A tricksy gust stirred at the door as if a mischievous hand twitched the latch-string, but it hung within. There was a pause. The listening children on the hearth sighed and shifted their posture; one of the hounds snored sonorously in the silence.
“Nuthin’ crazy thar ‘ceptin’ you-uns!--one fool gal--that’s all!” said her grandmother, with her knitting-needles and her spectacles glittering in the firelight. “That is a pest camp. Ye mought hev cotch the smallpox. I be lookm’ fur ye ter break out with it any day. When the war is over an’ the men come back to the Cove, none of ‘em will so much as look at ye, with yer skin all pock-marked--fair an’ fine as it is now, like a pan of fraish milk.”
“But, granny, it won’t be sp’ilt! The camp war too fur off--an’ thar warn’t a breath o’ wind. I never went a-nigh ‘em.”
“I dun’no’ how fur smallpox kin travel--an’ it jes’ mulls and mulls in ye afore it breaks out--don’t it, S’briny?”
“Don’t ax me,” said Mrs. Brusie, with a worried air. “I ain’t no yerb doctor, nor nurse tender, nuther. Ethelindy is beyond my understandin’.”
She was beyond her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly, silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion--they were naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt vaguely grieved for their sake, and she gave the clay that covered them, still crude red clods with not yet a blade of grass, the fellowship of her tears.
A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man’s disused brain. “Tell me _one_ thing, Ethelindy,” he said, lifting his bleared eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his stick--“tell me this--which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?”
“I’m fur the Union,” said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but small in proportion to her size. “I’m fur the Union--fust an’ last an’ all the time.”