A Lantern in Her Hand Read online

  Abraham Lincoln took his seat in March, but everything was not going to be all right. Twenty-seven days later the first iron horse from Dubuque shrieked its triumphant way across the Deal farm, and on into Cedar Falls, and the old-time freighter’s task was finished. The train’s arrival was timely for the community, inasmuch as events were to follow which would suspend construction and cause Cedar Falls to remain the western terminus of the road for four years.

  Abbie had now passed her fourteenth birthday. On an April afternoon, with the river high and clods of snow still at the roots of trees, she went into the timber to look for anemones and Dutchmen’s breeches, for dog-toothed violets and the first signs of Mayflower buds. Coming out on her own particular grassy knoll in the clearing, she went up to the hillock, in one of those moments of desire to let out her feelings in song. To the squirrels she may have seemed an ordinary girl clothed in a green-checked ginghan dress, with reddish-brown curls twisted up into a snood but the squirrels were not seeing correctly. For Abbie knew that she had a dark velvet dress that swept around her feet, a string of pearls on her neck, and in her hand a hat with a sweeping plume. She was holding it carelessly at her side with her long, slender fingers that tapered at the ends.

  At the top of the knoll she turned. A sea of white faces looked up at her. To the casual observer it might have seemed a mass of wild plum-blossoms. Even before she sang, the audience applauded vociferously and a few people stood up. An onlooker, who was not magic-eyed, might have thought the wind merely blew the blossoms. Abbie bowed, smiled,—waited for her accompaniment to begin. She fingered her pearls, and smiled at the girl at the reed-organ. All at once she realized that the girl at the organ was a talented orphan whom she had been befriending. It made her feel happy, light-hearted. She threw back her head and began singing:

  “Oh! the Lady of the Lea,

   Fair and young and gay was she,

   Beautiful exceedingly,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  The song embodied for her all the enchantment of the Arabian Nights. It opened a door to a magic castle. It smelled of perfume and spices. It stood for wonderful things in life to come.

  “Many a wooer sought her hand,

   For she had gold and she had land,”

  Her voice rose melodiously high and sweet and true.

  “Everything at her command,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  Her heart seemed bursting with love of the trees, the sky, the melody.

  “Oh, the Lady of the Lea,

   Fair and young and gay was she,”

  There seemed a gleam ahead of her,—a light that beckoned,—a little will-o’-the-wisp out there beyond the settlement in the Big Woods. It was something no one knew about,—Mother nor Mary nor Belle. Only for her it shone,—for her, and other lovely ladies.

  “Fanciful exceedingly,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  When the song had died away and Abbie was bowing to the invisible audience, she heard it, “Abbie, . . . oh, Abbie . . . hoo-hoo!” Mary’s voice was calling and crying in the distance. She slipped out of the clearing, climbed the stake-and-rider fence, and saw Mary coming,—calling and crying and coming toward her. “Abbie, they’ve just got word out from Dubuque that Fort Sumter was fired on.”

  Abbie clutched her. “What, . . . what does that mean, Mary?”

  “It means, . . .” Mary’s voice whispered it hoarsely, “Grandpa Deal says it means war.”

  CHAPTER V

  Yes, it meant war, with James leaving at the first call, and Belle’s young husband enlisting without her knowing his intentions. Abbie thought she could not stand it to see them go. It seemed that life was doing something to her which she could not countenance. She had a queer sensation of wind blowing past her,—of wind that she could not stop. She stood in front of the Seth Thomas clock on the shelf in her mother’s cabin and watched the hands moving above the little brown church painted on the glass of the door. Oh, stop Time for a few minutes until we can do something about the war.

  But the winds blew past, and the clock hands went around, and James and Belle’s husband and several of the neighbor boys had gone to war.

  And by 1862, when Lincoln’s call for additional volunteers came, Dennie, who was nineteen now, went into the Cedar Falls Reserves, a group of one hundred stalwart fellows. And Abbie again went all through the torn emotions of parting with Dennie and hating war.

  And then she learned that there was one thing worse than going to war. And that was not going to war. Will Deal told her so. To be twenty-one and able-bodied, and see the Reserves entrain and not go! He was ashamed, and miserable. But his father, with his one arm, and in the Assembly as he was,—and no one to farm,—and Regina and Louise and his mother all depending on him,—he could not go. It seemed queer that of all the people in the community, Abbie Mackenzie, who was only sixteen, should be the one in whom Will Deal confided. And because Will Deal had done this, Abbie told him some things she had never told a soul,—that some day she was going to be a big person. She could feel it in her,—that she was going to do great things, sing before vast audiences, and paint lovely pictures in frames and write things in a book.

  “You know, Will, I don’t want people to laugh at me,—and I don’t believe you would. But sometimes it all comes over me, that I can do these big things. It’s ahead of me, . . . kind-of like a light in the woods that shines and stays far away. And when I read verses, . . . or hear music, . . . or sing, . . . it beckons me on, . . . and my throat hurts with wanting to do something great.”

  Will did not laugh at her, but instead, looked at her queerly for a moment, noticing for the first time that her skin was as creamy-white as the May-flowers that grew in the Big Woods, that her lips were of deep red tints and her eyes of deep brown ones, and that her mop of curly hair held them both,—the reds and the browns.

  And then, the next year, Ed Matthews, who had been east to college, was drafted. And Doc Matthews called Will out of the field where he was cutting wheat with a cradle, and told him he would give him five hundred dollars to go in Ed’s place.

  Will walked to the house, laid the sack of gold pieces in his mother’s lap and said, “I’m going, Mother. There’s the money to hire the work done.”

  He left from the new Dubuque and Sioux City station two miles from his father’s place. Grandpa Deal was there, sick at heart, joking the boys. Grandma Deal, in her black cap tied under her wrinkled face, was there, scolding that Will was going, that the coach would be crowded,—scolding and sputtering in her little nagging way. Why didn’t they stand back? Why didn’t they go to-morrow? What made every one so noisy? Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie, in her white cap tied under her plump, placid face, was there. And Abbie Mackenzie, in a sprigged delaine over hoop skirts, and with a little pancake flowered hat tipped over her forehead, was there. Oh, God, stop the wind blowing by,—the wind that blows Time away. Stop the clock hands until I can think whether Will Deal ought to go to war.

  And then, something happened. The train was ready to start. There were good-bys and noise and tears and confusion. Will Deal shook his father’s one hand, and kissed his mother’s little wrinkled cheeks and Regina and Louise,—and started to shake hands with Abbie Mackenzie, but suddenly kissed her instead. And if battles have been lost and kingdoms have fallen over less, who is there to blame Abbie Mackenzie, that her own little kingdom was in a state of revolution when she left the station and drove home in the lumber-wagon across the prairie and over the damp, dark river road?

  In the fall of ’64, when she was seventeen, Abbie herself was teaching the home school,—in a new white schoolhouse with green blinds, but standing in the same spot where the hazel-brush grew in tangled masses down toward the river bank. There was only one big boy in school that autumn, a harmless unfortunate, whom Grandpa Deal termed a “three-quarters wit.” The others were “with Sherman.” And Sherman was before Atlanta.

  Abbie’s thoughts seemed always wit
h them, those boys in shabby blue: James and Dennie and all the old neighborhood schoolmates. Through the monotonously droning reading of the McGuffey readers, the ciphering and the cramped copybook work, she thought of them. “God bring them all safe home. Please bring them home, God, . . . James and Dennie and Will Deal.” There were other friends and schoolmates, but no one so big and fine and clean as Will Deal, and so understanding. Whenever she craved understanding, she always thought of Will Deal, who did not laugh at her fancies, but gave her sympathy instead.

  Ed Matthews, who had paid his way out of the draft, came home that fall for a few days. Ed was going to be a doctor like his father. Several times he had stopped his horse at the schoolhouse door and, with the reins over his arm, talked to Abbie. She was a little proud of the attention. It was rather complimentary to be singled out from all the girls in the neighborhood for attention from Ed. She could not quite make up her mind whether she really liked Ed or not. Will Deal didn’t like him,—had never liked him. But Will was prejudiced. And it was nice to see a young man dress as Ed did. In his riding outfit he certainly looked tony. There were some rumors around about Ed,—something about his drinking at times, and riding at dusk down a by-road which decent people avoided,—but no one had verified them, so far as Abbie knew, and, anyway, people were probably jealous of him and his opportunities.

  In that week of October on a Friday afternoon, when the hazel-brush was as brown-burnished as Abbie’s hair, and the Big Woods a mass of scarlet and bronze and crimson, she closed the schoolhouse and left for home.

  In the distance she could see the new, stylish, high-top buggy of Doctor Matthews going down the lane road where the honey-locusts, yellow now, bordered the north side of the Deal place. She was thinking that she could have ridden home with the doctor if she had been out a little earlier. Not that she cared, for it was pleasant walking. Who could believe that the guns of the war were booming in the South this Indian summer day? When nearly home she paused, turned abruptly, and climbing the stake-and-rider fence, walked through the oaks into the clearing where the October sun flecked down through leaf shadows. Not for several years had she visited the old grassy knoll between the huge trees. She went up to the top of the knoll now and faced an invisible audience in that old intangible dream which she always had with her. Half amused at her own childishness, half earnest in her actions, there in the seclusion of the woods, she unloosed from its binding ribbons the reddish-brown mass of her hair. She unbuttoned the top buttons of her lavender-sprigged delaine dress and pulled it down over the creamy whiteness of her shoulders, tucking in the edges to hold it. Then, with her reddish-bronze hair, with its overtones of gold, framing the Mayflower petals of her skin, and with her warm brown eyes half closed, Abbie Mackenzie threw back her head and sang:

  “Oh, the Lady of the Lea,

   Fair and young and gay was she,

   Beautiful exceedingly,

   The Lady of the Lea.”

  The notes rose like the nuptial flight of birds, notes of desire and a longing for their fulfillment.

  “To her bower at last there came,

   A youthful knight of noble name,

   Hand and heart in hope to claim

   And in love fell she.”

  They throbbed with the joy of life and the pathos of it, with the beauty of peace and the sadness of war.

  “Still she put his suit aside,

   So he left her in her pride,

   And broken-hearted drooped and died,

   The Lady—”

  A twig snapped and the note snapped with it. Frightened, Abbie whirled to the sound. Ed Matthews stood near her, his blond face aflame. Abbie gave a startled cry, and in fright and embarrassment, clutched the neck of her gown. But Ed Matthews had her in his arms, was kissing her full red lips and the creamy Mayflower petals of her neck, burying his flushed face in the red-bronze of her hair.

  “Abbie, . . . Abbie, . . . you coquette! . . . You’re wonderful, . . . gorgeous. I love you. I never knew . . . I want you. . . . You’re going with me. . . . You’ll marry me. . . . I’ll take you east . . . to New York. . . . Your voice . . . I didn’t realize . . . You can have the best teachers . . . I have to go back to-morrow . . . Abbie . . . you coquette . . . ! And we have to-night left . . . to-night is ours . . .”

  Swept away on the tide of Ed’s passionate words, she seemed to be without thought or comprehension. When she could speak, she found herself saying almost without her own volition, “Don’t, Ed, don’t touch me. You’ve no right. You’ve no right.” She was trying to button the high neck of her dress, pushing Ed’s protesting hand away, twisting up the red-brown curls of her hair. Ed’s laughter disconcerted and frightened her. He seemed so very sure of himself,—and of her.

  It was sundown when they reached the Mackenzie cabin. For a long time they stood in front of it, talking. Ed’s flushed face bent to Abbie’s.

  “I think so, Ed, . . . but I’m not sure. It’s sudden and, . . . when you come in the spring I’ll know my own mind.”

  “You’re playing with me. You are a coquette.”

  “No, Ed, . . . I’m really uncertain.”

  “Uncertain about marrying me?” Ed’s opinion of himself was not what one would term feeble. “Uncertain about going to New York, . . . with that voice? . . .”

  “Oh, Ed, if I went, . . .” Abbie was suddenly childish, wistful, “would I be a lovely lady?”

  Ed Matthews’ banter and his high-handedness were stilled, his passion and his ardor quieted. He bent and kissed Abbie’s pretty tapering hand. “You would be a lovely lady,” he said gently.

  When he had gone, Mary and Mother Mackenzie drew Abbie in to tell them what it was all about.

  Importuned to secrecy, Mary was excited beyond the completion of sentences. “Abbie . . . you . . . Doctor Ed Matthews . . . to go to New York . . . your voice . . . teachers in New York . . . it might be in the opera . . .”

  Mother Mackenzie asked gravely, “Do you love him, acushla?”

  Abbie turned burning cheeks to her Irish mother and clutched her plump shoulders. “I don’t know. Tell me, mother, what is love?”

  “That,” said Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie, “I canna tell ye. An’ no one can tell ye. Sure, an’ I mind an’ I knew it though, mysel’. I look for you to know it, yoursel’, Abbie.”

  Abbie went up to her loft room. She wanted to be alone. Love? Was this love? To be able to go to New York and study? Her voice . . . a new world . . . the world of courtly men and lovely ladies . . . of silken shawls . . . of strings of pearls . . . of flowing plumes. But that world also held Ed Matthews with his eyes that were not quite steady, with his disconcerting laugh and the vague, unproven rumors. But he loved her, that was certain. Or . . . was it so certain? His kisses . . . Abbie’s face burned with the memory. She thought of Will Deal and the day he had left for war two years before. Will had kissed her, too—

  Quite suddenly she wished she could talk the whole thing over with Will Deal. Will would help her know her own mind,—help her understand what love was. Of all the people she knew in the whole world, Will was the most understanding. He was so steady,—so dependable. “Oh God, bring Will Deal safe home soon to help me know.”

  CHAPTER VI

  And then the presidential campaign of ’64 was on in full swing. Over in town there were parades and banners and torchlights and much bombastic oratory. General Sherman was close upon Atlanta and Grandpa Deal was close upon General Sherman. For he had been delegated by Governor Kirkwood to go to the first division of General Logan’s Fifteenth Army Corps to bring the vote of the Iowa contingent back to the state. Many weeks elapsed before his return. Atlanta fell. All communication to the north was severed, for General Sherman had started on his wearisome march to the sea. And with the tramping columns rode Grandpa Deal on a horse whose mane was as black as Grandpa Deal’s own bushy head. A veritable old man of the sea he looked upon his return, grotesque appearing, with the bag of ballots swung ove
r his shoulder by a strap, a faded carpet-bag in his one hand,—in the bag the government’s pay to many of the Iowa boys.

  Abbie was “boarding around,” and was at the Deal house for the week when Grandpa came. He told his experiences to the family in high glee, his ice-blue eyes twinkling behind the bushy brows. “I’d al’a’s throw the old bag down,” he would relate with silent chuckles, “ ’n’ give it a kick for extra measure, so’s nobody’d allow the’ was any value to it,—’n’ all the time the’ was two thousand four hundred and twenty-two dollars in its old insides.”

  “Did you,” Abbie moistened dry red lips, “did you—happen to see Will?”

  The chuckles died. Yes, he had seen Will, had in fact kept as close to Company B, 31st Iowa Regiment as he consistently could. He had tried to make Will ride the horse a few times when he was exhausted. He had sat around the campfire with him a few nights, when the boys sang and joked and told stories to keep up their spirits. “Was the awfulest dense pitch-pine smoke from them campfires ye’d ever see. Boys used to kinda apologize to me about ’em, bein’ as how I was a sort o’ guest on the march. But I’d al’a’s tell ’em black smoke didn’t interfere much with my complexion.”

  In a few minutes he said soberly: “Will’s been caught stealin’.”