The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863Morford, Henry
History
The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863
Morford, Henry
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
They had perhaps waited sixty seconds after the disappearance of the
would-be rescuer beneath the dark waters of the Pool, and already every one
had given him up for lost,--when a ripple agitated its surface, a
white-sleeved arm came up, then a figure bearing another. It battled
wearily towards the shoaler part of the Pool, touched bottom and struggled
shoreward, dropped its burthen with one glance upon it, and then toppled
over--both out of danger from the water, but both apparently dead alike!
In an instant all those above had rushed down to the margin, and while some
caught the drowned boy and attempted to restore the life that seemed so
hopelessly fled, others, and the medical man among them, devoted more than
equal anxiety to the man who appeared to have paid so dearly for his
heroism. He was senseless, but his pulse still beat--the doctor discovered
so much; and a fairer hand than that of the doctor sought the heart and
found that the motion of that mysterious red current which bears the whole
of life upon its bosom was not yet stilled forever. The hand was that of
Margaret Hayley, who had drawn the head of the half-drowned man upon one
knee while she kneeled on the bare stone with the other, and who seemed to
feel that if that man died his blood would be upon her head and upon her
soul! A dangerous position, Margaret Hayley, whether he lives or dies, for
the woman who but yesterday dreamed that she kept her early love still
undimmed in her heart, however the object of it might be clouded in shame
and banished from her presence forever! Is that new ideal found already,
and found in a man so wrapped in mystery that his very name has never yet
been spoken in your presence? Fie! fie! if this is the eternity of love,
about which lovers themselves have raved and poets worse raved in their
behalf, any time these past five hundred years!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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