get sufficiently well,
re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that,
materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the
irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the
devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the
devil a saint was he!

The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had
passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first
disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once
restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its
indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage
roundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure still
incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly
returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--the
former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the
office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less
firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her
brother's death, and, quietest, most colourless Electra of a lucidest
Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched
fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to
Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's
people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as
well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston,
where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the
English steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"
or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off
drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment
found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still
sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Bronte
heroine?--though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with no
shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and
fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far
back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for
Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his
mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the
manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared
to me at the time, and has