The Flag-Raising | Page 4

here with a bundle o' things borrowed
from the rest o' the family. She'll have Hannah's shoes and John's
undershirts and Mark's socks most likely. I suppose she never had a
thimble on her finger in her life, but she'll know the feelin' o' one before
she's been here many days. I've bought a piece of unbleached muslin
and a piece o' brown gingham for her to make up; that'll keep her busy.
Of course she won't pick up anything after herself; she probably never
saw a duster, and she'll be as hard to train into our ways as if she was a
heathen." "She'll make a dif'rence," acknowledged Jane, "but she may
turn out more biddable than we think." "She'll mind when she's spoken
to, biddable or not," remarked Miranda with a shake of the last towel.

Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for
any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood. She was
just, conscientious, economical, industrious; a regular attendant at
church and Sunday-school, and a member of the State Missionary and
Bible societies, but in the presence of all these chilly virtues you longed
for one warm little fault, or lacking that, one likable failing, something
to make you sure that she was thoroughly alive. She had never had any
education other than that of the neighborhood district school, for her
desires and ambitions had all pointed to the management of the house,
the farm, and the dairy. Jane, on the other hand, had gone to an
academy, and also to a boarding-school for young ladies; so had
Aurelia; and after all the years that had elapsed there was still a slight
difference in language and in manner between the elder and the two
younger sisters. Jane, too, had had the inestimable advantage of a
sorrow; not the natural grief at the loss of her aged father and mother,
for she had been resigned to let them go; but something far deeper. She
was engaged to marry young, Tom Carter, who had nothing to marry
on, it is true, but who was sure to have, some time or other. Then the
war broke out. Tom enlisted at the first call. Up to that time Jane had
loved him with a quiet, friendly sort of affection, and had given her
country a mild emotion of the same sort. But the strife, the danger, the
anxiety of the time, set new currents of feeling in motion. Life became
something other than the three meals a day, the round of cooking,
washing, sewing, and churchgoing. Personal gossip vanished from the
village conversation. Big things took the place of trifling ones, --sacred
sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and husbands,
self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one another's burdens. Men
and women grew fast in those days of the nation's trouble and danger,
and Jane awoke from the vague dull dream she had hitherto called life
to new hopes, new fears, new purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a
year when one never looked in the newspaper without dread and
sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded;
and without so much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk
and started for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through
hours of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England
girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so
that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;-- all, but it served.

It carried her through weary months of nursing--nursing of other
soldiers for Tom's dear sake; it sent her home a better woman; and
though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between,
and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all
other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a
counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild
heartbeat of her girlhood. Having learned the trick of beating and
loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it lived
on memories and carried on its sentimental operations mostly in secret.
"You're soft, Jane," said Miranda once; "you allers was soft, and you
allers will be. If't wa'n't for me keeping you stiffened up, I b'lieve you'd
leak out o' the house into the dooryard." It was already past the
appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach to be lumbering down the
street. "The stage ought to be here," said Miranda, glancing nervously
at the tall clock for the twentieth time. "I guess everything's done. I've
tacked up two thick towels back of her washstand and put a mat under
her slop-jar; but