a keenness of perception that made her hunger for the world of art. With an earnest love for books, she had been obliged to devote her time to the care of her younger brothers and sisters. And so, out of her monotonous life, she had brought into old age an exaggerated idea of the value of learning and luxury, with a belief in possibilities and a regret for what might have been generally supposed to belong exclusively to youth.

This sounds more melancholy than it really was. Miss Mildred had kept her ideal of happiness fresh and vivid, and that is in itself a source of keen enjoyment. And, being a devout and trusting soul, she had framed for herself a prayer out of the thwarted aspiration of her heart and mind: "I thank thee, Lord, that there are joys so beautiful on earth, and I thank thee that they are not for me. Thy will is dearer to me than the realization of any dream."

Every one loved to come to Miss Mildred for sympathy. She believed in the reality and the durability of their joy, in the depth and in the cause of their grief. She did not say to the mother who had lost her little baby, "He is saved from sorrow and sin." She did not say to the young widow, "You have had the best part of life; later come trial and vexation of spirit." She knew that in bereavement the balm often enters with the sting; that the stainless beauty of the thing we lose is our only earthly consolation for its loss.

A great change had come to Holly Farm since the time when the doctor's visit was an important event. The sweep of meadow-land west of the house now served as camping-ground for the —th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, in which young Henry Vaughan held a second lieutenancy. Drumming and fifing, the arrival of carriages full of gayly dressed people to visit the camp, the music of the regimental band on moonlight evenings, such was the course of daily life on green slopes which cattle and sheep had once possessed without dispute, nibbling the grass and drinking from the river in all contentment.

Indeed, Miss Mildred's standard of events had so naturally changed in that course of seventy years that, when the little white gate swung open, and a young man in uniform walked across the lawn, she merely said to herself: "That must be Captain Adair coming to see Harry. He walks better than any man I ever saw. The maid's hanging out clothes; I do hope Sybil will have sense enough to come and speak to him instead of letting him knock."

Sybil had the amount of sense requisite for the emergency. She led the way into the green parlor, and, leaving Captain Adair with her aunt, went to announce the arrival to her brother, who was trying on his new uniform, and blushed to be caught admiring the epaulettes before a mirror in the library. There was no need of apology. Sybil was in full sympathy with the occasion, and returned to the parlor feeling as proud of her brother's military outfit as he of the beauty of the sister leaning on his arm.

It was a pleasant meeting. Adair's frank and sympathetic manner had won its way through Miss Mildred's reserve; and his familiarity with the world and its ways secured him an easy victory over his young lieutenant. Sybil was less impressionable than the other two. Her manners were gentle and courteous to all, but it was not easy to penetrate her likes and dislikes, or to find out their cause. Just a trifle uninteresting, she was, poor Sybil, like many nicely poised young persons before they have enjoyed or suffered keenly. The very finish of her beauty, of her lovely manners, of her pleasant voice and accent, left nothing to be desired—no suggestion of anything beyond. But a soul so brave, so pure and honest as hers deserved to be developed, and the occasion for development came.

II. ADAIR'S LETTERS TO HENRY ALLEYNE.

Camp Everett, May, 1861.

I had an adventure yesterday that should have fallen to your lot, my dear Alleyne, not to that of a prosaic dog like me.

Hearing that my second lieutenant lived near the camp, and that he could not enter upon his duties for a day or two, I took it into my head to go and see what stuff he was made of, for, Alleyne, I am awfully interested in Company B, and in every creature connected with it. How could I ever have lived in that bore of a city, or slept within four walls, or used a silver fork! "Going off at half-cock, as usual," you say? Well, perhaps that is better than never going off at all. But to return to my story.

I went through a shady lane, leading from the camp to Vaughan's house. (Vaughan is the second lieutenant and owner of the camping-ground.) As I drew near the gate, I heard a woman's voice singing. A little further on came a gap in the trees, and I took a reconnoissance—such another I can never hope for during my military career. A low-spreading stone house, covered with vines, stood among fine old trees. Great bunches of blue blossoms draped the walls, and on the velvety lawn were clusters of brilliant flowers. Beneath a tree, honor bright, Alleyne, if ever angels do appear in white gowns with broad rose-colored sashes, it was an angel that stood beneath that tree, answering a bird with a voice as fresh, an expression as natural as his own. I stood there looking and listening—it was really very fascinating—until I suddenly remembered my errand. Then I pushed open the gate, and, walking across to the porch, lifted the bright brass knocker. But the rival of the wren, without letting me wait the coming of some creature of baser clay, came from among the trees, and asked if I wished to see Mr. Vaughan.

Now, I had wished to see Mr. Vaughan, and as it would not do to say on so short an acquaintance that my wishes were too completely satisfied by the vision before me to leave any want unfulfilled, I stoutly declared that I did wish to see Mr. Vaughan, and that I was Captain Adair.

And then she showed your too susceptible friend into a summer parlor, where the general effect was white and sea-green, and where there were hanging-baskets of flowers surrounded by vines and soft moss, and where an elderly lady in a lavender dress, with white lawn apron and kerchief, sat sewing, and where portraits of rosy-fingered dames and periwigged gentlemen gazed on us from the walls and read our destinies—mine must have been too plainly legible on my ingenuous countenance. And the old lady received me very courteously, and the maiden went to find her brother, and, when the brother came, he looked like his sister, and surely never before was lieutenant greeted by his superior officer with such ineffable tenderness. And we dined, so far as I could judge, off dishes of topaz and crystal, heaped high with ambrosia, and soon after dinner I returned to Camp Everett, and met the colonel going his rounds.

"You come from young Vaughan's, I see," he said. "What impression did he make upon you?"

"Charming, highly delightful, very promising," I replied, with a happy combination of diffidence and child-like openness of manner.

He gave me a look out of his shrewd old eyes. "So attractive a person will be an acquisition to the regiment," he remarked, and let me pass on to my tent.

I am half-asleep. Good-night!

Robert Adair.

Camp Everett, June, 1861.

Things go on grandly at the camp, and between ourselves the colonel has just said that Company B is better disciplined than any other in the regiment—a compliment I'm very proud of, coming, as it does, from an old West Point martinet.

And now for the second part of my idyl. Every afternoon, Vaughan and I go up to his place and smoke awhile in the orchard. Then, by accident—it is wonderful, the unerring accuracy of accident at times—we appear at the east window of the green parlor, and there are Miss Vaughan and her niece, sewing or drawing, and sometimes Miss Sybil sings, to the accompaniment of a charming Pleyel piano, canzonets of Haydn in a style as fine, as pure, as exquisite as the composition. She—Sybil, I mean—has never danced a German or heard Faust! Duly shielded by the presence of aunt or brother, she is sometimes taken to hear the Nozze di Figaro or to see Hamlet, or to some other unexceptionable afternoon entertainment. I smile sometimes to see her absolute ignorance of life, and wonder that, in a village not twenty miles distant from a city where the world runs riot, this being has sprung into womanhood, unconscious of the existence of anything less spotless than herself.

This guarded life has given to her manners a certain high breeding that would keep one at a distance but for her kind, frank nature. No one can venture to fancy himself distinguished above others.

Do you know what this makes me feel? That hitherto, and I am nearly twenty-five years old, I have looked at women with a coxcomb's eyes. Any day, any hour, I feel ready to throw myself on her mercy, but an instinct tells me that her love must be won by something better than professions. When I have suffered in the cause she loves well enough to give her only brother to defend it, then I will speak.

Noblesse oblige—I see that in a certain lofty sense this is the motto of her life, and it shall be mine. Do you remember what our dear old philosopher used to say in the scientific school? "The better you begin, the harder is the work before you." And when we asked what he meant, he only said, "Noblesse oblige." It is true, whether the noblesse acts upon us in the form of intellectual strength or of spiritual gifts, or in the old material sense of inherited rank.

Except the hour spent at Vaughan's each day, and an occasional visit to my mother in town, I am wrapped up in the affairs of Company B. The life here is to me most fascinating. You would laugh to see me with a set of wooden soldiers before me on the little table in my tent, studying manœuvres, extricating my company from the most astounding and unheard-of perplexities. The progress of my lieutenants; the health, morals, and immorals of the company; the incapacity of our bugler to draw the faintest sound from his instrument—in short, everything that indicates growth or decay of discipline in Company B, seems to me a matter of national importance.

One word more about Miss Sybil Vaughan. My mother has seen her, and sympathizes with me. When she came to visit the camp, I took her to Vaughan's house to rest. As we left Holly Farm, she gave a sigh of relief, and said: "Robert, I feel as though I had stepped back half a century. When I was a girl, young ladies were like Miss Sybil Vaughan."

One more last word. In your letter you said, with an air of superior wisdom, plainly expressed in the tails of your letters: "You are in love."

Of course I am, and I should be a fool if I were not.

Your friend,

Robert Adair.

III.

It was June still. The laburnum path was all aglow with blossoms, and the grape-walk, just beyond, made a shadowy retreat toward evening. Sybil was sitting there with her work lying on her lap. She had not sewed three stitches. Why had not Harry come as usual that afternoon to the east window to get his cup of black coffee? Why—O dear! there are so many whys in the case, and never an answer anywhere. Why was there an indefinite air of bustle in the camp as she looked down on it from her bower? Why was there an undefined sense of stir in everything?

She watched the sun drop nearer and nearer to the distant hills. The air was full of saffron light, and heavy with the perfume of flowers. Nature was so new and fresh in her June loveliness; and life was full of a promise of coming beauty, as it had never been before to Sybil in any other of her nineteen Junes. That sense of stir was in her own soul no less than in external nature.

There came the click of an iron heel upon the gravelled path. Sybil half-rose from the bench, and then sank back again. Adair stood before her. "We are ordered off," he said. "We go in an hour. I've but one moment to stay, for I promised Harry to leave him time to come and say good-by."

In the white, scared look on Sybil's face he read the right to speak.

But it had all been so hurried, she thought, when he was gone. Oh! for one of those minutes to return, that she might express to him a tenth part of the joy and pain, the hope and terror, that filled her heart. She could remember nothing clearly or in order, and yet she would have given all the other memories of her happy life to recall each word as it was spoken. He had asked her to give him something of her own, a ring, a glove, a ribbon, no matter what. And she had taken from her neck the medallion, and laid in it a little curl of her hair, and given it to him; and she had felt his hand upon her head, and heard him say, "God keep my sweet, innocent love!" And when she lifted her head he was gone, and she had told him nothing. It could not be a dream, for on her left hand was the ring he placed there—one that she had seen him wear, and thought too beautiful a jewel for a man to have, but now she felt so glad that he had worn it. He had said this was to be the guard of the wedding-ring that he would place there as soon as he could get a furlough to come home; and she had said—yes, thank God! she did remember saying that, at least—she had said that no one but himself should take off this ring or put another in its place; yes, thank God! she had said it.

Then Harry had come, too overjoyed at the news of her engagement to feel the pain of parting. That memory was full of turmoil; mixed, too, with self-reproach that all other emotion was so lost in her new joy or pain, whichever it might be called, that Harry's going gave her no uneasiness.

The sun dropped behind the hills; star after star pierced through the darkening blue. Stillness lay on the valley below, so lately full of tramping horses, and shouting men, and shifting lights.

At last she heard her aunt's voice calling her, and roused herself to go and tell her beautiful story, old as the human race, new as that very June evening. She wondered that Aunt Mildred understood it all so well. Short-sighted Sybil! it was you who were beginning to understand Miss Mildred.

One August day, when a sultry fog held the earth in bondage, and scarlet geraniums blazed like red pools among the wilted grass, Miss Mildred pushed open the little white gate, and, with that hurried step that in old age so poorly simulates speed, hastened across the lawn. She gave a quick glance into the two parlors which were vacant, and then went up-stairs, grasping nervously the low hand-rail. In the upper hall she stopped, and leaned against the balustrade to take breath, and courage, too. Then, opening the door of Sybil's room, she stopped on the threshold to see her lying on the floor with a newspaper crushed in her hand. A bulletin in the village post-office had told her all: "Found dead on the field, Captain Robert Adair, —th Regt. Mass. Vols." They lifted Sybil up and laid her on her bed. She did not "strive nor cry," but in that first grief it pleased God to measure her power of endurance.

It was not in victory that Adair had fallen, but in one of those engagements where, humanly speaking, life seems thrown away. But such thoughts should not disturb the mourners cradled in the providence of God. He chooses the time and the occasion, and what is lost in the current of human events he gathers up and cherishes.

Weeks passed away. Letters came—precious in their recognition of Adair's high integrity, his courage, his compassion; letters, too, from his mother, far away in her summer home, acknowledging Sybil as one with her in love and bereavement. But she lay, white and listless, on her bed, taking little notice of anything except in the expression of gratitude. Harder than anything else for her aunt to bear was the pathos of Sybil's resignation.

There came a soft afternoon, early in September, when for the first time Sybil's easy-chair was placed in the open air, under a striped awning that made an out-door room on the west side of Holly Farmhouse. Here she could be sheltered from the direct rays of the sun, and yet enjoy the trees and flowers.

Great velvet bees hid their heads buzzing in the freshly-opened cups of the day-lilies; a hummingbird dipped his dainty beak into the sweet-peas, and then flashed away to hide himself among the nasturtiums pouring in a golden stream over a broken tree-trunk on the lawn.

Amid the glow of nature, Sybil looked very wan and frail. She had begun to think a little now, and her thoughts ran thus: "I am resigned to God's will. I've not the shadow of a doubt that this is all right. I am more than willing to die; I am willing to live, if only there is a thread to hold by—a stone, a stick, a straw to begin to build my life upon. Other women have borne this and lived. I've seen them going about among their fellow-creatures, talking, smiling, laughing, when others talked, and smiled, and laughed. I have no more sensibility than they. What I have lost was perfect; but what they had lost was perfect, perhaps, to them. I don't rebel, but I am dying of pain. It goes on, and on, and on; if it would stop but for ten minutes and let me take breath, I think I could catch hold of something on earth and begin to live again. There's that dear Aunt Mildred coming through the hall. Now, I will give her a free, happy smile, and lighten her burden if I cannot lighten my own."

Miss Mildred held in her two hands a great vase of spreading golden-rod, which she set down on the little garden-table. Just where she had placed it, against a background of dark-green leaves, it made so beautiful a picture that Sybil uttered an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. There was a delighted look on her aunt's sweet old face that made her think: "Here is something to hold on by; here is something to build on, if only I am generous enough to try."

Miss Mildred arranged the cushions in Sybil's chair, and then took her hand very gently.

"There is a man in the hall, dear, who brings you a little packet from Virginia. Can you see him?"

"Yes; at once, if you like. Please let him come out here. I can talk to him better in the open air."

He came—a shy, elderly man, whom Sybil remembered seeing once at the camp. He stood awkwardly, shifting his military hat from hand to hand, till she asked him to sit down near her, and said a few reassuring words. Then, seeing that he was struggling to conquer his emotion, she fixed her eyes on the vase of flowers, trying to keep down the impatience struggling within her.

"My name is Abel, lady," he said, at length. "May be you've heard the cap'n say as how I couldn't play the bugle, at the camp below there. The folks all said I couldn't learn, I was so old and dull; but he allus believed everybody was good for something, he did."

Sybil was leaning forward, breathless to hear more.

"I remember you," she said. "Oh! do go on. Tell me everything—every little thing about it all."

"Wall, you see, lady, my two boys they was all I had, and they jined the regiment, and I couldn't live without 'em; and I was hale and strong, and so I made bold for to jine, too. There was one place left in the regiment then—the bugler's place, in Company B—and I pled so hard, the cap'n he said I might try. And, lady, the plaguy thing used to seem to shut right up when I wanted to make it blow, and the men used to laugh at me, right out afore my boys. And Abner and John Henry they felt kind o' cheap, and they kept sayin' to me, 'Father,' they says, 'it makes us feel kind o' bad to hear you tryin' so hard and not learnin'; don't you think you'd better give it up?' And says I, 'No, boys,' says I, 'while there's breath in my body, I won't give it up till I've conquered that crittur.' And, lady, when the cap'n see me tryin' so hard and allus comin' to grief, what does he do but he takes hold himself, and he learns all them signals, and he teaches on 'em to me. And so I went to the war with my boys, and I nursed John Henry through a fever, and I kept Abner from fallin' into bad company; and, lady, if I could have saved the cap'n's life by givin' my skin inch by inch, I'd have done it; but I couldn't. So I just held his head against this old heart, and let him breathe his life away. And I laid him down on the sod as tender as if I'd been his mother."

"May God reward you! Did he suffer much?"

Tears, such as she had longed for, were pouring from her eyes.

"No, lady; he was gone before the surgeons came on to the field. He lay quite still, without a moan or sigh; and, now and then, he'd say a word to me. I was wounded, too, just below the knee. I dropped down about six feet off from him; and when the retreat came, and I saw as how I was left behind with the cap'n, didn't I praise the Lord!"

"What did he say to you?"

Abel took a little packet from his breast, and laid it in Sybil's hand. "He says to me, 'Abel,' says he, 'when you can get a furlough honorable,' says he—'for you mustn't go when the country needs you bad—you take this locket' (a-unhookin' it from his neck) 'to Miss Sybil Vaughan—her that lives in the stone farmhouse above our old camp at Holly Farm—and you tell her as how the poor thing tried to save my life; and she'll see it by the great dent in the gold made by a bullet. And you tell her as how she's to open it herself, and see what I put there. And you tell her '—I'm a Methodist, lady, but I'll tell you word for word what he said."

"Yes, word for word."

"'You tell her,' says he, 'how I pray that Christ and his Blessed Mother may be her comfort as they are mine; and tell her as how I've never let a thought enter my mind, since we parted, that she wouldn't have approved. And tell her,' says he, a-raisin' himself half-way up from the ground, 'you tell her I love her fond and true, and that we shall meet in heaven when she's done the work on earth she is so fit to do. And tell her to comfort my mother. Poor mother!' And then he put his arm round my neck, and kind o' stroked my cheek, and he says, soft and low, a few words, and all I heard was, 'Receive my soul,' and then I kissed him, and laid him down on the turf, and his face was like as I think it will be in heaven at the great day. And now I'm goin' to leave you, lady, 'cos I know as how you want to be alone. And, with your leave, I'll come again, and tell you how we loved him, and how we cried like babies round the ambulance that brought him to the camp; and how there was scarce anything left to send home to his mother, 'cos he used to give his things away to the sick boys—blankets, and money, and shirts, and all."

Then Abel took Sybil's delicate hand reverently on his broad, brown palm, and kissed it.

"Lady," he said, "you're the only thing ever I see that was fit to mate with him."

"You will come again," she said. "As you have no daughter, and there must be many things needed to make you comfortable during your convalescence, you will let me see to all that. And you will let me replace the many things you must have lost or worn out during these hard three months?"

She spoke beseechingly, looking up into his face like a child pleading for a toy.

"You shall just wind me round your finger like he did," said Abel. "I allus thought I'd got grit in me till I seen him, and then it seemed as though I hadn't no will but his'n."

Sybil was alone with the little packet. With trembling fingers she untied the string and removed the wrappings of paper. There lay the medallion with its twisted chain. She passionately kissed the battered enamel that had stood between him and death. Then she opened the locket. With the silky, yellow curl lay a little lock of dark-brown hair. She was touching it tenderly, wondering when he had placed it there for her consolation—whether just before the skirmish or soon after he left her—when a turn of the locket in the level rays of the sun showed two words scratched on the inner side with some rude instrument. She looked closer, and read: "Noblesse Oblige."

When Miss Mildred came to lead her into the house, there was a change in her face that filled the gentle lady's heart with gratitude. It was the look of courage that comes to those who recognize the claim of their high birth as the children of God.