lain during his boat-journey from the South to New York and thence again
to Newport, of lost Cabot Russell's stricken father, who, failing, up
and down the searched field, in respect of his own irrecoverable
boy--then dying, or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the
enemy's works--had with an admirable charity brought Wilky back to a
waiting home instead, and merged the parental ache in the next nearest
devotion he could find. Vivid to me still is one's almost ashamed sense
of this at the hurried disordered time, and of how it was impossible not
to impute to his grave steady gentleness and judgment a full awareness
of the difference it would have made for him, all the same, to be doing
such things with a still more intimate pity. Unobliterated for me, in
spite of vaguenesses, this quasi-twilight vision of the good bereft man,
bereft, if I rightly recall, of his only son, as he sat erect and
dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief; and so much doubtless
partly because of the image that hovers to me across the years of Cabot
Russell himself, my brother's so close comrade--dark-eyed, youthfully
brown, heartily bright, actively handsome, and with the arrested
expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that
travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that
memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to "do" something for
them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred
niche. They have each to such a degree, so ranged, the strange property
or privilege--one scarce knows what to call it--of exquisitely, for all
our time, facing us out, quite blandly ignoring us, looking through us
or straight over us at something they partake of together but that we
mayn't pretend to know. We walk thus, I think, rather ruefully before
them--those of us at least who didn't at the time share more happily
their risk. William, during those first critical days, while the
stretcher itself, set down with its load just within the entrance to our
house, mightn't be moved further, preserved our poor lacerated brother's
aspect in a drawing of great and tender truth which I permit myself to
reproduce. It tells for me the double story--I mean both of Wilky's then
condition and of the draughtsman's admirable hand.
[Illustration: Sketch of G. W. James brought home wounded from the
assault on Fort Wagner]
But I find waiting my father's last letter of the small group to Mrs.
Tappan. We were by that time, the autumn of 1865, settled in Boston for
a couple of years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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