第45章 Little Darby(11)

The next second, however, there was a puff from where he knelt, and then he sank flat once more, and a moment later rolled over on his face on the near side of the rock and just at its foot.There were no more bullets sent from that rock that day -- at least, against the Confederates --and that night Little Darby walked into his company's bivouac, dusty from head to foot and with a bullet-hole in his clothes not far from his heart; but he said it was only a spent bullet and had just knocked the breath out of him.He was pretty sore from it for a time, but was able to help old Cove to get his boy's body off and to see him start; for the old man's wound, though not dangerous, was enough to disable him and get him a furlough, and he determined to take his son's body home, which the captain's influence enabled him to do.

Between his wound and his grief the old man was nearly helpless, and accepted Darby's silent assistance with mute gratitude.

Darby asked him to tell his mother that he was getting on well, and sent her what money he had -- his last two months' pay --not enough to have bought her a pair of stockings or a pound of sugar.

The only other message he sent was given at the station just as Cove set out.

He said:

"Tell Vashti as I got him as done it."

Old Cove grasped his hand tremulously and faltered his promise to do so, and the next moment the train crawled away and left Darby to plod back to camp in the rain, vague and lonely in the remnant of what had once been a gray uniform.If there was one thing that troubled him it was that he could not return Vashti the needle-case until he replaced the broken needles -- and there were so many of them broken.

After this Darby was in some sort known, and was put pretty constantly on sharp-shooter service.

The men went into winter quarters before Darby heard anything from home.

It came one day in the shape of a letter in the only hand in the world he knew -- Vashti's.What it could mean he could not divine --was his mother dead? This was the principal thing that occurred to him.

He studied the outside.It had been on the way a month by the postmark, for letters travelled slowly in those days, and a private soldier in an infantry company was hard to find unless the address was pretty clear, which this was not.He did not open it immediately.His mother must be dead, and this he could not face.Nothing else would have made Vashti write.

At last he went off alone and opened it, and read it, spelling it out with some pains.It began without an address, with the simple statement that her father had arrived with Ad's body and that it had been buried, and that his wound was right bad and her mother was mightily cut up with her trouble.Then it mentioned his mother and said she had come to Ad's funeral, though she could not walk much now and had never been over to their side since the day after he -- Darby -- had enlisted; but her father had told her as how he had killed the man as shot Ad, and so she made out to come that far.Then the letter broke off from giving news, and as if under stress of feelings long pent up, suddenly broke loose:

she declared that she loved him; that she had always loved him -- always --ever since he had been so good to her -- a great big boy to a little bit of a girl -- at school, and that she did not know why she had been so mean to him; for when she had treated him worst she had loved him most;that she had gone down the path that night when they had met, for the purpose of meeting him and of letting him know she loved him;but something had made her treat him as she did, and all the time she could have let him kill her for love of him.She said she had told her mother and father she loved him and she had tried to tell his mother, but she could not, for she was afraid of her; but she wanted him to tell her when he came; and she had tried to help her and keep her in wood ever since he went away, for his sake.Then the letter told how poorly his mother was and how she had failed of late, and she said she thought he ought to get a furlough and come home, and when he did she would marry him.

It was not very well written, nor wholly coherent; at least it took some time to sink fully into Darby's somewhat dazed intellect; but in time he took it in, and when he did he sat like a man overwhelmed.

At the end of the letter, as if possibly she thought, in the greatness of her relief at her confession, that the temptation she held out might prove too great even for him, or possibly only because she was a woman, there was a postscript scrawled across the coarse, blue Confederate paper:

"Don't come without a furlough; for if you don't come honorable I won't marry you." This, however, Darby scarcely read.His being was in the letter.It was only later that the picture of his mother ill and failing came to him, and it smote him in the midst of his happiness and clung to him afterward like a nightmare.It haunted him.She was dying.

He applied for a furlough; but furloughs were hard to get then and he could not hear from it; and when a letter came in his mother's name in a lady's hand which he did not know, telling him of his mother's poverty and sickness and asking him if he could get off to come and see her, it seemed to him that she was dying, and he did not wait for the furlough.

He was only a few days' march from home and he felt that he could see her and get back before he was wanted.So one day he set out in the rain.