Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1875 — MARTIN. [ARTICLE]

MARTIN.

BY SUSAN COOLIDGE.

It was in the second year of the recent war, which seems so strangely shadowy and far away to most of us, that we made acquaintance with our Martin. He was a wounded hoy from a New Hampshire regiment; we, volunteer nurses, in charge ot Wards E, F and G, fractional parts of the great Jaggers Hospital. Why our’little town of Soundside was selected as the site of the Jaggers nobody kneyj. Hospitals in those days came and went “ unsought, unsent,” like love—or measles—and were Elanted haphazard in unlikely spots. oundside was a most unlikely spot, but none the less were we proud and glad to be chosen. Scraping lint and making sanitary jelly had of itself been counted privilege, but how infinitely greater that privilege when the recipiehts thereof lay at our very door, and we with our own eyes could watch our offerings applied and enjoyed. A certain show of discipline was kept up at the Jaggers, but in reality we all did pretty much as we pleased. There "was little plan about our work, no leadership. We blundered on as best we might. But the air worked with us and the blessed summer, good-will took the place of training, and ,a fair proportion of our invalids recovered. Martin’s wound was in the arm near the shoulder. For some time the doctor hoped to save the limb. He bore all pain bravely. I never saw him give way until the morning when he w T as told that his arm must go. Then for the first time he broke down. , “Hear Martin, I am so sorry for you.” “ I don’t grudge my arm. I’m not sorry I enlisted. Don’t think so for a minute,” he sobbed, long passes between the words. “It isn’t that!" Then he hid his face again. It was not until the next evening, when the amputation was successfully over, that we learned the meaning of his unexplained “that” The convalescents had hobbled out to supper, and the ward was still. Martin lay on his pillows white and bloodless, but very composed and peaceful. “ Don’t fan me any longer. It will tire you.” Always he was most considerate of those about him. “ I’m not a bit tired. Don’t you recollect poor Riley’s ‘ guessing’ that I was meant for a fanning-machine?” “ I thought, perhaps, while the rest were away, you’d write a letter for me.” “ Certainly I will. Shall it be now?” and I fetched my portfolio and inkstand. He nodded without speaking; then, after a minute’s silence, and with a visible effort, began: “ Dxak Lult : “ You will feel bad about what I have to tell you. Yesterday the doctor said my arm must come off, and this morning he has done it lam glad It isn’t the right arm, for it will be eaaier to get a living, and in many ways I shall miss It less. But it’s pretty hard at best, and makea a difference. I feel that It’s right to let ydu know about it, and give you a chance to say If you want to take back your promise. If you dq you arc free, of course. I expect I know what you’ll say, but I would rather wait for ypur letter before telling it Write soon, dear Luly, for I shall be looking out till you do. Ut seems to me as if I love

you more than ever, though I’ve only one arm to help along with ” “ Why, Miss Agnes, what’s that?” for a great tear had fallen on the paper and blurred the ink. “ You’re .not crying because of me, are you ?” “ Crying for Luly, Martin. She’ll be so sorry but so proud of you, too.” “ Do you think so?” smiling for the first time since the day before. “ Think so? I am sure of it.” He smiled again, finished the letter calmly and lay quiet for a while. Then: “ Tell me again, Miss Agnes. You don't think it’ll make a difference?” A certain disquiet was apparent in his voice, as there had been while he dictated the brave sentences of the letter. “ You see,” he went on, “ she’s only seventeen and so pretty! I don’t suppose you hardly ever saw anybody so pretty as she is. All the young fellows in our parts wanted her and 1 was so proud and so happy. It’ll come hard, after having her pick of the country round, to take up with a one-armed husband; don’t you think so ?” For answer I told of the English maiden who, when her sailor lover wrote to say that he had come out of an engagement minus an arm and both legs and offered to release her from her promise, made reply : “So long as enough of your body is left to hold your soul I am content and am’ yours.” “ Do you think an American is going to be behind an English girl in a matter like that?” I concluded. Martin was reassured. He slept well that night and the next, and the doctor looked bright. We did all that was possible—fed, guarded, watched and grew momently more liopeful. ,He did not again allude to' “Luly,” but ttyqfe was eagerness in his eyes at post-time, and w;e, his nurses, felt impatient to have the interval pass and the answer copae. “When once he hears from her,” we to each other, “it will be all right: his mind will be easy, and he will get well fast.” On the afternoon of the third day I was called out. “Somebody wanted me.” I laid down my fan and went into the hall. A brown, wiry little person.in a “duster” stood waiting on the doorstep. “ Is it here that Sergeant Martin, of the Third New Hampshire, is? They told me Ward G, over there” —indicating with a gesture the main building. “Yes,” I replied, “he is here, but I am not sure that vou can see him. His arm was amputated on Tuesday, and w T e are keeping him very quiet. Are you a relative of his?” “ I’m his sister. That is, his father married my mother. It’s the same .thing”— the brown eyes filling with tears as she spoke. “ When the telegraph came saying he’d lost his arm I felt to come, and there was nothing .tp keep me, sot l.set off at once. I cm see him, can’t I ? I don’t think it’ll do any hurt. We’ve always been friends, Martin and me.” She looked so good and steady that I did not think it could be harmful, so I permitted her to come in. The meeting was undemonstrative. “Well, Martin?” “ How are you, Jessie, and all the folks?” 1 —a clasp of the remaining hand —that was all. She took her seat by hia bedside as by right. And her presence was so evidently a satisfaction to him that we made arrangements for sleeping quarters and notified Jessie that she could stay so long as she wished, or as Martin wished for her. • “ Thank you kindly,” was all her answer; but the pretty, brown eyes continued the speech wuh eloquence. She had “ never been much with sick folks,” she told us, but was evidently a true nurse —patient, deft, noiseless, observant, possessor of that native “faculty” which reE laces experience. All day long she sat y Martin, feeding him, fanning, applying ice, changing the wet bandages on his arm, talking a little now and then, or reading aloud, but never long enough to weary or excite. When Martin slept she would steal from behind the screen and do little services for the other men, all with the same quiet helpfulness. Her presence was comfort to more than Martin. And we were constantly sighing for more nurses like her. “We shall never be able to get along without you, Jessie,” said 8., one day. “ You’ll have to take the oath of allegiance and stay on at the daggers till the end of the war.” “ Martin will want me for a good bit yet, ’ * was the reply. Martin was evidently her one thought. I wondered at times if the relationship, which after all was none, had availed to guard his adopted sister from the dangers of so close an intimacy where was no tie of blood. The brown* sensible face told no tales, nor did Jessie seem of the stuff out of which love-lorn maidens are constructed, still—!

Days passed. The time was come and fone when answer to Martin’s letter might e looked for, but no answer appeared. Martin continued very weak: his strength was at a stand-still, he did not fall back, but neither did he gain. Every afternoon a little access of suspense came on when the mail appeared and the other men were reading their letters. I saw the restless look in his eyes, then the depressed pallor which succeeded, and if ever! prayed in my life, it was that the suspense might end, the answer come, and “Luly” do her duty! That she would do it I never doubted. There was a bad case, just then, in Ward F, and I was, unavoidably absent a good deal from G, an absence made easier by reason of Jessie’s helpful presence, doming in at early twilight of the seventh day I was instinctively aware of something amiss. Martin spoke, smiled, when I addressed him,' but mere was an inde-, scribable change in his face. It had sunken. Dark shadows lay about the month, the paleness had deepened into ghastly pallor; out of the eyes, spite of the brave smile, looked a forlornness beyond relief. It was the aspect of a man smitten by some sadden and terrible blow. I drew Jessie aside. ‘ ‘ What’s the matter ? Is Martin worse ? Has anything gone wrong ?” “ I don’t know,” she said, hesitating over the words and looking Very unhappy. “ Nothing has happened that I know of—hut—he won’t say what it is!” “ What what is ?” “ I went over to the linen-room to fetch some sheet!,she went on, trying to speak

collectedly. “ When I came back Martin was lying with his face hidden. He made believe to be asleep, but he wasn’t asleep. When he moved at last and spoke he looked different; I can’t .say how, but I knew it. You know it, too. You asked right away what was the matter.” “Did the mail come in while you were out?” I asked with a sudden fear.* “I don’t know. Yes, I do; O’Rourke had a letter from his wife. It must have come, but Martin said nothing about having anything. Why? What makes you ask ?” I would not violate Martin’s confidence, so I avoided answer, but every glance at him increased my anxiety. Always the same smile, the same patience, but always the inexplicable look, set there by agencies 6f pain whose source I dared not guess. I .trembled as the hour of the doctor’s visit drew near. One glance at his face as he turned from the bedside gave my fears confirmation. “When did this change begin?” he asked in a low voice. “ I can’t say exactly. I was with Keiler till six; when I came back to Martin I saw at once that he was not so well. What is it?” “ I hope nothing which may not pass, but there are some symptoms of pyema." The hospital scourge! “ She has killed him,” I groaned to myself, but I said nothing, Twenty-four hours of alternate hope and fear, then we knew the worst: our Martin was doomed. He knew it, too, but;, the brave look in his eyes never faltered to the end. The night before he died we were alone for a little while. “You were wrong, Miss Agnes. About her, I mean —Luly.” “ Was I, Martin?” “Yes. I don’t blame her. It was natural she should feel so. If I Jiad been well and hearty I should have got over it somehow, I suppose, instead of—” he stopped abruptly, then drew a note and a card photograph from under his pillow. “ I want you to take these, Miss Agnes, and afterward please send them to her, and just say that I loved her to the last and didn’t think hard in any way. Read it if you like; the note, I mean. Don’t let her feel bad. Don’t tell her it killed me! O Luly! Luly!” These words of complaint, the only ones I heard him utter, were his farewell to conscious life. After that it was all thick cloud and delirium or peaceful, merciful unconsciousness. Now and then through the wanderings came murmured words: “ Enough of your body to hold your soul—enough to hold your soul.” “Luly, you like the cherry-hill road, we’ll take it.” “ Smell the lilacs, Luly, smell them.” And again, “Ah, Miss Agnes was wrong!” Out ol these dreary shad*' ows, out of the life so gallantly borne, the love that had wounded and betrayed, on the evening of tire fourth day after Luly’s letter cambour Martin passed into the full awakening. We read the note sitting beside his chill and peaceful presence. His wandering words had betrayed the truth, and I did not withhold it from Jessie. Her face seemed cut in stone as we read: Mr. Joseph Martin: I take up my pen to say that I got your letter, ana ma and all of us are very sorry for your accident About our engagement, we was both young, and it’s only natural for a girl to feel bad at having a husband that isn’t like other men. So I think, and ma, too, that we’d better call it broken off. You was real generous to make the offer, and I hope there won’t be any hard feeling about it. Ma sends her respects and hopes you’ll soon be well. So no more at present from Yours truly, Lucy Allen.

“I’ll take it to her,” said Jessie. She was very pale. Her set face looked old and gray. Ip her hand she held Luly’s picture, the photograph of a girl with long, lustrous ringlets, and a face whose delicate beauty was only marred by a certain coquettish pose of head and nality of expression. “You must give Martin’s message, then”—and I repeated it as exactly as I could. “ I’ll give it”—with the same set look. That evening Martin went home in his coffin, and the following morning Jessie followed to attend the funeral, which was fixed for the ensiling week. “I shall come back,” were her last ■words. “There’s nothing for me to, do there. I shall come back and work here for a spell.” We dared not count on this promise, much as we wished her return; but ten days later she appeared, looking years oldser, but otherwise the same little, capable, cheerful woman. All that summer and autumn she stayed, giving most valuable aid, quiet always, handy, indefatigable, tender, all that nurse should he. It w-as more than a month before she in any way alluded to Martin or to the errand she had. undertaken. One evening, in a lull of occupation, as we sat under the trees for a half-hour’s rest, she spoke, won to confidence, perhaps, by the dewy quiet and soft twilight sounds of birds’ twitter and sleepy insects’ hum. “ I gave that note”—abruptly. “ Yes, Jessie, I knew you would.” “ But I didn’t give it as you meant I should—or—as—he —meant” —she went on, with a tremor in the steady voice. “She came to the funeral, that gm! She has another beau now; but there was such a «tir in the village about Martin that she wanted to share in the glory somehow — and—Miss Agnes, she put on black!" “ Impossible!” “Shedidl We were all in the room with him —mother and his father, and the aunts and uncles and me. And she came in like a widow in a crape veil, and sat down by the coffin, and cried, and held her handkerchief over her face! I bore it till they took him away because he loved her so; but when they carried him out I couldn’t bear it any longer! I just got up before them all. 1 took the note out of pocket, and went across the room and “ ‘ Here, Lucy Allen. That is for yon.’ “She was frightened, and caught her breath. “ 4 Take it,’ I said. *lt is the note you wrote Joe Martin, breaking oft your engagement because he had given an arm to the country. And here’s your picture. You’re pretty enough, Lucy Allen; but you killed the boy wnofovea you, just as much though you had sept the bullet

through his arm! He was doing well the day your note came, and three days after he was dead. He died because he did not want to live any longer in the tarn world with a girl like you ! He forgave you;, but I don’t, and I never will! Take your note and go away! You’ve no place here among us who loved Joe. You didn’t love him, or else you would not have killed him!’” The passion of her energy made jpe shiver in that warm August air. “Oh, Jessie! And what did she say?” “ Nothing. She fainted, or made believe, and they got her home somehow. I never want to see her again.” “Martin forgave her. And the dear Lord forgives us all, Jessie.” “ I can’t—don’t ask me. Martin could forgive—he was good always; but for me ” She hid her face a moment, then raised it suddenly. “He never once spoke my name, Miss Agnes, never once in all his wandering! It was always Luly, Luly! And she broke, his heart and then came to his funeral! Don’t ask me to forgive her!” What could I answer? Poor Jessie!— Christian Union. —r"—,