She stopped talking, and hid her face, sobbing heavily, like a grieved child. Poor thing! I pitied her from my heart. But what could I say? People are not lost, now-a-days. The difficulty is to be able to hide, try they ever so much. It looked very dark for this Charles Lunt; and, by her own account, they had not known much about him. He was a New York merchant, and I had not much opinion of New York morals myself. From their own newspapers, I should say there was more wickedness than could possibly be crammed into their dailies going on as a habit. However, I said nothing of this sort to poor Percy, whose grief and mortification had already given her such a look of suffering as belongs only to the gloomiest experience of life. I soothed and comforted her as well as I might, and it doesn't always take a similar experience to give consolation. She said it was a real comfort to tell me about her trouble, and I dare say it was.
When Colonel Lunt got back from Washington, he had a great deal to tell us all, which he did, at our next soldiers' meeting, of the good which the Barton boxes had done. But he said it was a really wonderful sight to see the amount of relief contributed on that Lord's day, from all parts of the North, for the wounded. Every train brought in hundreds and thousands of packages and boxes, filled with comforts and delicacies. If the boys had been at home, they could not have been cared for more tenderly and abundantly. And the nurses in the hospitals! Colonel Lunt couldn't say enough about them. It was a treat to be watched over and consoled by such ministering angels as these women were! We could believe that, if they were at all like Anna Ford, who went, she said, "to help the soldiers bear the pain!" And I know she did that in a hundred cases,cases where the men said they should have given up entirely, if she hadn't held their hands, or their heads, while their wounds were being dressed. "It made it seem so like their own mother or sister!"
That fall, I think, Barton put up eighty boxes of blackberry jam. This wasn't done without such a corresponding amount of sympathy in every good word and work as makes a community take long leaps in Christian progress. Barton could not help improving morally and mentally while her sons were doing the country's work of regeneration; and her daughters forgot their round tires like the moon, their braidings of hair, and their tinkling ornaments, while they devoted themselves to all that was highest and noblest both in thought and action. I was proud of Barton girls, when I saw them on the hills, in their sun-bonnets, gathering the fruit that was to be for the healing of the nations.
Soon after Colonel Lunt's return, he told me one day, in one of his cautious whispers, that he and Mrs. Lunt proposed to take me over to Swampy Hollow, if it would be agreeable to me. Of course it was; but I was surprised, when we were fairly shut up in the carriage, to find no Percy with us.
"We left her at home purposely," said Colonel Lunt, in a mysterious way, which he was fond of, and which always enraged me.
I don't like mysteries or whisperings, and yet, from an unfortunate "receptivity" in my nature, I am the unwilling depositary of half the secrets of Barton. I knew now that I was to hear poor Percy's story over again, with the Colonel's emendations and illustrations. I was in the carriage, and there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Lunt was used to him, and, I do believe, would like nothing better than to hear his old stories over and over, from January to December. But I wasn't of a patient make.
Colonel Lunt was a gentleman of the old school, which means, according to my experience, a person who likes to spend a long time getting at a joke or telling a story. He was a long time telling this, with the aid of Mrs. Lunt, who put in her corrections now and then, in a gentle, wifely way all her own, and which helped, instead of hindering him.
"And now, may I ask, my dear Colonel," said I, when he had finished, "why don't you, or rather why didn't you tell Percy the whole story?"
The Colonel pulled the check-string. "Thomas! drive slowly home now, and go round by the Devil's Dishful."
This is one of the loveliest drives about Barton. I knew that the Colonel's mind was easy.
"What need is there, or was there, to cloud Percy's life with such knowledge? Why, my dear Miss Elliott, if we all knew what other people know about us, we should be wretched! No! the mysteries of life are as merciful as the revelations; let us be thankful for all that we do not know."
"And I am sure we couldn't love Percy any more than we do, let her birth or circumstances be what they would," said Mrs. Lunt.
"I don't believe in natural affection, myself," said the Colonel; "but if I did, it would be enough to hear Percy congratulating herself on being of 'our very own blood,a real Lunt!' Poor child! why should we trouble her? And I have often heard her say, she thought any blot on one's lineage the greatest of misfortunes."
"The reason the Colonel wanted to tell you about Percy was this. Now that her husband may be dead, who knew all about her, it is just possible that circumstances may arise that would need the interference of friends. If we were to die, the secret might die with us. We are sure it will be safe with you, Aunt Marian, and we think that, as you know about her husband, you had better know the whole."
Now this whole I propose to tell, myself, in one tenth part of the time it took the Colonel to tell me, prefacing it with a few facts about himself, which I guess he does not think that I know, and which relate to his early beginnings. Of course, all Barton is fully acquainted with the fact that he was born in the north of Vermont, at "the jumping-off place." He came to Boston, mostly on foot, and began his career in a small shop in Cornhill, where he sold bandannas, and the like. This imports nothing,only he came by and by to associate with lords and dukes. And that shows what comes of being an American. He fell among Perkinses and Sturgises, and after working hard for them in China, and getting a great deal to do in the "carrying-trade," whatever that may be, retired on his half-million to Maryland, where he lived awhile, until he went to Europe. After he returned he bought the Schuyler place, which had been for sale years and years. But in Barton we like new things, and we saw no beauty in the old house, with its long walk of nearly a quarter of a mile to the front door, bordered with box. The Colonel, whose taste has been differently cultivated, has made a beautiful place of it, applying some of the old French notions of gardening, where the trees would admit of being cut into grotesque shapes, and leaving the shade-trees, stately and handsome, as they always were. Now to his story in my own words.
CHAPTER IV
I can't think of a more desolate place than they had in Maryland, by their own account;a great, dismal house, without chick or child in it for years and years;full of rooms and furniture and black people, and nowhere the shout and cry of a baby. There was nobody to be anxious about,nobody gone away or coming home, or to be wept for, or to be joyful for;only their two stupid selves. Madam pottering about the great house, dusting with a feather duster all the knick-knacks that she had brought home from Europe, and that she might have just as well bought in New York after she got home; and he putting up books and taking them down, riding out on his white horse, and having somebody to dine once in a while,could any life be drearier and more tiresome?
Why people who have great empty houses and hearts don't rush into the street and pick up the first dozen little vagabonds they see, I can't think. With soap-suds, love, and the tenderest care, why don't they baptize them, body and soul, and keep them to make music in their silent halls, and, when their time comes, have something worth to render up to the child-loving Christ? Especially, why didn't two such affectionate, tender-hearted persons as Colonel Lunt and his wife? But they did not. They only waxed duller and duller, sitting there by their Christmas fires, that warmed no hearts but their own, rapidly growing cold.