"The forehead, _I_ think. Hair has the same curly twist."
Grey, hearing the whisper, colored, and laughed, and presently took off the Shaker hood.
"'Pon my soul, mother, it's a remarkable likeness.--You're _not_ related to the Furnesses, Miss Gurney,--Furnesses of Tennessee?"
"Pratt sees his wife in every woman he meets," said his mother, toeing off her sock.
She had not much patience with Pratt's wife-worship: some of these days he'd be sold to those Furnesses, soul and body. They were a mawkish, "genteel" set: from genteel people might the Lord deliver her!
"Does the boy look like this one at all, mother?--I never saw my boy, Miss Gurney,"--explaining. "Fellows are shirking so now, I won't ask for a furlough."
"The child's a Shelby, out and out,"--angrily enough. "Look here, Dr. Blecker,"--pulling up her skirt, to come at an enormous pocket in her petticoat. "Here's the daguerreotype, taken when he was just four weeks old, and there's Pratt's eyes and chin to a T. D'ye see? Pratt _was_ a fine child,--weighed fourteen pounds. But he was colicky to the last degree. And as for croup----Does your Pen have croup, Miss Grey? Sit here. These men won't care to hear our talk."
They did care to hear it. It was not altogether because Blecker was weakened by sickness that he lay there listening and talking so earnestly about their home and Grey's, the boy and Mary,--telling trifles, too, which he remembered, of his own childhood. It was such a new, cordial, heartsome life which this bit of innocent gossip opened to him. What a happy fellow old Pratt was, with his wife and child! Good fighter, too. Well, some day, maybe, he, too----
They were all quiet that night, coming closer together, maybe because they heard the rain rushing down the gorges, and knew what ruin and grief and slaughter waited without. Looking back at that night often through the vacancy of coming days, Paul used to say, "I was at home then," and after that try to whistle its thought off in a tune. He never had been at home before.
So, after that night, the summer days crept on, and out of sight: the sea of air in which the earth lay coloring and massing the sunlight down into its thin ether, until it ebbed slowly away again in yellow glows, tinctured with smells of harvest-fields and forests, clear and pungent, more rare than that of flowers. Here and there a harvest-field in the States was made foul with powder, mud,--the grain flat under broken artillery-wheels, canteens, out of which oozed the few drops of whiskey, torn rags of flesh, and beyond, heaped in some unploughed furrow, a dozen, a hundred, thousands, it may be, of useless bodies, dead to no end. Up yonder in New England, or down in some sugar-plantation, or along the Lakes, some woman's heart let the fresh life slip out of it, to go down into the grave with that dead flesh, to grovel there, while she dragged her tired feet the rest of the way through the world. Her pain was blind; but that was all that was blind. The wind, touching the crimson moccasin-flower in the ditch, and the shining red drops beside it, said only, "It is the same color; God wills they shall be there," and went unsaddened on its appointed way. The white flesh, the curly hair, (every ring of that hair the woman yonder knew by heart,) gave back their color cheerily in the sunlight, and sank into the earth to begin their new work of roots and blossoming, and the soul passed as quietly into the next wider range of labor and of rest. And God's eternal laws of sequence and order worked calmly, and remained under all.