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Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford · English · Gutenberg #29583 · 1,016,689 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

Author: Henry Morford


        
Release date: August 3, 2009 [eBook #29583]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHOULDER-STRAPS: A NOVEL OF NEW YORK AND THE ARMY, 1862 ***




Produced by David Edwards, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







[Illustration]


SHOULDER-STRAPS

By

Henry Morford

[Illustration]

T.B. PETERSON & BROS.

PHILADELPHIA.




SHOULDER-STRAPS.

A

NOVEL

OF

NEW YORK AND THE ARMY,

1862.


BY HENRY MORFORD.


PHILADELPHIA:

T.B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,

306 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1863, by

T.B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States,

in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

TO

DR. R. SHELTON MACKENZIE,

WHO

HAS ALREADY RECEIVED SO MANY DEDICATIONS,

THAT THEY HAVE BECOME

AN OLD, OLD STORY,--

THIS VOLUME IS

RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

BY

HIS GRATEFUL FRIEND AND CO-LABORER,

THE AUTHOR.

NEW YORK CITY, JULY, 1863.




PREFACE.


Several months have necessarily elapsed since the commencement of this
narration. Within that time many and rapid changes have occurred, both
in national situation and in private character. As a consequence, there
may be several words, in earlier portions of the story, that would not
have been written a few months later. The writer has preferred not to
make any changes in original expression, but to set down, instead, in
references, the dates at which certain portions of the work were
written. In one instance important assistance has been derived from a
writer of ability and much military experience; and that assistance is
thankfully acknowledged in a foot-note to one of the appropriate
chapters. Some readers may be disappointed not to find a work more
extensively military, under such a title and at this time; but the aim
of the writer, while giving glances at one or two of our most important
battles, has been chiefly to present a faithful picture of certain
relations in life and society which have grown out, as side-issues, from
the great struggle. At another time and under different circumstances,
the writer might feel disposed to apologize for the great liberty of
episode and digression, taken with the story; but in the days of Victor
Hugo and Charles Reade, and at a time when the text of the preacher in
his pulpit, and the title of a bill in a legislative body, are alike
made the threads upon which to string the whole knowledge of the speaker
upon every subject,--such an apology can scarcely be necessary. It
should be said, in deference to a few retentive memories, that two
chapters of this story, now embraced in the body of the work, were
originally written for and published in the _Continental Monthly_, last
fall, the publication of the whole work through that medium, at first
designed, being prevented by a change of management and a contract
mutually broken.

NEW YORK CITY, July, 1863.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.                                                             PAGE

Two Friends--Walter Lane Harding and Tom Leslie--Merchant and
Journalist--A Torn Dress and a Stalwart Champion--Tom Leslie's
Story of Dexter Ralston--Three Meetings--An Incident on the
Potomac--The Inauguration of Lincoln--A Warning of the Virginia
Secession--Governmental Blindness--Friend or Foe to the Union?           23


CHAPTER II.

Richard Crawford and Josephine Harris--The Invalid and the Wild
Madonna--An Odd Female Character and a Temptation--Discouragement
and Consolation--Miss Joe Harris on the Character of Colonel
Egbert Crawford--A Suggestion of Hatred and Murder--A New Agony
for the Invalid--A Lady with an Attachment to Cerise Ribbon.             41


CHAPTER III.

A Scene at Judge Owen's--Mother and Daughter--Pretty Emily with
One Lover Too Many--Emily's Determination, and Judge Owen's
Ultimatum--A Pompous Judge playing Grand Signeur in his own
Family--Aunt Martha to the Rescue--Her Story of Marriage without
Love, Wedded Misery and Outrage--How Old is Colonel John Boadley
Bancker, and what is the Character of Frank Wallace?                     60


CHAPTER IV.

Harding and Leslie make Discoveries on Prince Street--Secesh
Flags and Emblems of the Golden Circle--What do they mean?--Tom
Leslie takes a Climb and a Tumble--The Red Woman--A Carriage
Chase Up-town--A Mysterious House--Amateur Detectives under a
Door-step, and what they saw and heard.                                  63


CHAPTER V.

Who was the Red Woman?--Tom Leslie's Strange Story of Parisian
Life and Fortune-telling--The 20th of December, 1860--An Hour in
the Rue la Reynie Ogniard--The Vision of the White Mist--The
Secession of South Carolina seen across the Atlantic--Was the
Sorceress in America?                                                    73


CHAPTER VI.

Colonel Egbert Crawford and Miss Bell Crawford--Miss Harris
entering upon the Spy-System--Some Dissertations thereon, as
practised in the Army and Elsewhere--What McDowell knew before
Bull Run--Colonel Crawford's Affectionate Care of his Sick
Cousin--Josephine Harris behind a Glass Door--What she overheard
about Cousin Mary and the Rich Uncle at West Falls--Colonel
Crawford trying his Hand at Doctoring--A Suspicious Bandage, and
what the Watcher thought of it                                           83


CHAPTER VII.

Introduction of the Contraband--What He Was and What He Is--Three
Months Earlier--Colonel Egbert Crawford in Thomas Street--Aunt
Synchy, the Obi Woman--How a Man who is only half evil can be
tempted to murder--The Black Paste of the Obi Poison                     99


CHAPTER VIII.

Colonel John Boadley Bancker and Frank Wallace at Judge Owen's--A
Pouting Lover and a Satisfied Rival--The Philosophy of Male and
Female Jealousy--Frank Wallace doing the Insulting--A Bit of a
Row--A Smash-up in the Streets, and a True Test of Relative
Courage                                                                 115


CHAPTER IX.

The First Week of July--News of the Reverses before
Richmond--Painful Feeling of the Whole Country--How a Nation
weeps Tears of Blood--The Estimation of McClellan--The Curse of
Absenteeism--Public Abhorrence of the Shoulder-strapped Heroes on
Broadway--A Scene at the World Corner, and a Hero in Disguise           129


CHAPTER X.

Leslie and Harding following up the Prince-Street Mystery--A Call
upon Superintendent Kennedy--How Tom Leslie wished to play
Detective--A Bit of a Rebuff--A Massachusetts Regiment going to
the War--Miss Joe Harris and Bell Crawford in a Street Difficulty--A
Rescue and a Recognition--A Trip into Taylor's Saloon                   142


CHAPTER XI.

The True Characters of Men and of Houses--Fifth Avenue and the
Swamp--Gilded Vice, and Vice without Ornament--The Progress of
Temptation--The Legends of the Lurline and the Frozen Hand--Dangers
of Fashionable Restaurants--Scenes at Taylor's Saloon--Tom Leslie,
Joe Harris and Bell Crawford at Lunch--The Fortune-teller selected
by Miss Harris for a Visit--Wanted, a Knight for Two Distressed
Damsels--Tom Leslie enlists, and goes after his Armor                   160


CHAPTER XII.

A Glance at Fortune-telling and other Delusions--Our Domestic and
Personal Superstitions--Omens and their Origin--The Witch of
Endor, Hamlet and Macbeth--One Strange Illustration of Prophecy
in Dreams--The Fortune-tellers of New York, Boston and Washington       172


CHAPTER XIII.

Ten Minutes at a Costumer's--Among the Robes of Queens and the
Rags of Beggars--How Tom Leslie suddenly grew to Sixty, and
changed Clothes accordingly--Josephine Harris and Bell Crawford
still at Lunch, with a Dissertation upon One Pair of Eyes--An
Unwarrantable Intrusion, and a Decided Sensation at Taylor's            187


CHAPTER XIV.

Necromancy in a Thunder-storm--How Tom Leslie and his Female
Companions called upon Madame Elise Boutell, from Paris, in
Prince Street--A New Way of Gambling for Precedence--Bell
Crawford takes her Turn--A very improper Joining of Hands in the
Outer Apartment--About Chances, Accidents and Little Things--The
Change in Bell Crawford's Eyes--Eyes that have looked within--Two
Pictures in the Old Dusseldorf Gallery--Joe Harris Undergoing the
Ordeal--A Thunder-clap and a Shriek of Terror--What Tom Leslie
saw in the Apartment of the Red Woman--A Mask removed, and one
more Temptation                                                         198


CHAPTER XV.

Camp Lyon, and Colonel Egbert Crawford's Two Hundredth
Regiment--Recruiting Discipline in the Summer of 1862--What Smith
and Brown saw--Lager-beer, Cards and the Dice-box--An Adjutant
who obeys Orders--A Dress Parade a la mode--How Seven Hundred Men
may be squeezed into Three                                              218


CHAPTER XVI.

A Few Words on the Two Modern Modes of writing Romances--How to
tell what is not known and can never be known--The Bound of a
Loyal Pen--More of the Up-town Mystery--How the Reliable
Detectives posted a Watch, and how they kept it--Cold Water
dampening Enthusiasm--An Escape, and the Post mortem hold on a
Vacant House--Trails left by the Secession Serpent                      232


CHAPTER XVII.

Pictures at the Seat of War--Looking for John Crawford the
Zouave--Hopeful and Discouraged Letters Home--Events which had
preceded Malvern Hill--An Army winning Victories in Retreat--The
Morning after White-Oak Swamp--How the Sun shines on Fields of
Carnage--Appearance of the Retreating Army--The Camp of Fitz-John
Porter's Division--The Soldiers of Home, and the Soldiers of the
Field--The First Rebel Attack at the Cross Roads--Why the Potomac
Army was not demoralized--The Repulse, and the Pause before the
Heavier Storm                                                           239


CHAPTER XVIII.

More of the First Battle of Malvern--A Word about Skulkers--An
Attempt to flank the Union Forces--A Storm of Lead and Iron
rivalling the War of the Elements--The Rebels Repulsed--The
Attack on the Main Position, and the Second Battle of Malvern--The
most Terrible Artillery Duel of the Century--Patriotism against
Gunpowdered Whiskey--Shells from the Gun-boats, and their Effect--The
Dead upon Carter's Field--The Last Repulse of the Rebels, and the
General Advance of the Union Forces--Strange Incidents of the Close
of the Battle--Odd Bravery in Meagher's Brigade--The Apparition in
White, and its Effect--Close of the Great Battle                        256


CHAPTER XIX.

John Crawford the Zouave, and Bob Webster--Incidents of the
Charge of Duryea's Zouaves--Bush-fighting and its Result--A Wound
not bargained for--The Burning House and its Two Watchers--A
Strange Death-scene--Marion Hobart and her Dying Grandfather--Death
under the Old Flag--An Oath of Protection--A Furlough--John Crawford
brings his Newly-acquired Family to New York                            277


CHAPTER XX.

Judge Owen's Condemnation of the Rioters at his House--How Frank
Wallace was exiled, and what came of it--The Burly Judge making a
Household Arrest at Wallack's--Emily Owen and Joe Harris--A
Recognition which may cause Further Trouble                             297


CHAPTER XXI.

Another Scene at Richard Crawford's--Josephine Harris playing the
Detective, with Musical Accompaniments--A Sudden Demand for Dark
Paste, with Difficulty in supplying it--A Young Girl who wished
to be believed a Coward--Ever of Thee, with some Feelings
thereunto attached--Josephine Harris pays a Visit to Doctor
LaTurque--Her Discoveries with reference to the Obi Poison              312


CHAPTER XXII.

A Little Arrangement between Tom Leslie and Joe Harris--Going to
West Falls and Niagara--A Detention and a Night Scene on the
Hudson-River Road--Why Joe Harris hid her Saucy Face--Oneida
Scenery--Aunt Betsey, Little Susy, and a Peep at the Halstead
Homestead, with Pigs, Chickens and Cherries                             332


CHAPTER XXIII.

Josephine Harris in quest of Information--The Big House on the
Hill--Extracting the Secrets of the Crawford Family--How a Big
Fib may sometimes be told for a Good Purpose--Aunt Betsey made an
Accomplice--Mary Crawford, the Country Girl, and a Terrible
Revelation--A Bold Letter to a Bold Man                                 350


CHAPTER XXIV.

The Piazza of the Big House on the Hill--John Crawford the Human
Wreck, and Egbert Crawford on the Eve of Marriage--Chanticleer on
the Garden Fence, with Remembrances of Peter and Judas Iscariot--John
Crawford instructs his Expectant Son-in-law--Arrival of the Domestic
Post, with a Letter of Import--A Hit or a Miss?--Strida la Vampa        372


CHAPTER XXV.

Affairs in the Crawford Family in New York--The Two Brothers
together--Marion Hobart the Enigma--How Richard Crawford thought
that he was not able to ride to the Central Park, and found that
he could ride to Niagara                                                391


CHAPTER XXVI.

Tom Leslie at Niagara--A Dash at Scenery there--What he saw with
his Natural Eyes, and what with his Inner Consciousness--The
Wreck and the Rainbow--Another Rencontre with Dexter Ralston--The
Eclipse on the Falls--Leslie under the impression that he can be
discounted, and that he knows little or nothing on any subject          404


CHAPTER XXVII.

Society and Shoulder-Straps at the Falls--The Delights and Duties
of a Journalist--Leslie and Harding Exploring Canada--How one
Fine Morning War was declared between England and the United
States, and Canada annexed to New York--A Meeting at the
Cataract--Another Rencontre with the Strange Virginian--An
Abduction and a Pursuit                                                 420


CHAPTER XXVIII.

The Sequel at West Falls--How Colonel Egbert Crawford was
supposed to have been telegraphed for from Albany--Mary Crawford
once more at the Halstead's--The Final Instructions and Promises
of the Chief Conspirator--Joe Harris returns to the Great City,
and her Disappointment therein--Another Conspiracy hatched,
threatening to blow Judge Owen's Domestic Tranquillity to Atoms         433


CHAPTER XXIX.

Some Speculations on Moonlight and Insanity--Captain Robert
Slivers, of the Sickles Brigade, makes his Appearance at Judge
Owen's--He draws Graphic Pictures of the War, for the Edification
of Colonel Bancker--A Controversy, with further inquiries as to
the Age of the Colonel--The Market brisk for Hirsute Excrescences
on the Cranium, and no Supply--Judge Owen laughs ponderously            446


CHAPTER XXX.

Gathering the Ravelled Threads of a Long Story--What befel
Several Persons heretofore named--Marriages in Demand, and only a
few furnished--A Raid into Canada--What befell Colonel Egbert
Crawford and the Two Hundredth Regiment--A Cavalry Charge at
Antietam, and a Farewell                                                460




SHOULDER-STRAPS.




CHAPTER I.

TWO FRIENDS--A RENCONTRE BEFORE NIBLO'S--THREE MEETINGS WITH A MAN OF
MARK--MOUNT VERNON AND THE INAUGURATION--FRIEND OR FOE TO THE UNION?


Just before the close of the performances at Niblo's Garden, where the
Jarrett combination was then playing, one evening in the latter part of
June, 1862, two young men came out from the doorway of the theatre and
took their course up Broadway toward the Houston Street corner. Any
observer who might have caught a clear view of the faces of the two as
they passed under one of the large lamps at the door, would have noted
each as being worth a second glance, but would at the same time have
observed that two persons more dissimilar in appearance and in
indication of character, could scarcely have been selected out of all
the varied thousands resident in the great city.

The one walking on the inside as they passed on, with the right hand of
his companion laid on his left arm in that confidential manner so common
with intimate friends who wish to walk together in the evening without
being jostled apart by hurried chance passengers, was somewhat tall in
figure, dark-haired, dark side-whiskered, and sober-faced, though
decidedly fine-looking; and in spite of the heat of the weather he
preserved the appearance of winter dress clothing by a full suit of dark
gray summer stuff that might well have been mistaken for broadcloth. Not
even in hat or boots did he make any apparent concession to the season,
for his glossy round hat would have been quite as much in place in
January as in June, and his well-fitting and glossy patent-leather boots
would have been thought oppressively warm by a hotter-blooded and more
plethoric man. Those who should have seen the baptismal register
recording his birth some five-and-thirty years before, would have known
his name to be Walter Lane Harding; and those who met him in business or
society would have become quite as well aware that he was a prosperous
merchant, doing business in one of the leading mercantile streets
running out of Broadway, not far from the City Hospital. So far as the
somewhat precise mercantile appearance of Harding was concerned, a true
disciple of Lavater would have judged correctly of him, for there were
few men in the city of New York who displayed more steadiness, or
greater money-making capacity in all the details of business; and yet
even the close observer would have been likely to derive a false
impression from this very preciseness, as to the social qualities of the
man. There were quite as few better or heartier laughers than Harding,
when duly aroused to mirth; and those persons were very rare, making the
characters of mankind their professional study, who saw slight
indications of disposition more quickly, or better enjoyed whatever gave
food for quiet merriment. Once away from his counting-house, too, Walter
Harding seemed to assume a second of his two natures that had before
been lying dormant, and to enter into the permitted gaieties of city
life with a zest that many a professed good fellow might have envied. He
visited the theatre, as we have seen; went to the opera when it pleased
him, not for fashion's sake, but because he liked music and was a
connoisseur of singing and acting; liked a stroll in the streets with a
congenial companion (male or female); could smoke a good cigar with
evident enjoyment; and sometimes, though rarely, sipped a glass of fine
old wine, and indulged in the freer pleasures of the table; though he
was scrupulously careful of his company, and no man had ever seen his
foot cross the threshold of a house of improper character. It is
sufficient, in addition, at the present moment, to say that he was still
a bachelor, occupying rooms in an up-town street, and enjoying life in
that pleasant and rational mode which seemed to promise long
continuance.

Harding's companion, who has already been indicated as his opposite, was
markedly so in personal appearance, at least. He was two or three inches
shorter than Harding, and much stouter, displaying a well-rounded leg
through the folds of his loose pants of light-gray Melton cloth, and
being quite well aware of that advantage of person. He had a smoothly
rounded face, with a complexion that had been fair until hard work, late
hours, and some exposure to the elements, had browned and roughened it;
brown hair, with an evident tendency to curl, if he had not worn it so
short on account of the heat of the season, that a curl was rendered
impossible; a heavy dark brown moustache, worn without other beard; a
sunny hazel eye that seemed made for laughter, and a full, red,
voluptuous lip that might have belonged to a sensualist; while the eye
could really do other things than laughing, and the lip was quite as
often compressed or curled in the bitterness of disdain or the
earnestness of close thought, as employed to express any warmer or more
sympathetic feeling.

Tom Leslie, who might have been called by the more respectful and
dignified name of "Thomas," but that no one had ever expended the
additional amount of breath necessary to extend the name into two
syllables, was a cadet of a leading family in a neighboring state, who
at home had been reckoned the black sheep of the flock, because he would
not settle quietly down like the rest to money-getting and the enjoyment
of legislative offices; a man who at thirty had passed through much
experience, seen a little dissipation, traveled over most States of the
Union in the search for new scenery, or the fulfilment of his avocation
as a newspaper correspondent and man of letters; been twice in Europe,
alternately flying about like a madman, and sitting down to study life
and manners in Paris, Vienna, and Rome, and gathering up all kinds of
useful and useless information; taken a short turn at war in the Crimea,
in 1853, as a private in the ranks of the French army; seen service for
a few months in the Brazilian navy, from which he had brought a severe
wound as a flattering testimonial. He was at that time located in New
York as an editorial contributor and occasional "special correspondent"
of a leading newspaper. He had seen much of life--tasted much of its
pains and pleasures--perhaps thought more than either; and though with a
little too much of a propensity for late hours and those long stories
which _would_ grow out of current events seen in the light of past
experience, he was held to be a very pleasant companion by other men
than Walter Harding.

Perhaps even the long stories were more a misfortune than a fault. The
Ancient Mariner found it one of the saddest penalties of his crime, that
he was obliged to button-hole all his friends and be written down an
incorrigible bore; and who doubts that the Wandering Jew, with the
weight of twenty centuries of experience and observation upon his head,
finds a deeper pang than the tropic heat or the Arctic snow could give,
in the want of an occasional quiet and patient listener to the story of
his wanderings?

On the present occasion it may be noted, at once to complete the picture
and give additional insight of a character which did very independent
and _outre_ things, that Tom Leslie had gone to Niblo's with his
carefully-dressed and precise friend Harding, and sat conspicuously in
an orchestra chair, in a gray business sack, no vest and no pretence at
a collar. In other men, Harding would have noticed the dress with
disapprobation: in Leslie it seemed to be legitimately a part of the man
to dress as he liked; and neither Harding, or any one else who knew him,
paid any more attention to his outward appearance than they would have
bestowed upon a harmless lunatic under the same circumstances. Wherever
Leslie boarded, (and his places of boarding were very numerous, taking
the whole year together,) it was always noted that he filled up the
hat-rack with a collection of hats of all odd and rapid styles, with a
_few_ of the more sedate and respectable; and on this evening's visit to
Niblo's, when there was not a shadow of occasion for a hat with any brim
whatever, he had completed his personal appearance by a fine gray beaver
California soft hat, of not less than eighteen or twenty inches in the
whole circumference, which gave him somewhat the appearance of being
under a collapsed umbrella, and yet became him as well as any thing
else could have done, and left him unmistakably a handsome fellow.

An oddly mixed compound, certainly--even odder than Harding; and yet
what a dull, dead world this would prove to be, if there were no odd and
_outre_ characters to startle the grave people from their propriety, and
throw an occasional pebble splashing into the pool of quiet and
irreproachable mediocrity!

The two companions, whose description has occupied a much longer time
than it needed to walk from the door of Niblo's to the Houston Street
corner, were just passing the corner of that street on their way up to
Bleecker, when they were momentarily stopped by a very ordinary
incident. A girl, evidently of the _demi-monde_ from her bold eyes,
lavish display of charms and general demeanor, was turning the corner
from Broadway into Houston Street immediately in front of Harding and
Leslie; and as she swept around, her long dress trailing on the
pavement, a careless fellow, lounging along, cigar in mouth, and eyes
everywhere else than at his feet, stepped full upon her skirt, and
before she could check the impetus of her sudden turn, literally tore
the garment from her, the dark folds of the dress falling on the
pavement and leaving the under-clothing painfully exposed. The girl
turned suddenly, one of those harsh oaths upon her lips which even more
than any action betray the fallen woman, and hissed out a malediction on
his brutal carelessness. The man, probably one who literally knew no
better, instead of remembering the provocation, apologizing for the
injury he had done and offering to make any reparation in his power,
replied by an oath still more shocking than that of the lost girl,
hurled at her the most opprobrious epithet which man bestows upon woman
in the English language, and one by far too obscene to be repeated in
these pages,--and was passing on, leaving the poor girl to gather her
torn drapery as she best could, when his course was suddenly arrested.

A tall figure had come up from below during the altercation, unnoticed
by either; and the instant after the man had disgraced his humanity by
that abuse of a fallen woman, he found himself seized by the collar with
a hand that managed him as if he had been a child, and himself full off
the sidewalk into the street, and among the wheels of the passing
omnibuses, with the quick sharp words ringing in his ear:

"The devil take you! If you can't learn to walk along the pavement
without tearing off women's dresses and afterwards abusing them, go out
into the street with the brutes, where you belong!"

The two friends noticed, casually, that a policeman stood on the upper
corner, and at this act of violence on the part of the new-comer, they
naturally expected to see him interfere to preserve the peace, if not
make an arrest; but he was either too lazy to cross the street, (such
things have been,) or too well satisfied that the coarse ruffian had met
the treatment he deserved, to make any step forward. The fellow, thus
suddenly sent to the company of worn-out omnibus-horses and swearing
stage-drivers on a slippery pavement, turned with an oath, when he
recovered himself, made a movement as if to return to the sidewalk and
seek satisfaction for the violence, but evidently did not like the looks
of his antagonist, when he caught a fair glance of his proportions, and
solaced himself with a few more muttered oaths as he dodged across to
the other side of Broadway and disappeared in the crowd.

The second and prudential resolve of this person seemed fully justified
by even a hasty survey of his assailant, who happened to be thrown under
the light of the lamp at the corner, and in full view of our companions.
He was perhaps six feet and an inch in height, cast in a most powerful
model, and evidently possessing herculean strength--with a dark
complexion, high cheek bones, showing almost as if he had a cross of the
old Indian blood in his descent, fiery dark eyes set under brows of the
pent-house or Webster mould, heavy massed black curly hair worn a little
long, and a very heavy black moustache entirely concealing the mouth,
while the beard shorn away from the lower portions of the face left the
square, strong chin in full prominence. He was dressed in dark frock
coat with white vest and pants, and wore a dark wide-brimmed slouched
hat almost the counterpart of Leslie's, except in color, which
harmonized well with his personal appearance in other regards, and
while it left him looking the gentleman, made him the gentleman of some
other locality than the city of New York.

The new-comer, the moment he had sent the other whirling into the
street, approached the girl, who still remained standing on the corner,
her ungathered dress sweeping the pavement, and said:

"Madame, your dress is badly torn. Allow me to offer you a few pins." He
drew a large pin-cushion from his large vest pocket, (every thing seemed
to be of a large pattern about this man,) and was handing it to the
girl, who stretched out her left hand to receive it, when he suddenly
seemed to recognize her.

"Why, Kate!" He spoke in tones of the most unfeigned surprise--"Kate,
what the deuce! I thought you were in--"

"Yes, Deck!" answered the girl, with a coarse familiarity, "but you see
I am here! And you? I thought _you_ were in--"

"Hush-h-h!" said the man, in a quick, sharp, decided tone, prolonged
almost to be a hiss. "That will do! Now use some of these pins--quick,
fasten up your skirt, and then go with _me_!"

He spoke as if he was in the habit of being obeyed, or as if he had some
peculiar claim that he should be obeyed in this instance. And the girl
seemed fully to understand him, for only a moment served to supply so
many pins to the torn gathers of the dress as enabled her to walk and
hid her exposed under-clothing; and the instant that object was
accomplished she thrust her arm into his, he making no attempt to repel
the familiarity, but walking with hasty strides and almost dragging her
after him, down into the partial gloom of Houston Street.

When they had disappeared, and not till then, the two friends removed
from the spot where they had been standing entirely silent, and passed
on up Broadway.

"A strange person--a very strange person, that!" said Harding, the
moment after, to Leslie, who appeared to be thinking intently, and who
had not uttered a word since the affair commenced.

"Y--a--es!" said Leslie, in that slow, abstracted tone which indicates
that the man who uses it is doing so mechanically and without knowing
what he says.

"Poor devil! how the new man whirled him out into the street!" Harding
went on, _his_ attention on the incident, as Leslie's apparently was
not. "Just the treatment he deserved for being brutal to a woman, no
matter how lost or degraded she may be! Tearing off her dress was all
right enough, however, for all the woman deserve nothing better than to
have their dresses torn into ribbons for thrusting them under our feet
and sweeping the streets with them, as they do!"

Harding was thinking, at the moment, of a little adventure of his own a
few weeks before, in which, hurrying along to an appointment, early in
the evening, not far from the St. Nicholas, he had come up with a party
of theatre-goers, trodden upon the dress of one of the ladies in
attempting to pass--in extricating himself from that awkwardness,
trodden upon the dresses of two more--and left the whole three nearly
naked in the street; while three female voices were screaming in shame
and mortification, and three male voices sending words after him the
very reverse of complimentary.

"You think that a singular person?" at length said Leslie, as if waking
from a reverie, but proving at the same time that he had heard the words
of his friend. "You are right, he is so!"

"What! do you know him?" asked Harding, surprised.

"I do, indeed," was the reply of Leslie; "but I should as soon have
thought of meeting Schamyl or Garibaldi in the streets of New York, at
this moment, as the man we have just encountered. Fortunately, he did
not recognize me--perhaps, thanks to this hat--(it _is_ an immense hat,
isn't it, Harding?) What can be his position, and what is his business
here at the present moment, I wonder?" he went on, speaking more to
himself than to his companion, as they turned down Bleecker from
Broadway towards Leslie's lodgings, on Bleecker near Elm.

"Well, but you have not yet told me his name, or any thing about him,
while you go on tantalizing me with speculations as to how he came to
be here, and what he is doing!" said Harding.

"True enough," answered Leslie. "Well, he is not the sort of man to talk
about loosely in the streets; so wait a moment, until I use my night-key
and we get up into my room. There we can smoke a cigar, and I will tell
you all I know of him, which is just enough to excite my wonder to a
much greater height than your own."

Less than five minutes sufficed to fulfil the conditions prescribed; and
in Leslie's little room, himself occupying the three chairs it
contained, by sitting in one, and stretching out his two legs on the
others, while Harding threw off his coat and lounged on the bed, Leslie
poured out his story, and the smoke from his cigar, with about equal
rapidity.

"The name of that singular man," he said, "is Dexter Balston, and he is
by birth a Virginian. You heard the girl call him 'Deck,' which you no
doubt took to be 'Dick,' but which she really meant as a familiar
abbreviation of his name. It is a little singular that I should have met
him first at a theatre, and not far from the one at which we just now
encountered him. It was in the fall of 1857, I think, going in with a
party of friends, one night, to Laura Keene's, that one of the ladies of
the party was rudely jostled by a large man, who caught his foot in the
matting of the vestibule and fell against her with such violence as
nearly to throw her to the floor. He turned and apologized at once, and
with so much high-toned and gentlemanly dignity, that all the party felt
almost glad that the little accident had occurred. This made the first
step of an acquaintance between him and myself; and when, in the
intermission the same evening, I met him for a few moments in a saloon
near the theatre, we drank together, held some slight conversation,
exchanged cards, and each invited the other to call at his lodgings. His
card lies somewhere in the bureau there at this moment, and it read, I
remember, 'Dexter Ralston, Charles City, Virginia,' with 'St. Nicholas'
written in pencil in the corner. He was a wealthy planter, living near
Charles City, as I afterwards gathered from conversation with him, and
had an interest in tobacco transactions at the North which kept him a
large proportion of his time in this city.

"Of his own choice Ralston attended the theatres very frequently, as I
did from professional duty; and the consequence was that we met often,
and sometimes supped together. I liked him, and he seemed to be pleased
with me, though I should be perverting the truth to say that I ever
became very cordial or intimate with him. There was something about the
man which forbade familiarity; though I remember thinking, several
times, that if one only _could_ penetrate beneath the crust made by that
evident pride and haughty reserve, he was a man to be liked to the death
by a man, and loved by a woman with eternal devotion. After a time, and
without my receiving any 'P.P.C.' to say that he was going to leave the
city, he disappeared, and I saw him no more in the street or at any of
his favorite places of amusement.

"Well, I went down to Mount Vernon with a party of friends from
Washington, on board the steamboat George Page. Did you ever know Page
himself, the fat old Washingtonian who invented something about the
circular-saw, and has some kind of a patent-right on all that are made
above a certain number of inches in diameter? No? Well, he is an odd
genius, and I will some day tell you something about him. But I was just
now speaking of the steamboat named after him. The Rebels had her last
year, you remember, using her as a gunboat somewhere up Aquia Creek,
until they got scared and burned her one night,--though she was about as
fit for that purpose as an Indian bark-canoe. The Page was running as an
excursion boat to Mount Vernon, and sometimes going down to Aquia Creek
in connection with the railroad, in the winter and spring of 1858-9. I
was doing some reporting, and a little lobbying, in the Senate, at the
beginning of March, and, as I have said, ran down with a party of
friends to see the Tomb of Washington, curse the neglect that hung over
it like a nightmare, and execrate the meanness which sold off bouquets
from the garden, and canes from the woods, at a quarter each, by the
hands of a pack of dirty slaves, to the hands of a pack of dirtier
curiosity-hunters.

"Going down the river I found no acquaintances on board, outside of my
own party; but when we had made the due inspection, and were returning
in the afternoon, just when we were off Fort Washington, an acquaintance
belonging to the capital came up, in conversation with a thin, scrawny,
hard-featured man, dressed, in black, and looking like a cross between a
decayed Yankee schoolmaster and a foreign Count gone into the hand-organ
business. As we exchanged salutations he stopped, made a step backward,
and astounded me by this introduction:

"'Col. Washington, my friend, Mr. Leslie--Mr. Leslie, Col. John A.
Washington, proprietor of Mount Vernon.'

"I do not suppose that there was any merit in it, any more than there
would have been in refusing to drink a nauseous dose; but, really, I
felt that I was fulfilling a stern duty (no pun intended) in turning my
back short upon the Colonel, and saying:

"'Much obliged to you, Mr. ----, but I have no desire whatever to know
Col. John A. Washington!'

"I will do the Colonel (though he did afterwards die a rebel as he
deserved) the justice to say that I do not think he cared much for the
cut. I noticed that his sallow face looked a shade nearer to green than
before, but he merely drew himself up and took no other notice of my
decidedly cavalier conduct. Not so, however, with some of the
passengers, who had been near enough to hear the words, and who seemed
to think that the memory of the great dead was insulted, instead of
honored, by this rebuff to the miserable offshoot who kept Mount Vernon
as a cross between a pig-stye and a Jew old-clo' shop. Some of them, I
suppose, were Virginians, and neighbors of 'the Colonel.' At all events,
I heard mutterings, and the ladies in my company (they were all ladies)
looked a little alarmed.

"Directly one of the F.F.V.'s, as I suppose them to have been, stepped
forward immediately in front of me, and said:

"'D--n it, sir, the man who insults a Washington must answer to _me_!'

"'Must he?' I said, not much scared, I think, but a little flustered,
and quite undecided whether to get into a row on the spot by striking
the last man.

"'He must!' replied the F.F.V., with another curse or two thrown in by
way of emphasis. 'You may be some cursed Yankee, peddling buttons, and
afraid to fight; but if not--'

"'He will have no occasion to fight,' said a voice coming through the
crowd from the side of the vessel. 'I will take that little job off his
hands. Eh, Leslie, is that you? They tell me you have been giving the
cut-direct to that mean humbug who calls himself John A. Washington.
Give me your hand, old boy; you have done nothing more than your duty. I
am a Virginian, and no d--d Yankee--does anybody want to fight me?'

"It was Dexter Ralston. How many of the people on board knew him I have
no idea, or what they knew of him. He seemed to exercise some strange
influence, however, for Col. Washington turned away, with the friend who
had offered to introduce him; and the man who had offered to fight me
also disappeared. The crowd at that spot on the deck seemed to be gone
in a moment. Ralston and myself exchanged a few words. I thanked him for
having extricated me from a possible scrape, as well as for his good
opinion of my conduct, all which he waived with a 'pshaw!' He received
an introduction to the ladies with all due courtesy, chatted with them a
few moments, and then strolled off, smoking a cigar. I was engaged with
my party for the remainder of the trip, and did not see him again until
we had reached Washington and the passengers dispersed from the
steamboat, when of course I lost him, without any inquiry being made as
to his address or present residence. I went to Europe, the last time, as
you know, the summer following, and so perhaps lost him more
effectually. Tired?"

The latter word was especially addressed to Harding, who gave symptoms
of going to sleep. Refreshed, however, by a cigar which Leslie thrust
between his lips and insisted upon his smoking, Harding managed, even in
his recumbent position, to keep awake for what followed.

"Confound you!" said Leslie, "you might manage to get along without
yawning at my story, when you asked me to tell it! However, who cares!
You are not the only man who does not know a good thing when he sees or
hears it! Some of my best things in print have probably been received in
like manner, by people just as stupid!"

"Very likely," said Harding, drily; and Leslie continued.

"I came home from Europe in the winter of 1860-61, as you may likewise
remember if you are not too sleepy; and I was one of the ten thousand
who went down from this city to Washington, to attend the inauguration
of Abraham Lincoln. Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety odd went armed
to the teeth, carrying each from one revolver to three, and a few
bowie-knives, in anticipation of there being a general row on
inauguration morning, if not an open attempt to assassinate the
President. One man whom I could name actually carried four revolvers and
a dirk, without knowing any more about the use of either than a child of
ten years might have done. There _was_ danger of a collision, of course,
growing out of the very fact that everybody went down armed. I was one
of the very few who could not borrow a revolver or did not want one--no
matter which.

"Suffice it to say that I reached Washington on Sunday morning--the day
previous to the inauguration--found the hotels full and took lodgings at
a private house a few hundred yards from the Capitol, and spent the
early part of the day in inspecting the preparations made for the
holiday show, in and about the Capitol building. The courtesy of Colonel
Forney, then Clerk of the House, arranged for my admission to the
building during the ceremonies of the next day; and that of Douglas
Wallach, of the _Star_, furnished me a seat in the reporters' gallery of
the Senate for that evening when the last session of the expiring
Congress was to be held and a last effort made for putting through those
'compromise resolutions' which it was then believed might 'save the
Union,' but which we now know to have been as useless, even if they
could have been passed, as so much whistling against the wind.

"Although it was Sunday, time was pressing, and the fate of the nation
seemed to be hanging upon a breath; so the Senate had arranged a session
for five o'clock, which seemed very likely to last well into the night,
and was almost certain to be crowded to suffocation. As you will
remember, it _did_ last until seven the next morning--after daylight,
and witnessed one of the most exciting debates in the history of that
body,--in which Baker of Oregon flashed out even more than usual of his
patriotic eloquence; and white-haired, sad old Crittenden of Kentucky
moaned out words of fear for the nation, that have since been but too
truly realized; and Mason of Virginia showed more boldly than ever the
cloven foot of the traitor who would not have reconciliation at any
price; and Douglas rose above his short stature in alternately lashing
one and the other of those whom he believed to be equally enemies to his
type of conservatism. No one who sat out that session will ever forget
it--but enough of this, which should be written and not spoken.

"Of course after dinner that day I went down to the Hotels on the
Avenue, to take a peep at the political barometer and see what was the
prospect for violence on the morrow. It was a dark and stormy one. Most
of the avowedly Southern element had disappeared from the street, and
there were not many of the secession cockades to be met; but a few were
flaunted by beardless young men who should that day have been arrested
and thrown into the Old Capitol; and every foot of space in Willard's
and the other leading houses was full all day long of a moving, surging,
anxious and excited crowd, all talking, nobody listening, everybody
inquiring, many significant hints, a few threats, an occasional quarrel
and the interference of the police, but not much violence and no
bloodshed. The evening shut down stormy, as to the national atmosphere,
and I went home to supper impressed with the belief that the morrow
could not pass off quietly--a belief strengthened by the fears of Scott;
which were shown in the calling out of the volunteer militia in large
force,--by the tap of the drum and the challenge of the sentry, which
could be heard all around Capitol Hill,--and by the knowledge that files
of regulars were barracked at different places on the Hill, ready for
service in the morning and so posted as to command every avenue of
ingress to the inauguration.

"One of the high winds which belong to the normal condition of
Washington began blowing at dark, and it increased to a gale during the
evening, rattling shutters, creaking signs and filling the air with
clouds of blinding dust which went whirling around the Capitol as if
they would bury it. This added materially to the appearance and feeling
of desolation, especially when the white stone being worked for the
Extension would gleam and disappear through the cloud, and suggest
graveyards and monuments for the national greatness that seemed to be
falling. Then at dusk we had the report that several hundreds of armed
horsemen had been discovered by one of Scott's scouts, lying in wait
over Anacosti, and ready to make a descent upon the doomed city the
moment that it should be buried in slumber. Many doubted this report,
but some believed it; and I have an impression that hundreds went to bed
in Washington that night with a lingering doubt whether they would not
be involved, before morning, or at all events before the noon of the
next day, in such scenes of violence and bloodshed as the continent had
never yet witnessed.

"I went over to the Capitol after tea, and took the place that had been
kindly kept for me in the reporters' gallery of the Senate. No matter
what occurred there--history has made it a part of our painful record,
and that is quite sufficient. It was between one and two o'clock in the
morning, Crittenden had just concluded his heart-breaking appeal to the
North to be generous and not let the Union go by default, and Baker had
just closed his noble appeal to the new dominant party (of which he was
one) not to peril a nation by the adoption of the old Roman cry of '_Vae
Victis_,'--when I left the Senate gallery for an hour, intending to
return when I had breathed for awhile outside of that suffocating
atmosphere. I passed to the front through the entrance under the
collonade, and was just about to step out into the open air, when a
voice arrested me. Surely I had heard it before.

"'Straws against a whirlwind!' I heard it say. 'The work is already
done, and no human power can undo it!'

"'I yet believe that the Union can be saved by the adoption of the plan
proposed by Crittenden!' said the other voice. 'Mason is right when he
says that Virginia will join the seceding States if no concession is
made; but--'

"A laugh, deep, sonorous, and yet hollow and mocking, broke out from the
lips of the first speaker, and rung through the arches--such a laugh as
we may suppose to have rung from the bearded lips of the Norse Jarl when
the poor Viking asked his daughter's hand and the father intended to
stun if not to kill him with the bitter scoff. I had heard that laugh
before, more moderately given, and minus the accompaniment of the
rushing wind without and the ringing of the hollow arches within. It was
that of Dexter Ralston, and I now detected that he and his companion
were standing just within one of the embrasures, so as to be partially
sheltered from the wind, and I could trace their outlines. Ralston was
enveloped in a large cloak, and wearing his inevitable broad hat; and
his companion seemed much smaller, dressed in dark clothes, and wearing
the usual 'stovepipe.' I had no intention to play listener, but there
really did not seem to be any wish for privacy on the part of the man
who could laugh in that manner; and, at all events, I stood still in the
doorway and listened to the discussion of that topic, as I might not
have done to another.

"'Well, what does the laugh mean?' asked the other, in a tone that did
not indicate remarkable good humor, when the sound had ceased.

"'Excuse me, I was not laughing at _you_!' said Ralston, 'but at the
blind, besotted fools who believe that they hold in their hands the
destinies of this Republic, and who really have no more power over them
than so many children playing at marbles! Hear Crittenden and Baker
begging and pleading within there, to save what is lost; and Mason, the
sly old fox, threatening them with what is already done!'

"'What do you mean?' asked the other? 'Virginia--'

"'Virginia has seceded!' spoke Ralston, with an accent that sounded like
a hiss. I do not to this moment know whether it expressed triumph or
anger.

"'Seceded!' spoke the other, startled, as was evident from his voice.
As for myself, I was trembling like a leaf, for I felt that the words
were true, that the treason was already unfathomable, and that the
Capitol was tumbling down about my ears long before it was finished.

"'Seceded? Yes, I spoke the word!' said Ralston, 'and you are not very
likely to believe that I am mistaken.'

"'No, no, certainly not!' replied the other, in a tone of energetic
disclaimer which showed that he knew _why_ Ralston was not deceived.
'But then, if this is so, why does Mason remain, and why is the fact
kept in the dark?'

"'_To gain time!_' answered Ralston, 'and to procure more arms. Virginia
is a 'loyal State,' and arms may be shipped to her, while they cannot to
the States that are known to have seceded. You can guess that the arms
go further south almost as fast as they reach Richmond, and that Colt's
pistols, especially, will pretty soon be beyond the reach of many men
who live north of Mason and Dixon's line. Do you understand _now_?' he
concluded.

"'Humph! Yes, I begin to know something more than I did a while ago!'
answered the other. 'Then, as you say, all that is going on in yonder is
a farce, and--'

"'And to-morrow's proceedings will be a more notable one!' Ralston broke
in. 'Some of them, I believe, have been afraid of violence to-morrow. No
fear of that--the game is to be played differently, and it is not yet
ripe for blood. Well, I have had enough of it. Good-night!'

"At the word Ralston stepped out from the arch, and his companion
followed him. By the lamp-light in front I caught a view of the face as
the former went out, and saw that I had not been mistaken as to the
voice. I had intended, when I first knew it was Ralston, to accost him
before he left, but I had now lost the desire, while my head was in that
whirl and his own position seemed to be so ambiguous. He stepped toward
the gateway, and, I believe, entered a carriage and drove off. The
other, whose face I recognized by the lamp-light to be that of a certain
New York Congressman of more than doubtful antecedents, went back again
the moment after, and I suppose returned to the Senate Chamber.

"As for myself, I may say that within half an hour after, late as it
was, I had placed myself in communication with a leading member of the
new party in power, with whom I happened to be well acquainted and who
was well known to have the ear of the new President, even if he did not
receive, within the next week, the portfolio of a Cabinet officer. I
need not say, at present, whether he received the Cabinet appointment or
not, as it is a matter of no consequence to my story. Without mentioning
any names, I told him what had fallen under my notice, and gave him my
opinion that Government ought to act as if Virginia had already seceded.
He thanked me for the trouble I had taken, and for my earnestness; said
that if the assertion was true, it would be highly important, as guiding
the immediate policy of the administration; but, pshaw!--and the whole
story is that he did not believe it. Of course the new administration
did not act as if Virginia had seceded; the Rebels were allowed to
gather arms at will and at leisure, Fortress Monroe came very near to
falling into their hands, and Norfolk Navy Yard did so, with the
destruction of half our best vessels, and ten millions of dollars worth
of Government property--all which might have been avoided if they had
taken a hint from a fool. Everybody understands now,[1] that Virginia
_had_ formally seceded before the inauguration, and that she played
loyal for the very purposes indicated by Ralston.

[Footnote 1: September, 1862.]

"Now," Leslie concluded, "you know as much of Dexter Ralston as I do.
And I think you will quite agree with me that he is one of the last men
I could have expected to meet in the streets of New York at the present
moment, when martial law is so prevalent and Fort Lafayette so
convenient."

"Humph!" said Harding, getting up from the bed where he had lounged so
long, examining his watch to see that it was nearly midnight, and
lighting a fresh cigar to go home. "Humph! well, what do you make of
him? A leading traitor, deep in the counsels of Jeff. Davis, Yancey and
Company?"

"Humph!" said Leslie in return, "what else can he be?"

"Or a Virginia Unionist, faithful among the faithless, and too brave to
be afraid anywhere?" suggested Harding.

"Ah!" answered Leslie, in that tone which suggests a new idea, or the
corroboration of an old one.

"Or a trusted agent of the Federal Government, giving up old prejudices
for the sake of patriotism, and better acquainted with Seward than
Slidell--eh?"

"By George!" exclaimed Leslie, "there is something in that idea! He must
be one of the three--but which?"

"That we may know better one of these days," said Harding, as Leslie
accompanied him out to the street. "Meanwhile he is certainly a most
singular person, and I shall not be sorry to know more of him, whether
as friend or foe to the nation!"

How soon and how remarkably his wish was fulfilled, to some extent, we
shall see hereafter.




CHAPTER II.

THE INVALID AND THE WILD MADONNA--A BRAVE HEART BEATING THE BARS OF ITS
PRISON--ODD COMFORT AND DOUBTFUL CONSOLATION--THE DAWN OF A TERRIBLE
SUSPICION.


In the neat and tastefully-furnished back parlor of a house on West
3--th Street, one afternoon, at very nearly the same period mentioned in
a previous chapter--the latter part of June, 1862--lay on the sofa a
young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a countenance that would have
been strikingly handsome if it had not been drawn and attenuated by
suffering. He had a well-chiselled face, clear blue eyes, and
light-brown, curling hair, closely shaven of beard or moustache; still
showing, spite of sickness, the manly nature that lay within, and which
always makes, when it radiates outward, a pleasanter picture for the eye
of a true woman than can be supplied by even high health and the most
perfect physical beauty without it. The limbs, extended upon the sofa as
he lay, though a little attenuated like the face, showed that they were
well-formed and athletic. And the hand, drooping over the side of the
couch, though too thinly white to suggest a love-pressure, indicated, in
the taper of the fingers, and the fine round of the back, without any
coarse protruding knuckles, what a handsome little Napoleonic hand it
must have been when the owner was in full health and the life-blood
coursing freely through his veins.

By the appearance of the little back parlor, it seemed to be half
sick-room and half study, for, in addition to the sofa and an
easy-chair, there was a well-filled book-case, in walnut, and a
writing-desk open on a small table, with blank paper, some manuscripts,
pens, ink, and a book or two lying open, as if the occupant had been
writing not long before, and lain down from pain and weariness, without
waiting to replace his writing materials in their proper position.
Through the open door of a small room adjoining, some pieces of bed-room
furniture could be seen, showing that when the invalid wished to find
more complete repose, he could do so without painful removal to any
distance. Close by his side lay a daily newspaper fallen upon the floor,
with the sensation-headings of war-time displayed at the top of one of
the columns; and in his hand he held a palm-leaf fan, with which he had
apparently been trying to wave off some portion of the sultry heat of
the afternoon. At length the fan grew still, the weak hand fell down on
his breast, and he seemed to be dropping away into quiet slumber.

Suddenly a strain of martial music floated through the open windows--at
first low and gentle, then bursting loud and clear, with the rattle of
drums, the screaming of reeds and the clash of cymbals, as a band came
nearer along the avenue and approached the corner of the street. The
invalid's face lit up--he made a motion to rise hastily from the sofa--a
sudden spasm of pain crossed his countenance, and he fell back
exhausted, with a slight cry which instantly brought the sound of
sliding doors between the little back parlor and the large room that
adjoined it in front, and sent a pair of light feet flying into the
room.

"Trying to get up again, eh, old fellow? I know you! Couldn't lie still
when that music was going by! Now you great big boy, you ought to know
better!" Such were the words with which the young girl greeted the
sufferer, as she dropped down on her knees by the side of the sofa and
took one of his hands in both hers.

"Yes, Joe, I _was_ trying to get up and listen to the music," was the
reply. "You know how I have always loved the brass band, and how it
seems to rack my frame even worse than disease, just now! See what a
wreck I am, when I cannot even attempt to rise from the sofa without
screaming in that manner and alarming the house!"

"Oh, never mind alarming the house!" replied the girl, whom he had
called "Joe," the very convenient and popular abbreviation of the
Christian name of Miss Josephine Harris. She was, it may be said here,
an almost every-day visitor from the house of her widowed mother, a lady
in very comfortable circumstances, living not many blocks away up-town
from the residence of the Crawfords. In ordinary seasons Joe and her
mother (the young lady is made to precede the other, advisedly)--had a
habit of getting away from the city, early in the season, to one of the
watering-places or some cool retreat in the country; but this year
perhaps the illness of Richard Crawford had something to do with
retaining at least the daughter late in town. "The house can get along
well enough--it is _you_ that is to be taken care of, and I should like
to know, Dick Crawford, how any body is going to do it if you do not
manage to moderate your transports and lie still when you have not
strength to do any thing else!"

How her tongue ran on, and what a tongue she had! Not a bit of sting in
it, except when she was fully aroused to anger, and then it would
suddenly develope the faculty of morally flaying her victim alive, with
words of indignation that tumbled over each other without calculation or
order, in the effort to escape the tears of vexation that were sure to
follow close behind. At such moments Joe's tongue was actually cruel,
though without premeditation; at other times it was simply a very rapid
and noisy tongue, that spoke very sweet words most of the time and
exercised an influence all around it that no one could attempt to
describe. But perhaps the tongue was not alone concerned in the matter.
There may have been something in the rather tall and lithe form--the
brown cheek with a dash of color shining through it the moment she was
in the least degree warmed or excited--the eyes dark but sunny, wavering
between hazel brown and Irish gray, and the most difficult eyes in the
world to look into and yet keep your head--the profile uneven and
partially spoiled by the nose being decidedly pert, retrousse and too
small for the other features--the pouting red lips that never seemed to
fade and grow pale as the lips of so many American women do before one
half their sweetness has been extracted by the human bee--the wealth of
glossy black hair, coming down on the low forehead and plainly swept
back in the Madonna fashion over a face that otherwise had the purity
and goodness of the Madonna in it, but very little of her
devotion,--perhaps there was something in all this, besides the
influence of her flood-tide of language, to make Josephine Harris the
delight, the botheration and the absolute tyrant of more than half the
persons with whom she was thrown in contact. Perhaps there was even more
than all, to those with whom she came into closer intercourse, in the
breath that always seemed as if it came over a bank of over-ripe
strawberries dying in the sun, late in summer--and that intoxicated with
its aroma as rare old wine does with its flavor.

It is not difficult to believe (par parenthese) that the pearls and
diamonds that dropped from the mouth of the good little princess in the
old fairy story, every time she opened the ruby portals of her lips,
dissolved themselves into air and came out in breath suggestive of
spice-fields and orange-groves, and that the toads and scorpions falling
from the mouth of her wicked sister manifested themselves in a
corresponding rank and fetid odor. So bear with us, lady of the fevered
breath, if we take the privilege of ago and long sight to drink in your
flood of pleasant wisdom from a distance; and think not your lover
overbold, Edie of the Red Lips, if he bends so near you when you speak,
that the waves of brown and the curls of black even nestle together!

"Another sermon, eh, Joseph?" said the invalid, trying to smile and
apparently soothed away from his pain by the very presence of the young
girl. "Another sermon just because I cannot _always_ remember that I am
a poor miserable wreck!"

"Miserable fiddlestick!" said Joe, smoothing down his hair with both
hands and accidentally stooping down so low that her lips came near
enough to his forehead to breathe on it and send a pleasant creeping
chill to the very tips of his toes. "I read you sermons, as you call
them, because you are very impatient and very imprudent, and because I
really have no one but yourself who is tied down so as not to be able to
run away when I begin preaching. Don't you see that?"

"Yes, I do!" said the invalid, whom she had unconsciously introduced to
us in calling him Dick Crawford--"I see!" and his face grew into a
transient smile in spite of himself. "But where is my sister, and what
was the music?"

"Two questions at once, like all the men!" the saucy girl answered. "But
go ahead, for asking questions won't hurt your rheumatism. Bell has gone
out shopping, I believe. She discovered an hour ago that there was a
shade of cerise ribbon somewhere or other that she had not managed to
get hold of, and of course she ordered the carriage at once and posted
after it. As for the music--oh, the music was a brass band accompanying
the One Hundred and Ninetieth Regiment. They are going to leave
to-morrow, and they came up the avenue to receive a set of colors from
Mrs. Pearl Dowlas, the ugly old woman with all that brown-stone
incumbrance and three flags in the windows, round the corner."

"Going to-morrow!" said the invalid, and the old pained expression came
back to his face. "Going to-morrow!--everybody is going!--and I lie here
like a crushed worm, unable to move from my couch, useless to myself or
to any one else, when the country is calling upon all her children to
aid her! Pest on it! I would trade life, hopes, brains if I have any,
every thing, for a sound body to-day!"

"And make a great fool of yourself in doing so!" was the flattering
response of Josephine. "Now I suppose that music and my gabble have
started the mill, and we shall have nothing else during the rest of the
day than the same old weepings and wailings and gnashings of teeth. Just
as if, because a war exists, there was nothing else in the world to do
but to go to the war! Just as if we did not require some attention paid
to the needs of the country at home, as well as on the battle-field!
Just as if we did not need that the trade, and the literature--yes, the
_literature_ of the country--should be sustained."

"Pshaw!" said Crawford, impatiently, and making an effort to turn over,
with his face to the wall.

"No you don't, old fellow!" cried the young girl, exercising the little
restraint that was necessary. "You don't get away from me in that
manner. I will stop your grumbling before I have done with you, by a
remedy a little worse than the disease--plenty of my own gabble! I said
literature--do you see that desk littered with papers, you ungrateful
wretch?" (It will be seen that Josephine Harris had a habit of using
strong Saxon words, as well as some that were "fast," not to say
bordering upon popular slang; and the reader may as well be horrified
with her, and get over it, first as last.) "You have sent out from that
desk words that have done more good to the patriotic cause than the
raising of ten regiments, and yet you have not the grace to thank God
for giving you the strength to do _that_! You _dare_ to lie there and
call yourself useless! Out upon you--I am ashamed of you!"

"Words are not deeds!" said the young man, again moving uneasily.

"Words, when they come from the furnace of a true heart, shape
themselves into deeds in others," was the reply.

"In the days of the Revolution, my ancestors did their deeds, instead of
shaping them," said the invalid. "Two of them dead in the Old Sugar
House and the prison ships at the Wallabout, and another crippled for
life at Saratoga, bore witness that patriotism with them was no hollow
pretence. And look at the present. My brother John going through battle
after battle with Duryea's Zouaves, in Virginia, like a brave man and a
soldier; and I lying helpless here, while my cousin Egbert has his
regiment almost raised."

"_Almost_," said the young girl, in a tone which showed that she did not
think he had quite accomplished that laudable endeavor.

"And will be going down directly," Crawford continued.

"Yes, going down, clear down, that is if he ever starts!" commented
saucy Josephine.

"Yes, I remember, you do not like my cousin Egbert," said the invalid.

"I do not like humbugs anywhere!" sharply said the young girl. "Why
don't you call him 'Eg.,' as you do sometimes? Then I should be tempted
to make a few bad puns, and to say that in my opinion he is not a 'good
egg,' but a 'hard egg,' if not a 'bad egg,' and that I hope if he ever
gets among the Virginia sands he will come out a 'roast egg' or a
'cracked' one!"

"Shame, Joe, what do you mean!" said the invalid, really pained by her
flippancy.

"Mean? why, mean what I say!" was the answer, "and that is a good deal
more than most of the people do now-a-days. Your cousin Egbert is a big
humbug! I never see him strutting about, with his shoulder-straps and
his red sword-belts, but I have a mind to take the first off his
shoulders, with claws like a cat, and use the second to strap him with,
like a truant school-boy!"

"Why, Josephine, Josephine!" cried the invalid, still more surprised.

"Don't stop me!" said the wild girl. "I have intended for some time to
say this to you, but you have been very sick, and somehow I could not
begin the conversation. Now that it is begun, I am going to out with it,
if it costs a lawsuit. I do not like that man, nor would you if you
could know him half as well as I do. In the first place, I believe he is
a coward, and worth no more to the cause than just what his gimcracks
would sell for."

"Shame!" again said the invalid. "Josephine, you are really going too
far. If he was a coward, why would he have placed himself in a position
which must by-and-by be one of danger?

"Bah!" said the young girl, "I do not see that he has done any thing of
the kind. Officers have the right of resigning, and some of them have
the habit of skulking, I have heard. I will bet my best bonnet against
your old worn-out slippers there, that if ever brought to the test your
shoulder-strapped cousin would do one or the other! Besides--" and here
she paused.

"Well, what is the 'besides'?" asked the young man, a little
impatiently.

"Besides, he hates you like a rattlesnake, and would do any thing in his
power to get you out of his way," the young girl said, giving out the
words as if she was performing a painful operation and only doing it
under a strong sense of duty. "Tell me: is there any point in which your
interests would run counter to each other? I have seen daggers and
poison in that man's eyes when looking at you, and when you have not
observed him!"

"Interests?--in conflict? Good heavens, what are you saying, Josephine?
Hate me--he?" and a terrible shadow passed over the face of the invalid.
A moment before he had been unable to raise himself from the sofa, or
bear the least motion, without agony. Now, in the excitement produced by
her words and by some horrible doubt which they seemed to have awakened,
he forgot the pain, or did not heed it, and struggled up to a sitting
posture, his hands to his head and the whole expression of his face
changed to one of intense mental suffering.

"Mr. Crawford--Dick!" the young girl cried in alarm; "what has
happened--what have I said?--tell me: are you in sudden pain?" and she
threw her arm around him to sustain him in his sitting position.

"Do not ask me!" he said, hoarsely. "I cannot speak just now, but you
have agitated me very much. My cousin--in his way--heavens!"

At this moment, and when the young girl, frightened at what she had
done, scarcely dared to speak another word, and was altogether at a loss
what to do, there was a rattle of carriage wheels at the door, the sound
of a latch-key applied to the lock, then steps and voices in the hall.

"Talk of the Prince of Darkness, and he is not very far from your
elbow!" said Josephine, whose ears were sharper than those of the
invalid. "I hear Bell's voice and that of the puissant and patriotic
Colonel Egbert Crawford, who has evidently come home with her."

"_His_ voice with hers, after what you have said!" the invalid gasped.
"Lay me down quick, and hurt me as little as possible. I have not
strength to sit up, and this pain--this pain--it drives me to
distraction!" One hand was still at his head, and the other had fallen,
whether accidentally or otherwise, over his heart. Whether the one hand
or the other covered the pain of which he had that moment spoken, was
difficult to tell. One thing was certain--that something in the last few
moments had broken him down in health and spirits, even more than his
long previous sickness. What was it?

Josephine, ever an excellent nurse in sickness (spite of her rapid
tongue), and the one of all a crowd who was certain to have the head of
the fainted woman on her breast, and her hands chafing the pallid
temples,--assisted the invalid back to his recumbent position as quickly
and as easily as possible; and at the moment when she had once more
arranged the pillow under his head on the sofa, the glass doors between
the front and back parlors slid gently apart, and Isabel Crawford and
her cousin the Colonel, who had lately been the subject of so much
speculation and agitation, approached the sofa of the rheumatic. His
eyes were closed, and Josephine was standing at the open window with its
closed blinds. Still she saw what the new-comers did not--a quick,
convulsive shudder pass over the recumbent form, and the hand that lay
on his heart close with a nervous spasm, as if it was crushing something
hateful and dangerous that lay within it.

But the personal appearance of the two who had just entered, and the
after events of that interview, must be recorded in a subsequent
chapter.




CHAPTER III.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER--LOVE, HATE, AND DISOBEDIENCE--JUDGE OWEN IN A
STORM--AUNT MARTHA AND HER RECORD OF UNLOVING MARRIAGE AND WEDDED
OUTRAGE.


It was a very pleasant picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen, wife of Judge
Owen of the ----th District Court, was looking just at twilight of a
June evening; but something in that picture, or its surroundings, did
not seem to please her; for her comely though matronly face was drawn
into an expression of displeasure, and the little mice about the
wainscot, if any there were, might occasionally have heard her foot
patting the floor with impatience and vexation.

The time has been already indicated. The place was the back parlor of
Judge Owen's house, on a street not far from the Harlem River--the
window open and the parlor opening into a neat little yard, half garden
and half conservatory, with glimpses over the unoccupied lots beyond, of
the junction of Harlem River with the Sound, up which the Boston boats
had only a little while before disappeared on their way eastward, and
where a few white sails of trading-schooners and pleasure-boats could
yet be seen through the gathering twilight.

But this did not comprise all the picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen
looked; for in the window, with the last rays of the dying daylight
falling upon face and figure, sat her daughter Emily, listlessly toying
with the leaves of a book that she had been reading until the light grew
too indistinct, and with a slight pout on her lip and an expression of
dissatisfaction generally distributed over her pretty face, which showed
that her own vexation and that of her mother had some kind of connection
more or less mysterious. The face was not only pretty, as every one
could see,--but softly rounded, womanly and most loveable while yet
girlish, as only those could fully realize who had known something of
the comparative characters of women. The eyes (in a better light) were
hazel, with a depth and transparency which made the very thought of a
mean action in her presence apparently impossible; the cheek that showed
against the fading light had been rounded to perfection in the soft
atmosphere floating about eighteen, as a peach is rounded and colored by
the genial air and sunshine of late summer: the heavy masses of hair
that had partially fallen out of their confinement and swept down to her
shoulders, were scarcely darker than nut-brown; and the hand toying with
the book would have shown, even without a better glimpse of the half
recumbent figure, that that figure was of medium height, fully rounded
and delicately voluptuous. It is not to be supposed that Emily Owen knew
quite all this of herself. Some others realized all her perfections,
however, as will more fully and at large appear (to use the
conveyancers' phraseology); and for the purposes of this narrative it is
necessary to have the lady distinctly before us.

And now what had caused the shadow on the matronly face of Mrs. Owen,
and the pout on the red lip of Emily? The old--old story: told over at
some period or other in almost every household on earth. Old eyes and
young eyes, seeing very differently; old hearts and young hearts,
beating to very different tunes, and informing the whole being with very
different aspirations. There was a love--there was a dislike--and there
was a certain amount of parental solicitude and determination--excellent
materials from which to construct a serious disagreement and an eventual
family row. Not Hecate, when she threw "eye of newt and tail of frog"
into the infernal brew on the blasted heath, could have been more
certain of the final nature of her compound, than may the presiding
genius of any "well regulated family" be of the eventual result when the
two acids of love and hate are brought chemically together in the heart
of budding womanhood.

There was a certain John Boadley Bancker, a man of a family exceedingly
respectable, though decayed, who had himself been a speculator in lands
and stocks and amassed more or less money, and who was popularly
understood to have been intrusted by Major General Governor Morgan with
the authority of Colonel and the permission to raise a regiment for the
war. There was a certain Frank Wallace, a young man of no particular
family that any one had ever heard mentioned, a fellow of infinite jest
and agreeableness, but very little money and no commission at all except
to make love when necessary and extract as much comfort as possible from
the passing hour,--who carried on a small printing business which just
made him a comfortable livelihood, in a narrow street within a stone's
throw of the Museum. It was the bounden duty of Miss Emily Owen, seeing
that the portly Judge, her father, and the pleasant matron, her mother,
had formed the very highest opinion of one of these gentlemen, to fall
in love with him as quickly as possible. Of course she had contracted
for him a most unconquerable aversion! It was her bounden duty to ignore
the other, even if she did not hate and despise him--seeing that he
found no other friend in her family: could there have been a stronger
guaranty for her going madly in love with the scapegrace?

A moment after the period when we saw them sitting in silence and mutual
discomfort, mother and daughter resumed the conversation which had
brought about that state of feeling.

"You will be sorry for what you have said, Emily!" said the mother.

"So will you, for what _you_ have said!" was the reply of the daughter,
with that species of iteration which displays no wit but a great deal of
earnestness.

"You know, as well as I do, that your father has set his heart upon this
match," continued the mother, "and you know how much he is in the habit
of allowing others to oppose him."

"Yes, I know," replied the young girl, "and I know one thing more."

"Indeed! and what is that?" asked the mother, with the slightest
perceptible shade of a sneer in her voice.

"--That both you and my father made a serious blunder in bringing _me_
into the world, if you meant to get along entirely without opposition!"

"Hoity toity!" exclaimed the mother, quite as much surprised as nettled
at this original and forcible way of stating a domestic fact. "What has
become of your modesty? Do you mean to insult both your father and
myself?"

"No!" said the young girl, in a sharper tone and with her words cut off
much shorter and more decidedly than was her habit. While those plump
little white fingers had been toying with the leaves of the book,
sitting there in the twilight, heart and hand had evidently both been
busy, and they had produced any other effect rather than making their
owner more tractable. "No! mother, no! But I tell you, once for all,
that the match you are talking of is hateful! I have tried to keep still
while the affair seemed at some distance, but now that you bring it
closer it fills my whole being with disgust! Do drop it if you do not
wish to drive me mad or make me disobedient. Oh, mother!" and the whole
manner of the young girl seemed to change and melt in a moment, as she
rose hastily from her chair, ran to that on which her mother was seated,
threw herself on her knees with her arms around her parent, and buried
her face in the sheltering lap,--"oh mother! do be my friend instead of
my enemy, in this! I cannot--indeed I cannot marry that man!"

There are a good many things they think they cannot do--these young
girls--and they never know themselves until they are tried. Perhaps it
may not always be well to try them to their full capacity, however!

What Mrs. Maria Owen might have answered to this appeal, under other
circumstances, is uncertain. She was, or intended to be, a good and
tender mother, and would have cut off her right hand rather than do any
thing which could make against the ultimate happiness of her daughter;
and she really, at that moment, must have caught a glimpse of the fact
that the heart of the young girl was very much interested in her
refusal. But if there was any sentiment which the worthy woman
entertained more deeply than another, it was the belief that Judge Owen,
her husband, was the most wonderful man in the world. She thought of him
with pride when his portly figure disappeared down the steps of a
morning, when he was starting to go to "Court." She thought of him with
a respect amounting to reverence when she contemplated him sitting

   "At once mild and severe,
   On his seat of dooming,"

(to quote good old Esaias Tegner) a local Rhadamanthus from whose
judgment there could not be any possible appeal (although, sooth to say,
there _were_ a good many appeals, and quite effectual ones, from the
very unimportant decisions to which only his authority extended). And
when he came home at night, after dispensing justice for the whole day
(to wit--three hours on the average) she looked with almost holy
reverence on his broad brow, under which there must lie such a store of
legal knowledge, and thought what a blessed and honored woman she was to
have been allowed to mate with so much wisdom and so much dignity.

Does this sound like sneering at the wife's pride and devotion? If so,
let there be a word to qualify it. God knows that there are not too many
women who respect and look up to their husbands, and that the sanctity
and the happiness of the domestic circle would be much seldomer invaded
if there was more of this feeling. Only those poor women, on an average,
make such terrible mistakes as to the instances that should demand or
allow the full indulgence of this pride; and miserable humbugs are
looked up to and worshipped so much of the time, while those who could
deserve and should command that feeling are treated with indifference or
even despised by inferior minds to which they have been mated! They do
not "manage these things" any "better in France," probably; but they
manage them ill enough in republican America at about this period, and
the result is not a pleasant or even a moral one!

The check to any possible motherly concession to the weakness of Emily,
which Mrs. Owen experienced on this occasion, arose from the coming of
the ponderous man of law, whose heavy footstep and loud cough were at
that moment heard in the hall. Had the daughter been less absorbed than
she was in her own feelings, she too might have heard those tokens of
the Judge's presence; and had she been as wise as her mother, any
further discussion of the subject would have been stopped and the coming
catastrophe averted.

Either she did not observe or she was too much absorbed to heed who
heard her, for at the very moment when Judge Owen, a large-framed,
portly, broad-browed, iron-gray man of fifty, entered the back parlor
and stood full in the presence of his wife and daughter, the latter was
looking up to her mother with clasped hands and half sobbing out a
repetition of her former declaration: "I cannot--indeed I cannot marry
that man!"

"Hush! Emily, hush!--no more of this!" said the mother, half in hope
that her husband might not have caught the words; but she was widely
mistaken. The ears so much in the habit of listening to the least quaver
in the tone of a witness's voice, were not to be trifled with in the
present instance.

"Hey? What is this?" asked the Judge, in a tone that admitted of no
trifling in the answer.

"Nothing--that is--Emily was talking of--" began the abashed wife, with
a stammer.

"Of--_I_ know," said the father, who had heard quite enough of his
daughter's words to know without asking, and who was more behind the
curtain than his wife, in some other respects. "I heard what this
school-girl muttered. She _cannot_ marry the man whom I intend she
_shall_ marry, and she has taken this opportunity, when she supposed I
was absent, to acquaint you with her determination."

"Not determination," said the mother, willing to smooth affairs as much
as possible--"say wish."

"No, mother, determination!" said the young girl, springing to her feet
with an energy which was really not an ordinary part of her
nature,--under the impression that now, if ever, was the time to give
utterance to her true sentiments. "Father used the right
word--determination! I cannot marry Boad Bancker, and I won't! There you
have it!"

There was nothing classic or even romantic in the young lady's mode of
expression, or the nickname which she bestowed upon her would-be lover;
but they were at least natural, which is something gained in this world
of pretences and deceptions.

"You won't? and why, I should like to know?" broke in the Judge, for the
moment surprised out of the violence that might have resulted, by the
very audacity of the declaration.

"Because he is hateful, and ugly, and I do not like him, and--" answered
Miss Emily, with a charming return to the system of the school-girl
which she had just been called by her father.

"Silence!" thundered Judge Owen, who had recovered from the blow and
thought that he had a refractory juryman or an insolent attorney to put
down. "Silence! I have had enough of this. John Boadley Bancker is the
man I have selected for your husband. He belongs to an excellent family,
has wealth enough to keep a wife in comfort and even luxury, and has
lately proved himself a true patriot by springing up at the call of the
President--" (Judge Owen had by this time forgotten his indignation, and
fancied himself for the moment addressing an immense assemblage at Union
Square or in the Park)--"by springing up at the call of the President,
girding on his--"

"--Shoulder-straps!" put in Miss Emily, who had recovered from her
agitation and began to be mischievous the moment her father began to be
didactic and ponderous. Whether he heard the interpolation or not, is
somewhat doubtful.

"--Girding on his sword," the Judge went on, "and marching--"

"--Up and down Broadway!" put in the young girl, in a second
parenthesis, not more audible than the other.

"That is, he has not marched, but is going to march to the seat of war,
to fight for--"

"--The niggers!" again and finally interpolated the incorrigible, who
had somehow managed to get a peep behind the curtain of national affairs
and to see towards what the great struggle seemed tending.

"--For the defence of the country," the Judge concluded his peroration.
Then he went on with the pith of his remark, to the effect that the girl
who could be mad enough and disobedient enough to refuse the hand of
such a man as _that_, might go to--mumble--mumble--mumble--for she could
never more be daughter of his!

By this time Emily had recovered her equanimity, and almost her spirits,
and her mother shared in the feeling of relief, for the explosion had
not been half so violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms,
the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and
the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole
ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a
vulgarism, she "put her foot in it."

"Boad Bancker," she said (she had the common weakness of supposing that
the use of a nickname belittled the person spoken of)--"Boad Bancker may
be a soldier, but nobody knows it. I know he is a fool; and he is a
miserable humbug, pretending to be a young man, when he is as old as
_you_, Pa!"

If Judge Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the
bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and
that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under
the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to
disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would
have made him so angry. He had only muttered before--this time he
thundered.

"Old! You are talking about age, are you, you shameless, impertinent
hussy--insulting _me_ as well as my friends, are you! I know you, and by
G--" (he was a dignitary of the legal profession, and he was speaking in
the presence of his wife and daughter; but the truth must be
recorded)--"I know what you are driving at, and I'll break you of your
fancy or I'll break your stubborn neck! You don't like Bancker, the
husband _I_ pick out for you, because he is not a beardless boy, and you
choose to consider him _old_. And you think I will permit you to
encourage that miserable beggar, Frank Wallace, because he is _young_!
Let me see one more sign of familiarity between him and yourself, and I
will kick him out of the house, as I would a dog--and you may go after
him! Do you hear me? Now look out!" And the Judge rang the bell for the
servant, scolded her for not lighting the gas that no one had before
wished lighted, and stormed out of the room, leaving his wife to follow
him, and his daughter to drop again into her chair and muse over the
pleasant prospect for after-life lying so broadly before her.

But if the young girl had passed through an agitating and unpleasant
scene, and if the prospects for her future life had been sensibly
narrowed within the preceding half hour, the depths of her being had not
been stirred as they were to be before she slept. Perhaps she had
occupied the position of depression into which she had fallen, in the
chair by the window, with her head upon her hand, for five minutes--a
bitter sea of thought surging through her mind, and her flash of
resolution so giving way before her father's terrible anger, that she
felt almost ready to sacrifice her happiness, life, every thing, to obey
him and secure peace--when a hand was laid gently upon her shoulder, and
the quiet face of Aunt Martha, framed in its widow's cap, peered into
her own.

"Oh, Aunt, I am so glad you have come down! I was so lonely and so
wretched!" broke out Emily, the moment she felt the touch and saw the
face.

"I have been down some time, sitting in the front parlor by the window,
and trying to make music out of that very-badly-cracked hand-organ that
was playing on the other side of the way," said the widow, taking her
seat by the young girl's side. Perhaps five-and-forty years had passed
over the widowed younger sister of Judge Owen, who made her home in a
quiet upper chamber of his house. But they had not much thinned her tall
and magnificent form, or entirely destroyed, though they had completely
_subdued_, the quiet beauty of her face, which must once have been
strikingly like that of her niece. She had been in youth the underling
of her family, as her elder brother had been the tyrant; and it was
perhaps a fitting sequel, that at this period of her life she should
have become, to some small extent, a pensioner on his bounty, as well as
a peacemaker in his household.

"You have been in the front parlor some time?" echoed her niece,
surprised. "Then you must have heard--"

"I heard quite enough," was the answer, as Aunt Martha possessed
herself of both the young girl's hands, and finally drew down the
nut-brown head so that it rested upon her bosom. "I heard a few of your
words--enough to tell me what are your feelings toward the man whom they
wish to make your husband. I heard your father's fierce resolution, and
I made my own."

"And what was that?" asked the young girl, rising from her recumbent
position, and showing something of the surprise she felt at hearing her
gentle and pliant aunt speak of forming resolutions. She had cause to be
more surprised in a moment.

"What was my resolution?" echoed Aunt Martha. "A strange one, perhaps,
but one quite as immovable as my big brother's!"

"Yes, yes--tell me, Aunt, _dear_ Aunt!" pleaded Emily, feeling that
there was some shadow of hope in such words from such a source.

"My resolution?" said the placid woman, placid now no longer, but
starting to her feet, speaking with rapid energy, and seeming, for the
moment, half a foot taller than usual--"My resolution is that you shall
never marry the man whom I have heard you say that you loathe and
detest--not if sacrificing myself can save you--not if I can prevent the
wrong, by even taking his life!"

"Aunt! Aunt I what are you saying!" broke out the young girl, surprised,
and even horrified. "Do not say so, Aunt, for heaven's sake! I _do_
dislike Col. Bancker; I cannot marry him without misery; but his life!
You do not know what words you use."

"Do I not?" said the aunt, and there was a bitterness in her tone which
her niece had never before heard there, and which perhaps no one else
had heard there for many a long year. "Do I not? His life--pshaw! what
is his life, or the life of any man, compared to some other lives that
are sacrificed without punishment or even the knowledge of any crime
being committed!"

"Aunt, dear Aunt, it is for me that you are saying this, and you know
that I thank you; but you are excited, you are not yourself--"

"I _am_ myself--perhaps for the first time in years!" said the widow,
the tones of her voice still betraying the same bitterness. "In the last
half hour I have lived over again half a life-time of misery. Close that
door!" And she pointed to the door leading into the front parlor, with a
gesture of command that shamed her brother's most forcible attempt at
dignity. Her niece closed the door, and stepped back to her chair. The
aunt retained her standing position, and a part of the time walked the
floor of the little back parlor with strides that the shorter limbs of
Emily could not have compassed, as she went on:

"I had you close that door because I did not wish to speak to the whole
house: though the whole house might hear me without disadvantage to
themselves. You do not know why I am so much excited: I will tell you.
That man--your father and my brother--did an unwise thing in recalling
the past by that brutal speech and that rough oath; but he did recall
it, and he must take the consequences. I have said that you should not
marry that man whom you detest, and you shall not--no matter how I
prevent it! But do not mistake me, Emily! I am not arranging that you
shall marry another man, and one whom your parents dislike. That is your
business, not mine."

"I will not marry against my parents' will or against yours," said
Emily, as her aunt paused for a moment--"only prevent my marrying this
man whom I dislike, without doing any crime!"

"Hush, and listen to _me_!" said the aunt, almost sternly. "Do you think
that it is of yourself alone that I am speaking? No--I am thinking and
speaking more of myself than of you. Do you guess the riddle? No, you
cannot. Emily, _I have myself once married a man whom I loathed, and I
know what it means!_"

"You, Aunt? good heavens!" was the pitying reply of the young girl,
while the usually placid widow, occasionally with both hands to her head
as if in severe suffering, still walked the room as she spoke.

"You begin to understand me, and you begin to perceive how that man
threatening to marry _you_ to a man you hate, has opened again the
wounds of my own sacrifice--a sacrifice _he_ made nearly twenty years
ago--heaven forgive him! Richard West was a gambler and a libertine.
There was an indefinable something which told me as much, very soon
after I met him. He was tall and fine-looking, and he had political
influence. My brother had a motive for courting him. He carried out that
object by introducing him to _me_. I can scarcely say that I loved
elsewhere, though I certainly had a preference. From the first I had a
dislike to West, which soon grew into absolute aversion. Meanwhile I was
allowing myself to be more and more in his company, and my whole family,
with my big brother at their head, were importuning me to marry him. I
was a little reckless and did not know myself; and I think it was more
to get clear of his importunities and theirs, than for any other
purpose, that I at last permitted myself to be engaged to him. I hated
to be teased--I had no other settled hope in the world--and so I
promised to marry a man whom I despised. Are you listening?"

"Yes, dear Aunt, listening with my whole heart as well as my ears!" said
the young girl, creeping up to her as she made a momentary pause, and
taking one of her aunt's hands in both of her own. Strange to say, the
aunt did not permit her hand to be retained. She drew it away as if for
the moment she had no care for human sympathy,--and went on with her
agitated walk and her narration.

"I had a shuddering horror of the marriage, very soon after my
engagement was formed, though I knew nothing, except from my own
perception, against the character of West. That feeling grew as the
marriage day approached, and I found that instead of schooling myself to
meet with calmness what was now inevitable, every day increased an
aversion which was both mental and physical. I commenced to make my
wedding clothes. I began to think that I would rather be making my
shroud. And yet I worked on, stolidly, and bore the caresses of the man
who was so soon to be my husband. He grew warmer and warmer in his
manifestations as the marriage day approached. I suppose he thought he
was flattering and pleasing me! God help him, if he did! I was handsome,
I know it--and the sensualist began to gloat over the charms he would
so soon have in possession. I began to think how soon the slimy worms
would crawl over me! At length all this culminated. West was fool enough
to take me one night to the Old Park Theatre, where Ellen Tree was then
playing. She played _Julia_, in "The Hunchback," and I heard her make
that agonized appeal to _Master Walter_ and allude to the expected
horrors of an unloving marriage-bed. My eyes were opened. I saw it all,
now, as I had never done before. It was not alone my existence and my
mentality that I must sacrifice, but my _body_. That too was to be given
up! To what horrible profanation and outrage was I to be subjected! My
head grew dizzy and my eyes blind. I shared in the torments of
_Julia_--I was _Julia_ herself. I was on the brink of a precipice, with
hell beneath me and devils goading me on to the leap. I went home
stunned and half crazed. West spoke to me, but I believe that I never
answered him a word. If I could have killed him suddenly and without
reflection, I should have done it.

"The next day I implored my brother to assist me in breaking the hateful
engagement. He refused, insultingly, and threatened me with a ruined
reputation and the scorn of every one who knew me, if, after being so
notoriously engaged to West, and in his private society so much, the
marriage should now be broken off. I had no one else to whom to appeal,
and appeal to my _bridegroom_ would have been worse than useless. I
could not combat every thing and everybody. My God! my God!--that I
should have given up!--but I did. I went on finishing my
wedding-clothes, with only a week between me and their use. Oh how I
shuddered as my needle ran over the soft white laces and ruffles! They
were to deck my dainty limbs for _outrage_--such outrage as I did not
then know--and such as you can only dream. I only saw before me a vague
horror, but that horror was enough to set me on the dizzy verge of
madness, of suicide or of _murder_.

"A week went by, and in the presence of a minister of God I swore to a
lie. Richard West swore to another, for he was no more capable of love
than of honor. Then followed what, woman though you already are, I
cannot tell you of--prostitution, outrage, that left me a poor
dishonored _thing_--my womanhood a curse, and the creeping horror of
physical repugnance to a loathsome touch my bridal portion! God forgive
those who forced me to this! God forgive them!--I do not know that _I_
ever can! Ten years afterwards I saw one happy day--the first since my
engagement. It was when Richard West was shot down in a gambling-house
by one of his victims, and brought home dead!

"Now, Emily, you know, better than any other living, the heart of the
woman who is supposed to be so calm and placid! Now you can have some
idea what I have suffered to-night, when I saw the same pit opening for
_you_? Do you understand me? Have I said enough?"

"Enough, dear, dear Aunt, but not one word too much! I understand you, I
know you, now! Oh, save me, save me at any sacrifice from this
marriage!" And the young girl was sobbing in the arms of Aunt Martha,
who now that her story was told grew her gentle self again, and smoothed
down the brown hair with a promise of aid and sympathy which was not
likely to be forfeited.




CHAPTER IV.

ANOTHER ADVENTURE OF THE TWO FRIENDS--THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW--A
SINGULAR SPOT ON THE WALL--A CLIMB, A TUMBLE AND A PURSUIT--HOW IT ALL
ENDED FOR THE TIME.


We left Walter Harding and Tom Leslie, at the conclusion of a former
chapter, coming out from the lodgings of the latter, on Bleecker Street
near Elm, Leslie accompanying Harding out to a car on the Bowery before
betaking himself to bed. "Man proposes but God disposes," says the
French proverb: There is "a divinity that shapes our ends," even in the
matters of going to bed and getting into railroad cars. It was somewhat
longer than either had expected, before he reached the "desired haven"
of home and a bed-chamber.

It was past midnight when the two friends reached the Bowery, and the
Third Avenue cars, on one of which Harding was going up, were running
less frequently than early in the evening. There was not one of the
green lights in sight down the Bowery from the corner of Bleecker
Street, and the friends chatted a moment while waiting for one to make
its appearance. Then they grew tired and restless, as people very soon
do who are waiting for cars (or boiling tea-kettles, or marriage-days,
or any thing of that kind); and they walked down to the corner of Prince
to meet the tardy conveyance. There was a green light coming up, some
blocks down the Bowery, but it seemed to the two sleepy fellows as if it
would never reach the corner. They walked listlessly a block or two down
Prince Street toward Broadway, still arm in arm as they had left the
house on Bleecker. They wheeled to walk back. Suddenly the eyes of
Harding were attracted by the very bright light in one of the upper
windows of an old brick house on Prince Street, large and stately and
giving evidence of having once been the residence of some person of
fortune, though now a little dilapidated.

"People in that house must have an interest in one of the Gas
Companies," said Harding, "by the quantity of light they show at this
time of night! Why, the window is all ablaze!"

Tom Leslie looked up, as his friend spoke. They were on the opposite
side of the street from the house in question, and consequently had a
fair view of the lighted window. It _was_ very light indeed, a perfect
flood of gas-light pouring on a white curtain that partially covered the
whole sash. Partially, not altogether. Whether accidentally or by
intention, it was swept away at the lower right-hand corner, leaving a
little of the top of the white wall of the room visible, with the edge
of the ceiling. Was there ever a man (or woman) who did not look in
through a half-closed curtain, precisely because there is no propriety
whatever in doing so? Willis has made some of his most taking verbal
photographs, during his "lookings on at the war" at Washington, from
the glimpses caught of the lower half lengths of notables, more or less
undressed, through windows supposed to be closed against outside
observation.

Both Walter Harding and Tom Leslie took an eager look up at the white
wall and the edge of the ceiling, in the upper chamber of the house on
Prince Street. Harding either had sharper eyes than Leslie, or stood in
a more favorable position, for he saw what Leslie did not, and his
discovery was communicated in the brief exclamation:

"By Jupiter!"

"What?" asked Leslie.

"Look!" said Harding, drawing his friend's head into position for a
better view. "If that is not a secesh flag draped up near the ceiling,
may I never brag of my eyesight again!"

Tom Leslie took a nearer look. "If it is _not_ a secesh flag," he said,
"draped over some kind of a gilded ornament like a star, may I never
find another opportunity to look at a pretty girl through this
double-barrelled telescope."

And with the word he had whipped out an opera-glass from his pocket,
large enough to have been formed out of two moderate-sized specimens of
the optical instrument he had named, and levelled it at the object on
the wall. His observations and those of Harding through the same
powerful instrument resulted in the same conclusion. The two red bars
and one white one of the Confederate flag, with the blue field in the
corner and meagre number of stars, were all plainly visible, and beneath
the flag was a gilded circle, some four or five inches in diameter, with
a radiating centre.

"A nice house that, I don't think!" was Tom Leslie's not very classical
comment, as he took the double-barrelled telescope finally down from his
eye, after a second inspection. (It may be mentioned, in a parenthesis,
that the Third Avenue car had some time since rumbled by, and that the
very existence of that entire line of communication had been forgotten
by the two friends.) "Where is Provost Marshal Kennedy, I wonder?"

"Oh, it may not be quite so bad as you think," said Harding, reading the
whole of his friend's thought. "Who knows?--that secesh flag may be a
trophy won by one of our soldiers, and brought or sent home."

"Humph!" said Tom, significantly. "That won't do, Harding! If the flag
was a trophy, and in the house of a loyal man, it would not be quite so
neatly draped on the wall, with the lodge emblem of the Knights of the
Golden Circle under it!"

"Phew!" said Harding, "is that really the emblem?"

"_The_ emblem, and nothing else," answered Leslie. "There is mischief in
that house, and the nest must be looked after."

Suddenly, and while the two friends yet looked, there were dark shadows
flung on the white curtain, as if of moving figures, and then one
shadow, as if of a human arm, began to move up and down on the curtain
and kept moving steadily. Directly there was one quick sharp scream,
followed by no other sound, though both listened intently. Then a figure
came to the window, and apparently looked out, disappearing again in a
moment and leaving every thing as before.

"By George, I cannot stand this!" said Leslie.

"Nor I," said Harding, moved by quite a different feeling. "I am getting
sleepy and must go home."

"Must you?" said Tom Leslie. "Well, you are not going a step. You cannot
be spared just yet. Do you see that tree?"

Harding had seen the tree for some minutes--a tall one with wide
branches, standing a little to the left of the window. But he did not
see anything special in the tree, while Leslie did, and that made the
great difference.

"I am going on a perilous expedition," continued Leslie, in a bantering
tone, but his voice sinking lower, almost without his being aware of the
fact, and jerking off his boots meanwhile on the sidewalk. "If I never
come back, comfort my bereaved wife and children. If I break my neck,
see me comfortably buried, _without_ a coroner's inquest if possible."

"What are you going to do?" asked Harding, with a faint premonition,
however, of his intention.

"I am going to get a peep in at that window," was the reply, "or I am
going to break the most precious neck in America in making the attempt.
I used to be able to climb, though some years ago. Keep still, here
goes!"

There seemed to be at the moment no passers in the street, and Harding's
anxious gaze around showed no policeman in the vicinity. By the time he
had fairly spoken the last words, Leslie had thrown off his broad hat,
crossed the street, and commenced climbing the tree. Harding followed
and stood under the tree, as if Leslie was going to throw down apples
and he must catch them. Leslie was a little awkward, but hugged the bark
handsomely, and was soon on a level with the window. Harding saw him
distinctly, by the reflected light from the window, clutch his arm
around one of the main limbs, and throw his head and body forward so
that his face was not more than a foot from the window. He had not
looked in more than a moment, when Harding heard him utter a quick,
short cry, and the next instant he seemed to be trying to regain his
hold of the tree. Then there was a rush, a tumble, and he seemed to be
falling. Harding threw himself beneath him, and Leslie half slid and
half fell to the pavement, with such violence as to send both sprawling
into the middle of the street. Harding was not much hurt; Leslie seemed
to be injured, and limped a little as he sprang up.

"Are you hurt, Tom? What made you fall?" was the double question that
Harding attempted to ask.

"My God! can that be possible?" was the inconsequent answer, and his
hand went up to his head as if the organs of thought were for the moment
disordered.

"What do you mean? What did you see, Tom?" was Harding's next double
question. Leslie was pulling on his boots.

"See? Nothing--every thing! I will tell you all about it when my brains
get settled!" was the reply. "I have simply been frightened out of my
boots--no, I left my boots down here. But I was frightened out of the
tree, and came devilish near to killing myself and _you_. Eh, didn't I?"

"Never mind about that! Tell us what you saw?" said Harding, whose bump
of curiosity now began to be seriously agitated.

"The red woman! witch! devil! What does it all mean?" was the torrent
of incoherence which next burst from Leslie, not affording Harding a
very close solution of the mystery, but promising at least something.

"Well?" said the latter, expecting more. They had again crossed the
street, and stood opposite the house of mystery. Leslie was endeavoring
to brush his soiled clothes with that most difficult of all brushes, the
hand. Harding was looking full at the window, and waiting for the
further explanation. Suddenly, a carriage whirled through Prince from
the direction of Broadway, and pulled up immediately before the house.
Leslie stopped brushing his clothes. At the same moment, a head was
again thrust against the window, and immediately withdrawn. Then the
light against the curtain dimmed suddenly. Leslie "put that and that
together" with the celerity of a lawyer and the confidence of a man of
the world. The people in that house were going away. Where? That was
something to be looked into.

"You know where the livery stable round the corner is, on Houston?" he
asked hurriedly of Harding.

"Yes," was the reply.

"I am too lame to run fast," said Leslie, speaking very rapidly. "We
must follow those people, if they go to perdition. Go to the stable,
quick--do. There is always at least one carriage standing ready, and
have it here as soon as money can bring it. I will watch meanwhile.
Hurry! hurry!"

Probably Harding, who was rather precise in his ordinary movements, had
not gone so fast in ten years. He was around the corner before the last
words had fairly left Leslie's mouth--going as if an enraged woman and
three lively policemen had been close after him. Leslie stepped across
the street again, took a glance at the number on the lamps of the hack
as he passed, and then ensconced himself in a deserted doorway very
near, to watch what followed. Every moment that Harding was gone seemed
an hour. Would they come out and get away, after all, before the coming
of the other vehicle? What kept him so long? (He had been gone about
half a minute!) Had there been, for once, no carriage in waiting at the
livery? or had Harding concluded to go to sleep on the road? And what
the deuce did it all mean--the half-dozen persons, and one a woman
almost completely stripped, whom he had seen in that moment's glance
into that upper chamber? And the red woman!--aye, the _red woman_!--that
bothered Tom Leslie the worst, and as he had himself confessed,
frightened him.

At this juncture the door of the house opened, and a man and two women
came out. The man, from his stature and general appearance, and
especially from his hat, struck Tom as strangely like the tall Virginian
whom they had seen two hours before on Broadway. One of the women might
be the girl, Kate; and the third--Leslie indulged in another bit of a
shudder as he thought that possibly the third might be the red woman.
They were all muffled up, however, and Leslie dared not quit his shelter
to observe them more nearly. The driver kept his seat on the box. The
man opened the door of the carriage, all stepped in, and the carriage
whirled away out into the Bowery and up town. There they were, going,
gone, and Harding not yet returned with the means of pursuit! Confusion,
vexation and every cross-grained word in the language! So thought
Leslie, as he dodged out to the Bowery and watched the disappearing
carriage. It had not turned off into any one of the cross-streets, and
seemed making for one or the other of the forks of the avenues at the
Cooper Institute. Half a minute more, however, and it might as well be
the proverbial "needle in the hay-stack" for any chance they would have
of finding it again.

Hark! yes, there came tearing hoofs round into Prince Street from
Crosby, and the lamps of a carriage shivered with the speed at which
they were going. The horses were on the run. It was _their_ carriage
after all, for nobody else could be in such a hurry. Twenty seconds
brought the flying carriage to the corner--a second's pause--a hail from
each of the friends--and Leslie was inside with Harding, and the
carriage was dashing up the Bowery about as fast as two good horses
could run, with Leslie and Harding each peering out of the opened
windows at the side, to see if they could catch any glimpse of a
carriage ahead.

There is no doubt that the horses attached to the hinder carriage,
whatever may have been the opinions of those attached to the one
before,--thought that the rate of speed was a little rapid for a hot
midnight in June; and certainly one or two pedestrians who came near
being run over at the crossings just below the Cooper Institute, had an
impression that some rebel prisoner must be running away from Fort
Lafayette or some government official trying to stop one. As Harding and
Leslie neared that highly respectable but very ugly monument to the
profits of iron and glue and the public pride of Mr. Peter Cooper,--of
course there arose a question, the carriage being out of sight, which of
the two branches it had taken. The Third Avenue being the plainer road,
Leslie decided for the Fourth, and with a shout to the driver just
before they reached Tompkins Market, the horses' heads were turned in
that direction, and away they went up the comparatively quiet avenue.

At the rate they were going they soon overtook a carriage, as they would
have overtaken any thing less rapid than a locomotive or a whirlwind. It
was lucky that Leslie had taken the precaution to note the number on the
hack, as otherwise they would have been at fault after all. As they
dashed by the carriage, which was going at good speed, that cosmopolitan
saw that the number on the lamps was a wrong one; and so they kept on.
Another carriage was passed at the same speed, their horses by this time
dripping as if they had been plunged into the river, but the driver of
hack No. 2980 going ahead under the influence of a private five dollars
and the promise of an extraordinary glass of brandy. At Twenty-eighth
Street they jerked the check-string and the driver pulled up. There was
nothing in sight, short of the railroad tunnel.

"We have lost them!" said Harding, whose organ of hopefulness was not so
large as that of his friend.

"Humph! maybe so!" was Leslie's reply, his eyes peering out of the
windows on all sides, meanwhile. "One thing is certain, that I am not
going to bed until I find that hack and know where it has been
to-night!"

At that moment, with better fortune than two such wild-goose chasers
deserved, they saw the lamps of a carriage flash across Twenty-eighth
Street, going up Lexington Avenue.

"By George! there they are!" said the sanguine Leslie.

"Maybe so!" was the reply of Harding, echoing the words his friend had
used the moment before.

A word from Leslie to the driver, and away went the carriage down
Twenty-eighth Street toward Lexington Avenue. On the avenue there was a
carriage ahead, driving at good speed but not at such a headlong rate as
their own had been pursuing. Leslie pulled the check-string. "Pass that
carriage!" he said to the driver, and the horses sprung out at full
speed again. The speed of the carriage ahead did not increase: whoever
occupied it probably had no idea of being pursued. Before it had gone
two blocks further the pursuers had passed it, and Tom Leslie brought
his hand down upon Harding's leg with a force that made him wince, as he
saw the number on the near lamp.

"Got them, by the tail of the holy camel!"

It was indeed the same carriage that had left Prince Street less than a
quarter of an hour before. They were now ahead of it, and it would not
answer either to slacken speed so perceptibly as to let it pass, or to
turn back to meet it. Either course might excite apprehension, if there
was really anything worth watching in the adventure. A word more to the
driver arranged all. They wheeled down Thirty-fourth Street to Third
Avenue, drove rapidly around the two blocks to Thirty-sixth, and came
out again on Lexington, with the carriage just ahead of them and a fine
opportunity to dog it at leisure.

Two or three minutes afterwards the leading carriage wheeled out of
Lexington Avenue into East 5-- Street, not very far from the Eastern
Dispensary, which has lately so well supplied the place of a soldiers'
hospital. It was driving slowly, now, and unless some peculiar dodge was
intended, Leslie knew that the occupants must be near their destination.
To follow them further with the carriage would be both useless and
dangerous. Stopping the carriage and telling the driver to wait for them
in the avenue half a dozen blocks above, the two friends alighted and
followed their quarry on foot. They were close behind the carriage,
now, but keeping the sidewalk, and even if observed they might have been
supposed to be a couple of late wayfarers plodding home, and not _spies_
as they at that moment felt themselves to be, in however meritorious a
cause! About half way between Fourth Avenue and Madison, the carriage
stopped before a handsome brown-stone house. "Nothing venture nothing
have!" is an old motto that never wears out. Before the rumble of the
carriage had fairly stopped or the driver could have had time to turn
around, the two friends were over the area railings and under the steps.
Not a dignified position, perhaps, nor a pleasant one in which to be
caught in the event of a sudden opening of the area door; but other men
have risked as much for a much idler curiosity!

Perfect silence under the steps, except two loudly-beating hearts and a
little quick breathing. Leslie ventured a look around the corner of the
stoop--saw the driver get down and open the door, and the one man and
two women alight and go up the steps. For the rest, they were obliged to
depend upon the ears. One of the women spoke:

"It will come to-morrow at midnight?"

Harding could feel that Leslie shuddered, and could distinguish his
sharp whisper to himself:

"The red woman's voice! I knew I could not be mistaken!"

Then the voice of the man said: "Wait a moment!" and Leslie fancied that
he recognized that voice quite as well as the other. Then there was a
quick pull of the bell, the sound tinkling far back in the still house.
Then came two sharp pulls after the pause of a moment, and then a fourth
after another pause. Not until the fourth tinkle had been heard was
there any other sound within the house. Then a door was heard to open
and shut, and feet were heard in the hall. The man's voice said "All
right!" and the carriage drove away. An inner door opened, but the outer
one (as the friends could easily distinguish by the sound of the voices)
remained closed until some one within asked:

"How many?"

"Seven!" answered the man's voice. Then the outer door opened, all went
in, the doors closed and were locked, the footsteps in the hall died
away, and the friends heard no more.

Very gingerly, as if some depredation on personal property had lately
been committed, the two volunteer midnight guardians of the public weal
climbed again over the area railings, after all had been still for a
moment. Not a word passed between them. Harding stepped softly up the
stone steps to the door and noted the number on it, then down again, as
if he was treading on eggs. Leslie counted the number of houses from the
corner, with steps not more sonorous, and looked around to see whether
they could possibly not have been watched by a policeman, when getting
into and out of the area, because they did _not_ intend to steal. All
these things accomplished, and apparently nothing more to be done, they
went quietly down 5-- Street to Lexington Avenue and sought their
carriage.




CHAPTER V.

THE MYSTERY OF THE RED WOMAN--ANOTHER OF TOM LESLIE'S LONG STORIES--AN
INCIDENT OF PARIS IN 1860--THE VISION OFMTHE WHITE MIST--TWO MEN WITH
ONE WONDER AND ONE PURPOSE.


"And who was the red woman?"

It has been indicated in a former chapter that both Tom Leslie and
Walter Lane Harding intended, at one period of the night, to go to bed
as soon as possible. The event was that neither found that luxury until
the milkman was bawling under the windows. Harding had contrived to
raise a large amount of curiosity, especially about the "red woman" and
her possible connection with the events of the evening, and Leslie tired
and satisfied him, collectively and at intervals, with another long
story before they separated. Only in his own words can that story be so
conveyed as to be intelligible.

"I had returned from Vienna to Paris," he said, "late in 1860. No matter
what I was doing in Paris; and as we are upon a serious subject, don't
let me hear a word about 'grisettes' or the 'back room of a baker's
shop.' I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue
Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, for
the long picture galleries of which I had an unfortunate weakness. I had
a tradesman with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room
in which three persons could sit down comfortably, for my domicil. As I
did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient;
and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my
lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

"One of my intimates, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg,
had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not to put too fine
a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in company with
clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my return to Paris
in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those places in which
professional fortune-tellers carried on their business. It was early in
September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of Von Berg, who
had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I went with him,
late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the Rue La Reynie
Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward the quays of
the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue Saint Martin.
The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris, although built
of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was
eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long
been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when
we entered it by the dingy and narrow hall-way, that night, well
corresponded with the exterior. A tallow candle in a tin sconce was
burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the
plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which
it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

"My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered
table in the hall (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to
all appearance), and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On
recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the
way, without a word, to the same room she had herself just quitted.
There was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three
still more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood
on the table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of
some dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took
seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me
that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not
allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that
apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.

"Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of
waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and
the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing
behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright
light, which did not show through the curtain at all, and which seemed
almost dazzling enough to be Calcium or Drummond, shed its rays directly
upon her side-face, throwing every feature, from brow to chin, into bold
relief, and making every fold of her dark dress visible. But I scarcely
saw the dress, the face being so remarkable beyond any thing I had ever
witnessed. I had looked to see an old, wrinkled hag--it being the
general understanding that all witches and fortune-tellers must be long
past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have
been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and
a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond
description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiselled nose or brow
of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in
the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of
the countenance of the sorceress.

"I said that but for one circumstance that face would have been
beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a
face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary
glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze
involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a
nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most
hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that
you can catch the full force of the idea--I must try, however. You have
often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some
kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact
was that it was of the natural color and only affected by the lurid
character of the dress and by the Satanic pencilling of the eyebrows!
Well, this face was really what that seemed for the moment to be. It was
redder than blood--red as fire, and yet so strangely did the flame-color
play through it that you knew no paint laid upon the skin could have
produced the effect. It almost seemed that the skin and the whole mass
of flesh were transparent, and that the red color came from some kind of
fire or light within, as the red bottle in a druggist's window might
glow when you were standing full in front of it and the gas was turned
on to full height behind. Every feature--brow, nose, lips, chin, even
the eyes themselves, and their very pupils, seemed to be pervaded and
permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to
avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of
flame--salamandrines--who sometimes existed out of their own element and
lived and moved as mortals.

"Have I given you a strange and fearful picture? Be sure that I have not
conveyed to you one thousandth part of the impression made upon myself,
and that until the day I die that strange apparition will remain stamped
upon the tablets of my mind. Diabolical beauty! infernal ugliness!--I
would give half my life, be it longer or shorter, to be able to explain
whence such things can come, to confound and stupefy all human
calculation!

"Well, as I was saying, there stood my horribly beautiful fiend, and
there I sat spell-bound before her. As for Adolph, though he had told me
nothing in advance of the peculiarities of her appearance, he had been
fully aware of them, of course, and I had the horrible surprise all to
myself. I think the sorceress saw the mingled feeling in my face, and
that a smile blended of pride and contempt contorted the proud features
and made the ghastly face yet more ghastly for one moment. If so, the
expression soon passed away, and she stood, as before, the incarnation
of all that was terrible and mysterious. At length, still retaining her
place and fixing her eyes upon Von Berg, she spoke, sharply, brusquely,
and decidedly:

"'You are here again! what do you want?'

"'I come to introduce my friend, the Baron Charles Denmore, of England,'
answered Von Berg, 'who wishes--'

"'Nothing!' said the sorceress, the word coming from her lips with an
unmistakably hissing sound. 'He wants nothing, and he is _not_ the Baron
Charles Denmore! He comes from far away, across the sea, and he would
not have come here to-night but that you insisted upon it! Take him
away--go away yourself--and never let me see you again unless you have
something to ask or you wish me to do you an injury!'

"'But--' began Von Berg.

"'Not another word!' said the sorceress, 'I have said. Go, before you
repent having come at all!'

"'Madame,' I began to say, awed out of the feeling at least of equality
which I should have felt to be proper under such circumstances, and only
aware that Adolph, and possibly myself, had incurred the enmity of a
being so near to the supernatural as to be at least dangerous--'Madame,
I hope that you will not think--'

"But here she cut _me_ short, as she had done Von Berg the instant
before.

"'Hope nothing, young man!' she said, her voice perceptibly less harsh
and brusque than it had been when speaking to my companion. 'Hope
nothing and ask nothing until you may have occasion; then come to me.'

"'And then?'

"'Then I will answer every question you may think proper to put to me.
Stay! you may have occasion to visit me sooner than you suppose, or I
may have occasion to force knowledge upon you that you will not have the
boldness to seek. If so, I shall send for you. Now go, both of you!'

"The dark curtain suddenly fell, and the singular vision faded with the
reflected light which had filled the room. The moment after, I heard the
shuffling feet of the slattern girl coming to show us out of the room,
but, singularly enough, as you will think, not out of the _house_!
Without a word we followed her--Adolph, who knew the customs of the
place, merely slipping a twenty-franc piece into her hand; and in a
moment more we were out in the street and walking up the Rue Saint
Denis. It is not worth while to detail the conversation which followed
between us as we passed up to the Rue Marie Stuart, I to my lodgings and
Adolph to his own, further on, close to the Rue Vivienne and not far
from the Boulevard Montmartre. Of course I asked him fifty questions,
the replies to which left me quite as much in the dark as before. He
knew, he said, and hundreds of other persons in Paris knew, the
singularity of the personal appearance of the sorceress, and her
apparent power of divination, but neither he nor they had any knowledge
of her origin. He had been introduced at her house several months
before, and had asked questions affecting his family in Prussia and the
chances of descent of certain property, the replies to which had
astounded him. He had heard of her using marvellous and fearful
incantations, but had never himself witnessed any thing of them. In two
or three instances, before the present, he had taken friends to the
house and introduced them under any name which he chose to apply to them
for the time, and the sorceress had never before chosen to call him to
account for the deception, though, according to the assurances of his
friends after leaving the house, she had never failed to arrive at the
truth of their nationalities and positions in life. There must have been
something in myself or my circumstances, he averred, which had produced
so singular an effect upon the witch, (as he evidently believed her to
be,) and he had the impression that at no distant day I should again
hear from her. That was all, and so we parted, I in any other condition
of mind than that promising sleep, and really without closing my eyes,
except for a moment or two at a time, during the night which followed.
When I did attempt to force myself into slumber, a red spectre stood
continually before me, an unearthly light seemed to sear my covered
eyeballs, and I awoke with a start. Days passed before I sufficiently
wore away the impression to be comfortable, and at least two or three
weeks before my rest became again entirely unbroken.

"You must be partially aware with what anxiety we Americans temporarily
sojourning on the other side of the Atlantic, who loved the country we
had left behind on this, watched the succession of events which preceded
and accompanied the Presidential election of that year. Some suppose
that a man loses his love for his native land, or finds it comparatively
chilled within his bosom, after long residence abroad. The very opposite
is the case, I think! I never knew what the old flag was, until I saw it
waving from the top of an American consulate abroad, or floating from
the gaff of one of our war-vessels, when I came down the mountains to
some port on the Mediterranean. It had been merely red, white and blue
bunting, at home, where the symbols of our national greatness were to be
seen on every hand: it was the _only_ symbol of our national greatness
when we were looking at it from beyond the sea; and the man whose eyes
will not fill with tears and whose throat will not choke a little with
overpowering feeling, when catching sight of the Stars and Stripes where
they only can be seen to remind him of the glory of the country of which
he is a part, is unworthy the name of patriot or of man!

"But to return: Where was I? Oh! I was remarking with what interest we
on the other side of the water watched the course of affairs at home,
during that year when the rumble of distant thunder was just heralding
the storm. You are well aware that without extensive and long-continued
connivance on the part of sympathizers among the leading people of
Europe--England and France especially--secession could never have been
accomplished so far as it has been; and there never could have been any
hope of its eventual success if there had been no hope of one or both
these two countries bearing it up on their strong and unscrupulous arms.
The leaven of foreign aid to rebellion was working even then, both in
London and Paris; and perhaps we had opportunities over the water for a
nearer guess at the peril of the nation, than you could have had in the
midst of your party-political squabbles at home.

"During the months of September and October, when your Wide-Awakes on
the one hand, and your conservative Democracy on the other, were
parading the streets with banners and music, as they or their
predecessors had done in so many previous contests, and believing that
nothing worse could be involved than a possible party defeat and some
bad feelings, we, who lived where revolutions were common, thought that
we discovered the smouldering spark which would be blown to revolution
here. The disruption of the Charleston Convention and through it of the
Democracy; the bold language and firm attitude of the Republicans; the
well-understood energy of the uncompromising Abolitionists, and the less
defined but rabid energy of the Southern fire-eaters: all these were
known abroad and watched with gathering apprehension. American
newspapers, and the extracts made from them by the leading journals of
France and England, commanded more attention among the Americo-French
and English than all other excitements of the time put together.

"Then followed what you all know--the election, with its radical result
and the threats which immediately succeeded, that 'Old Abe Lincoln'
should never live to be inaugurated! 'He shall not!' cried the South.
'He shall!' replied the North. To us who knew something of the Spanish
knife and the Italian stiletto, the probabilities seemed to be that he
would never live to reach Washington. Then the mutterings of the thunder
grew deeper and deeper, and some disruption seemed inevitable, evident
to us far away, while you at home, it seemed, were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage, holding gala-days and enjoying
yourselves generally, on the brink of an arousing volcano from which
the sulphurous smoke already began to ascend to the heavens! So time
passed on; autumn became winter, and December was rolling away.

"I was sitting with half-a-dozen friends in the chess-room at Very's,
about eleven o'clock on the night of the twentieth of December, talking
over some of the marvellous successes which had been won by Paul Morphy
when in Paris, and the unenviable position in which Howard Staunton had
placed himself by keeping out of the lists through evident fear of the
New-Orleanian, when Adolph Von Berg came behind me and laid his hand on
my shoulder.

"'Come with me a moment,' he said, 'you are wanted!'

"'Where?' I asked, getting up from my seat and following him to the
door, before which stood a light _coupe_, with its red lights flashing,
the horse smoking, and the driver in his seat.

"'I have been to-night to the Rue la Reynie Ogniard!' he answered.

"'And are you going there again?' I asked, my blood chilling a little
with an indefinable sensation of terror, but a sense of satisfaction
predominating at the opportunity of seeing something more of the
mysterious woman.

"'I am!' he answered, 'and so are _you_! She has sent for you! Come!'

"Without another word I stepped into the _coupe_, and we were rapidly
whirled away. I asked Adolph how and why I had been summoned; but he
knew nothing more than myself, except that he had visited the sorceress
at between nine and ten that evening, that she had only spoken to him
for an instant, but ordered him to go at once and find his friend, _the
American_, whom he had falsely introduced some months before as the
English baron. He had been irresistibly impressed with the necessity of
obedience, though it would break in upon his own arrangements for the
later evening, (which included an hour at the Chateau Rouge;) had picked
up a _coupe_, looked in for me at two or three places where he thought
me most likely to be at that hour in the evening, and had found me at
Very's, as related. What the sorceress could possibly want of me, he had
no more idea than myself; but he reminded me that she had hinted at the
possible necessity of sending for me at no distant period, and I
remembered the fact too well to need the reminder.

"It was nearly midnight when we drove down the Rue St. Denis, turned
into La Reynie Ogniard, and drew up at the antiquated door I had once
entered nearly three months earlier. We entered as before, rang the bell
as before, and were admitted into the inner room by the same slattern
girl. I remember at this moment one impression which this person made
upon me--that she did not wash so often as four times a year, and that
the _same old dirt_ was upon her face that had been crusted there at the
time of my previous visit. There seemed no change in the room, except
that _two_ tapers, and each larger than the one I had previously seen,
were burning upon the table. The curtain was down as before, and when it
suddenly rose, after a few minutes spent in waiting, and the blood-red
woman stood in the vacant space, all seemed so exactly as it had done on
the previous visit, that it would have been no difficult matter to
believe the past three months a mere imagination, and this the same
first visit renewed.

"The illusion, such as it was, did not last long, however. The sorceress
fixed her eyes full upon me, with the red flame seeming to play through
the eyeballs as it had before done through her cheeks, and said, in a
voice lower, more sad and broken, than it had been when addressing me on
the previous occasion:

"'Young American, I have sent for you, and you have done well to come.
Do not fear--'

"'I do _not_ fear--you, or any one!' I answered, a little piqued that
she should have drawn any such impression from my appearance. I may have
been uttering a fib of magnificent proportions at the moment, but one
has a right to deny cowardice to the last gasp, whatever else he must
admit.

"'You do not? It is well, then!' she said in reply, and in the same low,
sad voice. 'You will have courage, then, perhaps, to see what I will
show you from the land of shadows.'

"'Whom does it concern?' I asked. 'Myself or some other?'

"'Yourself, and many others--all the world!' uttered the lips of flame.
'It is of your country that I would show you.'

"'My country? God of heaven! what has happened to my country?' broke
from my lips almost before I knew what I was uttering. I suppose the
words came almost like a groan, for I had been deeply anxious over the
state of affairs known to exist at home, and perhaps I can be nearer to
a weeping child when I think of any ill to my own beloved land, than I
could be for any other evil threatened in the world.

"'But a moment more, and you shall see!' said the sorceress. Then she
added: 'You have a friend here present. Shall he too look on what I have
to reveal, or will you behold it alone?'

"'Let him see!' I answered. 'My native land may fall into ruin, but she
can never be ashamed!'

"'So let it be, then!' said the sorceress, solemnly. 'Be silent, look,
and learn what is at this moment transpiring in your own land!'

"Beneath that adjuration I was silent, and the same dread stillness fell
upon my companion. Suddenly the sorceress, still standing in the same
place, waved her right hand in the air, and a strain of low, sad music,
such as the harps of angels may be continually making over the descent
of lost spirits to the pit of suffering, broke upon my ears. Von Berg
too heard it, I know, for I saw him look up in surprise, then apply his
fingers to his ears and test whether his sense of hearing had suddenly
become defective. Whence that strain of music could have sprung I did
not know, nor do I know any better at this moment. I only know that, to
my senses and those of my companion, it was definite as if the thunders
of the sky had been ringing.

"Then came another change, quite as startling as the music and even more
difficult to explain. The room began to fill with a whitish mist,
transparent in its obscurity, that wrapped the form of the sybil and
finally enveloped her until she appeared to be but a shade. Anon,
another and larger room seemed to grow in the midst, with columned
galleries and a rostrum, and hundreds of forms in wild commotion,
moving to and fro, though uttering no sound. At one moment, it seemed
that I could look through one of the windows of the phantom building,
and I saw the branches of a palmetto tree waving in the winter wind.
Then amidst and apparently at the head of all, a white-haired man stood
upon the rostrum, and as he turned down a long scroll from which he
seemed to be reading to the assemblage, I read the words that appeared
on the top of the scroll: 'An ordinance to dissolve the union heretofore
existing between the State of South Carolina and the several States of
the Federal Union, under the name of the United States of America.' My
breath came thick, my eyes filled with tears of wonder and dismay, and I
could see no more.

"'Horror!' I cried. 'Roll away the vision, for it is false! It cannot be
that the man lives who could draw an ordinance to dissolve the Union of
the United States of America!'

"'It is so! That has this day been done!' spoke the voice of the
sorceress from within the cloud of white mist.

"'If this is indeed true,' I said, 'show me what is the result, for the
heavens must bow if this work of ruin is accomplished!'

"'Look again, then!' said the voice. The strain of music, which had
partially ceased for a moment, grew louder and sadder again, and I saw
the white mist rolling and changing, as if a wind were stirring it.
Gradually again it assumed shape and form; and in the moonlight, before
the Capitol of the nation, its white proportions gleaming in the wintry
ray, the form of Washington stood, the hands clasped, the head bare, and
the eyes cast upward in the mute agony of supplication.

"'All is not lost!' I shouted more than spoke, 'for the Father of his
Country still watches his children, and while he lives in the heavens
and prays for the erring and wandering, the nation may yet be
reclaimed.'

"'It may be so,' said the voice through the mist, 'for look!'

"Again the strain of music sounded, but now louder and clearer, and
without the tone of hopeless sadness. Again the white mists rolled by in
changing forms, and when once more they assumed shape and consistency,
I saw great masses of men, apparently in the streets of a large city,
throwing out the old flag from roof and steeple, lifting it to heaven in
attitudes of devotion, and pressing it to their lips with those wild
kisses which a mother gives to her darling child when it has been just
rescued from a deadly peril.

"'The nation lives!' I shouted. 'The old flag is not deserted and the
patriotic heart yet beats in American bosoms! Show me yet more, for the
next must be triumph!'

"'Triumph indeed!' said the voice. 'Behold it, and rejoice at it while
there is time!' I shuddered at the closing words, but another change in
the strain of music roused me. It was not sadness now, nor yet the
rising voice of hope, for martial music rung loudly and clearly, and
through it I heard the roar of cannon and the cries of combatants in
battle. As the vision cleared, I saw the armies of the Union in fight
with a host almost as numerous as themselves, but savage, ragged and
tumultuous, and bearing a mongrel flag that I had never seen before--one
that seemed robbed from the banner of the nation's glory. For a moment
the battle wavered and the forces of the Union seemed driven backward;
then they rallied with a shout, and the flag of stars and stripes was
rebaptized in glory. They pressed the traitors backward at every
turn--they trod rebellion under their heels--they were everywhere, and
everywhere triumphant.

"'Three cheers for the Star-Spangled Banner!' I cried, forgetting place
and time in the excitement of the scene. 'Let the world look on and
wonder and admire! I knew the land that the Fathers founded and
Washington guarded could not die! Three cheers--yes, nine--for the
Star-Spangled Banner and the brave old land over which it floats!'

"'Pause!' said the voice, coming out once more from the cloud of white
mist, and chilling my very marrow with the sad solemnity of its tone.
'Look once again!' I looked, and the mists went rolling by as before,
while the music changed to wild discord; and when the sight became clear
again, I saw the men of the nation struggling over bags of gold and
quarrelling for a black shadow that flitted about in their midst, while
cries of want and wails of despair went up and sickened the heavens! I
closed my eyes and tried to close my ears, but I could not shut out the
voice of the sorceress, saying once more from her shroud of white mist:

"'Look yet again, and for the last time! Behold the worm that gnaws away
the bravery of a nation and makes it a prey for the spoiler!'
Heart-brokenly sad was the music now, as the vision changed once more,
and I saw a great crowd of men, each in the uniform of an officer of the
United States army, clustered around one who seemed to be their chief.
But while I looked, I saw one by one totter and fall, and directly I
perceived that the _epaulette or shoulder-strap on the shoulder of each
was a great hideous yellow worm, that gnawed away the shoulder and
palsied the arm and ate into the vitals_. Every second, one fell and
died, making frantic efforts to tear away the reptile from its grasp,
but in vain. Then the white mists rolled away, and I saw the strange
woman standing where she had been when the first vision began. She was
silent, the music was hushed, Adolph Von Berg had fallen back asleep in
his chair, and drawing out my watch, I discovered that only ten minutes
had elapsed since the sorceress spoke her first word.

"'You have seen all--go!' was her first and last interruption to the
silence. The instant after, the curtain fell. I kicked Von Berg to awake
him, and we left the house. The _coupe_ was waiting in the street and
set me down at my lodgings, after which it conveyed my companion to his.
Adolph did not seem to have a very clear idea of what had occurred, and
my impression is that he went to sleep the moment the first strain of
music commenced.

"As for myself, I am not much clearer than Adolph as to how and why I
saw and heard what I know that I did see and hear. I can only say that
on that night of the twentieth of December, 1860, the same on which, as
it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at
Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie
Ogniard, witnessed what I have related.

"I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the
incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain
abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the
affair as myself--which is not saying much!"

"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion
of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to
him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst
of it--"Ugh! your idea--I beg your pardon!--your _relation_ of the great
yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to
make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a
decoration."

"I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism
which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular.

"And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge--"

"That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and
interrupting the half-sneer that was coming--"is the red woman whom I
saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of
the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just
before the door opened. What do you think of it?"

"Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much
wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round
me, to _think_! Then the events of to-night--so much crowded in a little
space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been
a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few
mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the
fog on the East River in a February thaw!"

"And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as
possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of
lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said
Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more
into play. "You are ready to go with me?"

"All the way!" said Harding, graphically; and it was then that after a
few words of arrangement the two friends parted, to catch what might
still remain of uneasy morning slumber, in which red women, flying
carriage-lamps and respectable young men skulking in doorways and areas,
were very likely to be prominent.




CHAPTER VI.

COLONEL EGBERT CRAWFORD AND BELL CRAWFORD--SOME SPECULATIONS ON THE SPY
SYSTEM--JOSEPHINE HARRIS ON A RECONNOISSANCE, AND WHAT SHE SAW AND
HEARD.


At any other time than the present, before proceeding with the relation
of the events that transpired in the house on West 3-- Street after the
arrival of Colonel Egbert Crawford and Miss Bell Crawford,--it might be
both proper and politic to indulge in a disquisition on the meanness of
peeping and the general iniquity of the spy system. At any other
time--not now, when the country is deep in the horrors of a war that
principally seems to have been a failure on our side because we have not
"peeped" and "spied" enough.[2] The rebels have had the advantage of us
from the beginning,--not only because they were fighting comparatively
on their own ground and among a friendly population, but because they at
once applied the spy system when they began, and nosed out all our
secrets of army and cabinet, while we have neglected spying and
scouting, and made every important military movement a plunge in the
dark.

[Footnote 2: December 15th, 1862.]

Every military commander has blamed every other military commander for
inefficiency in this respect, and when brought to the test he has showed
that he himself had a _terra incognita_ to go over in making his first
advance. Quite a number of well-known people who were present may
remember a few words of conversation which took place on the Union
Course at one of the contests there between Princess and Flora Temple
(was it not?) in June, 1861. Schenck had just plunged a few regiments,
huddled up in railroad cars, into the mouths of the rebel batteries at
Vienna, as if he had been taking a contract to feed some great military
monster with victims as quickly and in as compact a form as possible.
The country was horrified over the slaughter, Ball's Bluff and
Fredericksburgh not having yet offered up their holocausts to dwarf it
by comparison. An officer of prominence under McDowell, then in command
of the Potomac Army under Scott, had come home on a furlough and was
present. Many inquiries were made of him by acquaintances, as to the
progress and prospects of the war. Among other things, the Vienna
blunder was called to his attention.

"Oh," said the officer--"that was one of the most stupid of
blunders--all owing to the fact that the ground had not been properly
reconnoitered beforehand! They seem to have had neither scouts nor
spies, and what else than failure _could_ be the result?"

"True," said one of the bystanders. "And the Potomac army--that is going
to advance pretty soon, as I hear--is _that_ all right in the respect
you have named?"

"What? _McDowell's_ army?" said the officer, contemptuously. "When you
catch _Irwin McDowell_ not knowing exactly what is ahead of him and
around him, you will catch a weasel asleep!"

So all the bystanders believed, and were confident accordingly. Four
weeks afterwards Irwin McDowell fought the battle of Manassas, the
result of which showed the most utter ignorance of the opposing
fortifications and forces in front, that had ever been recorded in any
history![3]

[Footnote 3: December, 1862.]

So much for the confidence that _one_ entertains, of being able to avoid
the blunders of the other! Not one of the predecessors of Scherazaide,
it is probable, went to the marriage bed of the Sultan without believing
that _she_ could fix the wavering love of the tyrant and avoid the fate
threatened for the morrow! And yet some hundreds of fair white bosoms
furnished a morning banquet to the fishes, before Scherazaide the Wise
succeeded in entangling the Sultan in the meshes of her golden speech!

It may be a little difficult to guess what this has to do with the
narration. Simply this--that one of the most amiable and fascinating of
women played what might have been called "a mean trick" on the occasion,
and there has seemed to exist some occasion for making her excuse before
relating the iniquity. Having settled that during the War for the Union
there has not been half enough of "spying," on the side of right,--and
having before us not only the examples of John Champe and Nathan Hale,
beloved of Washington, but of the two estimable young men not long
emerged from under the area steps in 5-- Street, let us dismiss the
contempt with which we have been wont to regard Paul Pry and Betty the
housemaid, listening at key-holes, in our favorite dramas, and look
mercifully upon the peccadilloes of Miss Josephine Harris.

Colonel Egbert Crawford, who entered the room of the invalid on that
occasion, was a tall and rather fine-looking man, with the least dash of
iron-gray in his hair and a decidedly soldierly bearing. He had dark
eyes, a little too small and not always direct in their glance, but only
close observers would have been able to make the latter discovery. Had
he been wise, he would have worn something more than the full moustache
and military side-whiskers, for the under lip and chin being close
shaven the play of the muscles of the lip, and its shape, were visible.
The lip was heavy and sullen, if not cruel; and any one who watched him
closely enough (close as Josephine Harris had sometimes been watching
him, say!) could see that the under lip had an almost constant twitching
motion, and that the hands, when unoccupied, were always opening and
shutting themselves much too often for a mind at ease. He was dressed in
the full regulation blue uniform, with fatigue-cap, in spite of the heat
of the weather, and with the eagle on shoulder and the red belts and
gilt hook at waist suggesting the sword that was to come some time or
other.

Miss Bell or Isabella Crawford, sister of Richard, who made her
appearance with the Colonel after her more or less successful search
for the peculiar shade of cerise ribbon,--demands a word of description,
and only a word. She was of medium height, well formed and rather plump,
with a pleasantly-moulded face and dark hair and eyes, undeniably
handsome and ladylike, but with something weak and languid about the
mouth, and indefinably creating the impression of a woman incapable of
being quite content with affairs as they came, unless they came very
pleasantly and fashionably, or of making any well-directed effort to
improve them. She was faultlessly dressed and irreproachably gloved, and
a close observer would have judged, after a minute inspection, that she
would be better at home in the pleasant idleness of a ball or an
opera-matinee than where she might be required either to do or to bear.

"A nice couple and belong together! Neither one of them good for
anything!" had more than once been Joe Harris' irreverent comment, when
looking at them as they entered or left carriage or ball room, a little
earlier in her acquaintance and when she had not yet enjoyed so many
opportunities for studying the peculiar character of Col. Egbert
Crawford. Just now she would have had her doubts about sacrificing even
the useless Bell to a man whom she herself began to dislike so much.

"How do you feel, brother?" asked the sister as she came in,--evidently
more as a matter of duty than because she felt any peculiar interest in
the answer.

"You look pale--your face is drawn--you seem to be in pain!" was the
observation of the Colonel, before the invalid could answer, and taking
the hand of the latter without seeming to notice the shudder with which
his touch was met.

"Perhaps so--cousin--Egbert--yes--I do _not_ feel quite so well as I
have done," muttered the invalid, who seemed all the while to be making
a violent effort to command face and feeling. "There was music in the
street, you know--I heard it and I suppose that it agitated me."

"Sorry! tut! tut! tut! You ought to be getting better by this time, I
should think!" said the Colonel, laying his finger on the pulse of
Richard and looking up at vacancy as a Doctor has the habit of doing
when he performs that very imposing (imposing upon _whom_?) operation.
What was there in his glance, that met the eye of Joe Harris, as he did
so--and gave her so plain a confirmation of her worst suspicions? What
power is it that lets in the daylight on our darkest wishes and worst
motives, just at the moment when we flatter ourselves that we have them
more carefully hidden away in darkness than ever before? Joe was still
at the window, where she had been joined by Bell, the latter already
half-forgetful of her sick brother and eager to show some astounding
purchase she had just made at one of the dry-goods palaces.

"There--go away, girls; you bother poor Richard with your chatter!" said
Colonel Egbert, affecting great cordiality and a little familiarity.
(The fact was, as may have been noticed, that Bell had spoken only five
words aloud and Joe not a word, since the two had entered.) "Richard is
not so well, I am afraid. I will sit by him awhile and you may go away
and gabble to your heart's content."

"Just as you like," answered Isabella, doubling up a half-unrolled
little package and preparing to go. "I have some little things to look
after up-stairs. Will you go with me, Joe? Of course you are not going
away until after dinner?"

"Humph! I do not know that I am going away at all!" said the wild girl,
her words very different from her thought at the moment. "You are such
nice people, and Dick is such an interesting invalid, and who
knows--well, I will not speculate any more about that, _in public_, just
yet! Yes, Bell, go up-stairs and attend to your finery; I am going down
into the basement to ask Norah for two slices of bread-and-butter and
the wing of a cold chicken!"

And away through the noiseless glass door buzzed Josephine, on her way
to the basement, followed by Isabella on her way to the inner penetralia
of the second floor; while Col. Egbert Crawford shied his fatigue-cap at
the desk and drew up his chair to the side of the sofa occupied by the
invalid. Isabella really went up-stairs, and for the purpose designated.
Shame for Joe Harris, it must be said that while she really descended to
the basement and made an inroad on Norah's larder to the extent of the
wing of cold chicken and _one_ slice of bread-and-butter, yet she
thrust both the edibles into a piece of paper and into her pocket, at
the imminent risk of greasing the latter convenient receptacle, and was
back again on the parlor floor within the space of one and a half
minutes by the little Geneva watch which she carried so bewitchingly at
her belt. If mischief and sad earnest can both be blended in the
expression of one face at one and the same time, they were so blended in
hers at that moment. What was in the wind and who was to suffer?--for
suffer somebody always did when Josey fairly started out on a campaign!

From the door leading to the basement, to that opening into the parlor
from the hall, she probably stepped lighter than she had ever before
done since playing blind-man's buff in early girlhood; and it is
doubtful whether that parlor door had ever before opened and shut with
so little noise, since the skilful hanger first oiled the plated hinges.
From the door to the back part of the room she went on tip-toe--the fact
cannot be denied,--little noise as her light shoes would have made on
the heavy velvet. We all have something of the cat about us--man and the
other animals; though the quality developes itself under different
circumstances. Pussy treads even softer than usual, when after the
coveted cream; that larger pussy, the tiger, steals lightly towards the
ambushed hunter who is to furnish him the next delicious meal; and
"Tarquin's ravishing strides" are undoubtedly a misnomer, for the Roman
must have been something more or less than man if he did not tip-toe his
sandals or cast them off altogether, when he stole towards the midnight
bed of Lucrece.

The cream for which Pussy Harris--shame upon her for that same!--was
just then making an adventurous foray,--was _a hearing of the
conversation which might take place between Richard Crawford and his
cousin_! That conversation she had determined to hear, at all hazards;
for what, she scarcely knew herself, but with an undefinable impression
that she must hear it--that (Jesuitically, and of course most horrible
doctrine!) the end might justify the otherwise indefensible means--and
that--that--in short, that she was going to do it, and this settled the
matter as well as finished up the reason!

The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards
the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered
with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person
in the chair would be within twelve inches of the glass doors and not
over ten feet from the two men at the sofa in the little back room.
Josephine distinctly heard, through the thin glass, the hum of their
voices as she approached the table, but not many of the words were
audible. Confound it!--she thought--her plan of sitting in the chair,
pretending to read as a safeguard against possible detection, and
overhearing by laying her head back against the door--this would never
do. Time was pressing--finesse must give way to boldness; and in the
sixteenth of a minute thereafter the sliding doors were softly parted by
less than half an inch of space--too little to be readily noticed from
the back room, which was the lighter of the two, and yet enough to see
through if necessary, (but she did not intend to look,) and to _hear_
through, which was the matter of first consequence. And there she
stood--an eaves-dropper of the first order--a flush of shame and of
half-conscious guilt on cheek and brow, and a wild, startled look in her
eyes, such as a hare might show when listening for the second bay of the
hound--liable to be caught by some one entering the parlor from the
hall, or by the Colonel taking a fancy to enter the room for any
purpose--and yet chained there, with her ear within an inch of the
opening, as if present happiness and eternal salvation had both depended
upon her keeping that position!

Could anything be more shameful?--anything more despicable? Was ever a
heroine so placed, even by English romancers or French dramatists? And
was not the long dissertation at the beginning of this chapter, to prove
the applicability of the spy system to war time, an absolute necessity?

What might have passed precedently, while she was looking after the
chicken and the bread-and-butter, Josephine had no means of divining. At
the time of her assuming her post of observation, Richard Crawford was
still lying back upon the sofa, and looking up; as he had been half an
hour before when she was herself conversing with him. If the spasms had
not ceased altogether, they were at least conquered by the will and
concealed from the eyes of the Colonel, as they had not been from hers.
The young girl thought she could detect, too, upon the face of the
invalid, a less hopeless look, and some evidence of more determined
insight in the glance, than she had marked for a considerable period.
Colonel Egbert Crawford was sitting with his chair drawn up reasonably
close in front of his cousin, and conversing eagerly with him, yet with
his face partially turned away most of the time, and not meeting his
gaze directly as most honest and earnest men do the observation of those
with whom they converse on important subjects. Perhaps that disposition
of the Colonel's face gave both his seen and his unseen listeners better
opportunities for close study of his expression than they might
otherwise have enjoyed.

"I am sorry to say that things are _not_ as we both wish them to be, at
West Falls," the young girl heard the Colonel say. "Of course I am not
less anxious than yourself to have everything arranged and the
property--"

"Ah, there is some _property_ involved, then! and at West Falls, of all
the places in the world!" commented the uninvited listener, speaking to
herself, and with her words very carefully kept between her teeth, as
was becoming under such circumstances--always provided there could be
anything "becoming" about the affair.

"Uncle John," the Colonel went on to say, "seems to have imbibed some
kind of singular prejudice against your mode of life in the city, if not
against you, and Mary--"

"Humph! there is a 'Mary'--a woman in the case, as well as the
property," commented the listener. "Little while as I have been here,
the thing already begins to grow interesting!"

"Well, Mary? what of her? Why does she answer my letters no more?" asked
the invalid, calming his voice by an evidently strong effort and
speaking as the Colonel paused for an instant. "Does she too begin to
share so bitterly in the--in the--"

"In the prejudice? I am sorry to say--yes," the Colonel went on, "though
I do not think that either of them could give a reason. I tried to probe
the matter a little when there, but the old gentleman answered me so
shortly that I had no excuse to go on; and Mary--"

"You did not say anything to _her_?" broke in the invalid, with the same
evident suppression in his voice.

"Of course not!" was the answer. "You know me, Richard, I hope, and know
that I would not have lost a chance of saying anything in your favor--"

"Trust _you_ for _that_!" was the mental comment of the listener.
"Wouldn't _you_ glorify _him_! Wouldn't _you_ make him blue and gold,
with gilt edges! I see you doing it!"

"--If I had any opportunity," concluded the Colonel.

"I should think not," said the invalid, his words so forced from between
his teeth that his interlocutor, had he been less absorbed in his own
calculations, must have noticed the difference from his usual manner.

"Richard Crawford, you are beginning to wake, for you know that man is
lying--I see it by your eyes!" was the comment of the young girl, this
time.

"I am going to West Falls again in a few days--that is, if we do not get
orders for Washington," continued the Colonel; "and if I have your
permission--as you are not likely to be well enough to go out even by
that time--I shall speak to both on the subject, as it would be the
world's pity if you should be thrown out of so fine a property and the
possession of a girl who I believe once loved you, by false reports,
or--"

"False reports? eh? who should have circulated false reports?" asked the
invalid, his face firing for a moment and his voice temporarily under
less command. But the momentary flush passed away, and it was only with
the querulous voice and petulant manner of sickness that he concluded:
"Eh, well, no matter; we will see about all that by-and-by, when I get
well."

"That is right--I am glad to hear you speak so hopefully," said the
Colonel. "All will be right, no doubt, when you _get well_." Did he or
did he not lay a peculiar stress on the two words, as the old jokers
used to do on a few others when they informed the boys that the statue
of St. Paul, in the niche in the front of St. Paul's church, always came
down and took a drink of water from the nearest pump, _when it heard the
clock strike twelve_? If there was such an emphasis, did Richard
Crawford hear and recognize it? That some one else in the immediate
vicinity did, and duly commented upon it, is beyond a question.

"You must modulate your voice better than that, Colonel Egbert Crawford,
before you go on the stage!" said the wild girl. "You think he is
dying--you mean he shall die--I have an impression that I did not come
here for nothing, after all!"

"And now," said the Colonel, rising, and taking out his watch, "I must
leave you. We have a recruiting meeting at ---- Hall at six, and I must
be there without fail. Oh," as if suddenly recollecting something
comparatively unimportant, that had been overlooked in the pressure of
more interesting matter--"I had nearly forgotten. Your bandage--is it
all right? I hope the Doctor and Bell have not found out the secret, so
as to laugh at what they would call our _superstition_. Shall I renew
it? I believe I have some of the preparation in one or another of my
pockets," feeling in one and then another, as if doubtful. "Ah, here it
is," and he took out from one of his pockets which he had hurriedly gone
over with his hands at least half a dozen of times, a small black box,
four or five inches in length and perhaps two in width by an inch deep.

Were Josephine Harris' eyes playing fantastic tricks with her on that
occasion; or did she see, as that little black box met the view, a
momentary repetition of the suffering spasm which had crossed the face
of Richard Crawford half an hour before, when she first suggested a
conflict of interests between them? At all events the spasm, if such it
was, passed away, and he merely answered, languidly:

"Yes, thank you, Egbert--yes, if you please."

At this stage of the proceedings, had Josephine Harris been a "real
lady," or had she possessed any well-defined sense of "propriety," she
would have left her post of observation on the instant. For though the
Colonel was partially between her and the patient, she saw him open the
little black box, take out a broad knife from his vest pocket, and then
proceed to other operations very improper for a young lady to witness.
She saw Richard Crawford unbutton his vest, a little assisted by the
Colonel. What followed she could not see, very fortunately. All that she
could make out, was that some sort of narrow white bandage seemed to
have been removed from the breast or stomach of the invalid--that the
Colonel took out a dark paste from the box with his knife, spread a
portion of it on the opened bandage, then re-folded it and assisted in
replacing it on the breast or stomach and re-arranging the disordered
clothing. This done, and the box put back into his pocket, he took his
cap and stooped down to shake hands with Richard; whereupon Josephine,
knowing that his way out would be through the parlor, shoved the two
doors together by a silent but very nervous movement, and managed to
escape from the room as silently, before the Colonel's hand had yet been
laid upon the glass door to open it.

There were half a dozen unoccupied rooms on the next floor, as she well
knew, and up the stairs and into one of these she bounded, her cheeks
still more aglow than they had been when she set out on her
"reconnoissance," and her eyes still more wild and startled, while a
strange tremor creeping at her heart told her that she had been witness
to much more than could yet be shaped into words or embodied even in
thought! Poor girl!--how her brain throbbed and how her heart beat like
ten thousand little trip-hammers!--the usual and very proper penalty
which we pay for an indiscretion!




CHAPTER VII.

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONTRABAND, WITH SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON--THREE
MONTHS BEFORE--AUNT SYNCHY AND THE OBI POISONING--A NICE LITTLE
ARRANGEMENT OF EGBERT CRAWFORD'S.


Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether
indispensable character. Not new to the world--sorrow for the world that
it is not! Not new to the country--wo to the country that it has filled
so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious
narration--the _contraband_. The negro must come in, by all means and at
all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written
without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past
forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some
incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes
of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no
distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of
position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed,
apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster
before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that
grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more
an object of mirth than of terror--and it certainly gave promise of
profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to
laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less
comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and
the black--the sharp profile and the broad lip--the springing instep and
the protuberant heel--have been having a long tussle, with the
probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-day the
struggle is doubtful if not decided in favor of the black. "Here we go,
up--up--uppy! Here we go, down--down--downy!" the children used to sing
when playing see-saw with a broad plank on the fence; and _they_
understood, what their elders sometimes forget--that the rebound of
extreme height is descent. One more illustration, before this train of
thought necessarily ceases.

Is it not recorded in all the books of relative history, that the
Normans, under William the Conqueror, invaded and subjugated Saxon
England and made virtual slaves of the unfortunate countrymen of Harold?
Yet who were the conquered eventually? England was Saxon within fifty
years of Hastings: England is Saxon to-day. The broad bosom of the Saxon
mother, even when the sire of her child was a ravisher, gave out drops
of strength that moulded it in spite of him, to be at last her avenger
and his master! The Saxon pirate still sweeps the seas in his
descendants: the Norman robber is only heard of at long intervals when
he meets his opportunity at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are
fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our
downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or
color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever
unloose the shackle!

Perhaps it is proper as well as inevitable that the negro should have
changed his place and mounted astride of the national neck instead of
being trodden under the national foot. Everything else in our
surroundings has changed--why not he? We do not yet quite understand the
fact--it may be; but the foundations of the old in society have been
broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of
the great deep at the time of Noah's flood. The old deities of fashion
have been swept away in the flood of revolution. The millionaire of two
years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from
his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the
most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent
upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents
can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that
time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky
adventures in government transportations or army-contracts; and the
jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut Street are busy resetting the diamonds
of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little
while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or
Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that flashed last summer
at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and
Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days;
and on the "Dinorah" nights at the Academy[4] there have been new faces
in the most prominent boxes, almost as _outre_ and unaccustomed in their
appearance as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in
a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished
Murray Hill, when he passed an hour there on his way to the
inauguration.

[Footnote 4: December 1862.]

Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many
of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able
defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world
their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon
a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall.
Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been
exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them
brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly--impotent for
good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile
sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished
themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have
displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair
and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have
done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been
founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human
calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the
estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they
presented themselves to each other.

Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change
not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we
know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God
only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been
founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has
passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability.
The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less
destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through
anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon
the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old
rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the
very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been
undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from
our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live,
has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation
dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we
have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but
reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is
springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it
may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past
of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton
Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat
and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one
inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the
negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and
may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.

[Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off
Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.]

Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in
this wise, retrospectively.

Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters,
to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a
thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and
not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the
parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,--had occasion to visit
that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson.
The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or
the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially
improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred
on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved
by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of
black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by
the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century,
festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton
handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel
furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by
disease--alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white
children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and
exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally
accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the
grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen
beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder
that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys
who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by
twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the
yells intended to attract custom.

Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into
the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would
naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of
crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might
be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking
measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon
the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den
of black squalor with a very different object--to find an old darkey
woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as
one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City
and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her
acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless
purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been
nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed,
when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.

One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from
the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated
panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that
peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago--seemed to the seeker to
bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide
open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which
issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of
fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as
one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious
necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the
bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they
contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half
a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third
floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a
second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy
darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not
make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the
lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with
a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.

"Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" yelled a voice. "Boo! hoo! hoo!
e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" and Crawford could just discern that he had run
over and partially demolished a little negro boy carrying a pitcher, the
pitcher and the boy seeming to have suffered about equally. Neither of
them had any nose left, to speak of; and the little imp did not make any
effort to rise from the floor, but lay there and yelled merrily. The
victor in the collision did not have much time for inspection, for the
moment after a door at the back end of the passage opened hurriedly, and
a hideous old negro woman came rushing out, with a sputtering fragment
of lighted tallow-candle in her hand, and exclaiming:

"What's de matter, Jeffy? Here am Mamma!"

"Big man run'd ober me! broke de pitcher! Boo! hoo! hoo!" yelled the
black atom in reply, without any additional effort at getting up.

"Get out ob dar! d--n you, I run'd ober _you_, mind dat!" screeched out
the old woman, catching sight of the dark form of Crawford. "Hurtin'
leetle boys!--I pay you for it, honey!"

"I hit him accidentally," said the lawyer, who had no intention of
getting into a row in that "negro quarter." "It was dark, and I did not
see him. I'll pay for the pitcher."

"Will you, honey?" said the old woman, mollifying instantly. "Well den,
'spose you couldn't help it. Get up, Jeffy."

"Can you tell me whether Mrs. ---- lives on any of the floors of this
house?" asked Crawford.

"Nebber mind dat, till you gib me de money!" answered the old woman, not
to be diverted by any side-issues. "Dat are pitcher cost a quarter,
honey!"

Crawford was feeling in his pocket for one of the quarters that yet
remained in that receptacle, preparatory to going out of circulation
altogether,--when the old crone, eager for the money, stuck her candle
somewhat nearer his face than it had before been held. Instantly her
withered face assumed a new expression of intelligence, and her hand
shook so that she almost dropped the candle, as she cried:

"Merciful Lord and Marser! If dat are ain't young Egbert Crawford!"

"My name is certainly Egbert Crawford!" said that individual, very much
surprised in his turn. "But who are you that know _me_?"

"Don't know his ole Aunt Synchy!" exclaimed the old woman.

"Aunt Synchy! Aunt Synchy!" said the lawyer, trying to recollect the
past very rapidly, and catching some glimmers. "What? Aunt Synchy that
used to live at--"

"Used to live at old Tom Crawford's. Lor bress you, yes! Why come in,
honey!" and before the lawyer could answer further, he was literally
dragged through the dingy door by the still vigorous old woman, and
found himself inside her apartment, Master Jeffy and his pitcher being
left neglected on the entry floor.

Once within the door, and in the better light afforded even by the dingy
windows, Crawford had a better opportunity to observe the old woman, and
he now found no difficulty in recalling something more than the name.
She might have been sixty-five or seventy years of age, to judge by the
wrinkles on her face and the white of her eyebrows, though her hair was
hidden under a gaudy and dirty cotton plaid handkerchief and her tall
form seemed little bowed by age. Two coal-black eyes, showing no
diminution of their natural fire, gleamed from under those white
eyebrows; and on the portions of the cheeks yet left smooth enough to
show the texture of the skin, there were deep gashes that had once been
the tattooing of her barbarian youth and beauty. Her hands were
withered, much more than her face, and seemed skinny and claw-like. Her
dress, which had once been plaid cotton gingham, was fearfully dirty and
unskilfully patched with other material; and the frayed silk shawl
thrown around her old shoulders might have been rescued from a rag-heap
in the streets to serve that turn.

The room, as Crawford readily noticed, was almost as remarkable in
appearance as the old woman herself. There was nothing singular in the
bare floor, the pine table and two or three broken chairs; for something
very like them, or worse, can be found in almost every miserable
tenement where virtue struggles or vice swelters, in the slums of the
great city. Neither was there anything notable in the smoke-greased
walls and ceiling, the miserable fire-place with one cracked kettle and
a red earthen bowl, and the wretched bed of rags stuck away in one of
the corners, on which evidently both the old crone and Master Jeffy made
their sad pretence at sleep.

But what really was singular in the appearance of the apartment, and
what Crawford noted at once, although he did not allude to it until
afterwards, was--first, a ghastly attempt at painting, hanging behind
the chimney, representing a death's-head and cross-bones, which might
have been executed by an artist in whitewash, on a ground of black
muslin. Second, a hanging shelf in one corner, with a dozen or two of
dingy small bottles and vials, and a rod lying across it, apparently
made from a black birchen switch, peeled in sections. Third, and most
important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room
to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung
with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when
closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of
snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black
cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's
skin--not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself,
peeled from the writhing reptile; two objects that might have been
spotted toads, run over by wagons until thoroughly flattened--then
dried; and one object which could not well be anything more or less than
the hand of a child a few weeks old, cut off just above the wrist and
subjected to some kind of embalming or drying process.

The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the
conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy,
when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced
the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front
of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered
features seemed almost plastered against his own. It is enough to say
that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words
of the crone would have engendered--that Aunt Synchy, in her younger
days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State
where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished--and that, at
last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to
the crime and misery of negro life in the great city. She retained, as
people of that feudal class always do, a vivid recollection of her early
life and of all the residents of the section where she had lived; and
Egbert Crawford, who was in the habit of putting many questions to
others, was not in the habit of answering quite so many as the old woman
put to him concerning the intermediate histories of the families of
which she had now lost sight for more than a quarter of a century.

In this conversation it became apparent, too, that Thomas Crawford, the
father of Egbert, had been the quasi owner of Synchy, and that she
retained for the son something of that singular attachment which appears
to be inseparable from any description of feudality. Thomas Crawford, it
would appear, had had two brothers, Richard, the father of the present
Richard Crawford and of John, the soldier, both Thomas and Richard being
then dead and their families in the country broken up. Another brother,
John, had become very wealthy, and appeared to be living, with Mary, an
only daughter, at West Falls, in the Oneida Valley. Finally, it became
quite apparent that the old crone, whatever her attachment to the family
of Thomas Crawford, did not hold the same feudal regard for some of the
other members of the family--in short, that she had retained the memory
of certain supposed early slights and injuries, quite as closely as she
had done the softer and more grateful sentiments towards others.

"So Dick am rich, am he, honey? an you am poor? Tut! tut! dat is too bad
for de son of ole Marser Tom!" said the old crone, after the lapse of
half an hour in which both tongues had been running pretty rapidly.

"He is," said Crawford, his face expressing no strong sense of
satisfaction at the recollection. "He bought property in the new parts
of the city, twelve or fifteen years ago, and the rise has been so great
that it has made him rich. He is now living on Murray Hill, in style,
though, d--n him!" and the face now was very sinister indeed, "he has
been attacked with inflammatory rheumatism and confined for some weeks
to his house, so that I don't think he enjoys it all very much."

"An Uncle John's big property," the old woman went on--"Dick is to have
all dat, too, you tink?"

"Yes, and Mary," answered Crawford. "Mary is a pretty little girl, and
worth as much as all the property. Dick has managed to get around the
old man, somehow, and if I can't stop it--"

"Eh, yes, if you can't stop 'um!" said the old crone, rubbing her skinny
hands together as if this, at least, pleased her. "Has you tried,
honey?"

Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, as has before been said, was much more in
the habit of putting others under close cross-examination, than allowing
himself to be subjected to the same sifting process. But whether he had
his own motives for telling the old woman the truth, or whether he saw
that those coal black old eyes were looking through him and divining all
that he wished or intended--he certainly submitted to the question and
told the truth, in the present instance:

"Yes, d--n him once more!"

"You want Mary and de property bofe?" asked the old woman again.

"Both!" answered the lawyer, after one more instant of hesitation and
one more glance into the coal black eyes. "I don't care if you know all
about it--you _daren't_ betray me, for your life!"

"Don't _want_ to, honey!" was all the old woman's reply; and the lawyer
went on:

"I have been twice up at West Falls since Dick was taken ill, and I
think I have set some reports in circulation there, that may make Miss
Mary hesitate, if they do not change the old man's will. How will that
do, Aunt Synchy--you old black anatomy? Eh?"

"Spose I am an 'atomy," said the old woman, apparently rather pleased
with the epithet than otherwise. "But Lor' bress you, chile, dat won't
do at all! You ain't ole enough yet!" and there was an unmistakable
sneer on the withered black face, to think that any body could be so
verdant.

"Ah!" said Egbert Crawford, who neither liked the sneer nor the
intimation. "What more could I do, I should like to know?"

What was it that Jeremy Taylor said--that old silver-tongued Bishop of
Down, Connor and Dromore, in Ireland?--"No disease cometh so much with
our breath, drinking from the infected lips of others, as with the
vessels of our own bodies that are ready to receive it." Shakspeare
says the same thing of mirth, when he records that

   "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
   Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
   Of him that makes it."

Artemus Ward, when he sets whole audiences into broad roars of laughter
over his odd conceits of "carrying peppermint to General Price" or
"going to be measured for an umbrella," may doubt the truth of this
assertion; and Lester Wallack or Ned Sothern, when inspiring chuckles
that almost threaten the life, may share in the infidelity: but let all
these remember that their audiences _come_ to be amused, and that their
best drolleries might fall very flat indeed at a Quaker meeting or in a
hospital devoted to men with the jumping tooth-ache! The conditions of
Crime are like those of Disease and Mirth--the patient must be ready
before the inoculation can take place. Eve was unquestionably wishing
for a break in the already dull routine of her life in Eden, before the
Serpent dared to make his appearance; and Arnold had some treason
crudely floating through his mind, even if not that particular treason,
before the overtures of the British commander led him to the attempt

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