"Rives, Hallie Erminie - In the Wake of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rives Hallie Erminie)

evening. His breath was coming heavily, and his fingers worked nervously in and
out of clinched fists. As the sky opened before him, a vision hurled itself with
the appalling directness of a thunderbolt before himЧ a vision of an acre of
bloody, trampled sward, iron-sown, and blue with pungent wreaths of smoke. In
the foreground a dismantled gun, prone upon whose stock a figure lay, with
blackened face and tattered gray uniform, and over it a second figure swinging a
clubbed musket, remorselessly cruel with the lust of war. The crest of that
spattered knoll strewn with quiet formsЧ these two alone fiercely erect. Then
the clubbed weapon descended. From the limp figure stretched across the gun rose
two protesting arms; two hazel eyes looked from beneath the bloody mat of hair,
and a voice shrill and terrifying: "My God! My head! don't strike me again!"
The vision blurred. Gusts of smoke came in between. Did the blue figure strike
again? Did it? Did it?
Maxwell threw his hands toward the night sky that flared with that quick rose of
condemnation and died again, as though appealing and inviting doom. The vision
had scarce faded into the dim of the early night sky when the lawyer came down
the steps. It was as though he had approached, black-robed and grotesque, from
the corner of the dimming pictureЧ a vengeance witnessing and impeaching,
binding him, the Brent Maxwell of that savage battery charge, to the Brent
Maxwell of this day, a strong man flying from the piteous pallor of a shrunken
and deranged wreck.
The one upon whom this sudden panic of soul had crashed like a falling tower
gripped him fiercely by the arms. "The man in there," he said hoarsely, "the man
with the blue face and yellow eyesЧ the man that looked at me! Did you see him
look at me?"
The other shrank back half fearfully. "Why, Maxwell," he said, "what's the
matter? It was merely a fit of some sort. I thought you knew he was crazy. Why,
man, you're shaking! Come along and we'll get something to warm us up."
"Did you see him put up his hands?"
The lawyer drew away his arm, almost angrily. "Heavens!" he said, "you're almost
as bad as the old man himself. He's crazy, I tell you, plumb crazy, and has been
ever since they brought him home from the war. He was struck in the head by a
shell or something."
"Yes, yes. Where? Where was it? What battle was it?"
"I've always heard it was at Missionary Ridge." The match he struck against his
boot-heel burned, sputtering, as he bit the end from a cigar."
Maxwell suddenly drew from his pocket the packet of papers; the parchment
crackled as he reached forward and held a curling corner to the flame. While the
lawyer stood in a maze Maxwell waved it, a flaming funnel, around his head until
it scorched his fingers. As he dropped it to the ground, a mass of slowly
blackening embers, a white shadow sprang out of the surrounding circle of
blackness. It was Miss Mary Ann.
"Miss Ma'y Ann," cried the lawyer, "do you see what he's doing? He's burned up
the mortgage! He's burned it up! That's all that's left of it there on the
ground!"
Miss Mary Ann stepped forward half fearfully, her fascinated eyes on the glowing
firebrand between them. She clasped her hands together. "Sir," she said,
painfully, "sir"Ч then she stopped.
An overmastering desire seized Maxwell to take upon himself the act of that dead
dayЧ to shout to them both that he, he, had been asked mercy and had denied it.