How Francis Willard Loved — In some respects Francis Willard, the great temperance worker, is the most remarkable type of American womanhood. Inspired by a purpose in which she deeply believed, her whole glorious character was bound up in her mission, and she worked for it with a whole-hearted zeal that moved many to remark that it was her first and only love.
There is where they are mistaken and where they are blind.
Did you ever study Miss Willard's picture closely? If you ever did, and know anything about the real humanity, you see there the undefinable stamp that marks the borderland of the divine, that transforms the plainest face of the woman who loves, or who has loved and lost. When motherhood has opened the door of the heart, and life become in truth a long, sweet song, the look deepens, the rose is in full bloom, its subtlety gone, yet glorious in its very plainness to the eye.
Francis Willard loved as only a woman of her powerful character can, and to her virgin heart came the blessing and the Gethsemane, that left upon her face a beauty that triumphed over years, and was felt by a multitude who could not understand how a woman could pass through the fire and have no scars.
I have heard the story often from my father and mother, bless the dear old souls back in the blizzards of the Illini. It was before the war, in a Chicago far different from the rushing, roaring, seething hell of people that is today. Over on the north side my people lived, on a street from which all signs of hearth-fires have disappeared in the shadows of the great wholesale houses. Then it was a street of homes, handy to the down-town district and undisturbed by the smell and noise of the river of today, . . .
Standing then on the open thresh-hold of womanhood, Francis Willard was a full master in the confraternity of brains, and was drawn to the little house by the magnetism that draws upon only the finest steel. She came often after the day was over and the music of her laugh lasted for hours.
Then she fell in love with a member of the fraternity, a clever, bonny fellow, whom the world might call a never-do-well, but to her a perfect man, and her heart went out to him without reserve. Her people did not approve, and many and many an evening they passed in that little house on Lake Street, happy to be near each other. Then came the call to arms, and the impulsive lover was among the first to join the blue, bidding his sweet-heart good-bye in my father's house when he went forth to the war.
He never came back. When he fell at Chickamauga, Francis Willard gave no sign that the world might know, and only that modest little home knew the depth of her agony, all the greater because denied expression in the way of woman and the solvent of tears. Her secret was kept and it was not until after death had removed the seal that it was told to me, and this is the first time it has ever been in print.
Many come to woo, but Francie Willard was true to her troth and to her soldier boy sleeping beyond Chattanooga. Her whole life was given up to good, and the world never knew whence came that celestial light that shone forth from the fine womanly face, whose passing sent a wave of Sorrow round the world.