Aladdin O'Brien Part 16

The laughter broke out afresh.

Beau Larch, in the uniform of a private, appeared at the door.

"Hallo, Beau!"

"Come in."

"Take a hand?"

"Thank you, no," said Beau. "I just dropped in to tell you fellows that we've just had a h.e.l.l of a licking at Bull Run."

"Us!" said the colonel, rising.

"Us!" said Hamilton. "Licked!"

"Us!" said Hannibal.

"And I've got other news, too," said Beau, bashfully. "If I stop drinking till my year's up, and don't ever drink any more, Claire says she'll marry me."

Hannibal was the first to shake his hand.

"Boys," said Beau, "I hope if any of you ever sees me touch a drop you'll strike me dead."

He went out.

"I'm going to find out about this," said John; "what did he say the name of the licking was?"

"Bull Run."

"Bull Run. And I'll come back and tell you."

He was starting to descend the steep stairs to the street, when he caught the sound of snickers and creeping footsteps behind him. He turned like a panther, but was not in time. The heavily driven toes of the right boots of the younger St. Johns lifted him clear of the stairs, and clean to the bottom of them. There he sat, his uniform a thing of the past, his left eye blackening and closed, and roars of laughter shaking him.

But Hamilton and Hannibal put the office more or less to rights, and sat down gloomily at their respective desks. Up till now they had faced being left behind, but this licking was too much. Each brooded over it, while pretending to be up to the ears in work. Hamilton wrote a letter, sealed it, addressed it, and presently rose.

"Bul," he said, and to Hannibal the whole manoeuver smacked suspicious, "I'm going to run up and see the old man for a few minutes."

"All right," said Hannibal.

Hamilton reached the door and turned.

"By the way," he said, "I left a letter on my desk; wish you'd put a stamp on it and mail it."

He went out.

Hannibal felt very lonely and fidgety.

"I think I'll just mail that letter and get it off my mind," he said.

He put on his hat, licked a stamp, and crossed to his brother's desk.

The letter was there, right enough, but it did not require a stamp, for on it was written but one word, and that word was Hannibal.

Hannibal tore open the envelop and read:

DEAR OLD Bul: I can't stand it any longer, but you'll try and not be mad with me for running off and leaving you to keep up the old place alone, and d.a.m.n it, Bul, two of us ought to go anyway....

The letter ran on for a little in the same strain. Hannibal put the letter in his pocket, and sat down at his brother's desk.

"It will kill the old man if we all go," he said. "And of all three I'm the one with the best rights to go and get shot."

He took from somewhere in his clothes a little gold locket, flat and plain. Each of the St. John boys had carried one since their mother's death. Facing her picture each had had engraved the motto which he had chosen for himself to be his watchword in life. In John's locket was engraved, "In fortis vinces"; in Hamilton's, "Deo volente"; and in Hannibal's, "Carpe diem." But in Hannibal's locket there was another picture besides that of his mother. He opened the locket with his thumb-nails and laid it on the desk before him. Presently his eyes dimmed, and he looked beyond the locket.

Hamilton St. John's ink-well was a globe of gla.s.s, with a hole like a thimble in the top to contain ink. Hannibal found himself looking at this, and noting the perfect miniature reproduction of the big calendar on the wall, as it was refracted by the gla.s.s. With his thoughts far away, his eyes continued to look at the neat little curly calendar in the ink-well. Presently it seemed to him that it was not a calendar at all, but just a patch of bright green color--a patch of bright green that became gra.s.s, an acre of it, a ten-acre field, a great field gay with trampled flowers, rolling hills, woods, meadows, fences, streams.

Then he saw, lying thickly over a fair region, broken guns, exploded cannons, torn flags, horses and men contorted and sprung in death; everywhere death and demolition. He wandered over the field and came presently upon himself, scorched, mangled, and dead under the wheel of a cannon.

After a little it seemed to him that the field of battle shrank until it became again the calendar. But there was something odd about that calendar; the dates were queer. It read July, right enough; but this was the year 1861, whereas the calendar bore the date 1863. And why was there a cross to mark the third day of July? Hannibal came to with a shock; but he could have sworn that he had not been asleep.

"G.o.d is very--very good!" he said solemnly.

Then he opened his pen-knife, and scratched a deep line of erasure through the "Carpe diem" in his locket, and underneath, cutting with great pains, he inserted a date, "July 3, 1863," and the words "Nunc dimittis." Below that he cut "Te Deum laudamus."

He looked once more at the picture of his mother and at the picture that was not of his mother, shut the little gold case, and put it back in his pocket.

Then he inked on the white inside of a paper-box cover, in large letters, these words:

This office will not be opened until the end of the war.

That office was never opened again.

XXI

The lives of sixty million people had become suddenly full of drill, organization, uniforms, military music, flags, hatred, love, and self-sacrifice, and the nations of the Old World stood about, note-book in hand, like so many medical students at a clinic: could a heart, cut in two, continue to supply a body with blood after the soul had been withdrawn? And the nations of the Old World hoped that there would be enough fresh meat left on the carca.s.s for them to feed on, when the experiment should be at an end. Mother England was particularly hungry, and dearly hoped to have the sucking of the eggs which she herself had laid.

It was a great time for young men, and Margaret shed secret tears on behalf of five of them. It had fallen upon her to tell the old man that his three sons had enlisted, and that task had tortured her for an hour before she had dared go and accomplish it.

"Papa," she said, "Ham has enlisted, and so has Bul."

The senator had not moved a muscle.

"It was only a question of time," he said. "I wish that I had begotten a dozen others."

He had borrowed her well-marked Bible from old Mrs. Blankinship and read Isaiah at a gulp. Then he had sought out his boys and bantered them on their new clothes.

Margaret sat very still for a long time after the interview with her father. She knew that Bul, whom she loved best of her brothers, was going to be killed. She had never before seen his face so serenely happy as when he came to tell her that he had sworn in, nor had she ever before seen that unexplainable phenomenon, known variously as fate, doom, numbered, Nemesis, written upon a face. And there were others who might be taken.